lyneux

Makes sense, but the old two-pin coupling bar that fits in a NEM pocket (in use on e.g. the Bachmann 150, 101 etc) was much neater. It also had a stabilising effect but without the visual bulk. Counting the pins, there are 14 on the new coupling! The Bachmann 101 manages interior lights and directional lighting all from 2 pins. Granted, the interior lights are only switchable via the bottom of the unit. If they had used the 2-pin coupling, it would have the added benefit of being able to create hybrid sets such as this (ok it's a 118, but you get the point):

Perhaps it's just me, but the enormous connector between units is massively off-putting. If I get one of these, that is going to have to come off. What on earth are all those pins for? I'd have thought 3-4 pins max should suffice for lighting. Separate DCC decoders might be the way to go. Guy

Thumbs down. Looks like it was designed by someone who failed their GCSE Art and Design (or whatever the US equivalent is). Horrible colours and horribly applied. Give me Yeoman or ARC any day. Even DB and Hanson looked pretty good compared to this. Guy

Thanks Andy. I wonder why section (e) doesn't talk about national governments as well as local authorities? Guy

Short rakes looking good for Oldshaw! Getting excited now... Guy

Jo, the outers are £10 more than the inners so it's more a question of: how many inners can I get away with before it's no longer prototypical. At the moment, I'm running rakes of 10-12 wagons on Whatley so I'll probably just settle for a single pair of outers. I've got a couple of the Intercity Models outers to use too. Guy

Prompted by Gary's post, I went on to the Rails site. Do we know which version of the livery these will be in in the initial release? If more than one, then which Dapol stock code corresponds to which livery? EDIT: just found this on the Digest site: BatchPartInner/Running NumberOuterNumberLivery 20184F-050-001Outer19303Yeoman EARLY 20184F-050-002Outer19311Yeoman EARLY 20184F-050-003Outer19306Yeoman LATE 20184F-050-004Outer19313Yeoman LATE 20184F-050-101Inner19335Yeoman EARLY 20184F-050-102Inner19337Yeoman EARLY 20184F-050-103Inner19349Yeoman EARLY 20184F-050-104Inner19361Yeoman LATE 20184F-050-105Inner19370Yeoman LATE 20184F-050-106Inner19398Yeoman LATE EDIT2: I was also trying to work out the ratio of outer:inner wagons. It's 1:4. There were 100 built, 20 outers (19300-319) and 80 inners (19320-399). So for a ten wagon rake, it would make sense to buy two outers and 8 inners. Guy

If you are after variety and something to mix with your Accurascale PTAs, ARC had 16 PXAs built that ran with the PTAs. Same same but different! https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/arcaggregatebox PR27001 to PR27016. They ran on a mixture of Schlieren and Axle Motion bogies. I've made a few for Whatley and am working on doing some more based around my own kit using the Silouette Cameo cutter and styrene. Will have to write it up... Guy

Hi Fran, They look very nice. I'm excited to be on the order book for these! Regarding the paint 'tweaks', can you confirm which colours you will be tweaking? Is it the main mustard colour? Having spent a lot of time photographing this shade I can understand that it looks quite different in different photos (it's not very tolerant of the colour casts on photographic film from the period). Also, the under frame grey looks a tad dark too (when compared to the grey of the ARC lettering for example). Could be a trick of the light though since that area is more in shadow in the photos? A couple of details that people might want to add (aftermarket) are the buffer locking collars and knuckle coupling pole on the outer wagon buffered end. They were often missing from the wagons though so no problem not having them. I never got round to adding these to my ones either! Cheers, Guy

They look absolutely fantastic Fran! Well done to everyone involved in bringing these to fruition. I can't wait to see the ARC ones. Guy

Nick, Just found this thread. Awesome work on the JHAs (even if they are the wrong colour.... haha!). They look really good. I didn't even realise that they were 2mm at first! My LTF-25s printed ok on the Photon but not as good as FUD. I've since tinkered with the settings and can probably do a better print so I might have another go at these. Not sure they would scale to 2mm though (otherwise I'd offer to have a go for you). I've just got a Silouette Cameo cutter and am back in the saddle with my aggregate wagons again. Guy

I have the same problem. Trial and error shows that it depends on the units that the software that is generating the file uses as well as the units that SS is set to. I set Inkscape and SS to both use mm and select mm when exporting the DXF. Despite this, I am still finding my drawing about 20% under scale in SS. Grrrr!

