Sentinel281

Really great, congratulations to that beauty!

Hi Colin, thank you for the fotos, thats really good information on the topic. Do I get that right: The wohle motor/cogwheel/axle arrangement is no more provided from Michael Chinery? Are there instead any suggestions where to buy what material, i.e. motor, axles, wheels, cogwheels, wormgears? I often changed wheels on existing axles to get vehicles with smaller flanges (RP 25 instead of sth. else) but building a gear on my own seems rather... embarassing. Cheers, Gerhard

Hm. Seems they don't want me to come in...

Thank you very much, I will try that!

Hello, Is there a source on the net or elsewhere where I can get informations about nowadays goodstrains and their normal schedules? I would like to take some photos if possible. Thanks in advance, Gerhard.

The dealer I thougt of is APC Adams, somewhere in Germany. If you would like me to ask him, please let me know. I guess sending a letter to Ireland cannot cost a fortune, and one belt plus 10 or 20 disks will not be more than a letter. Nevertheless it could be cheaper for you to order in the UK, so as mentioned above: If you want me to, I will ask Mr Adams. BTW: I'm quite sure that the spare parts mentioned above are appropriate for your wagon, but as you describe it, it is an even older version than the last #5569, as this last one already hat NEM-Pockets, but without coulisse. Yours seems to be the one that I do know from a friend when we were about eight or ten or so. In this times every manufacturer in mainland Europe had its own fixture for the couplers. Awful. Nothin' about "good old times", it was just a heck to run after the different couplers if one broke.

Hi, your agent from germany's speaking ;-) what exactly do you need from the spares section? The belt? The felt pads? They surely still produce spares. I regard the Fleischmann site as crap, not only from the actual serch but also from earlier experiences. They write you should type in the product id to get an "Explosionszeichnung", whatever this is in english, it should show the model as a diagram in exploded state. Out of that you ought to take the spares part number to order. I tried several times, but to no avail. I know a good specialist that seems to have nearly every spare part from the Modelleisenbahn Gmbh which is infact the holding of Roco and Fleischmann. He's even known to find a spare part without number, just by description. If you could name the parts you need I would try to make an inquiry if he can deliver the parts and what the costs for sending them to Ireland were. Please apologize my bad english, at the moment I am learning swedish which is not very helpful for my english knowledge and one Bulmers less last night also would have led to more mental activity... Thought it was appropriate to go to the local irish pub on March, 17th...

Hi No. 4, I just don't get that: Do you have a link to Johns Website, where the B101 class locos are already available? I would really like to see one in black and tan, but I still don't find ANY B 101 on his site The one on ebay is the second one I see after the pictures of the silverish one here on the forum. Cheers Gerhard.

I must admit, you are right. the sharp bend from the producer's photo cannot be seen on neither model plus the snatcher holes are not deep enough in my opinion, espescially when compared to the photo linked above.

Thanks for sharing the pictures, hard to decide how to go on now, I will have to think about that.

Well, looking back to when it all begun, the discussions about whether to have glazing or not, interior details or no interior... I'm really stunned about this great development. Congratulations, really really nice models. Cheers Gerhard.

Spotted some Dublin Buses in Hattons Britbus Bargain Bonanza: http://www.ehattons.com/StockDetail.aspx?SID=24569&utm_source=AdHocNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130920 http://www.ehattons.com/StockDetail.aspx?SID=39254&utm_source=AdHocNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130920 Perhaps somone of you is interested... Cheers, Gerhard.

Very nice indeed, she's a beauty. Thans for sharing the pictures!

I can fully subscribe to this point of view, me the same. I've got a moular station layout with an interchange from continetal normal gauge to meter gauge with a carrier truck pit and its much fun to shunt the wagons onto the carriers with a sounded steam tender engine. It even helps to forsee what the loco will do next. When I hear the steam go to the cylinders I know it will move, even when looking at the carriers in the pit. For Locos at speed I also cannot see very much use of sound chips.

