Mol_PMB

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on the roof finish. I haven’t quite decided - pros and cons.

Just out of interest, have you looked at the BritainfromAbove aerial photos? There are several of Portadown that may be useful for your purposes.

Nice! and we can see the water tower too. The window under the tower looked odd on your model but it's actually spot on compared to the prototype photo. Excellent work!

Perhaps not in the toolbox but a non-standard item in the materials store. Sommerfeldt, the model catenary manufacturers, sell copper-plated steel wire in packs of ten 500mm lengths, perfectly straight. The same as is used in their catenary. It's solderable just like copper or brass wire, but very stiff and strong in comparison to those materials. Equally it is easily bent to sharp corners using pliers. Absolutely perfect for handrails, for example. There are a range of thicknesses available from 0.35mm to 1.0mm. I suspect its commercial application may be in TIG or MIG welding, but it's a godsend in my modelling.

The ignorance of the vendor is often the best route to a true bargain! But sometimes ignorant vendors stubbornly believe that their goods are worth far more that their actual value, and refuse to accept a fair price.

Well in the spirit of this thread I have already voided the warranty on one of my new H vans, and they only arrived today! As a very minimum, regauging to 21mm needs the wheelsets out, and that requires removal of most of the brake gear on these fitted vans. Because my level of OCD also requires the buffer spacing to be corrected, those have come out too. I don't think I've done any dreadful damage in the process but I did find myself wishing that the factory's glue wasn't quite as effective in some places... Hopefully I can modify where necessary and get it all back together eventually! I bought six of these and whilst in some ways I wish I had more to produce different variants, in other ways that would just give me more of a re-gauging headache! I wish IRM/AS would use finer scale wheel profiles - the axles and bearings are spot-on but I think I'll have to swap all the wheels out. So, what's the plan? Well, it keeps changing, partly because I can't decide what era I'm modelling, and I think I'm ending up with stock to suit 3 slightly different periods: early 1960s (locos silver/green) , around 1970 (locos black), and mid 1980s (locos supertrain). I must confess that for some reason I don't like the black and tan livery on locos. I keep stepping back in time, and the business model of pre-order followed by a long wait has resulted in the wagons I've ordered perhaps representing a later era than I now think they would be more suited for. Certainly the three brown ones I've ordered don't fit well into any of the periods mentioned above, maybe one or two in 1970. Well, the current thoughts are as follows (all work includes regauging wheels, brakes, buffers): 1 brown van, add extended buffers, repaint to green/black, snail. 1 brown van, replace entire underframe with conventional steel solebars, unfitted, renumber as older type van. Livery undecided, probably grey and snail although brown options exist. 1 brown van, add strips on roof, renumber, still in brown. 1 grey van, heavily modify sides to to palvan variant, paint in grey/roundel. 1 grey van, modify to old-type hand brakes outboard of the wheels, repaint in darker grey livery, snail, cement branding? 1 grey van, no major modifications, tan roundel, maybe renumber. This gives 6 vans, all physically different, most liveries different, and none a simple 'unfitted H' which I suspect IRM will flog to me in due course. The spare Bulleid chassis released will be re-used under a Parkside palvan kit. Sounds like a I have busy weekend ahead of me!

As usual, the first thing to do with any new toy is to take it apart... Here are some learning points for the rest of you wanting to take these apart (oh, only me? OK...) I thought that to separate the body and the chassis I would need to undo the screws and then they would fall apart (like the corrugated wagons). This is not the case with the vans. There are several bits of the brake gear that are stuck to the metal floor unit rather than the skeletal underframe, so that undoing the screws does not free the frame from the floor. They are the vacuum cylinder, the brake gear crank near the middle, the brake safety loops and the vee hangers. These can be removed with a bit of care (fine screwdrivers, cocktail sticks, fine pliers etc), though I bent some of the brake safety loops in the process. Some of these seem to be fitted one end into the floor and the other end into the frame. Having separated the floor I then found that the body was a simple clip fit onto the floor, and perhaps I need not have separated the floor and the frame after all. Although the brake safety loops have to come off anyway to release the brake shoe assemblies and the wheels for re-gauging. The clips at the bottom of the body are under the roundel and the 'vac brake' wording. Anyway, having got the body off I discovered that the sides and roof are moulded in one piece. I'd been hoping they were separate bits to simplify modification and repainting, but never mind. Hopefully this is helpful to someone even if as an example of what not to do.

They look excellent. I have duly ordered a set. I have a variety of wooden blocks and strips with different abrasive grades stuck to them with double-sided tape. These blocks look they would be a good replacement for my bigger blocks. The smaller strips are very useful for cleaning up etches - a variety of widths helps.

Was that a lack of foresight by the Waterford and Limerick Railway back in the 1850s?

This might have some potential for an NIR 1 class, an industrial loco newly announced by Revolution: It's an Industrial Revolution - in OO! - Revolution Trains It's by no means an exact match but probably closer in style than other RTR offerings. (With apologies to IRM if you're working on a proper DH!)

I'm pleased to see that these are selling well on the AS website with some versions down to the last few in stock. Hopefully that will encourage future O gauge projects. I'll just leave this here...

I'm very pleased to say that both my packs have arrived safely this morning and I can show a Bulleid train on my photo plank. Thank you, IRM! I now have 4 packs of IRM Bulleid wagons awaiting regauging, modification and weathering - I can foresee a production line and might get started this weekend while I wait for the E class chassis etch. The fitted brake gear is exquisite but is going to be harder to regauge than the hand-braked version - a nice challenge. I might even do a green one with extended buffers? https://irishrailwaymodeller.com/topic/17713-the-green-h-vans/

The latest upload from the IRRS is a nice colour image of A6 in traffic in black and tan in October 1961: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/54340700855 Eight months later in June 1962, A28 was still running in tatty silver livery. Then it appeared in the all-over plain dark colour discussed in the posts above. Maybe they were using up old stocks of paint.

Over on RMWeb some people have reported (of the Heljan base models) that some brake shoes aren’t fully clear of the wheels, making the wagons a bit stiff. Might be worth checking if they don’t roll as freely as you would like.

I suppose we also need to factor in the recent ebay policy change that adds a buyer’s fee to the price.