DGO

Strangely the Schynige Platte railway track just visible in the steam photo above still uses steam at the start and end of the season, the overhead electrical lines are only in place from late spring to late autumn, and they use the steam loco to put up the lines (and I assume take them down later) at the start of each season, it can also be seen during the year on special occasions, I was once lucky enough to see it bedecked with garlands of flowers taking a bride and groom up to the top, Looked stunning.

I'd guess pictures 4-6 were taken from near the top of the Harder Kulm, you can certainly get those views from up there. I totally agree on the paint scheme, even worse are some of the sponsored WAB trains which look like old fashioned tin biscuit boxes covered in Coop Logos etc

It's more that they keep the sun from the windows during the hottest part of the day when the sun is higher in the sky, during winter months when the sun is lower it angles in through the windows and helps heat the room, it's based on things like alpine chalets with their wide overhanging roofs, but obviously you'd need huge overhangs for the tallest buildings so instead they designed mini overhangs for each window. It's one of those things that you probably wouldn't notice as an individual in the room but would notice in a decrease in electricity bills for aircon in the building as a whole, typically in the Norther Hemisphere you find them on South Facing windows

Rainbow was a J class yacht, whilst the original was indeed scrapped in 1940, a replica was built in 2012 to join the 3 surviving J class yachts and 5 other new ones, they were not small averaging 130 ft in length and about 21ft of beam with a mast of about 160ft they are beautiful vessels on the water, suitable for any harbour from 1930 to present day so long as you have 20 ft of water in the harbour to get in and out.

It's an interesting question because (and I may be wrong here) we also need to consider scale, at n gauge texture is much less important, I have been very impressed with the Chandwell model railway which is on youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/Chandwell he has got a lot of detail into his buildings with mainly printed textures glued to nothing more than cereal boxes. As you go up in scale I personally think you need to add more details, so at HO/OO I prefer a more solid structure than paper and card, I personally am very slowly working on an HO Alpine station which will have laser cut and etched metal, 3d printed resin parts, brass sections, laser cut mdf and ply and probably laser cut thin card as well plus various bits of styrene, you might call it a true hybrid, each part is being 3d modelled so that I can check fit etc and each material has been chosen for specific reasons, so for example MDF is going to be used for reinforced concrete walls and floors whilst ply will be used for the upper levels that are from interlocking beams. A lot I think comes down to how happy you are with your own skills so if painting lots of bricks or stonework is not your thing go for the printed materials

Platform support column for London St. Pancras International terminal, will you be doing the rest of the Victorian Gothic building to go with it ? Now that would be something to see

Bearing in mind Swiss earnings and if we assume 30 people to each coach for 150 people in total it comes in at about £50 per head but throw in Swiss earnings and costs and it would be roughly the equivalent to someone in the UK paying £20 per head (I think it safe to say that the Birthday boy was not on a minimum wage job)

The hardest part is getting the pictures to stitch together properly, The best way to do this is go out with a tripod and a fixed focal length lens with manual exposure, you need a good pit of overlap from one frame to the next and ideally in 35mm terms you would want to use a 50mm lens to get minimal lens distortion. You need to take the pictures in quick succession so that exposure doesn't alter too much between frames, then its fairly easy to stitch together in a photo editing package. Print wise you can get good results from modern inkjet plotters that will let you print long prints, the longest I managed some time ago was about 20 feet long and 3 feet high, but I was working for a company that sold the plotters so had the time and resources to play around, a lot of companies don't want to print extra long, look for someone who can do banner printing, consider slightly desaturating the image so that it fades into the background a little more. David

Temperature of resin has a significant effect, if you are printing in a room where the ambient temp drops overnight then expect failures, a number of people who print in non centrally heated have been working out ways of keeping their printers warm, note also do not add cold fresh resin part way through a print job unless you enjoy starting again

Do you not have platform dimensions ? If you do you should be able to get pretty close just using those pictures

Standard basic personnel shelter, the blast walls right in front of the doors give its use away, it may be a 50's depot but most of those were in active use during WW2, often such structures were built above ground when the local water table was fairly high, there were several different designs, designed to protect people from flying shrapnel rather than a direct hit. You might find a wargaming stockist would have something suitable, but it's a very easy structure to scratch build

