TheSignalEngineer

With steam to spare by geoff7918, on Flickr Possibly the Moor St to Avonmouth empties between Hall Green and Yardley Wood

Here's one I made earlier

Any Yellow Duck Tape in the stores?

Deleted, link bad.

Road policing has been abandoned except for accidents in most places. Today I will ride across to my daughter's house to do the school pick-up for her. 8 miles and two counvils/police forces. I will see 3 or 4 illeagally parked cars in each area on both journeys and obviously that won't include overstays. 10 minutes walk each way to the school will usually find at least 4 more and a lot of inconsiderate parking on pavements not leaving enough room for a pushchair or wheelchair. I've been doing twice a week in school terms for 5 years and have seen the Parking Enforcement company on our side of the border three times at most and only seen ticketed vehicles twice on the other area.

Plenty around the Peak District as well. They seem to delight in forcing people off the lesser roads avoiding the A6 through Hazel Grove whilst racing from Buxton to the Greater Manchester area. Worst is when they are empty and driving flat out to pick up another load from Hurdlow before closing time so they can make an early start next morning.

I haven't used one, but they are made to fit the Hornby body so still a foot short of the prototype. I think John was being modest when he linked macgoerdie's post above, he's done quite a bit of butchering of Hornby's Palethorpes stock in the past.

Hard Hats and Gloves were an 'As Necessary' when I was Signalling Works Engineer c1990. Hard hats were worn when anyone was working above you or crane operations were going on such as using a Hiab on a lorry. They were also specified for jobs under mechanical signal boxes because of the moving parts. Gloves were used for dirty jobs like pulling cables or handling materials such as concrete troughs. These are a couple of Hi-Vis shots I have put up before but have copied over for information. The first was at Essington Wood in 1981, full orange jacket and shorty vests. The second is full orange overalls at Kings Cross Thameslink in 1989. Still no reflective stripes.

I just managed to get a couple of the D J Norton photo books from the county library system. Looking through the first volume I found a picture of 72001 Clan Cameron arriving with an Up express at Birmingham New Street in January 1952. Brand sparkly new, even the wheels were clean. I'm wondering if it was running in ex-Crewe Works prior to delivery to Polmadie. I never managed to see one south of the Liverpool-Manchester axis in my spotting days although a couple of confirmed sightings of the Kingmoor ones did reach our patch, one on a special to Coventry in 1962 and the following year 72008 worked a special Leeds - Tyseley - Stafford Road Works - Crewe - Leeds. There was another report of one passing Aston in 1957 with a special full of RAF personnel but I can't corroborate that.

I think some of the problems with Mainline were caused by the way they were treated. Over-oiling can be bad for some kinds of plastic. I had a Collett Goods from new which was never oiled and never had a problem. It still ran perfectly when I sold it after 30 years. I bought three panniers and made one good one. I did however sell that as there was a nice weathered body which got enough spares from the other two to get it into good running shape. The bonus was that I actually made a profit by selling that all of the useable bits I didn't want on Ebay and learned a lot in the process.

Some boxes also had blast walls built outside the locking room door.

I've soldered on the ones not affected by lining before painting then carefully cleaned any paint off. As the Good Captain says it's a real pain to line with them in place. I glued the rest on after painting and lining, a dab of superglue on the back is usually sufficient, then varnished at the end.

I've recently rebuilt a couple of Airfix 16T Minerals I originally built in the 1960s. No problems there. Also still running on new wheels are at least three Ratio wagons, a Starfish (Cambrian?), two Airfix Meat Vans and a Cattle wagon built c1980, a GWR Open C, and an LMS Short Tube plus an Ian Kirk LMS 5-plank of unknown vintage but probably about 40 years old. To go with it I recently made a stable mate picked up at an exhibition. The original price of these was less than £1. None of these show any plastic problems. Conversely, a canal transhipment shed I built in 1980 from plastruct section and styrene sheet didn't survive.

My grandsons born in Stockport talk Manc with a Brummie accent.

We certainly saw increases on some areas where I worked in the late 1980s.

New build stopped in 1939. MoS took it over then aaccording to Hansard sold it back to LNER c1946. Not sure what was done there after that. MV had a factory around there until 1960s

Silver Fox do/did some parts, otherwise you can cut up one to get the necessary bits.

Continuing that thought Dukinfield just down the road was still doing carriage repairs at that time.

When I got back into modelling after a break of about 20 years I picked up a few things from ebay and elsewhere. I bought a duffer occasionally, some being refunded as not being as described. They were part of a learning curve as at the time RTR was coming on leaps and bounds. Some became practice for weathering and donors for cut'n'shut but served a purpose while I had them. Quite a few got rehomed, some after being dismantled and sold as spares, usually at a profit over what I paid for the whole model. Others were cascaded to the grandchildren as it's much harder to wreck a Lima Deltic or the like rather than let them loose on my better stuff. I really think it's a matter of horses for courses. I learned a lot quite cheaply and moved on. Some of the old stuff is surprisingly robust and a lot will run on Code 100 track. It's worth checking out the topic on here about known Mazak problems and there are lots of topics about what people have done to improve old stuff and which ones do or don't work. Rolling stock is usually quite cheap for some decent looking stuff from say, Airfix and Mainline. Not 100% but good placeholders and donors for future projects. I have about 10 coaches which started life as other things. Things I do steer clear of now are Mainline and other split chassis locos known to be prone to axle splitting Mainline also tend to have motor supporting lugs prone to fracture. Lima steam locos. Lima diesels unless i've seen them run Any Hornby stuff prior to the 4-digit R numbers The main thing to do is enjoy the hobby. I can marvel at what some people can do on a historical P4 layout but on a personal level my layout is for playing trains and relaxing. I also like to produce variations to what is available RTR such as converting the old Airfix suburban stock to other types not available. Life's too short to argue, get on and enjoy it.

In Summer 1954 and Summer 1956 South Eastern section CWNs it was shown, with five others of this type, a declassified Low-window FK s656s and two Maunsell D2401 BCKs, as part of Set 262 which was allocated to Folkestone Jn for special traffic. Wonder if it was red carded somewhere and the locals took a fancy to it?

He's an ex-journo, probably get rolled out by the Beeb next week and called a 'Transport Expert'.

There are a few on Warwickshire Railways at Snow Hill in 1947 https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/birminghamsnowhill_locos.htm#stock

Yes, a bit of a rat-hole. One of the proposals was to rebuild the DC Lines tunnels at Primrose Hill. Various proposals at the southern end included a new line from North of Aylesbury to join the line into Euston. IIRC there wasn't any proposal for running south of Aylesbury on the GC/Met alignment

I've only got six boards and they can be a pain at times. The tracks were laid over the joins, soldered to copper-clad screwed down along the edges then the rails cut. During the hot, dry weather last year I had to adjust some joins because of movement, this year in the damp they've been adusted again but not always in the opposite way to last year.

Looks like someone has been reading Adrian Quine's paper for the Adam Smith Institute. https://www.adamsmith.org/news Regarding his suggestions, I was involved in assessing some work on my patch for re-opening the GC from the Aylesbury area to Rugby for at least 125mph running to increase capacity northwards out of London about 30 years ago. It included connections to the Trent Valley line at Newbold, the Birmingham line near Brandon and Woolston, and a new line to join the WCML on the way into Euston. One suggestion was for the DC Lines to be donated to the Bakerloo, abandoned south of Queens Park and rebuilt to provide six tracks through Kilburn and Primrose Hill then continuing by developing existing tracks down Camden Bank.