New Railway Modellers Forums

Mustard seeds. What do I win?

I used to get Railway Modeller sporadically; then when I got more serious about modelling I got Model Rail regularly as I liked its "how to do stuff" style. I bought it every month for a few years along with occasional issues of Hornby and Railway Modeller. As I'm a bit of a hoarder the st...

Dear oh dear...I just dropped about €90 on an Airfix hovercraft kit - the SRN4 model. These are as rare as hens' teeth nowadays but I'll have fun trying to build it - as it's 1/144 scale it's not a million miles removed from N gauge.

I love building the Dapol oil wagons - they're as near as dammit to Irish ones and a great evening's entertainment can be had for a few Euros. I plan to build up a train of about a dozen or so - a train like this ran prototypically to the West of Ireland in the 50s as the roads were so bad lorry tra...

Greetings to one and all - I've not been here for some time due to the fact that I've been doing rather a lot of railway modelling and generally faffing about in my local club. All huge fun but I seem to have become something of a magnet for old Airfix kits. It started with the purchase of a Battle ...

Don't forget that the modern "smokeless" coal simply turns to a powder when you try to smash it up - here in Ireland I took a trip to a village out in the sticks where I was able to get some of the untreated stuff as it's banned in urban areas. The "smoky' stuff also burns better in y...

I have the number of the motor - R317 - 070 but not for the model as it's been obscured under several coats of paint. The large gear with the reducing gear has the number 2 on it; the smaller gears have no number at all. I'll have a poke around my Class 47s - I think i have one that doesn't run too ...

I just had a quick measure of the offending components - the large gear is 40/10 ratio and its outer diameter is 20mm; the diameter of the small inner gear with the ten teeth on it is 5.8mm. The smaller gear has 30 teeth and a diameter of 15.6mm. The teeth that are doing the louder gnashing are my o...

I'm quite happy to use the cheap and cheerful Chinese ones - they're great for populating coaches but the garish colours need toning down - as well as the fact that being Chinese all the figures seem to have black hair. My own personal crib is the lack of loco crews - you can only do so much with th...

Greetings to one and all and a happy St. Patrick's Day begorrah, bejabbers, bejayzus etc. I have recently discovered an old Hornby Class 37 that I'd forgotten about. It's got a horrible paint job so I'm going to replace the body with a new one and do the usual detailing job - roof fan, flush glazing...

Went to Marks in Dublin last week and bought a set of jeweller's screwdrivers and some Plasticard for about a tenner. Then I saw some coaches in the second hand cabinet and had to have them - five perfect Bachmann Mk 1 in midland maroon for €100. No boxes but otherwise mint.

I have great fun in restoring old locos to operating condition. Not all are a success - apart from an old 8F that had a neo magnet fitted and could do a scale 600mph. Just lately I got my hands on a Southern N15x built form a kit by a fellow club member years ago and while it's a great model the old...

I had a check with a magnet and the track in question is nickel silver. There is a mixture of steel and n/s track on my little layout but following the advice on here I don't anticipate any more trouble. Iv'e a power feed and a couple of link wires to do so I'll get at that this evening.

Boxcar - I just used my Admin privilege to check your location, you email address and IP address suggest you are not in the UK. Even here where 60/40 lead solder is only banned for water pipes many businesses will tell you it's illegal. You may have the same problem, go on line to look for 60/40 al...

Greetings to one and all and I hope that the New Year's resolutions are still holding fast and that you've all abstained from dressing up as Wonder Woman on Fridays or whatever your resolution was. Anyway here's a question. I've been working on a small layout - it's actually my first attempt to buil...