Brack

The question people will ask is about whether 16.5mm looks ok for 3'. That's a personal opinion really - like 16.5 vs 21 for broad gauge in 4mm. Dad (IrishSwissErnie) and I did some irish NG in O-16.5 about 20 years ago (an earlier incarnation of the sligo and donegal junction). Everything was built using rtr 00 chassis - 21t hopper chassis for most vans/wagons and plate frame bogie bolster bogies. Locos used Bachmann's manor, mogul, n class and v1. All styrene, lots of micro strip. Dad built most of the stuff, with a teenage me contributing a few wagons, vans, a railcar, an open topped cattle wagon and a Chilean taltal railway kitson meyer and nitrate gondola that perhaps were a touch extravagant! Mostly freelance designs based around the products of certain builders. The length of run in the loft must've been nearly 40', but to me, watching a cattle train trundle along the scruffy grass, over the bridge and into the station was convincing enough. My favourite locos were 1 & 2, a pair of beyer peacock 060t built on bachmann 43xx chassis. He's got more photos and videos on his flickr in this album. (Click on the image and I think it takes you there).

The tanfield railway also have a few pregrouping coaches - ex NER, GNR and MSLR. Bodies retrieved from allotments and holiday camps, mostly on ex CCT 4w underframes, but they feel more appropriate to the railway and locos than a bunch of Mk1s would. I rode on the Blonay-Chamby in switzerland in an ex RhB 4 wheeler and in each compartment, tied the the luggage nets was a very nicely put together scrapbook of photos showing that exact coach from builders photo in 1889, with a photo showing each decade of its service life, departmental use, deterioration and then restoration. A really nice touch, making you appreciate the preservation of the coach rather than just the loco pulling you. I'd hope the knotty coaches have something similar - those who put them back together deserve to have that recognition of the scale of the effort required.

https://knottycoachtrust.org.uk/history-of-no-23/ These people at foxfield have done some remarkable work, but I agree - if currently restored revenue earning vehicles can't be maintained, I cannot see it being possible to fix up a non revenue earning vehicle that is very far gone. A shame, but I can't see it happening.

On another forum, in a chat about grounded van bodies, a member mentioned he knew of one very far gone body in a field. It's inland from Larne. I asked his permission to bost the photos here, in the hope that somebody hear might be able to help work out what it is/was? The folk who own the field reckon it's been there since the 50s, and was once a hen house, but the man who used to keep the hens is long gone. There is somewhere to tie up livestock inside, but whether it's original or not is unknown. Looks like some sort of brake van with a single balcony end, but with doors for general goods, so a bit like a LSWR road van or the SLNCR drovers vans, but obviously not either of those. Apparently the body is about 8' wide. Did the NCC have anything similar? It's in their territory, closer to the narrow gauge than anything else. He, and the owners would be interested to know what it once was, and any pictures would be very interesting.

Family effort - I got beth to paint the snails and numbers as she has steadier hands, then eleanor did the washes and weathering on two of them (under supervision).

Thank you all for you kind words. He's still in there, 'enjoying' lots of scans. Looks like they might have found the cause of it all, and he's responding to the antibiotics. Not sure on the course of action just yet, but he'll likely be absent from the forum and flickr for a little while longer.

That's a shame, they had half a chance of getting the €500!

Dad (irishswissernie) got pretty ill over the last few days so has been temporarily relocated to a hospital bed. He's doing alright (for a given value of alright - he's on intravenous antibiotics and will be in for a little while so far as I can see), but seems better in himself than he was over the weekend (although he did manage to dispatch a shiny new bachmann double fairlie to my house for testing when my sister came over on sunday - runs beautifully, and sent back with a few feet of 9mm track). The working diagnosis is some form of internal infection, presumably post surgery the other week, and they need to check on his digestive functions. So far as I'm concerned, I'm glad he's getting seen to, he's in the right place, and hopefully they get him all sorted out, but it does disrupt his posting and modelling a bit! However he is currently cut off from the internet, so he asked me to let people on here know what's going on.

Have a new plan. Might be worse, but we'll see.

Is the pit just gravel on the bottom? Usually they're modelled as concrete.

The other interesting variation was K52. SAR asked Dubs for a 3'6" gauge version of the K class.

I'm sure lots of folk have been wanting a 1:76 scale 737-800 for quite some time. There isn't too much else at shannon to measure up...

Yes, they're just those ones. Don't think so - I've questioned myself enough - at one point I wondered if they were press fix as the top surface seemed to want to stick more than the bottom. Obviously the snail would then be the wrong way around, so that isn't the case, but perhaps I wasn't thinking the clearest when I was working on them past midnight!

Thanks for the suggestions. The wagons are painted Matt, but I'd used klear to gloss the area for the transfers, which usually works for me. Will have to have another think. Perhaps several layers of klear, a fresher bottle, or a different gloss varnish. I've always used klear as it is thin, bomb proof in terms of not reacting with other paints, and cheap. It works really well to seal in fiddly transfers like archer's rivets. It's weird- not known transfers that both desperately want to curl and have no desire to stick either, and I've used some ancient ones in the past! Will give it a few days to think.

On a slightly more depressing note, bought some microsol/set, put a bit of klear/gloss varnish on the surface (which has had a week to dry). Tried twice more on the snails. This happens every time: They curl up into a tight little roll. The transfers look fine on their backing, but I've made a lot of models, with decals from loads of different sources and never had any do this before. A bit of silvering, or old decals tearing, but none that literally curl up away from the surface whatever you do. This is from the other week - decals went on fine. Might try and paint one. Or 3D print a stamp or stencil!

