DJ Dangerous

Pfft, 40 degrees in summer is nothing. Come back to me when it's 40 there in winter... And when it's the place that IRM / AS are going to move production to once China are sanctioned for invading Taiwan...

There must be a bus just around the corner!

Brand new Bachmann Irish steam set, still wrapped. One for the hardcore collectors. Seller says UK only but to contact them - eBay re-set a lot of seller's ads to UK only dring the Royal Mail cyber attack, and many sellers are manually switching their ads back - current bid around €48: https://www.ebay.es/itm/195651450812 Spare buffers for 121 / 141 / 181 / 071 for €11,50: https://www.ebay.es/itm/155376010301 Murphy Models 182 in Supertrain livery for €255: https://www.ebay.es/itm/285159602391 Two Murphy Models RPSI Mk2's for €40: https://www.ebay.es/itm/134488173655 IRM A Class A23R for €320 "Buy It Now" with a reserve of €225 and zero bids: https://www.ebay.es/itm/266167504899 Oxford Diecast Tinnelly curtainsider for €25: https://www.ebay.es/itm/134422134917 Same again but for €35: https://www.ebay.es/itm/325507252714

My kingdom for a spare windscreen wiper! Absolutely incredible, @murphaph! You have managed to blur the lines between art and science.

In fairness to the second seller, it does say DCC sound fitted, but doesn't say what decoders or sound files, so it's hard to judge.

What's with the pricing on the A's at the moment? I have a few that I bought to re-number but have since decided to sell them and use the money on ICR's instead. I can sell them for about €275 each, after posting them up to Ireland and paying An Post's crappy fees, and I won't lose anything at all, or €285 each and make a few bob profit, but... https://touch.adverts.ie/models/irish-railway-models-a-class/29588269 https://touch.adverts.ie/models/irish-railway-models-a-class/29574951 I doubt that they have all been posted down to the Canaries, then posted up to Ireland, with tax paid both ends. Is that the market value or what?

Say no to snow!

Well, they're a bit shiny and the paint is a bit thick, but they're still better than blue bars.

I know, but I reckon I can touch those bits up easy enough. Even the metal coloured ones are made of a blue-ish plastic. You can see it in my zoomed-in photos on a few of them, where the grey paint has come away.

Gave the blue locking bars a quick blast of the only paint that I had. Will give them a few more coats before fitting them. Not a perfect colour but better than blue. Original ones lying beside them for reference.

Grand, I was looking for an excuse to not do any more of them tonight. I couldn't figure out another bar combination that would have looked prototypical. There's no way to get four handles the same height onto a container with two handles facing left and two handles facing right.

Yeah, real pain. Seriously, how the Hell are you supposed to clean the bits of the sprues off the bars without breaking the bars? To avoid gluing my hands to anything, I just used a cocktail stick to put a tiny drop of glue into each of the four holes for one bar, dropped that into place, then repeated for the next one. It was less dangerous than gluing the protrusions on the bars themselves, but did lead to glue splodges on a few doors. Just checking, and the blue Ferrymasters boxes definitely came with blue locking bars. Should these ideally be painted a metal colour?

The locking bars were painful. Six cuts per bar so 24 cuts per container. The sprues are stronger than the bars, so one of mine ended up in three pieces, roughly glued back together before fitting, and many of the others still have bits of the sprues attached. I was afraid to try clean them up as the bars themselves are so weak compared to the sprues. They'll be grand running around on 47' Flats but not great for yard photos or anything. I did all of the locking bars as per the photos from @MOGUL and @popeye but was thinking afterwards that I should have done one or two differently as if the containers had different doors or something. I have loads more of these locking bars to fit, and the blue Ferrymasters boxes (I think) seem to come with blue locking bars... Is that right or should they also be bare metal colour?

What the Hell was the driver of 080 looking for halfway through the video?

The link: https://www.hattons.co.uk/stocklist/siteresults?searchfield=HM7000

The 22000's were a ballsy move, but are great value when you think of the price of a loco and coaches. People are always talking about an Irish trainset. Well, this is more or less what a trainset would cost and entail. I hope to order a few more of these further down the line but don't want to overcommit just yet, after just clearing the NIR coach pack balance and having some IR coaches with payment pending. Plus, it's possible that we'll see Paddy's new run of 141's and 181's this year, plus we may have an IRM steamer, and we'd bloody better have 47' Flats and two-tone green Dublin Buses, all draining the budgets that little bit more. Possible that others are in the same boat, unwilling to pre-order until they get their stuff together.

Yeah, get @murphaph To weather, gouge and rust them beyond recognition.

Jusr received some Ferrymasters and Samskips today. Been in the post for a few months. Sadly, these will be my last Dapol containers. I'd rather go without, than have any more funky looking fuzzy mis-aligned print...

Future runs of... 071's? GSR800's? Arrows 'n' Sparrows?

Hornby Class 31 for €146,58 instead of €247,70 at Hatton's: https://www.hattons.co.uk/513724/hornby_r3880_class_31_1_31147_floreat_salopia_in_civil_engineers_dutch_grey_and_yellow/stockdetail

How many were there in total, what were their running numbers, and which were BCK's and BSK's? Sorry you posted now, huh?

Two things. 1. Yay, Fran's alive. 2. I just have to say that it's awesome how you give the years for each variant. This sort of info is often very difficult to obtain for the uninitiated, and you make people's lives so easy!

According to Wikipedia, nine Irish GSV's have survived in some way, shape or form. The IRM / Accurascale modular approach of today has evoled a lot compared to three years ago. I'd speculate with a hat-eating wager that a BR Mk1 BCK and BSK launch, accompanied with an Irish cousin variant or two, is a lot more likely on the cards over the coming months / years. Of the surviving Irish ones, several went back to the UK and now sit on narrow gauge British bogies, so the livery and configuration possibilities for both British and Irish variants are relatively vast. Ignoring the British variants, I'm sure that they saw a few different liveries under Irish use. CIE use, weedspray use, RPSI use, Downpatrick use etc. And now we have the RPSI pink variant. I mean, what sort of monster would you need to be to not buy at least two or three and bask in the pinkness on your layout?

You'd think that they'd have painted the whole train pink to celibrate it's retirement, not just the GSV.

So everything that An Post have been mucking up, consistently, for several years, is because Ireland is the EU's guinea pig for a software rollout? Two years of IRM orders and local post office packages being sent to me with no CN23's (An Post muppets insisting that customs declarations are not required when they clearly are) and subsequently returned, along with An Post charging VAT on items clearly declared electronically and physically as gifts, plus charging VAT on a random selection of parcels sent to Ireland from the UK (no logic, some are charged and some aren't), and it's not down to incompetence and operational failure, it's all a trial software issue... Now I get it it.