whart57

It was apparently never considered that as Arnhem was only a few miles from the German border that that would stiffen German morale. It became a defence of the Fatherland.

You are probably right that the British military leadership was too heavily committed to the flawed Market Garden plan to consider a change in emphasis. Even aerial reconnaissance photos confirming the presence of German armour near the Arnhem drop zones didn't cause a rethink. Nor did the fact that even if the First Airborne had managed to hold the Arnhem bridge until XXX Corps arrived, the British still had to cross the Ijssel river in order to hit the road into Germany. Something that took the Canadians a week in April 1945 against Germans about to surrender. What Montgomery and Eisenhower didn't know though was how close the Germans in the Netherlands were to collapse in September 1944. There was a brief window of opportunity to advance north from Antwerp and watch the Occupation regime panic and run East. Moving up to Breda would also have cut off the German forces on Beveland and Walcheren. It seemed such a no-brainer that the Dutch government in exile believed it had happened and broadcast that fact over the BBC. However, the German commanders restored order, Market Garden went ahead and the rest is history. Which unfortunately included the famine in the Netherlands and another eight months of Nazis winkling out Jews in hiding.

Antwerp without clear use of the Scheldt was of little value. However capturing the islands of Walcheren and South Beveland was surely classic airborne troops stuff. Drop in behind the fortified positions, secure beach heads and get in the support from ground forces.

Unusually the Dutch language version of this article contains less information than the English translation, but the place it was found might give a clue as to why it was there and why it was buried. The Noordkasteel was part of the nineteenth century defensive works around Antwerp harbour which were de-commissioned at the end of the century to expand the docks. Presumably the developments in artillery during the nineteenth century had rendered the fortifications obsolete. The wall and an underground magazine were not demolished then though. In 1944 however the Allied advance from Normandy was so rapid once the troops had broken through the coastal defences that the Germans were in panic mode. It's quite possible that something like a container was dug in to provide some form of pillbox along an existing defensive line, the underground magazine - which was apparently dynamited in the 1950s - would have been useful in WW2. As it happened, a combination of British troops and Belgian resistance fighters managed to capture Antwerp and its docks without too much heavy fighting, and it has been suggested that Montgomery should have reacted by cancelling Market Garden, which was just about to go, and refocussing on reopening Antwerp's deep water harbour to ease the Allies' supply problems. Most supplies were still coming in at the Mulberry harbours on the Normandy beaches, and as the saying has it, soldiers win battles, logistics win wars.

This morning I was rather surprised to be presented with a pop up video of pro-Israel propaganda when I logged on to rmweb. I accept that adverts are needed to pay for the service rmweb provides but surely there is appropriate and inappropriate advertising. And a fake news propaganda job seems very inappropriate to me.

If you want a Minories style terminus then have you considered Enkhuizen? This is the terminus of a line from Amsterdam which these days is operated by double deck EMUs but in earlier years had double deck carriages in push pull formation with a 1700 providing the power. Go back a dozen years or so and there is a YouTube video of a rush hour service formed of Plan V EMUs, the traditional hondekop type. For more variety you could employ a bit of modellers license and have the Sprinter service from Alkmaar to Hoorn extended to Enkhuizen. It should be possible to figure out the trackplan from Google Maps satellite view.

I'm guessing that the ship on the pic you linked to is the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, the flagship of the Holland-America line and the premier vessel sailing between Rotterdam and New York - well actually New Jersey. The loco I am guessing is a generic American one.

The main part of the Ironbridge Gorge museum is at Blists Hill, a mile or so downstream from Ludcrofts Wharf, on the other side of the Ironbridge itself. I didn't realise until I looked more closely at the nineteenth century 25" to the mile map of the Ironbridge area (thank you National Library of Scotland) how extensive the tramway networks on the north bank of the Severn were. A few "what-ifs" for narrow gauge modellers there I think. Particularly as the eighteenth century mines and workshops they served were smaller than the later nineteenth and twentieth century versions.

A link to a piece on Trevithick's collaboration with Coalbrookdale Works https://preservedbritishsteamlocomotives.com/richard-trevithick-1802-coalbrookdale-locomotive/

The rails aren't there but the course of them is still marked on the quay at Ludcrofts Wharf, now part of the Ironbridge Gorge museum. On old maps rails are also shown going out the other side of the building and around the warehouse and then crossing the road and going up the valley of a stream. This dale is Coalbrookdale, and this was one of the oldest tramways in the world. Not only that but Coalbrookdale works collaborated with Richard Trevithick to build his first steam locomotive, arguably the first steam locomotive ever. In the early seventies some old rails of the long disused tramway were found near Rose Cottage in the dale, and are now preserved by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum A bit of important railway history commemorated by those ruts in the brickwork at the wharf. So quite a bi

