Adam

Yes, they go behind the steps - a common position for tank engine injectors. I need to finish mine but before you fit them properly, do check that they clear the rods. I had to remove quite a bit of whitemetal to achieve clearance (in EM). Adam

Thanks Joseph - that confirms what I dimly remembered from the book and the track layout (at 5 am with a feeding baby, I wasn't able to check!). Yeovil would be more akin to the local passenger workings, which is why I suggested it and I'm sure they'd have used the up platform for a shunt; brakevans seem to have been a scarce commodity and the Western more controlling than most so two would be an extravagance. Adam

And the picture appears - with appropriate branding - taken at Bridport in the books in the line. I’d doubt that branch freight traffic, unless for export, would have gone to Weymouth; though you’d need a sight if the working timetable to be sure, far more likely than Westbury would be tripping the goods to Yeovil (Pen Mill), which had quite a busy yard, combined with other traffic there and thence to Westbury. Again, I’m fairly sure that there’s more about this in the books on the branch. Adam

In one of my books - I’d check but I’m away from home at the mo’ - is a nice colour picture of 9635 with smoke box plate and ‘GWR’ on the tanks, dated to ‘62. There’s a shot on Flickr showing it immediately post-repaint at Swindon a year later with the ‘G’ clearly visible under the new paint. Needless to say, my Bachmann pannier is down for a repaint... Adam

The sections of the Southern mirrored the pre-grouping companies: Eastern was the SECR, Central the LB&SCR, and Western the former L&SWR. This is *still* more or less reflected in the current franchises. So the boundaries are roughly Portsmouth and Hastings (and I suppose, formerly, Tunbridge Wells). So the Southern’s share of operations around Weymouth were part of the western section (though complicated by the relationship with the GWR). Adam

The key thing about coaching stock on the Southern is that they ran in fixed sets, so if anything, the formation of the coaches is as important as the colour they were painted (oh, and which bit of the Southern you're talking about, the three sections were quite different, reflecting their pre-Grouping origins - you can still see that in the state of Victoria which remains fundamentally two stations, a Brighton one and a South Eastern one with WHSmith in the middle). So there were two-coach sets, three coach sets (which could be Maunsell, Bulleid or mark 1s but never a mixture), four coach sets and longer with a slew of loose coaches that were used to augment the sets. It's... complex. Adam

In theory, this is an excellent and worthwhile project, which has lots of parallels in historical research so there are a number of established methodologies. I'm looking at this as a working university historian who has been involved in a couple of decent-sized transcription-based database creating projects. You can forget a research council funding this by the way! Whatever you decide, it would be a very good idea to talk to the relevant specialist at The National Archives (TNA) first. I'm not sure who that would be (I'm a medieval historian and the TNA is huge), but my friends at TNA are very helpful and knowledgeable. You might also find it useful to talk to the Head of Research at the Railway Museum who knows how to frame a research project - they're in no position to fund this either by the way. So some examples. None of these are directly analogous, but should give you some idea of how this sort of project can look: There are the census transcriptions that fuel the genealogy industry (many, for complicated reasons by the Church of Jesus Christ and Latterday Saints) - these are a bit rough and ready, but remarkably comprehensive (i.e., whatever the population if the time was), making mere wagon registers seem small. Check out Ancestry, Find My Past, etc. There's the Anglo-American Legal Tradition project which photographs and puts online many hundreds of thousands of images of English legal documents (for free, for researchers with a modicum of guidance): http://aalt.law.uh.edu/ - note that this is supported by endowment and the images are licensed by TNA: it's not quite as simple as taking pictures systematically and putting them online. Transcribing Bentham: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/transcribe-bentham - 20,000 pages in various languages, quite a high editorial overhead on this project with lots of data checking. Of course the form in which the transcriptions are presented needs thinking about and there is the question of searchability and workability: this sort of volume takes a lot of server space and that has a cost. That said, it shows that old writing in English is perfectly readable once you've got your eye in. The Railway Work, Life and Death project has a database of historic railway accident reports: http://www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk/. It is an academic research project - and it isn't meant to be comprehensive except for certain sorts of records - and the Principal Investigator, Mike Esbester is someone I know and has a lot of time for the levels of very specific knowledge that exist among enthusiasts, modellers, etc. So if I were contemplating this seriously the questions I would need to answer are these (I'm guessing to a certain extent because most of the published work on wagons that I have lacks meaningful archival references). 1. What documents are we actually discussing? i.e., what are the TNA series and item numbers that appear in the catalogue? (e.g., RAIL 254/256 - that's the one I found easily from a quick search of Discovery, so presumably the series is TNA, RAIL 254). How many are there? 2. What is the scale of the job? What form do the documents take? I'm guessing large ledgers? And how are these laid out? 3. What - if any - work has been carried out on these documents to understand/show how they were put together and for what purpose? Has this been published? This would be enormously helpful in designing a project. 4. Is the information consistently recorded under the same headings for every wagon/class/group? Would you like to preserve this in any resource you create? If it is then a database-driven approach might be best, if not then transcription might serve you better. 5. Do you want this to be comprehensive? If so, how do you achieve that? Document by document is probably the best way to preserve consistency, but would that yield the result you want? Do you want a handlist to find out about particular wagon types for those with access to the documents (and that *is* valuable and does not exist as far as I know) or full coverage of the GWR wagon fleet from 1837 to 1947 (or later?). Sorry that this is a bit long, and apologies to Duncan if he's already thought of all of this, but the sort of scale and crowd-sourced research you're talking about is something where others have gone before and it's much better to work with them where you can. Adam

