MrWolf

Many years ago I worked with a man named Billy Cobb who had been a fireman at Hasland (Ex Midland Railway) shed. He was also a successful amateur boxer, billed as the fighting fireman. He was only about 5'6" but one of the strongest men I ever met, even at near retirement. The apprentices having heard of his former life would pester him for an arm wrestle. He was a modest man and rarely took up the challenge. But quite a few lads more than forty years his junior and a head taller did eventually wear him down and get a match. They only ever did it once.

I did a similar thing with an old Hornby Smiths Crisps van (it appeared in many liveries) to create an ex Hull & Barnsley Railway van. I think that was another car boot £1 special. On ebay they are fetching around £10 including an average £4 for steerage class post.

Can't fault it in a way. Those old Triang vans may not be "worth" that much, but they made that price so good for him. I have one of the old blue ones, the roof had crumbled, so it got overlaid with Slater's corrugated iron and ended its days as a shed. I think I gave £1 for it on the car boot.

I do get that. I can repair and re-solder a 1920s motorcycle petrol tank, I can make a wiring loom from scratch, I can make control cables and solder the fittings to the ends. Can I solder dropper cables to a piece of Peco track? No. 'Er indoors did it and she has never used a soldering iron in her life.

You can also power it through a motor speed control circuit with a "soft start" facility. These were available as kits including a pre printed circuit board for educational purposes.

Something like this. Excuse the naff phone camera pic.

To cut a long, convoluted and frankly tedious saga short... No. Apparently the original moulds were bought up by someone who was going to continue making the kits. Which is like a lot of the vintage motorcycles I come across. Lots of talk about doing them up and using them again and no way are they for sale. Which translates as: They are rusting beyond use in a damp shed. Which is why people are asking and presumably getting £25 +post for the old W5 cattle wagon kit.

Stubby47, being a bit old school, I build my wagons on a small piece of glass out of an old picture that I fixed a bit of mounting card to the back of and protected the edges with insulating tape. (Because I can be a bit savage at times) I then know all is well in one plane and use a cheap 3 inch engineers square for the verticals. Or you could spend the price of a good night out on one of those new fangled jigs.

It is also possible to mount a disc under the baseboard upon which runs a lever arm roller microswitch. If small notches are cut into the periphery of the disc which line up with the exit tracks, the switch will trip and stop at each track. To restart the turntable or bypass tracks until you reach the desired exit, a simple push to make switch can be wired in to bypass the microswitch. It's a bit old school, but it's robust, not too fiddly and cheap. The turntable motor circuit is always switched out when the tracks are aligned and activated by the push to make switch so no need for a separate motor feed circuit or switches.

I don't think you can get"proper" creosote anymore. You can get a substitute though, might be worth looking up your local old school hardware shop) Back when I had several large ramshackle old sheds, we used to mix creosote 50:50 with old engine oil, decant it into an old fire extinguisher (the water type that worked by pressuring it through a car tyre valve) and liberally coat a 20'x8' shed in about ten minutes. More practical recycling!

Which is why I tend to give stuff away that is of little value. A friend had just bought an American spec 1971 BSA Rocket. Absolutely original down to the original wiring clips. When it arrived in the UK the previous owner put in a modern left hand dip headlight. I had taken a Lucas 700 lens out of one of my 40s bikes to fit the proper old Cats eye lens. Do I bother trying to sell my old lens for £5 on eBay ? No, go round and fit it to my mates' bike. I think that's a bit more green than chucking it in the recycling. Nothing much is ever truly scrap.

I can actually sympathise with the idea of binning stuff. There have been a few times where I've been tempted. I've had a good number of motorcycles come my way as several boxes of rusty bits. The first thing I always do is loosely assemble everything to check what I have and get the machines identity confirmed. Often I would sell one as is as a restoration project to fund the restoration of another. The amount of idiots who want to make a quick buck who clearly know nothing about the bike who contact me with daft questions is beyond belief: "Would I swap for a 1996 Ford Fiesta / Honda CX500 (all scrap) 10p and a balloon?" "I'm ringing about the bike, what's the least you'll take for it?" "What's the chrome like?" "Will it pass an MOT?" "Could it be ridden back to Exeter?" Or more frequently: "I'm not interested in restoring it, I'm just buying up old bikes as an investment." The answer to the final question is always: "If you're not going to rebuild it and ride it, it might as well still be laid in a hedge. I'm not going to sell it to you." Maybe I'm just intolerant?

They just didn't respond, didn't send the item back and when the time was up they obviously stated that the problem was not resolved and eBay refunded them.

Unfortunately, eBay always sides with the buyer who complains, whether or not he is a swindler. I had the same problem some years ago with a new convertible top for a car. Buyer says it's old, mouldy and damaged. Then ignores my response. EBay take the money back from me and threaten to chuck me out.

