Garden Railway Forum

Agreed with others. That's a lovely pair of carriages!

Must agree, it looks great. That livery really compliments the simple elegance of the loco. Absolutely! Am I spotting a Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway influence? Sure! Let's go with that! In truth, it was based on the early Penrhyn livery, with the admission that I wasn't going to try doing the d...

Yep. A few folks have already pointed that option out to me. Makes the most sense. Just need to learn how to silver solder. & Procure the necessary supplies...

OK, brace yourselves for the next saga in the roller-coaster ride that is my Dylan build... Over the last couple of weeks, the chassis has been disassembled, rebuilt and steam-tested several times trying to work some of the stiffness out of it. Each time the paintwork was touched up to keep it tidy....

Another minor update. New cylinder gaskets cut from a non-glossy Christmas card. I wonder how my friends and family would take a request that all future cards be on non-glossy paper to allow for easier 'recycling?!' IMG_20210131_151452-1.jpg Having disassembled and realigned everything several times...

Minor update: turns out my cylinder rebuild kit doesn't fit. My Dylan has the smaller (1/2”?) cylinders. I didn't even think to check. I'm a bit surprised, to be honest, as Roundhouse's museum section says the modular kits were introduced in 1987, but they switched to the 9/16” cylinders in 1984. So...

Well, the first steam test was.... A total failure. It gets up to pressure, but opening the regulator just sends jets of steam out the exhaust pipes & the wheels show only mild inclings to turn over. On the one hand, I'm not surprised, as the chassis feels very stiff. To the point where one has to p...

Hmm. Very interesting. Thanks Graeme. Yes, I was aware that it had at least a much higher methanol content. I suppose it makes sense that methanol is more readily absorbed through the skin than ethanol given its a shorter molecule. My other options seem to include a naptha (petroleum) based stove fu...

Looks great. A nice job you've made of setting the wicks, too. Appreciate this. My only experience of meths firing to date is with the old mamod trays, so setting wicks was new to me. My wicks actually sit slightly below the tops of the tubes, but the Roundhouse instructions say they shouldn't be "...

Next, onto setting the wicks in the burner. I decided to discard the original asbestos string wicks in favor of a modern equivalent. The included "Roundhouse Guide to Spirit Firing "was very helpful here. One thing I found helpful was to actually let the burner run dry once or twice before the final...

With the cylinders mounted, I could now set the valve movement and timing via the eccentrics. I confess, this is probably my favourite part of building a loco as it's very satisfying once you get an understanding of what's going on and therefore how to adjust things to optimise performance. With a f...

Another overdue update... My kit was missing one firebox end. Simon at Anything Narrow Gauge had warned me of this. The front and rear ends are similar, but differ slightly to clear the inside valve gear. Still, it was pretty easy to figure out the necessary shape of the missing rear end from the fr...

Another overdue update... A care package arrived with some 6BA bolts courtesy of my Dad, so the cylinders were mounted. Upon mounting the motion bracket these fouled the front cranks, so some material was filed away for clearance. This has been one of the biggest differences between building this an...

Overdue update on account of temporarily killing my laptop over the holidays... :oops: I decided to bite the bullet and get to soldering the bodywork. The cab and side tanks were basically the same as my Lady Anne, so no surprises there. The smokebox and saddle tanks took some creative setups to cla...

A quick ebay search for 6BA x 1/2" steel allen screws brought up cap head and countersunk versions. Admittedly they are UK suppliers but a quick search of Ebay Canada brings up the same results and appears to suggest they would post to you . https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334...