FrankS

Hi Warbonnet, The layout in the first 6 and 11th layout photos look to have been taken on Stand # 21 which looks to be a very nice looking layout. What was that one called, please?

Hi Dave, For those of us who can't come it would be really useful if "somewhere" contact details (website/e-mail/snailmail/phone)for the various layouts, clubs and business's could be listed. Cheers, FrankS

Hi Patrick, Welcome. A great start. Our railways are set in much the same part of the country. My Cildargan is set on the old GS&WR line from Mallow to Waterford and Rosslare. I've been looking for info on the 4whl Fertilizer Wagon. A close-up side and end view would be much appreciated. Cheers, FrankS in Tasmania.

Hi Guys, A bit on fitting Kadee's to 4whl stock. With modern stock fitted with NEM pockets it "should" be easy-squezy. It generally is with Bachmann and Dapol which are mostly at approx the correct height. But Hornby are all over the place. In some cases the Hornby mounting heights are so far out, that it's easier to remove all trace of the NEM mounting and treat them as you would an older model without NEM pockets. Fitting Kadee's to older 4whl stock There are variations, of course, but in most cases If you remove all trace of the tension lock coupler and its mounts you end up with a flat floor on which you can just glue a # 5 in its original draft-gear box(# 232) or in the newer # 242 snap-on draft gear boxes which work with whisker or original type couplers, both Kadee or Bachmann. Most times this works out to be pretty close and you can make it a bit lower by inserting shims cut from .10 or .20 thou plasticard between the draft gear box and the floor. In some cases you need to overcome a fairly big variation in height either HIGHER or LOWER. You can do this with a bit of experimentation with the range of offset couplers that both Kadee and Bachmann produce. These come in 3 different shaft lengths Long, Medium and Short and with the coupler head mounted in the Centre of the shaft, on the Top or on the Bottom. With the various combinations available, with experimentation you should be able to mount Kadee's on any and all 4-wheelers. But, DON't fall into the trap of just glueing a Kadee coupler onto the floor or whatever, it WON'T WORK. Kadees MUST have a certain amount of side-to-side play to work, which is why you use the draft gear boxes to mount them. Two Pain in the Bums with Kadee's. Biggest is the TINY springs on the end of the coupler heads. Unless you have excellent (ie young) eyesight thay are a real swine to replace. If you use the newish # 242 Draft gear boxes you can snap the box off and replace the coupler with a spare. Saving the couplers which need occupying themselves for a day when you are in a good, placid mood, the kids and SWMBO are out, and you can sit down in a GOOD light and swear to your hearts content Second is that unless you've got the height of the couplers on adjacent vehicles VERY close to perfect when you start to go up or come down a slope they will uncouple sure as eggs is eggs

