Following an excellent deal on a new Hornby GWR 41xx, the CME was asked to re livery the locomotive into BR Green with late crest. We are pleased with the result.
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Buoyed by successful ballasting through Winchester and the mainline through Bicester North, the Head Ganger has ballasted through Banbury station. Whilst the Head Ganger has claimed that he will not ballast the entire layout, one can't be too sure!
It is Banbury Connections' 50th Anniversary and we appear to have acquired some different sized figures which have been carefully painted for an upcoming project.
Interestingly, the farmer and his daughter, along with the dog and chickens, date back to dad's toys from the 1950s. They stand up well with the modern 3D printed ones. I'll let you all decide whether the small station staff member is in fact 00 gauge or N! Following repair, the King was not as long lived as we'd hoped! The valve gear started locking up intermittently after the initial centre gear repair, causing it to come loose again. After further examination, I identified that the front driving wheels were turning on the axle, causing the locomotive to lose quartering, thus putting pressure on the drive gear. I then glued the front drivers and put the locomotive back into service.
Not long after, the locomotive locked up again. This time, one of the positioning points for the coupling rod had come loose from the wheel and needed regluing as well! On the bright side, the King is back in service and has performed a couple of successful trips between London and Wolverhampton Low-Level. Touchwood this will continue... Following an incident during the Friday evening operating session, King Edward VIII was withdrawn from service and underwent surgery over the weekend. There was some confusion amongst the operating staff as to which King required surgery! (Charles III is also undergoing surgery).
The gear on the main drive was found to be slipping and needed to be reattached with an epoxy adhesive. Regrettably, this is the second time that the King has had this issue with the General Manager Special Traffic, conducting a similar repair to the locomotive about five years ago. Following successful surgery, the King is now running well and we trust that this will continue into the foreseeable future. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Banbury Connections - though we technically need to wait until December. It has been wonderful to see the railway being put to good use across many years with 104 regular operating sessions taking place across 2023 alone.
Best wishes for 2024. I didn't put any pictures of the actual cable drums in last month's post about the new Weltrol train. Please see the pictures below. For a couple of years, Banbury Connections has been in possession of a pair of Tri-ang tresstrol wagons which were parked in a siding at Gosport without an assigned use. Following the construction of some cable drums by the Station Master at Gosport, investigation into a cable train commenced. This resulted in the discovery that tresstrol wagons are rare and that cable traffic should instead use weltrol wagons.
Serendipitously, one Banbury Connection's operators had a rake of Bachmann weltrol wagons which he kindly donated to the railway. Five of the six wagons adopted were in GWR livery. As such, they were repainted in BR Grey (which we mixed up with some Tamiya paints) and had new numbers applied. We got the new numebrs printed on a laser printer at Officeworks given that the quality wasn't great on our home inkjet. The finished wagons and their loads look superb and have already been used for an export order from Sheffield to NSW via Gosport docks! Owing to the odd derailment on the southern end of Banbury, the head ganger changed the geometry of the DOWN main and Gosport Line. This should result in improved running across one of the most heavily used parts of the railway.
Following the passing of a skilled local modeller, Banbury Connections was gifted a scratch built main line terminus building. Finding a home for new buildings on a finished layout is always challenging. After considering Gosport and Bradford, a consensus was reached that the newly acquired station would best suit Birkenhead with the existing Birkenhead station to be transferred to Sheffield Victoria when an old set of Metcalfe parcels office and waiting room side buildings are found. This could take considerable time so Sheffield has retained its existing building with the former Birkenhead building currently held in storage.
The new building required minor repair work before going on the layout including regluing a few windows and reinstating the front columns. Some minor site modifications were also required at Birkenhead to meet the new buildings dimensions. A picture of the new building is below. It looks like it has been there since the mid nineteenth century! We had a recent visit by a lovely (?) brass NSWGR 38 class steam locomotive and a rake of five hub set carriages. Thankfully, the train was scaled down to 1:87 to allow for the larger loading gauge!
In a recent Friday evening operating session, we trialed a new freight protocol where the Head Ganger listed out a number of tasks that required completing in the operating session. We managed to get everything to its destination, though I am fairly certain not everything made it back that evening! The sheer number of different trains operating on Banbury Connections can make train identification problematic. In this month's post, I've photographed a couple of unusual workings spotted across the past few months.
The first is an ex-GWR King hauling two parcels vans from Chester at Shrewsbury. These vans were part of the London-Aberystwyth parcels train and supposed to be detached at Birmingham Snow Hill. This train is readily confused with the London-Birkenhead parcels. The second photograph shows a BR Standard 3MT tank locomotive on the Birmingham Snow Hill - Chester General cross country service. This train is normally pulled by medium power tender locomotives such as Granges, Halls and Counties but was accidentally run through to Birkenhead Woodside. This was due to confusion with the Chester-Birkenhead local service which is also comprised of four maroon carriages. You never really own Banbury Connections. You merely look after it for the next generation.29/4/2023 The big news for this month was the birth of James Day; the third generation of Banbury Connections operator. Below are a few pictures of James in the model railway room. This month I've included an interesting view of Sheffield Victoria's northern throat taken from the train room wall whilst doing some repair work. It is nice seeing all the catenary coming into the station with the adjoining electrified sidings. Unfortunately, some of the Tri-ang masts have been giving us some grief as they tend to move which causes the pantograph to get caught. This will likely result in the construction of some brass masts on the section between Sheffield and Manchester.
An article describing construction of Banbury Connection's new train shed at London Marylebone appeared in the Railway Modeller this month (February 2023 edition).
Banbury Connections has run a milk train from Aberystwyth to Birkenhead for several years now. The train leave Aberystwyth with two milk marketing board tankers and a Mk1 full brake and picks up three insulated milk vans from the siding at Machynlleth. These insulated milk vans were one of the last pieces of rolling stock to evade our quest to remove all pre-nationalisation liveries from the layout! Two of the vans were original Triang versions (which needed replacement ladders) whilst one was a fairly modern (probably about 15 years old now) Hornby reproduction in maroon LMS livery rather than the original white livery.
Following inspiration from a van which has been repainted in Hattons second hand department, the decision was made to repaint all three milk vans in British Railways Maroon and renumber them all with correct numbers and markings. A photograph of our efforts is reproduced below. The wagons are now comparatively quite boring in prototypical early 1960's livery with a touch of weathering! |
Banbury Connections General BlogThe Banbury Connections blog looks at issues of significant interest involving the railway and its staff. Archives
March 2024
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