Colin parks

Hi Claude, Perhaps like many contemporary items manufactured today, the damaged carriage from unit 377 (4)42 was probably not designed to be repairable - are there any spare parts for these units anyway?! Back in the days of BR(S), a coach with similar damage would no doubt have been cobbled back together somehow! Colin

Hi Nick, The Craftsmanship/Clever button does not do justice to what you have achieved with the Coal Tank. That is one heck of a model (and one heck of a speck of dirt!). All the best, Colin

Great shot of trains in the environs of Victoria Claude. I was going to say '377 heaven', but there seems to be an interloper just visible mid-picture, below the gantry! Is that damaged 377 really 377 442?! All the best, Colin

Ah yes, your Sheba Nige! It looks as if your model's bodywork is near completion. A Sheba is on my list of future projects -all those windows though! All the best, Colin

Hi Nige, Thanks for your message. Production is sort of back in 'full flow', though still only one unit at a time! All the best, Colin

That looks very nicely constructed Brassey. For a moment I thought you werebuilding the loco in P4 and S4 - until I read the text more carefully! All the best, Colin

Hi Dave, You would certainly win the 'prize length' of track with that first photo. The transition from bullhead to flat bottom rail really does look authentic and very 50s/early 60s. You probably have mentioned it somewhere, but can I ask what make of ballast you are using? It looks a lot like Greenscene material. Colin

Hi Dave, Great work on the E5X! The finish is as good as the construction of this model. The quirky two-dome design and the prominent tank brackets makes the loco look like a bit of a bruiser. Another LBSC loco to go with it would be nice - a C2X maybe, or a D3?! All the bets, Colin

View of the underside of the trailing pick up bogie, showing the soldered joint which allows some flexibility in the frames. Some cutting out for the chassis, including floors, solebars and footboards (black strips). One floor has been marked out for bogie pivots and has a brass lug which sits in a 0.5mm hole in the floor. This lug will position the Hornby 8ft bogies at the inner ends. The other floor has been marked out for the Hornby drive unit, which takes up more room than a Black Beetle would, so it will protrude into the driver's cab about 3mm. Next will to cut out will be some 10 thou. overlays for the solebars, complete with rivet detail.

Lovely. Just how I remember those units! Colin

Hi Kelly, There is no intentional compensation in the Roxey etched bogie, but due to the design, it does have some flexibility. I deliberately re-soldered the side frames to the centre spacer with just one substantial blob of solder in the middle, which makes the resultant assembly quite springy. (Perhaps I should add a photo of the bogie inverted to highlight the alterations.) I shall be interested to see how you get on with the Brassmasters bogies. At least you will have brake rigging provided on yours! All the best, Colin

A little more work on the bogies: This example is a Roxey Mouldings trailing pick up bogie etched kit. It has undergone major surgery to bring the side frames in by 1.5 mm. As originally folded up, the wheels almost fell out of the frames. With some careful work witht the soldering iron, the side frames are now re-attched and a scale distance apart. There are castings still to go on, but the main metal work is done. The kit does not provide transoms nor tie bars, so those have been added from brass channel and 0.5 mm nickel-silver respectively. As with the first one of these kits that I built, the transoms are only soldered to one side frame. This gives a whippy quality to the bogie, in the style of David Jenkinson's method for building coach bogies. There are plenty more small details to add from brass shim, such as corner gussets, steps,gguard irons and spring arresters. These will all be fixed with Loctite to avoid the risk of unsoldering the parts already there.

Hi pdanny, Excellent build and beautiful paint finish. All the best, Colin

Yes, point taken. But who is going to make the moulds? They are made, essentially, by hand. Colin

The trouble iak that there is that there is nothing in a PD kit to remaster, unlike music recordings, where the basic tracks can be re-mixed from the source material to create a new or improved product. From reading the article in a recent S4 News, it is clear that PD moulds are cut by a highly skilled person using machines and specialised cutters. It is not just a case of re-loading CAD files into a computer-controlled die-sinking machine, someone actually made the moulds. Once the mould is worn out, it means starting again with plain blocks of metal and a good drawing of the prototype for reference! (Not to mention setting up the ejector pins and stripping plates.) If Peco have not expanded the Ratio range, then expansion or re-tooling of the PD kits range looks er, unlikely. All the best, Colin

