railroadbill

Thanks Neils WRX, I'll try Dr Quinn.

Apologies if this has come up before but searched and can't find a reference. I'm building a DSB MH shunter in red/black scheme. (One of those very long term projects). Despite having other models in that scheme, plus pics of full size locos when running and a museum example, I can't work out exactly what red paint to use - was going to use tamiya xf-7 red which is perhaps slightly too bright. Any suggestions please?

Went yesterday, first show I'd been to for a long time. Terrific show, good mixture of interesting and different layouts, well organised, friendly and well worth going to. Thanks to all concerned.

Great stuff, enjoyed completing survey, made me stop and think about the modelling I'm doing. How many locos? Blimey, that many? Er, does that include unfinished projects? Oh well, keeps me focussed, good hobby really.

I can tick the Hornby tinplate o gauge clockwork, we had a black 0-4-0 tank (No 40?) and a green tender loco (No. 51?) , some trucks and 4 wheel maroon coaches. One thing I vaguely remember is that the goods brake van had opening doors with working door handles that turned to lock them. I can also tick Hornby Dublo 3 rail which replaced the O gauge tinplate. You could control this remotely so a great step forwards... Certainly didn't have a Bassett Lowke Stanier 2-6-4T, a rather nice model, but some years ago I had a friend with a large coarse scale 3 rail o gauge layout and he had one of those, along with various other goodies. Have to see if I have any pictures of it. Going back to young childhood times, my grandmother had some Lone Star push along stuff for my cousins and I to play with when we went to visit. My best idea for keeping the grandchildren amused train wise is LGB in the garden, which turned out to be very engaging for them! Making stations out of Lego kept them out of mischief as well...plus favourite soft toys could go for a train ride. ps the repurposing of yellow track for down the stairs model car racing sounds pretty well inevitable..

OK, this is a collectable/vintage Christmas jumper as it were. Playcraft obviously couldn't use Thomas the Tank Engine.... Sorry.

That's really quite an old map, (pre-grouping) as it show LSWR and LBSCR lines also the City and South London tube. As 3 of Joseph Lines's sons formed Tri-ang after the first World War (just looked this up on Wikipedia!) it must have been printed at or close to the start of the company. Not too sure about the half hour commuting time "from any part of London" though. Wonder how long the siding was in use.

This is Playcraft as well. As can be seen. On some track. Daughter's train set when she was very little, somehow it's survived and now her children have enjoyed playing with it although they are now a bit too old and have moved on. The colours of the plastic are the same as a Corgi garage that I found on-line. Playcraft seemed to have brought plastic moulding expertise to compliment Mettoy die casting originally. The loco is battery powered, although it looks like Playcraft made some Brio type pushalong locos as well. The track "gauge" is 1 1/4". The track fits together like Brio. Easy to put down a big layout on the carpet then pack it all away afterwards. Great fun! The loco mechanism was quite heavily engineered for what it was, with a clutch mechanism so it could be pushed along without turning the motor. Anyway, just for fun! 🙂

This is the back of the packet - you obviously need a cigar box (presumably empty). A house with a dedicated drawing room would also help. As it can take up to 60 hours per model, there is potentially 480 hours of building charm to be derived from the contents of this packet! And then sell them for 2 to 3 Guineas each - there is a certain period feel to this, although perhaps a Micromodel maker would be smoking a pipe rather than a cigar, like the Dad with his son in a 50s model railway advertisement. He would certainly be wearing a jacket and tie while Micromodelling. The address, 3 Racquet Court sounds like the sort of place a fictional hero like the Saint would live in....although it was actually an alley off Fleet street where some newspaper offices were, it's been demolished. Great stuff, I'd better stop now...

Just come across this Micromodels set in the loft. Only 3 bob for 8 models! You get 3 locos, an LMS dock tank, a GWR large prarie and an LNER J50. Plus an assortment of wagons. "3 dimensional volumetric" sounds good, not sure what it means though!

Interesting about Tri-ang coupling rods being conductive, thus electrically bonding the driving wheels together, a crafty idea! Better pickups using phosphor bronze strip or wire works well, easy to retrofit - having more wheels (tender etc) with pick ups does give more reliable running - avoids the big hand from the sky giving a push over points. Also with "collectors item spares" I've found some locos don't have all the screws, bolts etc. but it's easier to use a bolt of the right diameter and thread as a replacement rather than try and hunt down an original one. (Some of the Triang/Hornby ones seem to be shouldered etc.) I remember with Hornby Dublo 3 rail that they sold packets of "insulating tabs" which were paper or card squares that fitted under the central tabs on rails if you wanted to insulate a length of track. However, just cutting a square of paper just bigger than the tabs would have worked just as well! You got 12 insulating tabs for 7d (1958) and it was the same price in 1961. (Code 3747). So with an old postcard and some scissors you could have saved 7d!