The HO model is likely to be a 3D printed resin part so pretty light, basically a microvan like this that's used as a taxi service to take people between station and hotel, it's a bit on the small side to use a faller road system setup and 3 point turns would be difficult, likewise the magnorail system probably needs more space than I have by the station so a linear motor seems like it might be the only choice if I want movement, do IDL have a website ? I suspect it still might not be practical due to the tight turns required to go around the street corners

Ah I think I may have been misunderstood, I will try explaining again, there are no rails involved here just a smooth surface (like a road) as I understand it, so let us say the road surface is 0.5mm thick plasticard (or similar) and the "track" (yes I understand its actually overlapping coils) is directly beneath this surface, so to make this simple let us say the road finishes in a garage, the car drives in and stops, now let us say that inside the garage the road has a pair of kerbs on either side that hold the wheels of the vehicle in alignment, now let us take the floor (not the track below it) and spin it 180 degrees, the vehicle is now pointing in the opposite direction to how it entered, now reverse direction of the track and switch on and the car comes out and goes back down the road, thus the long road section needs no breaks at the far end, for that matter I can leave the floor smooth and have the walls of the "garage" turn so that the wheels just slide across the plastic floor which is probably even easier as I can use a central shaft from above. However what I'm not sure of is how you effectively get the equivalent of points at the other end in order for me to have my reversing wye so I can do the three point turn does anything in the track actually move to do this or do you simply have two sets of coils one over the other going in different directions ? And if that is how you do things how do you stop the current in one coil feeding back to the other (though I guess thats not an issue because otherwise you could not get smooth running from one coil to the nest) Am I over thinking things ? I'm a Mechanical not an Electrical Engineer LOL

Possibly silly question, but could you have a straight section of track with the turntable below ,drive the vehicle over the turntable, switch off the track and switch on the turntable spin the vehicle around then set switch off the turntable and switch the track back on ? Since there are no actual above ground tracks it strikes me that this might be possible given that the turntable is hidden anyway

Just wondering if this could be adapted to move some small vehicles at H0 scale circa 40mm x 17 mm in size would be really nice to have the hotel electric taxis go to and from my alpine station, and there is not enough room to do a magnorail setup, but I suspect the linear motors would let me do a setup to achieve a 3 point turn at the station and maybe a hidden turntable at the other end of the street

Nice house with very nice lean to greenhouse , I always prefer the relief one gets on plastic brick vs paper/card, the trick is getting a nice finish on outside corners, the wills plastic sheets tend to be somewhat thicker than other manufacturers which can be blessing or curse, that extra thickness typically results in an obvious line just behind the corner of a wall where the seam occurs, but that extra thickness compared to other makers can be used to your benefit, instead of cutting the walls as butt joints you can use that stiffer thicker plastic to your benefit and mitre the joints instead, this can be a pain in the backside but when done well completely hides the joint, the alternative is to run a downpipe from any gutter down the butt joint and hide it that way

Nice, working on Wengen Station myself

Därligen is one of those stations that's perfect for a model railway, with the lake in front and just the road between it and the steep hillside behind it's perfect for a narrow shelf layout. But does this mean you will also be doing Interlaken West Station and if so will you include the lake steamer terminal ?

A bit further away than the distance you need to see a human hair

Normal Swiss Prison trains I thought were windowless, they get used for cooperative non violent prison transfers, to courts, between prisons or to hospitals, also for deportations, the windowless van has separate cells plus a toilet, it's thought that train transfers are more humane than getting in a cramped van which may have to deal with traffic jams.

Very clever I was wondering how you'd got such a neat finish, now I know LOL David

