Class 28 to be produced

at

Must finish my scratch-built one, started about 17 years ago as a university project.

There can't be many non-shunting mainline diesel loco types left for the manufacturers to produce now!

PhilD

3 days later Rails and Bachmann announce one - well no price yet.

Cheers, Simon

Yet another box on wheels. Sooner or later someone is going to commission one of the major manufacturers to make a steam locomotive that's not already available RTR.

Hardly "just another box" - a particularly mal-formed and repellant box (though, from one who once owned the H-D model[1], not without a certain, limited, perverse appeal)

Said it before, say it again. NER C (J21). Ubiquitous, long-lived, and some of the most modellable lines in Britain simply need one.

[1] It was very cheap, as I recall. About 1/3 what I paid for a Tri-ang B12, which I liked much more..

Or better still parts to produce a family of related engines - Once you have a Duke and a Bulldog which share the same chassis you also have a curved framed Bulldog and a Dukedog.

In the US Bachmann produce engines with two cabs in the box, etc. Take this a step further and they can do engines with long or short smokeboxes, with or without top feed etc. All for not much more than the cost of one set of tooling.

Given that Dukes, Bulldogs and Dukedogs all lasted into the BR era, and most GWR enthusiasts would buy one of each they should sell a lot.

I agree. In my train spotting days we saw these on the Condor - they were remarkably ugly and AFAIR not that successful.

I always had a soft spot for the B12. Inside cylindered 4-6-0s were unusual and the real thing was an ecellent engine.

Undoubtedly effective, both in its pretty original form (with the lovely twiddly bits of side framing) and as rebuilt by Thompson (OK, during the Gresley period, but Thompson was the architect of the rebuilds..), which is what Tri-ang modelled. It'd be nice to see that model re-worked to modern standards, though an unrebuilt version would be nicer still...

Inside-cylinder 4-6-0s weren't that rare: the L&NW built hundreds of the things (Experiments, 19" goods, Princes..), which worked very well, and McIntosh on the Caledonian turned out a fair number, which were generally pretty but ineffective (the bigger ones were good publicity machines, though). GEM did kits of some of 'em, generally to fit on the Tri-ang B12/3 chassis..

And, given they've already got the City done, this opens up the whole range of Atbaras and suchlike...a very interesting possibility.

How about a 'Tilbury tank' of LT&SR design, some clerestory coaches? The old Tilbury Riverside, with steamer berths and paddlewheel ferries, a triangular junction, and simple scenery would be quite fun.

Or some of Mr Drummond's Highland engines?

What about some early engines, 6-couplers from the 1860s, with just a spectacle plate and no cab, big leggy singles, LNWR cramptons? with 4- wheel and 6-wheel coaches, and parliamentary coaches?

Or Havilah, the 4-coupled loco built for Lord Willoughby, with the accompanying tall 4-wheel carraiges and light coal trucks?

A leek and Manifold train, The Owl from the Northampton & Banbury Or some of their later 0-4-2 engines.

Oh, and it's time for complete trains. Find some genuine photo from a known date, and turn out the loco, rolling stock, some platform goods and luggage for the period, and a bunch of passengers and crew. It should be possible with late 19th c settings to get photos and names of real people and include them.

What about Thomas Cook's first ever excursion train from leicster to Loughborough? complete with the brass bands and bunting?

A fully accurate orient express?

Golden arrow - loco, coaches, headboards and carriage boards, luggage barrows, ticket barrier with name signs, and a slack handful of documentation like timetables. Or the night ferry (wagon lit coaches,

6 wheel luggage van)

Queen Victoria's royal train? With the monarch, consort, children, and some soldiers for protection? Alberts funeral train?

But part of the pleasure in building a model railway is the research and getting parts to make a complete train. If were given everything then we become more observers than modellers. Plus we'd all have exactly the same setup.

Cheers, Simon

I'm surprised Hornby hasn't cashed in on the success of "The Railway Children" as filmed on the Worth Valley in 1970.

Oakworth station is still maintained in Victorian style, and the Old Gentleman's Carriage is still in operation. There could be figures of Jenny Agutter as Bobbie, Bernard Cribbins as Mr. Perks, William Mervyn as The Old Gentleman, etc. Metcalfe does, or did, a cardboard model kit of Haworth station in the same Midland style.

LNER examples included B2 (later B19, GCR Class 1 'Sir Sam Fay Class'), B8 (GCR Class 1A 'Glenalmonds') and Class B12 as previously mentioned.

The NER even built a class of inside-cylinder 4-6-0Ts - Wilson Wordsell's Class W. Unfortunately they suffered from a lack of coal and water capacity and Raven had the whole lot rebuilt as 4-6-2Ts in order to solve that problem. LNER classification was A6, had they remained as 4-6-0Ts they would presumably have been classified as B20.

Yup. Forgot the GC examples, as one does.

The Willies. Yep, forgot them too. The GW had a few too - the Krugers

- which didn't last long (mercifully, given what they looked like). They may well be one or two other examples, but I think it's pretty certain that the L&MW/LMS and GE+GC/LNER were the big users of the type in (now[1]) UK.

[1] May have been a few Irish examples of the breed, too.

I said unusual, not unique. Especially in my train spotting days.

Oh, I understood that - I was just adding a little LNER flavour to the overall conversation. IIRC the main reason why they were unusual was that on most railways it was very difficult - if not impossible - to fit cylinders of the required size between the frames. This was a particular problem on the NER, all of whose 4-6-0 tender engines had outside cylinders.

Interestingly, only the GER B12s are considered a successful design (and I'm a little surprised that Thompson wasn't tempted to use outside cylinders on his rebuilds) - both of the inside cylinder GCR classes are seen as failures as mainline passenger locos and in general.

I'm sure you're a young lad really. ;-) I'd imagine that most of the inside cylinder jobs had gone by BR time.

And all of whch were pretty much failures as express passenger engines - the problem with so many of these early 6-coupled express engiens being grate, not cylinders (inside cylinders avoided the probelm of things working loose, which was an issue in the 1900s - as witness the rapid deterioration of Manson's initially-fine G&SW 4-6-0s with time...).

Like the CR mchines, this was surely down to boiler limitations though, and particularly the difficulties gettign an easily-fireable grate into a 4-6-0 which a lot of designers got wrong at that time. The outside cylinder GCR 4-6-0s weren't exactly howling successs, and the same was even more true for the 4-cylinder machines. If anything, the inside cylinder GCR 4-6-0s seem to have been the best of their bad bunch of

6-coupled passenger engines.. All the McIntosh CR 4-6-0s were dogs, of course, but again that seems to have been down to their inability to boil water rather than where the cylinders were. Pickersgill's outside cylinder machines were a pretty grisly buch too, with only the Greybacks capable of adequate work (and then only in the right hands...).

The L&NW seemed to make them work just fine, though like most L&NW engines they were built for a short life and an energetic one.

Well, the CR junk went early, and the LM&S worked the ex-L&NW types into the ground once Stanier started playing with his new toys, but some of the GC types lasted almost to BR, I think..

Only fair to note that most of the early /outside/ cylinder 4-6=0s went in much the same timescale as the inside cylinder ones, of course..