Martin S-C

Hello Derek It has been a while since I visited your layout thread and I am very pleased to hear you are doing well after your incident. The layout is looking as wonderful as ever. Can you tell me please, has it ever been featured in any of the railway modelling magazines ... and if not, then why? I can see Chris Nevard would be able to produce a stunning portfolio of photos of this model.

Its like people find their dad's train collection in the attic that's been there 30-40 years and think people will want to buy a complete 30-40 year old train collection. Like its some kind of essential basic starter set. They they get upset when dealers contact them and offer, not £800 but £200 because a) its not worth £800 to start with and b) dealers gotta put bread on the table too. There also seems to be this line of thought that train sets increase in age the longer you leave them in damp dusty conditions - like wine.

Looking at his other stuff, some is fair price but some he just randomly seems to add a percentage for no real reason. He has a few Silver Fox locos inthere too if you have £150 spare. There's a Hornby newish Pullman coach for £90 and a VERY RARE clerestory for £50.

Is this really worth 500 notes? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334123500107?

On the subject of early/curious station layouts were there any other non-standard ones? The triangle is always a fascinating station shape to look at but I wonder if there were any other oddities out there. Perhaps stations that were termini for one traffic (e.g. passengers) when other traffic routinely went onwards.

Not if its H0 !!

WWII politics is all about forced perspectives.

Who cares what gauge. That's not the point. (I'm going to throw in an unreasonable number of smileys into this so you know I'm not upset!) You said "there is no difference between H0 and 00" which rather surprised me, coming from someone who I know, knows what he's talking about! As I said, there is a huge difference between H0 and 00. I am not going to argue what that difference is, but am arguing that they are not the same - which goes back to my original point, that Airfix were quite wrong to express these symbols on their boxes of plastic soldiers as though they were the same thing. They were stating that the figures in their boxes were both 1:87 and 1:76 scale at the same time, which is patently nonsense and was obvious to even a 9 year old me. The problem being that Airfix didn't intend their figures to be two scales at the same time - so what did they intend? Who knows? But their box labelling was neither correct nor helpful and 6 decades later we have Bachmann perpetuating the confusion. Here I am desperately trying to drag the discussion back to the original posters comment!

Exactly. It was a ruse to mess up Hitler's invasion plans.

There's a huge difference because one is a model railway gauge to a scale of 1:87 and the other is a model railway gauge to a scale of 1:76. Neither are scales. Its plain wrong to offer a box of plastic model soldiers that cannot be at the same time both 1:87 and 1:76 scale, and then describe them in terms of model railway gauges. Bachmann do not have very much to answer for given that we've struggled with this confusion since at least the mid/late 1960s when Airfix chose such a horrible way to label their models.

A Junty made by Triangle Hornsby no less. Unique!

I get the impression that some people paint their garden railings, or perhaps the garage door and feel they are going to suffer imminent financial ruin if they don't use up the paint left on the brush. The first thing their hungry cost-saving gaze lights upon is a hapless model locomotive. The result is what you see before you. I Just noticed its our friends Fails of Sheffield again.

I disagree. 00 is a gauge. 1/76 or 4mm:1 ft is the scale. But the semantics are hardly relevant - we all know we live in a world that's getting dumber and dumber. However these people should have known better... I bought boxes of plastic soldiers like this from the age of about 9 and the use of "H0/00 scale" irritated me then. *And* H0/00 refers to model railway gauges ... er, scales , er whatever ... more than to military scales where 1/72 or 1":6 ft is the scale.

I thought it was a pie. I'm hungry now.

Did you try pigs though? This is what we are trying to deduce.

I'm assuming it was a natural progression from the coaching inn concept from which early railway passenger facilities developed. Operators fell back on the nearest similar arrangement there was to getting a bunch of passengers out of a building where they had bought their tickets and put aboard the conveyance. It probably only dawned very very slowly on railway operators that there were alternative ways to doing it for vehicles that ran on fixed rails. Yes, hence their demise (among other reasons) but initially with trains trundling about the countryside at sedate speeds of 15 to 40 mph this was not an issue. But the single sided station design did fade away quite fast and remained in only a few instances. There's a lot about early Victorian railway practice that was, at the time, eminently sensible and useful (and safe) but which to us now, looking back through time seems alien, complicated and wasteful. Ideas and procedures rarely leap ahead in big strides. Change in practice usually travels at a very slow rate with various things tried, used for a while then slowly put aside in favour of a different way of doing it. We see the evidence of some early practices like coach turntables and one sided stations and they seem odd to us now, but at the time were perfectly functional. I find this concept of how the modern mind views the past (in other spheres, not just railways) to be endlessly fascinating.

I think there's a bit of fun in the creative almost-fantasy school of modelling. I've seen some great photoshop images of preserved diesels in fictional black and silver with pre-1956 BR emblem and they look wonderful. A model based on a parallel universe but technically functional early BR could be a fascinating project if you wanted to have more freedom in your modelling.

If you are a Dublo collector that probably is 2,500 quids worth.

I find the smoke-free home bit of info useful. I once bought a loco where the box stank so badly of nicotine I had to dispose of it at once. Luckily it was sealed and the loco inside wasn't too bad. Any information, if its factual, helps.

I've bought a few bits n pieces from 2ktechnologies as well. They seem decent enough to me and tend to have a knack of stocking odd industrial building kits that others do not. I got a nice stone crushing plant thingy from them a while back that will be a part of my coal mine washery one day. But... yeah... the phone number and web address deletions are weird.

Nigerian money launderers maybe?

The seller is "whenitsgone" as in "when its gone we'll be fookin amazed*

Someone has glued the flock down in the churchyard. That takes some skill. Assuming its glued down that is and not just sprinkled loose for the camera. I'm wondering if the Scalextric track on the floor is included. Even so, still not worth that much. There's another layout part-built for £525 linked as a similar item on the same page. Now while that's mostly baseboards it does in fact show evidence of proper modelling with a fairly prototypical terminus station and some decently built baseboards under it.

Those were the days when red paint was called "red" and not "disembowelled orc guts red" and black paint was called "black" and not "Sauron's underpants black".

He does have some value on this planet, even if it is only for us to enjoy a chuckle.