Mikkel

Very nice. Appearances can be deceptive, but still: You look at packaging like that (and the simple but well thought out webpage), and you know you are dealing with someone who puts an effort into what they do. Good stuff, and good to hear you've got some modelling in :-)

We ought to have an annual RMweb day where everyone went to their nearest line or station and took a handful of snaps and uploaded them somewhere for posterity. It would be mundane now but in 50 years modellers and enthusiasts would thank us for the foresight...

Hi Simon, a nice way to end I think with your locos looking great on Hinton Parva. Good luck with the book, website and other new departures!

Lovely scene Al. The farm cameo at the back is also very effective, I think. It all blends together so nicely.

Great to see Granby alive on here again, John! The goods yard and new shed look very interesting indeed. Not often we see that sort of thing on GWR layouts. Any chance of some more photos?

Hi Marc, no need to apologise - the web is voluntary after all :-) Many thanks for these tips. I'll have a look at yours and BarryTen's layouts, I didn't realize they had removeable parts. I'm gathering various materials for a trial module to see how joins could be hidden with a cobbled surface, including some flexible foam. Will post on how it works out in due course. As for your doodling: Go on, you know you want to! :-)

Good idea Doug. I'll give it a try when I get to the detailing stage. It seems to be hard material this stuff, I might need to get my proper hacksaw out!

I agree: Eating cake, causing trouble and playing with stock like this sounds like my idea of paradise! I still cannot quite get used to sound effects though, and I don't just mean the blokes chatting in the background :-) But that's a very individual thing, I know.

Thanks very much, that image saved my day. What a sight, an extraordinary model as always. The roof looks good, I wouldn't have known it was actually wood. I must admit this kind of weathering is something I'd like to do more of. I didn't know 'rooves' was that much out of date in the UK! Shews my ignorance

Many thanks! The Didcot tour sounds fantastic. Doesn't look like funds will allow much travelling this summer, but I'll certainly keep it in mind if there's a windfall, or if work happens to take me to the UK.

Interesting. Especially the wooden roof, and the mixture. Sounds like a fun project. Are there any examples in your RMweb gallery? Thanks for the tip about thinning the edges. I use it for other tasks but had not thought of doing it with rooves. (it feels very GWR to say "rooves" rather than "roofs", not unlike "shewing"!).

A whole world of it's own. Luvly :-) Will there be more weathering to blend the colours and tone down the fire escape handrails and the mint-flavoured wall?

Now that is one of the most stylish work benches I've ever seen. With the marble it will be - as my son puts it - positively swag! So there will be no more ramblings from the balcony then! :-)

Well it just looks superb Richard. It's interesting to see how Thurso, Kylesku and The Mound have a clear family likeness in the modelling. I can't quite put my finger on it, but they all share that feel of real railway locations somehow. And maybe it also has to do with the surroundings of the railway that you somehow manage to portray in a limited space, eg the very effective scenic backgrounds, the trees on The Mound, the harbour on Kylesku etc. It simply works! Oh and great to see your work in the blogs again :-)

Thanks Tony! I'm off to see how things are going with Brafferton :-)

Thanks dogs :-) I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Farthing is exactly an attempt to make a model railway universe with fairly simple methods, and to keep moving ahead without me getting stunned by performance anxiety! I'm as much in awe of those with great technical skills as anyone else, and we should obviously strive to do better all the time, but for some of us it works best to take one small step at a time - certainly for me :-)

Hi Castle, Many thanks for this - exactly the confirmation I was hoping for. Sadly I have never been to Didcot (but one fine day in the not too distant future!) so this kind of information is very valuable for me. Good idea about the scenic photos, a job for tomorrow! I assume the lavatory windows were frosted in 1907? I'll look in my books for other examples from this period. As for the upholserty I think I'll give it a red/leathery tint since it was 3rd class.

What a treat, Mike. I really like the weathering on the 37, and the loco actually looks quite in place on Cheslyn. I laughed out loud at the "bit of fingertip hanging off the bodywork" - well sorry, but it sounded funny. And of course only the modeller would think of saving the model first and the finger later :-) I'm off to browse your gallery images now.

Eh? I assume we are talking about brake vans? (I googled "luxury toad" and got a recipe for toad in the hole!). Looking forward to seeing that, Will :-) Couldn't agree more PR. Some of it deserves getting binned of course, but some of it deserves a second chance. Plus, it's environmentally friendly. Oh, and quick ;-) Hi Mark. I hope so. I finished the first batch some time ago so they have been running on "The bay" for a while. I had to sell them recently to finance something else, but the new batch should look good on a special train of some kind. Jim with the work you are doing in plastics of various kind I can only imagine that both rooves and coaches will look fantastic. The neatness of your carriage shed is amazing.

Paul I agree. And yes these coach bodies are still square and solid, and a good proof of what you are saying. I call my own approaches half-baked because there are no doubt more "correct" ways to do some of these things - such as using brass rooves, soldering everything in place etc.

Ah... that explains why I got wet feet :-)

Job, I very much agree with your approach. It's nice to follow each others work, but take mine with a grain of salt as the approaches are sometimes a bit half-baked :-) BT that is a great idea - I'll try that. Thanks :-)

Ahem... yes grab rails not gas pipes as originally written! I'm sure your technique is as good as mine. I get the curve by bending the wire around a tube, and then do the angles by bending over a thin steel ruler/strip. It does take a few goes for me too.

A couple of the coaches I’m restoring had buckled or sagging rooves, so I’ve been rolling and detailing some new ones from Plastikard. It’s one of those pleasing tasks where you get the satisfaction of making something from scratch without things getting too stressful - although with brass rooves it can of course be a bit more tricky. Here's a brief illustration of what I've been doing. “So tell me dear, should I be worried?“ In retrospect, I can see why my wife was slightly concerned! But what we have here is of course just the Plastikard roof cut to shape and rolled tight around a tube. This particular tube is 3.1 cm across, and is in fact a bit of plumbing from a sink. The tube immersed in a tub of boiling hot water, left for 10 minutes and then cooled down quickly under the tap. The resulting curve works out right for the single-arc roof profile on these coaches. The Plastikard is 0.5 mm which I think is the thinnest I can get away with while still keeping it relatively sturdy. Gas piping from Alan Gibson straight brass wire (should it have been a smidgen thinner?) and lamp tops from IKB. The rainstrips are plastic strips from Evergreen. I’ve been ambivalent about grab rails on coach ends (life is hard for the railway modeller!). Partly because it can sometimes look too obtrusive on models: If you look at a real coach, it is not really something that captures the eye. And partly because I like to have my rooves removeable, and the rails gets in the way of that. So some of my coaches only have the grab rails indicated. But now I’ve decided I want it there in full, so the rooves will just have to be fixed in place. A trial fit and things look OK. But it seems I’ve gone and squashed the lamp brackets – hope I can get them straightened out! Glueing down the roof on a V2 that I finished some time ago. I kept the original roof on this one. The coach is on a flat surface with bits and pieces stuck in below to get just the right tension on the elastic bands - enough to keep it tight but not so much as to bend/damage the roof. I realize that plastic rooves are not as good as brass ones, and they require good internal support. But so far I haven't had problems with other rooves I've done in the past, so it seems to work. Go to part 4

Those rivets are very neat. We'll need to have a word with that fitter though. This is the GWR, remember, not some Colonel Stephens Railway running out of Waterloo or what have you!