murphaph

I have about a dozen words Leslie. My wife can speak it well enough though so she does all the talking

A couple of impressions from Hungary, which we are currently visiting. We took the sleeper from Berlin to Budapest Nyugati via Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Journey time of just under 14 hours. Still plenty of jointed track in southern Poland which made sleeping a bit difficult. Two long shunting stops in Bohumin and Breclav allowed for some more solid sleep. We departed Berlin in a train made up of Hungarian, Austrian and Polish coaches and arrived in Budapest with the Hungarian, Czech and different Polish coaches (ones which came from Warsaw and joined our train in Bohumin). Allegedly this route is the most complicated sleeper route in the world with all the cities served. This is Nyugati (west) station. From here we took a taxi to the grim Deli (south) station and from there took an ex German built rake of interregional coaches to lake Balaton which took roughly two hours. The stretch along the lake's western shore is single track so there was some waiting for oncoming trains to pass... The Danube was also in flood following all the recent heavy rains further upstream:

@DJ Dangerous has a Lokprogrammer AFAIK. That would be the weapon of choice for changing anything on an ESU decoder. Waaay easier than fiddling with CVs anyway. Once click and you're done with a Lokprogrammer and it's much less likely that you will mess something up.

Personally I have decided to standardise on the "US diesel" way of doing things, so F9 for drive hold etc.

I've seen some folks just use a 2B pencil for things like thise. If it's just for the couplings I reckon it would be just fine but pure graphite wouldn't do any harm of course.

You could just use a pencil rather than graphite powder. The powder is very messy I found. A bit of fine sandpaper and a pencil will also produce graphite powder if direct application using the pencil doesn't work.

Everything including the kitchen sink!

Fair play Derek. Every convert to the cause is warmly welcomed here! I dare say most Irish based modellers started out with BR stuff too as that's all we could get back in the day (the "real" modellers were able to build their own of course but most of use came the RTR way).Good time to make the switch, with plenty of stock due to be announced in the coming months and years.

240 is a good price for the three IE coaches and a free Lima repaint thrown in.

Just be glad the missus didn't see it George! holy moly that's some description.

The replacement buffers themselves aren't a problem on that 171 but if you look closely you can see the buffer beam has been damaged, perhaps drilled out to accomodate those replacements. I think €210 is way too much given the condition but someone was happy to pay it. I took a look myself, as being based in Germany the postage would have only been a fiver but once I saw it go over €100 I was out to be honest. It would have been for renumbering as I have the model already. I hope whoever got it enjoys it as I am sure they will. Great to see the demand is still out there all these months after the "Covid boost". Now bring on the new ones from PM this summer/autumn hopefully!

I also use two cheap Amazon airbrushes similar to the one Noel uses, think they cost even less. This is not detail airbrush work. You don't need a high end airbrush to spray models like ours. I would recommend a ventilation/spray booth if you have the space. I also mostly use acrylics as I spray indoors and anyway they dry much faster so you can move on to the next masking phase quicker. Cheap masking tape will break your heart. Just get Tamiya tapes if they have the size you want. I personally moved away from rattle cans because the propellant kicked up too much dust that landed on the model being sprayed. You could go outside if the temperature and humidity are right and spray freehand so there's no dust to kick up. Also most of the paint does not end up on the model so it costs a lot more in paint if you are going to be painting a lot. An airbrush is designed for close up working. None of the paint in the cup tends to miss the model.

Sold. Didn't take long and at that price I'm not surprised. Cheapest one of those in ages.

I suspect the Irish connection is on the more tenuous side rather than something that ran in Ireland. Otherwise we'd probably be hearing about another joint IRM/AS project like the mk 2's. Could be an Oliver Bulleid connection perhaps?

Yep:

Well I don't "need" Taras for my planned region/era but of course I bought some of the blues anyway to run down to Limerick wagon works because I like the more interesting corrugated lid profile on them. The intention was always to heavily weather them such as they would have appeared in 1994 or thereabouts, so virtually no blue left visible. That Albert Bridge image is tantalising as you can make out some repair patches and they seem to have continued using the blue or a shade of blue on those patches, but I wonder how late they were using blue paint on patch up jobs. I wonder did they start using bauxite on the blue wagons when patching them up at some stage. It seems highly likely that they would have, once they made the decision to repaint the fleet in bauxite. Some more pics would be great but they seem hard to find. Most people were only interested in photographing the loco back then as film was not free.

Does anyone have any more pics of dirty blue Taras?

There was fairly limited interest from forum members to be honest. A few folks took them, but most of the orders came from the facebook groups.

Hi all, Does anyone have any 201 spares? I am specifically looking for the pipework running along the side and bogies side frames. Feel free to send me a PM if you can help. Cheers!

Yep.

Yeah there is no way you can even earn minimum wage doing resprays to a decent standard unless the livery is exceptionally simple. Not many people are going to be prepared to pay the hourly rate required to "properly" respray stuff. As soon as you have to start masking, the time required goes through the roof. Weathering is different. There you can make money I think but people still assume that it "only takes a few minutes" to do everything, neglecting the set up and cleanup time.

Did the PR underframes end up under the Donelli gantry trains? An entry in the October 1993 Irish Railway News suggested they would do.

Good stuff. I would have almost been surpised if this hadn't been the case given CIE's propensity to mix n match stock! Thanks for the confirmation

Did they mix n match the suburban ones with mainline ones if they were stuck (in the late 80s, early 90s)?

You could also ask a friend or family member to reserve the items for you.