Poggy1165

If I remember correctly, these kits vanished into the Peter Waterman empire. With the demise of JLTRT the question is now whether the successor company has them and if so, whether they ever intend to produce them. I can only suggest you contact MM1 Models and ask.

You might be advised to check photos of CLC versions of these as the CL quite often used slightly different brake arrangements to the GC. It's a bit of a flipping minefield. OTOH you might well find they were exactly alike. The GC diag 8 itself had a variety of brake arrangements, including single lever on one side only, double lever at one end and what might be called "normal". As for GC 3 planks, ye gods, the variety is infinite, including some where the V hangers were not in the middle of the solebar.

I have had this problem in the past. Sometimes the decals really hate sticking to a matt surface, which is a pity because matt is generally what we want, especially with wagons. Produce a glossy wagon and then you have to spend hours dulling it down. So it's a choice of evils. Micro Sol/Micro Set may help. Failing that a local application of varnish will act as an effective glue. Personally, I always cover decals with a coat of protective varnish, this stops them being damaged and also usually holds them in place even if they are not in 100% top condition.

The new goods shed takes shape. This is a generic model (supplied by Laser Cut Railway Models at a very modest price) but it reminds me very much of certain GC goods sheds in the Manchester area, for example Levenshulme. So, while it might not be 100% kosher it satisfies my eye. To be brutally honest, for the supposed location it should probably be stone, but we can always assume the original burned down and had to be replaced, possibly in the 1890s. It fitted together beautifully, with only one or two curse words before the parts clicked together. What annoys me is that the corner joints, which were originally perfect, have sprung apart. Perhaps, unusually for me, I did not use enough glue. It is going to be hard to remedy this, I can only thing of clamping (as far as possible) and piling on weights while another layer of glue resets. And if that does not work, we shall have to resort to the dreaded filler. Of course, painting all those bricks is going to be the hard part. It should keep me quiet for a while.

You can but try. It's all any of us can do. Modellers who achieve absolute perfection are rare. To draw a parallel, I can trap and kick a football, but I'll never be Sergio Aguero. That's why he's on 200k a week while I never got past playing for my school House. We just try to do our best - and enjoy! Nothing else matters. As an aside, I'm amazed by how closely that Parkside van resembles a diagram 17. I am actually now wondering if the LNER just tweaked a GCR drawing. Entirely possible. If you'd suggested it to me off the wall, I'd have said - nah! But seeing it in a photo, it really does have the looks and proportion.

I can't dissent from that; except that I would submit that trains are now quieter than they have ever been and are, generally, faster. A class 40 at the head of a long train of loose coupled goods wagons made almost as much noise as an Austerity 2-8-0 - although nothing could actually make more than the said Austerity. I also remember the old Class 76 and 77 electrics, and you certainly knew when one of those babies was coming. Even goods trains now are relatively quiet and certainly much swifter than in early diesel days. As for the punters, the phrase that springs to mind is Darwin's law, though that is not a particularly kind thought.

Women come in infinite variety. In that they are rather like blokes. How many of your (male) mates like railways, or models? Probably not all. Maybe not any. I have a mate who has no interest in modelling whatsoever. Mind you, he's a boring git who doesn't like dogs either, and has very little interest in history and understands politics about as well as a hamster. So we have little to talk about except City. You need a tolerant woman who doesn't expect the house to look like the Ideal Home Exhibition. And in return, you need to be tolerant of her little quirks because, chaps, we (humans) all have them. I'm lucky, my missus has always not only tolerated my interest in model railways but supported it. But in return I don't moan about her obsession with paper crafts. We share a lot of tools and she is a big customer of Squires and Eileen's!

Problem is, perhaps, the great majority of the population don't know enough about trains to realise how (potentially) dangerous they are. Modern trains are (generally) much faster and quieter than the old ones were and you really do not want to be in the path of one. My generation spent our boyhoods crawling around engine sheds, and you jolly well learned to have a healthy respect for the machines. To this day, I can't even cross over a rusted siding without looking both ways. But we live in a world where youths grab hold of 25,000 volt cables and are surprised when they get burned. Anyone who visits Manchester can have an amusing ride on the front seat of a tram, and watch as pedestrians saunter in front of the moving vehicles, which they do on a regular basis. Funnily enough, very few people would be so hardy as to step out in front of a moving bus, but trams somehow, seem to be fair game. It's as if people think they are made of foam or something. Very odd.

Another option in the space would be an engine shed. Like this one for example. 7mm scale, but in a very modest space.

Fascinating, Andy. Quite likely given that (among other things) the CLC served Liverpool docks and Manchester, the centre of the cotton trade back then. I would never have dreamed of it as a load for a cattle wagon, but it just goes to show.

The first question to ask is whether you are mainly interested in passenger trains or goods trains. If passenger, the Minories concept is hard to beat. If goods, then maybe some simple (relatively) goods yard where you can shunt wagons in and out of assorted sidings. If you want a mixture of both, then a branch terminus takes some beating.

To go back to cattle vans for a second, the HMRS do a rather nice photo of a CLC version of the GCR cattle van I have never seen this photo before and came upon it completely by chance. However, it shows the arrangement of plates far better than my crummy photo. I am intrigued as to what the load is, but it certainly isn't cattle, or indeed beer casks.

There were quite a few GC and Midland joint lines. The one I have in mind had GC signal boxes (and signals) so far along, and then at a given point everything changed to pure Midland. You could envisage something like that. Alternatively you can always have one company on Level 1 and another on Level 2. Multi level layouts are great fun if you have the space.

It was a dangerous job at best. Must have been even worse when many wagons only had one brake, and when levers could be at either end. Talk about the quick and the dead!

