Flying Pig

And guess who has photos of the real thing: http://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/p940006411

Err - I can't see how you'd explain it better without using maths

I've never heard anyone who lives there refer to it as other than Cirencester or Ciren for short.

What is this mythical object of which you speak?

I like that a lot (especially the lever frame ). Hoping not to put my foot in my mouth, but there looks like a lot of ongoing scratch-building around the station. Is some of it just unfinished or are you using placeholders on your evolving layout? Well done hiding it in the Kitbuilding and Scratchbuilding section, too. The Waverley Route pack hasn't found it yet, but I think I hear a slavering in the middle distance...

I love the shiny new "Southern electric" world depicted here and it's superbly executed. To be *really* picky the path is perhaps a little wide. Maybe a narrower worn path surrounded by lower intensity "trample" would be more the thing. I suspect rather few if any on what is clearly a recently reconstructed cutting in the era of traditional management. Beauties aren't they? They've got twenty years' happy motoring ahead of them - or have they?

Thanks. Unfortunately I was looking the wrong way and was alerted by the sound just in time to see a flash of blue and a lot of tankers.

Something pale blue rumbled past my southbound train between Bromsgrove and Ashchurch with a train of tankers at about 1.30pm today. Would that be 60074 heading for Lindsey?

More info about the loco in the picture posted by relaxinghobby here. It's actually a conventional early 20th Century loco apart from the forward cab and a bit of extra casing, so probably not like anything that would be built today. A later (and apparently not successful) German attempt at complete streamlining is shown here (for comparison, here's its prettier sister).

A plan based on Sir Madog's idea with a few small changes. First I've included the facing crossover. The extra length I've stolen for this and a more sweeping curve at the left has meant I've had to hide the right hand end of the station off-scene by putting the buildings on an overbridge. This does mean we don't need to worry about what type of crossovers are used There needs to be an additional crossover in the fiddle yard to allow trains to return to the bay platform on the correct line - I forgot to include this and have had to sketch it in afterwards. The bay road is wrong as I've drawn it and should be further from the main line to allow a decent width of platform between them (and it now needs to fit in a stairway from the station building). The loop is meant to be freight and locos only so the adjacent platform should have a fence or wall along the back. There should be a trailing crossover on the main line to allow trains to rejoin the clockwise circuit, but this isn't really feasible on the curve. In practice, the trains can run off "wrong line" and cross over in the fiddle yard.

We've discussed this more than once and the idea of concentrating them in the mining districts on MGR workings had some support. Slow speed control for loading and unloading would probably have been a non-starter so a separate shunting engine would have been required, but air braking to work with HopABs shouldn't have been a problem. I find the idea of 9Fs trundling around Nottinghamshire into the 1980s quite appealing, however improbable, and it would make an interesting layout.

Yes, but in nearly all cases using steam to make electricity on board (e.g. here and here) and not t'other way round.

I take Stationmaster's point about shunting the creamery: would it be possible to swap it with the loco shed? Or would this change the character of the station too much? Personally, I think a largish structure with a tall chimney might work better there than smack in the middle of the board. I reckon it would be worth investing in a metre of flexitrack to make the sidings at the bottom of the plan flow a little better. And I'd probably make the dock siding a shade longer as it does look awfully short as drawn. Finally, there seems to be a bit of a squeeze in the track spacing of the loop, again right at the bottom of the plan, which may not be a good thing given the curves involved. My solution is as below: remove the straight at X and add a couple of sections as shown in red. As far as I can tell from a cut-and-paste analysis, this preserves the spacing quite nicely. I've also resited the trap () point on the bottom siding to allow for the corresponding reduction in space outside the main line (and permit a more flowing entry to the siding). I might actually shorten this siding - it just looks too long to me and disturbs the balance of the plan. Edit: origin of "And I claim my five pounds".

You are Paul Lunn AICMFP. Seriously, it's great to see a minimum space, Setrack layout so closely based on adapted prototypes. I hope you have fun with it.

What Grahame said, in spades, particularly the observation.

Lambourn is another GWR* terminus that's quite a popular modelling subject. See for example MRJ issue 23 (P4) and issue 32 (2mm finescale); I believe there's also been at least one 00 version in the press. *Other railway companies are available of course, though perhaps not so well supplied with rtr branch motive power.

The slip is needed to allow the sidings to be shunted from the longer headshunt (red routes and L below). If you split the back road as I've shown you have effectively four sidings to shunt which should be enough for anyone. The short headshunt (S in blue below) is only used for running round, though the section of loop I've labelled K could be used as a brake van kip.

Since everyone seems to be at it, here's a variation on Pacific 231G's plan that allows the sidings to be shunted directly from the back road, which may of course be too convenient for some tastes! That's a single slip by the way.

Care! One feature of Piano plans is that you must have sufficient headshunt at at least one end of the runround to shunt wagons to and from the front road where all the sidings are. The other headshunt can be reduced loco length of course.

That's an excellent job, Jo, but the Powerhaul livery is way too fussy to my eye and the symmetry doesn't help here. Something more like this, perhaps: Still too much like every other livery on the railway at the moment, though, and nowhere near as effective as the simplicity of the original Freightliner green. The best recent "47" livery IMO is the Arriva blue - symmetry not so bothersome in this case, maybe because it's broken by the branding.

There's a good view of the south end of the station at about 1:20 in . ...and if you tried, you'd have any number of folk telling you that you should be adding crossovers and slips to make a more flexible (and more anodyne) layout. Just goes to show the value of starting with a prototype. The Great Northern did the same thing with the bays at Lincoln Central - they must have really liked carriage shunting.

Not as eek as Network South East but still more Traveller's Fare than Pullman. I suspect the vehicles would have suffered a minor facelift before repainting (you can imagine the interior yourself...).

I only tweaked steaming_chris's Mountain, but here's an attempt at a 4-6-4 wearing the proposed tin bath anyway - a bit rough around the tender I'm afraid and not particularly to scale (though I did resize the drivers by 78/81 ). Since we're stealing Jubilee names, I've kept to the sequence and it's 6269 Admiral Codrington. Source here released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence. To be honest, I'm not that keen on the looks of the streamlined Baltic - it looks better naked, particularly with the Ivatt cab.

Which is probably why nothing bigger was ever actually built - there really wasn't a need (though I think 3500 ihp is probably nearer the mark). I think that's the point

Errm... it was a handwaving guess based on my very limited knowledge of boilers: too long and skinny and the front is too cool to produce much steam, but there's a great deal more to it than that, most of which is beyond me. Actually, I think the LMS might have gone back to the smaller wheels of the Princess to allow a slightly fatter boiler within the loading gauge (wasn't this proposed for the 4-6-4?). It would almost certainly have been a bespoke boiler and firebox design and I'd guess that the motivation would be higher sustained horsepower from the bigger grate and boiler. The grate area would certainly be getting into mechanical stoker territory, so perhaps a later rebuild with gpcs to reduce fire-throwing would be in order. Looking forward to MkII