Barry Ten

This is a bit good. Excellent, very welcome development.

OK, that is officially brilliant.

A couple from me, these are both oils and I wouldn't say either is 100% finished; I do like to put them aside for a few months/year and then come back with a fresh eye. Both are based on photos in railway albums, although with some elements changed. The 9F is at Templecombe, and the Castle (based on a daytime photo) at Sonning Cutting. The 9F is the more recent one; there's a lot wrong with that Castle from a technical point of view but I like the atmosphere of it. I've always liked paintings of trains at night; I think it goes back to one of the Revered Awdry books with that evocative image of a fish express at night? The wheels are a b*****rd to get right, aren't they? The 9F's perspective angle is more forgiving but I think I got the boiler slightly oversized.

Cheers! Sadly, no - although I'm relatively new to the area. I'm sure one of the local modellers will have known of him.

Made this movie showing some views of the layout and a selection of trains - hope it's of some interest. Every time I edit a movie I forget what I learned last time... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSFUhUB8ezA Thanks for watching!

I've been using that Revell plastic cement that comes with a pin-type applicator lately. There's no model shop in town but my local newsagent sells that stuff and I get on with it quite well, I've even built a few Parkside kits with it.

It's the Trumpeter kit, Max - quite a new one, with etched brass bits, photographic film for the cockpit dials, rubber mouldings for the engine parts and so on - pretty sophisticated.

I've yet to see a negative review of the Mozzie, so I'm guessing it's pretty good. Turns out that Airfix had wanted to do a 1/24th kit of this plane for many, many years but they'd just never been able to sort out the economics.

I feel the same way about the Mozzie. It looks magnificent, but what would I do with it? Plus, building this one has taken me 4 years! The mozzie has two engines... I do fancy a 1/48th B-17. I built the Monogram one as a kid, but I'm not sure what happened to it afterwards. The same kit is still available, under Revell's range now.

Hi all Anyone remember this thread, from back in 2007? http://www.rmweb.co....start=0#p193251 I started this 1/24th scale kit after I had to tear down my old layout. Anticipating a period of limited modelling, I decided to have a go at making a plane. Things went well but as you can probably guess, as soon as I got back into the swing of layout building, I was less keen on working on the Hurricane. However last year, encouraged by the new Airfix modelling magazine, I took it out of the box and continued with the assembly. Over this year I have tackled it in stages when the mood suits, but as the finishing line has approached I have found my enthusiasm rocketing, so much so that I have spent a worryingly long time looking at other aircraft kits and thinking about future projects. Here are some pics from the original thread, showing the cockpit, engine and associated parts: It's only as I've got into the latter stages of the kit that I've begun to grasp how insane this kit is. Here is the wing section, for instance: Those machine guns required several nights of assembly, but much of them is not visible at all once the wings are finished. The wing mounted fuel tanks are completely hidden. Why did I bother making and painting them? Dunno really! Anyway, here is the kit, nearly finished and ready for painting. I have to say that although parts of the kit have been very complex, it has been a joy to assemble. Every part just fits, with only extremely minor fettling needed on one or two components. I had some problems getting the wings attached but I think that is more down to my lack of experience than any fault of the kit. The instructions are exemplary. Hope this is of interest. The only problem with 1/24th kits is - where do you put them when you're done? I don't think I've got room for more than one!

The coupler's come in for a bit of criticism, actually - it's larger than it needs to be and the rear one isn't mounted at the right height. If that's all we've got to moan about, we really are making progress...

Hats off to Bachmann, because they've been doing a grand job of supporting N scale steam lately. I've mentioned their Baldwin 4-6-0 earlier in this thread (released this year) and now they've gone one better. Late this summer, they announced that they'd be doing a USRA 2-10-2 in a variety of road schemes. To everyone's general astonishment, the model had no sooner been announced than it was in the shops. And early reports were very favourable indeed - a powerful, smooth-running freight loco with on-board DCC. I managed to pick one up via ebay and here it is. It's big and black, with an excellent rendition of graphite on the smokebox, and (like all recent Bachmann steam) runs very nicely indeed. I've not hooked it up to anything yet but with traction tyres and a weighty, die-cast boiler, it's got everything going for it in the haulage stakes. It'll be interesting to see what it can cope with on my 2% grades. With some recent well-regarded diesel releases as well, Bachmann seem to be upping their game in N scale to considerable effect. Top stuff!

