Galteemore

An S class would be the easiest of the options to make 21mm-friendly….

According to ‘Irish Imdustrial and Contractors Locos’ it was an 0-4-0 vertical boiler type, in operation c 1885-95

Always worth a punt to see if he can use his authority to speed up delivery of those Rails 6w coaches…

The words of Jim McGeown on his 7mm scale generic coach kits always bear reading….. Although based on prototypes the concept of these coach kits is that they are very generic and represent typical coaches that were built by all the railway companies. http://www.jimmcgeown.com/images/6 Wheel Brass Coach Photo.jpg http://www.jimmcgeown.com/images/LNER Coach Side 2.jpg http://www.jimmcgeown.com/images/GWR Coach Side 2.jpg http://www.jimmcgeown.com/images/LMS Coach Side 2.jpg http://www.jimmcgeown.com/images/SR Coach Side 2.jpg These kits have been designed to provide the modeller with an economical coach that can be built in a reasonable weekend modelling session to a level of detail suitable for running on a layout. The modeller can then paint the coach in their chosen railways livery. By painting and lettering in say LNER brown livery a set of these coaches will capture the look and feel of a typical LNER rural branch line train made up of inherited pre grouping coaches. Your friends will probably make comments like "I see that you have modeled the coaches used on the Campbellwick Green branch in October 1936". You can then nod sagely and secretly smile to yourself knowing that the most distinguishing thing about coaches is their colour and lettering. Painted chocolate and cream they have the look of some of the South Wales railway companies coaches that were absorbed by the Great western and painted LMS maroon a Midland appearance and so on. The possibilities for these coaches is only limited by your imagination.

Yes, let’s draw a veil over it

But in an orderly queue

You want the Sisters of Plenitude!

Poor Clare - you left her out!

I always get her mixed up with her distant cousin Fran Ciscan.

What a delightfully elegant solution. Which would - mind cogs turning furiously - work just as well in 5.5mm scale where RTR 00 chassis are often used …..

Fabulous pic of No 37 showing how a monochrome loco weathers. Look at all those shades of grunge….

Make contact perhaps via Phil Parker who knows John Campbell. Phil has a blog -searching for something like ‘Phil’s Workbench’ will find it. From my own days as a 16mm modeller, I recall that his speciality is coal fired live steam. A basic off the shelf generic 0-6-0 live steam loco from a factory outfit like Roundhouse will cost around £1500. A hand built T and D steam loco by a master builder is probably heading towards or above 5 figures tbh. 16mm Irish locos are not common, largely because the prototypes were quite big units. Archangel used to do a Cavan and Leitrim 4-4-0T IIRC. Accucraft had launched plans for the same loco c2019 but I am not sure that production actually occurred.

One of my college lecturers said you could judge the literacy rate of a society by how far the graffiti was off the ground….. There’s some fascinating examples of 1950s graffiti in Keith Pirt’s Irish colour photos - including ‘God save Egypt’ chalked on an RT tank at Adelaide during the 1956 Suez crisis….

Interesting to see that it was not always thus. Pictures of Manorhamilton 2 years post closure show the yard full of carriages with every window intact. One wonders, without venturing into simplistic truisms, just how that could happen. After all, it’s not as if the youths of late 50s Leitrim had much to entertain them.

My kids had this - although mostly the plastic Thomas stuff, which we used to make massive systems. Something must have rubbed off - Galteemore Jnr is now a management apprentice with Transport for London….My own weapon if choice as a youngster was Dublo 3-rail, which was a robust and rather fun way to build fairly large systems fairly easily, albeit with an emphasis on operation rather than scenic fidelity!

UTA green is darker than CIE.

Yes. It wasn’t especially well lit. In reality it’s a nice mid green.

TS Hill Books in Dorking have a copy - see ABE Books

Here’s one I did years ago. Rover Brooklands Green aerosol. Sold on to another modeller, for whom I returned it to MGWR russet brown!!

Have a look at raylo.co.uk for more of this kind of thing

Try again on Monday…..

Back in east Antrim more times than usual this year, sadly due to my father in law’s final illness and death. As a lad, he and his brother used the 3’ gauge yard at Larne as a playground / shunting trucks by hand! Spending a fair amount of time around Larne this year rekindled my childhood interest in the east Antrim 3’. Reading some of @Patrick Davey’s musings on scale inspired me to make a little 5.5mm scale diorama on a wargaming base. It allows very cheap and easy sources of material - 16.5mm track and components being easily found…thus standard Hornby train set track duly butchered here to produce 3’ panels. So here’s Kilwaughter siding during lifting c1954, based on a photo kindly supplied by @airfixfan complete with an IoM wagon for now - NCC stuff is in progress! This will be a sideshow to my main projects but may eventually come to something. I have at least 1 loco chassis in stock…..spot the large blade of grass when I tried taking pics in back garden!! Some of the other pics were taken within 20 yards of the GW main line near Swindon- hopefully some day I will find a suitable spot in the Vale of the White Horse to take backdrop pics!

Retro tinplate style. Designed for shed or garden layouts with long runs and an emphasis on operation and sheer atmosphere over detail. Classic and most enjoyable stuff, but a world away from Finescale.

Very very nice indeed. The late Steve Rafferty would have loved that RT of yours! The GW collection is fab - is that a ‘Galloping Alice’ amongst them ?