PGC

Or here's an alternative take on electricity! This is a true story from the WordPerfect Helpline. Needless to say, the helpdesk employee was fired; however, he/she is currently suing the WordPerfect organisation for "termination without just cause". Actual dialogue of a former WordPerfect Customer Support Employee: "Ridge Hall computer assistance; May I help you?" "Yes, well, I'm having trouble with WordPerfect." "What sort of trouble? "Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away," "Went away?" "They disappeared." "Hmmm. So what does your screen look like now?" "Nothing" "Nothing?" "It's blank. It won't accept anything when I type." "Are you still in WordPerfect or did you get out?" "How do I tell?" "Can you see the C: prompt on the screen." "What's a sea-prompt?" "Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?" "There isn't any cursor: I told you, it won't accept anything I type." "Does your monitor have a power indicator?" "What's a monitor?" "It's the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it's on?" "I don't know." "Well, then look on the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?" "Yes, I think so." "Great. Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it's plugged into the wall." "........Yes, it is." "When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?" "No." "Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable." "............Okay, here it is." "Follow it for me and tell me if it's plugged securely into the back of your computer." "I can't reach." "Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?" "No" "Even if you put your knee on something and lean way over?" "Oh, it's not because I don't have the right angle, it's because it's dark." "Dark?" "Yes - the office light is off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window." "Well, turn on the office light then." "I can't" "No? Why not?" "Because there's a power failure." "A power....A power failure?! Aha, Okay, we've got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?" "Well, yes, I keep them in the closet." "Good. Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it, then take it back to the store you bought it from." "Really? is it that bad?" "Yes, I'm afraid so." "Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?" "Tell them you're too f****** stupid to own a computer."

I've been reading this thread for some tome and find it fascinating, humorous and inspiring. I keep thinking of comparisons between Iain and Allan in terms of composers, and I liken Iain to Mozart and Allan to Beethoven. Both were brilliant but totally different - Mozart created smaller scale compositions which had a lightness of touch and deftness whereas Beethoven created far larger compositions that had power and majesty, but both were, and still are, absolutely wonderful to listen to. Phil

More years ago than I care to remember, I worked for British Steel Corporation and had the pleasure of a trip round the tube works at Corby along with several other members of staff. One of the girls started the tour in her plastic soled shoes, but by the time she'd been across of a few of the bridges that had the red hot steel billets going under them, the soles of her shoes had disappeared and she was carried round by one of the lads! Happy days. Phil

If you want pictures taken of what remains, let me know. I rode along the track bed from Start Hill (where the track bed starts East of the M11) to the bridge in to Dunmow over the A120 only last Friday! Good luck with the project - GER layouts rule OK!!!!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KIT-BUILT-LNER-No-4967-J39-0-6-O-LOCO-ONLY-/271176071997?pt=UK_Trains_Railway_Models&hash=item3f235a7b3d He wants how much? Even if it came with a tender I wouldn't offer him £5 for the lot! PGC

What does DNA stand for? National Dyslexic Association.

Just seen an item on BBC news - this is the link from the BBC website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-22090686 In a later part of the item, Bob Crowe was saying the RMT are against level crossings and they should be replaced. How? Who pays? The Unions? I don't think so! Also in the item was a statement about a level crossing that's been closed and replaced with a footbridge. I wonder how cars drive over that? A "depressed at the inability of supposedly sensible people to grasp reality" PGC

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. He was born 99 1/2 years ago and made an enormous impact on English classical music. He wrote the War Requiem to commemorate the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Some of my friends will be going to Dresden in June to sing a performance of the War Requiem in Dresden - I suspect they will find it very, very moving and I wish I could be involved.. As an unashamed opportunity for some self promotion - you can hear some more Britten at If you like this, please feel free to pass it on to as many friends as you think would also like to hear it. PGC PS - On the track above, I'm the one at the front waving his arms, so you won't hear me!

Yes, this is the route I'll be going as well - the Comet white metal castings I've got, though, are very fragile. If only I could find some lost wax brass ones - they'd be so much stronger. However, I'll have to make do with what I've got / can find!

