mike morley

A whopping sixteen feet to play with! This should be spectacular, to say the least! What do you intend to use as a scenic break at the Junction end? The wide-open-spaces nature of the place doesn't offer any obvious options.

Half an hour ago four or five yellow carriages were being slowly propelled across Bletchley flyover by an National Rail 37. Something's afoot.

The spirit of the place well and truly captured!

I do have a mini drill but use it so rarely I often wonder why I bothered buying it. As they aren't the cheapest of things, in the unlikely event of it expiring before I do I would not even consider buying a replacement. With regard to cutting track with them, the bodies might not be that bulky, but they still force you to cut at an angle, which makes the resulting cut far wider than can be achieved with a razor saw.

All that sounds like a lot of hard work. I look forward to the piccies.

No need to re-motor it. One of my most reliable locos has been powered by a DS10 for over a decade. Just sort out the overhang at the back end and provide extra support at the front end.

You will undoubtedly get people making snide remarks about the DS10 motor and urging you to use something else, but if treated properly they aren't at all bad even if they aren't quite up to the standards of Mashima's best. One of the kindest things you can do to a DS10 is to provide an outrigger bearing beyond the worm to prevent the output shaft flailing around. The motor bracket you are using does not appear to offer that option so you could either fabricate an outrigger bracket (not the easiest job in the world) or replace it with one that does offer the option. You should quite definitely not cut the shaft off until that side of things has been fully investigated. Similarly, the shaft at the other end of the motor can also do without any unnecessary length to encourage flailing around so that gap twixt flywheel and motor quite definitely needs to be closed.

One unusual feature of Feltham yard was that the River Crane ran under the Whitton end of the yard in a long tunnel with a second tunnel beside it. I'm told the second tunnel was to allow the Hussars convenient access to Hounslow Heath, What a feature that would make! I walked through the tunnel a few times and reckon it was about 20 feet wide and twelve feet high with a squelchy floor.

I went to the Feltham School, beside Feltham marshalling yard, from 1969 to 1974. Every day I walked over the Hanworth Road bridge across the yard throat (A horrible bridge that is far too narrow for any sort of modern traffic, never mind the volume that uses it nowadays. I once nearly got the back of my skull stoved in by the nearside mirror of a lorry on that bridge). The yard had not long gone out of use but was still entirely intact and it was quite sad to see it slowly decline and be reclaimed by nature.

A humorous aside, courtesy of Radio 4 stalwart Lucy Porter (4'11") about her relationship with her husband Justin Edwards (6'4") "In the bedroom it looks like a ventriloquist's act that has gone to a very dark place."

All this talk of telephone and telegraph poles, but no mention of whose you intend to use. Could I recommend Masokits? They are what I used on Pentrefan and they were so good I doubt if I'll use anyone else's ever again. Yes, they are a bit fiddly, but they are so well thought-out and the instructions are so good their reputation for being difficult to build is totally unjustified. What Pentrefan lacks is telegraph wires. I've seen the stretchy latex string used by American modellers (Is it Lay-zee line?) on a few layouts and it's absolutely first class and perfect for the job - but where do you get it? Answers on a postcard, please . . . Finally, going back to the subject of poo . . . (As an old friend of mine once remarked, all conversation eventually reverts to bodily functions) Back in the 60's and early 70's, when my father had an allotment, the very suggestion of using human poo as manure left him aghast. I was a daft pre-teen at the time who was reduced to idiot sniggering by such subjects, so his explanation was terse, but I got the impression that the output of non-herbivores contained much that was downright undesirable from a gardeners point of view. I also know that poo was (and might well still be) a key ingredient in the process of tanning leather and that wee was one means of making wool workable (See Jerry Clifford's comments about the difference between a fulling mill and a tucking mill in his thread about his superb Tucking Mill layout on the 2mm Finescale section)

Forgive me if I've missed a mention of this that someone else has already made, but one of the main uses of the village tramway around Abergynolwyn, served by the Talyllyn's village incline, was the removal of "night soil". I'd be interested to know how "it" coped with being hoisted up the incline after being collected and what the Talyllyn then did with it.