Yup, the buffer height on the older ones, especially the locos and stock that started out as Triang, does stand out, as the buffer beam itself is higher and the front of the loco has been squashed up to accommodate this. On the other hand, one advantage of the older models is that they are ruggedly built, the brass bearings here are pretty chunky`so it'll keep going. The XO3 motor is another long life advantage. The main snag was only having 2 pickups a side, wipers one side and live chassis through 2 wheels the other. Adding more pickups should help. The great thing about H-D 3 rail was that there were 2 sliding contacts on the third rail and all the wheels provided the return.

The strange case of R.374.... So what happened? Well I oiled R.374 previously Spitfire but modified to 34002 Salisbury. Sometime later I gave it a run and after a while it slowed to a halt with smoke pouring out of it. Very realistic for a WC/BoB of course as they had cases of the lagging under the casing catching fire. It looked like the pick ups had oil on them, couldn't get it clean so took the body off. The 1980's ones have a keeper plate under the chassis block so you can take the driving wheel set out. I usually use a length of old coping saw blade to transfer a drop of oil to wheel bearings and other oiling points like valve gear. This time I'd used a squeezy oil bottle with a very thin nozzle directly onto the axles behind the wheels and had squirted a lot of oil without realising it, because oil had found it's way to where it shouldn't be. Anyway I cleaned it all up, also cleaned the motor commutator and the slots while I was at it. Then I started to put it back together (and it's a pretty simple device, no valve gear etc) - but couldn't get the driving wheels with connecting rods fitted, to fit back into the chassis, no matter how I tried. As the service sheet says, make sure the insulated bushed wheels are to the right. Ok, so as we know, the connecting rods should point to the front of the loco, and the representations of oil boxes on both connecting and coupling rods should of course face upwards. Did all that, but the wheel sets just wouldn't go in with the insulated wheels to the right. Because- I naturally assumed that the dummy articulated joint that's part of the stamped connecting rod would go behind the central driving wheel as on the full sized Bulleid pacifics. However...on the service sheet it's shown the wrong way round with the joint ahead of the central driving wheel. (Parts x.515 and x.516). As the connecting and coupling rods are screw fitted to the central drivers the insulated wheels won't then fit the right way round. I looked at a lot of pictures and drawings of original Bulleid pacifics, wondering if some had actually had the rods fitted the other way round with the articulated joint leading, but found no evidence at all of that. The answer was obviously to unscrew the rods, swap the coupling rods over while leaving the connecting rods the same side as they were, then screw them back on. The leading/trailing drivers have the usual pin on the rod fitting into a hole in the crank. This worked. It all went back together! Of course this only worked because the Hornby loco has the same distance between front and centre, and centre and rear driving axles. The full size Bulleid pacific has 7' 6" front and 7' 3" rear coupling rods. The current type of WC/BoBs that Hornby make do have the rods the right way round, and the articulated joint is riveted so it functions. There it is with the rods the "correct" way round. It took several goes to make sure the bearings were seated properly in the cast chassis and held firmly in place by the plastic keeper plate, but it now moves very freely when pushed up and down the track, rather like testing a kit built chassis. This payed off as the reassembled loco now runs quieter and smoother than it did before. Curiously, the same era Hornby Hall also has the rods the wrong way round with the articulated joint ahead of the central drivers. Don't know about other locos but was this just a Hornby quirk, perhaps going back to Triang?

Back to Bulleid pacifics. Right is Wilton, a newish Hornby one, this has the pivoting pony truck and is pre DCC. Left is Salisbury that started off as Spitfire, the 1980s Hornby version. For a model that first came out in 1961, it isn't too far off but the later one is obviously more accurate (looking at the cowl over the smokebox for instance). The newer one runs very well indeed, however the older type isn't too bad, now that it's had a bit of an overhaul. Which resulted in a strange discovery about older Hornby WC/BoB locos. More next.....

Well I've got an A2 controller, wouldn't use something electrical that old now, but I dug it out and - can't get the bulb out, won't move at all, so can't see specification. Don't know if it's screw or bayonet fitting. However, it does look the same shape as Andyman7's bulbs for what that's worth. Presumably if they are bulbs for controller spares then the boxes must be a trade pack for a dealer to use in repairs. They could actually be the same bulbs as Wolseley's building lights anyway. Controller difficulty with a bulb that lights up if an overload is if it fails you don't know if there is a problem...

