Mol_PMB

Oh dear oh DEER From Don Gatehouse on flickr.

Looking at the photos, there's at least 3 different variations of cantrail stripe as well as the different dogs etc. I did an image search on Flickr for 'class 26 railfreight' and sifted out some good ones, but there were plenty more to look at. If it were me, I'd model a loco which has the subtle variations in livery compared to the one you have already, and I'd weather it in a different way. So your two similar locos end up looking subtly different.

Have you been looking at this? I must confess I had to have a stern word with myself... https://railsofsheffield.com/products/Heljan-2683-class-26-railfreight-red-stripe-26025-orange-cantrail-stripe-with-eastfield-dog-logo-weathered I would also like to know the answer to your question, as I have a Heljan 03 from which I want to remove some lettering and electrification flashes. With the weathered 26025, I wonder if removing the numbers might make an obvious clean unweathered patch too? Though that's not a disaster, you sometimes see photos of locos with a patch around the number cleaned off. It might also be worth looking at prototype photos to check the positions of logos, numbers, dogs etc, as there is some variation. Also maybe the pilot scheme ones (first 20) might have grille variations? Some inspiration/temptation for you... 26004 by Neil Smith 26035 by David Christie: 26038 by Dave Peachey: 26037 by Dave Moreton: 26041 by Bruce Galloway (note quite different weathering pattern): Of course they don't have to be weathered! 26003 and 26006 by afc45014: Get it bought ;-)

Many thanks for the advice and encouragement, this is the result. I'm pretty pleased with my forest now, and need to get on with the meadows and the track!

I'm doing my bit for the environment by planting a few trees... Roughly normal viewing height: Aerial view from the small stepladder: Driver's eye view: The trees are a good fit in the holes I drilled, and they aren't glued in. I may yet move a few around to get the look right. Here's a photo from polier.ch showing the part of the line I'm trying to represent, at the right date. Most of my photos have 3 decades more tree growth: Here's a distant 2010s view, taken from Gruyere castle battlements. On the model I've had to cruelly compress the field behind the railcar! I've still got the other corner to do, and then the meadows to grass. Then maybe I might lay some track.

...and a mind-bending job of doing the yellow and black chevrons! I know, I did it once on a Bachmann brass one. Better still, model a brewery. Or it could be a cheap basis for one of the other variants of 350?

To the left of the set number is probably a cast plate with the main dimensions on it (length, wheelbase etc).

More progress on the forest backscene yesterday and today. Painting the distant trees using acrylic paint, chosen to match the tree foliage, and a simple home-made stencil: That looks better behind the trees, but it's only part of the plan. Then I painted some darker, larger triangles to represent the third row of trees (behind the two rows of 3-dimensional ones). And once that was dry, I stippled on some more paint (in slightly varying lighter shades). I also added some tree trunks from wooden kebab skewers, coated in brownish gunk. The short ones are in places where the upper part would be hidden by foliage in front, so I just put in short bits. It looks crude close up, but from normal viewing distances and with the trees installed, it's quite effective. In the meantime I added a first layer of ground cover material, sprinkled over more brown gunk painted on the ground surface. This is just fine brown ballast which will have other stuff put on top but looks like rough soil or leaf litter if there are any gaps in the subsequent layers. Now, I'd had to trim the kebab skewers to make the tree trunks, so the offcuts have become a traditional native necklace? Actually this is a fence. I just need to spread out the posts a lot! I know that in reality the wire should be stapled to the side of the posts rather than passing through them, but since I don't have a 1:45 scale staple gun it was easier to just drill holes for the wire. This is in the background anyway, and will largely be under the shade of the trees. so I'm sure it will be fine. I've placed two orders for new stocks of static grass and some other scenic materials, so the landscape might start going from brown to green before too long.

Bringing in full-grown trees on the back of a lorry is a distinctly Chinese activity. Instant nature, looks great for the opening ceremony and then they gradually wither and die. They've even tried it in the Maldives to turn sandbanks into a tropical paradise - except of course there's no fresh water on a sandbank. Here's a load of palm trees destined for a short life on a Chinese sandbank: I'm currently doing my bit for the environment by planting a forest of 150 trees on my layout. Not sure I'll get to as many as 1000!

There's some great inspiration for what the track at a Scottish diesel depot should look like!

