John-Miles

IMHO the Gibson chimney isn't very good. It lacks the subtle shape of a Johnson chimney.

If you go for unfitted then there were some long ones, for example from Barrow Hill to Tapton Junction and this was for complete freight trains which were destined for the Hope Valley line.

I travelled north yesterday on the 9.45 ex-Cardiff and south on the 15.30 Brum to Cardiff. The car park looked fairly full and there were plenty of passengers getting on and off. For a new station, it seems to be very well used. The most interesting question from my point of view is whether or not these are passengers who would have used another station but found this one more convenient or is the station generating new traffic. Hopefully we will get some statistics in the not too distant future.

It looks good on paper but there are some very weak links, for example the Mid-Wales Railway wouldn't be able to cope with a massive influx of traffic. In WW1 there has always been a myth that the Jellicoe specials were routed over the Mid-Wales and possibly one or two were but the vast majority were routed further east because there was the capacity and the routes allowed the use of larger engines. Also the Midland would never cooperate with Watkins given his long standing hatred of all things Midland.

According to what I was told at the Bristol O gauge exhibition a few weeks ago the answer is yes. This came from Slaters themselves.

Dave Being old school, I like your control panel. It's relatively simple and although you get lots of wires out of the back, if you test as you go, i.e. one wire at a time, it's a simple job.

According to Wikipedia, the sea between Larne and Stranraer is around 160m deep.

If you think HS2 is expensive ….

As promised, close up of 2F attached. I finally managed to do one which is in focus and doesn't have one of my fingers over the lens. Note the coal rails are a bit bent. They are very fragile and handling has pushed the out of place. My plan is to use the coal to stiffen them up!! Apologies for the delay in posting but we had a weekend in Hay-on-Wye, one of my favourite places. If you ever visit, it is possible to walk quite a lot of the trackbed where it runs between the town and the river Wye. There are also other remnants of the HH&B such as a goods shed at Kinnersley and Eardisley. On the DCC topic, being a Neandertahl, I like the fact that with analogue, if you get a fault you can track it down with a meter very quickly, essential at an exhibition when you have punters looking on. I don't understand the talk about there being more power. Surely a motor will only take so many amps, you can push more through it with DCC>

The Bachman loco looks pretty good to me. Shame it's a Deeley smokebox door. I'm not too sure about the chimney - I'll leave the experts to comment on that. Once it's painted and heading a rake of Slater's 6 wheelers, it will look great. Slaters by the way are planning pre-printed carriage sides in 4mm, already available for 7mm. In reply to Tricky, I'll have a go at a close up but don't hold your breath. Cameras and me are like oil and water.

As this thread has gone rather quiet, I thought I would post something. I have just received the two 2Fs back from Warren Haywood who has done the painting. Both are Gibson kits and unusually I have used most of the kit. The wheels are Ultrascale (I don't like Gibson wheels) and one has a scratchbuilt boiler. Both the chimneys are home made as are the smokebox wrappers, otherwise all Gibson. They are both in need of finishing with things like handrails, buffers and one needs the Salter springs. Not up to Dave Hunt standard but I am pleased with them. The station building is for my Penwyllt layout and was built by Graham Tierney. All in EM - 4mm scale. Apologies for the poor quality of the photograph - not my strong suit.

The automatic displays on the Cardiff Nottingham Cross Country trains have been advising passengers that the "next stop will be Worcestershire Parkway" since some time in December. Fortunately nobody believed this as the trains roared through at around 90 mph. I did try to travel on one of these trains on Tuesday 28th but it was cancelled and instead my route to Brum was via Reading. Arrived 2 hours late. Signal failure at Aschurch.

There are some wonderful photos from the 1960s of this branch in a recent book by Lightmoor/ Black Dwarf on the Midland lines in Gloucestershire.

The Cardiff Nottingham service is often a 2 car 170 and there are usually people standing from Cheltenham so Worcester passengers will find getting a seat difficult. I travelled in both directions on Tuesday and there were no running-in-boards. At present the timekeeping of the Cardiff Nottingham trains is good so it will be interesting to see the impact of the extra stop.

