3 historic Locos

[John Wagenseil]

Some information about your wonderful RR models
Three micromodels of famous historic locos - Search Yale Digital Content
Micromodels History • World of Micromodels

[didibuch]

Hi Mike,

that are nice little models. I like them very much.

Regards
Dieter

[tawnyman]

I'd never noticed it before, but the chimney is at the same end as the firebox, the complete opposite to most locos. I'd guess the driver would prefer to be at the leading end, unless it was raining, in which case he might want the scant cover provided by the boiler. I'm not sure there is a front and back to this setup! Nice models by the way, I'm sure it's quite a challenge working at this scale. Is it somewhere between OO and N gauge? Julian

[JohnM]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5BIbsnUcNk

Solved! This one shows it towing a train.

[looker]

Nope, not solved.
Cos when it gets to the end of that short bit of track it has to reverse back.
And when it's doing that it's pushing.
See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmTkjQPZlh0
and end of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGibEDopnMA
combined with earlier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_MLpJQswF4

[JohnM]

Stop being pedantic Looker. Every schoolboy knows that the engine goes on the front of a train. They can all go backwards when it becomes necessary, but few are truly efficient at pushing, 'cos that ain't what they were designed to do. Marine steam engines however were usually designed to run as well in reverse as they did forward.

[tawnyman]

The Wikipedia page has a modern photograph captioned 'Puffing Billy as seen from the front', with the driver's end. It doesn't mention the source for assuming this though. But I can imagine putting the driver at the front so he can have a good view in at least one direction.
Apparently the boiler is of a 'returning flue' type, so the flue tubes, having passed through the boiler once, go through a U-bend (under the domed cover at the 'drivers' end) and then go back through the boiler again to the chimney end. Hence the firebox and chimney being at the same end.

[TramFan]

Mike you certainly have courage building those little ones, if the baseboard is 11X10cm that is approx 4 inches square, it looks like the loco's are 2mm to the foot scale. The Puffing Billy is the correct way round, it has a return flu boiler with the smoke stack and the fire box on the same side and the driver operating from the section with the railings around. Also shown are Stephensons Rocket which won the 1829 Rainhill Trials which was run to select a loco builder for The Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The other loco is Stepensons Locomotion No1 of 1825 which he built for The Stockton and Darlington Raliway. I am busy building a model of Richard Trevethick's 1805 loco Penn-Y-Darren in 8mm scale, the first steam loco to ever haul a train on rails.
Owen

[Millimodels]

I think that these three are about 1:150 scale.
Most of the railway Micromodels were around 1:200 but they were designed to fit the space available on the cards and so the smallest subjects tend to be to a larger scale.
This also has a bearing on whether two or three locos were included in a set, and how much card space was left for diagrams and instructions. It has certainly been a bit of a headache for me to fit enough information onto my own model designs!

Robin Madge

[southwestforests]

Originally Posted by Mike Stamper

... reference pictures for two of the trains, there are almost none of the Puffing Billy, so I'm still not sure if the loco is facing the right way.

I'd wager that for all practical purposes it was used as though the front was whichever end faced the way it needed to go.

Just asked that question here, we shall see if reply comes https://youtu.be/m0h5-1VkK7Q