Boskonay foolishly said ~ Can you give us some basic pointers Frank, on how best to photo layouts, models? Well, My son will be amazed, somebody asking ME for advice on photography I've always fancied myself as a school teacher, so I hope you don't end up regretting the request Anyway, for what it's worth. I have no particular skills or technical expertise, my digital camera is just a point and press Olympus with fixed settings and 8x digital zoom, discarded 3 or 4 cameras ago by my son. I do not understand depth of field and all that sort of thing, and I don't particularly want to ~ I've got more than enough hobbies and interests to last me until my 125th birthday, without adding photography. So, If I can take halfway decent model photos ~ anyone can Tripod ~ The absolute essential for taking photos of models is a tripod, no matter how upright and sober you are, you can't hold a camera steady enough for small things like models. The tripod doesn't have to be a supa-dupa professional one, mine cost me the equivalent of about 45 euros from a local office/computer/stationery store. But it must have plenty of adjustable height to get above your baseboard level. Lighting - I almost always take my model photos in daylight to get pretty even lighting. I did make myself a couple of 8' high light stands (IKEA shelf ends with a garden floodlight attached to the tops) with the idea of placing one each sideof the scene I wanted to photograph. But, I hardly ever use them, as I've found the artificial light to be too harsh and the shadows cast by them to be too strong. Composition - If you're going to get reasonably realistic photos, then you've got to have a reasonably realistic scene to take them on. No matter how beautifully made and weathered a model it's not going to look in any way realistic if the background is dominated by coffee cups and screwdrivers. I guess my layout is about 50% complete, but rather than have it all at the same level I've deliberatly adopted the policy of bringing one section of the layout up to about 95% completness purely with taking photos in mind. Which explains why most of my photos are of Castlecromerby station and area. The section running down the other side of the room is now about 75% complete and I'll take more photos along there as it reaches the stage of being "photo-graphical". This is the area where I took the recent photos of the ballast loading area and the beet loading dock in the background ~ I zoomed in on the 'good' area and, hopefully, the viewer doesn't realise that a few inches on either side is the mess and chaos associated with a model railway under construction . When you've set up the scene you want to photograph have a good look through the viewfinder and see what is in the background, If it's not compatible with your model scene, remove it, change your angle a bit, or try to hide it. Earlier in this this thread there is a photo of a Woolwich Mogul crossing the Blackwater Bridge. This bridge has no scenery behind it as it's the "duck-under" to get into the layout area. To hide the background of bookshelves I pasted a section of a commercial background sheet on to a 2 x 4 piece of MDF and temporarily screwed it to the timber either side pf the bridge. Take plenty of photos. These days we are lucky that we are not paying out good modelling money for prints of photos which are often bad, sometimes ugly and only occaissionally good It costs us no more to take 1 or 10 photos of the same scene with a digital camera so change your angle slightly, change the vehicles in your train around, move the train backwards and forwards a few inches, etc. You can't tell looking through the viewfinder, but when the photos are blown up on your computer screen and you compare them, you'll soon pick out which ones have 'worked' and which haven't. Try and look at your photos on the computer before you destroy your created scene, that way it's easy to take a few more If something strikes you as nearly right but would be better without that van which blocks the view of the wagon behind, say. It's amazing how often some incongruity (good word, probably spelt wrong will leap out and smack you in the face on your computer screen, but you never even noticed it on the layout. Finally, Most of my photos I take from a fair way back so that on the computer I can edit them and crop out the bad bits and it zooms in on the bits I want in the photo. My layout suffers from being too flat and the baseboards too narrow (Castlecromerby is only 15" deep) but I've got no choice. That section of the layout runs in front of a 12' long window, and my previous layout, which was 30' wide caused S.W.M.B.O. to heap even more than usual amount of s**t on my shoulders, because for 3 years she couldn't get in to clean the window But, you can do a lot with your choice of backscene, to make it look deeper. I hope this hasn't been too boring and might have been some help. The important thing is to have a go, take some photos and put them on this forum. Even If your layout is overall only 10% complete, spend a weekend to bring one section up to the standard you eventually want the whole layout to be, and take some photos on it. The people here are very supportive and when they praise your photos it does your ego the world of good - If they don't like 'em, well, you can always just mumble S*d, em and go and find some online porn to look at Cheers, from Kangaroo country.

HI Guys, Kadee's Tension Lock Don't forget that Bachmann also do their own version of the Kadee to fit in NEM boxes or onto the floors of older stock.. Although, apparently not freely available in Europe, they can easily be got on e-bay from a company called 'The Favorite Spot' in Texas, who are completly reliable. The Bachmann part number is # 78035 and they only do one shaft length, equivalent to the longest Kadee shaft length I think (Must send for some Kadee NEM's and compare). They come in cards of 12 pairs, the Buyitnow price is around $US16 approx Euro 12.5 / GBP 10.00 but they also have 2-day auctions starting at $US0.01 and which can get up to anything from $US8 - $US12. They have a system wherby you can accumulate e-bay purchases for about 10 days before you pay for them. I usually work on getting about 4 cards (48 pairs) at a time, 2 at auction price and 2 at BIN price. Of course, you've got to factor postage into the equation to see If the savings over Kadee's are worthwhile. If you don't want to use the Kadee 'hands-off' shunting/switching feature (I and many On30 NGers don't, our railways are 'hands-on' rather than 'hands-off') you can improve the looks even better by snipping off the glad-hands/trip pins. Cheers,