Some lovely detailed louvres there by the looks of it David

The latest "40W" LED Lasers actually probably closer to 10 to 15 W of real power show promise, using a prism to combine two lasers into a fixed focus, single spot which is pretty much square making cuts more accurate, however you really want an air assist to blow the soot out of the cuts giving much improved cutting ability, Neje an Ortur rival have a Master 2S Max version with a cutting area of 810 x 460mm but the 40W version is $210 more than the 30W, Neje can also supply the bits required to link your airbrush compressor to give you air assist for just $16 extra which is not much more than doing a DIY job. I'd recommend some form of air assist on any laser, not only will it give you improved cutting but it carries off the soot generated and thus keeps the lens cleaner. People would be well advised to box in the laser and extract the fumes to outside, whilst most materials are safe some plywoods, mdf and plastics will give off harmful vapour when laser cut and extracting the fumes not only stops the room smelling like you have set it on fire but may if you do a lot of cutting prolong your life. To get accurate interlocking cuts you need a set of accurate verniers, then simply cut a 2cm square out of your chosen material (repeat for all materials) and measure the hole size and the cutout size, you can then adjust the drawings accordingly to get a nice snug fit, make sure the square is set so one side matches the x axis of the machine and the other the y axis and make a note of which way round they are because beams are rectangular and so will be fractionally different you may also need to calibrate the software to ensure that you are actually getting a square not a rectangle the following assumes you have calibrated the machine so that 1mm of movement on x and 1mm of movement on y are identical Lets say that your 20mm square hole measures 20.1 x 20.2 and your 20mm cutout measures 19.9 x 19.8 (along matching axis) then we can assume that the beam is 0.2mm wide and 0.4mm high (it will be less than this but I'm simplifying) so now if you want to get a square that is really tight in the hole and you want them both at exactly 20mm the hole must be redrawn to be 19.9 x 19.8 and the cutout must be 20.1 x 20.2 , after a brief sanding to remove the charcoal on the edges they should just fit one into the other with zero clearance, And this is how you get exact interlocking parts (note in reality you should either leave a hairline width between the two or carry a big mallet to force them together but hopefully that gives people a starting point) David

Typically tow is a single line to the single central forward bollard. On the Thames and other wide rivers two barges may be lashed together alongside each other using the port and starboard bollards, the Lines from the barges to the tug would still go from each of the central forward bollards to the tug forming a V. The kit must represent a powered barge, as you will note in the pictures above unpowered barges do not have tillers, this would explain the lack of a forward towing bollard on the model plus the raised prow which would just get in the way of a towing line. To represent an unpowered barge just remove the raised prow and the rudder/tiller at the stern and add a central forward bollard perhaps 3 scale feet back from the bow, You could optionally also add a fairlead right on the bow as this helps when towing. That said there are barges with high prows, though less common in the UK they do occur and in this case they do indeed use a line from both port and starboard bollards out to the tug though you would normally expect the lines to pass through Hawse Holes in the raised prow plate Double tow https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.gettyimages.com%2Fphotos%2Fcirca-1965-a-tug-towing-two-river-barges-on-the-river-thames-london-picture-id3423793&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gettyimages.com%2Fdetail%2Fnews-photo%2Ftug-towing-two-river-barges-on-the-river-thames-london-news-photo%2F3423793&tbnid=aAQSNW1F_9bpoM&vet=12ahUKEwiZscLrl7PzAhUbMRoKHW9iCj4QMygJegUIARDIAQ..i&docid=-D7vpgOh5XXwTM&w=1024&h=782&itg=1&q=towing thames river barge&ved=2ahUKEwiZscLrl7PzAhUbMRoKHW9iCj4QMygJegUIARDIAQ High Prow barge being towed https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fc8.alamy.com%2Fcomp%2FD23MT1%2Ftug-boat-towing-an-empty-barge-on-the-river-thames-in-the-pool-of-D23MT1.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alamy.com%2Fstock-photo-tug-boat-towing-an-empty-barge-on-the-river-thames-in-the-pool-of-52942625.html&tbnid=TiTKW2grK5XGwM&vet=12ahUKEwiZscLrl7PzAhUbMRoKHW9iCj4QMygIegUIARDFAQ..i&docid=mmkvnFNVwxskuM&w=864&h=1390&q=towing thames river barge&ved=2ahUKEwiZscLrl7PzAhUbMRoKHW9iCj4QMygIegUIARDFAQ Hope that helps

Over the years I came to the conclusion that every Airfix Kit I built was actually based on something but not every kit was produced from original engineers/architects drawings. In the Airfix/Dapol Cranes case I suspect that a lot of simplification came in, the basic shape looks ok from a distance but the legs would have almost certainly been an open lattice gradually narrowing towards the turntable, the jib would have been finer and there would probably have been further mechanisms at the top or back of the cabin, However it was a kit intended for something like 8 years plus to be used with a toy train sent rather than an accurate model and as such fills the role quite well. Faller do a not dissimilar crane now being sold as part of Gaugemasters Fordhampton products but of course it will be H0 scale