brightspark

Hello Jack, I just caught up with your post. First thanks for the kind comment. To answer your question it is all on one board. The gate at the end being closed and the reason why the shunting restriction is in place. As it such a small space I had to use A5 turnouts, which is the tightest that you want to go for in EM. Of course if you are doing this OO you will have plenty of space. Andy

Thanks guys. I will pass this onto the SLAG team. Andy

MADE IT! Yes I made to the finish line in time. Here is 35012 on Swaynton at Ally-Pally. I was a little nervous as I did the weathering under artificial light and I was also wondering if I had gummed up the mechanism in the process. But it charged down the layout with conviction and has attracted some positive comments, so I am happy with that. The weathering is based on the two colour pictures I have found. The 1959 photo at Bournemouth by Colin Boocock and the 1961 image at Brookwood by Richard Greenwood MBE. each shows opposite sides. If you are at the show, do come by to say hello and any please post any pictures of the loco here. Andy

Swaynton set up and ready to go. Here we are setting up. Andy

Thank you for the good wishes and the information about the circle and triangle. My google search let me down on that , but now I know what I am looking for I found this picture on flickr which I think confirms the picture by Colin Boocock of 1959. Yes it shows a circle. The only problem I see now is that this is a nice small circle and the Hornby model has a Jaffa. I really like the weathering on your model as well. I hope that I can come close to that standard. Weathering is underway as I write. Foot steps do seem to be fragile. I will persevere and I will try cyno again. The main culprits for letting go though are not the parts from the detail pack but the moulded brake gear that I had to cut and pack out to meet the wheels that have been pulled out. I do think longer term something made from brass. This will also act as a better retaining plate under the loco. I look forward to seeing Redbridge again at the weekend and if I get chance will stop by to say hello. It would be quite nice to take a photo of the two models together. Now isn't it a shame that we could join the two layouts together. Swaynton is of course only four or five stops down the line. Anyway here is another shot showing progress. Time to add some more grime. A

No photos at the moment. I had a bit of a disaster. So I managed to get the painted tender emblem off, but also managed to lose a little of the green paint. I affixed the new emblem and today thought that a bit of varnish would do the trick. Unfortunately the aerosol splattered and I got a very horrible finish. I had a go at it with white spirit and got it off. But the finish does not too good and more green paint came off. Hopefully I can recover it. The loco will be weathered so that will cover the sins. However I have a query that I hope you Bulleid experts can assist with. The Hornby model has a yellow circle under the number. This is to identify which water softener system is in use on the loco. But photos show it with a Triangle. Now these pictures all seem to be with the later emblem, so post March 1962) Derry and Sixsmith do not mention when the softening system was installed so was it always triangle, or was it installed in 1962. However there is a colour photo taken by Colin Boocock at Bournemouth on 24th May 1959 of 35012 on the up Belle, and there is a yellow blob under the number. But the photos I have seen published are too small to make it out. Triangle or circle? was it there in 1960? I am going to leave as is for the moment until I have clarity.

Well done to Peter from Australia for correctly working out that it is 35012 United States Lines. A very good guess from Jack in NZ and a shameful effort from the rest of you - go hang your heads in shame. The flag is indeed the wrong one as this is the plate carried by 35012 until August 1951 when it was corrected. Yes the SR also got it wrong. Here is the Fox nameplate cruelly enlarged. It looks OK when viewed from a normal distance. Note also that the plate has a black background. This was changed to red in 1962. I don't know when 35014 had its plate repainted, looking at the b&w photos it might be quite late. But only a dated colour photo will tell. Nameplate colours are a minefield for these locos. Going into the weekend here is work so far. It is for the main part still looking like Hornby intended but it does run, I tested it again last night on Met Junc (but not on the 3' radius curves), so will be more or less in this condition next weekend. It all depends on how much I can get done over the next day or so. Andy

A couple of great guesses. I note that both of you come from below the equator. Is nobody from the northern hemisphere brave enough for a punt?

