lepidotos
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Posts posted by lepidotos
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On 21/12/2023 at 11:36, Frappington Jct said:
As regards chassis, I think the original Dean Sidings catalogue listed it as for a Hornby Caley Single so presumably it comes with the slide bar etc.?
It's a shame the Hornby singles get pretty expensive even used (lowest I can find is $100), they're both pretty bad models and I'd have no qualms harvesting their chasses. I'll try to see about making my own, I imagine it could involve a couple useful skills.
On 21/12/2023 at 11:36, Frappington Jct said:The Dean Sidings kits (or ex Dean Sidings as they are now) are decent and fairly easy to put together as long as you're prepared to do a bit of modding and troubleshooting.
I was already going to be modding it to add the dome and solid splashers, so that's not a problem for me.
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I need some Singles, but don't want to go the Rapido route -- they're fine models, but that's the problem, I want to mod them to be the later solid splasher and dome variant of the Single, and paint them in ahistorical livery, and I don't really want to spend $632 before materials and DCC and all that just for two good models to destroy, in a way.
So I found these. Assuming they ship them to the US (I read their shipping page, not sure if these qualify), how are they? Has anyone here bought one and built it? They don't have any pictures posted, which I'm not taking as an amazing sign. Would love to see regardless, I'm not needing or expecting them to be museum quality but something better than "just barely not a toy train anymore" quality would be nice.
Thanks.
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2 hours ago, PenrithBeacon said:
So where are you going to put the waste generated during the lifetime of the power station plus all the contaminated materials when it has to be dismantled? You don't have to simply design against disaster or accident.
Wind+sun+batteries can provide all the power needed
Sure, ignoring the heavy pollution that producing them creates, and the fact you have to switch the batteries out fairly regularly. As for where to put it, first off most of it isn't even waste, just stuff we're too lazy to sort out. For example, the old PWR systems' waste is about 94.4% unburned uranium. Solid fuel designs have that problem, liquid fuel designs allow you to actually use up all the fuel. One notable fission product is technetium-99m, which is used millions of times a year in the medical industry. Another one we've been looking into is bismuth-213, which we've been looking into shoving onto antibodies to try to kill cancer cells. Secondly, we'd have a place already if it weren't for lobbyists and Greenpeace blocking every attempt made at finding a suitable place to put this stuff. We tried putting it all a mile under Yucca Mountain, that didn't get passed because "not in my backyard!". There's possibilities in Texas and Wyoming we can look at, though.
If w+s+battery is all we need, why has Germany seen such a resounding failure with Energiewende, which isn't even as restrictive as that? Post EGW Germany burned more lignite coal than pre EGW Germany. That and what do you mean by "all power needed," exactly? Do you propose we stop recycling materials? Because recycling is a major energy expense, if we did it via solar and wind there wouldn't be enough electricity for the rest of the grid, unless you had tons of batteries and hundreds of miles of solar panels, which is frankly ridiculous and would easily make a single drop of Chinese river water lethal, while using up all those rare earth elements that make 21st century life more comfortable and less dangerous the 1910s.
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2 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:
Does it?
£750 and a few people don't reckon these are very good, certainly not as refined as the Hornby 00 gauge model. But still light years ahead of that Bassett Lowke model.
Jason
Maybe it's not seeing the numbers 4472 or 60103 on the side of the cab that's making me look more highly upon it than I would otherwise do.
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2 hours ago, Northmoor said:
Lepidotos does make a fair point about electrification outside major centres. The economics of electrifying railways are the same in any country; it is traffic density that makes it viable, not distance or size of haul. In most of the world, the required speed can be achieved without electrification.
Much of the US railroad network has long gaps between trains. It is extremely difficult to pay back the cost of wiring 1000 miles of route on twelve trains a day. However, most of the environmental benefit is still achieved with a few big diesels. Who cares if they consume 5 gallons/mile? A fleet of trucks to shift the same tonnage would consume, err, about ten times that.
It's gonna start being a problem by around 2040 when oil costs $149 a barrel in 2019 dollars, or if not that, then 2050 when it goes up to anywhere between $185 and $215, again 2019. Sounds too distant in the future but so did 2020 for a while. It's gonna start getting really expensive, and you can bet they're going to want some kind of out for diesel. All it took was a couple months of oil crisis in 1973-74 to get people looking for better options.
4 hours ago, Allegheny1600 said:Err, ever heard of high voltage transmission lines?
