Table of contents for Issue 4755 in Model Engineer

National Museum of Computing IMLEC 2025 A note for your diaries. IMLEC 2025 will be held at the Fareham and District SME over the weekend of the 20th, 21st and 22nd June 2025. The full contact and web details will be published in the January edition of Model Engineer. In the meantime you can start practising! Extra Curriculars Have you ever wondered what your hard-working editor does with the vast expanse of free time that comes with his job? Amongst the many activities that occupy his idle hours is working on the EDSAC Replica Project at Bletchley Park (photos 1 and 2). The original Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was built at Cambridge University between 1947 and 1949 and came about when the director of the Mathematical Laboratory, Maurice…

Continuing my visits to this part of the UK, I arrived at a club site located within the boundaries of the Buckinghamshire Railway Society at Quainton, but the construction of the new HS2 Railway project actually reaching Quainton has made it quite a tortuous journey compared to previously. Perhaps a history of the Vale of Aylesbury MES would now be a good place to start. The Society was first formed in 1972 when four model engineers got together in a pub and thought about gathering information about the potential for founding a club in the area. In May of that year nine modellers formed what they called the Vale of Aylesbury Society of Model Engineers (VAMES) - and they haven’t looked back since! Like many clubs at that time, however,…

If ever a railway should have never been built it was the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. Whether or not Victorians and Edwardians understood modern connotations of S&M it became a line inflicting massive financial pain on lenders and shareholders. The railway was conceived to run through a sparsely populated area surrounded by lines run by major companies of the GWR, LNWR and Cambrian who were mostly hostile to the newcomer. If connections with Montgomeryshire were tenuous the chief promoter, landowner and Llanymynech quarry operator R.S. France, imagined it as part of a through route from the Midlands and Potteries to North Wales. Built to a good standard at an inordinate cost of £60,000 per mile with double track it was grossly excessive for the area. R.S. France secured a large rebate…

The two stretchers are in their near correct position but are much simplified, being just bits of 3/4 × 3/16 inch bar (fig 6). Note the 2.889 inch dimension, being the width between the frame plates. This slightly odd dimension is to account for using 3mm steel for the frame plates rather than ⅛ inch as in the old days and puts the outer faces the customary width apart for a 3½ inch gauge model. It’s odd but not as frightening as it looks. If it can be measured then we can generally make it. First square up the ends of a length of bar. This is easy with a milling machine or if the vertical slide is set-up on the lathe. Just pop the bar in the milling vice…

In Part 1, the author expounded his view that, while the benefits of a technology are often arguable and difficult to quantify even in hindsight, the results of our model engineering activities represent a clearly beneficial and complementary technology to their prototypes because, thanks to their more manageable size and accessibility, they are often better able to demonstrate the workings of their full-size brethren; especially if the latter are confined, coldly and inanimately, to a museum. Phew, what a mouthful. The drama of big Having planted the small is beautiful banner upon Butterside Down’s grassy plain, in the interest of balance and counterpoint it’s time to contradict myself entirely and those who recall my earlier medical self-diagnosis with respect to technology are likely shaking their heads in pity and I…

Last time we took a quick glance at the powerful tool called differentiation or the differential calculus. Now let us look at reversing the process. Integration If we know that a body is accelerating at a certain constant rate then, as we have seen from our examination of the equations of motion, we can – provided we know certain information – work out, for any given time, the velocity of that body and its displacement from a given point. For example, if we know that a body is accelerating at a rate of 3 ms-2 then we can deduce that after 5 seconds it will have increased its velocity by (5 × 3 =) 15 ms-1. If the acceleration is not constant, but can be defined by a suitable function,…

My model of the legendary Canadian Pacific Railway 4-4-0 locomotive Countess of Dufferin is based on LBSC’s famous 3½ inch Virginia. This article describes a realistic LED version of dim, flickering kerosene headlights, common on late 19th century Canadian locomotives. The Countess of Dufferin was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works (Philadelphia USA) in 1872. The 4-4-0 wood fired locomotive, tender and several boxcars were transported on a barge by the steam powered sternwheeler Selkirk, north along the Red River from Fargo North Dakota, arriving in Winnipeg, Canada in 1877 (photo 1). The first steam locomotive west of Ontario, it was named Countess of Dufferin after the wife of the then Governor General of Canada the Earl of Dufferin. In the late 19th century, as the Canadian Pacific Railway moved westward,…