Thanks Jack, My thought with laying in a plug and socket arrangement is where are you going to put it? There is not much space in this area. However making up the pick-up is really simple, just follow the instructions. There are a couple of things that are annoying me with this build that will need some modification at a later date. The first is the over complex wiring arrangement on this model that uses a PCB. This is not for DCC compatibility, but maybe they were thinking about preparing for such a thing back in 2004 and this is an early experiment. I am thinking that I might simplify this area by ditching the boards and the suppression devices. But the bigger annoyance is the choice of plastic that repels any glue that I throw at it. The brake rigging keeps coming adrift and my attempt at fixing on the front footsteps is very fragile. I do not see either of these surviving the show. I think that the brake gear will have to be replaced by brass both on the loco and tender. The front foot steps may also need something more robust, but it comes back to how you attach it to the slippery plastic. Anyway here is a picture of the front of the loco. I chose not to use the Hornby Brake pipe instead making up something with bent wire. It needs a bit of black paint still. I did make up a steam heat pipe , but this failed to bond properly, so I will need to make a better fixing point. Before I move off this part of the loco, I was surprised to find that this was the set up when it arrived. Yes it had an air pipe fitting. How odd but nicely moulded. This brings me around to the next bit, that is which loco is it? I hope that enjoyed guessing what we know so far, I certainly did. But I am a little disappointed that no one has gone for trying to work out which actual loco I have. I will refresh you with the clues. It is a Hornby model from first decade of this century. It is a Merchant Navy and is one of the second batch. (This brings it down to 10 locos) It is a Nine Elms engine at the period modelled. (that brings it down to 9 ) The model does not require renaming which brings it down to 5. (see sremg.org) Although it will require a new nameplate (why?) Finally I gave you a very clever cryptic clue. (well I thought that it was clever and cryptic) All of us will have a punishment for our announcements. I will reveal on Friday. But I hope that you will humour me by having a go at working out which one it is before then. Andy

Hi All, This week has seen some painfully slow progress as I attempt to deal with the drawbar between the loco and its tender. One thing that I dislike with off the shelf OO models is the large gaps between vehicles that is there so that the train can negotiate a 'reasonable curve'. That is the very tight radius curves that you find on OO layouts. As the track gauge gets wider the minimum radius gets larger. However if you decide that your minimum radius is closer to scale, then you can ignore the compromise and start to close up the gaps between railway vehicles as well as clearances on the vehicles, ie bogie swing. I have a minimum radius of 6feet or 1800mm and that means that I can have a scale gap. No more will the fireman risk his life by trying to reach the tender without falling through the precipice to his doom. So this week I set about reducing the gap between the loco and tender which is a whopping 5mm oversize. Now I have by my side a The Book of the Merchant Navy Pacifics, by Richard Derry & Ian Sixsmith. It is a great resource for the modeller and historian, but I think that it was an oversight not include and drawings. So you have to go to J.H.Russell's informative tome A Pictorial Record of Southern Locomotives. From these two volumes you can deduce that the Merchant Navy's were produced in 3 batches with 3 different tender types. (That is a bit generic but for the sake of keeping this short I stay there) The first batch, Nos 1 to 10, had 5,000 gallon tenders. The second, Nos 11 to 20 5,100 gallon tenders. The third, Nos 21 to 30 had 6,000 gallon tenders. But beware, gentle reader, these tenders had various modifications, were swapped around and at the locomotive exchanges where even a different type. The Russell book has the weight diagram for the rebuilt MN's and we know that this loco from the second series kept its tender. Now this is important because we are interested in closing the gap and the only dimension we have is the distance between the centre of the rear pony wheel and the centre of the leading wheel of the tender. For rebuilt locos (pages 321 to 324, this gap is 9'9" for 5250, 5100 & 5000 gallon tenders and 10'5" for the 600gallon fitted to the third series. So the result of this is, as stated is that I have to reduce the gap by 5mm. The Hornby drawbar looks quite daunting as it also includes some wiper pickups. These collect power from the tender through the drawbar pin on the tender and a plate on the underside of the tender footplate. Here is the Hornby part. Note that the two wipers that are intended to rub on the plate have broken off. And the underside showing the wipers that act on the tender pin. The EMGS Manual sheet describes making a new drawbar that has 15,5mm centres. This I did but then read the second part of the notes where Douglas refers to the rebuilt WC that also oversize by 5mm. So I made up the wrong drawbar. This did close up the gap, but not by enough. I then made up a new bar that would be 5mm shorter. But found that it was too short as the bodywork fouled. Douglas also reported that he had this problem and resolved it by removing the detail from the front of the tender. I removed all of this detail off the front of the tender drag-beam. This resulted in the drawbar being able to be installed but the body and tender were hard up against each other, so there was no way that they could negotiate a corner. I can't figure out where the error is here so resorted to making a drawbar 1mm too long with the wheel space at a scale 10'. So it is a compromise, but an improvement just the same. The wipers were made up from phosphor bronze sheet and fixed by the method in the manual sheet. Slow progress but the gap is now better. Progress so far.

Hi Sulzar, I also suggest joining the EMGS. Also contact your local area group and try to attend some meetings. You will get plenty of advise and help there. The list of area groups and contacts are on the EMGS website and you may want to go before signing up. The main reason people of all gauges join is the manual. It is quite comprehensive. Have a look at some of my threads where I talk through some of my builds. I am currently tackling a Hornby steam loco that is simpler than it looks. Andy

The main course part 4. Feeling rather pleased with myself that all was running well, I was a bit miffed to find that the motor and electrical connections had to come off again so that I could fit the connecting rods and cylinder assembly. Oh dear me- how sad-never mind. Happy that the chassis with the coupling is free-running the next check is to make sure that the leading crankpin nuts clear the connecting rods. They do just, but I had to adjust one side. Happy that this is a good fit I fixed the nuts in place with a small dab of cyno and cut back the leading and rear crank pins. The next problem is the the lower end of the Hornby con rod has quite a large bore, as does the eccentric crank. As the Gibson coupling rods come with a set of con rods, I decided to solder on part of this to the back of the Hornby rod. This would both reinforce it and provide a smaller bore that could be opened up to fit the crankpin bush. (I hope that you are following this?) Here is a picture of the Hornby con rod showing the over size end. And here is the rod fitted with the reinforcement attached and bored out. I didn't fill in the space inside the Hornby part. Now I did say that space was tight between the con rod and the leading crank pin nut. So the reinforcing strip only goes part way up the rod, stopping short of the point where it would foul the nut. Next part to tackle is the eccentric crank. You can see the odd shaped hole in the above photo. I filled this hole with a piece of scrap etch and soldered this in. Apologies for the rather poor picture, I had trouble focusing on this as it is so small. I then drilled a hole in the centre that just fits over the screw. This will be trapped between the nut and the bush. Before assembly I did some work on the cylinders. The first is to drill a hole on the front of them as the piston may now hit the end. This is because the Gibson wheels have a 4.5mm throw instead of the correct 4mm. I also added the drain cocks. These come from RT models and are a brass casting. At some point I will have to fill in the missing quarter from the front of the cylinders. So with that complete, the whole chassis was assembled, the motor and electrics reconnected and a test run was completed. With that successfully done I then assembled the front bogies and rear pony truck and then the tender and tested again. All without drama. So here is progress so far. Andy p.s. I do hope that this makes sense and is of use to someone. pps Have any of you had a go at identifying which MN this is by using the clue in the earlier post? I would enjoy seeing your answers and how you interpreted my clue.

The main course, part 3. I have made quite good progress this weekend. The weekday evening being occupied with other matters, writing up the last two posts, replacing the motor on one of the cripples ready for Ally Pally and reviewing my input into Bankside. (I must get my finger out on that one, but at least I have a plan as to what materials I am going to use) So to recap, the loco is wheeled, the pick-ups are in place, tested etc and the retaining plates are modified and fitted. I am having a problem with the brakes in that they are not sitting correctly and keep fouling the couplings rods when I came to fit and test them. I think that it is the soldered on wire, but they just keep twisting out of shape. Perhaps I should have followed Dougs instructions more closely. So the task on Saturday was to make up the coupling rods. These are Gibsons and for the first time I remembered to open out the leading crank pin hole on the outside etch. This is to clear the head of the crank pin nut that I fit upside down. The reason for this is that with the wider track gauge there is less room behind the connecting rod and piston assembly. To ensure that I did not lose the length of the rod (between holes centres) I took an unmodified rod, placed it onto two wheels (on the crank pins) and then offered the assembled rod on top. This took a couple of adjustments to get right. But at the end of the exercise I knew that had two rods of the same length. The rods at the rear were assembled as per normal. The rods articulate on the centre wheel. Now I used to really struggle with getting steam outline locomotives to run well. I was told that I didn't have the quartering right, or that there was too much free-play or even not enough. So for years I have struggled because I have had rather poor advice. I have now, I believe, worked out how to do it. So for the beginner here is the secret. First check that the chassis is square. Then make sure the crank pins are square and that they are the same distance from the wheels centre. Next press the wheels on correctly quartered. The GW wheel press is a Godsend here as it is consistent in its alignment. Connecting rods are made up to be exactly the same length both sides. Check using pins. Then check each set of rods two axles at a time. Put on, fettle, check, then when one set is checked to the next. Note that there is a lot of checking and rechecking and this is why it took most of the day. The result is that at this stage I have managed to produce a chassis that is free-running without any need to open up the bores. Yes all the holes in the connecting rods are a snug fit onto the crank pin bearings! I have surprised myself here as it is the third loco build where this has happened. So I think that I have mastered it. (of course we have yet to see it on the mainline.) With the chassis free running I can now try it with the motor in place. It is quite satisfying seeing run for the first time with no stuttering or stalling. The lump of Bluetack is to counter-balance the motor as at this stage the front wheels lift off the track. The only problem I had was with the complex wiring arrangement caused by the sound suppression and the circuit board. But by close of play I had it sorted and wires neatly stowed.

The main course part 2 In his introduction to the chassis, Doug comments in the manual sheet, "The locomotive chassis incorporates almost as many innovative features as Bullieds prototypes." I have to agree, the gear drive was a break from the usual direct worm and big gear and also the clever reversible spacer on the rear driver. However some (?) of Mr Bullieds innovations were very complex and Hornby did the same thing with the sandwich of plates under the chassis. The design has a plastic plate with the spring detail on it. Under this are two pick-up strips and this is held in place with another plastic strip with the brake detail. Unfortunately the plastic is difficult to glue at best and impossible at worst. Later models seem to have a better material choice. Because of this I decided to deviate from the instruction be not cutting off the springs, opting instead to file back the plate that holds the brakes. The only problem with this approach is that there is very little material for the end brake block. I managed to have one snap off. I fixed it by drilling a hole into both parts and pinning it with a bit of 0.5mm wire. There is also a modification to the pick-up strips. The pick up on the middle wheel fouls the spacer washers. The manual sheets has an instruction to make up a bridge piece. I did this with some phosphor bronze, but realised that my new bearing still interfered with it. So I missed out the bend. So far it looks good. On my original conversion (Coombe Martin) I made up the retaining straps. But these eventually failed as there is not much material for the self tapping screws to keep hold of and they soon rounded off. Drilling a tapping 10BA is the option if this happens. I also suspect that these plates don't compress enough to allow the screw to bite and allow the plate to hold the plastic retaining strips. So instead I used thin 2mm/ 10BA washers. The photos show progress. This slot will need opening up to clear the spacer washers. The assembled sandwich. Brake moulding cut in half and thinned so it can pull out align the brakes with the wheels. Note the brass washers to hold it in place. Hopefully you can see the bridge piece in place on the pick up. The finger to the wheel sits on top of the this. (if that makes sense) And here is progress so far.

So with trips out cancelled due to the storm (thankfully unharmed here, but a couple of miles down the road a very different story), I had a couple of days to make progress. I will also do a bit a detail for the likes of Jack P. Who I hope has dusted off his red box and will either start a new thread or add to this thread his experience. The last update was the front bogie. That has now been painted and wheeled. Oh I didn't include this picture that shows the extra weight I added. Please ignore the fact that I fitted the life guards upside down, this is the underside of the bogie. In the interval we just had, I have done some updates to the title and the first three posts. In the post about problems I have added a further item to look out which is the gear wheels. But I will repeat the built in snags below. The main course part 1. We now have the tender, rear pony truck and the front bogie converted. We now move onto the chassis. When stripping the loco, I take lots of photos so I can see where everything came from and bag and label everything. All the bits live in that blue boxfile. I stripped everything off the chassis and gave it a good clean to remove the grease and dirt. Then the rebuild starts. The first thing that I did was to the centre axle. For some reason Hornby decided that one long bearing was enough. I can see their logic as the chassis is very narrow and I assume that this is for the tight toy train radii. This is one of the advantages of build chassis in EM and P4 is that you have more room so that you can fit in bearings etc. The problem that I have with the single bearing is the gearwheel next to it will be applying an uneven force as it tries to get away from the gear train (Newtons 3rd Law). It is good engineering practice to place a bearing either side of a gearwheel to support the bearing and restrain any force away from the driving gear. Our experience as a group has been that earlier conversions wore out very fast. Perhaps not helped by the wider wheel gauge exaggerating the off-set movement. To fix this I made up a new bearing for the Ø3mm axle. I didn't have any Ø3mm bore tube and I wasn't sure that a trip to a model that carried any would give me a bore of the correct clearance. So I took some wider tube, sliced it and reduced the diameter until I had a good fit and soldered up the slot. Onto this I soldered a washer and a thin plate to keep in it in position and then carefully opened up the slot in the frame for it to fit into. This should be a tight fit into the frame and to make sure that it is aligned correctly an axle should fall freely through the assembly when both bearing are fitted and clamped down by the keeper plate. This will need checking and adjusting again when the driving gear is fitted to make sure that the backlash is not too tight or loose. Hopefully this should fix the problem. Another clean up to remove the swarf and it is time to check the gears for worn teeth and splitting. These models are known for the latter. If all is well then reinstall the idler gear in the tower. (this is removed by just pushing out the small axle and replaced by the reverse operation). I have tried to ensure that this gear is sitting central in its bore. Back to following the instructions on the manual sheet and we put a countersink onto the entrance of the cable tunnel as we will need to get two wires through the bore. I guess that we should also have checked for Mazak rot. But these models do not seem prone to that. Next is assembling the Gibson wheels. Here they are. I have already blackend the rims. Follow the assembly instructions in the pack and you can't go wrong. Well you can, I make sure that the screws really are perpendicular to the flat face of the wheel before screwing them in using a square. Recover the bearings and gear from the old wheel set. The Hornby wheels are splined so you have to pull them off straight - NOT twist and pull! Note the new bearing I made up on the centre driver. Of interest is the rear axle with its offset spacer. Here is a photo of it still on its Hornby axle. This clever little design allowed the Hornby to use the same chassis while accommodating the two different wheelbases. The West Country/ Battle of Britain classes having a shorter wheelbase that the Merchant Navies. So the orientation of this block is important. So the MN will have the long edge forward. Assemble the new wheelsets including bearings and spacer washers. Follow the instructions carefully here. The front wheelset should have minimal side play as close to zero as you can while ensuring that the wheels still spin freely. To fix the gear wheel on the centre axle you will need to first spline the axle. I did this by measuring where the gearwheel is going to be. Use the dimension in the manual sheet. Then with the rough edge of a course file... ...place it on top of the axle at the desired position and roll backwards and forwards with downward pressure. Don't go mad and make the spline too wide. It mustn't go into the bearings. If it does then smooth off the excess spline by gently rubbing a fine file over the surface. Don't go too hard as you reduce the diameter. Then as per instruction apply Loctite and position the gear onto the shaft. Then put together the wheel assemblies with the gears, bearings and spacer washers. I use a GW wheel press. Make sure that the back to back gauge is a tight fit. Also check that your gauge is 16.5mm if you are making this to EM. The same goes for other track standards, check the gauge before assembly! Next is the part where I deviate from the manual sheet. We will find out if this works later, so fingers crossed.

Well done John. Good detective work. By 1960 all of the Merchant Navy class had been rebuilt, so confirming your thinking of the rear truck. Thanks, I will try that on the next one I do. Excellent. Make sure that you read the EMGS Manual sheet 3.2.3.(4). I have followed it pretty much word for word here but will take a slight deviation in the next bit of the build. Right, I will update the title and text in the opening posts as John has correctly worked out another part of the puzzle. This now means that there are only 30 locos left to work out which one I have on my bench. Now on with the next bit.

I found T-cut on a cotton bud works nicely and it also polishes the surface which gives a better foundation for the transfer and makes it look more like a painted number/line. As an aside, I am doing a Hornby conversion to EM, here. For a bit of fun I thought that I would leave the identity of the loco out and let people guess. So far we have determined that it is a Bullied pacific and obviously (as I put it on this thread) a Spam Can. But which one? I have posted a clue, which I repeat here, as to which loco it is and I invite you to have a guess and post it on that thread. All of us will have a punishment for our announcements. Stay safe and have fun. Andy

