Neil P

Sound fitted class 150 Provincial for £237 in the TMC Black Friday deals https://www.themodelcentre.com/32-929sf-Bachmann-oo-gauge-class-150-1-2-car-dmu-150115-br-provincial-original-sound-fitted

Great. Thanks. I'll have a look!

Looks excellent and I like the forced perspective of the higher ground towards the back. Do you have any tips or techniques you could share?

Finally got round to finishing the viaduct (5 arches) and painting it. I added a few small details that I’d forgotten during the design process using Plastikard.

Can't believe how busy it was today. My children's school was closed, so I thought we'd arrive at lunchtime to beat the crowds - and everyone else clearly had the same idea! Sadly, I only saw that BRM were renting step-stools for children to stand on as we left, but my boys enjoyed it anyway. Must say a special thanks to West Hill Wagon Works. I bought a replacement Hunt coupling for a HST and explained it was to replace an identical one I'd broken while fitting it, and they let me have it for free.

10% off everything in the Rails of Sheffield eBay store by using the code BAG10 https://www.ebay.co.uk/str/railsofsheffield

Started work on the viaduct. This is the first section of 6 in primer. It was an 18 hour print, so not a quick job! The joins between each section will be covered by separately printed stonework strips which are proud of the rest of the brickwork. I have seen something similar on various real-world examples. I will also print some separate pieces at the top with low walls to contain the track. I’m finding mapping the stone textures onto more complex shapes a bit of a challenge, and can cause Blender to slow down and crash.

I agree. I apologised earlier in the thread for anyone I upset with my clumsy choice of words. I was surprised that there wasn’t an offsite backup. Hopefully it will all be smooth sailing with a new hosting provider.

At the very least you'd need a handful servers to run a site like this. It's a busy site, so you'd have to separate the databases from the web server. Plus at least one standby server ready to go. And you'd want a SAN with an array of RAID drives for your filing system. Plus a very good symmetrical internet connection and a very good backup connection in case someone drilled through the first one. And some air conditioning to cool it all. And so on... Or you could just outsource it.

I worked for a company where we used to keep a backup onsite in the fire safe, plus offsite backups which staff took home with them. We used to call them "the hamsters", because it was like taking the school pet home to look after, knowing there would be trouble if you lost it.

I think you've summed up my thoughts on the matter far better than I managed to with my somewhat clumsy posts last night.

I see your name twice on the left of your posts, and it looks like your avatar/profile picture has disappeared. If you re-upload it that might solve the problem.

Clearly I misjudged how personally my comments would be taken, which wasn't my intention, and I apologise for any upset I caused. I didn't say that nothing was done to avoid this or that not nothing would be learned from it. Clearly emotions are running high and some people are assuming I meant something more significant than I intended.

I meant lost from the forum. The photos that members upload, especially when they're explaining how they've modelled something are a great resource, as we all know. I agree that Dediserve should have done what they were paid to do.

Thanks, ColinK. As they're selling out, I think I might buy one and risk it. They're great looking models.

I'm not looking for a scapegoat. I feel sorry for the guy who had to cancel his holiday. There's been a lot of fingers pointed at Dediserve, who have clearly messed up, but I don't understand why it's wrong to suggest that the rmweb team should consider how they might have done things differently.

A daily incremental backup doesn't cost much more in terms of bandwidth. Everything that's been backed up has already been uploaded to the server that day, and it's probably been downloaded to people's web clients many more times. It's not just a "nice to have" if you're running a commercial website. I agree that restore times over the net can be horrendous, but it would only be required in a disaster-recovery situation, which is exactly where rmweb has ended up. Some hosting providers will let you courier magnetic or flash media to them if required. Hindsight is a great thing, and I feel sorry for the guy that's had to cancel his holiday, but someone in the organisation should have planned for this.

I don't want to be *that* person, and I appreciate all the work the team have put in restoring the site, but are the RMWeb team taking any responsibility for the failure and loss of service or is it just a case of blaming it on Dediserve? After all, a lot of people have lost photos that they uploaded for the benefit of helping other modellers. Perhaps taking regular backups rather than relying on the hosting provider to do it would be a good idea in future?

Could anyone tell me how easy it would be to change the destination blinds on these? I grew up travelling on these buses in the 80s but my layout is set in Wales. I was thinking of changing the destination to a private charter.

Thanks, JCL. It was your excellent tutorials that got me started on these. The brick walls were done in Tinkercad, but the stone ones in Blender after watching your tutorials. I oriented the stone walls so they were standing upright while printing - i.e. the orientation they'd be in when being used - with quite a large raft to keep them still. The photos are already about as close up as I can focus on them. The stones are around 5mm high. I sprayed a coat of Hycote filler primer on them to help smooth them a bit. Once painted and weathered, you can just about see some horizontal banding on close-up photos, but they look perfect to the naked eye. The brick walls are less successful. I printed them lying flat on their backs (bricks facing upwards), and I think they might be better printed standing up like the stone ones to maximise resolution. To make that work, though, I think I'd need to double the mortar gap between brick courses but leave the gap between adjacent bricks the same. At the moment, the bricks are approximately 1m x 3mm with a 0.2mm gap all round. I'll post a close-up photo later. I haven't started on the tunnel portals and viaduct yet due to lack of time, but I hope to do so in the next week or so.

Sorry - only just spotted your reply. Did you want me to post a short tutorial or have you managed to work it out another way?

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Does spraying the whole thing with hairspray or varnish when it’s finished help at all?

Sorry if I've missed the answer elsewhere on this thread. How do you prevent your grass from getting squashed when you lean over your layout? I'm using the Greenscenes applicator, with a dilute PVA base and WWS layering spray. The end result looks okay, but it's pretty fragile.