FoxUnpopuli

Yes John - it would be a monster, the whole thing is a very long term project. Unfortunately the home and garden where it is going needs a bit of work first. I may put some of that progress on RMWeb. As for the layouts, because all them are quite a way off starting, I'm a little wary of a public thread. Stock collection/creation is under way; my LMS and LNER fleets are getting somewhere, with the odd GWR loco creeping in. I'm looking forward to finding some Bulleid and Maunsell locos. There are a good few wagons to run... but coaches, well, I might need a bit of help finding sensible stock and rake organisation thereof. Next is kitbuilding and some 3D printing work, for wagons, locos, buildings and other items. I'm looking forward to some brass construction and airbrush use. But for the beginning of this year, this is more the dilemma: re-plaster this lath with lime, or strip it all and apply plastrboard to the stud and skim that instead...

.... put a few random wagons on the mainline... to give a foreshortened impression of the sidings?

Is there an E/J71 left in stock? Or did they all sell?

Stargate SG-1 one of the best sci-fi series of all - actual a very coherent basis in science behind it. And they had fun too. The 'Groundhog Day' episode is hilarious. "IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BACKSWING?!" See if you can find 'Almost Human'. An underrated future buddy-buddy cop series by J.H.Wyman with Karl Urban. And cancelled after one series, like Firefly, just when it was getting good.

Hmm. A very similar one (painted black) for £85 from Manomano (in France?) and from Amazon in a black case for £120. Why wouldn't I go for an Iwata Silver-Jet for a few pounds more? It doesn't quite have the pressure of the AS196... (OK, now we're thread hijacking. Maybe we should take this to PM...?)

Thank you gents. 10 cents for a compressor?! Mind you, Father and I bought 20-odd motors recently for <£2 each, free postage. One of the types ordered is identical to the Hornby black unit which seems to sell for ~£20. Silly. It's going to come to tears at some point, surely?

@Kylestrome@cctransuk Not wishing to hijack this thread too much, I have two related questions for both of you: what compressors do you use, and what compressor would you buy now if you had to replace it?

I have to bow to the superior knowledge... but if it were mine, I'd restore it and use it as David did. This is from someone who has four classic cars and a Victorian cottage, all of which need more work than I'd care to reveal.

Ooh. That sounds useful. Is it available from any other Loco Decoder manufacturers? EDIT: I looked it up, on many of their decoders, Zimo allows the half-speed function to be mapped to a variety of function keys, including F3. Very cool!

Back-to-backs on old models are usually pretty narrow. If it's physically possible to pull the wheels out further on the axles, more of the flanges will have more of a chance of being in contact with the rails at any one point in time. It's not perfect, but it will be an improvement. Adding further pickups to the unmotored bogie would be more reliable. Nothing to stop you from doing both.

Generally, when writing fiction, a fair rule is to not write overpowered characters. Recent Star Trek reboots suffer because of this seeming necessity to 'have a bigger bear'. I haven't yet watched 'The Orville' but I know I'll enjoy it because (I am led to believe) it does not do this. in Discovery, the ship itself is just way too bonkers for Star Trek, as is the engineer behind it. Plus, if you didn't know, the ship and all the characters were plagiarised/stolen from an indie computer game designer (look it up) and CBS/Paramount are doing their damnedest to bury the reporting of the court case. For this reason, I stopped watching Discovery. In Picard, it began ticking along OK - the initial core character being who she was... that was just about acceptable. However, since then, the home-help's 'vocational history', the Romulan Section 31, and killer nuns (!)... yeah. It just smacks of bad writing. That said, if you can see past that and suspend your disbelief in the details (ST5, anyone?) it's well produced and directed, and holds the attention. It's shaping up to be a cross between Voyager, The Hobbit and Firefly... the best bit is simply regarding the other core character... I'm genuinely intrigued as to what's going to happen and how it will all pan out. If you genuinely want to watch the next episode, rather than watch out of some sense of obligation, it's probably AOK.

Beautiful bit of kit. Keep it, use it, don't buy a new one unless it's an addition. https://www.cumber.nl/AerographDevilbissSuper63parts.html https://www.airbrushforum.org/threads/aerograph-devilbiss-super-63-service-bulletin.20571/ (You'll have to create an account to get these service sheet images.) https://www.airbrushforum.org/threads/found-some-useful-devilbis-parts.19860/ Otherwise, a period airbrushing book might have some useful servicing instructions... just an idea. If you think about it, when you spray, you'll be the modelling equivalent of that guy driving a Lotus Cortina instead of a Ford Mondeo.* (* Artistic Licence applied.)

My father built me a 4ft by 7ft baseboard, hinged onto the wall with fold down legs, lift/drop assisted by a single car tailgate hydraulic ram. At age 7, I couldn't quite pull the layout down and push it back up by myself, but it wasn't long before I could, and it survived many years. It was 1/2" chipboard, with 3x1" framing, and the droplegs were 1" square, and all linked to drop as one. I was pretty light, I used to climb up on the thing to lay track, so it was pretty sturdy, even though it doesn't sound it from the numbers!

I've popped you a PM - I have a US HO modelling friend in the Newbury area who might be interested in some items.