I was thinking that this build is like a four course meal. The entrée being the conversion of the tender. A nice little taste of the meal to follow. After this came the amuse-bouche of the rear pony truck. A simple easy little dish to consume that is pleasing to the palatte. Before the meat and veg is the slightly awkward fish course that needs some work to debone it before we get to enjoy the dish. In this case the front bogie. This will require some radical surgery or deboning before we get to the pleasing result. So for this course I started with this. This is the bogie having been taken off the chassis. Next the wheels are removed by twisting and pulling. Conversion could be done by just adding spacers behind the wheels and you might be able to pull out the Hornby wheels to the wider gauge (but you would have problems with point crossing clearances) or just replace with Gibsons or other choices. However this would not look right as the bogie is very narrow. So I have taken the more radical route as described in the EMGS manual sheet. That is to cut the bogie in half. Here you can see that I have removed the rivet/eyelet to release the swing link and cut the bogie in half. I have also removed the protruding centre boss and part of the projection at the front for the coupling mount. I then made up a bogie stretcher from 0.036" sheet brass following the drawing by Douglas Smith in the manual sheet. This is 12.4mm wide and 32mm long. I didn't like the proposed mounting arrangement that Doug suggested, preferring to reuse the rivet as the bearing. I had removed this by just removing the tail of the rivet. Reusing this will retain the nice fit into the swing link (BTW the swing link has different size holes in it so make a note as to which is forward) and has a suitable internal diameter for a 10BA screw. The rivet/bush is soldered to the centre of the bogie stretcher. I then glued the whole thing together using Araldite precision. This takes some time to cure, and I chose this because the bond is still strong but not so brittle and the glue will flow better into the joints. There is also plenty of time to make sure that everything was square. To keep the wheel bearing holes clear I used the pin-point axles that come with the wheel sets and made sure that they were well oiled so that they didn't stick to the araldite resin. On my kit built and scratch built locos I prefer to make the bogie do some work, so incorporate springing between it and the chassis and also add side springs to help lead the loco into curves. With the swing link arrangement this is not possible and the front bogie just runs along in front of the loco. I have found that this arrangement can be the cause of derailments especially if the bogie is a bit light. So to help prevent this I filled the 5mm gap between the bogie halves with liquid lead (lead shot) bedded down with more araldite. The front end of the bogie need cleaning up and will have a sheet of brass attached to represent the front spacer bar. I also made up the life guards from some more scrap etch and also bonded these on. Both of these can be seen in the images above. All it need now is some paint and then this unit can be assembled. Then we await the main course.

Don't listen to him- he knows nuffink. Cos I didn't tell 'im anyfink that would give the game away. Thanks for the kind comment Alan. Hmmm an original Bulleid painted in Express Dairy livery. Now there's a thought. I saw it there for some time and thought that it will fit. Renumbering and renaming would not be too hard. But I will leave as is. Back to the topic and ... Yes, it is one of Mr Bulleids examples of understated engineering. So now you are all up to speed with with Nigel and Alan. They did ask me if it was in original or rebuilt condition, but I didn't give an answer. With that in mind there are now only 3 classes to pick from. So I am hoping the Bulleid enthusiasts will work out which loco it is. Especially those with knowledge of Hornby production runs. So more progress below and some more clues perhaps? Also don't forget the cryptic clue in my last post. So to progress. Following the instructions in the EMGS manual sheet 3.2.3.(4) I have made good progress with the tender. The wheels I could shim up easily before assembly. The clearance for the wheels requires the removal of some material from the floor of the tender. The brakes took a little time to adjust. Fortunately the plastic used on this version seems to allow polystyrene cement to have some bite. I will paint the underside a mucky black to hopefully add extra strength. Fitting the AJ coupling caused me a bit of a headache as Hornby decided to place a screw right at the back of the keeper plate where the coupling mounts. Both Hornby's effort and the AJ. Then I had an idea and drilled into the plastic plate at the 10mm height and also through the screw. So the AJ passes through the screw. I only then need to adjust the depth and angle of the AJ and lock it into position with a slight twist of the screw. There was also a little damage on the front buffer plate but I had a sizable chunk of the broken part and glued it back. There is one more task to do to tender but that will have to wait until after paint. I then set to work on the rear pony truck. The wheels are held in with a plate that is riveted on. The rivets are removed and the plate is bolted back on with 10BA screws. Note that I have plenty of washers to pack out the wheels. This was quite a quick job as no other work was needed. Next task is the front bogie. The work needed to be done to this is a bit more radical and will be in the next post. Finally, here is a picture of the work done so far. Andy