Brazil and China have managed to send power lines quite some distance.
Plus, I seem to recall that steam locos do require rather a lot of water - unless you add in condenser units? South Africa did use these of course.
(Also re: grovenor but I can't get this phone to move your quote up to this edit box)
Yeah, but us Americans have this thing where we're afaid of things progressing past the 20th century. My mom just said to me yesterday while we were talking that she thinks that 5G towers cause the virus and high voltage transmission lines cause cancer. Someone's absolutely going to use NIMBY on high voltage transmission lines.
Condensation was something I was going to add in there but forgot to. Yeah, it'd use a condenser unit.
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13 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:
'A far smaller environmental impact'
I think that should be in the Jokes thread.
Of the three major disasters (3MI, F. Daiichi, Chernobyl) one of them was a safety test taken too far on a design nobody even builds anymore (Chernobyl), one was the builders cheaping out on building materials in a country known for flooding (Daiichi) and one was only a partial meltdown that didn't give you enough of a dose to get a sunburn (3MI). It's no coincidence all three were built in the 1970s either.
Tell me where the technology is at fault here, when it's only had one real incident not the fault of someone else's lack of foresight in... 74 years? Especially when considering that "nuclear power plant" is as broad a concept as "automobile".
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1 hour ago, PenrithBeacon said:
You don't need nuclear power anymore, it's more expensive than renewables. There's lots of sun and wind in the US and I would have thought that the traffic over the Rockies with grades of 1:40 give or take would make it viable. Whether the prevailing climate deniers would agree is another matter. Probably not.
Per kilowatt maybe (though with MSBR it's dubious)--but it doesn't really matter because solar and wind have awful capacity factor that depend on the local climate and can't ever improve (solar, for instance, has a 30% or so CF); nuclear has about a 98% capacity factor with far smaller environmental impact. Batteries are certainly one option, but they're nowhere near environmentally friendly. Plus, the low density means for just 500mWe, you're gonna be plopping down a lot of solar panels.
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This has more to do with this individual seller I'm assuming, but a thousand bucks for an O-gauge A3. Personally it doesn't seem like it's thousand-dollar realistic, it kinda looks better than RtR stock but it's not enough to not instantly go "oh, that's a model".
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I was thinking about this topic recently, because oil is incredibly unstable (more in a bit) and electrification is kinda nonexistent here in the United States; it's basically just a bit of Texas, the NEC, the PRR, and various bits and pieces along the eastern half. And that's to be expected; the United States, I don't know if you know this, is a pretty big place. You can't really electrify lines out west outside metro areas of California or Colorado because of how spread out everything is, you'd have to start plopping nuclear power plants down in the middle of nowhere, specifically molten-salt reactors due to the fact there's no water out here, and we haven't really been doing MSR since the 60s. Meanwhile, steam doesn't depend on external factors besides the existence of two rails (or grooves), can burn just about anything, doesn't care if it's being run in the wrong type of snow, and is far from developed to its max. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for electrification where possible, but it's not possible everywhere.
So, oil. A 2000 prediction by Dr. Sadad al-Husseini, a pretty well respected oil geologist, predicted that by 2004 oil production would reach a 15-year plateau, and conventional oil could be used up as early as 2057. He was correct on the first half, though it was actually 2005, with year to year fluctuations that don't derivate too far from the trend to break it. The U.S. military backed him up on it, predicting shortages starting between 2015 and now, but we pushed it back a few decades due to hydraulic fracturing. The clock is ticking on that, though, and we aren't really doing electrification (as explained previously), so... anyone up for a brand new class of steam locomotive? I've been cooking one up in my head because I'm certain it'll be a thing within my lifetime, at least.
Not mentioning exact statistics, because I'm not personally an engineer (though I will end up majoring in it when the virus time ends and I can go to college), here's a ""brief"" collection of my thoughts. Half of it is going to be stuff you already know, but I'm still putting in A. to explain my reasoning and B. for those who don't. Feel free to mock it, I finished it up at 1:10 am and it's probably gone off the deep end somewhere.
As for locomotives that existed already but don't anymore, I really want to see an LNER H2, maybe two of them since I can see it being a good design for preservation railways. If I was gonna do it (and I might, at least in live-steam form), I'd make it a Porta-ble testbed (geez that's a terrible pun).
