Northroader

For weathering powders I go to an artists shop, and buy sticks of pastel chalk. Rub one on some emery paper and you get some fine powder. Scatter this lightly over where you want, then brush it over with a dry fine hair paintbrush. Usually I go for umber, burnt sienna, orange, tan brown, and black. More on the undercart and ends. It can be washed off with soapy water if you dont like it.

What are you using for bait?

I used to make model aircraft for my son, most having an “aluminium” finish. I used Humbrol “silver” paint, with a metallic finish. However, I found with handling, the finish wore badly (“A” class diesels comes to mind!) So, to do better, I do a 50/50 mix of the silver paint with a Humbrol flat light grey, and I find this works quite well.

Usually you’d get a chimney towards the rear, over the boiler. The nature of the intermittent working is such that you couldn’t rely on the blast from the cylinders to create a draught, so you’d have a fairly tall stovepipe, hinged for loading gauge clearance, and the steam exhaust would be from a plain pipe on the back corner of the cab. Before each lift you’d want the cylinders warmed up, so the crankshaft would be run before getting engaged, and a shower of hot water coming out of the exhaust.

Best wishes to everyone, have a great time with your folks, and good progress with your modelling in the new year. bob

I think if certain security forces were present at that exercise, they don’t like having pictures taken which may show their identity.

I use their “premium” service, which is to me quite reasonably priced, certainly cheaper than getting an “ad-blocker” app. It gives you a reasonably clear screen, although some home site ads still appear, and that repetitive movie in the lower RHS corner has gone. As it does not need all the ads refreshing, it seems to me to be much faster response as well.

The NCC had a go with one of them, there’s a picture with it teamed up with a pair of sixwheeler coaches, though I fancy the idea didn’t get much further, pity, it would make a nice little branch line set. my Model is a plastikard body on top of a motor bogie from an old Lima class 33 diesel, and I might have missed some louvres off the end. I fancy a new Dapol one would perform much better.

Glad you’ve done the planking.

There’s a nice collection of four wheelers in the old photo of Castlebar, MGWR:

Looking good, the only item I would question is the rubbing strake(?) low down on the bow disappearing under the waterline. Wouldn’t it look better if that was removed?

Great to see things happening over there, the thing that really stood out for me in those pictures is how the sky changed through the sequence. Any one of them would look great on a model backscene, and yet they’re all very different. A day for staying close to the pub.

The cone shaped objects above the footplate are screw jacks, with a transverse table under them with another screw to shift them sideways. Used with hardwood packing blocks and a wood “biscuit” on top, where a minor derailment has happened. The couplings look like “Norwegian” or “chopper” couplings, common for a lot of n.g.lines. There’s a spring at the back, which helps with buffering up. One coupling carries a chopper on a pin, and the opposing coupling carries a pin for it to hook on to. The pins are removable, and can be swapped around if necessary. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Norwegian_coupling

If you’re doing silver,paint, mix some of the metallic silver paint 50/50 with a Matt light grey paint. It will look realistic and wear much better when handled.

Johnny, when you’ve got your engine and wagons and coaches, any thought as to where you’ll be putting them, and what sort of space you’ll be using?

All that —- and BLUE engines!!

Very kind of you to say so, sir. Actually, I’m slowing down appreciably, and I’ve reached an age where I’m having to think of the future, how am I going to downsize? I should try to progress jobs, finish stuff off, then another bright (?) idea hits me.

Beautiful job, looks good, well made, and runs smoothly.

Mark, perhaps I should add to my remarks on compensation, thinking it over. If you’re modelling in P4 or S7, it’s really compulsory to use compensation. This is because the wheel flange depth is minimal, and you must ensure the wheels are fully in contact with the rail, all the time. With the usual modelling standards most folks use, you have deeper wheel flanges which do give more latitude for any errors, particularly with track-laying. The Leinster and CCW kits I started with showed me that accurately drilled frames, with the “finescale” wheel flanges, could run over carefully laid track without springing or compensation, and this simplifies building a loco no end. You can still aspire to using the finer standards and methods, but it is more demanding for your craftsmanship and skills, and I’d advise a “knife and fork” approach to start with, giving a approach which realistically caters for the conditions you’re going to encounter. It’s one step up from a “tinplate” approach, with four coupled locos and very deep flanges are placed on sections of track clipped together in a tight curve and laid on the carpet. The one layout which did impress me at a show was the Merseyside MRC “Adavoyle”, Irish gauge to P4 standards, which performed flawlessly in running and performance, but done painstakingly by skilled craftsmen.

I’m not a fan of beam compensation, as being very fiddly. I picked up a loco on eBay recently and found the whole lot jammed up with paint anyway, and a very poor runner in consequence. I think if you compensate just the carrying wheels, you’d introduce a hard spot somewhere which would compete with the drivers for adhesive weight. Having one set floating, and bringing the c.o.g. close to the drivers does work well.

Thanks for those, they’re a really beautiful and informative set of pictures.

Thank you, David. One thing has since struck me, I haven’t mentioned you can’t get 5’ single driver wheels (I.e. no crankpin) from Slaters, you have to make them. It’s just going round the boss, hacksaw blade parallel with the spokes, needle files rubbing around the crankpin projection, all the time with a very light touch, as there’s a recess behind for the crankpin screwhead which makes the spoke sections quite thin.

Well, shaking off summertime torpor for an hour to write this, you could say that a microlayout with an 0-6-0T, 0-6-0, and 2-4-0 is well blessed for motive power, but folks never know when to stop. I really fancied one of those little 2-2-2STs that show up in old photos of Broadstone yard. I gather the old boy Martin Atock had a soft spot for them, and kept them them going for much longer than all the other members of the MGWR loco fleet, which had a very rigid time expired replacement policy. They were built by Fairbairn, who had a ship building yard down the Thames in London, and branched out into loco building. The 5’ singledriver tanks seem to be a firms standard pattern, you can find preserved ones in Portugal and Brazil. Construction followed on from my previous attempts, with brass strip frames and machined spacers, carrying Slaters wheels. Having learned from the 2-4-0 that you need the carrying wheels to deflect or they rob the drivers of much needed traction weight, I looked at how I could do this with a 2-2-2. If both sets of carrying wheels deflected, you would end up with a rocking horse, so I felt one set should be rigid with the drivers, and just have the other set floating. Then it was just a question of loading the engine with weights to bring the centre of gravity just to the side of the drivers with the rigid axle. (Determining the centre of gravity I place the engine on a bit of ply just longer than the engine, then place the whole lot on a round pencil square across the ply, then roll the lot backwards and forwards over the pencil until it just rocks.) I ended up doing a sort of trials with a long cassette propped up at one end to make an incline, pulling and pushing some wagons, chimney end leading and trailing, and it will take more pushing than pulling, and with the rigid carriers at the downhill end, but in the worst conditions it will still manage five wagons on a 1 in 50. To do this it is quite heavy, but just pottering on a microlayout, it performs quite well, and with the minimum amount of wheels, it is quite an economical engine to make, so the conclusion is, don’t be frightened of doing a single driver. I think of 2-2-2Ts as having quite strong Irish connotations, the DSER fleet and the long lived Waterford and Tramore ones, besides the MGWR ones are well known examples, and with digging around more show up.

Near Brighton the other day: “If you’re getting off, mind the gap, it’s very big and very scary”.