Thanx Shinkansen, Very nice of you to say so, I try, although I've got a long way to go. My son is a VERY keen photographer and I try to pick up pointers from him, not to mention his cast off camera's. A tripod is absolutely essential, I generally try to compose my photos and take them from a fair way back so I can later crop them to cut out baseboard edges, etc. BTW - I thought I had an expensive hobby, until I was photocopying my son's custom declaration form for the equipment he was taking on a photographic trip to Hong Kong, I went weak at the knee's when I saw the values - If I had the money he's spent on photographic gear, I could open up in competition with Paddy Murphy

Thanx Guys, Looking through my photos I came across this B/W shot taken in the 1950's when the Cildargan section shunter was Sentinel 0-4-0Vertical Boilered 0-4-0T No. 281. This was slated for withdrawl under the GSR but managed to survive long enough to be preserved by the RPSI, and is based at their Southern depot at Mallow ??? As for YouTube ~ so far I havn't managed to get my brain around how to do it - too much tampering with history, probably:x

Thanx, Popeye, That looks the go ! I'll add one to my next Hatton's order.

Hi 201bhoy, In my fevered imagination it's on the old GS&WR route from Mallow to Waterford and on to Rosslare. The rumours of it's closing were greatly exaggerated I'm always on the lookout for traffic we can 'pinch' from other 'far inferior' routes to and from Cork, Limerick, Waterford , Rosslare and Wexford

Ah, sorry about that, got my photo numbers mixed up THIS is the photo I SHOULD have uploaded showing # 190 shunting the Irish Cement Diostribution Centre at Castlecromerby ~

Hi Guys, I thought it was time to post a few photos to show that we haven't been asleep down here in Cilldargan. Thanx to Wennaire the Double-headed Rosslare Express can now be seen pounding through Castlecromerby on its way to the boat for Fishguard ~ The Ballast Siding is now in operation and these pictures show ballast wagons being loaded and D.303 shunting the ballast sidings ~ Meanwhile # 190 shunts the Irish Cement Distribution Centre ~ Finally, I'm very taken with the use of open top containers and plan to represent the Cawoods Coal Trains and the Scrap Containers which ran from Dublin NW to Irish Steel on Haulbowline Island in Cork Harbour. Also I like very much the traffic which went to Asahi Chemicals at Ballina. Not so much the special chemical containers, but more the coal and oil trains with the demountable oil tanks and open top coal containers. Even with my 'elasticated' versions of history and geography. Ballina is a bit off my patch so I've Put my muti-million Euro support (doesn't every railway need a fairy-godfather ??? ) behind a new Courtaulds Man-Made Fibres factory at Waterford which will, like Asahi, receive its Chemicals, Oil and Coal in demountable containers and ship out its products in Bell line ISO Containers. Here we see B181 hauling a coal and oil train past the East Cilldargan Sugar Beet loading dock which is getting ready for the coming campaign. The two towers were part of an unsuccessful scheme to load the beet using hydraulic lifts, which failed and they've now reverted to the old fashioned trailers tipping directly down into the beet wagons. In actual facts, the two towers disguise (hopefully) two of the supports for the IKEA shelving which the railway runs on at this point.

WOW, a Guru ~ does that mean you get 40 virgins when you go to the big Marshalling Yard in the sky ? Maybe you could swap them for 40 071's ?

Lovely work, Enniscorthyman. Pity the show is so far from me, would love to see it in the flesh.

Hi Irishtrains, I'm modelling (faiurly loosely) late 1970's so that would be OK. If you come across it, please pm me or contact on franksavery@bigpond.com Much appreciated.

