SRman

I have a few of the new ones in SECR liveries on the way. It is anyone's guess as to when they will arrive here in Oz - some recent deliveries from Britain have got here in 10 days, some from Germany in anything from 12 days to 3 months! I'll be interested to see how these new ones run. I found the one previous example I have was very stiff, although I managed to get the wheels out without breaking anything and drilling the axle boxes out slightly before reinserting the axles. It now runs much more freely. I am looking forward to receiving these new variants, appetite whetted by some of the above posts.

Still on the European side, I have been having difficulty finding the correct colours for current Danish passenger stock, However, I recently landed some Lifecolor sets for the DSB, the earlier period set (Set 1) having a light grey for RAL7038. I had purchased a set of Roco (ex-Hobbytrade) double deck coaches with the lower door positions, perfect for the DSB, but in DB Regio red. Anyway, the RAL7038 light grey seemed very close to what was on the one Hobbytrade driving trailer I had in DSB livery, so I have just done a quick livery test on one coach on one side only. This is extremely rough, and intended only as a tester, using the light grey, Humbrol midnight blue #15, and Humbrol blue-grey #79. The blue-grey is just a fraction darker than the existing grey on the base of the German livery, the rest actually look pretty good, bearing in mind the light grey has only one light coat on a red base. Once I do the coaches properly, I'll use a light undercoat and mask everything off properly. The photo shows the result against the original Hobbytrade driving trailer's factory finish.

I like the robustness, quietness, smoothness and sheer power of the Heljan mechanism, and can forgive the inaccuracy. Having said that, I did eventually do the mods as illustrated above. I think I overdid the green one slightly, the maroon one looks about right, to me. Maybe I'll get out the filler and just add a tiny bit back into the peak in the middle on the green one.

Agreed regarding pricing. Buying Heljan's own branded Hymek is approximately £40 cheaper than buying the EFE branded version. EFE simply gives a wider retailer base for the Heljan products, but there is a premium involved. Returning to the Heljan Western, the front 'face' is not too bad, mainly let down by the over-prominent peaks above the windscreens. There is sufficient 'meat' in the cab roofs to allow one to file the profile down considerably, being careful to leave the horn bumps untouched. A coat of correct paint colour, plus a bit of weathering will hide the modifications.

Another couple of newbies arrived at Newton Broadway. Both models came from ModellBahn Lippe Shop, with the second one being on sale - I think I got a bargain here. I finally managed to get hold of a Danish Vectron, from the Piko Expert range. EB 3201 ran absolutely superbly straight out of the box when tested on DC, sufficiently so for me to add a decoder straight away. The actual interface is intended or PLuX 16, but I only had PLuX 22 decoders available here, which should work perfectly well, so popped in an ESU LokPilot v5 and away it went,. I did my usual tweaks for acceleration and deceleration, and I think I will have to alter the top speed a bit as it races away very freely to a high speed - much higher than I need for my layout. The second loco is a Trix one, with sound, in BLS 'Die Alpinisten' livery. This is my first Trix/Maerklin locomotive, and it is quite impressive with its metal body and full roof detail with four pantographs, plus the colourful livery application. I found it initially to be very loud, so went to turn the volume down a bit - it is also the only Trix Selectrix decoder in my collection - so found the setting in the manual which turned out to be the same as ESU's sound volume CV, CV 63. However, when I tried changing the volume on the fly Programming on Main, the loco died completely. After much fiddling on the programming track, I got it going again with reduced volume as well. There may be a few tricks for me to learn yet with the Selectrix decoder (no pun intended).

Some good photos there. Johann - also sad because many of those buses are now lost to us. However, there is a glimmer here: 241, the Leyland Royal Tiger Worldmaster has been preserved and is in use at the Swanbank railway preservation group, the Queensland Pioneer Steam Railway, and can be seen in its original silver livery on their website here http://www.qpsr.org/ . I do have some photos from the earlier days of the Tram Museum, but they are prints and I will have to scan them into digital form at some time. I took some of their official opening day photos with their camera, too (don't ask how I got the job!). Even in your photos you can see the poor condition of some of the buses. For anyone who is interested, I can identify them as follows: 67 and 68, I'm not sure but could be Daimler or Albion. 203 AEC Regal IV with Commonwealth Engineering body (later known as Comeng). 80 is the Tram Museum's operational AEC Regal III. 10 was the first Leyland Panther from 1966 with its unique Denning body, and 2-speed ZF transmission. 343 (not showing its number) was a Freighter bodied Leyland Leopard, the first BCC design with the lantern windscreen and double width front entrance. 263 AEC Reliance 590 with Charles Hope body. They also had very similar 303, a Leyland Leopard with Hope body. 241, as mentioned above, Leyland Royal Tiger Worldmaster with (I think) Atholl Hedges body.