Last night I hosted the local EM Gauge society meeting when two of those attending mentioned this thread. Then I realised who James Spooner is. It is none other than Narrow Gauge Nigel. Also attending was Alan AKA Bodmin 16. So they were both convinced that the model is a King Arthur and were pushing me for more detail and the identity. I am hoping that others, who are following this thread and are trying to work out what the loco is, will post up their guesses. I have given a number of clues to help along the way but as a push. I refer you to the photo above that shows that it is not a bogie tender. So a 6 wheel tender it is. You may also have noticed that I didn't show the wheels to clearly. Why? Then I put the loco chassis into the hands of the two gentlemen and at first they were puzzled until I pointed out the square cut-out. This brings the class of locomotive down to 3 and also reduces the number of versions that Hornby made. Finally Nigel asked if I make up crossword clues, I don't and I really struggle when trying to solve them. But in the spirit of the game. All of us will have a punishment for our announcements. So I invite conjecture from anyone else as to what the classes are and all of you to continue to guess the loco as well as filling in the gaps in the opening post. As for the Hornby model, I suggest a review of Mr Muz's website and/or Blood and Custard. Both mines of data and an enjoyable distraction. Enjoy Andy

I don't know if it was suggested earlier, but I suggest that you avoid using black. It is a very strong colour and just sucks out the light. Being a strong colour it also draws the eye to it. My O level art teacher removed the black paint from our art boxes and told us to go an look at the real colour. "There is no such colour as black" she said. She was correct, if you look closely and you see the other colours. So do I have black in my art box? I sure do, but rarely use it raw and I am always aware that it kills the light. Also look at the lighter colours. They are not just at the sun. They reflect up and around objects and through that smoke. Andy

Hi Nigel, correct. Work on the loco conversion has been put to one side while I work on the cripples from Saturdays rehearsal. I have ordered new transfers for the tender (there is a clue) and a Bournemouth Belle headboard.

Yesterday team Surrey dashed up the M40 to meet up with Heart of England team to revive our old friend Swaynton. It was great to see it up and running well. After a bit of maintenance we plugged it in and trains ran with no gremlins to report. All stock was run, we had a couple of cripples to be either reworked or withdrawn. The team of operators familiarised themselves with the layout operation. We have a new operator for the centre and also a new fiddle yard operator signed off. So ready for for Ally-Pally. Set up and ready for the first train. Lots of Green stock. Slowly, oh so slowly we have managed to get the stock correct for 1960. Lots of green, a bit of red for foreign trains and the dregs of blood and custard. A view over the station. Note that the trees have not been set up. They are getting some attention as they were starting to go bald. Sir Brian, dashes out of the eastern tunnel on an inter-regional. Possibly the Birkenhead-Bournemouth.

Hi Nigel, a very good and nicely researched answer with good reasoning for the locomotive. Well done you get 5 points. I hope that you enjoyed digging around to start solving the puzzle that I set. I will update the above posts with your answers. There are still a few gaps that need to be answered. That is then to be followed by someone to spot the errors that I have made or are making. I did start to highlight what you had correct, but then thought that there are still a few blind alleys for you. But this picture confirms maker. Note that the OO wheels are still in place. See what I mean about the dust. Although in the picture the wheels do look like that they have had some use. So not so much a shelf queen as I had earlier assumed. Here are a couple of the new tender axles being prepared with the spacers. The notes are to work out the width of the spacers. I am working from an EMGS manual sheet where this has been determined. I thought that I had purchased enough 2mm washers for this project. But I didn't get nearly enough so I am using a piece of short tube 1.8mm long with a washer each side to take up the side load. Swaynton is being assembled and tested this weekend. I have a couple of jobs to do on the layout before checking that my stock runs. Of course this loco is not ready yet so will probably be only getting test runs at the show. As you mentioned Arthurs, here is one that I picked up from e-bay a couple of months ago. It's a SEF kit built to EM with a Portescap motor. It needed a little bit of tidying up, mainly cosmetic and is now ready for its trials this weekend. I am very pleased with it. I wonder who built it? So here is a supplementary question. I am stretching modelers licence by running this on Swaynton. It's a nice loco and is typical of what would be running in May/June of 1960 that is the period set for the layout. But why should this raise an eyebrow? Do your digging and feel smug when you record your answers below. Andy

Good news is that Swaynton is going to be at The London Festival of Railway Modelling at Alexandra Palace. This weekend the layout comes out out storage and we will set about cleaning off the cobwebs, fixing the things that broke at the last outing and trying out the rolling stock that has been acquired since then.