Well, I also can't beat an elephant, but I've got another one: The whole story can be read here (sorry, in german only), http://www.solingen-internet.de/si-hgw/tuffi.htm so here a summary: A Circus came to Wuppertal and wanted to let Tuffi the elefant have a ride on the "Schwebebahn". Alas Tuffi did not like the narrow and swinging coach so he escaped by braking through a door. Luckily the Schwebebahn was over the River Wupper at this time so Tuffi just fell into the water and was rescued after. As no photos were taken, poscard printers had their interpretations of the case made by their retouchers (for the younger: no, there was no adobe Photshop at that time...). A colleague of my girlfriend told her she nearly had a similar passenger: Some people of a circus wanted to beg for money in the city center and thougt it was a good idea to take along the baby elephant to do so. I don't know if she knew about Tuffy but she refused to give him a lift in her tramway.

Would be interesting to know what is really part of the original construction. Looking at the pictures here, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-20272985 it seems the loco was rebuilt every few years. The freshly painted loco looks very nice!

Thanks Wiggy for these videos. As far as I can see the chips delivered by PM are manufactured by ESU, someone had put some pictures to one of the threads here. Every ESU chip I ever saw and bought had that typical white badge showing the week of production and code of batch. If the sounds are the same as those from the ESU site I don't know, every word from me concerning that would be purely speculative.

Surfing arround on the internet I also stubled across the ESU offer. On their home page you can have a hearing sample. They indeed seem to offer these chips for 071 and 201 class. I did not have a chance to do any further research; here in Germany and especially as ESU is no 200 km away from me it should not be a big issue to get these chips. Alas, I will not be able to get into this matter before July. In November a friend of mine and I ordered some chips from modelshop Belfast and thus I can assure you its another thing as the chips from msb are made by Zimo, an austrian manufacturer. On this site the sonds projects can be downloaded: http://www.esu.eu/en/downloads/sounds/generation-4/loksound-v40-oem/ scroll down a bit to the irish locos. As far as I understand you need to have a "Lokprogrammer" which is a device that allows to put the downloaded soundproject onto an immaculate ESU Loksound 4.0 chip. The sound projects are free downloadable if you agree to the license agreement. On the right hand side of the site if you click "Bulletin" some notes can be found what function will allow which sound. Perhaps I can find someone here who has got such a Lokprogrammer but as I wrote before: not before July and not sure.

Hello Finnyus, thanks for sharing your pictures. If want to get a guided tour trough the Stuttgart Tramway Museum one of the next times you are here let me know, I think I could arrange that for you (certainly also for other members here). Cheers Gerhard.

A great issue in preserving historical vehicles, be it railcars or buses or trams or sth the like is to overcome the stage when they are regarded as rubbish. When their livetime ends, normally everybody (ie every normal passenger) regards them as "the old ones" but not as something historical. At that stage the vehicles often have not had much attention as the workshops previously knew about the nearing end of service. Thus the old generation of railcars at the end of its live nearly always is a rather bad state. As mentioned above by another member, they are generally of the same historical interrest as locos or carriages. I presume riding in a Great Northern railbus (of the converted bus ones) might also not have been quite comfortable. Today it would be fun riding in one. Or riding on wooden seats with steep backs where you can sit on upright or not at all is not a question of comfort, but people love it as it somehow feels and smells like good old time, despite the fact these times might not have been really good. Think about all the "mk1 railcars" that existed in Ireland. These early examples would be great for any historical railway today. I think today the 450s are regarded as crap and thus demolished. Looking forward 50 years they will be good old time and nobody would bother if they are cold in winter and hot in summer. I also know about the difficulties described above, when every vehicle is wired individually and no proper plans are available, this is really a problem if you want to run it for a long time. One final thougt: A 450 is probably much more suitable to get a historical vehicle than a 22k ever will be as it has by far not as much electronics as modern vehicles do what, in my eyes, will convict most modern railcars to a fate as standing objects in Museums some 70 years in the future (if they will ever survive that long).