I posted a little about one of these on another thread but I thought that a more wider exposition might justify its own thread. The lines in question are both in the South West of the Netherlands, in the province of Zeeland and both serve docks on the West Scheldt river. The first is the Sloe line. The Sloe is a former channel separating the islands of Walcheren and South Beveland. In medieval times it was an important sea lane allowing vessels to pass between the West and East Scheldt rivers without needing to enter the North Sea, but it became silted up and in the nineteenth century ceased to become a through route when a dam was built to carry the railway to Middelburg and Vlissingen (Flushing). The silted up areas were turned into polders in the 1960s and became an industrial area and an extension of Vlissingen port called Sloehaven. It was then remote enough for the Dutch to site the Borselle nuclear power station there. Sloehaven received a rail connection from the beginning, but initially the connection to the main line was over a former light railway laid through the rural part of South Beveland. Part of this light railway is now the SGB heritage railway. In the 1990s however a new connecting line was laid and the former light railway became a cycle path. An article in issue 354 of Rail Magazine (May 2018) describes the traffic to Sloehaven then. A list of five daily trains with another eight running between once and three times a week was in the piece. Traffic included LPG, coal, ore, cellulose and steel girders and coil loaded in Sloehaven for inland industries and car transport from Ford for export The other line is on the opposite bank and serves the industries and port facilities around Terneuzen in Dutch Flanders. This line was built by two Belgian companies, one building a line from Terneuzen to Ghent and the other building a line from a junction at Sluiskil to Axel, Hulst and eventually Mechelen (Malines). In 1948 the lines came under government control, Belgium assuming responsibility for the lines on their territory and the Dutch taking control of what was on theirs. Passenger traffic ceased in the 1950s and the line from Axel to Mechelen closed completely. The line was expanded as industry grew, particularly on the west side of the canal to Ghent. Some relaying and provision of new bridges was needed when the road tunnel under the Scheldt was built as level crossings on a motorway are generally discouraged. Rail Magazine covered the line in issue 377 which unfortunately I do not have. However the same sort of mix of tank wagons, vans and ore cars seems to be the traffic. The Zeeuws-Vlaanderen line is diesel operated, but the Sloe line has catenary up to the marshalling yard where diesel locos take over. There are still some 600 class 0-6-0 shunters (Dutch version of the English Electric model) in private use at Sloehaven.

Well just across the North Sea there was plenty of stuff that would be familiar to UK eyes. The Dutch State Railway (not a nationalised company but a private company operating the state built and owned lines, not unlike our present franchise system here) got most of its locomotives from Beyer Peacock and they were much like the locomotives British companies used at the time. Passenger carriages were the same style of a load of separate compartments with passengers facing each other on benches, each with their own doors, as British passenger carriages of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were. When the Holland railway decided to buy British in the 1890s what they bought was a class of 4-4-0s which could have slipped onto any British railway of the time without raising comment. The Netherlands Central Railway also bought from Britain and rebuilt some old 2-4-0s to be 4-4-0s of a distinctly British appearance. The Staatsspoor (State railway) was even left side running on double track sections before 1921. You could put a British looking 4-4-0 with three compartment carriages and a van in front of a windmill and a farm on a polder without breaking any rules on authenticity. I would say the problem with modelling steam era Dutch railways in this country is that they aren't different enough, whereas bright yellow EMUs might be different but in these days of City Breaks hardly unfamiliar to UK railway enthusiasts.

What that was supposed to mean that an anything goes philosophy was a cliche of Continental layout back in the 70s and 80s. The "line is near the French-German border so I can run French and German stock with a smattering of Swiss because I'm imagining a secondary route to Geneva ....." As for Austerities not being of interest I was saying they were of less interest. They are after all just one loco class. OK two. By the late 1940s though they were only on heavy freight duties. Once the electrified lines were repaired the EMUs returned to take over most passenger duties. A whole new class of EMUs was designed and put into service in 1946 and 1947. The withdrawal of Allied troops from the three Western occupation zones and the creation of the federal republic of West Germany in 1949 also saw the return of German locos and rolling stock and the final return of captured Dutch stock, albeit not from East Germany or from other Soviet bloc countries. Rolling stock borrowed from Sweden also returned home. In short the period when Austerities might be hauling trains of mixed nationality rolling stock was very short, possibly eighteen months. One other problem with modelling Austerities in post-war Holland is that they did a lot of their work after dark. Passenger traffic required lots of trains working an interval timetable. Fitting in a slow and heavy freight could clog everything up during the day.