In terms of active new build projects, the one I'm most excited for is Beachy Head. The LNER C1/LBSCR H2 is one of my favorites with Gresley/LBSCR cab installed, so I'll be happy to see one up and running.
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On 08/02/2020 at 07:44, The Johnster said:
I don't like LNER Apple Green, or the lining; looks gaudy and fairground-like to my mind. But I like the look of the A1, purposeful, powerful to the point of brutality, and uncompromisingly practical with that drop at the front to the buffer beam, a no-nonsense get down to business looking sort of loco.
I mostly agree, the one thing I'm not so sure of is how long the smokebox is, it just looks weird. It doesn't have to be Gresley length, but a midpoint would probably be ideal. I'm 100% sure I have no idea what I'm talking about and there's a good reason for it, though.
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Admittedly, I'm not the biggest fan of how Tornado looks, but it looks a fair bit better when given an LNER livery.
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8 hours ago, Vistisen said:
I quite like it, but if you think it is ugly, blink and it'll be gone
I think I will, that's pretty good advice.
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On 19/03/2020 at 13:07, RedGemAlchemist said:
Copy of the image so that once the listing goes down (whether by someone buying it or it expiring) the KB can still be... appreciated? Is that the right word?
On 20/05/2020 at 03:15, doctor quinn said:
Same here
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I've seen something truly awful
Imagine having a whole runway for a nose
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7 hours ago, LNWR18901910 said:
Now that you come to mention it, mine too! Though, the MSWJR Maroon livery is nice on it.
That's what we invented paint for.
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I've noticed I tend to like anything with four driving wheels (esp. 4-4-2s and 4-4-4s). To be a bit more specific, on the UK side the Sharp K2s and LNER C1s/LBSCR H2s, though the latter definitely had a bit of a glow up with the addition of the Gresley cab, as pictured. They used to be my favorite, and still rank up there, but something else took its place as we'll see shortly. Honestly, the Furness had a bunch of heavy hitters. Here's another K2. The C12 tanks are cool too, and it's probably cheating to mention the Stirling single, but I want to give appreciation to the less appreciated (or, less overtly appreciated) domed Stirling single. Though double the driver count (and for that matter, double the fireman count) and you get my new favorite, the P2. Late Humorist also contends for that title, as you may have been able to tell from my... to be nice, "modest" effort at cutting and shutting a Humorist Atlantic.
On our side of said ocean, the NYC 999 is probably one of my favorites from the company. I like it more than the streamliner at least. The PRR E6s is also pretty nice, in a different less elegant way. Speaking of PRR, the A5s and D16 both had appeal, the former for being cute (seriously, it looks like a non-prototypical model) and the latter for being about as muscular as 4-4-0s got, at least for the PRR. And go way further to the west, and you end up in Lithuania where they got the quite nice TK. Reading's 4-4-4 had an even look to it, which I like. Milwaukee's A2 gets to be on the list too.
Favorite tank engine goes almost certainly to the LNER H2. Honorable mentions to the SR USA class, LBSCR L class, and LSWR C14 class for being absolutely hilarious and G16 class for being elegantly muscular.
In terms of diesel, probably either the Class 25 or 37, with the Deltics being close competitors. The Class 37s with split headcodes sort of look like someone with really thick glasses, which I can relate to given how powerful my own prescription is. And man, I just realized how much of a wall of text I make these, but I really just can't pick one.
Also, the GT3. The GT3 looked really cool. Though the better half said the face of it makes it look like a Railway Series character, and I kind of agree...
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On 05/03/2020 at 23:07, Zomboid said:
The Pennsylvania T1 of course. Not sure which side of the genuis/ insanity line it sits, but I'd love to see such a beast in action.
It's ugly, but I agree. Whether it looks nice or not, if it breaking Mallard's record, assuming it does so, draws more attention to new-builds (and steam in general) it might be a very nice help for future projects. Plus, it could help be a test-bed for torrefied biomass. If that happens and it turns out to be more economical than diesel fuel as the CSR claims...
Don't like the idea of them using it for commercial electricity though. There's already better alternatives than biomass, such as molten-salt reactors.
On 08/05/2020 at 07:08, brack said:I've made one, but as a non functioning scale model. This also avoids the issue of finding and refining the yellowcake, which isn't really something you want to be doing in your house...
That reminds me of the time I had the bright idea to go hit up junkyards across the state and get enough scrap metal to make a working scale model of an MCFR. I'm still not sure where I would have found the uranium from, but the americium starter load I'd get after investing in a third of the country's smoke detectors.
