Galteemore

Don’t be daft JHB. Those last bits won’t be in cab 2. They will be on a separate sprue so you can pick which flavour you want, and the Indos will be supplied with a range of dates!

Here’s Sutton station via this site..http://irishrailwayarchitecture.blogspot.com/2018/11/watt-shock-sutton.html?m=1 The edges of the picture do suggest a covered footbridge. Agreed - it’s not Dundalk or Drogheda

Thankfully officialdom can work the other way too! BCDR No 30 at Cultra had a lucky escape after the UTA noticed a major surge in the value of copper, and intensified their loco scrapping efforts. No 30 was a prime candidate for the torch until the late Harold Houston at York Road had her sent to the isolated shed at Cookstown Junction until the market settled again!

Alan O’Rourke is pretty good on this David - an email to him can yield more information on many subjects. I have certainly found him a wellspring of helpful facts! On instructions, there was an interesting debate on the Gauge O Guild Forum lately as to whether a kit designer was actually the best person to write them - a case could be made for a joint effort with someone who had never seen the etches before and could come up with potential pitfalls or ambiguities that the designer may have unconsciously overlooked.

Intriguingly, the NI Government was taken to task on one closure by a former Ulster Prime Minister in a 1950s speech at Stormont. JM Andrews (NI PM 1940-43 and brother of the Titanic designer) asked why the line could not be reopened to Comber given its likely usefulness and that it still wasn’t lifted. The fact that Andrews had been a BCDR director pre 1921 - and his family mill had sidings off the line - may have influenced his thoughts!

I remember coming home at about the age of 11 from a visit to my grandparents in Leitrim and eyeing up a Wrenn 0-6-2T in the loft with a view to such a project. Don’t think it would have ended as well as yours Mayner! 2mm would be a fantastic scale to model the SLNC, with the greater scope it gives for sweeps of landscape. As Mr H says above, imagine the 7:20 in all its faded glory - seen at full length in an Irish landscape ....

Great stuff, Ernie. Think you may be right as it doesn’t look like any of the familiar angles of the main stations. The scenery looks too free of hills to be along the middle of the line. I suspect it may be taken facing south at Collooney. I think Casserley may have had a brake van run on a cattle train, which would also fit - Collooney being the main starting point for the SLNC livestock specials.

Unless they’ve used the wrong pic, that’s a OO gauge one Tony - even less interest to you! The coupling looks like a standard Bachmann OO one. There may well be interest on here.,,

Looking good David - and some fine soldering!! This sounds a most familiar tale though. Fettling the curves on my little tank took ages. I was genuinely anxious that the rods would end up clouting the valances. When I tried running the loco there was a shower of sparks accompanied by ominous grinding noises - before everything shorted out. As you know better than I, it’s possible to build Alphagraphix locos to 36.75 - but not always easy - I suspect that they are designed primarily for 32mm wheels which fit in that little bit more comfortably. To fix the issue, I had to take a Dremel to the inside of the F6 and grind away various bits where the flanges were rubbing things they shouldn’t. It was test and adjust all the way through but all came good in the end...looks like you’re sorting the issues as they come up!

I think it finally closed to Rathkenny in 1940 and the rails were probably lifted in short order given what was happening that year...which also meant it was a rather inauspicious time to go taking photos of a transport asset - even a redundant one.

What a beautiful loco, Leslie!

Nice work. Unusual prototype too.

I did enjoy the time travel in the new IRRS journal - showing @leslie10646 back in 1963!

Nice prospect, John. Tony Ragg has built a rather splendid one which I have seen at a show. Oddly, this is one of the easier ones for 7mm as Alphagraphix have a card kit to work off - and also produce suitable w/m bogie frames.

Looking good David! The F6 I recently built had a similar fix for the curved running plate, although the J18 seems to have a bit more meat in the footplate which should make construction more solid. I found that building the superstructure with the loco clamped to a piece of Formica helped keep it all square.

Nice work Noel. Number on the frame looks especially good

Isn’t that what finescale is all about?

The Loughrea and Ballinrobe lines had 79lb rails originally on half-round sleepers. FB rail was used AFAIK. In 7mm we tend to use code 100 - am guessing you could get off with code 70 which I have seen recommended in 4mm.

Wow! Another masterpiece takes shape...

My biggest regret re my student days is that I now realise I was living not far from Richard Chown and could have applied to be an operator on Castle Rackrent.....how amazing it would have been to have seen that huge 36.75mm system.... I made up for that a little at least by arranging a meeting in 1991 with the late P D Hancock of Craig and Mertonford fame. A highly reclusive man, he only agreed to see me because I was studying the same subject at the same university he had attended!

Very nice. And a lovely shot of the GNR MAK diesel too...

Cheers Ernie. I for one am most grateful that the SLNC stuff is in your hands - given your generosity in sharing your treasure trove.

This sounds so familiar to my inner monologue last month. Every time you look, there are more of those things!! I ruminated on several ways of building it, including brass sheet punched on a press - but there just is no shortcut, largely due to the distinctively bolted ribs. Looks terrific so far.

Looking good Angus. Traditional it may be but the front view offers a bit more scope for detailing - as you know, the area under the canopy at Dromahair is rather rich in poster boards, barrows and scales. Unlike Manorhamilton and Glenfarne, the ‘street frontage’ at Dromahair is most uninspiring as it was basically the back of a rather plain house - no elaborate door, canopy or such - photo taken last summer. The level crossing etc at the Ballygawley end might offer some scope for trompe l’oeil distractions. At the Lisgorman end, a telegraph pole and some verdancy might serve...

Nice work David. You did it a much cleverer way than I for the angle. I used T section Evergreen and stuck individual bolt heads down each side.... What I did find useful for the detail strips was a solvent called Limonene which is much gentler and less aggressive than the Plastic Weld I used for the main construction.