Bill

Spam-cans, 4 subs and Bils Make for far better thrills! When running on time The trips, quite sublime O'er Southern, Sunshine and Hills!

+ It is a lot lighter than I thought it would be - When the parcel was collected from UPS it felt very light and I thought they might have sent an empty box.. However it will pull 7+ Hornby Maunsell coaches - not well because of the coupling problems and Hornby coaches can be finicky... very finicky. So that would probably translate to about 10 HO scale coaches - which is something in practice it might never need to pull but unless one had a large layout that could accommodate rakes of 12 or more coaches and the S100 was the station pilot of choice - but as you pointed out - plenty of space for ballast. It will be interesting when the model rail OO gauge tanks arrive and we find out what they can pull in comparison About the fine scale Peco track - I don't think the retailer in question is that well known for its generosity! But having deeply thought about it (i.e. pierced the bubble of my fantasies about my track laying skills) I shall stay with code 100 for now...warts and all..

Thanks - By gum you're right.. But It isn't no more - It's now vertical as the designer intended There is some small play in the chimney socket. This provides two positions vertical and also as photographed, a bit laid back - like many an American

A Rivarossi S-100 USTC has appeared. It came from Locomotion it was the only one I could find at the time. (I discovered REE only after I had bought it!) It is a really lovely little machine and runs well... And will be good company until the one from Model Rail turns up. I have always been fascinated by continental railways and this will give me chance to get acquainted. It has also made me all the more eager to receive the OO offering. Coincidentally someone stuck an unordered Peco code 75 curved LH Turnout in a parcel by mistake. And it is very clear that Code 100 looks terrible next to anything in HO gauge. So I am now summoning the necessary financial and internal fortitude to dump all my code 100 track. I had never realised before how out of scale it looks - you could almost use it for 7mm modelling!

How about some of the centre coach(es) from the Bachmann birdcage stock in Lake? Or even some Gresley suburbans in teak or maroon might squeak by until some authentic stock becomes available? They sort of resemble that era... sort of... They would be completely wrong but might well look the part for anyone who lives north of Watford, south of Kingston, west of Amersham and east of Epping ..... Perhaps one could or might have to adopt the continental way of thinking - "as long as the scale is right...." .....

out of scale

That's a good idea - they must look and feel much more like the real thing with their wheels properly gauged (from whose demented mind came the idea of OH/OO?) It is worth mulling over whether or not to go this route

Thanks - I received an email from Kernow today - they really are prompt - letting me know that the order is still good. They have been having some glitches with the new site which is apparently why it is not showing up in my orders section... So all is well - said he keeping his fingers crossed. Does anyone know an expected delivery date?

I thought that might be the case, but the site no longer lists the Green late BR emblem version. Maybe they ran out of Brunswick Green in China? :-) I have emailed Kernow about this and hope to receive a reply - if it is interesting I'll post it here!

Does anyone know what is going on with the Model rail USA tanks? I had placed an order for the green late BR crest version.. only to discover when checking my advanced order records that the order had vanished/been erased/gone without a trace and had to start all over... So it now it appears that the green version is no longer in production... Is this true? I hope not as I was set on getting one...

That's great - Thanks - And nope It did not cross my mind - that is very useful information... If it happens again I'll know what to try..

Well this arrived after a Regent and three Esso versions and very nice they are too... They have a good heft, the bearings are all sprung, have nice screw link couplings - However the hooks were designed almost identical to the prototype and are thus a bit awkward to use.. They might need their points fettled to increase the gap to improve their ease of use. The other day I noticed an end link from a screw link coupling upon the floor of the train room (in and of itself a miracle) Upon further investigation made the discovery it had dropped off from the newly arrived Heljan Mobil Class B Tank... Closer scrutiny revealed that the screw bar was barely inserted into the block of the link attached directly to the chassis frame. So that could also have been irretrievably lost... Rotating the screw bar caused it to penetrate no further into the block, so I made the mistake of removing the screw bar. I managed with some difficulty to re-attach the end link to it and then tried to reattach the assembly - but with absolutely no success. Somehow the thread in the block was rejecting the screw-bar.... After two days of fruitless attempts in which I had to restrain my impulse to completely 'lose it' a revelation - remove the thread and glue in the screw bar instead. Easier thought than done - none of my drill bits were of the right size or made much impression on the cross-threaded block. Then I discovered a diamond drill bit that a friend had given me back in 1983 and never used since. It was just the right size and after a couple of minutes drilling the screw-bar now slid easily through the block. All that was now needed was a little Gorilla brand super glue to fix the screw bar in place and voila.. A half working screw link coupling! Now I do wish they would notice these things before sending them half way round the world.. 'Wistful sigh'! knowing nothing will change and that every so often repairs will be needed... At and around the same time this arrived... As it was crying out to be run - an oval of track was hastily assembled for it to use... And as I rather like the result, ways are being investigated to incorporate an OO gauge layout... More later...