This is coming along very nicely! As an aside, I've always had a soft spot for Class 26s in railfreight livery - it seemed to suit them very well. Very few BR pilot scheme diesels lasted long enough to get into a BR livery beyond blue. I think 20010 was the only one that wasn't a Class 26, but no doubt someone will correct me! Mol

There are some very nice 3D printed parts available here suitable for Gresley coach underframes. If you can't see what you want in your scale, then Paul will probably be happy to print items smaller or bigger to suit: https://fk3d.co.uk I've got some Gresley brake cylinders and reservoirs on the way to me, including some custom sized ones for a project I'm working on. Cheers, Mol

I think you have done exactly the right thing in straightening out the rails beyond the frog; not only is this more prototypical for a crossover, but it will definitely reduce buffer-locking problems. On the real railway, there is a requirement to have a short section of straight track between reverse curves for exactly this reason.

I'll put a few photos here as a work-in-progress. Much more to do but already it's looking a lot better. The first step was to paint a very dark brown band on the wall, like this: Then yesterday I took a tree to the Fred Aldous shop and compared it to dozens of different green acrylic paints until I found a good match, which was the one shown in this photo. I also got a slightly lighter shade of olive gree, plus some black and brown. Then I experimented on some scraps of board until I had a process for the treetops. I made a crude stencil out of thin card and used that to paint the 'horizon' of treetops: Then I filled in underneath, using diagonal strokes (rather crudely I confess). This photo is a little over-exposed but it shows the effect quite well: The next step I've only just tried so far, which is to mix up a slightly darker shade of the green, and then use a different stencil to paint in the shapes of individual, nearer trees. Seen to the left hand side of this photo. My plan is that I will then use a splodging/stippling technique with a paler green over these, to give an impression of the foliage. Hopefully that will give an intermediate step of detail between the 3-dimensional trees and the very simple representation of the distant trees. Sorry this is all rather crude, I'm no artist! But I think it's got potential and from normal viewing distances I think it will be fine, and a massive improvement on the 'sky' colour behind the trees. So far, I've painted the distant treetop horizon so it drops beow the windowsill. I'll see how this looks when it's all done, my other option is to extend the green up to the windowsill and to put some small 3-dimensional trees on the windowsill itself. Thanks for all the advice and hopefully I'll do it some sort of justice. Mol

I remember travelling on these units on a family holiday to Denmark probably in the late 1980s. They were 1-man operated, with a ticket window behind the driver's cab so he could turn his seat around and sell tickets to passengers as they boarded, just like on a bus. I can't imagine ASLEF approving of such a practice, but it worked!

A public inconvenience? No room for a fiddle yard? Just terminate your railway in the middle of the scenic board with a random portaloo and a few plastic barriers. from fototak on Flickr

Picking up ideas from several contributions here and another issue I think you've been having, I would suggest the following. At the end of the ng siding where the transporters are loaded, have two copper or brass strips sloping upwards towards the bufferstop (and raised sg rails), positioned outside the narrow gauge rails. The height of the metal strips should be set to that the low end is just below the bottom of the transporter wagon side beams, and the high end (by the bufferstop) is a mm or so higher than the bottom of the transporter wagon side beams. The strips should be sprung probably with a bend in them and using their own springiness. When you push the transporter wagon into place, the strips rub on contacts on the bottom of the side beams, and give you (1) electrical feed and (2) support the end of the transporter wagon as the sg wagon is loaded on to it.

Progress continues with the brown sticky mess, as I build up layers to make a reasonably stiff scenic surface. The cork track underlay is now glued down all round the curve, so I'm not far off being able to lay the track and wire it up. Using the same tempera powder paints that I colour the plaster with, I mixed up a very dark brown (nearly black) and painted a strip of the wall in that colour, where it will be behind the trees. Trial-fitting some trees in front immediately looks better than it did before: I am also making some plain tree trunks with wooden kebab skewers coated in black/brown plaster gunk. These can be stuck directly on the wall to represent the next row of tree trunks behind the 3-dimensional ones, and will help to make the forest look deeper. I also need to get a range of green acrylic paints to represent the upper parts of those trees, filling the gaps between the 3-dimensional treetops. I can feel this coming together now, though there's a lot more to do yet!

British Transport Docks was created in 1962 so this advert must post-date that. The fact that the state-of-the-art cranes advertised mostly had a capacity of about 6 tons indicates why so few ports were capable of handling ISO containers in any quantity when they started turning up in the UK just a few years later. Many ports had one or two heavy-lift cranes (often floating) but handling ISO containers at anything other than a dedicated terminal was to lose more efficiency than the containers gained. Nevertheless, a lot of places tried it for a while. I particularly like this example: I mean, yes, we can lift a small container with our 95-year old 35 ton steam crane, but we can't lift it very far and the way we've had to sling it means the container won't be fit for use again! Bristol floating harbour, 1973. https://www.bristolfloatingharbour.org.uk/images/life-of-the-harbour/nggallery/image/the-fairbairn-steam-crane-1973

