34theletterbetweenB&D

Properly grubby too, really looks the part. Just displace that bogcart with a C12 on a local service... Never forget people, the railway originates on the right side of the Country.

That's another where Bachmann have the headstart deriving from the CAD's for their Peppercorn A2 and A1. They have already come a fair way down this road, as the A2 took major pieces unaltered from the A1. What with the A2 being a small class it's been already been surmised on past occasions that Bachmann may do this once they have pretty much churned all the available variations of the A2

They generally move on - not just blackbirds, all species - but never fear they will breed. A blackbird pair featuring one with a distinctive white crown, permitting great confidence that at least one of the pair was the same individual, had four attempts around our garden some years ago, before finally mastering the concept of a well concealed site in a location with too much constriction to allow any corvid access. there's a pair of wrens travelling much the same road this year, two nest sites pulled apart already, much to my wife's fury. Pin that up in the rope pulling room.

Hornby offered both 70050 and 70052 among the earlier introductions of the current Brit. Bought a 70052 cheap as a spare mechanism, apparently didn't sell well, and was sorely tempted by 70050 when that too went on offer (I'll not mention the price as you will feel a pang). They are a minority of the class, and the poor things had to wallow in the ordure of LMR's lack of locomotive cleaning. All rather different from the obvious care with which they were kept at Canton, Norwich and Stew Lane. I sometimes sneak the BR1D behind 70039 when representing the brief period the class ran regularly on the ECML: the Brit is enhanced by the visually more imposing tender. (It's not all roses though, no one at Hornby can have attempted coupling on this tender at the closer spacing, as the ensemble forms a near rigid unit once you have suceeded (think 3 metre minimum radius), and then is the very devil to get apart again.)

The same 'absence of flywheel' on the D16/3; the chassis casting has a location clearly shaped to take a flywheel, but none fitted or displayed in the diagram. Looks like cost down to me, little 'nibbles' to take out nice to have but not wholly essential features. The J15 has what I estimate at 44:1 reduction, the example I have there is no end float on the motor shaft to a subjective 'finger-poke'. Exemplary performance on track.

If the premise is 'from what they already have in CAD' ( I believe tooling is created as a complete production kit for a class of locomotive) then the streamlined final version of the P2 is in reasonably easy reach. Just need to persuade them that BR green is a viable livery, prototype be damned. Backdating the K1 to a K4: passenger liveried, named. if they have made a good tender choice on the Q6, the Thompson B2 offers from B17 and B1, with an NER tender.

Caution duly acknowledged. I normally take all new examples of toys to pieces 'just to have a look' but will refrain on his one. Identification of an effective threadlock compound for use when disassembly is necessary, might be a handy future item for the toolkit.

Swifts arrived here yesterday evening, about half a doz. I do enjoy a good airshow, and hammocked with a beer until the bat shift took over, what with it being so pleasant and all. Perhaps it's natural justice? Our gang were real thugs, and only the Nuthatches were uncowed amongst the regular seed and nut feeder visitors. They are far better behaved now there are just a pair...

In addition to which, I hope these small 0-6-0s show sufficient customer uptake to encourage yet more of the breed. It's been a notable lack in RTR provision long term, and now that both Bachmann and Hornby have 'put out' it's in our hands whether this continues.

I use wet blobs of Evostick - the full strength solvent sniffer's delight, accept no substitutes - once I have a brace such as you have installed to positively hold the motor in the right position. Give the adhesive a good 48 hours solvent evaporating time in a warm place like a linen cupboard, before using the model. Typically this alone is strong enough to hold the motor in place permanently; removing the motor should that ever be necessary for salvage or to replace brushes is only a matter of slicing into the adhesive with a scalpel blade, several passes going succesively deeper until it is cut through.

and have been time out of mind, thus the clever reference from Bill Shakestick: Golden lads and lasses must, In their time, all come to dust. (I expect that's not quite what he wrote, but it's close enough, considering he couldn't spell his own name consistently.)

I do like that the model makers correctly representthe tank bottom to cab bottom relationship: the tank bottom was slightly higher. They may even have captured the characteristic slight mismatch in the verticals of the cab front and tank rear, very evident on many photos. A very characterful job.

Hornby have been consistently using brass on the new steam introductions to the range since the move to China. I wear through the plating on drivers inside a year, and they run just as well in this condition as when new.

Ah, well there you go. Other than edibles : vegetables, fruiting plants and trees, all flora is labelled grass, cabbage or thistle in my domain. Mow, chop or uproot/burn/mangle/terminate/destroy pronto are the appropriate responses to these three classifications. (My wife is ever on hand to mollify the rivet counting fraternity among the green fingered 'No dear not a cabbage, that's Tradescantia Nickedfromchinensis'.)

I won't have pwerishing niger seed for love or money, bloody thistles everywhere. The goldfinches are back here again today, so they aren't necessary anyway, asthey are raiding the sunflower seed quite happily. Heading pretty much due North from London by road on the A1 the signs read 'town name and the North', until one saw 'Biggleswade and the North'. Thereafter no more 'and the North' was in evidence on the signage, therefore one was in the North. QED. Alternatively the North is pretty much the Danelaw. Plot a straight line on the map from Mersea Island to Chester to see the general trend of the division between Saxon and Danelaw (it runs just North of Biggleswade!) and there's 'the North', with respect to the Saxon Kingdom of Alfred.