The BR Lined version of the E4 arrived today - It is quite the wee marvel! Having converted to 7mm it meant hastily laying out some new narrower track to accommodate it... (also the 2 HAL which has not had a serious outing since it arrived last year).... It ran perfectly right out of the box. It is a superb model in every aspect. The next thing, in the absence of the birdcage stock, will be to mate it up with Hornby's maunsell push-pull set pro-tem... Also... Its so good that the Southern version has now become a serious contender... (Who needs an APT anyway?) The problem now is how to design the 7mm layout in such a way as it can incorporate the 00? Perhaps an elevated track as a part of the back-scene might do the trick? Whatever happens its going to be a fascinating and creative year.... Seriously - if anyone is holding back on getting an E4 it is something you might well regret if left too late.. It's Bachmann's design team at the top of their game...

The email of death also arrived from the big 'H'.. I too imagined the price was secure but had already ordered another at the higher price. The E4 however is intrinsic to my modelling strategy and so it is essential to pay the extra bunce required. There was an interesting revelation in today's guardian concerning the new 12 sided pound. The pound now resembles an old three penny bit. So consider this is a pound now only worth three pence? If so then a hundred pounds is only a mere 300 pence. Or just #1/5/- in 1950's money... So is the increase really too much to pay? Difficulties in emotionally handling these kinds of situations can occur if 'business ethics' get equated with 'morality' - (They appear to differ in the way they handle pain...) For those on a short budget these price rises must be a worrying trend and of some continuing concern...

You are probably using IEX11 as a browser - Change to Firefox - For some reason, probably security related, IEX will no longer do a lot of things on this site - including uploading images to a blog and quoting pages. If you lower the security settings on IEX to "Please give me a virus, now" then these services might just return, but don't bank on it

To me, one of the things that helps set a good railway layout are a few vehicles. Cars of any vintage can be found off the peg or RTR at a scale of 1/43... Trying to find Trucks, Lorries and Buses at this scale in any kind of UK outline vintage or not - impossible. It appears that the scale of choice is 1/50... In other words useless....! Many have tried to persuade me that 1/50 when seen from a distance is just fine. Fine for them maybe but not me. So imagine my joy to discover that one can buy from EBay a fully finished diecast Regent III at 1/43... And at a reasonable price of around £20 or so... Now Orpington is nowhere near St Pancras and the words 50p a tad too modern. But it provides somwhere to start from. I also found a ford Thames for a similar price, but it suffers from Chinese language comprehension disease... Can you spot the deliberate mistake? ... Unless there was in the early 1950's a town called "North Restern"...? My sense of humour and the complete unavailabilty of any 1/43 RTP at a reasonable price, lets me live with it. It is excellent starting material to be formed into something else. There are other UK outline trucks flaoting around, but with foreign markings. There is a nice Bedford coal truck - but how does one explain coal being delivered from France? A miner's strike perhaps? They were quite common in the 50's and 60's... Now its about time the layout was designed... Mmmm...I wonder...

On the 20th Nov last year I moved to a new home - still in Nova Scotia but now in the town of Bedford.. Much closer to civilization than before . There is space for a small trainroom that permits a layout that is about 2' wide in the form of a 11' X 10' rectangle... At last the locomotive stock can be properly run in.. The previous shunting layout did not permit any going around in circles for half an hour at a time... Here is view of the new premises.. (At this point I have abandoned using IEX. It has been getting progressively fussier with RMWeb - and now it won't even allow the uploading of files.. Bye Bye IEX hello FireFox!) Unfortunately I discovered O gauge is not like OO, one cannot just create a space and cram points etc., in on the fly - It all needs to be measured and planned in advance.. Just like a real railway... Also.. I am now stuck with a load of OO stock cluttering up rather a lot of useful space... It's mostly 1950's-70's BR(s) steam and diesel stuff. with a bit of here there and everywhere A result of getting far too enthusiastic which 00 scale permits - It is all totally wasted on this side of the pond as no one would know what to do with it... If there is something you have been desperately been searching for and don't mind payin the freight from Canada, then do ask - you never know!

Kingfisher in LNER blue 4463 - But I am not sure why I keep it as I only model and run BR(s) in 00 scale. (The train pack was going cheap, and I could not resist a bargain - then promptly bough some extra coaches... And there they sits loved but unused to this day...)

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fastener came loose