A few survivors went to the Queensland Bus Preservation Society (correction) Queensland Omnibus andCoach Society - they have Panther 722, as well as several other buses - but most of the buses that the BCC left to the Tram Museum were allowed to rot beyond redemption. The BCC basically left them one from each batch of buses, usually the class leader, although 722 was the last Panther. I would have loved to see Charles Hope bodied AEC Reliance 263 back on the road, but I don't think any of those have been preserved anywhere. The Tram Museum also had trolleybus N0. 1 at one time. I don't know if they still have that or not.

With 340 of them to this style (and one earlier one with a completely different body design), all bought within a few years as tram replacements, it took quite a while to wind the Panther fleet down again with newer buses being delivered in smaller batches. Even so, a good many went on to second lives with more provincial operators, including a batch I encountered in Townsville, roughly 800 miles north of Brisbane. It must have been fun driving them northwards with a top speed of 68 kph!

I don't really have any idea on costings, but would it also be possible to lower the tracks and rebuild part of the station - obviously the platforms would have to be lowered to match the lowered tracks, or truncated short of the bridge and extended at the other ends. Would that be any cheaper or more cost effective than demolishing the road bridge and rebuilding, including raising the road level? The way I was looking at it (with no engineering expertise), they could excavate the centre roads and put new tracks in with wires, then once that was up and running, excavate and rebuild the existing tracks/platforms while still running through trains on the new tracks. There have been some vaguely similar projects here in Melbourne associate wth level crossing removals, and around 20 years ago, with the experimental double decker train on my local lines, which involved lowering tracks under some bridges and modifying platform clearances along the line.

Crossgates station in February 1999: some rather shaky video footage I took on a trip to England to visit my Mother in Leeds. Note that the suburb is Cross Gates, but the station name is Crossgates - I hadn't noticed this before but the station name boards show this quite clearly. It had snowed overnight and was still quite chilly on the rather windswept platforms. This shows the Ring Road overbridge mentioned in earlier posts.

Quite possibly: Leyland eventually replaced the AEC range completely with their own versions. Some later Reliances I rode in had wooden springs like their Leopards! Some of those Maltese Swifts were far more drastically rebuilt, and gained front engines and manual gearboxes. Apart from bits of the chassis and remains of the LT bodies, they really weren't Swifts any more.

The Cross Gates location shouldn' be too difficult if they can lower the tracks a little under that bridge. It is spacious enough to allow excavation without stopping trains on the line altogether, although that would interfere with trains stopping in the station.

I often wondered why they didn't take a leaf from the Leyland Panther design route, and use a front mounted radiator with the superior AEC engines (the Panther and Swift chassis were essentially the same thing, from my understanding). Brisbane's Leyland Panthers operated reliably for many years in their sub-tropical climate, with the problem being that it was the drivers that tended to overheat on hot days, rather than the engines!

A couple more wagons weathered and graffiti added, but only a few bits ths tme. Left-hand wagon was done using the same techniques as before, but the right-hand one was done with a different technique, so that more of its original livery showed through. This shot shows the four wagons in a train, with a couple of pristine wagons in between.

There is no cure, you know, Kym! I have all sorts of oddballs and things that don't belong, but are simply there because I like them. It's a lo-o-ong slippery slope! p.s. I also bought two 4-coach rakes of the Hornby 4-wheelers, one for LBSC, and the other for LSWR, but am really holding out for the Hatton's versions to get some more. With theirs, I want to supplement the Hornby ones to make 7, 8 or 9 car rakes, plus I want to get some SECR ones too, including a few 6-wheelers. As you say, they are generic, but they fill a gap that can only otherwise be filled with kit or scratch building, and the subsequent home painting and lining jobs.