Anything with motor train gear is a swine. Having installed all the visible pipe work on a Terrier (before Hornby/Rails came along) I can’t help but envy the amount of space something the size of an I3 gives you. That and being able to use ‘normal’ size bits rather than having to make everything a size smaller. You’re right that these things are only superficially plain and need the pipe work to look ‘right’. Adam

No. The X2 is a rather bigger loco (16" rather than the 14" of the RTR model). Boiler's pitched higher, and is bigger, etc. Adam

To give a sense of exactly what is wrong with the DJH S15 and the work required to get a loco that looks like one (a Maunsell example in this case) you could do worse than to take a look at Andy Avis's thread on his effort: I remember talking to Andy about this before he started and even then we were of the view that it was a dog of a kit. Hats off for his persistence however. Adam

Very nice - is there any particular reason why it has a BR smokebox plate fitted? I know some tenders lasted with the letters 'GWR' on the side (Frilsham Manor had on into the '60s) but did 6363 keep one with a Shirtbutton? Adam

I'm really not sure that's the case. They certainly were not a small, local company in the way that say Tasker, Savages or Robey were. Sentinel were a relatively tiny player in railway applications but were a major player in steam-powered commercial vehicles (with a substantial factory - using innovative, quasi production line techniques - and fairly extensive housing for its employees in Shrewsbury and a subsidiary in Chester (which is where the loco conversions were done). They made literally thousands of steam lorries between 1920 and the late-30s and 100 S types for Argentina as late as 1950. Steam locos were a sideline really, albeit a significant one, and one of many that they applied their high pressure boilers and high speed steam engines to, pretty successfully. They would certainly have had a tech pubs department producing manuals and other things and these would have been illustrated. Adam

I'm sure I can find my Mercian rendition of an X and take some basic measurements. The real thing was a bigger loco, and more powerful than a B2, which was a 14" type - the X had 16" cylinders and thus the boiler was likely bigger in length and diameter. To give you some sense of the difference, a 14" Barclay is around 15% smaller in all dimensions than the broadly similar looking 16". So I reckon you might be able to get a representative HO X class out of a B2, but I'm doubtful that an X would work in 4mm. Adam

As Stuart (Barclay) said. The other factor here are those shiny wheels and rods which draw the eye a bit too easily. It'll come together. Adam

