Tankerman

Wayne, To me that price is a very pleasant surprise, I was expecting it to be around the £30 mark.

On a railway topic, a Class 42 Warship to current RTR standards, which could possibly happen. On a general topic, that the Covid-19 epidemic teaches humans that not everything can be predicted or controlled immediately, and that their behaviour can adversely affect other humans. Which, having seen how a large number of humans have behaved so far, is a forlorn hope

You wouldn't have seen any steam locos west of Plymouth as they were replaced by diesel locos/multiple units by the end of 1962. One of the reasons for this being that it was a lot cheaper to transport diesel than coal to the wilds of Cornwall.

Hi Ray, Thank you so much for taking the time and trouble to try the body swap for me, it is indeed food for thought. I've only recently decided to get back into railway modelling after life got in the way quite a few years ago. It was triggered in the first instance by finding an unused Class 22 in a cupboard, I then found a Class 42 Warship which I remembered was a poor runner and a Class 43 which I bought on a whim a few years ago. Hence my question as to the possibility of buying a second Class 43 and mounting the Class 42 body on it.

That's got to be better than trying to fit the body of an much older model on to a newer chassis.

Thanks Wayne, That's only 35mm longer than the Peco bullhead point which is easily manageable with my planned layout.

Apologies for asking such a basic question. what is the physical length of this B7 point?

Hi Ray, Have you tried mounting the 42 body on a 43 chassis yet? Chris P

My neighbour received a text from Amazon about an hour ago stating that her Amazon order had been delivered and handed to the recipient. The doorbell hadn't rung and there was no knock on the door. She went to her door and the parcel had been left on the doorstep. Fortunately we live in a close where all the neighbours know each other at least enough to say hello.

Hi Trevor, Apologies, I've been remiss as I forgot to mention the Cornwall Railway Society website. It has a number of photographs of the Dock railway, some of which shows the tank wagons and refrigerated vans. In addition there is a lot of information about Cornwall's railways both past and present. I think you will enjoy browsing through it.

Hi Trevor. As far as I'm aware they were as one of the lines in the docks ran next to the building where the cold stores were.

You can get a very short adaptor lead which has a headphone socket on one end and the lightning connector on the other.

The majority of the vanfits would have contained animal feed, mostly either for cattle or pigs, but also pellets for chickens. There were regular traffic flows from Avonmouth docks where BOCM (British Oil and Cake Mills) and, I think, Rank's and Spillers' had processing plants. If my memory is correct there were what were effectively block trains of vanfits, mostly Warship hauled, which dropped off wagons at Liskeard, St Austell, Truro for Newham and Penryn, and ended at Penzance. I'm not sure about the Helston branch, but I think that vanfits carrying such loads went to Nancegollan, possibly up until it closed to goods traffic in October 1964. Penryn was used in preference to Falmouth as the access to the local road network was much easier and closer to the local feed merchants. On the Falmouth branch in addition to the van traffic there was the occasional load of coal in 16 ton minerals. The main coal merchants in both Penryn and Falmouth had premises adjacent to the harbours and most coal was brought in by coastal ships. Other traffic at Penryn consisted of some broccoli and cabbage in their season and varied loads in opens. One other traffic, which from memory ceased about 1960, were tank wagons carrying oil of some sort, I think either Paraffin/TVO (Tractor Vaporising Oil) or diesel for a small fuel depot situated on Treliever Road by the junction with Browns Hill. The end of pipe was under a locked cover to the left hand side of the goods yard entrance and ran down to the depot from there, allowing gravity discharge. Travelling through Penryn there were refrigerated meat vans or containers for the ship provision cold store at Falmouth Docks, vanfits carrying shot blast granules, used for cleaning the ships hulls before repainting, bitumen tanks, there were heated tanks near the head of No 1 dry dock, steel plate for hull repairs, the quantities varied depending on how busy the Docks were and the nature of the repairs being carried out and various vans and opens with all the items necessary to run a ship. I hope this has been of some help.

