Black Marlin

Can anyone advise on how to open these wagons safely and non-destructively in order to install cattle, ale or produce loads?

Please forgive me for this, as I am only now getting caught up on the thread, but some (very late and therefore ineligible) votes for favoured loco names... Patriot - 5523 Bangor (Home town - but not that Welsh imposter version!) Britannia - 70005 John Milton (greatest poet of English) or, had it had the nameplates that were once considered for it, 70047 G. K. Chesterton King Arthur - 741 Joyous Gard or 805 Sir Constantine (any Hellblazer fans knocking about?) Lord Nelson - 863 Lord Rodney (my grandmother once had a tour of the battleship, and kept a souvenir brooch) West Country - 34030 Watersmeet (a peaceful-sounding place) or, for the hilarity the name engendered in Cabin Pressure, 34045 Ottery St Mary (not to be confused with Weasels King Henry, or Hedgehog O'Brien...) Merchant Navy - 35020 Bibby Line (former employer of a former phenomenal girlfriend) D34 - 62468 Glen Orchy (not far, geographically speaking, from where I enjoyed a phenomenal holiday with the aforementioned. The weather was awful and we didn't get out much.) D49 - 2716 Kincardineshire (where I spend much of my time)

Modellers of the ECML, a question: I've been reading Brookbanks's "Triumph & Beyond: The ECML 1939 - 1959" and he mentions that in WW2 there was a daily train of whale oil that ran in the winter of 1940-1 from Merseyside to King's Cross. Does anyone know what tankers belonging to what company would have conveyed whale oil? I have never seen such a thing modelled, and it would be an intriguing thing to send rolling round a layout... Gavin

Have spent the last few days going through my various reference books looking at photographs to see what prototypical train formations I can recreate with my stock, and noting them down so that I can eventually run accurate trains. One I was very pleased to find is in B.W.L. Brooksbank's "Triumph & Beyond: The ECML 1939 - 1959". It shows K3 No. 1307 with an ambulance train on 27th May 1940. Unfortunately, due to the angle of the picture, it's impossible to see what lamp headcode is in use. I assume Express Passenger 'A'? Or were ambulance trains a special case using something else?

This is a fortuitous conversation, as I've just spent the day in Mr Wright's (literary) company: my copy of "Modelling the ECML in the British Railways era" arrived. And very good it is too: I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would have said that the content is timeless, but 2020/21 has thrown something of a googlie at that. You see, Tony refers to trimming the hanging-basket-liner embankment grass with "a cheap self-haircutting set", and after repeated lockdowns I can assure you that there is no longer any such thing as a *cheap* self-haircutting set...! As for articles I would like to read, and for which I would pay money for that specific purpose, I did this recently, hunting down an old magazine on ebay for the purpose. I want to read articles on prototypical operation. The article I just paid for was on offloading oil at a branchline goods yard. For those of us modelling earlier eras (I'm an LNER man myself), articles that teach you how things worked, so that you can replicate them in model form, are worth their weight in gold.

Is there an explanation somewhere of what differentiates the Hornby Dublo range from the main Hornby range?

Managed to find an old pair last night. Will crack on today!

Well this is irritating. After getting everything together to solder some droppers to some track, I discover that my wire strippers have gone walkabout. The downside to knowing exactly where you left something is that, when it turns out not to be there, you are utterly bereft of ideas for where it might be...

There are 1/72 barrage balloon kits available on eBay. (No connection, etc) https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Scale-model-Barrage-Balloon-kit-1-144-1-200-1-300-1-350-1-450-1-600-1-700-/192826835734?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292

Very late to the party, I know, but for me the best names for the Peppercorns and the Gresleys were: Gresley A1/A3: Hyperion Gresley A4: Quicksilver Peppercorn A1: Silurian Peppercorn A2: Sun Chariot I like 'Sun Chariot' in particular. It puts me in mind of Andrew Marvell's great poem, 'To His Coy Mistress', which contains these lines - "But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; [...] Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run."

Well that's my order placed... In whose company could I better start the new year than Sir's?* *lingerie models specifically excluded from this thought experiment.

