Martin S-C

Hold on a moment...

Aaagh! What has been seen cannot be unseen.

I'm interested in what you do with the RTR horsebox as well. I need a couple for my layout and the only pre-grouping ones around are brass kits. I honestly hadn't considered shortening one in the same way I've cut and shut Hornby clerestories.

I was always a little unhappy with the Train Packs concept of selling TS add-ons. You'd get 5 or 6 locos but you probably only actually wanted or had use for 1 or 2 of them. It was always a source of annoyance that you were required to spend extra money on something you simply didn't want. Why TS payware add-on companies can't just sell loco X for £X.XX one at a time like Hornby or Bachmann do in the real world I don't know. I would have been happy to pay exta for different loco identities or different weathering conditions but these offers never seemed to materialise. EDIT: Lancaster622, something odd is happening with the visual finish of the 0-4-4 tank here versus the rest of the scene. These variations in graphic rendering were another bugbear of train sims I think.

Wow. Train sims have come a heck of a long way since I used to play them...

I think a wiser and cheaper course of action is to just not play silly beggars again.

I was just being silly. I was using a razor saw at my workbench in a vice which is at one end of our lounge. The lady of the house was at the other end watching telly and was complaining about the noise, so I went into the kitchen and tried to continue on the edge of the rounded worktop using my hand instead of the vice. The job slipped and whoosh... not nice. Just stupidity on my part. Certainly won't do that again! The thumb is under a gauze dressing right now and beginning to itch badly so that's a good sign.

Kevin, you make 16.5mm gauge track look like 18.2mm gauge. What's your secret?

I hadn't seen Nile's work, Stephen so thank you very much for the link. His putting together 2 Hornby 4-wheelers for a bogie coach is inspiring and his re-use of cheapo Hornby vans ends up with vehicles that look just like the kind of thing I need to represent Madder Valley vans on my layout.

My dad worked as an accountant for the coal board back in the 60s and his one good after dinner story was that he and a couple of other accountant types were visiting an office for an audit one day and were eating lunch in the canteen when over the PA a female voice, in impeccable Home Counties English anounced: "Would Mr R. Sole please report at once to the managers office". The poor fellow had to stand up and leave while the entire canteen around him dissolved into gales of laughter.

I must have already become a model railway pedant by the age of about 8 because I remember thinking that Ivor's whistles were probably out of gauge.

That's correct. I went on a management training course once and the tests resulted in me being given that title. I often put off starting things with a fear and loathing... but when I do finally get round to it I usually wonder why I was so averse to doing it. And finishing something that's all my work is a great feeling. I love ticking those mental boxes of "done that", "done that one" etc.

That works too. A little unorthodox but tramways were unorthodox.

Good advice. I think it may have been you who gave it before, right near the start of this thread! I think my creative juices will get flowing again once the baseboards and first track goes down. When electricity is connected I'll be much more in the mood to get a couple of locos properly finished and running. My problem is I have this dislike of leaving projects part done. Right now I have the Wisbech & Upwell coaches to finish, 2 pairs of kitbashed Hornby clerestories to finish, my pair or trio of GW Diag. O1 milk van kits to finish, the greaseworks tar tanker, another oil tanker and a set of 4 Victorian 1850s 4-wheel Keysers coach kits to do. When I turn to other projects without completing the current one I just feel like it'll never get it done if I don't do it now. Then of course I end up not being "in the groove" any more to finish that one delayed project so everything grinds to a halt. It must be a very minor form of OCD. I am also feeling cross with myself for being so stupid as to saw into my own thumb Tuesday evening. That's put me in a grumpy mood all week. Makes modelling a lot harder and gives me a stronger excuse to sit and do nothing!

I think this way you now have two passing loops end to end, a little odd but it also means your goods shed is standing on a loop still so engines can propel wagons into it from either end.

I have several ready for painting and lettering. I am going through a slow programme of getting engines fitted with sound decoders as funds allow. Then its time for painting and weathering. I thought I'd start on something small, so its probably either my Bachmann MR 1F with the full cab or the LBSCR E4 0-6-2. I intend to leave the E4 in its umber scheme, so it only needs a relettering and renumbering but the F1 will probably be my first experiment in repainting into my ochre yellow (aka M&GN) scheme.

That wasn't the picture but something similar. It was a wooden frame or trough lined with foam and a padded foam wrist-rest. I recall one end of the trough was wooden as well so a square could be placed against it. I can definitely make something up based on your photo though - thanks very much.

I am terribly sorry if this is the wrong thread but I saw somewhere, quite recently, a post by someone about coach lining and a photo that included a home-made padded wooden cradle to place the coach model into so that a metal square could be placed along the coach body to get a good straight line from an art pen. I'd like to build a similar cradle. I have been going through various threads I've been reading recently but just cannot find the post. Does anyone here recall such a thing?

If you displace the goods shed towards the camera almost to the heel of the timber siding point, then lay in a crossover from where the train on the left is to where the goods shed is now, that would do it I think. It may look a bit odd but then again somne light railway/tramway track layouts were curious. Take Wantage for example. I'd hate to think I'll cause you to have to widen the station site and shift all that scenery. EDIT: Like so:

Operators of PO wagons might also number new wagons in a continuing sequence, even though a wagon was being replaced and scrapped or taken back by the contract hirer. Another ploy to make their fleet appear more numerous than it was. Not a lot is happening on the modelling front for the moment. I am a bit burned out on building and weathering wagons and I am still sat here staring at 6 part-painted coaches that I am dredging up the courage to try and line and letter. I'm aware I must make a start on repainting, lining and lettering a loco or two very soon and that's filling me with dread as well. As to the garage the build is finished and I'm slowly painting the interior white, but with an injured hand this is slow work. I also made the false economy of buying cheap paint and its not covering well so more than one coat will be needed. I should have gone for the expensive famed "one coat" emulsion by the big name company that advertises with a shaggy dog rather that Shyte and Co's Cheap and Nasty Thinnest Mix. Also - don't buy the cheapest brushes you can find. I am sick of picking detached bristles out of my new wet see-thru paint... Lesson learned.

Regarding disappearing engine parts I recall this problem with MSTS. Usually its all down to some small heirarchy in the model parts list or folder tree. Sometimes the software just doesn't like something. By retexturing some part and altering a file size you probably fixed whatever it was. Sometimes it was just a case of rebuilding a 3D model and retexturing it in the exact same way that fixed it. We had so much fun in the early days of MSTS dealing with weird gremlins like that. As to your small terminus layout I am a bit concerned that the route a loco needs to take to be released from the front of the train takes it through the goods shed. The porters won't be very happy when their freshly stacked bales of textiles or creamwares get covered in smuts.

I always thought they added 100 or 1000 in front of the actual number, things like that.

This is very true and especially true of PO wagons belonging to tiny tinpot companies but the other side of the coin is I don't think I have any wagons numbered 1 and would quite like to have one.

They have grass. Grass is much more interesting than a train. You can't eat a train.

"Grume" has a rather unhappy meaning in these dodgy internet days... I don't think my signwriting skills would extend to intertwined anything! Let alone lettering that has curves in it. Many of my renumbered wagons end in 1s, 4s and 7s because they're the simplest digits to hand paint. I rather like "Lye, Grabbit and Rhunn, Attorneys at Law, Solicitors for Oaths" which will be one of my town's businesses. I need to name a brewery as well, and a tinplate works, and a wood distillation plant, and a water mill, and a stone masons and a wagon repairers, not to mention numerous coal merchants.