97406

Have a go at giving them the Shawplan treatment...

We were chatting about this way back when on this thread, and it is not possible to mould holes in the sides of the door apertures, and drilling them would be prohibitive expensive. I first observed it when I took a Bachmann retooled 40 apart for a respray. The older 40’s handrails were moulded and a pain to remove.

They look ace. I look forward to the splitbox ones in Large Logo and blue that I have on order and the undoubted future run of 80s 37/4s, of which I shall partake.

I tend to listen to music on YouTube a lot, so took out a subscription, alongside Amazon Prime and Spotify. I limit the number of subscriptions to 3 so they change every so often, if there’s summat good on Netflix for instance.

I can certainly relate to that! :D

It could be worse!

It could be due to collision repairs, or even the Romanian build quality. It’s definitely warming on me as a look, and a real credit to the crank(s) working at GBRF.

Still can’t work out why it wasn’t straight, and the lower edge of the grey windscreen surrounds clashes with the detail underneath the windscreen. The Pullman liveried one is a better application, and they got their masking lines much straighter, apart from the nod to the original Pullman livery atop the windscreen. Being a glutton for punishment, I have a Lima HST power car stripped back ready to go into the original blue livery, so I have similar to come (wibble!). If this turns out OK, then an executive one will be attempted after that. Much squinting to follow!

I’ve applied transfers a little wonkily before and squinted at the result for a while before removing and redoing them if they were too bad. I’d be doing the same with 005 too. There are elements I like about the livery despite the wonky bits. Mind you the RailAdventure livery on the HST power cars is perhaps a worse example of a good livery idea wonkily applied around the cabs. The ability to paint clean horizontal lines around a locomotive seems to be a dying art, alas.

This came to mind when I read your post.

The whole scene is lovely. It has that depth to it. Well played!

Is that the Malverns in the distance? Great backscene.

I'm not fussed as I've managed to deceive my own eye when it comes to the track, based on squinting at photos of the real thing and the layout. If I had space for prototypically-radiused points and curves, then that may influence a decision to migrate to EM, P4 or S4, but that won't happen within the confines of the spare bedroom. In other news, after watching many YouTube videos, I have the NCE Powercab on order, with 40143 (a later Bachmann retooled example) earmarked for the first dip into sound. An 86 will follow after that, the idea being to eventually roll out sound to at least one example of each class. The entire fleet will have DCC decoders rolled out across in the next year or so, with the first proper layout extension following on from that, to connect with the headshunt I changed recently. That's the current plan, anyway.

I wonder why the orange cantrail stripe is lower on the modern large logo repaints, as opposed to being on the join between the blue and the grey. Make it stand out a bit more?

Aye, they've come on a bit since I last tried making points from a kit!

Solder paste and flux are your two best friends! ETA, or perhaps not - there looks to be a lot of plastic components on some of the kits

I thought about that at the start, but It's a lot of extra effort, and code 75 rail and the underscale sleeper spacing helps alleviate it to these eyes. Not that I'm decrying EM, P4 or S4 one bit. It's great to see what people on here have done with it, and the pointwork is a work of art in itself!

Thank you. It’s firmly set in what was quite a nostalgic period for me centering in the late 80s, but with the timeline blurred slightly, so still plenty of interesting ‘dinosaur’ diesel classes alongside fancy liveries.

There’s the new one which looks to be Android based https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/6009456047?iid=294431661490. Out of the rest, the NCE Power Cab looks good. There’s no rush, but one system or another is likely to go in before I think of a layout extension. Plus I do quite fancy dabbling in sound.

That looks good and it will be ideal for when the layout goes all around the room as there will be 2 (or more) running lines either in front of the existing depot, or behind it on top of the existing cutting and retaining walls. Or both! However at this stage it will be very much a ‘one engine in …err… “steam” ’ layout, even with the initial extension, so the likes of the Gaugemaster Prodigy looks to fit the bill at the moment.

It's the simplification of the wiring that attracts me to it. It was quite an involved job to put sections into what is such a small layout and make them switchable. I don't want to have to do all that again with any future sections. Plus I can run DC and DCC until it's done, and sort the messy wiring out under the existing layout as well. I am warming to the idea of it.

Green machine and ice cream van.

Any medium you like. Looking forward to those being printed, too.

Well if you're going to travel back in time, you might as well take a drone with you!

The eponymous 97406 - a Lima loco that's been altered 3 or 4 times in its life. The photo was taken with the camera on a tripod and the smallest aperture the camera can manage (F13.6 as it happens), which means a decent depth of field so as much of the photo as possible is in focus. I let the camera govern the exposure automatically, but it was a few seconds.