It's great to see a big, busy town/city centre coming to fruition. I'm especially interested in areas like this as I'm both planning a 'London-based' station, and also one of the layouts (Bournville) is a shed, a station and the industrial area (Cadbury's) so there will be large buildings amongst them. The London scene is coming together in my head. Part of something that became known as 'the Abercrombie Plans' included the redevelopment of the South Bank and the rearrangement of the major railway stations in the south-west part of the city. Victoria was very well established, but Waterloo & Waterloo East, Cannon Street, Charing Cross, and Blackfriars/St. Pauls and their various lines and viaducts all (still) take valuable real estate in that area. Abercrombie suggested they be combined into a single larger station, and his team's ideas for a total redevelopment of The South Bank pretty much flattened (or substantially relocated) Waterloo. I'd love to model a new Waterloo station and surrounding area in 1947, which would remove Charing Cross and Cannon Street, probably retaining Blackfriars, as the link north-south through Farringdon to St Pancras would have been much more relevant. The challenge will be the massive proposed architectural redevelopment of the South Bank - and showing a bit of river too. It's a huge expanse of model - about a square mile, or roughly a 20 metre square - thus it would have to be 'focussed' somewhat. Practicality means it would be 5.6/6m square double garage sized building, with routes in and out through the walls, but access means the model would be a 2-2.5m wide 'curve' through the centre of the room, allowing access from... well, the North-East (riverside) and South-West (say... 'The Old Vic'!) Operationally, this gives me the chance to run all four carriers in the station, with LMS and LNER travelling East (then north) through Blackfriars, and GWR moving off to the South West (with the occasional north for Paddington) and SR going both ways. I thought it might be fun to have London Transport run the overground local trains and station piloting too, so some 'modern' locos from the big 4 could be liveried up in the lovely red and gold LT colours that they never really wore - Fairburn tanks for passenger trains, maybe some Q1s for goods! But to bring it back - nice buildings, very interesting construction and tip-top kitbashing to make them 'yours'. Big thumbs-up.

Being a Fox myself, and thus listing all locomotives with 'Fox' in their names and figuring out how I can justify owning them... I have just spent the last fifteen minutes researching tropical fish! I always loved looking at the neons in aquaria when I was a kid, but I think I'll stick to the model railways. Good luck with sorting the pump, Father's been on the Skype this morning, apparently, one of the windows on his home went from 'a bit drippy' to 'a raging flood zone' with all this weather happening. And the power's just dropped out right here, so there's definitely some weather happening here (as if the noise of the howling gale outside wasn't clue enough.) Stay safe, PN fans.

Electric motors and gears are simple things, RTR models should work just fine. Anything that labours, grinds, goes too slow or makes a horrible noise is not right and needs examining. DCC decoders* are more complex, but electronics, once proven to work, usually work reliably. They can suffer from infant mortality syndrome - but if they survive a couple of weeks use they should last years and years. If you have a new model that does not perform as it should (DCC or DC) - send the damn thing back. As a consumer, you have a right to expect a basic level of quality from a purchased product. As for S/H purchases... that's a bit of caveat emptor - but again, if you've committed and you can't return it, stripping a model to check its basic mechanicals and electrics is not difficult, and most things can be repaired somehow. DCC chips can be removed to return locos to DC, then tested separately and replaced if required. I actually don't have a DCC decoder 'tester' per se, but I'm thinking about making/buying one. ESU make a decoder tester which I looked into in the past, but I have slept since then. ( * I call them 'chips' from my old Zero 1 days, apologies if that slips in.)

Come friendly bombs, and all that.

Can't wait for the final Stanier go. It shall be my first metal kit. A pair of 15" Hunslets are required at some point to make 'Austin II' and 'Austin 3'... they might be a more sensible first attempt kit!

http://www.highlevelkits.co.uk/flyshunterpage.html

I've considered a paternoster lift before now. While the engineering of it is a little involved, the volume of traffic that can be stored relative to floorspace is huge.

Looks pretty bloody good to me. Test, test, test, make sure your coaches aren't fouling.

You have to feed them lettuce levers.

Ah, the new Hornby Thompson A2s will be good for something then...

Thanks to 'Professional Layout Services' website for the photo, and while they appear to have used a Class 40, the general advice as @Chimer says is to use your longest carriage. Now if you want to get absolutely precise, you should split the pencil in half, but then you have to decide your own clearance. But first, lay sheets of paper on the board, run a pencil (or your dirty thumb) along the edge of your cork to get you your starting template, cut it out and re-lay this onto the flat board. Then you can run your pencilcoach across the top of this. Voila - one template ready to be trimmed. Trim it out, and then make a second copy of this template and retain the master. Depending on what you use for your platform edging you'll need to offset back from this edge to cut whatever it is you are using for: A) your platform substrate, and B) your platform top. For the PECO stuff, as you can see below, the edging is not quite 'flat' on the inside at the top so A & B are not the same, also you need to relieve the substrate for where the connecting tabs overlap, and also at the bottom of the platform edge. I don't know how flexible this stuff is, can users comment? Whichever: use the template copy for cutting, pasting it to whatever you need to cut and offsetting the right amount, and then if you need another one, just copy the original again. Also: