Broithe

Royal Mail charged me £8 for the privilege of them 'handling' the £3 tax that was due on the item.

There are some bonkers issues going on in food "economics" for many years now. I remember two facts emerging during some sort of chicken-based emergency a few years ago. At that time: 1, The two largest sources of chicken imports to the UK were Thailand and Brazil - neither seems handily placed to me. 2, The UK exported almost exactly the same amount of chicken to the Netherlands as the Netherlands exported to the UK.

It did. It was more of a train set than a model, but it kept him occupied. Often, I would start a bit and then leave him to carry on for a day or two - between us, it all got done in the end. I made most of the proprietary card buildings, apart from half the ones at Lowe End - the "specials", like the power station, etc., were 'picked up' here and there. The cooling towers were turned from solid lumps of wood... I had a plan to fit a 'misting unit', one of those ultrasonic things that "shakes" a mist from a supply of water, but we never got around to that. The points were all mechanically operated, sometimes in pairs. He liked "things that did stuff", hence the electrified crane, winding wheels, coal conveyor and the self-emptying hopper wagons. There was also a TPO with a pick-up and drop-off for the bags. I've a vague idea that there's a building with a smoke unit in there somewhere.

Yeah, I didn't procure that one - it'll be in a box 200 miles away - I'll have a look one day... I got most of the stuff that was on there, but bits would appear from other sources, sometimes. I used to slip stuff in and see how long it took him to spot things. Weeks, sometimes. That would explain why it's on the wrong side of the road.

By the boiler transporter? I'm not sure about that, or even where it came from. This layout was in Stafford, which has a history of producing generators and transformers, then dragging them through the town causing traffic chaos. There should be a Pickford's transporter with a transformer on somewhere... There are a few other 'local' items around - the Stan Robinson lorry is another. The power station was originally based on Meaford, north of Stafford and now obliterated. It has been relocated to a layout in Laois, where it is now Ferbane, the current owner having been involved in the construction of that one. One or two buildings and a bit of rolling stock are on there two - the rest is in boxes. (One day..) Well spotted!

Most of it was built over a three/four year period around 2005 to 2010-ish. The section in the garage was first, Two 'circular loop tracks, with a couple of siding set-ups and a loop platform at the back. As was inevitable, it was decided to expand into the larger area of the car port. This was done via four points and a crossover, so it could operate as independent loops or a full figure-of-eight. Outside, in the car port, the inner loop was originally intended for a couple of live steamers, so any possible accidental connection of the two systems was avoided by having the inner loop totally separate from the outer. Eventually, there was a mine at one end, with a power station at the other. The coal could be loaded at the mine, via the conveyor, then transported and dropped at the power station, by means of the automatic hopper wagons. It took some fiddling to get it all to work, but it did in the end. The final extension at the far end was the result of one of our associates passing on and a lot of items from his layout were reused to crate a small town for the power station workers. his name was Ken Lowe, hence new signs were made to commemorate him. Of course, it was never 'finished' - we had plans to run a narrow gauge set-up under the boards, as a mine railway. Apart from the conveyor, the mineshaft wheel were also motorised, as was the 'dockyard' crane, though it was never fully reliable. There was a permanent control set-up in the garage, with a Model D - and two plug-in points for a portable Model D in the car port. One set of 'banana' sockets can just be seen in the bottom left corner above, with a slide out shelf below. One aspect that the Old Boy really liked was running it in the dark with the lighting on. The street lamps there are LED, but most of the rest of the layout was grain-of-wheat bulbs, running in series pairs at 16 volts, so getting 8V each - this gave a pleasant olde worlde glow, and greatly extended the bulb lives - in fact, we never lost one - if we had, we would also have 'lost the light' from the one in series, of course, but it never happened, and all the wiring was quite visible underneath the tables.

You're meant to pretend that you thought it was an excellently executed slip-coach manoeuvre.

