Satan's Goldfish

It's not minories, but YouTube just threw this at me which is 2m x 1m n gauge with a terminus station and track through scenery and it made me think of your post https://youtu.be/-TaiQ5gRghM

Global warming being what it is I suspect they'll enjoy the warmer weather... If they're not fussed about getting naked in public now, then I doubt they'll care if there's suddenly some cameras around too Just out of curiosity what is the rate of erosion for your part of Lincolnshire? Wondering how it compares to the Norfolk/Suffolk rate of land loss.

I once read that only a couple of the ECML TGS received buffers for those tests before the decision was made that they weren't needed with the 91s coupled up.

I would like to refer the honourable gentleman to my post yesterday at the bottom of the page. Waste will not be stored on the surface or anywhere even close to water level, the eventual erosion of the land into the sea is a good future security measure for the site.

Ref Theddlethorpe, just a quick glance read of this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-57973015 and my immediate thought is there's some standard uninformed (and uncorrected) comments contained in it. The chap that says there's already places to store the waste needs to be informed that there's no long term plan anywhere for that apart from in 1x Scandinavian country where they are already implementing something similar. The woman worried about it being unmanned and nobody having any idea what's going on once it's sealed, somebody needs to explain to exactly what that involves rather than just leaving her worried. The location being close to the eroding coast isn't a problem, it's all due to be buried in solid rock that is well below sea level anyway, not an area of loose land that will take a battering from the waves and cause a major incident. The coast being eroded away in the long run will just make it even harder for any future civilisation to accidentally access the site in a few 1,000 / 1,000,000 years time. Wikipedia article for those that want to know more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository and can explain the choosing of sites better than i ever can! Nuclear related infrastructure always seems to suffer from having had a bad PR department at certain times in its past and people always remember the negatives. I could rant for a quite a while on why i think it's something we should be investing more in, but unless Clive is planning on adding a reactor alongside the line at Sheffield Exchange then i'll resist

@Lacathedrale This might not be feasible as i'm not familiar with Kato track geometry, but a couple of thoughts: is it possible to angle the minories throat and keep it towards the front, or are there suitable curved turnout options so the scenic curve is as large a radius as possible? Wider curves always look better running than tight ones. Do you have the space to make the balloon loop double track? If so, how about having a double junction at the back of the layout after the curve with each pair of lines disappearing into 2 separate double track tunnels. The hidden loop tracks should be long enough to hold 2 trains each (4 total) nose to tail, plus no hidden difficult to access point work behind the backscene which is where sods law states things are most likely to derail. Just a thought anyway.

Def go with 8ft high and roof most likely smooth. Can't help with many other details, although what you've highlighted from your research is you could choose to make the container using a combination of any of the characteristics shown in your photos and i doubt anyone would ever tell you it was wrong. If you plan on making two then go for 2 different styles, but you're right the reinforced double forklift holes do seem to be common to all of them.

The plus side to this obstacle is it has meant the track can't just follow a straight line now and does weave about as it would if built on a mountainside. Unfortunately, even taking the clearest route through, 2 of the plants are too close together and will need moving, which will be difficult to do without upsetting the wife. I now need to get soil under the matting at the far end to bring it up to near sleeper level for running the track into the next bed along. Especially as I believe more plants are turning up on Tuesday...... I've been told the roll of white weed matting I've got is the same as that used by network rail under the tracks, seems fitting for use under LGB then. I'm going to start stockpiling old planks from work for the track bed as well, hopefully that means there's a level surface and no severe gradients when track is finally laid properly.