Yes, the gap's the one mentioned in the first post. I've got the gap filled properly at one end, but the other still needs a little filling - I'll use Milliput. I must admit that I was surprised at the Comet end not matching their roof extrusion - I seem to recall someone saying the end profile of the etching was correct - well, not according to the Isinglass drawing!.

Well, time has moved on and I've done more work to the carriage. However, the earlier post didn't show a picture of the chassis from underneath, so here's one. The picture shows the end wheels mounted in the W irons, and pivoted. The rods that comes from the end "trucks" (is that the right word?) and slot in to the middle W iron are what moves the middle W iron sideways when a curve is encountered. The Brassmasters Cleminson chassis may seem a complicated means of giving the coach a chassis that gets it round a curve, but some people (OK, why try and be discrete! - Bill Bedford, who has attached comments to this blog) obviously doesn't realise that when the chassis is being scratchbuilt, as this was, it's so much nicer to have a kit that goes together easily, with good instructions, and that fits the wheelbase. On that basis, this is a good kit and I'd recomend it to any one else who wants to make a 6 wheel vehicle. I took the coach down to the club and tried it on the layout. I was very happy - it runs very well indeed. The only problem was that as there are no couplings currently fitted, I had to push rather than pull the coach, and in one place it buffer locked, but as there are no buffer heads in the body, this wasn't a total surprise. I've now added all the under chassis detail, except I haven't put a representation of the drive belt for the dynamo. This will be made from a strip of paper curved and glued round the dynamo end once I have dunked the chassis in a mix of either dilute milk of magnesia or soda crystals to neutralise flux that may be lurking. I've also added the torpedo vents on the roof, the axle boxes, and I've drilled the holes for the jumper wires on the ends. I think that's all, but the pictures show the results of my efforts. Actually, looking at the pictures makes me very happy - I've created the steps from bits of square brass soldered behind the solebars, then I added a small piece of brass that created the backplate of the step and lastly I soldered the step itself on. All this was done by use of heat sinks (made from the very soft sprung metal clips one can get from a hair dresser), a clean and hot iron and lots of flux! Well, the bits left to do now are: The jumper wires. I've got Comet white metal ones but the bottom sits in a housing in the coach and I have to make these from small pieces of brass, The hangers and springs for the axle boxes. Again I've got cast white metal ones from Comet, but trying to work out how to set them right and fix them to the coach has so far given me a headache, so I've decided to leave them for the time being. The rain strips on the roof - I'll use micro strip. Lamp irons on the ends. I think that's about it - then I can start painting the coach. The livery is going to be unlined maroon, and that's about as far I've got with this apsect so far. That's for the future!

Or, "always beware the kit that has no instructions - you never know what you'll end up with!" Or have you started producing instructions yet, Bill?

