Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post pictures and information about your own personal model railway layout that is under construction. Keep members up-to-date with what you are doing and discuss problems that you are having.
Bigmet
Posts: 10516
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:19 pm

Re: Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post by Bigmet »

Jim S-W wrote: Sat Sep 14, 2024 11:17 pm ...we are all happy to bend the historical truth when it comes to places but why not locos too?...
That's the attitude! On a different railway more hard pressed for cash they would have lived on, probably relegated to slower operations. The 'killer' in this specific case has to be the consistent success of the Fowler 2-6-4T and the Stanier development that followed it: work on 'the problem child' or replace with 'as good as it gets'?

Nevertheless makes a handsome model, and bound to baffle a few shown carrying BR livery...

Addition to the 'why not' possibilities: Stanier arguably should have taken up the Garatts for review, to extract the full performance potential from these expensive relatively new builds; 2-6-2+2-6-2 perhaps? "Summer holiday traffic use saw the rebuilds successfully working the heaviest trains on 60 mph schedules, that previously required double heading, but now only required a second fireman on the footplate." Go on, you know you want to...
Jim S-W
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Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2009 5:38 pm

Re: Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post by Jim S-W »

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I ended the first part of this project by mentioning I needed some bits from Scaleforum.  One of these was the injector which I modified a little from an Alan Gibson one.
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I also needed some firebox wash out plugs. Again Alan Gibson did the honours. It's worth noting that they are not on the same places either side. The cab roof was just a bit of nickel silver rolled to the right radius and a few bits of strip for the rainstrips. The vent was filed up from Evergreen section.  While on the subject of the cab the kit includes some bits and an etched floor. I found the handbrake column, if mounted to the cab floor as the kit was designed, gets in the way when trying to mate the body and chassis together so I cut it from the floor and mounted it to the body instead. The kit specifies that the reversing screw is mounted on the left side of the cab but, while hard to see in photos, it seems to be mounted to the right side so thats what I did.

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With everything in place and being happy wit the fit of things the body was given another light undercoat before the missing rivets were added from my dwindling supply of Archers along with some from Railtec.  Thankfully the flatirons dot have a lot of visible rivets.

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I don't normally take a painted but pre-weathered picture but this time I made an exception.  I mentioned in the last post that because of the carzatti front axle the coupling rods seemed backwards to the norm with the joint ahead of the middle axle not behind it. When No.2000 was modified this remained the case.  The kit has the coupling rods the normal way round with the joint behind the middle axle and I've never seen a model flatiron (in either 4mm scale of 7mm scale) that addresses this. I found 52f models do a set that have the right wheelbase with the joint in the right place so I used those instead.  One little tip that seems really obvious but I've never seen anyone mention (perhaps its because it is obvious to everyone else?) is that I line up the coupling rod on this side with the orientation of the grub screw on the final drive gear.  It makes accessing the grub screw simple should you need to in the future as you know where to stop the wheels rotation.

Below some pictures of the finished loco with my usual caveat of still needing coal and a crew.

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With her baby sister!

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Bigmet
Posts: 10516
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:19 pm

Re: Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post by Bigmet »

Handsome model that looks very well in your on scene pictures.
Jim S-W wrote: Tue Oct 08, 2024 9:29 pm ...One little tip that seems really obvious but I've never seen anyone mention (perhaps its because it is obvious to everyone else?) is that I line up the coupling rod on this side with the orientation of the grub screw on the final drive gear.  It makes accessing the grub screw simple should you need to in the future as you know where to stop the wheels rotation.
This was the sort of know how I acquired at my first MRC; many of the members were in hands on engineering employment, and had the resulting orientation of working to a consistent pattern that makes the job simplest to execute while yielding the best result. Other simple - yet obvious when you stop and think - technique such as doing the roughing out work as a batch on the lathe or mill, then performing the higher precision finish work as a batch with the machine tool and feedstock thoroughly warmed through and thus more stable.

Some years later when management of a large scale precision turnery 'in trouble' was sent my way, I was able to fix it on the first weekend by installation of a second set of outside doors so that the whole shop maintained a more nearly stable temperature, rather than oscillating over every two hours from outside to inside temperature, which was especially serious during the colder months of the year: it was a 3 shift operation. Nothing like model railway for career advancement...
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Mountain
Posts: 6249
Joined: Mon Oct 24, 2016 3:43 pm
Location: UK.

Re: Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post by Mountain »

Your models look great. You have good patience and an eye for detail.
Phred
Posts: 721
Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2023 10:53 pm
Location: Queensland Australia

Re: Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post by Phred »

Superb modelling as usual. :)
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manna
Posts: 1169
Joined: Mon May 31, 2010 10:13 am
Location: S Aust or Qld

Re: Birmingham New Street and Brettell Road in P4

Post by manna »

G'Day Gents

Fooled me with the Flatiron, I had to check, as I thought they'd all gone before WW2, they had. Good one, very plausible.

manna
EDGWARE GN. Steam in the Suburbs
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