Mike, that's a very helpful write-up, thank you! Having eyed these up for months, I finally bought a few of these to run on Oldshaw and they look great straight out of the box. That said, trying to get the wheelset out, pull wheels out to EM and then re-insert has proved a total pig. Ok, there is just about enough room to pull the supplied wheels to the correct back-to-back and re-insert them but you can't do this without the top of the wheelset fouling the sprue joining the brake gear together (as Mike has stated). So the brake gear has to come out. So, where to hold the wagon to get the wheels out? There is so much fine detail all over it, it's really hard to grasp without breaking something off. I hadn't even finished removing the brake gear from one wheelset on the first wagon and I had already managed to break (and lose!) one of the small hand wheels at the end of the tarp sheet. I guess I'll be replacing this with one of Colin Craig's etches as half of it snapped off onto the floor somewhere never to be seen again. The other bits that seemed to ping off are the small cleats at the corners of the hood. Fortunately I managed to find where this pinged off to, so I have it saved ready to re-attach after re-wheeling is complete. My experience of the glue holding in the brake gear was totally different. It was glued fast and no amount of coercion with a knife blade would get the bond to break. So next step, try to cut through the glue with a scalpel. This required quite a bit of force so I was worried that the blade would slip and either slice through some of that nice fine detail or worse, my finger. There is very little space to get a blade in at the correct angle due to the wire staples forming the brake gear. I gave up on this and I ended up stroking the sharp tip of a new scalpel blade 15-20 times across each joint (there are two per brake assembly) before I finally managed to free them. The same was true of trying to remove the wire rigging from the brakes to allow the blocks to be removed. Glued tight. Needed two sets of pliers and a deep breath to pull the wire end out of the block. So, after an hour of swearing I finally have one wheelset and associated brake gear removed. I haven't even started on the next one! The W irons are so strong that you really need a lot of force just to get the wheelset in and out. They seem to be made of the strongest and stiffest plastic known to man! I'm fairly new to EM but I've converted something like 30 different vehicles already. This could have been so much easier... Guy

ADB968008, since we seem to be re-visiting page 11 of the thread all over again, I'll post a link to my photo of (left to right) my re-sprayed 59 (Phoenix colours) against 'stock' Lima and Hornby: Sorry, but the yellow on the Hornby is nothing like the ARC mustard in the photos you posted above. I think Lima were closer than Hornby to 'correct'. Also, note that Dapol seem to have painted their decorated samples with different grey on the roof than the sides of the cab (quite apparent from your photo). It'd be good to see some decorated samples from Dapol that are different from the ones they showed back in November 2018. Guy

It's an Anycubic Photon. The point of printing upright (or upside down in fact) is so that they don't need supports. If I printed the branches horizontal to the print bed then I'd have lots of supports to tidy up and remove. Print time isn't a massive issue as I'm only printing with 0.5mm layer thickness at the moment. But I agree, I think I will need to print several branches at a time and have them attach to the model. The software is great fun to use and doesn't take long to assemble a very authentic looking tree armature. I'm only beginning to understand all of the settings by playing with it. You can vary most parameters that govern the shape of the tree. Here's a bigger one next to the first one that I did (but still only about a quarter of the size that it needs to be). It'll be interesting to see how a bit of paint, postiche hair and 'leaves' improves the look. Guy

Here is the model that I printed it from. So it's clear that quite a few branches haven't printed properly, but this almost doesn't matter. Also the branches are incredibly fine at their tips, a fraction of a mm.

First very small-scale results are very promising! This would be something like a rose bush in 4mm. In principle, the technique works. For trees with large horizontal lower branches, I will make a split, detach the branches and print these vertically to be later re-combined. I feel the need to do something bigger now I know it works without additional supports. Guy

The aim is to print without supports but this will require the angles to be correct (i.e. the branches all pointing more or less at 45-90 degrees upwards).

