big jim

I blame Bachmann and the double fairlie!

Feeding time, spot the odd one out!

And the boards all screwed to the cross members, nice and solid with no real flexing and to get an idea of what i can fit in the space ive placed some of the mill buildings in place as well as an engine shed Looking along the back, the narrow gauge line dropping down the incline and crossing the heritage line on the level Set of points into the heritage shed Mill buildings can be linked up to make one big building I recon Gatehouse entrance and boiler room end of the mill Adding some skirting to the other edge of the boards means I can maybe continue the narrow gauge around a touch more to a terminal station alongside the run round loop, I may week add an extra 20cm to that edge too

I dunno, a damaged obstacle deflector could mean the loco or unit is a failure, a damaged air dam isn’t a safety critical item requiring it be declared a failure, two totally different items for example a missing obstacle deflector (life guard) on a 66 is a failure but if the front air dam (skirt) is a bit bent, but not effecting the safety of the loco, then it can continue until repaired

Got some wood earlier to extend the back board a touch, got B&Q to cut the sheet down the middle to give me 33cm if board but putting it in place it was just slightly too wide, meant I’d struggle to reach over the layout to the display cabinets I decided to reduce the width by 10 cm or so down to 20cm wide which I cut back with my circular saw, as the boards are above the cabinet doors I need to keep the supporting boards thin so have used 9mm timber at the back and a length of 9mm skirting along the front as it’s wider so hopefully be able to be secured better I’ve just got to pop to Screwfix to get some small wood screws and hopefully I can secure it later as well as the other bit of the town area as for the skirting as that’s the same width as the baseboard I think I’m going to get another length of it and run it along the edge of the layout on the station side to widen that bit a touch (65mm) so the passing loop isn’t on the edge of the board but that’s for another day

Made a kit that’s been in my ‘to do’ cupboard for about 3 years, a Kibri Gottwald rail crane a nice little kit, Lots of moving parts, it’s most likely going to be a static model sat in the sidings as it’s not got much Bogie movement! With the jib out it’s an impressive looking thing I’ll have to add a match wagon to it to carry the lifting beam, seeing how it looks with 1/2 a Dapol FCA placed behind it obviously it needs the decals adding as well as the yellow plastic weathering down

Not much done today, Secured part of the town board as well as measuring up the height of the castle board ready to secure I got myself a Metcalfe arched wall instead of the gatehouse I built The gatehouse can move around the wall a bit though so it won’t go to waste

172s are simple enough, just wait until you have to learn 196s

little from column A, little from column B

Yeah I did spot the charter going over the top of me at washwood Heath!

Yeah go through that quite a bit late at night, normally in the day there is a terminating unit in the platform so you cross at pleck i remember not long after starting with colas I was working my first train through walsall having not done it for a while (a good 3 years!) since the old fastline coal trains from ironbridge, I’d ‘refreshed’ the route and put it back on my card but not realised they had removed the blocks and it was now a through road. I came round from bescot on greens and into the station only to suddenly have that sinking feeling that I was heading up the dead end road into the (now non existent) buffer stops! I threw the brake in but then thought, hang in I’m running on greens so I can’t be heading to the blocks, I then crept into the platform before realising I could get all the way through!

The hardest thing with the new phone is keeping the lens free from grease or smudges, you can see in the first picture below how it effects the lights anyway some from this evening, RHTT rugby to Kings Norton, running mega early due to the passenger service being all over the place thanks to the storm last night rugby Pretty much non stop to kings norton arriving in 2 hours early! one stupid little light engine move tomorrow toton to bescot, hardly seems with coming in for!

Some from last night and this morning first up, bescot to rugby rugby taxi back to bescot to work another to rugby but the driver of the other train realised we would be following each other from walsall so we did a swap there and he went to rugby and I went to hams hall bescot Walsall My other train arriving for the swap Hams hall And then another one from hams hall to bescot And into bescot Running round in the snow And homeward bound, again in the snow in Wolverhampton back tonight for the RHTT from rugby to kings norton

One of Hank and John to compare sizes! Hank (the black one) is 18 month old and John is only 13 weeks old!

Go on, I’ll give you that…… from the GB manual which was updated from the original BR manual

Picked up a Bachmann Shakespeare express train pack for £144 earlier during eBay/nectar power hour which between 12 and 1 have you 50x nectar points, buying through TopCashback have another 6% cashback i got £36 worth of nectar points and £8.64 cash back so it’s taken it to below £100 for a Bachmann hall, 2 pullman and a MK1 brake coach as well as an open top bus, really pleased with that to top it off the seller is on my cycle route between wolves and bescot so I’ll be collecting it later this evening on my way in, gonna be fun carrying it though, bought my big backpack along with me

EDIT: OFFER ENDED

Just a few from last night, final night of 196 testing this week I believe this wagon at Tyseley has the distinction of being the oldest wagon used on the network as it’s used ‘mainline’ to travel with rubbish between the carriage sidings and the factory side of Tyseley depot, hauled by the class 08 they have on site A shorter job last night, just crewe and back to complete the mileage required to be accepted back to 66s tonight

EDIT: FLASH OFFER NOW ENDED

I simply call the bit on the front of a 66 below the buffers the skirt, agreed, the obstacle deflector is the lifesaver directly in front of the wheel as for class 60s having ‘snowploughs’ I’m not sure they are for snow in particular, I think they may have been planned to be used for ballast ploughing in possessions etc and they used to be able to be raised up and down but the mechanism is locked off now with lock wire, some of the locos I’ve driven still carry the tool to raise and lower them them in the clean air end, almost like a cranking handle

Some from last night, got the train from crewe as 37175 and 37612 came in en route to manchester tyseley, 196110 again Crewe Malcolm train passing through crewe Stafford Trafford park to Southampton service passing through the station

Weigh in day and I’m now down to 16:10 so 1lb more and I’ll have lost exactly 6 Stone, hopefully I’ll lose that this week but the cycling will slow down a bit compared to the 30 mile I did on Monday, only going to get 6 mile in today, 9 tomorrow and possibly 10 on Friday and Saturday nights also working nights this week which plays havoc with my eating pattern but here’s hoping I can still lose that elusive pound!

Here we go, wired in the jumper leads, then the lifting section and we now have trains running on the mainline excuse the mess, I had to move various buildings and wood I had in place for the branchline section to clear the tracks for running apart from a couple of bits of the resin on the rail top near the lifting section that I had to scrape off trains run perfectly over the joints without derailing which quite frankly I’m amazed at given its rough and ready construction!

This evening I wired up the tracks, the main feed is at the lifting section end of the station, drilled through the baseboard and joined all the wires up into a chocolate block and put the feed from the controller into it I then did similar at the other end of the crossover set up so that the feed passed beyond the insulating fishplates the result being I now have a fully working crossover matrix with a live feed either end, I’ve various tried locos across all the crossovers and straight on and have no dead spots (that I can tell anyway!) This may not look like much but 5 locos all live sat beyond the crossover is a huge step forward ive now got to add live feeds beyond the 2 sets of points at the opposite ends of the station and that should make the whole mainline circuit live (apart from the lifting section which will be easy enough to do anyway, hopefully do that sometime tomorrow if I get a chance

Just 3 from last night, 196 testing Tyseley Crewe and back to Tyseley day off today, a bit of layout time I recon