coachmann

It would be a shame if 'muck & brass' layouts based in Pennine mill towns became a cliché, as they were such a refreshing change in reality after donkey's years of summertime country branch lines. On 'totherhand, having lived in a foreboding mill town, I can understand the popularity of a country BLT.

It's got five legs....!

Yeh, I'd forgotten about North Wales. Neat BLT's existed at Amlwch, Bethesda, er....I've run out. Blaenau Ffestiniog a neat BLT? Too sprawling with all that narrow gauge stuff. Corwen wasnt really a dead end. Blackpool a nice little BLT? Southport a holiday resort? Peak District, well now you're talking....... But no BLT's immedietly drip off my lips.

A weather sheet between loco and tender does not deflect rain water towards the coal. The water gathers in funny places waiting to dump itself down someones neck. I imagine wagon sheets go through the same thought processes!

I suspect your are right. Trouble is the LNWR and LYR were in the wrong places......Muck and mills and nothing holiday-ish about them at all. The MR seemed to fare much better and Dave Jenkinson gave this railway a good airing. The GWR BLT has everything going for it.......Green engines, choc & cream coaches, neat stations in out of the way places. Most of us had to travel out of the doom & gloom towns and cities to visit them so that was an added attraction. No doubt the GWR in Birmingham was nowhere near as attractive...

Not sure the popularity of the GWR was all down to it keeping its original identity up to 1947 and beyond. It was afterall easy for modellers to build GWR layouts because of availability of GWR loco kits in the 1960s and not at all easy to model anything similar for the other big four companies. When I mentioned the MR 0-4-4T and an LMS push pull driving trailer to CJF, there were no kits for either and so it was mighty difficult to give any weight to persuasion.

Cliche......I nominate the Bachmann BR Mk.I......The universal coach...

I find it interesting that having read through back-copies of 1950s and 1960s Railway Modeller, people today find there was no bias towards the GWR. It proves how impossible it is to know how things were if one wasn't there and that going off back copies of magazines is not conclusive evidence. It is what wasn't written that puts the meat on the bones. As one who was there and met Cyril Freezer and the regulars at the Manchester Exhibitions in the 1960s, I can assure everyone that the perception at the time was that RM had a GWR bias. At one Xmas friendly-bantering session, Smokey Bourne, Steve Stratten, George Mellor and me accosted Cyril about forgetting the GWR 0-4-2 auto tank and auto trailer, and thinking in terms of a MR 0-4-4T and LMS push pull coach instead. Cyril said it was an interesting concept, though he needed some persuading. What did happen was the LMS Society was gaining ground and producing articles on locomotive liveries, carriages and wagons, many of which did appear in RM.

Who's brick paper are you using in the above shot? B)

Been reading through this with interest after following a link from Andy Y's thread on altering Peco track. I love your track, grass treatment and above all your stone walling. I had thought that the 7mm Slaters stone was far too big for 4mm, but I was counting the courses on a wall I was modelling and had let pedantic overule character. Point is the 7mm stuff captures the character of retaining walls far better than anything available in 4mm. Also intrigued by your stone weathering process. Having seen what you have done, I think I can alter my process to capture the grey look of your walls. The sooty look suits the steam-age far better than weathered sand stone.

I liked the switch from blue era to steam era as all of a sudden everything looked far more interesting. Your Mk.I coaches have a very prototypical flush-sided look about them and so I guess you have fitted etched brass sides yeh? The Period II LMS Diner compo is one I've yet to build so I was interested to see this vehicle. The MPD looks a tad overcrowded though, a casualty of compression.

I'm tempted to say leave the lighter coloured coach as it is. It looks like bleached paintwork as sometimes found. This admittedly is a mainline train as running today......

That looks very nice indeed. With those black hinges it reminds me of the Hornby Dublo Mk.I's.....I think the best RTR flush sided coaches ever produced (apart from the chassis!)

A hard one this. I've brightened the picture on my PC and still don't know.

I can only agree with you there Barry. And it must push up the price of coaches too. I've already had to fit couplings directly to the bogies on some of the Hornby Gresley coaches and they work just as well. Same with the bogies themselves......On the one hand Hornby is pandering to the scale modeller with fine detail that falls off while on the other they are pandering to the toy market that uses sharp curves. Over-engineering over sensible compromise....

A class act. I don't know how i came to miss much of this thread. The stuff you are building is right up my street but you must have bags of patience building those multi-part bogies.

Just in case it is of interest, this shot was taken of a late afternoon parcels passing Abergele at speed on 21st June 1977, and shows.... S1320 Southern Railway van built in 1939 W299 Great Western design Full Brake built in 1951 M----- LMS 50' Full Brake built in 1940

Taken in the context of the 1960's, buying another locomotive meant buying a kit, wheels and motor and doing ones best to produce a decent working model. If something worthwhile resulted, it was worth showing off.... It wasn't a case of buying the latest RTR loco as we do today. I cringe when i think back to the crudity of what was on offer in the 1960s.

If couplings are in the NEM sockets, they could be replaced with a Hornby-Roco couplings, or to shorten the gap even further a Hornby-Roco coupling coupled to a Roco coupling on the adjacent coach. These couplings will uncouple over ramps too, but the great thing about them is the coupling is 'solid' and, with no slack to be taken up, the whole trains sets off together.

Pass..... :D The reason I mentioned the bit about satisfaction is because if others are like me, there'd be the temptation to extend the platforms to take through trains to Paddington and provide a fleet of 'Castles' to work the new services while relegating the old Pannier to station pilot duties. Through trains would be working in off the S&DJR headed by 7F's, and heavier goods trains would almost certainly demand the use of 28XX and 38XX 2-8-0s. A later period would allow the introduction of Hawsworth coaches, and before long the calender would be reading 1959 and Hydraulics would be on the scene....

Affluence must have killed off the model GWR branchline. In 'olden days we would spend years in between working for a crust building a couple of whitemetal tank locos, spiking down rails, constructing buldings and scenery, and using winter nights to build rolling stock from the few kits that were available. The things we used indoors such as smoking fish glue or plaster of paris & bandages were enough to give any young wife cause to question her vows! With todays RTR & RTP one could knock up a GWR BLT in a month, but how satisfying is that?

Slightly up a siding but to do with eating (!), unless my eyes are deceiving me when browsing the sites of Comet, Dart and Kemilway, none of them produces Gresley Buffet Cars.

Quite simply it is my point of view, freely expressed just like all the others on this thread, so there is no requirement to understand it, question it or argue with it.

These are your words not mine. The minimalist railway was a fact of life in many many areas.

Not sure if its a cliche or just a fact that so many modellers who profess to dislike what they call "Kettles" plonk their blue diesels and Mk.I's on essentially pre-1964 steam-age layouts. I suppose the minimalist railway that actually existed in the 1970s and 1980s bus-shelter revival era is too constricting and boring for people. But it is the cliches that go the other way that get my goat........A simple single line branchline terminus "developed" into a station with loco hauled trains to London plus fuelling point and sidings for umpteen locomotives. Aaaggghhhh.