Withdrawn engines could live on scrap lines for quite a while. The case I have in mind is De Robeck, a Jubilee which did not show up in my "Combined" - and there was a lag between those being prepared and them appearing in one's hand. Anyway, I saw the engine and was deeply puzzled by its absence from the printed data. It lived on Edgeley's scrap line for what seemed like an eternity - maybe a couple of years?

It is a long time (getting on for a year) since I lasted posted anything about Wathboro, so I thought I had better reassure everyone I'm not dead - yet. Relatively little has been done, partly because my energies, such as they are, have been elsewhere. Also, I was not sure what I wanted to do with the RH side of the layout, and it had to have a severe coat of thinking. That goddamned dog-leg in the main line struck again, and this time I decided bodging was not the answer. So a suitable section was ripped out and a new piece laid, made from individual sleepers and rails. Guess what, at first this threw locos off the track too! I almost broke my heart, but then I took up a track gauge and found that (in part) it was narrow to gauge. This was sorted and all is now well. At last I have got around to laying in the goods shed siding, and the pictures show it in incomplete form (very) with no ballasting done as yet. But at least we have a proper GC stop block. (Ragstone kit). In the old layout this space contained no less than three sidings but it always looked stupidly overcrowded, especially as the sidings were way too short to be construed as a marshalling yard. I considered two sidings, but the less is more philosophy persuaded me to lay just one and put in a goods shed. Even this is cramped, but the siding will easily hold nine wagons, which is reasonable. The theory is that much of the traffic is dealt with down the road at Wathboro Junction, and as this is supposed to be a coal field I would imagine domestic coal is supplied by way of land sales, and is not usually transported in by rail. Wagons depicted: GCR 3 planker, diagram 6B. One of the few wagons on the layout not built by me, it was picked up at a GOG event some years back for peanuts. I don't know who built it, unfortunately, but he was a fine craftsman, and this is one of my favourites. GCR diagram 12 van. From JLTRT kit, with the running gear thrown away and replaced. The body casting is superb, but I could not get on with the JLTRL chassis design. LNWR diagram 33 from an excellent kit by ABS, changed only by the fitting of older brake gear. I have only yesterday reluctantly painted over its white roof, which was not applicable to period. Still not 100% happy with the new roof colour. GCR diagram 17 van, built from Connoisseur kit. A relatively easy brass kit. (I believe Mike Osborne mastered the bodies for the diagram 33 and diagram 12.) The old station can be seen in the background. This will be demolished shortly and sold off. I have yet to finalise what will go at the back. A private siding for Howarth's Mill is a virtual certainty. There may also be room for a small loco shed, on the basis such will not require shunting. If possible I should like to fit in a loco coal road as well, but I can't see it being shunted very often as I do not have the arms of a gibbon.

Yes, the NER practice is interesting. Was coal in that part of the world less friable than elsewhere? Because apparently a common complaint was that coal drops tended to smash the coal into fragments. I can think of examples of coal drops on the former MS&LR, for example at Ardwick and Penistone, but when the GC London Extension was built they simply provided "ordinary" goods sidings. The NER also had the advantage of being very rich and having a virtual monopoly, so they could afford to supply the coal wagons and were, to a very large extent, able to dictate to the punters. Most railways were not in that happy position.

There is also the issue that if you were a small coal merchant, unloading by hand, you really did not want your coal arriving in massive great wagons. For many years the merchants preferred an 8 ton wagon, so the 16 ton standard wagon of post-war fame must have been a great leap forward for these guys, and not one that they necessarily appreciated. You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause i can't go I owe my soul to the company store

There used to be very strict rules about points being within so many feet of the controlling signal box. Power driven points relatively remote from the box are a comparatively recent development. From memory, about the time of Grouping. This is why many refuge sidings used to be single ended, putting in a loop of any length meant a second signal box, until technology changed.

I'll be tempted to buy the GW type and fit GC arms and finials. As long as they are the wooden post type of course. Be a lot easier than scratch building.

Good example of how good modelling transcends all else. When people say "there's nothing for me" in a magazine or an exhibition, they are generally wrong because if the modelling is quality or makes use of new techniques there is usually something to be learned from it.

Yes, that's why I put a full stop after "Dunford".

Some, but by no means all, of the Manchester-Sheffield expresses were booked to call at places like Dinting, Hadfield, Woodhead and Dunford. I seem to recall Woodhead closed about 1964, but not sure about Dunford. There was, in latter days, no "ordinary" passenger train service as such to these stations*, just these odd expresses making odd calls. In steam days there was an "ordinary" passenger service stopping at pretty much everywhere between Manchester and Sheff, but I'm not sure when it was terminated. Apparently it used to take a couple of hours and would have been great fun to sample as an enthusiast, but I doubt it made much in revenue. * Woodhead and Dunford. Dinting and Hadfield of course had frequent EMUs, and prior that that, steam powered locals.

Alphagraphix (Roger Crombleholme) produce kits for an MS&LR third and a MS&LR first, 4 wheelers, in 7mm scale. Now kits for a 4 wheel PBV and composite (the latter based on the prototype preserved at Ingrow) are proposed and expressions of interest are invited. Only six of each are needed for the project to go ahead. If anyone here is interested please contact Roger Crombleholme at 23 Darris Road, Selly Park, Birmingham. B29 7QY. stating which kit (preferably both!) you would like. There has already been some firm expressions of interest, so it should not take that much of a shove. But please do not leave it to others, or the kits may not happen! Email is sirberkeley@outlook.com Anyone who is a member of the GCRS Yahoo Forum will find relevant drawings there.

I like simple; more is less. Especially in 7mm scale where the actual locos and stock do the talking. How much would we all give to spend an afternoon at somewhere like Scout Green back in the glory days?