Easy? You have to take the wheel off the axle your way, Bill, and then put it back on the axle with correct back to back, and true. The Brassmaster Cleminson chassis means you can use the wheels as bought, and if they're good ones (I don't know which wheels you use) the back to back will be set right. In addition, no specialist tools or equipment (hacksaw etc.) are needed. I sniff a whiff of jealousy that Brassmasters can produce kits with decent instructions!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the first time I've ever posted a blog, so please treat me gently! For various reasons I haven't done any serious modelling for 7 or 8 years, but I've recently got back to modelling and wanted to build something a little different. I looked throguh my pile of kits and discovered, squirreled away at the bottom, some Comet sides and ends for a Thompson 6 wheel passenger brake van.However, it's not a complete kit for the coach, just a set of body components. In a masochisitc moment, I decided this would be fun (!) to build so started looking around for bits such as axle guards, roof, underfame details etc. One of the first things I did was find photographs. For this, the Paul Bartlett site http://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/paulbartlettsrailwaywagons was a great help, and I found a few other pictures using Google. I also bought an Isinglass drawing so I had an idea what I was dealing with. I then started hunting down bits and pieces and working out how to make the chassis so the coach would go round curves! I'm sure that most people reading this will realise of course, that my major problem would be getting a 6 wheel vehicle to go round a model railway curve. Modelling in EM as I do, the minimum radius of any layout the coach runs on SHOULD be 3 feet, but that's still a lot tighter when scaled up to prototype dimensions than the standard minimum radius the real vehicles would go round. To get round this, I bought a Brassmasters kit for a Cleminson chassis. This pivots the end axles and connects them to the axle carrier for the middle axle in such a way that the middle axle slides to the outside of the curve. I hope that makes sense! In the further hunt for components, I discovered a Comet alloy roof moulding at John Dutfield. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was actually avery close match to the profile of the roof in the drawing, but as the ends were not to the same profile it meant I would have to do some filling between the end and the roof - not something too difficult to overcome! So, to the start! I decided to make the chassis out of double sided copper clad paxolin and cut a piece that seemed to be about the right size from the sheet I had. I am very lucky to have bought many years ago a Minicraft drill and pillar drill mount - I laid these on their back, put a slitting disc in the drill and with some pieces of wood glued and screwed to roughly the right height, I had a sort of circular saw table that allowed me to cut the paxolin relatively easily. This is a tool that I am going to refine further - it helps to make life easy and safe at the same time! Once I'd cut the paxolin, I marked both middle lines on the chassis base so I would know exactly where to line up the baseplate for the Cleminson chassis. The next step was to make up the Cleminson chassis kit. Fortunately, the Brassmaster kit is so well thought out - it makes up easily to a whole variety of wheelbases and as far as I can tell, will work for any 6 wheel vehicle model produced. Certainly I will be buying another in the future and trying the chassis on a 6 wheel milk tanker. Having followed the instructions with the kit, the chassis went together very easily and once soldered to the paxoling, gave me a free running chassis. I was very happy! The next stage was to build the body. I am very lucky to work in a school that has a very good DT department, so I asked the technician to make me a piece of ply with 2 sides raised up that were exactly 90 degrees - I pinned one side and one end to this jig and soldered them together, I then did the same for the other side and end, then soldered the 2 components together and ended up with a square body. I had already decided that I was going to fix the chassis at low level to the body, so I then glued the roof on using Devcon plastic steel - this also acted as a filler for the gaps between ends and roof. I put this to one side and left it for a few days so the plastic steel could set hard. The next step was to solder some L shaped stretchers to the ends - these stretchers have nuts soldered to them for fixing the chassis. I then drilled holes in the chassis that screws could go through to fix the chassis to the body. Somewhere along the line my measuring had obviously gone wrong - the body didn't sit correctly on the chassis - it was skew whiff longitudinally. I pondered for a while how to fix this. I cut some small pieces of brass from spare etch, drilled holes in these, then drilled the holes in the chasis over size (which gave me flexibility to align the chassis correctly within the body). I then put the brass piece on the bolt, the bolt through the chassis in to the body fixing nut, made sure the chassis was aligned correctly and soldered the small piece of brass to the chassis. I now had a chassis correctly aligned to thew body, and it started to look like a coach! The next thing to sort out was solebars - I found some brass channel in my stock, and also some fine section T shape brass - I used this to make the running step in the solebar. Having got the body this far, the next part was the detailing. The Comet sides, fortunately, had holes marked for the door stops, hinges and handles and handrails, so I marked these out and soldered short lengths of 0.7mm wire for the door stops and lengths of 0.33mm wire for the handles and hand rails. I wondered about how to make the hinges - then had the bright idea of using the Comet etch of T door handles - these look like hinges as you can tell from the attached photo that shows the side with the hinges done (they're not all put on yet!) One of the characteristic things of these carriages are the plate style W irons that the axle boxes slide in - Comet very thoughtfully include these in the etches, and I'm soldering them to the insides of the solebars, although they're not in the final position just at the moment as something else has gone awry with my measuring! I've attached a couple of photos that show the coach at this stage - since taking the pictures I've added the chassis underfarme details using Comet components. The things still to do are: Finish the hinges Jumper wires on the ends Lamp irons on the ends Torpedo vents on the roof Rain strip on the roof Coupling hole plates on the buffer beans. There are 2 strengthening gussets at each end on the real thing that locate the body to the chassis - I'm not going to replicate those on the model (call me lazy - you're right!) Once I've done these, I'm going to bath the coach in something (either dilute milk of magnesia or soda crystals) to neutralise any residue phosphoric acid flux, then I'll paint it in unlined maroon livery. I hope you've enjoyed reading this so far - it's been fun for me and has really started my modelling juices flowing - I'll post some more details and pics in a little while. Phil