Yeah I didn't do it on my then 14 year old budget.
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While I don't have any models at the moment besides a single Rio Grande hopper car, I've kind of wanted to take a model of Humorist (full smoke deflectors) and paint it in weathered BR freight black, as though BR kept steam into the early seventies for freight trains. Because I have little respect for the sacred things. I've tried it out in a railsim with an example train and I thought it looked kinda nice, if unholy.
To go above and beyond, I considered giving it Flying Scotsman's number and nameplates. Still might, actually.
On 26/03/2020 at 11:35, john new said:The HP world I concur has both JKR’s canon and the other adaptations, so we already have possibilities for a Castle (from the name), a Hall from the films and a rebuilt West Country from the film’s pre-release publicity tour. Also no diesels yet at the HP side of K Cross as magic kills their electric control gear. The image, of a sort of 4F derived loco, on Wizarding World/Pottermore adds even more confusion.
My own Fan-fic story based on the HP railway scenarios is here on the Ao3 story site.Hey, I did my own one of those too, starring a young Arthur Weasley in 1963, though in it they swap out for a more appropriate locomotive for being kept at King's Cross. It's not anything particularly good, hopefully it's nothing awful though.
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12 hours ago, The Johnster said:
Oi! The entire GWR was located in the western hemisphere, west of the Greenwich Meridian...
If it's any consolation, so was the LMS. But alright, I'll specify a bit and say "the New World".
12 hours ago, The Johnster said:The E1 was by no means the only locomotive in the UK that had tanks that overlapped the running plate; TVR 'O' series and the BR standard 4MT 2-6-4 tank come to mind. The objective was of course to increase the capacity of the tanks without compromising the fore and aft balance of the loco, which increased range and put the weight above the driving wheels where it had the most effect on tractive effort.
It's not so much that, the 4MT quoted is fine because the cab and bunker came along for the ride and it looks balanced as a result. It's that the cab and bunker aren't as wide as the water tanks.
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On 15/03/2020 at 08:08, The Johnster said:
which precludes the spectacularly ugly Bulleid CIE Turfburner (I have no problem with the look of 'Leader'), Paget, GER Decapod etc.
I don't think the Turfburner or Decapod are too bad, myself. At least not pre-rebuild Decapod... might be my American perspective here (as in, we have some real nasty-lookers over this way, and they're inoffensive compared). It's kind of hard to actually pick a single one, the western hemisphere isn't really known for good looking steam locomotives. I've narrowed it down a little here, but even then some of these are just categories.
Links lead to Wikimedia Commons
UP 844 is one, for feeling a bit fowardly lanky and awkward with those wall-like smoke deflectors.
While I'm all for the new-build, it doesn't help my opinion of how the PRR T1 looks. That opinion is a poor one.
Really just any time we've tried to do streamlining doesn't (yes, that last one is Canadian, but Canadian rail is basically U.S. rail) really work, aside from maybe the Hiawatha Atlantic. Though really that's just due to my lack of appreciation for streamlining in general, outside specific circumstances.
On the other hand, pure function-over-form isn't a recipe for success either, as seen in the New York Central L1 class.
And finally, any tender locomotive with more trailing wheels than leading ones, such as this S2 class Berkshire.
Runner up: While generally it looks fine, the LBSCR E4s' water tanks protruding far past the cab is something I'm really not keen on. It's fine that they're that wide, but at that point the running boards aren't much use for getting from one end of the locomotive to the other, so I don't see why the cab and coal bunker couldn't have just been made flush with the tanks.
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Does anyone have any experience with the Phoenix Paints Stirling Single kit?
in Kitbuilding & Scratchbuilding
Posted
Okay, so I ended up actially getting a Hornby Single chassis -- found one on eBay for $51 shipped (£40 total). It was just the chassis, wiring, and wheels, no motor, but that's perfectly fine, and desirable in the lack of a shell or tender. Now we'll see about getting the Phoenix shell, it seems like a whole process. I might not do the second engine, at least for now, since the likelihood I'll find a second cheap chassis is pretty low, but if the opportunity presents itself I'll take it.
Probably, I'll just do the later-condition (1991 era) of the two planned models (the other being 1916), in VoR-style Rail Blue and with a few modifications, to go with a Rail Blue Stanier 8F and some Mark 1s and 2s.