Would anyone care to offer an opinion as to whether the regulations about barrier wagons twixt loco and gunpowder vans were introduced at the same time? And, going back to Jonathans comment about the Brecon Forest Tramroad as yet another of this threads many asides, two or three years ago a narrow-gauge modeller was attempting to refine a model of an 0-4-0 Equine-class hayburner. His layout was loosely based on the Manx horse trams on Douglas Promenade, with the trams-cars being powered. To start with the horses were fixed in their shafts with loose-jointed legs dangling below and being jerked around by the jolting as it moved along (accompanied by sound effects provided by a pair of coconut shells!), but IIRC the owner was intending to improve the joints in the legs and introduce more controlled movement via unobtrusive drive rods made from fine piano wire, driven by cams from the tram-cars axles.

Maplins PCB is fibreglass

The track to the docks might have been lifted, but that does not necessarily mean the railway's right of way has been given up. Could that be why progress has been slow? The various authorities arguing over the need to build a bridge over a railway line that is never likely to be reinstated?

When my track-building skills were even worse than they are now I occasionally applied the soldering iron to PCB sleepers so often and for so long that I sometimes burned the copper away, but that was all. I would therefore suggest that although it may be theoretically possible to cause de-lamination, in practice it is extremely unlikely to happen. One thing I did learn very early on is that fibreglass copperclad is immeasurably better than the paxolin-based version, which needs little more than a humid day to make it warp.

If the card is of reasonable quality/density and not too thick you will probably get away with it, but fingers would quite definitely need to be crossed. Is it feasible to remove the cardboard and replace it with something better - thin ply probably being the best option.

It could be worth making sure the fault isn't with your meter, too. I once wasted a couple of days trying to trace an intermittent "short" in a siding that eventually turned out to be one of the probes. I eventually discovered that if I pressed fairly hard, the probe was capable of registering a short in 6mm plywood!

Perhaps cluster would have been a better word than clump? Certainly you only find the occasional lone bracken, usually in deep gloom under trees, while in more open areas you often find extensive areas of the stuff, expanses the size of a tennis court or more being far from unusual. One thing I should say to reassure anyone put off by my description of planting the stuff earlier is that the use of long-ish static grass renders the need to solder on fine wire stalks unnecessary. I also suspect that there's an even more user-friendly method of planting them out there somewhere. Long-ish static grass is simply the best method I'd found by the time I decided I'd planted enough.

Scalelink ferns comes in two sizes, the larger of which is perfect for adult bracken in 4mm scale while the smaller size is about right for young bracken. The latter is very fiddly and a good test of the eyesight. Both sizes are surprisingly difficult to "plant" - not least because the stalk does not extend beyond the lowermost fronds on quite a few of them. I spent an hour or so doing my sanity no good at all while I soldered fine wire stalks onto those that lacked them. Wibble . . . The most effective way I found of installing them was to prepare the ground with some fairly long static grass then apply the pre-painted, pre-curved plants individually with a pair of tweezers after dabbing the stalk in the glue of your choice. The static grass gives the fronds something to catch onto and holds them upright and in place while the glue dries. Bracken grows in clumps and it is another good test of eyesight and patience as you build up a clump by interlacing individual plants. Its not quite a mind-boggling as ballasting, but its heading in the same general direction.

Here we go, off on another tangent! I've got some Scalelink etched ferns, and very nice they are too. But . . . I spent a long time experimenting with colour until I found a shade of green that when held against a real life frond of bracken was indistinguishable. When planted on the layout, however, it looked cartoonishly unrealistic and I've yet to find a "believable" colour. Greyer than real life and darker than real life appears to be the way to go, but I'm not there yet.

Only a few weeks ago I spent a few days in Dolgellau with my daughter and her new husband and it was noticeable that a high percentage of the sheep we saw on higher ground had a lot of mid-brown in their coats. All three of us commented on it, but it's only now after reading your posting about Northumberland sheep that I wonder if it was more than just a localised phenomenon. As has been remarked upon before, this thread is an education as well as the story of a model railway layout!