Martin S-C

To be honest it depends what the paint is drying on.

Thanks Ian, I need any and all comments I can get. I agree that coupling quality as well as consistency is important. Its never wise to mix coupling types in model trains, even on the flat. You can multiply the problem several fold when banking. Vehicle weight will matter here as well, as much as engine driving speed. I can envisage some of the longer and lighter wagons like empty Lowmacs, LWB opens or bogie bolsters may cause problems, but I can always add additional weight under any troublemakers or write my own rulebook about how such wagons must be marshalled. All part of the fun of inventing your own railway company. The plan for now is to first assemble a train of known weight and maximum length allowed by the rulebook. I'll start with a longish passenger and a loaded coal train which will probably be my heaviest trains. Then try a test run with every loco expected to work on that traffic type up the bank. If they all get up we are fine. If any do not, they'll get sent to the company workshops to see if we can add any weight to them. If we can, we do so and test run them again. If we cannot we'll stand them aside and conduct a managment review on them to include answers to questions like: 1) do we really like this engine? 2) can we do without it? 3) is there another engine similar we can use instead? 4) what's its second-hand value? and so on... If we find that the answers are: 1) yes 2) no 3) no 4) quite low Then the trains hauled by that engine will enter the "banking experiments" stage of the problem. I think banking is fun but it would be nice to not have to do it very often. I think the fun factor of these model railway diversions can quickly turn into a chore factor. This opens up the possibility of having an early diesel or battery loco as the banker if it might sit there all day and only be used once or twice. On real railways certain gradients had every train banked and/or certain trains had engines of enough power allocated. With my eclectic stable of engines and irrational desire to run pretty small locos I will no doubt have to bank some trains some of the time but I would wish to avoid banking all trains all of the time.

Happy birthday!

I saw the line of males in the 4th pic from the bottom and thought "queue for the gents". Great ideas Mikkel. Shamelessly filed away for use on my layout.

But, but, kind sir. It's not running bunker first its pushing, chimney first!

Thanks for that Johnster, I felt sure the cab end of the loco needed to be coupled to the coach for the auto gear to be functional. I must confess I have never seen a photo of an auto-train running bunker first.

Wonderful to visit you today Gilbert to see the layout and chat about all kinds of things. Great to meet Herr von Duck as well. I learned a lot about DCC control and macros as well as the cassette arrangements. I am sorry to say that Peterborough station is a shadow of what it was as is the surrounding area but if there is anything you need pics of, just drop me a note and I'll easily have time to do a quick photographic trip. Now that I can put a face to the name I won't be calling you Kevin any more either! The photos of that curious green machine with a cab at the wrong end have come out well.

Yes, very definitely you'll get more pulling power as the physics involved are exactly the same as in full scale. How much extra power you would get I cannot say and I'm sure it would depend on the motors, gearboxes, weights of the engines and the speed you drive at. You can double head or bank. You can double head in DC if you wish, still getting more pulling power, as long as the two locos gearboxes drive them at fairly closely agreed speed. With DC you will draw more power so in theory any two locos would both lose some maximum speed, and you can in fact add several if you wish until the current drawn trips the controller. But its definitely possible in DC. You could attempt banking with DC but you have no control over the separate engines of course, something you need for a banker as it must drop off the train at the top of the gradient. There was a big exhibition layout in the 70s that appeared in the MRC which had a banker engine that was the Triang-Hornby Class 76 running off overhead catenary wires up the incline to the marshalling yard, therefore giving a completely separate power system. In DCC you have a choice. You either consist two or more locos together via the programming track and the computers drive the two motor/gearbox sets as one locomotive setting the running speed the same for the two engines. All handled by the computer chips that sit between the power pick up wires and the motor. Clever stuff. Or you can do it the old-skool way and use two separate controllers and (preferably) two people driving and they drive at as close to the same speed as possible. The consist approach is intended for multiple locomotives as train engines as the Americans are wont to do, where some long heavy trains have multiple diesel units; frequently a pair in front, a pair in the middle and another pair at the rear. For British banking and double heading operations its a lot less useful since a banker must assist every passing train up a grade so you do not want to digitally consist it with another engine as you don't want the pair to be identified by the system as one engine. If you do consist two or more engines together they both carry the same address so if they are separate on a layout and you select the consist address, they'll both move. Not ideal and also no good for allowing a banking engine to drop off the rear of the train when it's done its thing. For banking you should aim to get the couplings slack in the rear half of the train so that each loco is handling half the weight and here things get trickier because you really do need to drive the pair of engines very close to identical speeds otherwise if the train engine is moving faster it will put tension into the whole train and end up dragging the banking loco as well (if it has couplings fitted). If it isn't coupled up it'll just be left behind. Conversely if the banker is moving more quickly there's a strong chance of the train derailing as the vehicles all get pushed up against the train engine.