It's a funny thing, collecting, it doesn't matter what you are interested in. There is always that one thing that is the key item and often wipes out the saving you might have made on the rest of a set. A friend was selling a whole raft of vintage model railway locos and stock from Bassett Lowke, Exley, Marklin etc to more prosaic items like Trix and Triang. The thing that got all the attention was a Triang American diesel set. He was constantly asked to sell just the centre car, the whole thing was mint and boxed. The loco and dummy are apparently common as muck, but the centre car jacks up the value considerably. I bet if he had split the set it would have been on eBay the same night. We recently renovated and sold a bedroom set made for Harrods in the late 50s. Individually, the items are worth a few hundred pounds each. But if you find the dressing table, which was the most fragile part, that was least practical (and for a time unfashionable) then the price (I don't like the word value too much!) more than quadruples.

I knew I hadn't dreamt it! There was an under bridge, partially flooded, that led out to the main line, beneath which and beyond saving was a Ford Consul Mk1 and a Morris Oxford MO, removing the hard to find bits from these distracted me a while from stripping bits off the 1956 Vauxhall Cresta that I had actually been after. The rest of the place was full of the usual Marinas, Granadas and rusted out Toyotas etc. I took no notice of anything post 1980 as usual, of which there must have been a couple of hundred. The place was so rammed with junk it was hard to tell what it had been, now I know at last. I did find some pictures once, taken in the 60's, I need a time machine!

Last time I went to Radstock was about 20 years ago, on a detour coming back from Westland at Yeovil. Didn't find much in the way of railway remains but there was an interesting scrapyard in a railway yard with brick retaining walls. It had obviously been there for donkeys years, judging by some of the relics I bought. I bet that has something less interesting built on it now too.

He could get a set of etched plates for it and rename it Sir Ralph Wedgewood - It's not been dropped, that's scale blitz damage guv'nor!

That sir, is the Dobermans' cojones. Well worth the effort.

Or he could be one of the smart / lucky ones. Get a job as a trainee fireman, knowing that you will be called up for military service in a couple of years. Instead of waiting for the letter, volunteer for the right regiment and get sent to Germany. Decide to stay on a few years to get your papers for driver/instructor on steam, diesel and electric traction. Demobbed and back in the UK, return to British Railways and skip half a lifetime of shovelling ash and saying Yessir! My late father's older cousin did exactly that.

Cleaner / lighter up: "Two engines a day they told me when I started. I'm b###ered if I'm raking ash out of that lot!"

My actual point was that RTR is better than it has ever been. I don't see too many locos at £70 though, they seem to be £110-150 average. Going DCC doesn't seem to justify the price hike over analogue for the components involved tbh. We ARE well served with rtr and kits, for post 1923, with the exception of GWR wagons, hence the prices online. As I said, I also buy rtr and improve it , particularly because it is so good. Naturally things come full circle, our motor industry rested upon its laurels and the Japanese offered a better product and a better deal. Because their people no longer want to work in a factory for peanuts, their industry has been farmed out to places like Taiwan and Brazil. But of course people there want to afford a decent lifestyle and the goods that they produce, so it goes on. I could cite the example of a British owned factory in China making key components for the aircraft industry which was suffering from some serious quality control issues. I was tasked with finding out what the cause was. I came back with the simple answer: You have your workers on piece work. The first batch is perfect and passes inspection by your customer. But, because you have cut your prices and timing to the bone per item, the only way that the workers can make a living wage is to rush or cut corners. Not something that you want to be doing with a safety critical engine part. The only way forward was to pay the Chinese better wages and take less of a profit to remain competitive. No amount of on the job training was going to change that. I do happen to live in the real world, I spent about 20 years working all over the place and people, regardless of where they come from have basically the same desires.

Very true, you'll need to motorise the rest of the locos for towing failed Warships / Westerns and their trains

I think that most people on here muddle along, every day is a school day so to speak, there is always something new to learn. We all do the best we can with what we have. My own interests lie mostly in pre grouping railways. Mostly L&NWR, L&SWR and the GWR, as well as oddballs like the M&SWJR, even a leap up north to the Highland. But what I actually do is model the GWR between the wars, specifically minor lines (I have never been interested in Kings and Castles etc, nor any of the other company's big mainline locomotives, reminds me of train sets I think) What this actually means is that I can use rule 1 to run some oddities and antiquated stock that I can obtain as cheaper kits or rtr. I came to the conclusion long ago that if I wanted a "proper model railway" that was the way to go because to do anything else would mean etched kits etc for locomotives and stock. That would mean I couldn't afford it at all. I buy older, pre DCC locos which are sufficiently accurate to be further detailed, as the price of such things has quadruped in less than 20 years, no doubt discouraging many potential modellers. I hear all the reasons for putting a microchip in a model loco, which are fine, as well as appreciating the extra detail and accuracy currently offered, but as a former engineer, I look at these things and conclude that we are being ripped off for what when all is said and done, a toy made in the third world. If we are not careful, the hobby will go full circle, back to the day when it was the preserve of a wealthy few who could afford to commission a bespoke model. The manufacturers may be shooting themselves in the foot.

You should see the Bachmann 4 car underground set he is also selling, 9 bids to £490.00 with 6 days 18 hours to go. Sorry folks, I'm all out of witticisms.