Bit of a pain today with the cattle wagons - the snails curled up and wouldn't stick, despite attempting to persuade them with carrs transfix and others. I haven't had any trouble shoving transfers straight onto halfords grey before, but these definitely aren't cooperating. Plan B involves a coating of klear on the area first, and I've ordered some microsol/microset as I've heard others swear by it. So there might be a brief hiatus until they turn up. It was all going a bit too smoothly! As an aside, the cattle wagons are a vastly easier build than the corrugated wagons - there is a lot of drilling, but a pillar drill makes light work of it. I only broke 1 drill this time too.

Done a bit more after the kids went to bed. Details on and given a spray. I used the last of my can of Halfords CIE gray, down to fumes, but just about got there. Tomorrow I might get the decals and weathering on. We should really have come to see you at the end of the week Dad, rather than on tuesday! Still, your birthday/christmas present is sorted! Although I still need to make some sort of trolley for you little works line.

Progress, of a sort. The third van is lagging a touch behind the others as its sides had warped somewhat. A soaking in hot water then spending overnight clamped in a vice between bits of plywood appears to have sorted it.

On the subject of small ships - a while back I looked at the Ilen (A 56' ketch built in ireland for serving isolated stations in the falklands, but recently returned and restored). there are lines plans and 3D models of the hull available online http://www.tradboats.ie/projects/south/ak-ilen/ (Tradboats also has a lot of other useful scans/plans of little boats) https://afloat.ie/blogs/sailing-saturday-with-wm-nixon/item/27910-vintage-wooden-boats-get-a-lift And the images on this site might give you enough to make profiles for the hull: https://bluejaydesign.github.io/projects/ilen/ilen.html

Regarding the point throw and rotating ground signals, perhaps a lever or bell crank to multiply the linear movement of the points. then a link to a crank or rack and pinion (or small geneva wheel?) to convert that to rotary movement. It'd take some adjustment to get it spot on though. Or you could put a servo motor to rotate the ground signal triggered by the same switch as the point.

The pacific tank would make more sense as a big baltic, but it'd be 20 years too late for the post ww1 baltic tank fad (none of which were particularly successful - ltsr, furness, gswr, bcdr, l&y etc)

And then there were 4... Who knows, might even have your Vans built by the time you're allowed to come and get them! (The second tanktainer is now fully stripped and ready for the second attempt at painting).

BA Bodil I assume?

You know, I've had a lot of people (who don't do CAD or 3D printing) that rescaling is easy, just a couple of clicks. Yes and no. As someone who has produced the same loco in CAD for 3D printing in 1/43, then 1/24, 1/17 and 1/32 scale, it certainly isn't just a matter of rescaling! The loco in question is the smallest Bagnall standard saddle tank (4"x7" Sipat class). 1/43 (this is mine - the others below are customers models) 1/24 1/17 If the 2 scales are fairly close you can just rescale and get away with it, but for a bigger jump (e.g 4mm to 7mm, or 4mm to 2mm) the thicknesses, detail levels and sizes of everything are pretty different. The easy bits to rescale are fortunately the hardest to draw in the first place (chimneys, domes, steam manifolds/ boiler fittings). Provided you drew them at the limit of what is possible in the smaller scale, you can enlarge them and they'll work fine. However bodywork thicknesses and strengths vary enormously, and the different scales of loco had to be adapted to their various mechanisms, so effectively large bits were redrawn from scratch. All in all I reckon it took 50-60% of the time it took to draw the thing in 1/43 to get it rescaled to 1/24, both redrawing bits and adding extra details that I couldnt have done in the smaller scale. If you drew the first CAD in a larger scale you'd run into problems as none of your fine detail parts would be viable when reduced as theyd be too weak, too small and likely beyond the capabilities of the machine, assuming you worked to its capabilities in the first place. I mean, you can just select it all and use the rescale command and it'll work, but it won't get you a good result (in my opinion). Obviously a coach is a slightly different matter, but I would hope they would use the same idea/process of re-evaluating which detail can/should be included and redrawing things to the best fit for fidelity, robustness and machine capabilities.

Thanks all - the kits themselves are nicely made, and theres a lot of texture to the wagons in terms of rivets, strapping and corrugations, so painting is just highlighting what is already there, if that makes sense. The instructions describe using diluted b&q tester pots of paint. I didnt fancy that! Working from photos the wagons seem to have been unpainted, but the zinc galvanisation weathers to a slightly blue light grey. I used a can of u-pol acid etch primer (it works fine on plastics, and gives a much lighter gray and slightly finer finish than standard halfords gray primer) which looked about right for the base colour. The underframes were originally painted. I mixed up some lner wagon grey, a bit of br bauxite and a few drops of black and put a few drops of water in to thin it a bit, then smeared it over the underframe. As each brush load of this was used, the drying remnants were used to dry brush the rivets on the wagon bodies. A few spots of corrosion were dry brushed on in bauxite. Looking at photos the bottom of the bodies and where the rivets were takes on a slightly brown colour where the rust stains it, this was done by putting army painter soft tone wash on those bits (not all over as you might often use a toning wash). This allows you to make the corrosion slightly different on each wagon. On our allowed christmas visit I was handed a bunch of kits to build for Dad - following the 4 opens there are 3 cattle wagons and a van to build. 4 wagons finished in 2 months is pretty good going for my modelling these days, but hopefully i can get the rest finished a little quicker! These arent my first irish models - a few years back i built dad a few of the ssm/dapol tank wagons and produced a rake of 11 bubbles using Dapol prestwin kits, my own 3d printed bodies and the ssm detail etch, before they became available rtr, which obviously look better than my efforts, but don't smell as minty (that nice cement effect is toothpaste/water). At some point I'll get more done on the sligo tanks as well.