2mmMark

I should also add that the Microtrains Z wheelsets are much finer than the Marklin equivalents, albeit moulded Delrin. There are equivalent metal wheels available from Fox Valley http://www.foxvalleymodels.com/NWheels.html

Happy to share my experiences of working in Nn3 where I've achieved some reasonable results. Marklin chassis do have some issues but these are not insurmountable. http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/57215-an-clr-2mm-scale-65mm-gauge/?hl=%2Ban+%2Bclar The difficulty has been reliance on a single manufacturer Marklin for all the powered and unpowered donor chassis. This is changing now other manufacturers have entered the market in the US and Japan. Rokuhan have recently announced a keenly priced "shorty" bogie driven chassis which has potential for becoming an adaptable power unit. http://www.rokuhan.com/english/news/2017/10/introduction-of-z-shorty-from-rokuhan.html A friend of mine in the US designed the Powermax drive unit marketed by Searails http://www.searails.com/ This is a very compact and smooth running little motor bogie and is used power a range of small N, Nn3 and Z locos. To my knowledge, there have been few attempts to produce British items. The early 1980s saw some bodies produced to go on a Marklin chassis, I think there was a 47 & an HST. I also saw an etched kit for an RCH wagon but it was quite expensive at the time. Brian Yallop built a couple of GER region layouts in Z scale. These have been featured in the Railway Modeller. Brian Harrap, who's an RMWeb member has worked in Z finescale. For expediency, I've stuck with the Z scale standards but built my own track with code 40 rail. It is encouraging to see thought being given to a consistent rail and wheel standard.

Say what you like about MRJ but what other magazine gives you the ability to examine some really tiny stools?

I dug out the coffee jar lids I use to make "corrugated stuff" and grabbed a couple of shots. They are 1990s vintage Nescafe lids. The lids nowadays are a bit "designer" and are unsuitable so other brands or products might have more suitable lids. Pitch of the ribbing is about 0.70mm, overscale for iron but as people have said earlier, the HO scale product appears to work OK in a 2mm context. The lids I have are tapered so they need to be used as shown, in opposition to each other. Just ordinary aluminum kitchen foil will do. I'm using Tesco Strong Foil here. Incidentally, it will never, ever be "nesslay" to me, always "nessuls". The Milky Bar Kid says so. Mark

You'll need to do some work to the body as the original chassis formed the bottom section of the body. So you'll need to extend the sides downwards and also provide the buffer housings on the nose ends. https://www.flickr.com/photos/lemoncat1/2290275642 As a period piece, they have a certain charm. Reasonable ones regularly turn up on ebay and that's where I would start. Drive bands are 1/8" wide slices of 1/2" diameter neoprene tube. Beware though, the motors do lose magnetism, the symptom of this is running very hot. In good condition, they will scoot around a Lone Star layout at a fair old rate of knots but don't expect slow running. http://www.lone-star-diecast-bk.com/OpenDay.html If you want a scale model of a Baby Deltic, resin castings are available which do look quite decent and the body could sit on a modified N gauge chassis. If you want a working replica of a Lone Star diesel which will function without too much TLC, I would be inclined to mount the Lone Star bogie frames on the guts of an N gauge loco, something like the old Minitrix Class 27. In the early days of 2mm Finescale, people did reprofile the Lone Star wheels to finescale standards but the smaller flanges didn't resist the sideways pull of the belt drive so converted locos were found to be prone to derailments. Overall, the quality of the product is impressive. Lone Star items don't seem affected by the "mazak pest" so survive very well. The locos are held together by proper brass screws. The belt drive was chosen as it was a pragmatic solution to sourcing a range of gears and then having specialist workers assembling them. Lone Star (a.k.a. DCMT) were primarily a toy manufacturer. 2017 saw the 60th anniversary of the launch of the "Lone Star Locos" range. Possibly the first comprehensive 2mm system with digital control. Up to ten channels were available... The motorised OOO "Treble-O-Lectric" range came along in 1960. Mark

Being of a curious nature, I looked up "Hadrian Spooner" on the web and found a link to HMS Engineering. http://www.hmsengineering.co.uk/ So there's some competent engineering backup to the programme.

Maybe the bit where the yellee(s) threw the yeller in to the canal was edited out? What's (who's) underneath the drowned quadbike? Tune in for next week's thrilling episode.

Well, my wife Beverley & I enjoyed the programme. She was interested in how the teams worked together. OK maybe some of the participants came over as a bit gauche but to cut them some slack, they are not professional TV presenters. The banter & arguments were just like the average model railway club. The technology choices were interesting too. Obviously the track was designed to be robust and practical rather than properly railway-like. I think that was sensible even if it did look a bit like a Mattel Hot-Wheels setup. A steam loco that needs refuelling every 20 minutes? Hmm, I can see that getting a bit wearing after a while. Will we watch next week? Yes, we're hooked. The characters and scenery make it good viewing. There's a little bit of the false jeopardy that seems to be par for the course these days. Not overdone like in some other programmes. It's refreshing to see that producers didn't feel the need to have the usual irritating recap after each ad break. Mark

If you call people a "bunch of prats", it's not surprising you get a hostile reaction. In football parlance, play the ball and not the man. Mark

Uncalled for, I think. You'll find your TV has buttons to change channel or turn it off. Use them.

