Lacathedrale

I'm so sorry :( Can you please give me the executive summary or direct me to roughly where it was discussed in the ~140 pages? :)

Sorry if this question has already been answered, but the photographic samples in the Hattons website of the SE&CR livery show a kind of scarlet colour: Whereas the purple lake livery I believe should be quite a bit darker, like so: Is this something that has been addressed already?

Bought without reservation! What colour did you use for the red, please? I think mine is too close to the SER and P.O. oxides. Would that Hybrid livery have been seen circa late 1890's also? Or is it purely a 1900's thing?

Well, I had been reading the instructions before bed every night :) I think I'm going to need some extended axles to set up the axleboxes and hornblocks properly, so to set myself up for success i've sent over an order to Poppy's Woodtech for their jig that comes with the axles. Speaking of ordering things I've caved in re: the transfers for the GWR wagon, so it will get some of Fox's finest in due course. I am going to continue working on my hand lettering, but since I also needed transfers for coaches I figured it was silly not to just add it to the order. Still not sure what to do about the LNWR horsebox - the turned bearings needed to be removed in order to swap the wheels out and re-gauge to EM-SF, but they were a washout anyway with so much rolling resistance the wagon would slide down an incline with locked wheels rather than turn them. I think it was due to contamination of the bearing surfaces and/or the fit being slightly too close. With the undercarriage 'complete' everything is a right pig to access, I can't even properly clean the inside faces of the arms that the bearings would need to glue against because it's all half-etched joins and inside corners. For now I've used the original slotted approach and may just use a dab of glue to fix a bar across the top of the slot. Hopefully with the length of train I'm looking at for my layouts the rolling resistance will not be acute - I am definitely going to be avoiding inside bearings going forward though!

LCDR coaches are completely different with birdcages instead of duckets and square mouldings, but I might be able to fudge the Hornby NBR lined maroon with the NBR decals removed and replaced, as SER coaches? I'm not sure anyone could pinpoint the coat of arms being wrong! They're not quite purple lake, but look to be closer to it than the crimson used on the Hattons SE&CR samples! That said, I already have six four-wheeled Ratio coaches with the rounded SER-type molding to hand, so it may be simpler to just spray them purple lake (and have another shot at lining 😢 ) and call it good, at least initially. I have also seen some fairly compelling renderings of the Ratio Midland Arc roofed bogie coaches painted up in LBSCR colours, so maybe that would also do as a stop-gap solution for some bogie stock while a few rakes are being built.

Thanks matey, I've got that MRJ so will refer to it in due course. Finally started the loco chassis - it's going well so far! I should probably make myself a B2B gauge, shouldn't I?!

A little tickle of the O gauge BLT from MRN yields the following: Beetford v2 - 13' x 2' Switch the cattle dock and loading dock, and had the goods shed running off a separate line to give some separation to the yard. I imagine a road bridge over the station approach, with a ramp down to the goods yard. There is definitely scope for grouping-era trains on this one with huge platform and siding capacities. If anything I think the station area could do with being a little wider to balance the goods yard.... However, coming back to CJF's final Minories, in light of recently finding it in RM - I'm really starting to like the version I whipped up. It was last seen with SR era stock, but here it is with my proposed LCDR items: Final Minories v1.1 - 13' x 2' It is of course much more densely tracked (only 2 extra turnouts) but has a remarkable similarity to Beetford. The use of three platform faces instead of two neccesitates moving the carriage siding to the other side of the station, and the exigencies of the double track throat mean the engine shed is mirrored into to a trailing instead of facing connection. @t-b-g made a point that a turntable isn't required as long as the FY sidings are long enough to contain a train and two locomotives, so each set of carriages can pull double duty. This wasn't feasible with 64' coaches and 70' tender locomotives, but the diminutive LCDR engines and (at max) 48' bogie coaches give ample room for that hack. So far the only "problem" is that as drawn the radius into the FY traverser is a 36"-31" transition curve. I'm quite sure I can solve that with a templot rendition. I wonder if the biggest blocker here though, is the stock required for a layout of this scope! Four rakes of coaches, half a dozen locomotives, a pilot, etc. - I can imagine getting the track laid but precious little actual usage until several hundred hours of scratchbuilding has taken place! I guess it would motivate one to be consistent in their scale/gauge/prototype!

Well, I've just passed April 1957 and that's the famous introduction of CJF's "Minories" - the modest 1.5 pages doesn't really hint at its massive impact. Interestingly, he suggests that there is almost no focus on pilot working on the original design - rather that the spur is exclusively used for turnaround locos as per the Liverpool Street / GER Jazz service. The pilot locos were suggested 'only' for a variant of the plan which has an enclosed goods shed alongside the platforms. Re: Preserved railways - to me, modelling them is like painting another painting, rather than painting from nature. A huge part of what is satisfying for me in railway modelling is looking directly at the prototype and trying to do that thing - rather than operating within the confines of what a manufacturer or kit designer offers.

