wirey33

Great stuff. Look forward to the next installment.

Please, please, please can you remove the items that are no longer in stock ? Nothing more frustrating than thinking you've found a bargain, to have it snatched away from you by those horrible three letters - NLA !!!

Roy Langridge's post (last but one on page 157) is where you should be looking; all the details are there.

It did in some quarters and it will again; and that will be amplified by greater internet access/use. Imagine someone coming back into the hobby after ten years, when Lima was the go-to option for class 47 at £50. In 2015 that someone would find the RRP for a Bachmann 47 was £115 giving a street price of £99. Now we have an RRP of £229 and a street price of £199. That kind of change cannot be maintained in an ever narrowing market.

Also worth noting is the tooling obviously covers at least two of the boiler port types... 47815 / 492 / 578 - Spanner MkIII 47596 / 501 / 600 - Clayton And as they re all post-Tops numbers, they will have the Serck Radiator Shutters.

The £229 price conveniently gives you £199 after the usual 15% discount. I'm sure this is a huge factor in the pricing choice; all hell will break loose when the £200 barrier is broken for an non-sound fitted, non-weathered loco.

If you put a butterfly in one of these, look through the magnifier and squint really hard....

Those boxes are also exactly the right size for Humbrol tinned paint.

I wish you could buy that cheaply in litre bottles...

Their website indicates that they are based in Hong Kong, but have warehouses in the UK, Netherlands, USA & Australia. https://hobbyking.com/en_us/faq?shumTo=IDfreeshipping-terms&shumParent=.faqBox&shumTarget=.block-heading - look under "Other Terms and Conditions". EDIT : And when you do a search there is an option to include global and/or EU warehouses - so that should eliminate issue about VAT & Import duty (as long as they have your item in the EU warehouse)

The Oxford ScotRail TSO twin packs are a very good price at Colletts... https://www.collettsmodelshop.co.uk/product/oxford-rail-or763to005b-mk3a-tso-second-open-sc12015-sc12030-in-scotrail-livery-twin-pack/

OK. So what you're really looking for is a complete list of all 'OO' RTP buildings ever produced by any manufacturer and which railway company's architecture they're based on?? Good luck with that. Perhaps a better question might be "I'm modelling area X, in period Y and I'm looking for suitable RTP buildings. Can anyone make any suggestions?"

Bachmann.

No Class 37's were allocated to the Parcels sector, so none were painted in any form of Post Office red. Plenty of locos got the RES livery (08 / 47 / 86) but none got a livery similar to the 128 units or the liveries applied to various rolling stock items (TPO, GUV etc.) A 47 in full Post Office red with "Royal Mail Letters" would look superb.

You might want to spend a good long time reading this thread...

Can anyone explain the Hymek? Can’t see what gauge it is? Odd non-Bachmann product code? if it’s OO, why go up against a fairly acceptable Heljan model? I is cOnFuSeD ??

I would love to see the original JGA wagons built for Hall Aggregates (later RMC) as produced by Standard Wagon. Started off on the Southern Region in 1984 working sea-dredged aggregates on the Newhaven to Tolworth/Crawley circuit. Later transferred to the pool working from Peak Forest to many Northern/Midland destinations and latterly also ended up working from the Mendips to London. A long lasting design (30+ years) and widespread usage. Quite good looking wagons too; if you like that sort of thing !! Useful info here.... https://www.ltsv.com/w_profile_013.php

The perennial problem of glamour locos on glamour trains in tiny spaces. If you model a mainline terminus in 6ft it becomes like one of those kids puzzles with the square blocks, you have to move one block to free up space to move another block; and it’s never the one you want to shift. Thinking out of the box, with some “Rule #1” sprinkled on top….. The Southern Railway holiday expresses like the ACE started out as large trains but by the time they reached their destination, they had split into much smaller ones. The locos used would certainly be called mainline (West Country, BoB etc.) How about developing this into a GWR version? The train starts at Paddington, heads into South Wales, beyond Swansea and onwards to Tenby and Milford Haven, but a portion of the original train is destined for Marloes and St Brides (totally fictitious railway but a cracking name). Of course there would be a turntable for these large engines, but that can be off-scene. You can also have local passenger trains with 2 coaches and a pannier, some freight - fish traffic, local general goods and household coal. Maybe it’s stretching the imagination, but isn’t that what this hobby is all about? Tell the story, make it half-way believable and Bob’s your mother’s brother. PS - If you use “Marloes and St Brides” as your layout name, I want credit

I saw a handful of reasonable prices at the MonkBar Model Shop ín York... http://www.monkbarmodelshop.co.uk/index.php?route=product/category&path=161 Bachmann Class 37 37025 In BR Large Logo Livery is £129 Bachmann Regional exclusive 37685 in InterCity Livery is £129 (sound fitted is £209) Bachmann Class 37 37275 in Railfrieght Metals livery is £139 (sound fitted is £219) They also have stock of the ScotRail livery DBSO which has sold out almost everywhere (currently 5 in stock)

Scrap it, build a new one. Alternatively, these gadgets seem like they might be useful (available from Amazon etc.)

Awesome; until they fall off.

The last version of your trackplan is going to be really dull to operate. Train In / train out won't give you much variety. I go back to the Minories layout - it's been repeated hundreds of times times because it's a really optimal arrangement for a small terminal. Add in the kickback siding to some kind of industry (or a Parcels / Newspapers depot for an 80's timesscale), perhaps extend the loco siding to accommodate a DMU and it's about as good as your going to get in a restricted space.

Kickback siding Domestic coal? Would work with your mineral wagons for the 70's, but they would have been HEAs by the 1980s though. Timber? Oil terminal? Vans - Deliveries to a warehouse - Full of anything from Avocados to Y-Fronts? Departmental siding with a crane, some ballast wagons? Train arrives into the siding above the platforms, propels the wagons into one of the sidings and then goes off to re-fuel / stable somewhere. The 08 shunter comes off the second siding and shunts half the train into the warehouse/oil terminal etc. Shunter swaps over the two halves of the train, then joins the two halves togther and pulls them to the bufferstops. Train engine returns, couples up and off we go. The layout shown on the Gavs Workbench has both coal and Warehouses. I really like the two different lengths of warehouse sidings, creates some interest and moves away from the "cram in as much as possible" school of layout design.

Peco also do printable versions of their track, so you can have a play with various ideas. This works well if you can’t use one of the computer based track design programs. I very much like the kick-back siding idea, it gives a whole new activity to the layout rather than just a train in, train out, which could become dull very quickly. It removes the traverser possibility and shortens the storage sidings, but I think that’s worth it for the extra interest a shuntable siding would bring.

Your track plan is very similar to the classic “Minories” by CJ Freezer. No offense, but yours looks like a train set, his looks like a model railway. Take look at this blog. There is a development of the original halfway down the first page which has dimensions which will help with your width query even if you don’t use this exact plan; it’s for OO so it’ll need adjusting for your N Gauge. Click on the link to Gavs Workbench to see a very nice layout; plenty of inspiration. https://esngblog.com/2016/12/18/minories-1-the-original-design/ Good luck.