Madreddog

Don't have a track plan outside of my head. Here's some of the metalwork that has been done.

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This carries eight levels with one side of a deck frame in place to check the fit. The roller bearings are unbranded unknown that were bought for peanuts on ebay ages ago. The adaptor parts were all turned by me.

Deck frame parts that contain 700+ drilled and machine tapped holes. The red box contains the link bars because the decks have to be made in two halves.

All machining done by me.

2 minutes ago, Paul H Vigor said:

'Cost of living' crisis vs 'cost of track' crisis? If that is the size of your fiddleyard, how much bigger is the layout? Barn sized??

It's about storage that avoids having to constantly handle locos and rolling stock. It will allow all locos to have their own 'road' while saving a massive space (which I don't have), complex wiring and vast numbers of points.

3 minutes ago, Paul H Vigor said:

Big plans often require deep pockets. 

It doesn't help that I've been diagnosed with skinflintitis.

17 minutes ago, County of Yorkshire said:

The 44xx is welcome but the 45xx & 4575 variant is an odd choice as there’s very little wrong with the Bachmann model and I won’t be replacing mine. 
 

Surely low hanging fruit like the Saint and Hawksworth County would’ve been a better choice? 
 

CoY

The even lower hanging fruit are the Metro tank and 517 class plus various classes of saddle-later-pannier tanks.

I shall be sticking with Bachmann whose model can be had for sub £60 secondhand. Given that Rapido appear to be avoiding using wiper pickups on their models and instead using the problematic split chassis that, as yet, no-one has made reliable on steam locos I won't be buying their locos.

11 hours ago, BoD said:

Wow. 300m that’s a rather big fiddle yard.  You may be able to cutdown on the price of the plain track but what about the point work?  The mind boggles.

Not that large. 3m x 750mm vertical traverser. Bit like a nelevator on steroids.

I'll work out how to create it one day. Most of the metalwork is done though a lottery win is needed to stand any chance of actually getting this project to the stage of operating.

I find it really hard to believe that Peco is the only option. There has to be something cheaper out there surely??????

Aha! Hoarding does work... found a bit which is marked 'GT Italy.'

Ideas anyone? I can only find overpriced scrag ends on ebay.

22 minutes ago, RobinofLoxley said:

Say that track is £2 per metre. Mixed stock of wagons and locos at new prices is going to be north of £200 per occupied metre. So if you can afford to populate the fiddle yard, the track isnt where the bulk of the cost lies. Of course a lot of that stock has already been bought but the argument still stands.

I'm a bit of a hoarder. There, I admitted it!

Thanks guys.

Already disabled all browser extensions... nothing comes up on the left side. Site displays normally. Everything on there functions normally.

I think I'll give up at this point. I'm seeing this as a hassle I don't need right now.

Now 3+ hours of searching.

FAKE PROMOTION BEING REPORTED.

I see Rails are advertising this game in which you can win various discounts.

I've just scrolled though the O gauge section... nothing showing there.

OO gauge? Not there either.

N gauge? I got annoyed and didn't finish searching.

Wonder what the Gambling Commission would make of this? Advertising something where there is neither a way of playing or winning doesn't sound very legal to me.....

The track worked perfectly well as long as you didn't try to either bend it or pin it down! I'll be bolting it down to avoid the sleepers shattering.

Ebay is out because the only stuff on there is priced higher than I can buy it new RRP for.

I need this track for a fiddle yard project which could 'swallow' up to 300 lengths if my brain can make it work that is.

There used to be some pretty awful very cheap flexi track being sold by many retailers. I've been looking around but I can't find it.

Ideas anyone? I need a lot and Peco has priced themselves out of the market for me.

Stanier 8F please. The Hornby one has a pile of poo for a chassis.

13 hours ago, surfsup said:

Is that... ducks for cover... a long awaited increase in Quality Control... 

You mean like the Hornby Dublo standard 4 tank of the 50s? 100,000 made. Returns to the factory? 8. Probably a few minor issues that got dealt with by the retailers though.

They could also hire someone who knows how to correctly design a gear train without floppy, draggy bearings that wear out rapidly. Oh, and use motors that don't sound like a washing machine with gravel in it.

3 hours ago, Billystanier said:

They are going to announce more versions of the 78xxx, to go with the other versions which have not been delivered yet.

78018 with a detailed model snowdrift?????

59 minutes ago, No Decorum said:

Is there much point in producing accurate RTR coaches for a company which isn’t represented by RTR locos? On the other hand, there are pre-grouping companies which have a few RTR locos. From my point of view, it would be agreeable to have authentic vehicles to run with them. Dapol’s Wainwright D looks very satisfying hauling six Birdcages. An alternative, now less likely due to the appearance of these generic coaches, would be for Dapol to produce 00 versions of its 0 scale Stroudley coaches. I suspect that they might look a little better than Hornby’s effort. Most of the latter have been decorated in such a way as not to look like what they are supposed to be. Bachmann produced three non-SECR wagons with SECR insignia using the “better than nothing” argument and some people disapproved. I would suggest that coaches are more distinctive than wagons*. It’s all a little odd.

 

* Apologies to wagon fans.

Don't forget that the coaches and wagons still existed in small numbers in some cases years after all the locos were rendered extinct. Let's not forget that there is zero LNWR rolling stock available RTR yet we have three locos available.

There were a huge number of one-off and two-off locos built and many of these we know existed from photographs. Small company no-one has really heard of where there are no known pictures of their locos....

I spy an excuse...

It's all about the 'excuse' like having wagons for a private owner that never existed on your model. In the case of these coaches the excuse is that they are/were absorbed into (insert real company name here) from (fictitious company name here). They're perfect for what I'm (eventually) modelling; a fictitious company running on lines that did exist.

13 minutes ago, Paul H Vigor said:

It is said that 'fools and their money are easily parted'. A lot of dosh disappears via ebay!

You wouldn't believe the number of times I sit watching an item and laughing at how much people overpay. I will admit to taking advantage of their desperation and listing items at the underbidder's bid on a small number of occasions on non-model railway items.

On 16/11/2022 at 01:29, PieGuyRob said:

I guess it is like everything else in life. You just have to be savvy, wise, and, above all else patient, eventually what you want will come along at the right price.

There is also the other side of the coin. Fools overpaying for common, run-of-the-mill items. The funniest example I saw was when the Slaters OO wagon kits were only available secondhand and some were going for £30+ a kit. When these came back on the market the fools kept paying far more than retail and several people were selling obviously new kits.... they still didn't catch on for a couple of weeks despite multiple chancers selling them!

This still makes me laugh!

12 minutes ago, 96701 said:

It isn't even fit for going down a drainpipe, never mind up one. Even moving the decimal point 4 places to the left........

.

Do you think giving it six decimal places would be fairer?🤪

12 minutes ago, PieGuyRob said:

Spoiler alert, it's not a class 27.

Looks like a Lone Star body on a different chassis. Originally it would've had overscale tension lock couplings. The original chassis was gearless and used two little bands to drive the axles direct from the motor shaft. These run faster than a rat up a drainpipe!

17 minutes ago, PaulRhB said:

Yep and Bachmann have seen it and agreed it needed looking at so all good on the support front. 

What I'm seeing in your video is so much slack it's causing binding.

One of the problems with engineering is the standard tolerance of +/- 0.2mm. This isn't an issue with larger parts but it is on those crankpins and rods. They possibly need to aim for closer to 0.05mm clearance which will have barely noticeable play.