Skinnylinny

Hi Mikkel,

The buildings look wonderful, as ever. It's reassuring that your approach to the platforms (Peco sides, brick plasticard and Wills paving) is the same as mine - means I can't have gone too far wrong!

This may be digging things up from many years back, but I don't suppose you happen to have any close-up photographs showing the relief and detail on the Langley retaining walls? I've been considering using these for Linton Town, but the lack of any decent photographs to be found makes me cautious, as I'm picky about such things as brick bonds, which restricts me from using the Hornby Skaledale or various laser-cut options, and I'm not a huge fan of printed card for brickwork.

Thanks!

Linny

Oh wow, absolutely stunning! Thank you for sharing with us.

Regarding the loco running backwards, changing the wires over wouldn't help - DCC uses alternating current rather than the direct current of normal analogue control, so it's not affected by the polarity of the controller connection. You would have needed to change one of the CVs ("Configuration Variables" - basically the memory of the chip that tells it things like maximum speed, which direction is forward, etc) on the loco chip - remember you're driving the loco, not the track!

Not wanting to suggest that you were wrong in ditching the DCC (I'm a DC user myself) but if I were starting out in DCC, I'd be starting with an already-fitted loco and having a good play around before fitting any chips, and I'm an electronic engineer by trade! It does seem that by adding the complexity of chips and suchlike, there are more things to go wrong, and it's very sensitive to things like momentary short-circuits, but it does seem that you were very unlucky - I've operated several digital layouts and never seen anything like that happen!

Hi Stuart, welcome! It's good to see your modelling on here too. I loved your Broadstone diorama when I saw it on Twitter, and it'd be great to see more of your shots on here. The D1's also very nice!

Linny

Very nice - I wish my first completed kit had looked that good! The rust and weathering is particularly nice. Keep it up!

How did you get the pale lining? I know that most printers will not print white, which would suggest you're using white transfer paper, but then how did you get such lovely neat curves?

Based on what you've described, yes, there are 18 spokes on the wheels. You shouldn't count two spokes that are opposite - the second one's on the other half of the wheel! 

Another way to think about it - draw a line through the wheel *between* the spokes, then count the number of spokes on one side of that line. 

It's getting more expensive in China to produce, but the wages there are still much lower than the minimum wage here in the UK.

Ohhhhhhh, that's absolutely beautiful! What do you use for cleaning up after soldering? Getting that finish with a fibreglass brush would take me weeks!

Looks good to me! Only one thought - has the interior been put in that Collett the wrong way around? You appear to have the internal corridor along the compartment side of the bodyshell.

There are also the Oxford Rail models of the North British Railway "Jubilee" coal wagons of the 1880s, though they're a distinctively Scottish design with the big hinges on the end door. Some of the design were, I think, privately owned, and North British wagons have been seen as far south as Southampton, though I don't know how much the coal wagons tended to stay local.

I have to say I love the idea of using magnets to hold down the point levers - much easier to reattach them if they get knocked during track cleaning!

I have used a candle effect LED in a station building fireplace - they can be acquired very cheaply from Poundland (other cheap available) in packs of three "flameless tealights" - they run off a 3V button cell from memory, and I blew one up while figuring out the appropriate resistor, but at £1 for 3, that wasn't the end of the world! That being said, a loco firebox tends to be a nice, big, hot fire (hopefully!) so the flickering effect is reduced, if it is there at all. Depending on how hard the loco is being worked, I would suggest that a fairly constant light from yellowy-white (not working hard) to bright "warm white" if barking up a steep hill would probably suit best.

Thank you, Corbs! I did consider swapping the splashers around, though didn't bother in the end as I found the longer middle splasher/sandbox combo disguised the fact that the middle wheels on the Jinty chassis are slightly too far forward!

Mikkel, the rounded end wagon with the tarpaulin bar is a Cambrian kit of an LBSCR D1369 10 ton open (kit reference C33) while the green PO wagon is another Cambrian kit - C53 from memory - of an RCH 1907 4-Plank built by Wheeler and Gregory. They seem to have quite a range of the 1907 POs, as well as a decent selection of pre-grouping wagon designs.

The C class has cost me about £9 for the body, about £15 for the loco chassis, with tender wheels and detailing parts from the scraps box, so all in all some very cheap modelling!

I did - they have been replaced by Bachmann sprung ones. I also removed the out-of-gauge cab roof whistle, the strange continental safety valves and the boiler-mounted sandbox, as well as filing the large central rear window.

Thanks for the comments. I should have mentioned, this is set in the south of England, on the basis that England already had a Great Northern, Great Eastern and Great Western! As a fictional railway company, I have plans to allow rolling stock from other fictional railway companies to appear, including from the North Western Railway (Sodor), the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway (Discworld) and perhaps the Great Northern and Southern Railway (The Railway Children).

A strange moment when in the Pendon video, the commentator proudly states "The overall scale of the viaduct and the train is one centimeter to the foot, or one seventy-sixth of the actual size." Um... does this mean I've been scaling things wrongly all these years?

Looks interesting. I have found that the valve gear covers on the Hornby pug actually pop off with a little persuasion leaving two slidebars (no crosshead though - just a rivet between them to guide the connecting rod). They weren't glued on at all - simply lever the bottom of one of the covers down with a screwdriver or thumbnail. 

Sadly, as always seems to be the case, the camera's gone walkabouts and is nowhere to be seen, and my phone camera is totally useless when it comes to taking photos of tiny shiny pieces of metal... I'll do my best to get the photo up when I can.

Thanks, Nick. I guess I'm a little confused as to why the instructions say to fit the shorter bearings to the front axle, then the long ones to the rear axle (which has the gearbox) - would it not be easier to swap them over? Thank you for the advice about the reamer - it looks like I now have an excuse to order from Eileen's! Anything else you'd suggest I get while I'm there? Turned brass seems like a very hard material to be working by hand...

Looks good! What glue did you use to secure the PTFE tubes? I've found superglue won't touch it... It looks like you've used hot-melt glue. Has that stood up to the rigours of use?

N15class: Yes, that fiddle yard plan has indeed been changed since - the yard above was to see if I could do a siding fan with Setrack points, but having seen the huge improvement in running over Peco Streamline Electrofrogs, I'm loath to have Insulfrogs anywhere on the layout!

In fairness, the kit didn't have that many flaws with it, most of the problems were due to my bashing to get it to fit under that Dapol body...

Dukedog: the tension-locks are actually short enough that on sharp curves it's possible for the buffers to touch... also I'm thinking of trying again with Peco wheels, given that they seem to have been the cause of many of my problems.

halfwit: Can you confirm whether the axles in the tank wagon kit are plain-ended or pinpoint? If the latter, I might try again with a full kit, see if it comes out any better - this being a bodge job, I wonder if the fact my w-irons and buffers clashed is because of the material I took off the ends of the solebars...

...wait, those markings on the ruler are millimeters, not inches... Missy, you astound me...