BR60103

I sometimes use a denture cleaner (bought for MIL but she didn't want it). Not sure how effective, but it's shaken the dirt of a number of wheels. The size will fit an O scale bogie and smaller wagons in OO.

I think Baden is about as far west as they've ever gone and not many went that far even for 3 layouts. William: I think I'm going to miss the new layout again! as we've booked a trip for July.

block bells: didn't one of the early P4/S4 layouts run with block bells? opening the boxes every morning with 3-3-3 all round? and the comment "I can hear the bells ringing but I can;t see an trains running".

Include, in with all the village and farm noises on the sound system, the Coronation Street theme music --every 5-10 minutes.

I was contemplating ways of going about modelling the "wrong" way. I decided that what we need is build to P4 standards but powered on the Trix Twin principle. And to get a second lynch mob from the other direction, use original Trix stock rebuilt to P4 standards.

We were quite frustrated in Canada as the bogie wagons available here often came with no buffers but still with the big holes in the buffer beam. Nobody in Canada stocked buffers as extra parts.

An old episode of Last of the Summer Wine (was on the PBS channel tonight) (dates to the Seymour era) the 3 chaps call on the Vicar who really just wants to run his model railway. Blue streamlined Coronation visible. Have now forgotten the episode title.

Mal: I don't use mail order much, but we were in New York last fall and Trainworld is located right at the bottom of the stairs from an elevated line (well, it's underground in Manhattan) which makes it an interesting scenic ride as well. Staff was really helpful with our obscure requests.

I saw this in a Borders store this summer (Borders was large book store chain which had gone bust) during their clear out sale. "No customer washrooms. Try Amazon.com" Sign was reprinted in a recent Consumers' Reports.

An episode of Last of the Summer Wine where Foggy is a closet railfan and Compo manages to start that GW Pannier in LT coours. A Hard Day's Night -- if you turn the sound down there are scenes inside carriages (Mark 1?) including the guards section. From the '50s -- Casey Jones, an American juvenile series with Alan Hale Jr (later captain of the Minnow) using the same loco as Petticoat Junction(?).

Not specific, but possibly a series of buildings that woulld fit over Peco or Hornby point motors that are surface mounted? It looks very suspicious to have the same platelayers hut beside each point. Possibly a larger structure to go over the pair of motors for the 3-way points. Do I need to find a supplier of An sized paper to print your kits? I don't think even the British Connection stock it.

My school friend Ross Wood's sister is named Holly.

If you label photos, be more specific than "me, mum, auntie Ivy". When my father was going though some photos with us, he said "I don't know who the girl is that your grandfather has his arm around". We also have a lot of very small snaps of the middle east WW2 campaign. Pictures of huts made out of jerry cans.

Another stop in Winter Park is the Morse Museum http://www.morsemuseum.org/ which will delight your girl friend and probably you as well. There is a railway connection -- Morse was part of Fairbanks-Morse.

My panels -- from the elaborate to the ones with Atlas electric switches. St Mary Ax has a hand drawn track plan that's not shown; the plan is Minories. All points are manual. The elaborate one (Exeter St Dayle's) is designed to slide into the top shelf between the books and the framework. (Posted to show the other end of the spectrum from what has gone before)

With the degradation of education since the 1960s, Ontarians no longer are taught what the names of the numbers are beyond 9.

I have a couple of comments and queries about my Clan. I took a piece of insulation (from mains cable) and drilled it out a bit larger and slipped it over the peg of the engine-tender connection to keep them together better (given the fragility of the wire connector). The brake mechanisms that need to be installed don't seem to fit and don't really match the instruction diagram. One is square and one has tapers but neither looks to fit on the bottom. The front axle often doesn't rotate. I think I tracked this to the Kadee coupling I installed. The little nubs that hold it in fill the whole space between the NEM box and the axle. I took it out and filed a slant on it; it seemed to work on my layout but I noticed it stuck when I double-headed it behind another Clan at Lostock on Saturday. None of the bufferbeam detail will survive the Kadee that I installed on the bogie.

Thank you 34... I went looking for a 2.5mm nut driver today. The closest I could get were some bolts from a model aircraft shop with a hex socket. Between that and pliers I managed to reposition the crank. By the way, my model came with a bag of coal. Does anyone know what radius is required if I install the flanged trailing wheels?

I purchased my Clan McGregor on the weekend. It works well. However, the speedometer cable seems to flex a lot. The crank that it is attached to is not pointed at the center of the wheel, as I'd expect, but off to the side. Is this right or should it be set for least movement? Can I move it by loosening the screw and re-tighteneing?

Kadee make a big selection of mounting because the American market has a variety of places to mount. Kadee's website has specs for the mounting height for all their variants. You do not need to settle on just one as they are all compatible. You may have to use different lengths depending on buffers and how far back you have to mount the draft gear. When I started, Kadee had the 4/5, 6, 7, 8, and 10 (10 is now 5). And they were mechanical, not magnetic.

I've wondered about the practicality of making these in single-compartment units: a first and a third second. Plus the other little rooms. How close to uniform were compartment sizes? They could probably be fudged a little to fit.

Carl: thank you for the poem.

My father used to have a bit of poetry that ended "... but the islands are MacBrayne's!" Does anyone know the rest? (It could be common in Scotland, but not here)

I originally wrote this 5 years ago. What I left out of the story was the suspicion of the cause. The truck in question had oil axle boxes, i.e. not roller bearing. The cars were checked in Chatham before being added to the CPR train. It was said that the axle box had a lubricating pad in it (to move the oil from the bottom of the box up to the journal) that was a size too big. There was debate about whether that would matter or not, and whether it had happened. Apparently, at one yard the pads were all separated by sizes except for the two largest which shared a box. The pad itself was burned. A lot of the recommendations of the inquiry were moot, because the railways were already implementing them. There was some concern that even if tank cars were given roller bearings, the car in front might be something else with plain bearings. Note that if you modelled this scene in HO, there would be a piece of tank car 25 feet from the wreck site. The locomotives on the train were GO Transit units, rented to CP for the weekend. They were equipped with rear-view mirrors but CP discouraged use of them for checking back over the train. The investigation didn't assign any blame, or even try to decide where there was fault; it was for checking procedures and making recommendations. I saw a notice last week asking for people with memories of the event to share them at a meeting. (Is the diagram big enough? I can try to scan it again.)