These two coaches nearly ruined me. I really thought I'd give up while I was trying to make these from what the kit builder sent me, into what I wanted. They were expensive buys on e-Bay but I know they are very rare now and I've never seen them again - online or at a show - Frank Bulkan built the pair of brass D&S kits for me and white undercoated them and that was an extra very significant cost - and as some of you will know, since late September I have fretted and cussed over them in various moods and languages. All I had to do was paint them but while painting and weathering wagons is easy for me, I have never liked painting coaches, nor, even, really weathering them. Almost everything that could go wrong did. The white undercoat gave me a base that was too light so the main colour of EWS maroon came out looking too washed out. I then used too heavy a final coat of EWS maroon spray that gave me a horrible lumpy finish. I sat them aside for weeks and hated the very sight of them on my work bench but finally got the nerve to paint the roofs grey and add extra gas lamp covers and piping, the end ironwork black, the underframes dirt color and lastly line them. I used HMRS transfers to line the 4-wheeler which was messy and awkward but after much stress gave a decent line. I used acrylics on a brush to line the bogie coach to see if that would be easier and it was - insanely easy - but it left a rougher, thicker line. Transfers were from HMRS for the numbers and class designations but the crests and letters were commissioned by me from Fox. With the transfers and lining things turned around and even with the indifferent paint job they began to take on the character I'd always hoped for - a pair of coaches bought second hand; given a cheap repaint and used in service for a number of years with minimal serious maintenance but getting a decent wash down quite often. Something in the Col. Stephens style but with a bit more spent on them... more often. I always seem to be experimenting with my weathering techniques and the weathering on these was another style I've never used before. Instead of the greyish-brown-track dirt acrylic wash I usually use, I left them exactly as painted but used black ink and a very fine brush to carefully darken lines at the body base, below and inside and around the lining, at the vents and roof line and around the gas lamp covers, gas pipes and rain strips - almost in a wargaming style. I then wiped this all down with a clean flat stiff brush dipped in water which wiped away much of the ink but left traces in all the recesses. I think this gives a clean look but with grime beginning to build up in the places the cleaners mops don't reach. At last, along with the GER luggage van and one of my freelance passenger guards vans I have my first passenger train complete. In a week or so we'll have some live track to run it on. As received from Frank. Adding interior seating to the 4-wheeler. Adding interior seating to the first class saloon of the bogie coach. Interiors protected by Tamiya masking tape - the ends were too but that hasbeen removed. First maroon coats on. Underframes and running gear painted "Grot" [tm] colour. Painting the interiors. Exteriors being tarted up, black ironwork painted, end steps and verandahs done. Glazing. Gawd how I hate glazing! Holding "Glue n Glaze" adhesive in with "pit props". Glazing and interiors all finished. Several G&Ts consumed in celebration. Lining, transfers, weathering. They need an overall coating of Dulcote to flatten some glossy bits.

It was a labour of love but I was let down by a couple of content providers who let me use their models but then withdrew permission later so it stalled for 10 years or so but finally got finished by a really supportive and dedicated team of friends who were amazing. Its available still for download with all the stock and activity packs (this is MSTS 1 remember) on Matt Peddlesden's UKTS site. I was especially pleased by the guy who wrote the activities for it. We had the entire history of the line to work from so he wrote a complete story for it - from contractors trains hauling dirt in the 1880s to the last diesel demolition train that lifted the track in the early 1960s. Nothing like that had been done before and as far as I'm aware nothing like it since. My favourite activities are the timber trains in WWI when a company of Canadian lumberjacks were posted in a temporary camp near Stanton woods and cut timber for the war effort. Some of those trains were 40 wagons (mostly bolsters and other flats but some low side opens too) and were propelled down the branch at 5 mph. Having trains 3 times the length of the run round loops makes for some hard thinking. We modelled the ammonium nitrate works at Swindon as well and some of the shunting activities in there were real balls of kitten-trashed wool to work out. Great fun. Like massive Inglenook Sidings puzzles but with more sidings, certain wagons that couldn't go on certain roads and of course gunpowder wagons that could not be marshalled next to the loco.

