Galteemore

Very nice. Sets the era very well

You need to use thin stuff - under 0.5mm or thereabouts. Best place is an engineering supplier like College Engineering or Metalsmith. Ideal source would be another modeller who can let you have some scrap etch bits etc. eBay may be able to assist.

Great stuff. SMS range is really good and they seem a nice friendly company. I get their weekly customer email which is a nice round-up of modelling expertise- often images of their products in use. I hope you’ll be sending them pics of Clogherhead.

No worries. If someone goes to the trouble of posting the results of their modelling, I think it deserves a response!

Worth the effort - looking good

Must be early UTA for the UG. Still pretty clean with GNR markings very clear!

This is all an ongoing debate in 7mm world. Consensus is that big shows may have had their day. Cameo shows like Larkrail seem to thrive, with smaller layouts requiring fewer crew and thus lower expenditure. Mind you, people probably thought collapse of IMREX decades ago was end of the world - and it wasn’t. https://www.themodelrailwayclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/15_Exhibition.pdf

Yes. It’s happened before - W and H, Beatties, Victors, Modelzone…still a sad loss though. Always liked the old school paper parcels.

I was in Cheltenham Model Centre a few weeks ago and they had bought some of the EE stock but not catalogued yet.

Loving this. Like the lifebelt cabinet on the sea wall too.

Purchase here https://irrs.ie/archives/maps_drawings/

IRRS have a drawing of the SLNC van, available electronically.

And so it begins. Another falls into the all embracing arms of 7mm. There’s no going back now, Ken ….;) stellar work btw…..

Get yourself a fibreglass pen, some flux, and some scrap brass to practice on. Try a wagon or even a brass building kit (eg a small shed or similar). Practice skills like scribing and folding brass. Once learned never forgotten. https://www.world-of-railways.co.uk/techniques/how-to-build-your-first-etched-brass-kit/

The CIE coaches will be produced btw - the company is not insolvent and is closing down in an orderly way.

Yes, given that in 1922 every other engine in Adelaide was black (no GNRI blue or green then!) something must have stood out for Fred!

Made one of these about 30 years ago after reading ‘The Mighty Hood’ as a kid. Those etches really lift the model, as they provide real finesse. Agreed re thin line, challenging though it was to mask!

Thanks Jb, but the Small and Large Tanks have the aesthetic edge over the Loughs ! Re the DSER moguls, they were well travelled in early life- one of the few DSE classes to see north of Dublin. Arriving during the Civil War, they were sent to Adelaide for safety (the irony of this to a child of the 70s is hilarious). Fred Graham, who saw the engines in steam at Adelaide, swore they were green….

That’s fabulous David. Really captures the look of the prototype. Nice work on the turning !

Hope the recovery goes well Patrick. Lovely to see 205 looking so much at home.

Jeeps were available until mid 1971 so a new build might not even have been necessary. In retrospect it’s the biggest missed opportunity of Irish preservation, but it wasn’t so at the time. 4 cost £1275 to buy in 71. This is the equivalent of some £16,000 now, but such cash simply wasn’t available. Although you’d have to be a septuagenarian to recall the Moguls in their prime, it would at least represent one of the red Irish liveries on the main line again! A polished up W class with a suitable nameplate would look glorious. Moguls, incidentally, were found to be superior over Jeeps on the Derry Road. Not so much in pulling trains as stopping them - the extra braking power of a Mogul gave them an edge over WTs - on at least one occasion, I think, a heavy goods train almost overcame a WTs stopping power on one of the steeper downgrades. Hence WTs hardly ever appeared with any regularity on the route until the lifting began.

With any prototype, there are signature features which identify its origins. An easy way to make an ‘Irish’ loco from a generic UK 0-6-0 is to stick on a smokebox door wheel - instant win. As JHB says, livery and transfers will also take you a long way. Many designers crossed the Irish Sea in both directions so there are significant commonalities, especially in that late Victorian epoch.

Fair point, although 131 is incredibly accomplished at working current trains….but in his concluding comments in ‘Decade of Steam’, Drew Donaldson does pick out the 400 class as the cream of the CIE steam fleet.

There’s also a reason CIE effectively mothballed these locos fairly quickly. Irrespective of loading gauge, they are designed to do one thing and one thing only - haul heavy trains out of Cork and Dublin, and speed between those two places at pace. Swiss Army knife they are not. The other Irish main line express locos of the era - represented by 85 and 105 are far more versatile express locos and can get far more places = more viable for preservation. Santa trains to Maynooth and back are not 800 class diagrams….Arguably, for far less cash, a new build of a GSWR 4-4-0 classic D19 or an MGWR 2-4-0 would be a better way of getting a southern speed queen on the rails. Having said that, I understand the fascination with 800, having glimpsed her first c 1976 in Witham St Museum - so big in that space you couldn’t really sense her beauty but only her sheer mass over all the other objects crammed in there. At least in Cultra there’s space to see her properly.

Great idea. Planning similar myself. The late Richard Chown used to discipline himself for 20 minutes in workshop irrespective of how he felt. Vast majority of times he stayed for longer. Not sure if anyone else is like this but I often put off modelling for fear of failure. Once I overcome the psychological barrier of actually sitting down at the bench and doing something it’s generally ok.