Owing to limitations of instrumentation, we did only measure one end of one cylinder, and duly discovered that it was doing less than 1/8 of the total work! Here's the pressure transducer: Should have measured more... Still, the main aim of our tests was draughting rather than valve setting. The traditional way of measuring smokebox vacuum is with a water manometer (U-tube partly filled with water), one end connected to a pipe within the desired part of the smokebox, the other end open to atmosphere. The difference in height of the water in the two sides of the U is a measure of vacuum. This could be mounted on the side of the smokebox and data recorded manually in the indicator shelter. Alternatively, with a much longer pipe, it could be positioned in the loco cab or even in the dynamometer car. We used electronic pressure transducers, which are attached to the ends of those angled pipes in the photo below. Having the long pipes helped to keep the transducers from getting too hot! However, the traditional manometer doesn't tell the full story on smokebox vacuum because the inertia of the water tends to average out the reading to a near-constant value. Here's a time-history of smokebox vacuum measured with an electronic transducer, showing how it fluctuates (black line): Each of the big downward spikes represents a 'chuff', in this case about 12 chuffs per second, or 3 revolutions per second, about 17mph on the Melvin. The chuffs aren't all quite equal, suggesting slightly imperfect valve setting (though it sounded fine, and I've known a LOT worse!) Between chuffs the smokebox vacuum drops back towards zero (top of the graph).

We all know that Assume makes an Ass of U and Me. Variations in valve setting and the streamlining of the steam passages can give quite different results from different cylinders or even the two ends of the same cylinder. The famous example is Gresley's conjugated valve gear, where the middle cylinder could end up doing much more than its fair share of the work.

A single indicator measures one end of one cylinder. To get a complete picture you would need to instrument both ends of all cylinders, which for a King would mean 8 indicators. Other parameters we measured in our tests were the steam chest pressure and temperature (which also gave a measure of superheat), and the smokebox vacuum before and after the spark arrestor mesh. Depending on the technology used, some of those parameters might also be monitored locally by the attendant in the shelter. I suspect, on the Bulleid photo at Rugby, the devices mounted on the walkway handrails may be water manometers for measuring smokebox vacuum at several locations. I really would recommend that anyone interested in this should read Alan Rimmer's book 'Testing Times at Derby'.

With last week's announcement of trains on the moon... https://www.independent.co.uk/space/moon-train-lunar-base-darpa-b2516248.html ...and today's news item about creating a unified lunar time... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/02/moon-nasa-coordinated-lunar-time ..how long will it be before NASA advertises the role of Delay Attribution Co-ordinator?

I'll add a little more about how the traditional indicator itself worked. I have used one of these myself, in a lab session during my engineering degree. That was on a single-cylinder gas engine rather than a steam engine, but the principles are the same. The upper cylindrical thing is the recording drum. A piece of paper is wrapped round this (once) and held in place by the the pale-coloured clips on the side facing us. The hook dangling down would be attached to the loco crosshead. As that (and the piston) move back and forth, they pull the cord wrapped around bottom of the recording drum causing it to rotate. Inside the drum is a powerful return spring to keep the string taut and return the drum to the starting point when the crosshead moves to front dead centre. It will be apparent that the circumference of the drum must be greater than the stroke of the piston! A small-bore steam pipe is attached to a fitting on the end of the loco's cylinder and connected to the fitting at the bottom of the indicator machine. When there is pressure in the pipe, it pushes a small piston upwards, and therefore lifts the pen which is mounted on an arm attached to the piston. There is also a spring which acts to push the piston down. So as the steam pressure increases, it can compress the spring more and push the pen higher up. So when the loco is working, the indicator produces a plot with piston position on the x axis and steam pressure in the cylinder on the y axis, similar to that in my post above. The operator in the shelter would have to move the pen to touch the paper when it was desired to take a reading, and then move it away again after a few cycles. The operator would then have to change the paper. There must have been some way to de-clutch the drive to the recording drum, as the loco didn't have to stop to change the paper on the drum.

I have definitely read about this in detail, I just need to try and recall where! I think it was in this book: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/133471110631 Testing Times at Derby - A ' Privileged ' View of Steam by Alan Rimmer 2004 The indicators created an x-y plot (piston position vs steam pressure) rather than a time-history plot, and therefore the paper needed changing every time a new reading was made (e.g. at a different cutoff or speed). There was also a need to change and clean the pens frequently, and ensure that a good plot had been achieved for each setting. It was much easier when I did it, as we had the benefits of electronic sensors and data-logging and could watch the data coming in from the comfort of the buffet car behind!