coachmann

A glance at the small firebox on a Dean Goods is enough to tell me I would be shoveling coal all shift. This is what happened on the L&Y A Class 0-6-0's if asked to do a road job instead of pilot work. On a 4F, I only threw a couple of shovel fulls down each side the box. It wasn't my engine and so I don't know what the fireman thought of the machine. I'll bet the men at Lees would have been glad of half a dozen 4F's in place of the A class once they got used to them. The shed had Fowler 2-6-2T's and 7F 0-8-0's. I mean things couldn't have gotten any worse, but it was an LNWR outpost in L&Y territory and the men stubbornly refused to admit they had crap.

I will be going with this trackplan showing a single slip from the bay to the mainline. Interestingly, the slip was replaced by a ladder at some time, maybe during the late 1920's remodelling, but a ladder would use up too much space on my baseboard. The slip was probably getting too much of a hammering.... Courtesy the flyingsignalman

There wont be any coal mine grot on my horizon. I had my fill of that oop north. I'll bet 'the house at the back' will not be on the layout because it would cast a shadow on the backscene. Based on Ruabon is the keyword here though naturally I hope it will resemble Ruabon at the end of the day.

A bogie pin to the rear of centre and extra side-play on the leading and centre drivers would solve some of the problems associated with providing locos for ultra sharp curves while restricting lateral oscillation. No RTR manufacturer wants to restrict his sales and so their designers have worked wonders over recent years.

Ruabon has an interesting track layout that lends itself to simplification by reducing the number of marshalling roads to keep baseboard width manageable. So track-laying and hitching points up to Mercontrol will keep me busy for a while. Then there are buildings to construct and relatively simple scenery. I have alreadsy chosen a suitable backscene. Within the two overbridges, which is what I will be modelling, there is a Down lay-bye to allow freight to be overtaken by passenger. Goods off the Dolgelley line will be remarshalled and transferred over to the Up yard as necessary and vice-versa. Freight traffic potential is enormous with block oil, block brick, ballast, general merchandise and parcels. Passenger brings in coaching stock from all the Big Four companies. Some Dee Valley trains local terminate in Ruabon while others, including auto-trains go on to Wrexham. Summer extras bring in traffic from all over. It is on the mainline to Paddington and so motive power can be just about anything ex.GWR. LMS locos were also to be seen even before 1963. I foresee it keeping me interested for some years to come. If Carrog could have been developed further, it would have been, but at the end of the day, Barmouth Bridge always restricted development. So I'll see what I can do with something bigger. Diggle Junction, which was similar, never went beyond my shed walls and so it was basically an untested diorama.

It's not like you to be funny.........

Flyingsignalman, I cannot thank you enough for this information and especially the pictures. They are invaluable and fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the station. My original intention was to re-use the Carrog building and fit a canopy as a 'quickie'. But the more I learn, the more inclined I am towards building a proper station. This project has a lot of long-term potential.

Nice picture, but the 24's had gone before the siding was laid in the 1980's, or is my memory going....again?

One thing I forgot to mention is the matt finish. I have no need to build coaches for the Southern Region formations when the RTR stuff is so good, so I finished the blood & custard Diner in matt to match.

I dun one of them too.... As bought.... Picked out the window bolections and droplights at the kitchen end as before..... Roof and chassis weathered as well to give me another inexpensive layout coach ready for mainline services through Ruabon...

The window bolections are moulded on the body with some windows but are moulded on the glazing of the 'passenger' windows. The Diner's appearance is much improved if the bolections are picked out in body colour..... Only the gutter was painted carmine on high window stock... Two dropights are moulded on the kitchen windows but picking them out in cream is not entirely successful. The glass was also painted grey.... The transfer for Restaurant Car moved and has secured itself to the paint before I had time to adjust it. The paint was soft and i had no option but to leave things be. The roof was sprayed matt black and then lightly sprayed over with my weathering 'grime' along with the underframe and bogies.

Something different....

P Personally I dont see as that at all. It wouldn't matter if the gears were made by a watchmaker, it was still a idea that rendered connecting rods superfluous and led to them having super-size holes because they were in fact cosmetic. DJM has 'form' when it comes to design.