What symmetry. Right about then I moved to employment with the UK subsidiary of a large US Corp with a name begining with X that specialised in photocopiers that weighed at least ten times those of the newly emerged Japanese opposition. One of this business' problems was that the US based design teams were unable to remember that there were non-Imperial paper sizes in general use outside of North America. My personal tendencies to monomania came in very handy for 'helping' the US based designers realise the importance of catering for ISO paper sizes...

They would only have got as grubby as the day's running made them. Pre-WWI there were three huge factors which made a big difference to cleanliness. Railway work was premium employment, with all that went with that, and cleaners were on the road to becoming footplate crew. Cleaning was a priority for the companies, and the labour to do it cheap and plentiful. There was no superheating: lower temperature cylinder oils which did not set solid once they cooled after exhausting glueing the soot and ash to the paintwork, so much easier to clean off. There are excellent photos of Victorian locos in action that show this. My favourite - the greatest of them all and to answer also - the Stirling single! There they are in photographs caught pounding away at speed at the head of a Great Northern express mid run between London and York, Leeds or Doncaster destination. There's a positive volcano of exhaust, flattening above the chimney top due to the high speed, and the ash cloud stretches the full length of the train and more. Yet the loco is gleaming in the summer sunlight, paintwork and brightwork. Oh to have had colour photography back then.

Wrens now nested on the outside wall of my layout room, may even be feeding fleglings judging by the flight frequency. I get 'shouted at' every time I go in or out. As for the constipationists and cuckoos, what a cuckoo idea. Just leave them alone. It's a cyclic system: over-predation reducing the host species population naturally acts to reduce predator numbers; and in the case of the cuckoo they may well then adapt to another more numerous host species. Previous host species recovers, new host species numbers decline and so on. You never know, one day the cuckoo may come up against a host that can detect the intruder egg and feeds it to its own young. Then the cuckoo will have to adapt to working for a living or die. With the theory of natural selection pretty much accepted as scientific fact now, you would think that observing it in action and not interfering would be a natural corollary. It's only creationist retards like me, appointed as masters of all life, who believe that interfering is perfectly OK!

Everybody 'makes it up as they go along' where there are insufficient facts or data to provide a fully reasoned decision. And that's most of life, for anything more complex than 'my bladder's full, better take a piss.. There's often a post facto rationalisation; most spectacularly when someone has triumphed mightily in some way and 'writes their book' telling the world 'how to do whatever it may be and succeed the same way I did it'. But typically it is all self-deception: those with real insight confess of their triumph 'the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life' or similar. (That was the Duke of Wellington on Waterloo.)

I have just had a puzzle solved thanks to a sex show. Over the past couple of weeks I had been observing a pale 'milky coffee' colour bird very much like a Dunnock in size and behaviour, but lacking the orange legs. Thirty minutes ago it perched in a hedge just a dozen feet away, and I had the binos to hand. Still baffled, just pale milky coffee coloured all over, slightly paler on the underside, grey legs. And then a male blackcap came, (and presumably came) and 'thank you ma'am' promptly buzzed off again: so assuming that Mr Blackcap can reliably identify Ms Blackcap, even when she isn't wearing her brown cap... (The only small bird I could find with a somewhat similar plumage to what I was seeing is the Eastern Chiffchaff, rare passage migrant in the UK, and too small anyway. Otherwise I might suspect that the hitherto unknown Blackstern Capchaff is about to evolve...)

lttle douce coupe, you don't

If you ease off the front keeper plate screw a couple of turns, the lower keeper plate which retains the pony truck will move enough to allow you to unclip it: then you can apply all the force required wth no risk of collateral damage. Even ignoring that the B-G was a Hattons commission to that business' specification, I reckon if you were to ask the typical B-G owner - I know two - or the typical O2 owner (me for example) what they feel about the product, you would find them smiling. It's rather early to consider a track record on the basis that the O2 definitely isn't perfect. Because that applies to all the models I own. In the LNER 2-80 stakes the Hornby O1 has their daft camming pony truck, ugly cut outs in the cylinder fronts, isn't quite heavy enough to pull a full load, and has a visibly out of position loco to tender coupling; the Bachmann O4 an overlong widened section of the footplate over the cylinders, the piston axis pointing below the centre of the crank axle, and isn't heavy enough to pull a full load. What the Heljan O2 definitely has is plenty of weight for traction, and a mechanism to adequately exploit that weight: that happens to be what floats my boat once the basic 'looks like the subject' criterion is met. My assessment then, a very promising start.

This morning's highlight a Willow tit, a bird I have only positively seen once before at our present home. This one perched two feet away on a wisteria branch outside the window while dealing with a reluctant to be eaten grub of some sort.

The new B17 model's strangely depressed superheater header covers are the one significant blot that my eye is always drawn toward. Easy to correct thankfully. With the small GER pattern tender to make it a 'Sandy', the charm of this model is redoubled. You may want to hold a little madness in reserve for the GN cab and tender O2 versions. Very characterful. That we should have three native LNER design eight coupleds, (with another to come) and a generous helping of the rest of the UK's eight coupled types available RTR is not something I ever expected.

The O4/8 does it for me, and the freight loco grot* just redoubles the appeal in my eyes. Were it not that I have all the bits and pieces in hand for a DIY job to occupy some future winter evenings... * I have a little debate going on over just which of the heavy freight types is going to represent the recently ex-works specimen. I remember this as quite startling, you saw the machine in an entirely new light. Waiting until the O2/2 is seen before making the decision, suspect it wll be the O2/2, a final blaze of glory for the old carthorse. Brian Haresnape obliges with a picture of 8602M with an Austerity tender at Euston in 1948, in the 'Stanier Locomotives' volume of his pictorial history survey.