You have to feel sorry for whoever got the job of researching parrot bogies.

Reg Hollis joining CI5

Overlooked in the flurry of new announcements

Looks like an interesting project. For an interesting scenic break incorporating a road, railway & canal, it might be worth taking a look at Three Bridges near Southall. It's not quite the arrangement you need but there's some visually interesting ideas to be gleaned. Mark

Etched ladder strip should be reasonably easy to find. The "M" handrails could be made in a simple jig where the main rail is bent around a shaped piece of wood which has a hole drilled to hold the centre vertical in place while it's soldered. Mark

Most of my soldering is with solder wire, liquid flux and a soldering iron. I seem to have developed a knack for making it work so like a one-club golfer, it's what I invariably use. When I do resort to solder paste, my choice is Nealetin. I bought a pot at a model engineering show a few years ago. Doesn't dry out noticeably and flows very well, giving a good joint. Mark

My first running 2mm loco (in 1983!) was a Langley 24 on a Mike Bryant chassis kit. Mike offered a range of diesel drive units and motor bogies. It ran quite well but in my naivety, I assumed the unbushed etched brass was OK for chassis frames and the chassis was assembled with more enthusiasm than skill. Contrary to what's been said, I think it's worth having a go at a split frame diesel chassis as it gives a chance to learn the techniques of gear meshing and frame assembly while avoiding quartering of coupling rods. A much lower gear reduction can be used too. A diesel body will easily house a decent size coreless motor and a hefty flywheel. One of my projects is a chassis for the Armstrong-Whitworth D2 which is basically a single 6 wheel motor bogie with a pony truck at either end. Nigel Lawton belt drive components can be used, these will be quieter than the equivalent gear train. In fact Nigel does an 18mm wheelbase drive unit that could be used as the basis for a motor bogie. Fabricating sideframes would be the hard bit, if appropriate spares cannot be obtained. Where a scratchbuilt chassis scores is in the ability pull in the bogie sideframes to something more akin to a scale width and incorporating more convincing end detail. Diesel underframes are worthy of study. Dapol and Farish are getting better much improved over early efforts but when you look at the real thing, it's far from being a solid moulding. There's a lot of components which are hung on brackets and getting a bit of daylight & airiness in this area really helps capture the feel of the loco. Mark

I think this could help your witzelsucht: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm Mark

For anyone who's planning to set their recorder to grab the programmes, I've found that the Sunday evening documentaries on C4 often start a little earlier than the scheduled 20.00. Mark

That's a fair point. I'm in a different ball park in that I don't want or need block trains and am more interested in having smaller numbers of higher quality models. Building a 20 wagon hopper train would tax my patience, so I'm in awe of the determination shown by the Fencehouses team. Mind you, cleaning up 20 substandard prints will also be time consuming and the results probably disappointing. Now that there is an adaptable and inexpensive 6.5mm gauge chassis on the near horizon, there's a range of French autorails on Shapeways which I find attractive. Smoothing down those wouldn't be too bad. Mark

Clearly the potential is there but for me, that kind of surface finish is unacceptable, however cheap (or in Shapeway's case, expensive) the prints are. The French metre gauge items I obtained were much better than this, albeit on the replacement printing. It illustrates what I find so frustrating about 3D printing. Akin to producing a beautifully crafted document on screen when you've only got a 9 pin dot matrix for the end result. Mark

£50k isn't inconceivable as there aren't many Series Ds about, true value is down to how much someone is prepared to pay. More than enough to make me think twice about leaving it parked anywhere if I had one. That's the one sad thing about escalating classic bike values. Even securely locked up, a bike is still reasonably easy to steal. A lot go overseas never to be seen again and are sold in countries where fewer questions are asked.

The two turnouts were a bit banana shaped before fixing but that's due to the PCB board rather than rail expansion - the ends were curved upwards towards the rail. 0.8mm is very flexible. The turnouts are less than 300mm long overall so I'm not expecting any expansion issues. The PCB was fixed down to a wooden base during construction as I used the milled turnout templates and their respective screw holes. There were no problems with expansion. The rails were tacked in place, followed by a small fillet of solder, just basic 60/40 tin lead, not low melting point at all. The trick is to even out the soldering along the workpiece to avoid getting any specific place particularly hot.

Indeed, that's the destination. As always with Iain, the journey is most enjoyable. Mark

As Tim says, robustness and also speed. There's no need for any individual sleepering so I simply used 2mm Assn. plain strip rail on sheets of 0.8mm PCB. This matches up closely with the thickness of the brass & nickel strip rail. Thicker PCB would have meant scraping away the top layer of ply to provide a recess for the turnouts. Soldering was dead easy, it just involved running a fillet of solder along the rail/pcb joint. I extended the check and wing rails to ensure reliable running. The tie bar is 1.5mm pcb with hinged pivots. Electrical gapping was achieved by scraping away copper in appropriate locations and putting a saw cut in the rails. It has occured to me that a quayside layout like Chapel Wharf could be constructed likewise. In that case, there would be no need to use the hard to find 0.8mm PCB, commonly available 1.5mm pcb would do just as well. Mark