As happens when working away from home, sometimes life goes on without you. One side of the garden is planned to have raised flower beds along it and permission was received from the domestic authorities to run a single track along it through the plants. While I was away, my mum decided to visit and help my wife with her flower beds by clearing a section (of weeds) and putting the first plants in. Unfortunately this means there was no prior discussion about where the line would run, it wasn't filled with soil to the level it was supposed to, and now I'm having to improvise hard! This stint while at home, I've cleared the rest of that part of flower bed and cut the weed matting to size. I still need to add a lot of soil under the matting to get it to the correct level, but instructions will be left on where NOT to plant things until I've topped the soil levels up. Next was to work out where the line would/could run without disturbing the greenery already planted. Track is upside down for a reason that will become clear shortly... Once the route was figured out, a black spray can has hopefully made it difficult to miss so no plants appear in the permanent way.

This is sad news, Gordon was a very inspirational man and modeller. The interactions I had with Gordon over the years were always helpful and supportive. You will be missed.

I've done some thorough YouTube research, and it would seem the white stripe at the top should go to just above the first roof rib on every single EW iv coach I saw, and RIC coaches, and most of the other EC type coaches which aren't green and grey but have a similar stripe, including the one with the bear on the side (screen shot below, courtesy of Thomas Eckhardt on YouTube). Looking closely at the pictures I took the other day, the narrow stripe on the Fleischmann model is the more accurate of the 2. Luckily n gauge is small enough that from a distance hopefully it's not too noticeable

You've made the same error I did when I first compared them and didn't use the version with the bear on to keep track of which is which; it's actually the Roco version that has the thick upper stripe. I will be wasting a lot of time on YouTube at some point to check, but i thought in green they were all the same thickness, but i have spotted variations on the modern white/black before so anything is possible.

Last but most definitely not least, 16x of these to represent the North Walsham to Harwich oil condensate flow. They all started off as red Texaco TTAs from Hornby but have had added detailing and paint to make them look like the version required and each one is individually weathered differently. I think I need to tone down the 58 pulling them. Cheers again Mick and Dan, excellent work, and good motivation for me to crack on with the wiring!

Wagons! The 2x kadee fitted TTAs to run with the container flats for the WL fuel point have had a good weathering. A couple of randoms; bogie cement wagon and a bogie sliding wall van beautifully grottied up! And a pair of Replica BGs that received a respray into blue/grey. Can never have too many of those.

Some news! Nothing to do with containers or making things run, but some stock for the layout has arrived back from Mick and Dan Lawrence. Admittedly it's been ready to come back for a while but work schedules never lined up. This will take several posts probably... First up, a pair of PCVs for the TPO. These were undecorated prototypes bought direct from Replica way back when WL attended a show at Peterborough 7 or 8 years ago. They're now finally back with the layout and looking superb. I've reduced the TPO set down from 8 coaches to 7 as it was only just fitting in the 8ft storage yard length, the PCVs are longer than BGs which makes it even tighter, and one of the red BGs will be replaced with a BCK courier van conversion which is also a bit longer.

The Ibertren 'version' appeared as a 'you may also like' while I took a look at a much nicer 2 tone grey Roco Eurofima. I'm trying to complete rakes of coaches now but as mentioned a couple of days ago the supply seems to have dried up a bit. Watching far too many YouTube videos, a set that appears often is 2x 2nd class RIC, 2x 2nd class EW iv, 2x 1st class EW iv, and a baggage van. I've all the bits of that apart from the 2x 1st class coaches, there's often variations on that make up and specifically on the 1st class coaches I've seen videos with a pair of 1st class Eurocity, or 1 EW iv and 1 orange Eurofima instead. In an actual stock comparison (not had one of those for a while!) I recently got hold of a green/grey Fleischmann EW iv to compare with the Roco versions I've already got. The grey is a slightly different shade, and the stripe above the green is a different thickness. I'll need to do a bit of YouTube research to see if that different stripe thickness is a common occurrence. In my normal use of it in the push/pull set it won't be directly coupled to the similar Roco version anyway so if one of them is not right then it shouldn't notice so much. The level of detail with the windows etc is fairly similar, I lost track of which was which when I compared it to a Roco version without the bear on! But I think the paint job on the Fleischmann is nicer and a bit more defined.