One of the minor hassles of modelling Southern has been the problem of obtaining plausible cabooses in sufficient numbers. For a while the only option was Walther's old bay window caboose model, which - while not (as far I'm aware) accurate for any Southern prototype - did at least look the part, especially with some additional painting and weathering. However, with its body mounted Rapido couplers, it took a bit of delicate hacking before Micro-trains trucks and couplers could be added. A worse problem was that I only managed to snap up two of these models before they seemed to vanish from the market. A couple of years ago, Atlas did a run of cupola cabooses in some useful schemes, and I snagged two Southern examples, as well as models painted for ACL and Central of Georgia. Things have definitely picked up now, though, because Athearn has released its bay window caboose. I think the model has been out for a year or two in other schemes but it's only now that Southern examples have hit the shops. I scored two from ebay and they are lovely models, with many refinements absent from the Walthers version. I'd have to check the books to see how accurate they are, but even as generic cabooses they definitely hit the mark, with good paint and some lovely separate detailing, the kind of thing which until recently one would have never associated with N. I plan to order a couple more, since it will probably be a good long while before any more Southern cabooses appear. The only downside so far is that - once again - an N scale manufacturer has fitted a magnetic weight in their model, which really negates the usefulness of fitting magnetically operated couplers. MTL and Atlas seem to manage not to do this, but some of the newer entrants into the game don't seem to get it... Meanwhile, I've made some slow progress on the scenery on the corner of the layout. Here's are a couple of views of work in progress: I'm not a big fan of that "bridge jutting into thin air" scenario that seems to be quite common on North American model railroads, so the aisle-side of this road bridge will eventually meet a suggestion of elevated terrain, with the fascia contour rising to suit. The gas station is the Walthers kit; it looks a little contrived in this location but I like the contrast between the white/red of the building and the greenery around it. Needless to say, being an Al myself, it had to be lettered for "Al's Victory Service". That whole section of scenery on which the gas station sits is removable and sits right over the western throat of the hidden storage yard, with the terrain concealing the camera mounted behind it all.

It works very, very well with a couple of provisos - I find that only MTL couplings work reliably with each other over magnets, so I'm (slowly) standardising on them wherever practical - and that some freight cars come with magnetized weights or mouldings that make uncoupling impossible, as the car jiggles over the magnet. Often you can get inside to remove the magnet, but not always. Really the manufacturers shouldn't be doing this - it's daft to fit magnetic trip pins to the couplers and then bung a magnetised weight inside the car - but at least Atlas and MTL seem to get it right. As to the other half of the equation, the reliable running of the locomotives, that's absolutely not an issue. They (anything made in the last 10 -0 15 years) run superbly well, and even better on DCC. Some - maybe most - modellers in N seem not to bother with remote uncoupling and just use cocktail sticks or whatever to uncouple as and when needed, which obviously eliminates the problems mentioned above. One of my long-term plans is to build a small self-contained switching module to demonstrate that this kind of operation is perfectly feasible in N. Thanks for liking the layout!

A mate started a 1/72nd Revell spitfire, but abandoned it when it went wrong. I inherited the project and completed it - he got it back for Christmas: This was my first finished model plane in years so it was a learning curve for me - I still need to get it back from him and fix that poor fitting canopy, for instance. Last week I was in Hobbycraft and on an impulse purchase bought a Tamiya 1/35th scale Panzer tank - where will it lead?

Gosh, is it April since I last reported on progress? Time flies ... but in truth there hasn't been much worth posting; although I've continued to enjoy and develop areas of the layout, there's not much point in showing lots of wiring and woodwork or areas of bare polystyrene. One problem is that I began to develop an area of elevated terrain which was going to host a small town, but after doing the groundwork, it didn't look right. I sat and stared at it for several months, wondering how much to scrap, before ripping it out a few weeks ago and going back to square one. With that decided, I felt I could continue progress on the hills behind Woods Furniture. This whole area has been stuck for months, but at last things are moving forward again. For a long time I've not been sure where to site the Woods factory but now that it's in place I like it a lot, and especially the way that even this big building is dominated by the rising terrain on the other side of the tracks. I built this factory in 2002, as my first project after taking a dip into US modelling, so it's good to see it assuming a role on the layout. Still lots to be done, of course, in terms of bedding it in and adding more detail and weathering. Less excitingly, but just as important to the overall look of the layout, is the new fascia. The old one - bits of which have been incorporated into the new - was a mixture of MDF and thick card, painted a walnut brown. It was OK to get something in place, but I was never happy with it as a longterm solution. The replacement is clear PVC, which is easy to cut and flex. It doesn't take paint well so needs at least 3 - 4 coats before it begins to look satisfactory. I chose a light matte green after being pleased with the fascia on my valleys layout. A darker hue might work better in terms of focusing attention onto the layout, but I also don't want to suck too much light out of a room which is also my main modelling den. The fascia of the S&D layout will be painted a complimentary light blue That's it for now. I could also mention that I've swapped the DCC system from Gaugemaster Prodigy to NCE Powercab, which has worked very well. No complaints with the Prodigy (other than a sticky speed dial) - it's now supplying DCC control for the S&D layout. So far I'm equally happy with the Powercab.

I spoke to the builder a couple of years ago (Robert Tivendale, who now runs Powsides) - my recollection is that he said he'd dismantled it; it had served its purpose and he'd moved on to other things (7mm). Like you I was a big fan of it, I don't know whether it was the sweeping curves or the convincingly railwaylike atmosphere but it definitely had a certain something.

Doesn't say Schumacher to me at all ..

Mainly Trains do a nice smokebox dart which is easy to fit.