Mm, those first class plush velvety seats look comfy. Just right for an adventurous day out to the seaside with a bottle of pop, a bag of ham sandwiches curling at the corners and a big block of Kendal mint cake. I too found that there were things in train simulators completely unlike real 3D railway modelling that kept me fascinated and the physics of loco performance as well as train weights, braking forces, gradients, etc was one of those endlessly absorbing "new" things that 00 scale doesn't cover. On the Highworth Branch route I built there was a gradient of about 1 in 50 for a mile from the top of a bank at the south end of the Stanton estate woods down across a field and into the small station of Stanton. The real railway (and my simulated one) had one of these placed about 30 yards from the start of the downhill run. And with the wagon weights adjusted (loaded trains went down the hill in the majority of cases), you really did need to stop your train, open up the shunting window and apply the handbrakes on about 1 in 4 or 5 of the wagons, as well as the brake van, before starting down the grade which had a 10mph speed limit. I watched with amusement some drivers who didn't do this and found themselves with a runaway train, sailing happily through Stanton station at a steady 30 mph or so, troublesome trucks in tow, all jostling to be the one in front. I don't suppose, even with the advances in digital technology, we will ever get those kinds of experiences on model railways, at least those smaller than the engineering scales.

I am a Completer Finisher in my approach to many things, not least railway modelling and this evening I felt a great sense of achievement at finishing this little cutie.

I think the boss needs to make the team an offer they can't refuse. "Last man with his steampunk biosuit on gets to couple up the Evil Cheese Tanker".

The tanker of what is now very well-matured cheese is still in the dairy I see. Maybe it could be shunted out and added to a London-bound passenger service so that it can be delivered to the War Office as a possible bio-weapon for use against Hitler?

Prior to tarmacadam what would have been used other than setts? I can't think of a long-lasting strong alternative. Timber might be sufficient for paths and animal tracks but vehicles would need something more resilient. Its curious - this is an issue I've never even thought about before.

Music while you work. Excellent. BTW, John, I think you must be the only railway modeller on the planet who has a workbench that's cleaner than the clean zone of a pharmaceuticals research lab. I don't know which impresses more, your modelling or your workshop.

James, you can buy "3D transfers" of strapping with bolts on, or just the bolts I think.

Some more stills here taken during shooting (so some have modern crew in them). According to one comment on YT by a person who was an extra in the filming there is a faithful scene set on Horsell Common with the heat ray being first deployed as well as a scene on the coast with people having to run down a beach and get into small boats. There are also comments that the black smoke is featured. Apart from two new characters (male and female leads) the story seems pretty faithful to the book. Lets hope there are trains too.

https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a25890001/war-of-the-worlds-2019-cast-bbc/

James, you should post on that steampunk forum that was mentioned up the page a way. This contemporary view of politics, empire and British self-importance would freak them out.

A Martian canister was fired at Siberia to establish a base in an area well away from human interference but it exploded above the Tunguska forests and was destroyed. As regards that Woking .pdf I had no idea Wells lived on Maybury Hill. There's a lot of auto-biography in the story. I can imagine him sitting in his living room or staring out of a bedroom window looking at the Surrey skyline and plotting where the Tripods would advance from and to, like one of us planning a model railway. He was a geek of the finest calibre.

Don't dispose of the damaged signal, cut it up into components, saving the best bits and use it as a wagon load for the S&T Dept.

Horsham? They also set a recon team into Sussex? What book is this? Must buy now...! There was a TV series about British SF a while back and the presenter was on Horsell common (Surrey - not Sussex!) and there were areas of fairly open ground still. The dude doing the talking called it the ground zero of British Sci-Fi which seems fair. "...from the railway station came the sound of shunting trains ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. It all seemed so... normal..."

If you've time to sit about slurping beer, you could have stayed under the baseboards screwing bits in for longer!