SRman

You may have difficulty getting the kits from Charlie (DC Kits) at the present time. He had a major fire a while back which means most of the kit stuff is in storage and inaccessible. I would suggest phoning him before placing any on-line orders.

Thanks for the compliments, both. Much of the drudgery of building these is removed in Radley's newer kit versions with their one-piece body mouldings in resin. What always slows me down on these kit-builds is glazing the things. At least with the F Stock, all of the glazing pieces are relatively short and easy to handle, and all are flat.

The LT F Stock trailer construction continued tonight. The side and door sections have been glued together and glued to the roofs. Both cars are still sitting loosely on their underframes. Has anyone ever wondered what the F Stock from 1920 would have looked like if they had been built in aluminium and left unpainted? Well, here you go! I suppose the next thing to do is to build the bogies and mount them on the underframes. I could also glue the roof vents into position too. A curiosity of the F Stock was that those vents proved rather too effective, so were blanked off fairly early in the life of the stock. There is a small amount of weakness in the centres of the sides, reinforced by the underframes and the tabs and recesses there. Once the interior partitions go in, they will strengthen things further, in spite of the fact that they are fairly soft and flimsy themselves. The whole is stronger than the individual parts.

Following on from the previous post, here is a pic showing the elements that make up each side. On the left I have left the items spaced out, while on the right they are positioned very close to the final effect. You can sort of see what I meant about the possibility of getting it even slightly wrong so making the sides too short or too long, and also the possibilities of getting the side components slightly out of alignment or crooked. The double-ended driving car had two more components per side (the cab side doors), while the single-ended driving car (motor or trailer, depending on period modelled) had one extra door per side - all that is rather academic if you build the resin kits from Radley Models as the body moulding comes with sides, ends, roof and internal partitions as one single casting.

I would say, "Yes." I intend to keep running my old Hornby Dublo/Wrenn, Parkside and K's vans in mixed trains because they still add variety to the mix. My efforts cannot match the finesse and detail of the Bachmann units, but when they are in a train that is actually running, they all blend in. Besides, it is still more fun to build your own and to be able to point at it and say, "I did that."

Having nearly completed the two driving cars for the London Transport F Stock, I decided to make a start on the two trailers. Bearing in mind I am on an antibiotic and a little under the weather still, so my hands are a bit shaky and my stamina is low, I decided to just do little bits at a time, The two trailers i have are original Harrow Model Shop white metal ones, which means there are three double doors plus four separate sections per side, two halves of the roof joined with a bridging piece (plus the vents to add later), and an underframe that has two extra end headstock pieces to stick on, it is just a little bit more complicated than the one piece resin bodies of the later kits from Radley Models. After that, both types of kit require the underframe details to be added and bogies to be assembled, and also the internal partitions to be added. With so many separate parts to the sides, I came up with a method long ago that used Blu-tac, a steel rule, a flat, hard surface and 5-minute Araldite glue, plus a modicum of cursing and swearing. That's jumping ahead a little. For starters, after cleaning up all the relevant bits with a file, I glued the two roof halves to their bridging piece, for each of the two trailers, and left those to set on a flat surface. Next, I glued the headstock pieces to the ends of the two underframes, while at the same time, gluing two coach ends to each of the roofs and propping those to dry with the coach ends held vertically. That's where I am up to now. The photo shows the two roof/ends sitting on the two underframes loosely. As you can see, the alignments are perfect. The sides will be next, and the reason for assembling the roofs and ends is so that I have the correct lengths to work to for the side assemblies. With so many separate pieces to fit and room for small movements relative to each other, it would be quite possible to end up with sides that are too long or too short by a few millimetres.