A few weeks ago, I had to travel from Cardiff to Birmingham and return. It was a Tuesday probably October 29th. I caught the 9.45 Nottingham train which was a two car class 170, I was seated in the rear carriage. All was fine until approaching Gloucester when the engine in the rear car cut out. At Gloucester station, there were attempts to restart the engine but these failed so the train crew after a lengthy time on their phones to whoever was in charge got back on the train and announced we would carry on, on one engine. So we slowly proceeded north through Cheltenham and Worcestershire losing time all the way of course. At Stoke Works the train had to stop for signals so when we reached Bromsgrove our speed was no more than 50 mph. You can guess what came next, the train stalled on the Lickey about halfway up. So there was then another long pause while decisions were made and we then rolled slowly back to Bromsgrove. Fortunately this is now a 4 platform station so we drew in platform one and on platform 2 was a Voyager which had been following us. We all transferred to the Voyager and this made it to New Street at about 13.15 (should have been 11.45). The person I was supposed to be meeting so there was nothing to do but grab some lunch and catch a train home. So at around 13.40 I went back to the station to catch a train. The departure boards were amazing. Every train was late, Some by well over an hour. Lots of trains were being cancelled but at about 14.10 I managed to get on a Voyager which was going to Bristol TM. This was running 90 minutes late. All went well until Cheltenham when the train was cancelled and we were all turfed out. After around 30 minutes a Cardiff train turned up which got me to Cardiff with no problems. I then went to platform 8 to catch a train to Eastbrook (Barry line). One turned up on time and we all managed to squeeze on although I didn't get a seat. After 10 minutes of inaction we were told that this train was cancelled due to there being no guard. So we were all turned out onto the platform. The next train was a two coach Pacer. The passengers from two trains tried to squeeze into this. I managed to get on. The trick is to anticipate where the doors will be and stand on the right part of the platform. This was packed to the point of being very uncomfortable and lots of people were left behind. Happily it wasn't cancelled.

I can't find my copy of the Awdry book but IIRC the Birmingham and Gloucester did look at going through Worcester but was put off by the cost of the land. The line was therefore planned to miss Tewkesbury, Droitwich and Cheltenham as well. The good citizens of Cheltenham kicked up a fuss and so the line was diverted (you can see this on any map or Google Earth) to skirt the edge of Cheltenham. It was always the aim of the B&G to get to a port so they could export their goods. I don't think they cared too much about the intermediate towns. As to the "what if", it's pure speculation.

Sorry for being slow with a reply but I have now consulted The Icon of Abercraf. He says that the normal way of talking about a colliery is to use its name - such as International, Gurnos, Pwllbach etc.. If you were to refer to colliery as such he would Pwll Glo or Gwaith Glo (literal translation coal pit or coal works) but he says that would be unusual.

I will consult The Icon but just to confuse things, I did an article about a colliery in the Aman Valley which was called Gwaith y Lamb. The lamb was the nearby pub. Gwaith means work.

Sorry when I made my comments about traders, I didn't mean this to start off a critique of Cardiff exhibition but rather the lack of modelling traders applies to almost every exhibition. As Abergwaun said, it's a growing trend that, apart from box shifters, traders don't want to do exhibitions other than the very large shows or specialist ones such as ExpoEM.

There seems to be an increasing lack of traders who sell modelling bits at exhibitions. We recently exhibited at the Woking show and I wanted to buy some superglue - there was none on sale but lots of box shifters. At Cardiff, I wanted some Humbrol enamel paints and plastic brick sheet and superglue. There was a man selling glue but it wasn't superglue but for basic modelling supplies such as scalpel blades, plasticard etc there was nothing. In the case of the Cardiff show I know the problem lies not with the organisers but with the traders.

Pencader will now be replaced by Ynysybwl. This is due to he Grumpy faction in Cardiff 4mm Group deciding they didn't want to put in a few extra hours.

Stephen I have just read through this thread and I am going to digress slightly from your title. IIRC Johnson became CME of the Midland in 1872 and the order for the 1102 class was placed with Neilson in the September. So either he burnt a lot of midnight oil or there are two other possibilities that I can think of. The first is that the design was already largely completed when Johnson was appointed and he just tweaked it to give it that Johnson look. This is partially supported by the fact that when more 0-6-0Ts were ordered (the 1377 class) they were different in terms in various aspects. The other possibility is that Derby issued a specification and the detail design was done by Neilson. The only GA that I can find is a Neilson drawing not from Derby.

I see the list of layouts includes Kerrinhead which won best in show at Scaleforum. Really looking forward to seeing it.

As a regular Guardian reader, I long ago came to the opinion that Larry Elliot is a bit of a plonker.

I had an office which overlooked the line north of Queen Street station from the middle 1980s for about 10 years. I saw virtually every type of then current diesel loco with the exception of the class 20s. Most of the odd ones were things like Rugby specials.