As requested by @DJ Dangerous and @PJR in the Advice On Clearances thread. This was built over a few years for an old boy who was housebound - initially, it was just the double circuit in the garage, then it expanded to link with another, larger, layout under the car port. The outer track could be either two loops or, via a crossover in the doorway, a figure-of-eight around the whole thing. The inner loop in the garage was connected via points to the outer one, but the inner loop in the car port was not - this was because that was originally kept separate for live steamers, with their special power supply. This inner loop was modified later to allow access for the loader at the mine and the unloader at the power station. Unfortunately, upon his eventual death, it was necessary to dismantle it, though I do have most of the "bits" still. One day... These videos give the gist of it and I'll find some more relevant pictures.

I'll stick some up elsewhere, to avoid derailing this (hah!). There's a few videos, too. The ramp was based on some hardboard we had left - hence the 8 foot length dimension. The lift might have been 3½ inches, but it was 'steep' in the generally accepted view of model layouts. If anybody has a Hornby suspension bridge to hand, that defined the lift - mine is 200 miles away and it probably wouldn't accepted as an essential journey. It was clearly close to the limit, but we rarely had issues. Restarting on the slope was not always possible without the Hand of God. We never had any motor stalling issues, all the propulsion failures were slippages. The number of axles in the train was as important as the weight of the carriages & wagons. Most trains were drawn, we didn't do a lot of propelling, but I don't recall any special difficulties there, though. We had the obvious advantage that it was fairly accessible - if it had been more awkward, I might have been inclined (hah, again) to drop the bridge a bit, as there was nothing underneath it that mattered.

We had a large layout with a straight incline, as an excuse to use a suspension bridge. It rose four inches in eight feet, but had bends not far from the bottom ends. The bends, as @murphaphsays above, do add to the resistance. It would be noticeable, with longer trains, that the ascent would accelerate slightly (it was a DC layout) once the whole train was on the straight. We didn't have huge issues with the gradient and there was a great variety of motive units on there - new and old, traction tyres and all metal wheels, etc. A few points did emerge:- Heavier locos were, as would be expected, less prone to slip. Murphy products (only 141/181 on there whilst it existed) were amongst the best performers. Before you commit to a final design, it might be worth building a test set-up with the intended track profile?

Indeed. And they have to consider what happens if they bleed us all dry and we starve to death.

Phew, thank God it's not for 'us'... My wallet had palpitations when I saw the thread title.

When you're building a DART layout and prefer doing water features to ballasting.

Was there also a 'disc' on the smokebox door, albeit a bit more liable to getting dirty?

Spike was always a source of such things...

I'm sure that someone did put a "Scalescenes"-type image up on here years ago, from which a reasonable replica could be made, but I've been unable to find it again...

A bit over 00 scale, but maybe suitable for a G scale arrangement? https://www.irelandbeforeyoudie.com/father-ted-fan-designs-incredible-replica-parochial-dolls-house/

Plenty of opportunities at the moment...

"Item Location" may not always be trustworthy on eBay, either. I recently bought a couple of Dremel chucks that they wouldn't send to anywhere outside GB and, being under house arrest 4.9km from Ballybrophy*, I got the seller to send them to a friend on the Big Island, as I'm in no real rush. I'll admit that I was suspicious that the stated location being Manchester just might have been untrue, but at that time, the £15 allowance still applied, so, even if my suspicions were correct, my agent would not be hit for an extra payment. When they arrived, they most certainly hadn't been posted in Manchester - I haven't actually seen the packaging, but, from the description it seems almost certain to be Hong Kong or mainland China. This 'risk' probably applies more to tools and materials than actual models, but it's worth bearing in mind. * I will do an inspection at some point.

Obviously, the live-steam turf-burner will have been bumped up the list by the news that Bord na Mona are not going to be holding stocks of the necessary material for the required microsods for much longer.

This could be handy as 'evidence', for when you run out of blue while painting the back scene...