Hi Adam, Glad to see wagons rolling off the production line again! All the best, Colin

Hi Bernard, It does not take too long to rectify this mistake of the Hornby design deptartment once the beams are removed from the side frames. The collector shoes are moulded in line with the beams, which is wrong but understandable. It is a little tricky to repostition them, but when put behind the beams, they are exactly spot on for alignment with the third rail. These bogies are, despite their little foibles, the best representation available by far. If only the 2 HAL trailing pick up bogies were available as a spare parts. Colin

Hi Dave, We will probably never know the answer! Colin

Hi Dave, Spotted the 12" sleeper spacing at the rail joints on the track in the foreground- nice! The ballasting looks very neat indeed. Colin

Well, with so many of these units in stock, you can only guess that some mishap during production must have led to them becoming available as spares. The units run really well, so it cannot have been a mechanical problem. Whatever the cause, the units remain a bargain and have plenty of power too. Colin

Nice paint job SRman!

Yes Kelly, it is the very same. (Hornby part number X6953.) Curiously, though the drive unit/motor bogie was packed in a sealed bag, there was evidence to suggest that they had been wired at some stage, although only to one set of pick ups and the motor. I have two units and both look as if wires have been soldered on and then removed - strange! Colin

Some more work on the Hornby 8ft w.b. bogies and the fitting of P4 wheels to the drive unit. On the 8ft w.b. bogies, the brackets on the inner steps boards have been changed for something a little more like the prototype shape. One bogie has had pickups added, cut in a rather free style manner from phosphor-bronze sheet. For the drive unit, Exactoscale 14 mm dia. disc wheels and Hornby gear wheels were bonded to C&L 1 mm to 2 mm dia. conversion axles. This was achived with Loctite 435 for the axle to gear joint and Loctite 603 to bond the brass sleeve to the axle, and the wheel to axle joints too. The Hornby drive unit's gear train and consequently the gears on the axles are designed to be slightly off-centre, just to make life more interesting... The wheels were held with two back to back gauges until the Loctite reacted with the steel axle. This is not for the faint-hearted, because once this stuff has taken hold, nothing will separate the parts! Once the wheels were set, the matter of installing them in the motor housing was tackled . The design of the drive unit allowed so much side play in the 00 wheelsets, that this could not be allowed for P4 wheels. The tyres would just have rubbed against the cosmetic side frames, which are very close to scale width. So, some Plastikard spacers were made to limit the side play of the gear wheel, which reduced the side play of the wheels to 0.25 mm - just enough for the wheels to still turn, though some plastic material still had to be removed from the inner face of the cosmetic side frames - as it turned out. (One set of spacers is shown in place.) ... and here with the wheels in situ and the pick ups adjusted. The side frames then had to be slotted for clearance for the wheels bosses so that the cosmetic side frames could be clipped into position. It really was that close. The wheels are 0.5 mm wider that the inside measurement of the frames, which themselves suffered from not being quite square to the wheels, something that was apparent even with the factory-fitted 00 wheels sets. (I did check, the wheels were correct, the frames were skewed, causing some heavy bending to be employed to address the problem.) And finally, the drive unit shown here with unaltered cosmetic side frame detail, and temporarily wired. (It runs very well.) There is a lot of chopping to do yet: the gargantuan shoe beams need a severe dose of the knife; the axle box covers are incorrect; the guard irons are not correct for this type of bogie and the NEM coupling socket will be excised fro the front transom. The Roxey trailing pick up bogie kit is next up, though it will need the over-width side frames correcting - they are approx. 2mm too far apart from a quick inspection of the etches. Hmm, out with the piercing saw then.

Thanks Kelly. A valuable collection of detail photos. I shall be referring to page five and six quite often. All the best, Colin

Hi 73c, There is a very good image of the chain in Michael Wadman's photo here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelwadman/33337371683/ I can see what you mean about it being easier to operate the mechanism from the platform. Having looked at many photos on the web, it seems that these chains only appear to be on the buffer on the driver's side. There is some interesting pipework under that r/h buffer too. Colin