I'd got my reference books on LMS 4-6-2s out but too late! It seems to me that Hornby have actually produced models of each variant, streamlined, not streamlined, (single and double chimney, with/without smoke deflectors), de-streamlined (semi and later smokebox) and the Ivatt pair. Have I missed any? I don't have a streamlined one but did Hornby make both single and double chimney variants of those?

Here's a Sik (goat) 200 class on display in Rotterdam. It's in a part of the old docks where there is a maritime museum with steam tugs, barges and other old work boats. Well worth a visit. They are 21 tonnes so just a bit heavier than the Köf II. I eventually got a second hand one off eBay, bit rough and a noisy runner but with some TLC it settled down a bit and is ok running slow, which of course is what it should do! The Sik was the same, according to the (Dutch and English) information placard by the preserved loco I saw. Also the Sik could be driven from ground level from controls outside the cab so the operator could walk alongside the loco while shunting. These small shunters are very compelling, an excellent thread!

Another classic Hornby loco was the WC/BoB which started off in I think 1961 with the Triang model. It went through a few iterations over the years. This one is early 1980s. There was I think a further version with a smaller post-Xo-3 motor and traction tyres, which also had working slide bars. This started as R 374 BoB Spitfire. It was in SR Malachite green. It must be getting on for 40 years old now. It got repainted as 34002 Salisbury, cut down tender, coal, etched plates crew and all that stuff. It then sat on a shelf for years via a couple of moves until I could start on a permanent layout. The front coupling's been removed since this picture. When I first tried running it in earnest, it was ok but surprisingly noisy. With more running it has got quieter, but really improved after I had to take the chassis to pieces and rebuild it. More later on that. Trouble was by the time the layout was up and running newer better running locos were available (current design Hornby re-built WC for instance, better/smoother/slower more accurate better detailed runner than the old ones) so this and similar locos were only getting a run every now and again. But still fun to operate. This is what it looked like originally (actually a GBL body on the same chassis) 🙂 Going back, it was the only WC/BoB kid on the block unless you had a Wrenn one or motorised an Airfix kit.

Just discovered that the Nene Valley Railway has a Köf II ! Interesting story here. http://irps-wl.org.uk/restoration-projects/international-restoration-projects/kof

Some really interesting Köf II photos, Bernard, and Ian. This is a Köf II used as a shunter at the Cheminova chemical plant at Thyboren in Jutland. The plant siding crosses the main road and joins the Thyboren - Lemvig line, the VLTJ. Had to enlarge this a lot I'm afraid but it does show its rather jolly colour scheme. This one (T 27) was built in 1958, used by DB until 1982 when the VLTJ bought it and it's been with them ever since. Took this in 2017. As an aside, the DSB had their own version of the Köf II built by the Danish Frichs company. The bonnet is more plain and the cab is modified. They had the same Voith hydraulic transmission as the German built ones but had a Leyland diesel engine (same 128 hp though). Only in preservation now. Fun fact: Köf II weighs 17 tonnes. It seems to me that a micro layout with a few structures/buildings to represent just a part of a steel works or chemical/fertiliser plant, factory, warehouses, GDR era Soviet weapons dump oh perhaps not that one, or whatever with a couple of lengths of track and a point or 2 would work very well with an Ho or TT Köf II (or is there an N gauge one as well ?)

Brawa Kof II. Smaller and lower than the wagon.

I've got a couple of the Brawa ones, very good runners and will run very slowly. I've seen several of the full size in Denmark over the years, ones on private sidings apart from preserved lines. (DSB had their own version as a standard small shunter apart from imported German ones). I believe it would have been a very common DB loco. If you want a Kof III then Roco do a good one, bit bigger loco but again an excellent runner. The Kof II is a very small loco so for a minimalist layout would be perfect. Just my opinion.

Really superb model! Pity about the return cranks setting as you say. As an aside the video shows that the mech has the centre and rear axles geared together, leaving the front axle to be driven just by the rods. Coincidentally an old Ho gauge Fleischmann 0-6-0 I was running yesterday has the same arrangement. Wonder why they didn't gear all the axles together (as other models). Runs very well though.

Thanks, Ruffnut, that's very useful info, basically an XO3 with a black worm will fit a chassis with a 28 tooth grey wormwheel. The few motors/chassis etc in my bits box (one of!) seem to be that spec so I should have parts to be able to get my 1980's WC/BoB repair project running ok. The parts/service sheets are very helpful. Bill

Good point about those locos being easy to improve, details like crew, headcodes, etched nameplates etc. drew the eye away from the basic nature of them and you had the satisfaction of making them better.. Final thought about the Hall, the green livery (I think) looks better than some of Hornby's latest green locos!