Views and opinions expressed in letters published in Postbag should not be assumed to be in accordance with those of the Editor, other contributors, or Mortons Media Group Ltd. Correspondence for Postbag should be sent to: Martin R. Evans, The Editor, Model Engineer, Mortons Media Group Ltd, Media Centre, Morton Way, Horncastle, Lincs LN9 6JR F. 01507 371066 E. MEeditor@mortons.co.uk Publication is at the discretion of the Editor. The content of letters may be edited to suit the magazine style and space available.Correspondents should note that production schedules normally involve a minimum lead time of six weeks for material submitted for publication. In the interests of security, correspondents’ details are not published unless specific instructions to do so are given. Responses to published letters are forwarded as appropriate. LBSC Dear…

Regular readers of Model Engineer may recall a series of articles I wrote on the construction of a live steam plant which were published in the magazine between the 7th of October and the 15th of December 2022 (M.E.4701 et seq.). The articles illustrated and described how I built and assembled a working model steam plant principally building the engines from kits purchased from Chiltern Model Steam. The article aimed to show what can be done by the steam enthusiast with the minimum of tools and equipment and encourage the beginner to ‘have a go’. The plant was deliberately designed to be visually interesting and incorporate all the features that I considered important on a working steam plant, features that would display well and interest the novice onlooker with little…

A new attraction in Scotland is a sort of roller coaster for those who don’t like heights. It runs downhill on a type of track, reaching speeds of 30 mph, a sort of Cresta run on rails. A video is on YouTube, filmed at a similar track in Germany: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZipukcDd4 In this issue: the Roving Eye, flowerpots, GCR update, ‘LBSC’, superglue, a laser cutter and a folly. Grimsby & Cleethorpes Model Engineering Society, September, tells of members who visited Sheffield SMEE for their Open Day. The Railway Magazine, July carried a story about a new type of locomotive, using a Class 60 as base. It will contain 20 modular steam generators running on hydrogen and oxygen to make steam. Greg Marsden apologises for the low page numbers this issue; he…

Now that we have got the frame stretchers out of the way I thought we may as well get on with the motion brackets (fig 19). These are very complex and will need some careful attention. I am hoping that Mike Jack in New Zealand will come up with some lost wax casings for these two. However, just in case the worst comes to the worst, I am hoping that there will be enough dimensions etc., for you to make a decent job of them as they are very visible items, especially the left-hand one which has the reversing screw built into it. The whole of the valve gear depends on these brackets. There are four small castings which you will need with your motion brackets and these are the…

Locomotives, giant machines steaming and puffing ahead exploring new boundaries and discovering new territories. Following on from medieval times, the industrial revolution, which broadly speaking started in England in around 1760, had driven huge advancements in many areas of activity, particularly in mining, in the textile industry and, of course, in agriculture. Things were moving fast and the interaction between inventions worldwide inspired many industrialists to change - to optimise their production methods and invest in new machinery. The first steam locomotive was invented in 1804 by Mr. R. Trevithick and, before too long, railway tracks were built across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. In order to sell their products to a railway company, the manufacturer of a steam locomotive often used a scale model of its…

Aboiler Inspector’s seminar was held at the Echills Wood Railway site in Kingsbury water park on Saturday 19th September. Aimed at prospective new boiler inspectors and as a refresher for existing boiler inspectors, the day was organised and staffed by the Federation of Model Engineering Societies and Northern Association of Model Engineers. Peter Squire opened the proceedings with the history and background of boiler testing (photo 1). A session of the design of copper boilers was presented by Bob Hayter of the Northern Association and the morning rounded off with the differing considerations for steel boilers. Following a buffet lunch delegates transferred to the steaming bays where Ben Pavier from Southport Model Engineering Club took the group through a practical demonstration of hydraulic testing (photo 2). There was much discussion…

SMEE On with the reversion back to its former glory The following description is partly for the benefit of the owner and also for all those others who are new to steam and yet to build their experience with steam models. Many model engineers are like me, making engines for display rather than running and the procedures required to ‘steam’ a model are still a foreign country. To the experienced reader, much of this article will be second nature. Unseizing this engine would be an interesting exercise to say the least. There is nothing onerously difficult, whether it’s going to be an easy or a less easy job, but an explanation of the procedure might be helpful to others so here goes… Sometimes this problem can be a breeze to…