I had the same thougt some months ago. The point is: You will have lots of detail that does not belong to the AEC Railcar but to the Cravens. Be it as Blaine said (which I don't doubt) or not, John improved the his Cravens in some points, for example he fits the covers between the bogies cover motor etc. on the real railcar. There are no similar covers on the Cravens. In my opinion its a big issue to add parts like these to a detailed model without make the added parts stick out as less detailed parts of the model. Besides that, respraying a Bachmanns Cravens set does not change the wrong windows and arrangement of doors and windows. Finally I think its not fair to compare the cost of an own respray with a model from someone like John from SFM if you don't take into account the (cost for the) time you need to do the respray incl. disassembly and reassembly.

I also took a look at it and be sure, it will not have been the last. Great work, I like the presentation of the layouts, really inspiring!

Hi there, as I promised now some pictures of the steps I did on the A Class loco: It ist rather difficult to get a picture that shows the real thing. In this picture you can see, as it is in real life, that the left hand side marker light (looking from the drivers view certainly ) is not as bright as the right one. Two more pictures from the other cab, directly to the front. Here it looks better, the lights are indeed a little bit darker than it looks here. The second picture shows the red ligts on, indeed they are really red, but taking pictures in aritficial light makes the camera compensate the higher red/yellow parts of the main light so the red marker lights are alas overcompensated... The very beginning. The ready made PCBs. The little PCBs in neighbourhood to the big ones bear additional resistors. spot on, direction 1. The little white PCBs are for the head lights. A close up of one set of PCBs. The parts with the numbers on it are the SMD-resistors. Alas I did not make any pictures of the whole arrangement when fitted but thats perhaps better as inside Michelle everything looks like spaghetti à la copperwire or in other words its a dirty mess. Making the CAWS antennae. I glued a strip of 2mm brass with a 45° angle on one side into the bent over etches. After that I applied primer. The buffer plates had to be narrowed slightly to fit the antenna bearings between. After painting the antennae in black and red they were fitted to the loco body. Be careful not to apply too much colour, otherwise the fine holes in the antennae will be filled up and look bad. Thats for now, if you have further questions, dont hestiate to ask.

Thanks for the friendly words! @Kirley: I am not fully satisfied with my work and will have to do something on it, but not at the moment. I found it rather complicated to fit LED. The main issue is: How do you ensure the light coming the right way? I will enclose some pictures when I'm on my home computer again so you can get a good impression how I did it. Short and simple described: I made PCBs on which I soldered SMD-LEDs. Every lens on the model was drilled trouhg and afterwards cuttings from a 1mm-diameter polycarbonate (in german "Plexiglas") strip were put through the holes in the case. These strips are put into a piece of strip styrene 2x3 mm where are also holes drilled trough. The syrene is then glued on top of the PCB so that the holes SHOULD fit the LEDs on the PCB. Infact it does not completely on one side. I should change the resitor of the not so good fitting two LED to make it shine brighter through the marker lights but this means lot of work again (as I used common resistors for any two LED that work together (i.e. Marker lights/ red ligths)) and I am not so fond of the Idea of beginning the whole thing once again.

Hello all, as I don't want to be counted among those that only talk don't do anything, here some pictures of what I am currently doing. At first, a face lift for Michelle: I used CAWS antennae from SSM, painted the buffer beam in normal red (not in dayglow as delivered from Silverfox), added Window frames (also SSM) a modified (torn) H0fine coupler hook (see H0fine.de), brake pipes made from 0,99 mm guitar string and wipers (also SSM). The lights were drilled trough and fitted with LEDs which is not perfect but it somehow "glows" . The model was RTR from Silverfox but i liked to improve the look. Certainly it can't cope with one of Murphy's but for me its ok. Thats for now. I will add some pictures of the "making of", but need to re-read the forum rules concering the attachment of pictures.