Adam88

I thought you meant something like this...

The 45deg cutter is also useful for cutting chamfered cork for track beds.

I once knew an "Ian Rose", known to all as "Ian, Rose and Throat"

So are some 1:1 scale finials...

Dave, Thank you for the answer, I trust your are recovering now. L&Y railmotors have always been a favourite of mine. I started one of these kits very many years ago but it came to nought. In those days very small, suitable motors and gearboxes were hard to come by and the delicate outside valve motion was beyond my skills at the time. I have a friend who had much more success with his though and it ran very sweetly. Adam

Any news, or did it turn out to be a bit too challenging?

I would suggest Trafford Park.

Private W. Wood V.C. came to mind

From the web site of the Monreagh Hertitage Centre describing the Owencarrow Viaduct accident of 1925 on the Burtonport Extension of the L&LSR: ... Crew: Neil Boyle, train guard Bob McGuinness, engine driver, 13 years experience on the Burtonport Extension line Con Hannigan, firefighter ... I doubt that was any more the correct term in 1925 than it would be in this context now.

You need one of these

... nor should they have decimalised our wonderful, historic money system until all the old people had died.

As well as playing with the contrast, one of the things I have done when converting colour to B&W is to experiment to simulate the effects of orthochromatic film, e.g. Victorian and Edwardian photographs with union flags make the red look much darker than the navy. Another effect is the simulated use of colour filters - do you remember using yellow filters to enhance clouds - by adjusting the colour channels? These only go so far though. The geometry and resolution of the large format cameras of yesteryear cannot be replicated easily, nor can the fact that many photographs taken in the mid-twentieth century were taken from waist level rather than eye level.

There is a Talgo in the museum in Madrid and some of the Copenhagen S-tog trains are built on similar lines, each car except the end ones only had a single axle.

There's a nice four page colour photo feature of Peterborough, mostly from the late 50s & early 60s but including GNR No1 in 1938 in the Dec 2019 Backtrack. PN, the model, certainly captures the atmosphere of these photographs.

Apparently a lot of people [in the US] buy Thomas Kinkade...

I drive to work along a rural A road with 50/60 speed limits which passes through a number of villages with 30 or 40 limits. Traffic flow is always pretty good and most people seem to drive within the limits. It is not unusual for the police to set up mobile speed cameras and when this is the case drivers coming the opposite way sometimes flash their headlights - I don't personally and I believe it can lead to prosecution in its own right. One morning though a number of vehicles were flashing their lights in a most urgent way - perhaps a speed camera or a bad smash? No, just a duck and a string of ducklings waddling across the road in their own gentle way.

There is a great deal of information available on the Andrew's Raid for example: Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor but much of the information is derived from one of the survivors, William Pittenger. His memoirs are available to download FOC from Project Gutenberg, e.g. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36752/36752-h/36752-h.htm (incidentally PG has a wealth of fascinating content, albeit with a US bias), Not all the raiders were executed but they were almost all captured. I always found it intriguing that you could be a fugitive in your own country speaking the same language, etc but perhaps in rural Georgia any stranger would arouse suspicion and they didn't have MI9 and escape lines. Last year I was able to spend a day at the museum at Kennesaw near Atlanta where the original, but much rebuilt General is preserved and on display. The Texas is on display in Atlanta but I did not have enough time to visit both. A couple of weeks ago I was able to spend a little time at the B&O museum at Mount Clare in Baltimore where they have William Mason which starred in the Fess Parker Disney film. The locomotives in the Buster Keaton film were representative American types but without any connection to the Andrews Raid. Regarding colourisation of monochrome photographs and films I am generally not in favour. One recent book on railways in the Great War even showed some green L&YR coaches on its cover. I watched Peter Jackson's partly colourised film of the Great War recently and much preferred the monochrome sections - a shame really as so many people must have worked really hard to achieve the transformation. I had reservations about some of the sound dubbing too, but not the witness accounts from the 1960s and 70s. I hold judgement on the revised Buster Keaton film.

It would be relatively straight forward just to double the gauge - possibly add a quarter inch or so. The old Great Western acheived their final gauge conversion in just a few days. Is widening as easy as narrowing?

I seem to recall that David Jenkinson did just that at Garsdale Road.

This frame shows something which I cannot recall seeing modelled, not even on finely observed models such as MMRS's Dewsbury, namely a lorry adapted to carry wool. The lorry typically had a platform over the driver's cab supported on stanchions from the chassis or front bumper. I have always assumed that this was because there was a lower weight limit for lorries in general - I don't know what it was in the sixties, seventies or earlier but I can recall ever increasing all-up weights being introduced in more recent years, 40 then 44 tonnes - perhaps as part of a harmonisation process with TIR and EU regulations. I always assumed that wool bales would be relatively low in density and thus the smaller, lighter lorries could easily cope with a simple extension. My picture from 1970 shows one such vehicle to move equipment in use at a Scout camp in the Yorkshire Dales.

What about clockwork? It always used to be very popular.

Where do you 2mm folk get your giant coins from?

My word?

Here's another example. This is the RHS of the Baldwin prototype high pressure three cylinder 4-10-2 locomotive no. 60000 of 1926 now on display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. There are many unusual features on this locomotive but the one which struck me immediately was its use of a water tube firebox - reminiscent of Gresley's Hush Hush in some ways, although the latter's whole boiler was water tube. I saw 60000 in 2006 but it was not well displayed or interpreted, you could however 'ride the footplate' as it was periodically dragged a few yards up and down a short length of track - remember City of Birmingham? There were a couple of other early 19C locomotives there too, both interesting survivors.

Are you famiiar with 'Train Landscape' by Eric Ravilious? It is held in Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums http://www.aagm.co.uk/theCollections/objects/object/Train-Landscape but is widely used for cards, prints, etc.