Looks really Nice, Ciotog, More photos, please.

Hi Guys, I am asking this in the hope that one of you may have come across what I'm looking for. On my 'Cilldargan' layout I want to creat a scene where a tipper truck is in the act of tipping its load from a loading bank into the wagon below. To do this of course, I need a Tipper Truck that actually TIPS - The ranges carried by Hattons (Base Toys, etc.) include a good number of tipper trucks, BUT they don't say If they actually TIP or not. The only one shown in a tipping position is the EFE Bedford Tipper Truck, and I was really P*****D-O*F when, after paying about 3 times the price of equivalent models in other ranges I found that, while it TIPS, the tailgate is FIXED so rendering the whole tipping idea a complete waste of time. I don't wan't to spend my way through all the tipper trucks available in the hope of finding what I want, so I wonder If anyone has come across a Tipper Truck that tips AND has a working tailgate. Cheers from Down Under.

Hi Grange Castle, Presuming that you are working in OO scale (1/76) there shouldn't be too much trouble adding an Air Component to your GARDA Collection. AS 'Barl' has said, At present the Garda Air Support Unit uses two Eorocopter EC 135 T-1 Helicopters and a Britten-Norman Defender fixed wing aircraft. Previously, they used a Eurocopter AS355N Squirrel Helicopter. See: http://www.irishairpics.com/database/search.php?q=Garda%20Air%20Support%20Unit&u=operator for photos Revell in Germany do a 1/72 Kit (# 4649) for an Austrian Police EC 135 which should be very similar and have the extra Police gear fitted - available from US dealers see: http://www.1001modelkits.com/eurocopter-ec-135-model-kit/29310-eurocopter-ec135-polzei-1-72-revell-model-kits-4649.html and http://www.modelcars.com/revell-eurocopter-ec135-austrian-police-helicopter.html I guess the hardest part would be finding suitable national markings, but Marks Models might be useful for this. At present Airfix do a Hawker Hurricane kit which includes Irish Air Corps markings. I’m pretty sure that there is /was a kit for a Squireel Helicopter, I’ll have a bit of a dig. Hope this helps to get your GARDA into the air Cheers from Down Under

Re: GARDA Helicopter What type do they use ? - ALOUETTES ??? There could well be a 1/72nd plastic kit available.

Hidden Agenda said " I,ve just doubled my Hattons order bound to be a better investment than gold. " Sound thinking Hidden Agenda, I've just done the same.

Thanx Dave. Now how did I miss that - these Senior moments are getting more frequent - either that or following second childhood, second puberty is starting to kick in - and my mind is on other things

To hark back to Weshty's Post # 6 in which he says "For real authentic looking coaches get some Replica Railways B5 bogies as they are fantastic looking and aren't that expensive. " I'm quite happy with my Silver fox SGV as it sits at the same height as the Cravens ??? but I would like to change the bogies, which have the old BIG version coupler moulded as part of the bogie for ones which have the NEM box on them - mainly because I want to swap the god-awful annoying tension lock couplers for Kadee's. Can the Replica B4(RA05) or B5(RA08) bogies be fitted with their own Part # RA23 NEM couplings ???, please. Or, If not a Bachmann or Dapol NEM Box, maybe.

When you get a chance, a direct link would be very handy, please, Brian, as maybe it's just me, but I can't find it. Hope it comes as a Garda Barracks would make a nice model - could ask Wrenneire for some pointers on modelling one Mind you, you've got to be careful what you ask for - I once called into a Taxation office to pick up a form and innocently asked the guy behind the counter If this was where you q'd for tickets to the public floggings, funny, he seemed slightly less than impressed

Jeez !!! A few customers like that and you could retire, Wrenneire Where are these mugs when you want them

WOW Now THAT's what you call a fiddle-yard ! My adled brain would go into terminal meltdown trying to keep track of all those tracks - =))If you know what I mean.