The late Brian Haresnape and I corresponded on BR liveries, in fact his last letter to me was just before his tragic death. He tried to cover a lot of ground in his livery books, which was a big ask. Anyone with knowledge would spot the mistakes anyway. I cocked up with a caption in a magazine article on BR liveries several decades ago and once it is in print, you are doomed!

Wasn't there an idea floating about in the earlt 1950's that Bulleid's light Pacific's would be useful in Scotland. Personally, i can't imagine anything Bulleid being useful anywhere let alone where brakes were paramount. His name would have stunk to high heaven at any other time in railway history for the chaos he caused with so many engines.

The G7S was a big boiler with a large firebox married to a short-lap engine portion designed for plodding along on freight duties. Cheap to build and economical on coal if used as intended, not for nothing did the operating department keep asking for more. The LMS was a business ~ first and last. I consider myself fortunate to have ridden on a 2P 4-4-0 on passenger and a 4F's. "Fowlers" got my heart racing for a variety of reasons, not least their steady beat and ringing of the snifting valves when steam was shut off.

A visit to Halfords this afternoon produced nothing in the way of a suitable scpraycan of green for BR(S) coaching stock. This is one of the diners after I fitted an extra rain strip and gave the body a light coat of Halfords plastic primer. Masking tape protected the ends.... In the absence of green, I opted for blood & custard...

Men leaving their job due to retirement was not unique to BR. The problem was, by the late 1950's, lads of my generation weren't joining the railway in sufficient numbers to cover. I made it to Passed Cleaner in two weeks. I needn't go into the dedication required in order to gain promotion save to say that footplate men did not leave BR lightly when they knew their skills were useless to them in civvy street.

Really......?

Unfitted wagons and other things look primitive to young people today, and indeed they were, but to us at the time, it was as normal as expecting a bomb to land on the house.

I don't know about overhauls. I only saw the affect of the lack of them on the ex.GWR/Cambrian areas. The other three regions didn't seem too fussed about external appearance, and the build up of grime acted as a protective barrier to metalwork I suppose. The Western Region was a beacon in Wales and the borders for clean green paintwork, so when cleaning ceased around 1963/4, the well scrubbed paint was so thin that it offered little protection. Like Datsun cars, rust appeared in all the wrong places(!) and Western Region locos ended up looking the worst of the lot. Their coaches didn't fare well either and it was noticeable that L.M.Region Stanier coaches brought a shine back to the region after the L.M.R. took over.

It's a good point and is actually how it was. No man goes to work to work harder than he needs to when he doesn't get paid any more. A loco that a driver did not have an instinct for could lead to an unhappy 8 hours. Giving them a Passed Cleaner for a duty was bad enough without giving them a loco that was not off their planet. My mate and I brought an ailing B1 on shed one afternoon and all the canteen turned out to have a shufty. It is doubtful if anyone on our shed had even seen one close up before. "They've got ###### armchairs and electric light". That was a criticism!

A September 1948 repaint would have been in company livery, teak in the case of an LNER vehicle. No BR liveries had been decided at that date. If that was kept until withdrawal, then it obviously wasn't re-lined. Lettering style could only be LNER style insignia but without company markings. I thought this had been covered already.

This afternoon, I dipped into a drawer I rarely use and looked through the accumulated 'colour' patterns. There was a tin lid marked :- 31st May 1961, Valspar new multi-unit stock green BR Spec.39 Item 14R shade Ref F2266. The green is quite dark and is far less blue than the malachite or blue-ish loco-stock green we see amongst the model paint ranges. It has been scanned but it doesn't really tell you anything. If it was applied to a 4mm coach, folk would think it was Maunsell olive....

For GWR/BR locos, I use Deep Bronze Green. It would definitely not be appropriate for coaching stock. Some eight years ago I disposed of most of my cellulose railway paints, some unique because they had been mixed to trustworthy patterns. For instance, Ross Pochin had prepared the Furness Railway red pattern before the war and I had to match it. BR(S) Coaching stock green would have been a piece of cake when I had the tinter colours.