Ruston

I have been digging in my box of gears. I found some Delrin chain and sprockets and these nylon gears. The 1st motion shaft will go out of the baseboard front and be driven by a winding handle. It's far better to drive these things manually than electrically as you can feel what you're doing and not overwind anything. The small gear on that shaft is fixed and drives the large gear on the layshaft. The small gear on the layshaft is fixed and drives the larger gear on the 1st motion shaft,which is free to turn on that shaft. The final shaft has a fixed driven gear and on the other end will be a Delrin sprocket that connects by chain to a similar sprocket fixed on the rocking shaft attached to the wagon platform. I just need to make the box to hold it all together now. I reckon on about 3 full turns of the winding handle to get the wagon to tip fully. I have chosen just the two different sizes of gear so as to have the same distance between shafts and simplify marking out the centres.

Go on then, I'll bite... I don't know much about them. I don't model pre-group passenger trains. I do know that I'm not capable of painting and lining coach kits in those complex liveries, so if I did model them I would consider Hattons coaches but then I know very little about coaches in general. That said, if I get an interest in something I learn about it and will either do it or weigh up the compromises. If I felt that the Hattons coaches are too far from my intended prototype then I'd have to reconsider what I was doing. I have absolutely no idea about the Rapido APTE. I didn't even know that such a model exists as it is completely outside my sphere of interest, so all I can say on that is that it's a very well known train, a one-off that there is lots of information about, in books and on the internet. It's quite obvious that any spurious livery is exactly that. It's completely different to making up what amounts to a false history on an industrial prototype, where relatively little information exists. Exactly.

I don't know how this is going to work, but it's a start.

I'm going to say no. I think that even if it did help it to hold together, which I doubt, the varnish would quickly abrade off from being loaded, unloaded and then being tipped back into the screens to go around again. The other problem, of course, is how the devil do you spray and evenly coat tens of thousands of tiny pieces of coal? They'll just blow away in the blast from an airbrush or aerosol and either be scattered all over or clump together with wet varnish. Even a test load of one wagon is many hundreds of pieces. I really don't think that I can get it to work reliably and the fact that the hoppers are so finicky about the particle size and that it's going to get spread over the rails that are things I can't see a way around. It's going to have to be end tippers. I just need to work out how to make a tipper. Having end tippers is still in keeping with British Oak. They didn't build the new staithe, for use with hoppers, until 1969 anyway.

It works - sort of. I don't have any suitable real coal or anything else of the size that will work, so I used Woodland Scenics ballast. It's not without problems though. As with the chute, if the material isn't small enough it simply blocks the door and remains in the hopper, but if too small it leaves some hanging on the insides. This extremely light and small material bounces if it hits anything and you can see the spillage from this one wagon already. The doors aren't 100% reliable in closing completely and so this remaining load can then drop all over the track on leaving the staithe. If I use real coal it's going to end up as coal dust all over the rail tops and the wagon wheels are going to spread it all over the layout. I don't know what I could use as an alternative either. I went to my local model shop and they had Woodland Scenics "lump coal", which looks to be about the right size but at £6.50 for a bag that would barely fill two hoppers, they can bloody well keep it! When you consider that every train is going to be loaded at the screens with the same stuff, and I'll be running up to 22 hoppers or wagons at any time, it would be very expensive to buy sufficient WS stuff. I've got an ice cream tub full of some of the last coal to come out of Kellingley and which cost me nowt. End tippers won't be fussy about the size of lump and as the material won't touch the rails it won't get spread around if it does become dust, so I can use real coal. The other thing with end tippers is that lots of them had the tipper and mechanism completely enclosed in a tipper house, which means no stray load bouncing onto the canal and any mechanism I build that is way over scale can't be seen.

I've been trying to get the staithe/chute to work. The idea was to have the coal loads drop out of the hoppers, along the chute and into the waiting barge, as per prototype. I ought to have known that this would be nothing but trouble and that gravity doesn't scale down from previous experience with Harboro Stone. The angle of the chute, as first made, was too shallow to get the material to flow, so it had to be steepened. It would then flow but when it came out of the end it went all over the place and not just through the hole in the baseboard. Narrowing the chute to give more control and direction worked to an extent but that was with trickling material through. When the working hopper doors open the load will all go instantly and so I replicated this by tipping in material from a wagon. The chute couldn't take so much so quickly and blocked. I think the answer is to not have the material go into the barge at all. Instead, it will drop straight down, through a vertical chute that has a greater section than the hopper door, which should guarantee that it can take more volume than the hopper can deliver faster than the hopper can deliver it and so shouldn't block up. That's the theory, anyway. The chute into the barge will be a false one. Vertical chute. I'll try it. The other thing may be material spraying out from the hopper door and not going down the chute but instead landing on the deck. If it isn't much then I suppose this can be vacuumed off every now and again, but if it's too much then the entire thing will have to be scrapped and it's back to the drawing board to come up with something to use end-tippers. At least they will drop their loads completely clear of the rails and deck.

From the linked photo in my previous post it would appear that it still had the plates at withdrwal. I'll have to order some. Thanks. That kit looks like being quite a challenge!

I found from a google search on the RCTS site but an attempt to find it again comes up with nothing. If you put RCTS 52044 into google it shows the thumbnail but going to "visit" the site that the photo is on takes you to a site called Pressreader, which shows absolutely nothing of the photo or anything about it. Google RCTS 52044 and instead of "visit", right click the image and it brings up this link, shown below as the image to which it is linked (I haven't copied it so no forum copyright rules broken): That's obviously taken at British Oak but what is the engine doing there? It's not in steam, so hasn't worked a train in, but has a tender full of coal. 52044 was the last of the Barton Wright 0-6-0s in service and was sold by BR in August 1959, from Wakefield shed, so I guess this is immediately after sale. According to the K&WVR it was stored in Retford before moving to the Worth Valley in 1965. I wonder if it made its way to BO under its own steam and if it was steamed there before being moved to Retford?