They worked the Falmouth and Newham branches from the time they displaced the 45XX and 84/94XX until November 1971 when the local goods facilities were withdrawn. If you saw a pair of them on the Paddington-Falmouth between 1959 and 1966 that wouldn't have been that unusual as they often ran in pairs to substitute for a failed Warship. My abiding memory of them is being at Truro on a Saturday when two of them arrived heading west at the head of a train for Penzance, which included the failed Warship. The weather was bad as it was a westerly gale and the noise they made getting away on the curving adverse grade was unforgettable.

Being ex Merchant Navy myself, albeit in peacetime, I always stand in remembrance of the men of the Merchant Navy in both World Wars, particularly those of WWII, who in 1940 and 1941 suffered a near 50% death rate. Their sacrifice is now almost forgotten, but without them none of the armed services would have had very much to fight with and both they and the civilian population nowhere near enough food to eat.

I forgot to mention how good it was to see Treneglos again. I first saw it at an exhibition some years ago, that many that I can't remember where. What I do remember is that I was convinced that it was an actual location. When the operators, who were very friendly and chatty, told me that it was fictional I was quite surprised, I was even more surprised at their pronunciation of Treneglos and gave them the correct one. I doubt any of them remember this, but if they do thank you for creating a layout which truly captures the Southern west of Exeter,

This was my first experience of a virtual show, I have nothing else to compare it with, so my comments are very much those of a novice. The first comment is that if this is the normal standard of production that your team can produce then all I can say is "More Please!" I particularly liked the fact that it was a series of items, rather than being all put on the site at once. Also that the items were left on the site so that they could be looked at after the inevitable breaks in viewing for brewing tea and what are euphemistically called 'comfort breaks'. The whole thing clearly took an awful lot of planning and work to put together and in me you have at least one very satisfied customer. Lastly, the highlight for me was the interview with my fellow Cornishman at Kernow Models. He was in my good books anyway for producing a second production run of the D6XX Warships. For personal reasons I couldn't buy any of the first batch.

Twenty odd years ago now the name of the building manager at one of the buildings in W1 I visited to carry out insurance inspections was Rick O'Shea.

The British licensees in general didn't seem to build to a good standard, I sailed on the Orissa with a Kincaid built B&W which was also pretty bad, later I sailed on the Garbeta, twice, which had a B&W built by B&W and it was lovely.

Biggest one I every sailed with was a 24,000 Sulzer built by Sulzer at Winterthur, being built by them to their standards, instead of a licensed builder, it ran like a sewing machine.

Quote - The little boys' regular call of "A no rack!!" earned them the self-same shout as a nick-name for them. [See, it wasn't the little coats, after all] But it was the little coats that gave rise to their nickname of Gangy's in the 1980's Green Anorack, No Girlfriend Yet

A quick question for those who have one of these models. Is it possible to widen the back to back distance of the wheels to EM gauge as done with the D63XX?

I agree with Gwiwer and like him I have just ordered one, in my case D604. I missed them the first time around as personal circumstances prevented me placing an order.

For me it's peanut butter yes, Marmite NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Yes, the days of Eddie Beaton, if I remember correctly he started as an apprentice in the shop and worked there until he retired or died. Two things I remember about him, he didn't suffer fools gladly and he made roll ups with six strands of tobacco which became half their length when the match was applied. I'm sure you must be talking about the first shop I knew while I was there, the sliding doors faced the main office block and we would try to arrange for a motor winding to need spraying between 8 and 9 in the morning so we could watch the office girls arriving. About 1964/5 the moulding shop, which was on the left hand side of the wide road leading to the wharves was closed and after it was given a concrete floor and work benches we moved into it. His office in that shop was built into the structure and gave him an even better view of the shop floor. Looking back now I would love to take a modern book learnt H&S inspection back there.