Thanks Gordon, all useful info. Back to Ibertren, it's easy to see what you mean about cumbersome on bogies on this one. It looks a bit French in style to me, is it a 1st class Eurofima that's been repainted or is it something French that's been repainted? Since the recent change in access to European markets following the B word, it seems to be increasingly difficult to find Swiss carriages on my 'wish list' and I think some improvising may be need, more on that later...

If they've been rebranded, that would explain why they were tricky to find... So (and I'm sorry for all the questions, just trying to learn what's what) are the 2nd class orange SBB 'like eurofima' coaches the same as the 2 tone grey eurocity coaches, after a paint job?

Finally just got around to watching your YouTube videos on the layout. Very well done, gives a good idea of the size of it all. Looking forward to more!

Ibertren by the looks of it, https://www.ricardo.ch/de/a/spur-n-sbb-eurofima-2.kl.-von-ibertren-1111135012/ any comment on the quality of ibertren? I'm not that familiar with them. Additional: I didn't think minitrix did anything scale length in Eurofima orange, but then this appeared! https://www.spurweite-n.de/ncontent/ndb/ndb-artdetails.asp?ID=453054140&DoLog=0&LogType=0&NoLog=1&Sel_Hersteller_FString=Minitrix&Sel_ORDERBY=Produktdatum&ToShow=3379&MaxCount=4478 shame it's 1st class.

It's also worth noting to help with your sizing comparisons that in some of the pictures you can see that the OHL is the same height for both SBB and RhB. For another visual comparison, the RhB also has some piggyback wagons for carrying standard gauge wagons as per here linked from flickr:

Useful insight there Anadin Dogwalker, what 'the norm' was for trains on certain route seems to change very regularly in Switzerland and if nobody has uploaded a video to YouTube from a particular location at a certain time of a certain year then it's anyone's guess what was actually running! I can remember travelling on a 'Swiss Express' set in 1990 from Zurich Airport to Luzern and how bright it's colour scheme seemed to be compared to the dull dark green on everything else. The screenshot from YouTube above was from a video dated 1999 to 2001 and had 2x orange 2nd class (i think, minute 1 of video below) Eurofimas with SBB branding running with the grey version so some of them did survive until quite late on. I know some of the original orange 1st class Eurofima got painted into grey and can be seen in some YouTube vids (the windows are different from the majority of the grey coaches) but I've never noticed a window difference on any of the grey 2nd class coaches which would tie in with the 1st class being more common.

Damn :( Cheers Gordon.

I just had to check something I'd posted earlier in the thread. Something about the orange FS Eurofima coach never looked quite right (outside of ride height and build quality from Arnold!) when coupled to the grey Eurocity coaches. Ref the picture below, the white stripe on the SBB orange coach lines up nicely with the white stripe on the grey coach, but the white stripe on the FS coach pictured on page 2 isn't even close lining up! All credit to HansP74 on YouTube for the screen shot: So the questions that result from this are! 1. Do prototype different nationality orange Eurofima coaches have the white stripe at different heights? I thought they were supposed to be the same, but I haven't seen a picture of an SBB coach coupled to an FS coach. 2. From previous Ebay trawls, I know somebody does/did manufacture decent N gauge 2nd class orange SBB Eurofima coaches, but I can't find any now. Can anyone remember who it was? The orange FS coach will eventually move across to a complete FS train rather than being mixed in with SBB stock so if the white line is at the wrong level then hopefully it's less noticeable there. Cheers

Depends how 'to scale' you'd want it to be. If you're just going for an 'inspired by' type model, HO model curved viaduct parts are available that could give you the look you're after. https://www.topslotsntrains.com/topslotsntrains/final.asp?ref=Faller-120466-OO/HO-Scale-Model-Kit-TWO-TRACK-CURVED-VIADUCT-SET-&id=16732&manufacturer='Faller Kits' if a scale model that's 2 and a half feet high and over 5 feet long is what you're after then you're into scratch building as not many have space for a model that size.