lucas

When I was young I was a passenger aboard a heritage train (in Belgium if I remember correctly) involved in such an accident. A few cars had already queued up at the crossing, but the car in question apparently thought they were just parked up and decided to overtake. How this individual passed their driving test I'll never know! We were sitting in the back of the train so we hadn't realised what had happened until the guard told us. Little 8 year old Lucas was bawling crying thinking the locomotive had been destroyed. In reality the train was going at most 2mph as we were pulling into the station just beyond the crossing; once we disembarked we could see the only damage to the train was a bit of paint transfer on the buffer. Luckily nobody was injured, but the car came out looking a little worse for wear.

According to this post a couple years ago from @jhb171achill the correct dark green is BS 226 Mid Brunswick Green:

If you could get some measurements of the wheelset and the bogie that should be great! Just to double check; wheel diameter should be 12mm, axle length should be 28mm, and there would need to be >~24.5mm space between the frames. And you wouldn't be able to get an accurate measure of the cone angle on the axle pinpoint? I'll get the measurements for the Park Royals when they arrive here, and take it from there. I don't think there is an easy way to avoid that unfortunately. As far as I know I can't deduct VAT the way a business can. I had thought about splitting the shipment (sending half to Ireland and half to the UK) but we'd end up paying shipping twice in that case and for a small order it's actually a good chunk of the overall price. So that really wouldn't end up being any cheaper in the end. I'd read quite the opposite in a few places. Something about the sleeve being what maintains the proper gauge in OO. Also the difficulty in moving metal wheel on metal axle, unless you have the proper tools to do that. I wonder if it's the 2mm axle or the pinpoint angle that causes issues? or both? I know some axles are made to 55° angle while others are 60°. Could it be that the bearing expects a 55° angle while the axle is 60°? It would be ideal if a 2mm axle could work with the correct cone angle.

A couple of weeks ago, while browsing the forums well after my bedtime, I half jokingly asked how difficult it would be to have some aftermarket wheel sets made to regauge the upcoming IRM Park Royals. The Park Royals use split-axle wheel sets similar to the Mark 2s for electrical pickups for the interior lighting. This has the side effect of making them a bit of a pain to regauge. To answer my own question, I did a little digging and found a guy who's happy to run off a small batch of wheels for a half decent price. So would there actually be enough interest to justify producing some wheels? They would 12mm diameter EM profile wheels set to 19.3mm back-to-back on a 28mm long 2mm diameter split-axle. I know this is not ideal for those using P4, but I guess it's better than nothing? From what I can tell 21mm EM seems to be more popular (and it's also selfishly what I'm using). These will be designed to fit the Park Royals when mine arrive. They should also fit the Mark 2s, I don't see why they wouldn't, but I don't personally own any to test with. If someone can send me a few measurements of theirs to double check it would be much appreciated! The cost should work out to around €9-€10 per coach (set of 4 axles), depending a little bit on how many I order and what I end up getting charged for import tax. So, I'm trying to gauge interest to see if anyone else would want a set. I'm happy to take on the risk of ordering the wheel sets, but only if I can be somewhat sure I will sell them. Please reply below or send me a PM letting me know how many sets you would want for either the Park Royals or Mark 2s. This is purely to get an idea of numbers, I'm not accepting pre-orders. I don't want to take anyone's money until I have the wheels in hand. But on the off chance I run out, anyone who expresses interest now would get priority.

I think I might have an old one lying around at my parents' house Not sure if it's still there (or if it still works) but I'll can check next time I'm there

Ok, I know we're getting very off-topic for a thread that's meant to be about Black and Tan. This is my last post about it, I swear. Any of these look better? Seems like almost every website I came across has a similar but slightly different representation of what should be the same colour. On-screen colours are additive while pigments are subtractive so none will be completely accurate. Unless someone gets their hands on some physical colour samples it would be impossible to tell for sure. Then CIÉ's paint supplier may not have matched the intended colour with 100% accuracy either. Of course BS 221 may not actually be correct either, CIÉ did use their own names for the brown and tan livery. So who knows. In doing a little more late-night internet sleuthing I found the question about the dark green livery had already been answered a couple years ago:

Indeed looks promising for (I assume) lighter green. Of course I'm far too young to remember the shade, but looking at photos it's not a bad match. At this rate we'll know all the shades before long

With EdN we did at least know the name, so someone had to stumble upon it sooner or later. I reckon the various shades of green probably also came from the same/similar colour standards, but there seems to be minimal information on them out there beyond a few photographs. Could be worth having a look about the pre-BnT liveries too next time you're there. Anyway, here's the best I could find about CC 222/BCC 74 (Golden Brown, or Saffron according to CIÉ) alongside CC 239/BS381C 279 (Greenfinch/Steel Furniture Green [what kind of a name is that??], or Olive according to CIÉ): Do take this with a grain of salt; the sample on the left may have degraded over time and we are comparing a photo and a computer generated colour. But it gives you an idea of what it might have looked like. I reckon quite a few CIÉ trains actually wore this livery, albeit only when they hadn't been washed in a while.

As far as I can tell the BSI is referring to the BS381 standard I could only only find one chart online which includes this colour (many skip over 279), but here it is: Screenshot taken from https://www.rawlinspaints.com/content/british-standard-381c. I wouldn't exactly describe it as green personally, but not sure how accurate the colour shown on the website is. But even more interestingly, when browsing the same chart I found another colour with a familiar name:

Make that 3 of us Looking at the pictures shared earlier it does look like much the same setup as the Mk2s. Makes me wonder how difficult it would be to get a factory to run off a small batch of 21mm split axle wheelsets

Yes, that's the front footplate I mentioned is still missing. I'm sure that's not the correct term, overhang might be better. I'll be making that out of brass since I reckon a thin sheet of plasticard would be too fragile. I might get the curved shape etched since it saves me a bit of work and I'll be getting some etches made for some of the other details anyway.

Made some progress building the frame out of plasticard over the last week. I had estimated the height of the solebar (or at least the visible portion thereof) to be 4 inches when I created the model, or 1.333 mm to scale. Unfortunately I didn’t have any 1.333 mm plasticard lying around, so I had to laminate together 0.040” (1.02 mm) and 0.012” (0.30 mm) to get the correct thickness. I created the buffer beams by cutting and drilling holes for the buffers and coupling. The detail around the coupling was incredibly fiddly to put together, but the result isn’t so bad. I did a little more filing after this photo was taken. It’s not perfect but once painted and weathered I reckon it won’t be too bad. This was glued to the ends of the solebar along with the triangular gussets which drop from the solebar down to the bottom of the buffer beam on either side. On the prototype there are two plates welded to the underside of the buffer beam and the triangular gussets. You can see in some of Ernie’s photos that it makes the buffer beam appear a little taller on both sides and there is a clear weld line against the gusset on the side. I added two thin pieces of plasticard to represent these. I haven’t cut any holes for the chassis yet, just marked out where the bogie centres should go. That will come later when I have a better idea of what the chassis will look like. For now here is the finished frame sitting underneath the body. It looks a bit weird without the front footplate (or whatever you call it) with the lamp mounts, almost more like an A Class. I will probably try to make this out of brass so it's not too fragile. Buffers and couplings are loosely fitted to show what it will look like. These will be one of the last things to be glued in place as I have a history of accidentally breaking off smaller protrusions mid-scratchbuild. The screw link coupling is a Hornby part, while the buffers are Accurascale Class 37 ones. I will file down the buffer cylinder to remove the little foot step on top, since the Cs didn't have them.

A few people have asked about the 3D model I made, so I've attached them both here and in the original post. The .f3d file is the design file for Fusion 360 and the .stl is the finished model if anyone wants to print it. Feel free to use them however you want as long as you give appropriate credit; i.e. don't pass it off as your own. c-class-body.f3dc-class-body.stl

As long as I can get a little use out of mine before before it gets usurped by a RTR version I'm happy

I recently bought a sound chip for my Murphy Bachmann 181 from Roads And Rails. He emailed me after I had put in my order to ask whether I had the old Bachmann or the new Murphy version, so there must be some difference. I haven't gotten around to fitting it yet so I can't give you the full review, but I might try to tackle it this weekend.