Probably a heap of sludge in the bottom of the vat, but it feels worth a try! I'm going to try something more like the size of a shrub to start with so that I don't have to wait for ages to see if it is viable. Guy

Think of the amount of time it takes to make a really good tree armature by the time-honoured technique of twisting strands of wire together and covering in modelling clay. Now think about how quickly this could be accomplished using 3D printing and algorithms. I've been playing around with Blender and a plugin called 'modular tree' to create tree armatures for 3D printing. They look quite lifelike and are nice and random. The attached screenshot was the result of 5 minutes of playing with the package. I was able to create a manifold mesh by closing up the 'hole' at the bottom of the trunk. There are tons of parameters that you can play with. To get an idea of what this package is capable of have a look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQx0eh8z-iM I'm going to set the printer off in a moment and see how I get on. Watch this space....! Guy

Just found this thread. You are right in your original post, the Hornby 153 body is way too squat (as also evidenced from almost all of the photos that JDW posted)! I am busy doing a 155 in EM from a mix of Dapol 155 and Hornby 153 bits that I am documenting over on the DEMU forum. Whilst the chassis is a no-brainer (use the Hornby 153 one), I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide whether the Dapol 155 or the the Hornby 153 bodies were a better starting point. I have settled on the Dapol 155 as I think the Hornby 153 body is way too 'squat' (something like 2-3mm vertical compression compared to the prototype). The Hornby 153 also rides about a mill too high. This could be because it is using 12.2mm wheels in place of 10.5mm wheels. When the wheels are converted to the correct size, this then brings the frame down to the correct height (about a mill). Below are some comparison photos with the different wheels so that you can see the height difference (lined up next to a Bachmann 150 which is correct). In addition, the Hornby gangway is about 3mm too squat (presumably to fit the too-squat 153 body shell). Below are some comparison photos of the Bachmann 150 gangway against the Hornby one. I will be using a resin cast copy of the Bachmann one on my 155. Edit: Note that in the pictures the Dapol 155 has had 3mm trimmed from the bottom edge of the body (as per Jim Smith-Wright's approach over on his P4 New Street blog). This is because Dapol modelled the sole bar as a lower extension of the body shell whilst Hornby have retained it on the chassis. Guy On the original Hornby 153 wheels (12.2mm diameter): On Keen-Maygib 10.5mm wheels (note cantrail stripe, bottom of door and top of roof are now at the same height as the 150). Hornby on the left, Bachmann on the right.

Having re-motored a Lima 59 with Bachmann 66 innards I can vouch for the fact that the axles are in the same position on both. Can't vouch for what Hornby have done though. Will try to take some photos... Guy

I've got a 155 on 153 under frames conversion underway at the moment. I'm trying to write it up on the DEMU forum. I spent quite a bit of time trying to work out if I would use the 155 body or the 153 body as the basis for this. This got me looking at the key dimensions. My conclusion was that the Dapol body moulding isn't bad at all. yes it needs work, but the key dimensions are correct. The analysis has also shown up the inadequacy of the Hornby 153 which is too 'squat'. This is very obvious from the attached photo of the two side by side against the prototype: The lights are set too high up on the Hornby 153 and possible a bit too low on the Dapol/Hornby 155! Here's a comparison of the gangways of the Hornby 153 with the Bachmann 150/2 to show just how much shorter (about 3mm) they are (they should be the same height).

Heljan spares now seem to be available on the Gaugemaster website: https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/magento/catalog/category/view/s/Heljan-spares/id/834/ Sadly, they seem to have stopped selling complete sprues and instead are (somewhat meanly in my opinion) selling the individual parts that they have removed from the sprues. How this can make a spares service more manageable I shudder to think. They are providing some exploded diagrams of the models so you can locate a part number for what you need with an elaborate stock coding system and a massive PDF list of all the parts. So before, where I would have ordered a few sprues from Howes for the stock box for use as 'consumables' on scratch-building or detailing projects, now I don't think I'll bother. The Anycubic photon will have to substitute... Guy

Yes, similar to Kev’s work here: Not a priority project at the moment mind...