Flying Pig

Interestingly, in Living with London Midland Locomotives, A.J. Powell (a man well versed in real life traction needs) proposed two classes of 2-8-2 for the post-WWII LMR: a 5' 6" 7P9F using the Britannia boiler and a lighter 5' 3" 6P7F using the Clan boiler, for operation on weight-restricted routes. AFAIR he doesn't actually get round to commenting on the Clan, but as his Jubilee rebuilt as a Pacific using a Brit boiler would surely render it superfluous we're getting back to boiler profligacy again Perhaps a simple shortening of the Brit boiler's front ring would have sufficed for a light 2-8-2?

Booster, you say...?

For a post-steam layout, I'd remove the engine siding and fill in the resulting hole, which would increase the length of the bottom platform face. I'd also demolish the goods shed and lay a couple of carriage sidings over it, perhaps with the foundations of the shed and odd patches of stone setts still poking through. Remaining newspaper, mail and parcels would be handled in the station. MUs would dominate of course: the platforms will easily hold a pair of two-car trains. The atmosphere would be of general dilapidation and grot. By the time Sprinterisation came along, the place would likely be heavily redeveloped or closed,. All true, but if well imagineered, busy urban termini like Minories give a great deal of operational interest in a small space, at least as much as a shunting yard of equivalent size. For many home users this is an significant factor.

Or bite the bullet, use medium points and flip the whole lot round: I'll shut up now and go and do the shopping...

A slightly different treatment that gives a more generous runround at the expense goods departures being wrong-line. I'm loathe to solve this by using Peco tandem turnouts in the throat (dotted blue line) as the radii are rather tight and it would involve one of the passenger routes, so I'd probably imagine another trailing crossover just off-scene.

Bradfield Gloucester Square is not much more extensive than Minories and features a variety of long distance and parcels trains among the locals. Another approach to freight operation can be seen in Geoff Ashdown's excellent Tower Pier (which has certainly appeared on RMweb if not somewhere in this very thread). Here the freight lines are kept entirely separate and provide variation in levels as well as traffic. It has integrated signalling too, though the Crispins remain flesh and blood. Part of the secret in both cases is the imagined hinterland of the model which justifies the variety of destinations and trains (East London and the West Riding are both very fertile in this respect). It ain't all about what you can see.

Nice - I like the yellow cab too. However, if we're keeping steamers into the 80s, they should be red, at least metaphorically. Drill some holes in the firebox and give it GPCS and a mechanical stoker.

Nelson, if your wagon is anything like wooden wagons built on this side of the Irish Sea, then it was held together by bolts and not rivets. Usually, the bolts were threaded from the inside and what you can see on the outside is the nuts. These can be represented by suitably sized cubes of plastic if you're very dedicated (the method Chris Crofts described in his articles in MRJ 12-15 which will tell you more than you really want to know about British wooden wagons), but getting them small and even enough is tricky to say the least.

It's a Banded Demoiselle.

Oh dear, looks like sugar may trump Nocton's wholesome potatoes. Great choice of prototype, Dave. I can see all sorts of fun freelance light railways resulting as well as industries.

More likely that the Queens Own Highlander is having a wee word in private with the Type 4 laddie about standards of personal grooming.

Fortunately both species are pretty distinctive, so you should be able to resolve the question with some decent views. BTW, one of the birds on the Google search for pie fly that I linked is an interloper that you definitely won't see in Worcestershire! The male common redstart is a lovely bird - I stumbled across one on the Marlborough Downs last year which had stopped off on migration and was singing on the edge of a small wood. That pretty much made my spring!

They do sound like common redstarts and pied flycatchers, either of which would be a great garden tick for most of us. Do you have mature woods nearby?

The pale blob above the legs looks like a foreground flower to me (it's yellow on my monitor) and I think the thick bill is an illusion cause by a pale artefact above it. I see how the pale neck contrasting with the cheek could suggest pied flycatcher, but I don't think the rest of the bird supports this (legs should be dark for one thing). I'm sticking with dunnock.

Dunnock in my opinion. Enlarged and lightened crop of your crop shows dark grey bill, orange-ish legs and grey head contrasting with streaky brown back. Smaller than you thought, but size is very hard to judge on an isolated bird like this.

I have one of the original 1980s releases stashed away somewhere and I believe that has the twin pivot pony truck, so it ain't that new!

I was only thinking of a few inches - say half the length of an N2 or less - to make a gloomy hole, without hiding the end wall completely so it's still obvious that the line terminates. Found a thread on Finsbury Terrace on the old forum - here. Sadly the rest is lost in the RMweb palaeolithic.

Your pictures of the dead end give the perfect impression of a railway that was meant to be extended to somewhere impossible like Basingstoke or Lille before the money ran out (which would certainly explain the placing of the station building). The platform level shot looks quite convincing as it is, with the end wall against a blank sky, but I can understand the need for more when viewed from rooftop (or modeller) height. Perhaps the soulless rear of a commercial premises set on girders over the last inch or two of track, a cut-and-cover over a line that never was? BTW, I think there are threads somewhere in the aether covering the construction of the station building and the low relief structures along the rear of the layout which would be well worth revisiting.

We have peregrines in Wiltshire too. Here's one attacking our local starling roost yesterday evening (taken out of my window so it almost counts as a garden bird ):

Strange, when I saw it back in the '80s it looked like this. Derived from images by Phil Sangwell licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

...or perhaps tw∇?

I'm afraid the front wheels of your otherwise splendid 2-2-2T would almost certainly foul the cylinders. The most elegant engineering solution to this problem is to do away with them altogether and balance the design by extending the bunker and lightening the smokebox. I've provided a pair of small rollers on the guard irons purely to reduce the tendency to nosedive under braking at the end of a long run when the bunker is empty. The fin is an experimental addition to damp down the side to side motion resulting from such an unavoidably short wheelbase.

This page may be of interest: http://www.davros.org/rail/signalling/lmsr/ (seems the Mirfield article was never written which is a pity).

The 350hp shunter is actually a diesel electric, so theoretically could be arranged as a mother + slug. However, the transmission is already set up to absorb the full engine power at low road speed and produce high tractive effort, so there wouldn't be any advantage in doing so. In the Class 13, of course, both units retained their engine and generator. The Class 37 transmission absorbs full power at about 14mph; below that speed there's excess engine power that could be used by a slug.

On a train to Victoria unexpectedly diverted to another large Manchester terminus; got lost on the way and ended up on the Midland heading for the Peak; too proud to ask for "London Road" until Derby, whence directed to Leicester; asked there for "London Road" and someone pointed up the stairs; much confusion until they were made to understand that a terminal station was wanted, when all pointed south along the main line, muttering something about "St Pancras"; that didn't sound right even in East Midlands dialect, but the starter had cleared and there was no time to quibble; off again, seemed to be taking a very long time, but no matter as the Radial had a snazzy water scoop that worked in both directions and coal was readily available from slow moving trains on the adjacent line using a long fire-iron (some of the passengers getting rather desperate however); finally reached streets of grim terraces and it started to rain; this looked more promising; ran into a terminus with a big arched roof; looked about right by all accounts; rolled smartly to a stand but seemed to be unwelcome and station staff were inexplicably tight-lipped (passengers were unsurprisingly grey-faced and walking funny); shunted and despatched again with a promptness that wouldn't have shamed the Lanky itself; signalman at Kentish Town baffled by approaching foreign-looking loco and carriages and jumped to the wrong conclusion. There's always a rational explanation if you think hard enough.