murphaph

I picked up the 40' Hanjin 8'6 and the 20' DAL 8'6 dry boxes in Marks the other day. I mainly wanted the Hanjin but I'm wondering does anyone know for sure if such a DAL container ever ran in Ireland? Credit to the unknown photographer.

This is true. The original price paid by a seller is unknown. Not everyone was able to buy at the original retail price. I recently sold a few bits and also had to factor in the fact I paid sterling with no rake discount + Vat + handling charges + post to Germany for them.

Ah I wouldn't expect anyone to sell anything to me for less than market value, especially in these inflationary times. Who knows what financial pressure sellers are under these days.

You have a real modeller's eye for the detail Adrian. Nothing escapes you and it shows in the end result. A health and safety officer's nightmare from the 90's with slippy surfaces and trip hazards galore. Love it! If I can achieve these standards in my own diesel shed some day I will be very pleased.

That is strange indeed. Good to know it was something easy to fix though. I will make a mental note of it lest I encounter the same issue

Poor description. He doesn't mention Murphy Models anywhere. He will struggle to be found.

That would make a cracking model.

I have to practice on one first. Maybe I'll do a certain one that Catzilla destroyed and send it back to its owner filthy!

In that case he has reversed his names to fit in with the Irish way of doing it. Best of luck to him. Great to see a new online model retailer in Ireland.

Gabor can be a given name or a family name. My wife's cousin is a Gabor (given name). Her Hungarian teacher is Mrs. Gabor (family name). So take your pick lol. But my German/Hungarian wife says it's almost certainly his given name so as not to confuse locals who would be unfamiliar with the way Hungarians do it.

Right, this is the final update on these 111s. They are "finished" now after I applied the glossy touches to the oily/greasy bits like the wheel bearing journals, fuel tanks, exhaust ports etc. Nameplates will someday be applied whenever Steve at Railtec has made them available. Should be trivial to apply them and weather lightly then. I didn't want to leave them in a million pieces waiting for them to arrive. This has been my most ambitious respray with a number of false starts and dead ends. I probably stripped these locos back to plastic three times, including after having applied the transfers as I was so unsatisfied with the large logo as a transfer. That sent me down the path of laser cutting out masks and I learned a bit from that too. In the end though I am really pleased with how they've turned out.

I strongly suspect he would have little interest in it to be honest. He'd be bombarded with "when is x coming out?" questions, the answers to which he probably doesn't know himself yet.

The announcement of the babies came well after the 201s, mk3s and mk2's were announced, didn't it? Hattons just threw that page up. PM maybe didn't explicitly inform them of the baby run. Perhaps it's not a huge run and he's confident they will sell out through IRM and Marks? Brexit has surely added an extra headache that PM maybe doesn't need.

I will be in for more IR ones and green and silver ones whenever they do come out. A46 was as far as we know a unique livery, is that still the received wisdom? If so we should obviously not expect that livery to appear again unless it's A46 again.

Great Summary John. Thanks! I have wondered previously what the comparisons are like. It's very interesting that there's no RTR equivalents to MM and IRM despite the high level of interest in the hobby. I suppose the Irish manufacturers have a GB market to tap into too, as many of the MM locos obviously ended up there. Most eBay auctions of MM locos seem to be from GB based sellers anyway. A hypothetical NZ manufacturer would presumably be almost entirely reliant on sales within NZ. 44 operational steam locos is an incredible number. I'm very impressed by that! I wonder was it more difficult to scrap them than it was for Irish owners who could send them to Hammond Lane for easy onward shipments to steel plants in Britain. I wonder did NZ's remoteness depress the scrap value of those locos to a point where it made no sense cutting them up in the first place. It seems that although NZ does have a (fairly unique!) domestic steel industry, it came very late and the furnaces used are not like those in traditional plants that use iron ore mined from the ground. Those canny Kiwis developed a way to make steel from sand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/iron-and-steel

Stephen I'm wondering have you just sent the price of pre-owned A's tumbling or skyrocketing

How popular is the hobby in NZ John? More popular than at home? Hamburg Hbf doesn't look much but it's the busiest station in Germany and second busiest in Europe by passenger numbers. Bit of a dark horse. Most people assume either Cologne or Munich are busier.

I think we are drawing to a close on these thankfully. Time to move on to the next project

I've probably not run my A's long enough to see the failure George. I am interested to hear what it turns out to be though. Hopefully just a dry joint somewhere in the chain. Have you tried a different decoder first? The ESU stay alives are a three wire job I think so in theory the decoder could be gone bad as well. It's not a simple capacitor connected across the potential of the rails AFAIK. There's a bit more too it because big fat capacitors work as stay alives but they also swallow the ack pulses from the motor when programming so they have to be switched out of the circuit then. The three wire ones use some charging and discharging circuitry on the decoder and therefore don't need to be isolated during programming like simple caps do.

Yeah except with the addition of roof grime and soot. Otherwise I think the same.

Bit more weathering before the sealer coat goes on:

Hello and welcome to the forum. Great to have you here

Weathering the resprayed 111s some more. Not quite done but not far off now:

Amazing work and the weathered version is far better looking to me too! It just adds so much realism.

Lovely atmosphere.