Beams for Second Sondes Thank you that makes alot of sense and I'll consider that my method, then! I'm sorry if I'm being a thicko but I'm still not sure how cosmetic axleboxes will work on the outside frames - with this method I'll have a nice square slot in the outside frames with a round axle going through the middle of the void? If I have something tight fitting/etc. Rescuing a GWR Iron Mink The GWR Iron Mink is a Peco/Ratio kit of vintage.that had been sitting neglected in my box of bits without wheels, brake gear, and not only were the transfers silvered and oversized, they were not period correct for a Victorian layout either. Given the known dimensional issues of the kit, rather than spend a bunch of money to buy transfers and parts I thought I'd mend and make do. Early Iron Minks had grease axleboxes so I cut away the front of the oil axlebox mouldings to give a flat fronted approximation. I used some NS rod between the brake hangers, but at some point the brake push-rods and shoes will need to be located and fitted, too! I gave it a few light coats of Vallejo Red Leather (my base 'red oxide' colour) mixed with Red Ink to make it richer. With SER Red Oxide (terracotta), P.O. Red Oxide and GWR Red (darker) I've got lots of reds and not much grey. This was my first experiment lettering with the Easi-Liner and it didn't go well - I will need to experiment further but I get a much finer line and control with a brush. If the LNWR Horsebox ever shows up, you can see how badly that went 😬. I may re-do this in future with transfers, but for now it's sufficient. I tried to use acrylic ink washes instead of oil washes and I now remember why I defer to the latter - there's a palpable lack of depth and variance in specularity that oils provide, so I may go back over this with a thinned oil wash in future. To add some of that depth back in, I drybrushed with the base tone mixed with Vallejo Pale Sand to catch the edges and corners. It still need 3-link couplings installed (and I need to figure out if I'm going to standardise on those for my layout or some kind of auto-coupling system) but is basically complete and is now at least ready for use on a layout instead of languishing sans wheels and with a botched transfer job: Thank you for reading.

Looks lovely, and so neat!

Sorry, I understand what you mean about the use of the tubular bearing on the beams, but depending on the thickness of the bearings, there must be some slop between the inside face of the bearing and the outside face of the axle, otherwise the axle couldn't roll and would be held parallel to the axis of the bearing?

Interesting! what kind of fit between the bearings and the axle? Presumably some slop otherwise the beams wouldn't work? In other news, rather than start the R-class chassis I'm wrapping up the two half-built wagons I've had knocking around - the LNWR Horsebox and the Peco/Ratio Iron Mink. Honestly I was not hopeful for the end result and frankly they are quite a dissapointment you might see them in the background of some other shots but I won't be featuring them here for now!

I'm backdating my own dodgy Peco Iron Mink and I need to figure out lettering among other things, I don't suppose I could buy just those required from you for a single van, could I? Or if not, where you could get these? I couldn't find anything from Fox, Modelmasters or HMRS!

I'm certainly open to being convinced in making an inside-frame chassis, but It is not clear to me how cosmetic outside hornblocks would work? how do they stay aligned to the horns? If the 2-4-0T outside frame really is going to be a pig, would an inside frame 0-4-2T with a radial axle be any better? Both are on the list but I figured they were both as annoying as each other! I could feasibly

@Keith Addenbrooke my workbench link is somewhat scatterbrained, going from 2mmFS to S to No. 1 to No. 3 to P4 and now to EM-SF. I say without any reservation that building in S-scale was INCREDIBLY rewarding. Really, given how it's looking with my Victorian LCDR plans, I may as well have built in S anyway! The kits I've tried so far have paled in comparison to scratchbuilding. I do most definitely to build some locomotives though, I can't survive on wagons forever - and that will be the telling point. @Regularity @t-b-g @Pacific231G - the use of specific spots must help. The recent screenshot of Charford v4 tweaked earlier showed different coloured wagons, and using those as a kind of sorting system helped also to give purpose, otherwise not only was the shunting frustrating, it was also pointless. Maybe the difference between declaring the latest arrival "passenger train" or "10:03 Rear Portion of the Flushing Mail".

Thank you. Do you have any recommended hornblocks/horn guides for beam suspension? And the position of the beam in the normal position?

Operating to strict operation/rulebook working/etc. is absolutely my cup of tea. I'm sure we've shared this station picture before. Placing the goods sidings on the same side of the station as the runaround does mean it can be shared, which is probably no bad thing. Given the challenges of shunting with clockwork, I do wonder if that goods yard was ever used :) Flipped horizontally it fits into more or less than same footprint as the tweaked Charford v4: Beetford v1 Another example of a station which has alot of room around it - the voluminous runaround could be shortened to make the layout more compact, or as-is the goods area could easily be pulled around towards the curve for some more breathing room. I have always read the 'impractically busy branch line terminus' as a kind of denigration, but I wonder if that's just a misinterpretation of the style of operation that naturally goes with a BLT, i.e. sequence working rather than to a timetable? Like how in Buckingham it's always Market Day, a monthly race-day special in real life may be part of a daily sequence, the weekly loco coal delivery happens on every goods train, and the daily through train to London occurs every hour. My main umbrage was, and I think will always be, that to me as a born city lad - is that I expect a 'real' railway is always double track. Any time I see a single line it feels like a quaint anachronism.