Yes, Lord Salisbury was an X class (Mercian used to do a kit). Though superficially similar - the Peckett house style was strong - the wheels are bigger, the wheelbase is probably a bit longer, the boiler is certainly mounted a bit higher and that has quite a big effect on appearance, and the cab is a strange squashed thing rather than the more elegant and generous effort on the B2. I wouldn't even think of it but your mileage may vary. Adam

The key variations are 4' as opposed to 4' 6" wheels, and a cab roof of a slightly flatter profile. There's a conversion of a Hornby 08 here: http://www.emgauge70s.co.uk/model_omwb154.html and here: http://www.emgauge70s.co.uk/model_omwb153.html. Adam

A pair of completed (well, in one case, all bar the shouting) milk lorries to serve the off scene dairy on the layout. Both are from Road Transport Images bits and both appear further up the thread, but here they are in the full colour finery. First the complete one, the Austin FF in the (fictional) colours of Bateman of Pitney, mover of milk churns. The real Bateman is a friend who'd probably be bemused by it... Glazing the cab took a bit of care. I'd managed to lose the vac' formed screen that RTI supply and so had so sort my own replacement from OHP slide film that I'd kept in the 'solutions in search of a problem' folder. Before painting I thinned the bottom edge of the opening and cut a strip of the film which conformed to the inside of the cab nicely. Once fixed in the middle with a spot of superglue, the ends were trimmed to approximate shape with scissors and the full fixing was achieved with a bit of Glue 'n' Glaze and looks not all that bad. While the Austin has hung around for some years, the big Scammell MU has been a bit quicker. Given the geographical setting of the layout a big milk tank *should* be an 8-legger AEC in Wincanton livery and maybe I will, one day, but I like Scammells and United Dairies owned plenty. This one needs plates and a spot of weathering, but not too much as milk lorries were generally well-scrubbed. Adam

Masokits? Seven pairs (self assembly, involving some fiddly soldering, much aided by metalblack and of course via rather 'old fashioned' mail order). Excellent value and I've never had one fall apart. The Accurascale version is four pairs for £7.50 (though those are more suitable for more modern prototypes or locos). Adam

Hi Stu - I hadn't see the Accurascale couplings until now. I see what you men about the tommy bar which is a bit of a shame, but the stem on the hooks is so short I'd want to replace those anyway. Worth looking into for the price. Adam

True - though heathen that I am, I build them all long. The spare links, of whatever length, are incredibly useful for all manner of things - lifting eyes, fixings for things, tow loops... Adam

Hi Stu - the screw couplings are Masokits: https://traders.scalefour.org/masokits/ which look reasonable and are indestructible. Having done a bit of googling, it seems that the bodies are fairly representative of LMS or BR all wood-bodied opens. There's a maker's picture of a real Ralls wagon in the replies here somewhere: The real thing seems to have been a Gloucester C&W wooden-framed thing 15' 6" over headstocks. So, yes, a Cambrian chassis would work with the body, but not with the livery. Adam

More churns have just arrived in the lunchtime post, but here's some actual modelling (and in the form of a couple of relatively quick projects - there are others dragging on, but more of these later). This pair of Lowfit, both with LNER-type fitted brakegear but different in construction. Obviously in model form they're both rendered in Kirkcaldy-tooled plastic. The more complete of the two, fully lettered and liveried is the BR-build, from the Red Panda kit but with a Parkside LNER chassis: Hopefully, you'll be able to see the additional work on the brakegear (which I've been told isn't worth it, more than once...) and the slightly wobbly tare numbers. Oops. Here's the other, an LNER, wooden-framed version, like this one: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blue-diesels/45772458865/ And from underneath - obviously there are levers and lashing loops still to add, but probably no Ford Anglia. Stay safe everyone. Adam

The 200 HP is a bit longer, though obviously there's a bit of a risk with such a 'square' wheelbase to gauge ratio. I can't speak for P4, but my pair give no trouble at all in EM (and only 1 has a flywheel). Adam

Yes, that's right (and is as it is on the models). Adam

Found the threads: 100 HP And the 200 HP: Adam