Ruston

Thank you. Just the thing. And a choice of cable or hydraulically-controlled dozer blades too!

Thanks. That would be just the thing if it wasn't HO scale.

Evening all, Does anyone know of any kits or die casts for pre-1990s bulldozers? Preferably of a similar size range to a Cat D8.

Yes, another one! As if building a shed layout, finishing a micro and planning a joint project wasn't enough. I have been given a 4ft. x 15 in. baseboard, so it would be rude not to build a layout on it. Early 1990s Speedlink era. 1ft. FY area, using either cassettes or sector plate. 3ft. scenic area. Two roads for loading or unloading of tanks. One road for the loading of covered vans. One engine shed. Peco Bullhead trackwork. TTA tanks. VEA vans. Ruston 88DS. It's not a puzzle; it doesn't really do anything. Shuffle wagons up and down. It's better than watching the telly.

321731 certainly got about. Here it is much later in life, in this Gordon Edgar shot.

Ah yes. Different profiles, by the look of things. I hadn't realised that the Bristol one was a low cab and the tops of the windows being in the shade made them look larger and a bit odd. Someone here must know about clearances on the line at Bristol...

This one's an oddity that I've never seen before. The caption says that it's unidentified, but if it was taken in 1952 at Bristol Canon's Marsh gasworks then it has to be W/n321731 of that year. It looks very new in the photo, which makes me think that cab is original. I can't think why that odd cab would be specified though. https://bristolharbourrailway.co.uk/2014/08/28/tbt-another-ruston-at-canons-marsh/#jp-carousel-781

Black Milliput is the answer. I'll need a couple of packs just to cover the area under the loader, but I've just put some down in front and at the sides of it. To make a crossing I rolled sausages of it and laid them inside and outside of the rails and smoothed them down, as I did with the shed concrete. I got a couple of diecast lorries and pushed them around to leave tyre tracks around and across the rail tracks to the loader and to clear the flangeways I pushed an old Lima stone hopper and a Triang wagon chassis up and down. Their flanges are deeper and the wheels broader than anything I'll ever run properly, so ought to have pushed the Milliput out of the way. I'll find out, tomorrow, when I put power to the tracks again and attempt to run a loco and wagons up the sidings. I sprinkled some sand and fine coal on but I'm not sure that will stick.

I'm thinking along the same lines, Cap'n, but not for the gauge. I'm thinking that the HL kit will allow the builder a choice of wheels. The Class 03 wheels are quite distinctive, with their large balance weights that take up around a third of the wheel, where the Bagnall has a more usual crescent-shaped weight and if you're going to the trouble of building the chassis kit then you may as well use more prototypical wheels. I imagine the HL kit will have been designed for the older Bachmann body but changing the position of a hole in a spacer to match the newer body, and this kit, can't be that difficult.

And? Is it any good? I hope that it shouldn't be long now before we get to find out for ourselves.

It could work in 7mm but I think that 4mm wagons, especially the kit-built 21-ton hoppers, would be too lightweight for the flanges to push down the sponge. This is chopped from a photo of the British Oak screens, found on the interweb. Obviously in wet weather. The rails can barely be seen. And one in dry weather, by 5050's friend, Bryan. Pretty much the same only not looking wet. Only the line at the far right, on which no coal loading took place, shows any sign of the sleepers and chairs. The above photo is facing toward Blacker Lane with the single road loader standing away from the larger two-road building. I'm going to do something similar but in reverse to give a broader expanse of low-relief building as a backscene. That's just a rough approximation. I'll probably not have it extending so far to the left. That was going to be for lorry loading but that could now be supposedly done under the backscene building and the lorries would then drive up toward the camera, cross the two tracks in front of the loader and go off down the left hand side of the building. The left wall and far corner will have trees as the backscene. How the area is looking at the moment.

Now that I've decided on not having a working loader I can decide on the footprint of the buildings. I'll plan this out and lay some concrete patches for the supports and then ballast around them, before making and planting the buildings. The last time I did a colliery yard was on the O gauge Royd Hall Drift Mine and, to be honest, I was never happy with the ground coverage for the pit yard, screens and washery. It looked no different from the ballast on the rest of the track and the sleepers, rails and chairs were all visible. I've noticed a few colliery-based layouts that have ground cover that doesn't look proper too. The track in area around the screens at British Oak, and on almost every photo of every colliery yard I've ever seen was up to the rail tops in with years of accumulated mud and spilled coal, so I want to try and do this but the flanges and back-to-backs of OO models have to be considered. To start with I've made a ballast mix that's much darker than on the rest of the layout. It uses only coal and sand this time. It could do with being put through a finer sieve. So that I don't have to lay this stuff on as deep as the track height I'll probably cut and lay card in the area first. It'll take a lot less ballast to bring it up to the level.

I didn't know it was being banned. It hasn't been allowed to be used around here since I was very young. The entire district became a smokeless zone and I remember my granny not liking the fact that she had to use coke on the fire instead of coal. I never thought a time would come where you can't simply find or buy coal anywhere. I wanted some coke for wagon loads not long ago and thought I'd just stroll through a public footpath that goes through my old infants school and pick a couple of pieces off the pile that was always in the playground for use in the heating boiler. Not only is there no pile of coke in the playground but there's no longer a public footpath and the school has a fences and gates round it that would put a maximum security prison to shame! How times have changed and not for the better. I've got most of the coal that I used on the O gauge, so it only needs crushing into finer pieces. I've also got an ice cream tub of coal, from Kellingley Colliery, in reserve.

