That looks a really interesting booklet, Stephen. the sort of thing I'd leap on if I saw it at a stall and my wife would give me one of 'those looks' when I brought it home. Online it seems to go for between £30 and £40, so I'll just keep an eye out at shows, i think.
I've been working on
Grantham stock after York and before Bristol. There were the usual issues with things breaking or needing attention, though not as many as usual. There has been some thought devoted to managing the way locomotives are allocated to trains on the layout. We were below par at York and while some of the running problems we had on Saturday were down to the layout and were resolved or at least improved until permanent repairs were possible, some were down to less experienced operators sending out inappropriate locomotives. Those of us who've been with the layout from the start have got used to seeing certain engines on certain trains and use them again almost without thinking about it. New operators don't have that exposure and can't tell just by looking how good a performer a loco might be or what it's best used for. That most especially applies to engines which go onto and come off shed.
Graham has therefore devised a system of testing and classifying engines for mainline/non-stop use only and then for stopping trains and on/off shed. We spent last Sunday with part of the layout erected and a test through the more taxing parts of the dead frog pointwork in place which the two crates of engines I'd taken up there were put through. Hopefully the end result will bear fruit at Bristol.
Immediate effect is the addition of tender pickups to a couple of engines:
17 is a Bachmann K3 which was part of Tom Foster's stud for
Leaman Road. When Tom changed modelling direction, he sold it to me. Tony Wright had built a new mechanism for it and fitted a brass cab from SEF. The original tender had been retained. I finished it off and it's worked mineral trains on
Grantham ever since. Although it will never go onto shed, having only screw link couplings, it does need to work it's way through some long ladders of points and crossovers and (whisper it in case Sir hears) was slightly hesitant in places.
Bachmann tenders are dead easy to fit pickups to, the biggest nuisance is often cleaning paint off the back of the wheels. I use copperclad sleepers as a base as they're readily available and a convenient shape for what's needed. I've mentioned the the plugs before; they're from
Peter's Spares and work very well imo.
The O1 worked very well over the York weekend, but it was slated to have extra pxckups fitted and you can't ever have too many, really. Kit built tenders can be a bit more of a challenge if pickups haven't been designed in when they were built, but this one wasn't a problem.
I spent part of yesterday working through my crate of Hornby pacifics and a couple of those had to have the tenders dismantled and the pickups cleaned and tweaked. It's funny how they conspire to lose contact even though they're way up in the frames and you'd have thought away from anything which might bend or distort them.
Finally a genuine fault. C1 3275, a performer on the layout since Day 1, was reported as being 'unhappy' in reverse. Testing here proved this to be true so onto the bench it came. 3275 came to me as one of a pair of EM gauge K's kits, really nicely built by someone a long time ago.
Of the pair this was the better in that the K's motor still worked, but it had to be converted to OO and as part of that I reworked it such that the cylinders were part of the frames rather then the body - as designed you had to thread the crossheads back into place every time the body went back on. It was also repainted to a mor eaccurate shade of green.
On examination today, one of the small sleeper lengths used to mount the pickups had detached from the underside of the chassis. You can see it below, it's the upper one. It's now been epoxied back into place. You can also see here the brass extension I added to the K's chassis to carry the stretcher for the cylinders.