Maybe we should think about weathering our hifi stuff. Artfully airbrushed ciggy burns, coffee cup rings, fake dust etc. A new world is opening up.
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Tony Ford (now deceased) and wife were friends of my folks. I used to visit them sometimes with my folks. On the odd occasion, I was invited to the loft to see the models.
Touching anything was verboten.
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OMFG ! That’s gone and done it 
At that obsessive, wonderfully eccentric level, absolutely worthwhile.
Chapeau.
I preferred Scalextric 
So did I, but now thinking trains 
Fuck I’m getting old.
I did once customise a stock Scalextric Ford Capri by carving out the rear wheel arches, fitting some F1 back wheels, spraying it blue and gluing on random chrome bits from an Airfix kit (all badly).
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Carlos Fandango super wide wheels styley. Class ! 
Technically two, and class 1 locos are supposed to be bigger than shunters even if some attempts didn’t really work. Thought there were enough choppers still kicking around for them to be a fairly common sight though, so what caused the crowds on that occasion?
Farewell tour - hence the phrase “see-off”…
Loads preserved - guess the look conveniently straddles the steam/diesel interface, and they don’t take up too much space.
BR Class 20, innit..
Weird looking machines.
Had to subscribe to this…
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This little lad is 7 years old and is standing in front of the romatically-named British Rail Standard 9F locomotive.
Lots of 9Fs were built because there had been A War On and all the older stuff was worn-out. They were very powerful indeed, and, when they were built in the mid-1950s, they were designed with a >30 year life span. So, had Beeching &c not happened, we’d still have seen them around when Adam Ant and Kadjagoogoo were in the charts. There are diesels in mainline use today which were built 65 years ago, so who knows how long the 9Fs might actually have lasted in a parallel universe where people really like smog and grey washing?
The driving wheels - behind nipper - were unusually small for a steam loco because there were 10 of them.
10 driving wheels don’t like going round bends, so only 4 of them have full sized flanges, 4 more have half-sized flanges, and 2 no flanges at-all. No-one likes an undersized flange, but 9Fs had to live with them.
They could weigh up to 145 tons with tender, and one managed to shift a load of roadstone wagons totalling 2178 tons - the most of any British steam loco (they were designed for 900 tons max). They were meant for slow-ish freight traffic, but could hit 90mph on passenger runs. 251 of them were built, 9 survive, several are runners. One survivor, called Evening Star, was the last steam locomotive ever built by British Rail, in 1960. Most of them went to the scrapyard before they were ten years old.
Boo!
Evening Star:
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The little nipper clearly invented ‘tagging’ because he obviously wrote “HELP ME NOT TO FORGET” on the wheel to his right… 
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Regular reader, first time poster. Just came across this wonderful video of Richard Feynman talking about trains, specifically how they actually stay on the track (and adjacent, how they take corners). I had absolutely no idea of the mechanism:
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I found this channel to be rather interesting:
Not sure if it’s a post-migraine phantasm, but I’m pretty sure I saw a link on a modellers’ forum to an entire forum where people discuss the physics of contact-patch friction and rail profiles with spreadsheets and equations…
A place where sex is more theoretical than quantum dynamics…
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Fnarf…
\usefulthreadcontribution
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Continuing the long-established tradition of immediately fucking-about with things I’ve only just bought, today I replaced the front bogie 
of 35028 ‘Clan Line’ with a newer one that is a lot closer in appearance to the real thing.
This involved drilling and filing parts so tiny that only a watchmaker would envy the task - luckily tiny trains are a bit simpler than watches, and so it looks better and works well on its tiny tracks.
Which is nice.
For a sense of scale, the whole (aptly-termed) ‘loco’ is about the size of my middle finger 
Funny to think this particular model has had 26 years use to-date; the original loco had just 19 before it went to the scrappie*!
.
.
*From where it was saved.
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