An update to the list of engines known to have worked at British Oak... I don't know if I mentioned them before but there is also BR 08870 that was hired from BR in 1992 when the site had no locomotives of its own. That's a straightforward RTR 08 that needs only remumbering and a painted Tinsley unofficial name. Ex-L&Y Class 25 52044, which is in a photo that was probably taken just after it was bought for preservation from BR. This one will be run as a BR engine and will be built from a London Road Models kit, which I have in the kit mountain.

The differences are there, yes, but the basic engines are all very similar 0-6-0WTs with the same valve gear. Anyone who would be bothered about the individual differences could modify them to be accurate. As for moulding the name plate into the tooling - oh dear. If only they'd have given this a bit more thought then I'm sure Narrow Planet or Railtec could have made a lot of sales. We as modellers make stuff up all the time to justify running something on our layouts and that's our prerogative - Modeller's Licence, if you will , but I'm against manufacturers doing it. There are so many people who seem to take as gospel what the manufacturers put out and they think that the manufacturers know more than anyone, even when they are wrong. This kind of deliberate fiction only makes it worse. Oh well, I can't wait to see the the Caledonian-liveried one! 😁

What is that supposed to mean? What if we create a spurious livery to boost sales of a loco with limited appeal? Why don't they just tweak a few things and use names from Bellerophon's classmates instead of trying to make up their own version of history?

I have ordered 12099, in Hargreaves orange, as it totally suits my British Oak-based layout. I just hope that Heljan have made these to the kind of standards that they did with their 05s and 07s and not the poor quality of those Ruston PWMs!

The Class 27 is done. Transfers from @railtec-models. It weighs only 10g under the weight of the Bachmann C Class despite all the DCC gear, bar the speaker, being in the loco itself. The speaker is in the tender. Another 25A-allocated engine. I haven't completely given up on the old chassis. That may yet be used under a 3D print of a Class 28.

More wagons for BL. I had two Hornby 21-ton minerals given to me, last year. Yesterday, I finally got around to doing something with them. Another case of "it's only a wagon and not the Flying Scotsman, so it doesn't really matter", from Hornby. I'm sure these 'Felix Pole' PO wagons were never vac-fitted. In fact I'll bet that the numbers on them aren't even for this type of wagon. They must think we're daft. I brushed on some Tamiya Hull Red and then applied Maskol, before giving them a blow-over with Freight Grey. I also changed the wheels for 3-hole discs simply because the flanges on the originals were quite a bit larger. And a bit of dry brushing and weathering powders later...

Beware Loco.

Ey up, Stan! What's thi 'avin fer thi snap? Rabbit pie. Ar lass meks a reyt good rabbit pie. Nice! I've got potted dog, again!

The 27's new chassis. I managed to get a Bachmann Southern Class C for a decent price, on ebay. I stripped it to a bare block and put it on a crash diet in the milling machine. All the excess lumps were shaved off to get it to fit in the etched body and then the motor was replaced by one of those 99p Chinese jobbies that I can't remember the name of. The worm is from a Hattons Barclay motor. The original motor was too long and keeping it would have necessitated removing the boiler backhead and making a replacement, which would also have to sit further back in the cab.

Staithe under construction.

I've decided on hoppers for the staithe line, so have begun the concrete foundations, well, plasticard foundations, actually. Signage.

It all depends on the weighbridge. Some had a second set of rails that the loco could be diverted onto. Gauntletted, I think they were called. The place my layout is based on had two weighbridges and engines up to 50 tons drove over them without a diversionary set of rails.

With regulator closed, Wm. Pepper's Jinty rumbles over the weighbridge before crossing Blacker Lane, at Blacker Lane opencast disposal point.

The final scenic board is at last getting some scenery. The idea of having a canal lock under a bridge has been abandoned. Space constraints mean that I couldn't get a satisfactory set up, so the lock will be kept for possible use on a future micro layout. Instead, I've gone for a sort of embankment/tunnel type set up for the canal. A barge will be a permanent part of the scenery and will have a hole in the bottom for coal to fall through into a container. I still haven't settled on whether the wagons used will be hoppers or end-tippers.

How many limited edition Bachmann British Oak Jinties are running on layouts of, or based on, British Oak? Not many, I'll bet but this has to be the engine that most people associate with the site. I have posted about this model before but it's finally got a proper home on Blacker Lane. I took the DCC sound gear out of a Hornby Peckett that I bought from a friend and fitted it into the Jinty. I'll get it reblown with the proper Jinty sound project in due course but at least it can now run on the layout. Bachmann's effort lacks the little details and the livery is quite poor. I bought mine from ebay, where the seller actually had it listed as being black and gold! I repainted it to get rid of the so-called factory weathering and to give the orange a better shade. The details Bachmann left on that shouldn't be there are the vac pipes and the ejector, so I removed them. They left off the blue sand box, on one side only, that probably came from a Hudswell Clarke. I used a sand box from RailwayMania.

The Black Hawthorn's tank is much lower than the Peckett's and there's no free space above the motor inside the Peckett body, which would mean that the proportions of the Black Hawthorn would need to be terribly distorted to get the body to fit over the motor. You could save a couple of millimetres if you're prepared to bin the Hornby motor mount and turn the motor on its side. It will have to be glued in place though. I have done this in order to get sound decoders in but you could use the space saved to lower the tank. Even so, I'm not sure the tank would be low enough despite doing that. Those Black Hawthorns are very small engines when compared with a W4 Peckett.