Frustrated by my own lack of motivation in building my London Transport train of 1920 F Stock, I ordered one resin body shell for a single-ended Driving Motor from Radley Models. I still have the older Harrow Model Shop white metal kits to build and one double-ended Driving Motor already built (also white metal). The resin shell was intended to speed the build of one more coach so I could at least run half a train with driving cabs still at both ends. However, having painted the resin shell red with grey roof, and assembled two bogies and an underframe from one fo the white metal kits, that's where it stopped again. All that was quite a few years ago. I have had a few days off work with a chest infection, but got bored and decided to attempt further work on the single-ended car to bring it up to a stage where it matched the existing "finished" double-ended car. This involved painting black around the window rims and down the door centre divides, plus painting the interior with green (I use Humbrol #88, which has a suitable bluish tint to pass muster), the floor dark earth colour, with plasticard strips hiding any holes, then glazing the lot. All that doesn't sound too hard, except my hands were shaking rather a lot and I had a nose bleed half way through! At least it matched the red exterior colour! Anyway, after a few trials and tribulations, I only have to glue some of the underframe bits and pieces in place to complete a two car set. Next, I have to construct two white metal centre trailers. I'll try not to let it take so long this time.

Nice photo, Michael. What's with the big 'X'es all over the place ... well, on the two rail vehicles, anyway?

Now, now, Rick. You know you can't use real gorse, or we'll end up with the problem they have in New Zealand. Come on, admit that you have used wattle as a substitute.

I have only just caught up with this, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me. I have had many good dealings with Howes in the past but they lost some of my business when they changed the online ordering system so overseas payments could not be processed. I'm sure that has also affected others not in the UK. This meant that one had to phone them up, or email with a list of items to be ordered, then follow with a phone call to give credit card details (it's not a good idea to include those unsecured details in an email). I sincerely hope they do continue in business for a long time to come.

Just to muddy the waters slightly, there was one exception to this: the hydraulic units of class 127 were originally coded as blue square but later changed to red triangle (re-used after the original Derby Lightweights of that code had long gone). They could work with blue square units but with special provisions for the gear changing on the blue square unit(s). That also means that class 127 trailers and blue square trailers could be used interchangeably - one of the preserved railways does indeed mix these types on occasions. The change of code came about because at the time the 127s were still coded blue square there was a failure caused by the blue square unit being attached at the back of the class 127. Being diesel hydraulic, there were no gear changes or gear changing apparatus on the 127, so the poor old blue square unit at the back was being forced to run at higher speeds still in first gear. Surprisingly, this was not very good for it mechanically!! In most respects the two types were still compatible, and the MU cabling through the centre trailers would have been identical as far as the signals they were carrying.

Class 108s were also referred to as Derby Lightweights, while classes 107 and 114 were referred to as Derby Heavyweights. You can sometimes find the letters 'LW' or 'HW' stencilled on the fronts above the buffers or even in white on the blue square coupling symbol.

You have jogged my memory, Clive. There is a picture in the DMU one of the colour books "for railway modeller and historian" series (I don't have it immediately to hand for the correct title): it shows a BRCW class 104 driving motor in plain blue at the head of a Trans-Pennine 124 unit in blue and grey. There have been many mixes of types in normal service (as opposed to the rather specialised Trans-Pennine units), including classes 101, 103, 104, 108, 111, 117, 119, 120 and 121 that I can think of in photos or videos , and possibly even more types than that. Some of the mixes depend on geographical distribution of the units concerned, so, for example, I wouldn't expect to see a class 103 Park Royal vehicle in one of the four car North Eastern units that triggered this topic.

After a conversation with someone recently (was it you, Doug?), I decided to experiment with a bridging section for the curved bit along the viaduct. I had originally envisioned it as being a solid embankment or wall section, but we talked about another lattice or girder bridge to leave the view more open. With that in mind, I have used mostly recycled bits and pieces to create a deck with plate girder supports. I have used six plastic tube sections as supporting posts here but if I did build it properly, these would not be required, or possibly just the two centre ones if I want something different. The ends would be on buttress supports from the arches on either side. The deck would be wider on the "production" version too. As a way to visualise the effect, it works quite well. I like it, but would welcome any comments too.