Wow, two layouts in two sheds (presumably with a garden section linking them?) I totally see what you mean about the experience maybe requiring the layout to be altered. In your case, maybe the old Ashburton chestnut of horse shunting expected? The more consider that idea though, and the more I look at Berrow, Charford, Buckingham - I realise that there are a class of layouts where the operators did not just start over, they set about improving them and tweaking them as time went on - in some case, for decades. Maybe it was part of the 'mend and make do' attitude of the time, where it wasn't as straight forward to get a completely different fleet of rolling stock and locomotives, new track or even materials? I like that idea. Particularly I like the idea of building towards a corpus of rolling stock, structures, etc. that would work within reason on any of the layout ideas I'm proposing. Anyway, with regard to Charford's awkward set-back goods yard, the addition of a goods runaround (highlighted in red) on the throat alleviates almost all the trouble with shuffling back and forth to the platform runaround and does not otherwise impact the length of the layout: Charfield (Tweaked 'Charford') v1 I very much like the look of the layout as shown above, it has an air of authenticity - particularly how spacious it looks. I think its secret in this guise is that with the exception of moving the coach set from P1 to P2, all shunting occurs within station boundaries. I also saw Tyling, by Ken Payne - an Early EM Gauge layout in April '57: I think the cutting is particularly effective, and there has been a clear restraint on the scope of the model I think, and it shows - it seems like a remixed Charford v2 (i.e. the first published) with a close attention to prototype detail without being slavish to it. I'm not sure I could cope with quite so much simplicity, but you can't argue the visual impact: gentle curves, view breaks and height changes. The second shot gives me such an impression of peaking over that bridge parapet and staring at the loco simmering on the runaround it's quite queer indeed.

That means alot, thank you. It's been a bit of a hot and stuffy evening so not really fancying getting even hotter with the soldering iron, so I whipped up a CAD of the Second Sondes I'm hoping to build. Originally built in 1865 as a 4-4-0T, then rebuilt in 1878 as a 2-4-0T and again in 1906, they survived on suburban services until 1909. The pink frames are external, the red are internal. I really am leaning towards mounting the horn blocks to the outside frames and leaving the inside frames cosmetic unless someone can give me a compelling argument! The wheels I have available to me are 1.5mm too small, or 0.8mm too large - so I guess i'm going with the smaller ones, and an added benefit is that I guess I will not need to increase the depth of the horn slots when using beam suspension. Do I understand correctly that the bottom of the beam should rest on the top of both axles at their normal resting position (i.e. a little bit of travel up and a little bit of travel down?) Whatever feedback, it's going in the bank- R-class next!

Re: use and non-use of layouts There is of course a danger of the layout not being operated frequently if it's a home layout, certainly that is something I'm bearing in mind. That said, I have frequently talked about layouts and operational potential with a local enthusiast, and I think we came to the conclusion that while it would be horrible to have a layout that had NO operational potential, or a layout which was NEVER operated - the vast majority of my time spent with model railways was either with no layout, or a layout in early stages of being built that was stopped for one reason or another - so though I'm keeping sight of the end goal, I'm trying not to fetishise it. Number of Operators What I meant earlier when I obliquely mentioned working signals and a lever frame was kind of what @t-b-g has said - solo it will afford train running and shunting and lever switching sequentially, but with more than one operator those same moves can happen simultaneously.

Cross-posting from my workbench thread, EMSF appears to be a success: One of those wagons is 6" too long and 6" too narrow, because I put the ends on top of, instead of between, the side sheets. The middle two wagons have glue blobs instead of square nuts on the washer plates. Would most people notice unless I mentioned it? Probably not. But the satisfaction of making them myself and the enjoyment of the process? Vivid and very real to me. I really enjoyed the entire process of scratchbuilding the wagons, and I didn't really enjoy the kits at all by comparison, @kitpw - I think it is as you say, since you are doing it yourself, you know what you mean; there is no deciphering of instructions or drying to work out what fits against what or in which order. I want to build the HL chassis for my SER R-class before starting the scratchbuild, but I'm reasonably confident at being able to muddle through an LCDR 2-4-0T :)

Certainly neater than my efforts! Here are the wagons I've built to-date (LNWR Horsebox excused as I'm still girding my loins to line it out and letter it): I've had the little display plank they're on knocking around forever - it was originally 00/S/0-MF, so I removed the 00 and S laying a new EM-SF gauge rail and some 0.8mm check rails. Nothing is tweaked so far out of the (Alan Gibson) packet and yet runs through very smoothly. I should probably chop out one of the sections and add a dummy vee, but for now it works. EM-SF Test/Display Plank Maybe I should regauge the outside rail from 0MF (31.5mm) to 28.06 for Broad Gauge EM-SF? 🙈

That would make me very happy :)

More tidying up yet, but the first pass is looking OK and it as at least 'me' rather than Fox :)

I'm working to EM gauge. I can't find any information of whether they are double or outside framed conclusively, I'm happy to go with what works well. I didn't realise AG did outside cranks, it may be worth a look. It seems they do two outside-crank wheels, either 20.5mm or 22.5mm - probably better to err on the smaller side, eh?