Gryphon

Took the standard PECO box van, painted it a dark red/brown and used some drybrushing to bring out the highlights on the body and frame. Painted it red/brown to imply it was air brake fitted and wouldn't look too out of place in a passenger train as a parcels/mail van.

The BR Standard 5 and the coaches arrived yesterday and I am pretty blown away by the quality of the engine, particularly its slow speed crawl. Even creeping over a complex web of points with unpowered frogs it can go through without a hitch. I'm not sure what to think about the rapido couplers though. The coaches have some pretty clever engineering to make them close couple and still take pretty sharp (11" radius) curves no sweat, but breaking out the "hand of god" when I want to do any switching gets old fast. Apologies for what are likely going to be very stupid questions: 1) I was looking at the Dapol and Graham Farish coaches I got and I'm a bit mystified on how I would replace the rapido couplers with the easi shunt - let alone some american Micro-Train couplers - without doing a fair bit of surgery to the coaches. The coupler is 'sandwiched' between two plastic pieces. Is the rapido one supposed to pop out and the easi-shunt slide in? Looking at the design of the easi-shunt coupler itselt, it seems like the rapido one pops out and the easi-shunt gets pushed in. I did a bit of poking and pushing but it did not seem like the rapido coupler wanted to pop out. (And I'm loathe to break it the day after it arrived!) 2) I also got a Peco box wagon kit (I enjoy building model kits) and it looks like the way the coupler is mounted would require notable surgery to the model to cut off the molded box to fit the NEM box. Do I understand it right? 3) On the subject of the box wagon kit, decals. Would a sheet like this be appropriate for the box van? I'm not sure if it is the search terms I'm using, but I'm having a weirdly hard time identifying the decal sheets I would need. https://www.railtec-models.com/showitem.php?id=1047 Thanks for all the comments and insights!

Haha that sounds just like modern companies!

Thanks for the feedback everyone! @The Johnster Thanks for the information about brakes and freight operations; I didn't realize it took UK railways so long to adopt continuous braking!

Hello! I normally do n-scale modeling of American trains (fancy way of saying I have a loop of track on plywood and plans way too big for my space and time), but I've always been interested in British trains. After stumbling across a N-scale model of a BR Standard 5 with DCC and sound for sale, along with the crimson and cream coaches, I found I just had to order it. After looking for simple layout designs to put the train on, I found this forum had a number of threads on the "Minories" layout which seems to fit what I'm looking for; a simple and fairly small/portable layout designed to replicate high intensity urban passenger terminal. I was hoping you could help me with a few questions I have. 1. Is there anything special I need to do to make the UK decoder place nicely with my DCC controller (Digitrax Zephyr). I've read that DCC is a universal standard so the locomotive will work, but I don't know if there is anything I should look out for, particularly in terms of programming values. 2. Rapido couplers. I can't remember the last time for American prototype equipment it came from the manufacturer with rapido couplers, but it clearly is a standard in the UK. What options are available for uncoupling that doesn't require me to pick up the equipment? What options are available for replacing the rapido couples with ones that are smaller and more realistic? Does anyone have experience mounting the American Micro-Trains style couplers on UK models? 3. The Minories layout plan. I was hoping I could learn a bit more about how it operates in practice. For example, in the plans I've seen and the playlist on youtube (Brenford Exchange, I think) don't seem to have any off-stage turntables. Are people turning the locomotives by hand? In n-scale, do people encounter a lot of pickup problems moving small steam engines over all the back-to-back switches in the plan? 4. Any places to learn more about British passenger train operation? I thought I had a basic understanding of railroad stuff, but then I started seeing stuff with passenger trains like Brake 2nd Composite, Trailer 3rd Open, etc, and it started to sound like a foreign language haha! Many thanks!