Going back a little, and drifting just a little off-topic, I think it is high time Hornby dropped the 8-pin socket altogether ... and don't get me started on that ridiculous 4-pin version they came out with. Bachmann got smart a long time ago, using the same PCBs for their models regardless of whether or not they had sound fitted. Most of the diesels and electrics got 21-pin interfaces, and if one wanted to change to sound, all one had to do was fit the sound decoder and solder the speaker(s) to the marked solder pads on the PCB. For smaller locos, they have moved from 6-pin to NEXT18. They now are moving to PLuX22 for newer models. Hornby have now switched small locos (0-6-0ST Pecketts, Ruston diesels, and Stephenson's Rocket to name a few) to 6-pin, but their compulsion to keep the 8-pin for larger locos is puzzling. They did use 21-pin for the earlier sound locos with ESU decoders, but even those were not standard as the LED wiring was different to the standard non-sound models. To get up to date and even ahead of the market, they really need to move to PLuX22 for larger locos, and NEXT18 for smaller locos, standardise PCBs with provision for sound (pads for speakers to be easily added - surely there would be economies of scale in using only one PCBdesign for any given model), and, of course, leave room for the decoders and speakers to be fitted. Come on Hornby, how about it? The class 71 shows a lack of forward thinking, but we do know you can do it if you try.

As per Geep7's response, Meir's experience is not typical. As Geep said, the mechanism is identical to the EPB, MLV and CEP units, and almost identical to the class 150 as well. I don't have a plain blue 205, but I do have a green one, a Connex one and an NSE liveried version, plus five 2 EPBs, six MLVs, and eight 4 CEPs, plus a few of the aforementioned class 150 units, and not one grinds or growls.

3. (continued) - apply the transfers 4. Stage 3 was applying a coat of satin or matt varnish to fix the transfers and first weathering coat (no photos). 5. Stage 4 , to date, weathering powders applied liberally. I mainly used dark earth, with some touches of dirty black. 6. To follow, I will add a little more in dirty browns (powders or washes), plus some black flowed into door gaps and joints.

Thanks Andy. The Continental stuff is the result of seeing and experiencing some of these trains in 2018. Yours looks fascinating. On that subject, I decided that even though I really don't agree with graffiti being done on items that don't belong to the perpetrators, I wanted to model some of the trains as I actually saw them. With that in mind, I purchased some (American) graffiti transfers, which are laser cut so that there is no observable carrier film outside if the actual designs. These may not be 100% accurate for European trains, but they give the right impression, so I have been applying them to two of the vans, one DB 4-wheeler and one DSB bogie vehicle. I am showing the stages of weathering and graffitying. 1. The wagons in pristine condition. I didn't see any in this condition in the short time I spent in Denmark and Germany. 2. First stage of light weathering washes. 3. Stage 2 was to apply the transfers. -- Continued in next post --

Aahh! Sorry, I misunderstood.

Thanks Doug. The previous backscenes were good but ended up with a very noticeable disjoint in the middle. I did have to crop the full-width photo to remove clutter below and walls above the scene. I also had to rotate it slightly (about one degree!) because I had the camera at a slight angle.

Did the 1400/1450 have dynamic brakes? Only three of the 1460 class which followed had dynamic brakes, with the prominent angled vents on the short hoods ahead of the cab. I realise these were different to the NZ types in a number of ways, but I also thought that just possibly the bogie designs may give some clues as to what was on the NZ locos.

You may also find it useful to look at Queensland Railways' 1400 and 1450 classes, which also came out of Clyde Engineering. Both have 3-axle bogies, but the 1400 class was A1A-A1A whereas the 1450s were Co-Co. Like NZ railways, these are on 3' 6" gauge.

Hi Adrian, these were from id Backscenes, in my case the Village scenes 203A - 203D. The ones in the photos are from 203C and part of 203D, leaving the A and B sets for the left-hand edges of the layout, plus some in reserve to take the scenes around the corners at the ends, when I am ready. Jeff.

I spent this afternoon working on replacement backscenes with better continuity. DougN suggested I could get some 3mm MDF faced with melamine rather than having to seal standard mdf to accept the self-adhesive backscenes. I bought two of the large sheets (2440 x 1200 mm) and had them cut into the required 40mm strips lengthways, which meant they would fit into my car (a Honda CR-V). We also picked up a thicker piece for my OH's workbench top - that couldn't be cut down quite so drastically, and was a tight fit in the car, but we got it in too. I used the old backscene boards as templates for the screw holes and tunnel access cutaways, and all went reasonably smoothly. I still ended up with the odd wrinkle in the new backscenes, but I did do a better job than last time. As can be seen, I am currently running quite a few European HO trains. I am switching over from my recent NSE running period.