Flying Pig

Edit: ok try again I emailed Hornby querying this livery and they responded with a scan of the photo of B448673 in Working Wagons, but no additional information on how they have interpreted it. It seems that they are correct to represent this design with a piped wagon in bauxite, but they may have inferred details of a new wagon from a picture of a well weathered vehicle. There does seem to be a dark patch behind the number in Dave Larkin's photo, which could indicate a repainted number, or just a weathering effect.

Where's the "my eyes, my eyes!" button? Lima steam in any scale was usually compromised, but that 4MT surely takes the prize. As Robin says, coarse scale toys don't really count as they were fun and made no pretensions to accuracy, but once you start pasting BR standard cabsides on a ?German loco you've crossed a line.

Your edited photos show that a plain sky backdrop would work well. IMO photo backscenes can be overwhelming unless carefully chosen and blended with the modelling.

Agreed, but if it's like the 31, that appears to be some sort of clip fit, so easy to remove when a suitable replacement is available. Presumably the Extreme Etchings Class 37 parts will be suitable for the 40 also?

Since we seem to be drifting slowly towards a wishlist, any chance of option 3 being finished with one small potato yellow buffer? Seriously - good choice of prototype and I hope it draws enough support to go ahead.

Well of course as they'll have to be made collapsible.

Seems you were at least partly correct: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/114711-new-gw-toplights-by-the-end-of-the-year/&do=findComment&comment=2425892 Amazing.

It was -the interior ironwork is as moulded. I wonder if it was copied from the 3H LMS D1666 open, which has identical interior ironwork at the corners? Plate 129 in Vol. 1 of LMS Wagons (Essery, OPC 1981) shows the interior of D1666 and the caption references the ironwork, which is substantially correct in the 3H model, if a little heavy.

Here's what the old Three Aitch kit looks like inside. Not exactly a primary source, but I'd guess it was surveyed from a surviving vehicle. Note the multiplicity of washer plates in the corner: the big one at the top is clearly meant to be a single item, but split in the kit. There's a very narrow strip protecting the top of the door, but it's on the outside only and doesn't fold over the edge. The top plank is however tapered slightly. I clearly forgot to paint the interior orange before I weathered it with dust. This late survivor in Paul Bartlett's photo has gained late type capping strips on the top plank: http://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/lneropenwood/h1744777e#h1744777e

I'm really thinking of more common but less dramatic instances such as poor lane changes or pulling out of side roads, where a bit of anticipation could have saved the dash-cammer from being troubled much or at all. You may well be right however that they are more concerned with nurturing the dramatic potential of the situation than avoiding danger. Or maybe they have Gerald Ford syndrome and are unable to lift their right foot and make self righteous remarks for the camera at the same time.

Many of the dash cam videos now appearing online seem to illustrate their owner's inability to recognise and back off from developing situations at least as much as the crazy antics of other drivers.

1st gen units regularly operated all sorts of services, including quite long cross country routes. Two hours or more on one was not unusual and gave plenty of time to savour the rattles and racket as well as the exciting ride at any speed. That's if you weren't kicked out because the oil heater had caught fire again. Oh how we laughed when people started calling them heritage units.

A cunning plan, well observed and beautifully executed. I particularly like your ballasting and ground textures - the variation from the main lines across to the loco sidings is really effective. Integrating the fiddle yard with the imagined hinterland is a cracking wheeze and has freed up a nice length of main line. Bonus points for not filling it with platforms

Fenchurch Street itself on the SRS site - http://www.s-r-s.org.uk/html/lner/E95.gif (no idea of the date). Note the use of single slips with separate crossovers to allow parallel moves to occur, which is a fairly common feature in British practice. The bend in the station throat absorbs many reverse curves in the Minories style, but a few remain. Quite a compact station to be fed by a four track approach.

Hoppers are tricky anyway and this one was similar to the Parkside 21 tonner: hopper as a single moulding with sides and ends separate, leading to a lot of long butt joints between flat sections. The real pain however was that the underframe included only the solebars, end platforms and headstocks, which made it fairly flimsy until mated with the body. Mine was very flimsy indeed as I mistakenly left out the end platforms, thinking they were mounts for tension lock couplers only (I was going through a period of 3-links). It still exists, though I wouldn't want to subject it to any kind of drawbar pull. In other respects it is a typical Three Aitch kit - accurate and well detailed. I'd agree about the others in the range too.

Given the Three Aitch habit of short-shot sprues, probably not a whole number. Still, it was a decent kit and would have been even better, and a lot easier to build, if they'd included the rest of the underframe. Now about to be thoroughly eclipsed by a Hornby rtr model though - who'd have believed that in 1978?

With luck it'll be the lubricator drive that's to blame and amenable to adjustment.

Singing from the top of a post in March? It's a dunnock. Garden warblers won't be back for another month, tend to sing from deep cover and despite the name they aren't common in gardens. Dunnocks are unobtrusive most of the time, but obvious and confiding when singing and they do have a sweet song.

Surely a true Fell-tic would have 4 x Deltic engines driving through the Fell system of clutches and differentials? I agree it's difficult to understand why none was ever built.

The Silver Jubilee set included 47164 in full Stratford bling with Union Jack and white rims.

I'm not familiar with the H&P livery so I googled it - a bit disappointing really as I was hoping for some thing like this.

I failed miserably to understand the problem in analytical terms so plugged the numbers into Excel instead (see attached). Having chosen a rough value for the ratio between jib and tower, it's relatively easy to calculate the resulting load height for various angles between the two (I used 5 degree increments between 5 and 70 degrees) with nothing more than the Cosine rule. The range of heights obtained can then be reduced to a single value. Minimising this value by tweaking the jib:tower ratio gives the optimum proportions for the crane (I use the Excel solver to do this). For a line running 3 times between tower and jib, it turns out that optimum ratio of jib:tower is 3.602:1 at which total variation in load height is about 7.7% of the height of the tower (or about 23cm with a 3m tower and 10.8m jib). Interestingly, the best result for a single run of the line is 12% of the tower and increasing the runs to 5 only gives a slight improvement to 6.7%, which is no doubt why the prototype stuck with 3 runs. That was my evening. Andy Hayter reached the same conclusion much more quickly Crane.xls

US patent 460649 appears to refer to a variant of the horse head design: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US4606469 This Meccano model may be of interest: http://www.alansmeccano.org/models/pic12.htm Sadly, Meccano omitted to mention how the system works, but it does seem to be a passive feature of the geometry.

Lengths from Wikipedia: Routemaster 27' 6"; Bristol VR (short) 32' 9".

A Peckett, a single Mk I looming over it, a yard or two of track and a short, obviously new platform and you've got most 1970s preservation startups to a tee. Actually, it would make a perfect trainset for nostalgic 40-somethings getting back into the Hobby.