Martin S-C

The builder contacted me today and the remedial work on the electrics and the investigation into the dampness issues won't be started until January.

I had a quick Goggling session for the layout and saw a group of people operating it in 2018 from the Bishops Castle Railway Society. Did you purchase the layout from them, Simon?

I do enjoy seeing your step-by-step photos Neil, very useful for reference for anyone else. And your work is always nice and tidy and clean and crisp, unlike my own "bodging in a swamp" style.

When you get Lydham Heath on the road Simon I look forward to seeing it.

Stephen, you're right and BOOTH & MITCHELL was the same Booth as William Henry Booth. There's a bit about them/him in Keith Turton's PO Wagons, a Ninth Collection. I don't have the Bill Hudson volumes that cover the other Booth wagon. The 1907 photograph of BOOTH & MITCHELL wagons empty at Peterborough shows, some distance away from the camera, what look like 5-plank wagons.

It may not be "BOO...". I think there's a possibility those letters could be Cs or Gs as well. I tend to find that the smaller traders prefixed the owners name with his first name initial so a trader named John Booth would letter his wagons "J. BOOTH & Co." It was quite unusual to have a family-named company PO wagon with ONLY the surname on it. Single-word wagon liveries were usually bigger concerns that were more widely known such as collieries. "BOO..." / "BOC..." / "BOG..." could be the start of a place name as in "BATH STONE COMpy."

Both of you are very much talking about subjects that inspire and drive me in my layout creation. By "stealing" the Forest of Dean I was lucky to hit upon several key local industries; coal mining, tinplate works, wood distillation works and stone quarrying as well as dressing/finishing the stone are all industries prevalent in this part of Gloucestershire. To these I have added a brewery, primarily because I love beer and brewery railways are a fascinating microcosm in themselves. The modelling potential of a siding running between the gloomy cliffs of dirty limestone buildings with all the small clutter of docks, barrels, sheds and so on makes it one of those industries I really enjoy researching. One of the Bachmann resin-cast brewery building sets at an extremely good second hand price on e-Bay clinched the deal. A dairy or creamery is less plausible as much of the farming in the Forest (such as it was) seemed to centre around sheep, while much of the actual land surface was given over still to ancient forest or the newer pine plantations but as I'm sliding the layout northwards to a location between Mitcheldean, Hereford and Gloucester, dairy herds are more likely. The greaseworks is another of those grotty and nasty industries that tended to crop up near railways and ever since finding out a bit about the GWR greaseworks at Swindon as it was in the 1920s I decided I needed such a thing. It also gives a reason to run some tanker wagons of which far too many nice ones are available for me to resist.

The drill hall is looking magnificent. Is Annie's take on the WNR wagon livery close to your plans for it James? I didn't know that you'd mentioned what the livery would be and was wondering how you selected it, Annie.

Its on hearing stories like this that I'm tempted to build a little coastal German NG layout, maybe something inspired by Rugen Island, and call it "Schadenfreude am See".

I assume 4mm is necessary to slot into the aluminium sides of the lift?

That's a very nicely textured building, it oozes character. I like the fencing too.

Something where I need to wear tights - Peter Pan or Robin Hood maybe? Actually Peter Pan suits me - the boy who never grew up. (Mr Edwardian, do please feel free to slap me down and tell me to shut up whenever my posts go beyond your red line - or even get close to it.)

Only at weekends dearie.

Will you please stop talking about me like that?

...and of course I read that as "in-VA-lid" saloons, rather than "inva-LID", wondering why CA would have trains made up of coaching stock that didn't count.

* snort *

That's just beaker people building sandcastles.

and crossroads

A bridge without a bus is like a station without a train. It NEEDS to be so, the feng-shui demands it. As regards the Goggle photo, the bus is level because its in the middle of the road. The cars to the right are clearly obeying gravity+camber effects. I mentioned the 'ump a page or two back but there's no need to give your bridge the 'ump over it.

Presumably, from an operational POV, the enlarged verandahs and extra side windows to lean out of negated the need for duckets. Is that how the design evolved?

If you then choose to move bus to a level location such as a station forecourt: 4. Make and paint figure of bus driver squatting down beside wheels looking at the flat tyres.

I understand the intention was to attach the studding to the ribs of the concrete panels so that the maximum depth was then available for the celotex. The idea being that maximising celotex depth this way meant we could get away with studding of smaller dimensions and so encroach on the final internal room width as little as possible. Not every stud may have coincided with a rib however. The plasterboard wasn't entirely plastered but received only a skim over the joins and screw heads, even so I left this about 2 weeks before painting. The paint was extremely basic water based emulsion so not vinyl. EDIT: Post #358 on page 15 shows the extent of the plastering.

Don - I am halfway through my third 5 litre tin. I expect 13 to 14 litres of paint will have gone in there by the time its all painted sufficiently.

The hollows in the concrete panels are where the celotex sheeting goes. The upper and lower wall battens were fixed to the ribs of the concrete panels so the celotex could be slid in between. The studding was attached to the top and bottom battens and the plasterboard walls to the studding. I'm happy that there is both air circulation and insulation between plasterboard wall and concrete panel though its not quite as you suggested in your first paragraph. I have edited a photo to try and show the arrangement with the vertical studding in orange, the upper batten in red and the ribs of the concrete panels in light brown. The green arrows indicate the recesses between the concrete ribs where celotex sheet has yet to be "stuffed in" and of course the top batten is proud of this area, being screwed to the ribs, so yep, some air is allowed from the celotex sheets up into the eaves and roof void. Post #207 shows the battens and studding. With air from the eaves able to circulate past the top batten. The fibre roof roll insulation was of similar form to the underfloor insulation you can see in the photo above. "These gaps, if they have not been stuffed with ceiling insulation..." I think so. I went back through my set of photos of the build and the one below shows the roof void between the new rafters being stuffed with insulation fibre so it looks like there is space for air to circulate there, though I didn't pay close attention to quite how much insulation was packed into the spaces. I simply trusted the builders to do it correctly. I will be horrified if they haven't! "You don't need a howling gale flowing through just nothing to impede the natural interchange of air." I really do not know if I have that. It will be expensive to pull the walls off and look now... Thanks for all your continuing help and advice.

I've done some of that in the past and have accumulated a library of skyscapes and rural/urban/industrial landscapes for use behind photos of models. Transforming a photo of a layout from a cluttered exhibition hall setting into a fake landscape is quite rewarding.