TSLRB ... thanks Robert Shrives. I couldn't remember the correct designation for the trailer buffet. I knew the four car Met-Cam units were a North Eastern specialty, but were the four car BRCW class 104 units also NE-based? I have a feeling they were (I may be mistaken but I seem to recall one such unit heading for Durham). These also had some TBS vehicles but no buffet cars.

The four car formations I have seen were DMC(L)+TS(L)+TBS+DMC(L), or DMC(L)+TBuS(L)+TBS+DMC(L) - the latter containing one of the fairly short-lived Buffet cars. These avoided the duplication of Brake Vans in the formations, although I am sure I saw a photo once of a DMBS+TS(L)+TS(L)+DMC(L) ... it is possible one of the TS vehicles was a Composite though (TC(L)). Having said that, almost any combination was possible with the mixing and matching of blue square DMU types, with vehicles of other classes possible in the formations as well. The parcels workings were most probably dropped off at their destination, to be returned on any other suitable train later. Classes involved in parcels duties later in life include classes 114, 127, and 122 (which were reclassified 131 for the purpose).

OK. I have now been able to examine my class 16, and the bogie frames are a little different to the usual Heljan ones. They still 'unplug' easily but the sideframes are integral with the base and end transoms. It appears to me that they would still be relatively easy to modify for width, but it would take a little more work than simply using spacers as for most other Heljan diesels.

I can't check the 16 right now (I'm at work, it's at home!), but most, if not all, Heljan bogie diesels have separately fitted sideframes that simply pull off their spigots. That means you could easily gain a millimetre or two by adding spacers. That may affect the bogie swing but if you are going P4, I would assume the curves won't be all that severe.

My tracks are fairly level (within the limits of the floor the layout is on!!), and I found that with the 6-car train there was no problem with traction. I did take the precaution of oiling each axle of every coach before assembling the unit and running it. My smallest curves are approximately equivalent to radius 3 set track, and there were no problems there. My biggest worry was that the mechanisms would foul the third and fourth rails somewhere. but that hasn't happened, thankfully.

My 6-car set arrived today in a nice big parcel from the LT Museum. After unpacking the individual vehicles, I worked out the correct order for the particular ones I have. I ran the two motor cars in simultaneously on the rolling road on DC, then after an hour or so of perfect running in both directions, decided to fit two identical decoders. I had two TCS EU621 decoders in the box and one Lenz Silver 21+ (the preferred choice), so it was the TCS ones that got installed ... except that on interrogating them on the programming track, one of them was a Lenz decoder! So my preference was realised with two Lenz decoders fitted. I programmed the two decoders simultaneously to address 87 and set the inertia/momentum CVs to CV3 = 25 and CV4 = 20, which give nice balanced acceleration and deceleration rates. I left the top and middle speeds (CVs 5 and 6) at the Lenz defaults for now but may adjust them later. There was no need to reverse one decoder using CV29 as the motor coach pairs seem to be wired accordingly. Once the set was assembled on the track, it behaved impeccably and didn't highlight any clearance problems through the platforms either, at least in the direction I am running it at the moment. I'll post pics and possibly a little video later, but right now, I'm very happy with my purchase. EDIT: two quick photos posted. As can be seen, the 6-car set just fits the platform and loop lengths perfectly.

Huntsmen look fearsome but are actually useful in that they eat some of the other household pests, like cockroaches. Most huntsman bites are from females defending their eggs, which is when they get aggressive. As Matthew said, their bite is harmless to humans. Do you want to know what preys on redbacks? Surprisingly enough, one of the predators is daddy long legs!

I dunno about that: he can't be all that nice if he keeps redbacks as pets!!

Agreeing with the first two parts of the sentence : for the last bit, the spider is known as a 'redback', which is very closely related to the 'black widow' spider, and rather venomous. While rarely fatal, the bite can be extremely nasty and can cause ongoing medical problems. Best left alone!! Edited to correct redback as one word instead of two.

Ha ha. While one is never too old to learn new things, I am a teensy bit too old to be a student at the high school I work in!! I finished my year 12 in 1973. I am still a fair way away from getting the upper level running, but it really is something I am looking forward to.

An iptical ollusion!!