Horsetan

I wonder what will happen once the eco-mentals ban coal entirely. What will the RPSI burn instead? Turf? Now there's a thought....

To misquote Father Dougal: "These engines looked black, but when I looked closely, they were actually a very very very very very very very very very very very dark grey...."

We've waited that long, a few more weeks won't kill us, so.

Usually steam heat would have been supplied to buildings. Sometimes stationary boilers weren't actually stationary; if engines were still capable of moving under their own power then they could supply steam for carriage-warming duties. Couplings would generally be removed so that they would be unable to haul stock.

Might yield some useful spares.

I'm just having a look at the bare bogie frames and trying to work out where to modify them for CSB springs....

Anything that can recreate the preserved stock gets a "yes" from me

If that can build either of the preserved pair of coaches, count me in for an etch set!

Put a reserve of a grand and a half on it

I suspect there might have been a touch of the oul shilling going on

Jaysus, I forgot the feckin' invoice!! Let me go and pay that off now....

I wonder what that might have in the way of drawings?

I put my name down for one. Looks like I was the only one.

How long have you got?

Do we have any information on the wheel diameters?

...and even that's a touch different to how she actually looked, especially in the cab area

I had understood that Jackie Whelan hadn't been in the best of health in recent years. The West Clare is basically him - he put in a lot of the funds from his own pocket to get it off the ground and get something running, notwithstanding general apathy. I don't know if Jackie owns Slieve Callan directly or if it's an asset of the railway or Clare County Council, but he was instrumental in having it restored to steam in the first place. The boiler certificate will have expired by now, so the cost of overhaul is not going to be cheap.

K's kits were big adopters of the D-axle. The one advantage was that grub screws for final drive gears readily screwed onto the flat, locking the gear in place with no drilling needed.

In 4mm scale, Bradwell, Finney and Brassmasters - and a few of the more recent South Eastern Finecast - kits allow you to make the valve gear reversible if you want to go that far.... Rude not to have a go.

Death does funny things to people where money and property are concerned. I see it often in my line of work.

I think they have their hands full with something a touch bigger and longer than a J26.... Still, a new-build J26 would be a great gas....if you could find the drawings for it.

We've got to get this together somehow. During the Covid period, the Scalefour Forum had an impromptu "Great 3F Build-Off" challenge, where anyone who had a 3F type loco kit (of any class, from any railway) was invited to get as far as possible in building their kits. "The Great J26 Challenge" sounds like a good one. Anyone else out there with a J26 needing some work? Soldering iron will need a clean...

Here's the original TMD instruction sheets, painstakingly typewritten and hand-drawn.... TMD J26 instructions.pdf

Same on mine. The interesting thing about the box that mine came in was that it was labelled "J26 - October 1976"!!! Did Terry MacDermott start drawing the design as early as that? The Glasgow tank eventually became part of the Perseverance etched kit range, I think, which became part of the Puffers brand run by the late Chris Parrish. One kit came up on eBay last year and sat around for some weeks. All of the Perseverance/Westward/Puffers kits and parts effectively died when Chris passed away. There was some talk a while ago that the range had now found a new owner, but it will take many years for anything to be relaunched as the chassis designs are now mostly very old and need to be redesigned - most were the work of Rod Neep, whose design techniques tended to worsen if the chassis was complicated by outside valve gear. I remember buying a Perseverance chassis kit meant tor the Ivatt "2" 2-6-0 and 2-6-2Ts, and then realising the frame profiles were completely wrong in front, and the motion bracket design would obstruct the operation of the valve gear! So that was 25 quid wasted. Likewise the kit for the Bulleid Light Pacific could not be built properly due to design mistakes in the crosshead and slidebar - 20 quid wasted there.

Problem half-solved, so. I think Branchlines still sell a split-axle conversion kit, so that could help with the cut-and-shut.