Hello all. After a pretty horrendous year that has seen me almost entirely devoid of modelling enthusiasm, may I share my first ever attempt at a coach bodge? I wanted something a bit more reminiscent of the Silver Jubilee than Hornby's own coaches, but being unable to afford much more than a bit of paint and some plasticard, here's what I was able to do. I know it's still hideously inaccurate, but I think it's a wee bit better than the starting point.

Finally I made a card template for the sideskirts and used it to make the skirts from 1mm plasticard. Once they'd been neatened up with a rotary sander in my dremel, I glued them in place and painted them. Tamiya XF-77 is a reasonable match with Hornby's choice of grey for these coaches. Here is the final result, and I must say I'm very pleased with it. I know it's not accurate, and I know the purists may very well howl in derision, but for a modeller on a budget I think it's not a bad approach to getting something that looks a lot more like the Silver Jubilee than what Hornby offers!

With the articulation taken care of, it was time to turn my attention to the streamlining. Again, I'm not looking for scrupulous scale accuracy here - the nature of the coaches I'm using precludes it - but something that gives at least the impression of the Silver Jubilee. So I decided to use what was already provided on the coach as supports for the streamline skirts. I cut a pair of shims for each side of each coach - one 1mm thick, the other 0.5mm thick. Sandwiched together and glued to the truss rods, they gave me a backing that a 1mm thick skirt could be affixed to.

The next task was to modify one of the bogies to become articulated. This was very easy. I simply cut off anything that protruded above the top, and cut off the coupling. I then marked and drilled two 2mm holes for the new pivot pins (15mm brass nails obtained from a set of picture-hanging fixtures) and glued them in place with two good blobs of Loctite 'Power Flex' superglue gel. (I love Power Flex, by the way: it's so thick that it supports small features as it sets, which makes it ideal for gluing crews and headlamps on locomotives).

A project I completed yesterday was to hack Hornby's Silver Jubilee coaches into something that looks a *little* bit more like the prototype. Obviously there are kits available for those who want an actual model of the thing, but I wanted to convert the coaches I had (three that came in the Silver Jubilee train pack). Apart from anything else, it's a damn sight cheaper - all you actually need is some paint, some plasticard, some glue and a pair of 2mm x 15mm brass nails to make the new bogie pivots. I decided to do nothing more than articulate and streamline the coaches. More talented modellers than I could no doubt go to town in repositioning windows and doors, but I wanted to preserve Hornby's lovely paint finish, which meant leaving everything above the solebars alone. The first task was to remove a pair of bogies from the ends of the coaches that would be articulated, and cut off the buffers. I then made new swivel points from layers of plasticard, built up to 4mm thickness and then drilled with a 2mm drill bit. To make life easier for myself - especially since I didn't have scale drawings - I decided to centre the new pivot pin above each axle, and align each locating hole with the edge of the door on the side of the coach. That would give me clearance on curves, and also make marking-up the various things to drill much, much easier.

The whole lot was then covered in a layer of plastercloth, which was then stained and painted. There's still a fair bit of work to do - most notably with blending the structure into the water - but I'm pleased with progress so far.

This was followed by a plastercloth covering and matchsticks to make the steps down to the still-to-be-built jetty:

Hello all and happy Christmas. In this post, some slight (and incomplete) scenic work to report. On the baseboard, I've made a rocky foreshore for the fishermen's cottages. There's still detailing and blending to do, but enough is done that you can get the gist of it. Here is our starting point and the polystyrene used to shape it:

Hi Ade From the back of the layout to the front: Light viaduct over river: Torri Laser laser-cut MDF kit (available on ebay) Girder Bridge in front of waterfall: 2x Noch Girder Bridge (21320) & 1x Noch Approach Bridge (21330) (plus Faller viaduct piers (120479)) Twin-track bowstring bridge: Torri Laser 60cm MDF kit (available on ebay. Note that the kit does not contain the track bed, which I made from 12mm ply) Viaduct with green centre trestle span: 2x Faller 2-arch viaduct kits (120477) (with piers from the kits used with the Noch Girder Bridge) & centre section scratch-built with trestles obtained from Torri Laser Low-level trestle bridge: scratchbuilt from 10mm square-section pine rod and coffee stirrers, with Wills planking and Torri Laser MDF handrails used to complete the walkway sections.

Hi all. I'm afraid I haven't been up to very much, but I have at least completed the right-hand side of the main waterfall!

That's extremely helpful, thank you!