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.

Last bit of progress today, I've had the quote from 4DModelshop for the next batch of etches, and paid for it. Should be ready next week. Here's the new bonnet and the existing complete body: Once the H vans arrive I can mock up a Bulleid train with the E class.

Ouch! A bit of price gouging: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/156719853958 I'm hoping there are a few grain vans left over for me to pick up at a more sensible price.

4DModelshop sent me a free spare etch of the bonnet when I had the first body etch done. It looked like there had been some production issue that had damaged the rest of the sheet, but the top third of it was OK. So today I thought I'd build another bonnet using the later radiator grille options, and also to illustrate a couple of minor modifications that I applied retrospectively on the first build. This shows the later radiator grilles fitted. These are an option on the fret: I'm waiting for a quote from Iain on the chassis etches, and my intention is to order 2 chassis etches and 1 more body etch, which ought to allow me to complete 2 locos and have a small stash of spare bits. The first one I've built will be silver, representing E410 as it ran at Fenit. The second one will be black, but I haven't quite decided on my preferred prototype. The logical one is E410 because it lasted the longest and didn't lose its exhaust cowl, and therefore the model can represent the mid 1960s to 1979 time period. But then I'll end up with two models of the same loco! All the other locos still in traffic into the late 1970s had lost their exhaust cowls around 1975, so I'd be forced into a decision on pre- or post-1975 condition.

I think this is the final version of the chassis etch. I've added an extra geartrain option and a few spacer washers, also a mix of strips, angles and channels with no particular purpose in mind. As a scratchbuilder I know it's always more useful to have bits like this rather than blank bits of fret!

Superb placement of the figures to spur the imagination, while being entirely plausible that they're standing still.

IRRS are continuing the super sequence of shunter images with D303, freshly painted in green in March 1957: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/54336333309 Note that this loco does not have the bulge on the back of the cab - looking at photos I think this was only on 1000 = D301. I think D303 was the only D class to carry this livery, mid green with a D number, and assuming the date is correct then most diesels were still being turned out in silver at this time. A handful of main-line diesels appeared in green in 1958, in readiness for an event at Inchicore. Ernie has a super colour image of D303, in the same pristine green livery, that must have been taken around the same time. Prior to this the class had been numbered in the 1000 series and were painted a much darker green with eau-de-nil stripe and snail. Most carried that original livery into the early 1960s and then went straight into black (D301/3/5) or black and tan (D302/4). However, there are several images of 1001 in a livery I haven't quite worked out yet. Original number but no snail or stripe.

I'm rather confused. I'm hoping it will all sort itself out in the next week or so, and I don't need an immediate answer to this! I paid for my two packs of H vans just before Christmas, at which time I was expecting them to be shipped from Ireland to me in GB. The invoices were for £63.00 sterling for each pack, but did not explicitly include any shipping, tax or discount. My understanding at the time was that the VAT would be collected from me by the courier when they were shipped from Ireland, and that the shipping charge was free. Now that they are being shipped from GB, I could see that there may be a need collect the VAT that I didn't pay before. I'm not averse to paying the tax due, but I hope it doesn't come with a handling fee as well (which seems quite common with couriers, and often the handling fee is more than the VAT due). I also have a feeling that the two packs will end up being sent separately and then I may have to pay any handling fee twice! The advertised price for a pack of H vans on the AS website now is £74.94 including VAT, which is 19% greater than £63.00. UK VAT is 20% so something doesn't add up there either, effectively the price currently advertised is less than it was a few months ago, once VAT is accounted for. At present my orders aren't even showing up on the AS website, so perhaps I'm a bit further down the queue. I don't mind if they take a few more weeks to turn up, but I'd rather not be stung with a load of extra fees.

Many thanks David, I'll take a look back through the thread. It's good to hear that several people have built them and achieved good results. I've used the Delrin chain on 7mm scale models, but with small-wheeled shunters in 4mm scale it's hard to get fine enough chain or small enough sprockets.

Very nice - thank you! It's a bit nerve-wracking waiting to see when/if my orders re-appear on the AS website and then hopefully on my doorstep! Hopefully the price I've already paid will remain the same although I'm half wondering if the VAT will be handled differently now these aren't being delivered from Ireland to GB.

Mine’s the same, and the points haven’t transferred yet either. I expect it’s all just taking some time to work through everyone. I hope so, because some of my pre-orders are already paid for too.