Sorry if I've missed it but there are 21 pages of this to wade through and as I can't see any on the Accurascale website, I'm wondering if loads are available, or are going to be available, for the HAA/HOP AB? Or if not, what have other people done about loads? I need removable loads and while I usually make my own loads the problem with these hoppers is the cross bracing. They will need to be cut out and embedded in the loads, but then when the wagon is running empty the cross bracing will be absent. If loads are going to be made, will there also be a removable insert that can be put in for empties? Or are these parts available as spares so I can make my own? This conundrum aside they are really nice wagons.

A view of the same Rolls Royce diesel-hydraulic propelling wagons of scrap through Watery Lane sidings.

I had to stand in an abandoned shopping trolley that I found in order to get high enough to get this shot over the wall at Charlie Strong's scrapyard.

Another of my posts where I don't actually do anything. I've been thinking about this a lot. I've made working loaders before and they make for an extra and interesting aspect of layout operation but they have their downsides. The first is building and making it work. No easy task in itself. Then there is the inevitable mess and spillage. No matter what's used as a load or how well the loader itself works, I have never made one where 100% of the load remains in the wagon on loading. Some always hits the floor of the wagon and bounces out onto the floor (of the layout), where it accumulates. Accidental spillage due to operator error adds to this. To clear it up involves brush and vacuum cleaner, but more importantly, a building that can be lifted off the baseboard in order to access the area. More hassle in the design and build stage. There's also the material. The only thing that looks like coal is coal. I don't care what anyone says, this is a fact. The working loader that I did in O gauge used real coal that I smashed and sieved to pieces of 2 grades, the smallest being approx 3-4mm, which in O doesn't look terribly oversized, especially given that deep-mined coal was graded into some pretty large sizes for some uses. What's supposed to be coming out of BL is opencasted coal, which went mainly for use in power stations. Small stuff. If I were to smash the coal down to a realistic size for power station coal, in 4mm scale, it would be not far off grains of salt. It would make one hell of a mess with spillage and the amount of dust could cause problems with keeping the track clean. I'm now thinking of using fixed loads that are placed in the wagons and lifted out in the FY. I already do this with the scrap loads on Charlie Strong's scrapyard and the steel coils on Watery Lane. It's not an exhibition layout, so the only people who I have to please are myself and the friends who come and operate the layouts now and again and if they say anything about it then they can Foxtrot Oscar. 😁 The shunting at the screens can still be reasonably interesting as the trains need splitting to get into the screens sidings and by shortening the screens building in length, the placing of the loads can be done on the terminus end, where only 3 wagons at a time will be able to fit. This means that a number of movements is still required to load a train and get it ready to go out. With no loose coal being loaded at all, the loads of the internal use wagons will need to be lifted out at the staithe but one at a time as each wagon is shunted to the tipper house, so there is still as much to occupy the operator of that train as there would be with a loose load. The only difference being that the hand of god lifts the load out instead of it being tipped. Any additional wagons for this run won't need all of the faff of altering them to actually discharge their loads. I wish I'd bought some of those BRM/Rapido NCB internal use wagons now. Anyway, that looks like being the way forward.

Slow progress, putting off the day that I have to tackle the screens building. I have now filled the space between the rails with "concrete". I had cut a strip of thin plywood and had scored it to represent sleepers laid longitudinally but the gap for the flanges looked huge and the chairs seemed to really stand out, so I decided to have the track inset into concrete instead. It's one of my modelling pet hates when people attempt inset track but you can see the chairs and sleepers through the flangeways, so I was determined to do better than that. In the photo in the previous post you will see the sides of the rails, and the chairs, are visible on the outside of the gauge. I filled these gaps with Milliput and smoothed it so it would come to slightly below the rail tops. I reckoned that the Milliput would hold the rails to gauge even if I cut out all of the sleepers, so that's what I did once the Milliput had hardened. The sleepers were cut out and trimmed flush with the inside of the gauge. A length of 1.5mm thick styrene was cut to be a precise fit inside the gauge and a length of cork cut and glued to the styrene. The cork was cut to allow the back-to-backs of RTR loco wheelsets to clear by 0.3mm. The entire insert was painted before being glued in place. Now there are no chairs, no sleepers and no spaces, just as it should be and as close as RTR OO gauge will allow.

That would be a great finish for extremely weathered and peeling paint! It's just a shame that's not what you intended.

This 20-ton Ruston 88DS was sold for scrap after the ICI works at which it was used ceased to use rail traffic. It had been well-maintained by the ICI fitters and, instead of being cut up, was put on the sale or hire list at Strong's. It spent some time in use as the yard shunter and also shunting the Watery Lane works of Metal Box Ltd. It was later sold for preservation but, as is so often the case, was cast aside as soon as the railway got ideas above its station and started to run an ex-BR steam loco. The Ruston was sold back to Strong but this time it was not so lucky and became razor blades and Rover 75s.

The only electrics on a standard 88DS were the front and rear lamps, internal cab lamp and the electric fan for the cab heater. And of course the battery and dynamo. They could all pose a spark risk so the flameproofed gear had sealed cases, with tamper-proof fastners and, I presume, toughened glass on the lamps. I don't know what they did about the heater fan motor. The other spark risk would have been the ignition system on the donkey engine that charged the air-start reservoir if it became totally depleted. This was why the flameproofed locos used electric start, instead of air, as the battery box and starter motor were also flameproofed.

And one that came in from an ICI works that ceased to use rail traffic.

Speaker and SA in the cab.

I'm confused now. I was under the impression that it was OO, not N. Or do you mean Phil's is N but the kit will be OO, or available in both scales?