It was originally built by a private company to link the port of Terneuzen with Mechelen (Malines) and bringing railway connections the other main towns of Dutch Flanders, Hulst and Axel. The history of Dutch Flanders goes back to 1648 and the treaties that ended the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War that started with the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish king. The merchants of Amsterdam wanted to keep control of trade into their former great rival Antwerp and had demanded both banks of the Scheldt river. During the great religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that part of the river bank had also become protestant, probably as a result of the large numbers of protestant soldiers garrisoned there, which meant that when the Belgians revolted against the Dutch king in 1830, Dutch Flanders remained stubbornly loyal. Until 1914 though the border was completely open for ordinary people so there was no problem a private company building a cross border railway. The problems arose after WW2 when much of the line and facilities at Terneuzen had been destroyed and needed rebuilding and the private company couldn't raise the capital to do so. The Dutch cared more about Terneuzen than the Belgians did so it was the NS that took things over in 1951. The line closed to passengers but the fact Terneuzen lies on a bend of the Scheldt and as a result has the deep water channel just off shore, it was a good location for industries that needed things like oil from overseas. A fair few industries sprung up around Terneuzen as the Dutch revived their economy during the fifties and sixties. These days there is a tunnel under the Scheldt from Terneuzen to Goes and the rest of the Netherlands motorway network so the area is not so off the beaten track as it was. As a result there are a number of YouTube videos that give a flavour of operations today. This one is from the 1990s when the 08 look-alikes of the 600 class (don't hammer me with the differences please) were handing over to the larger 2200 class Or this one It's a measure of how successful the line has been over the last sixty years that the traction power has had to grow from 4 wheel shunters to the 0-6-0s of the 600 class to fully fledged mainline diesels.

Sounds like the cliche of continental modelling which gets aired by the "foreign muck" brigade. Seriously though, there are a lot of possibilities with Dutch railways, some that haven't even been explored by Dutch modellers themselves. How many know for example that the first Dutch railways were broad gauge. The first lines were 2 metres centre rail to centre rail so 1950mm gauge. Regauging took place in the mid 19th century so it would be a bit of a niche affair. Pre-grouping/nationalisation could be colourful, there was the Netherlands Central Railway with its yellow locomotives - later like the LBSCR in Britain changing to brown - or the North Brabant railway with 4-6-0s in blue. There was an extensive local network with small tank engines and four wheel coaches. The preserved Hoorn-Medemblik line is an example of that. Post-war, for about five years, there was a local railway from Amsterdam's Haarlemmermeer station going south. Almost every tank engine type worked on it with Dutch and Swedish four wheel coaches. Freight traffic, primarily coal and chemicals, was hauled by outside framed 4-4-0s with large drivers. Later various diesel classes ranging from mainline types to four wheeled shunters worked the line, which survived for freight until 1986. The main thing though was the Netherlands pioneer status in electrification, the consequence of which is the obsolescent 1500v DC power over nearly all the network (high speed line to Brussels and Paris excepted I think). Streamlined EMUs which were mirrored by streamlined DEMUs on the secondary lines. One interesting idea for a layout I saw many many years ago was based on Roodeschool up near Groningen. Passenger traffic was in the hands of single or twin DEMUs, which could of course be coupled together for rush hour trains, but there was also the gas industry requiring tank wagons and other stuff. For freight traffic offering nearly every sort of wagon there is the small stand-alone network in Dutch Flanders. Run by the Dutch NS it connects with the Belgian railways. However the area served around Terneuzen has chemical works, oil refineries, sugar factories which get wagon loads of sugar beet and more. It's absolutely suitable for an American style wagon despatching layout. Unfortunately without mountains to hide fiddle yards in. Or for a shelf layout there is the Distelweg freight terminus in Amsterdam. On the wrong side of the river Ij this collection of sidings - some running through the street - was served by a small ferry which could carry a four wheel shunter and a couple of wagons per trip. That expired in the late 80s or early 90s but there are local history websites that describe it. And of course there was the temporary line that only ran during low tide that we modelled in the Great Model Railway Challenge. So those Austerities are probably the least interesting subjects.

The 5N was the ONLY tournament in amateur days. Club rugby was just a mish-mash of friendlies. The fixtures secretary of our college rugby club would spend the summer on the phone trying to get matches against better clubs, or trying to get an existing fixture promoted to a higher XV. How many of the "first class" clubs who had their results read out on Grandstand are still in the national leagues, never mind the top tier. It was all "who you know" not how good you were. As an aside, rugby league was no better then. Yes there was a league table but it wasn't a competition where everyone played everyone else home and away, the only stipulation was that everyone played the same number of games. Otherwise there was an unspoken Yorkshire-Lancashire split in the fixtures. A rolling invitation to a South Seas team was a non-starter, unless you count New Zealand as a "South Seas" nation. Which geographically speaking it is. Now that players can earn their living from playing the game that might be feasible but back in the amateur days? No chance. The world was changing at the end of the twentieth century. Rugby was already heavily skewed towards the private fee-paying schools, and the pressure on school sports fields in the state sector meant many schools which dabbled in rugby stopped doing so. Most boys wanted to play round ball football anyway and schools increasingly had to find space for girls to do so as well. Indoor sports like basketball and volleyball were easier to arrange if a school had a decent sports hall and were also weatherproof. Rugby could stay in its comfort zone and slowly decline - which is probably what a lot of its followers were happy with - or it had to change. The best players were frustrated with the complacency though - remember Will Carling's 57 Old Farts jibe? - and a breakaway was an increasing risk. Rugby needed to open out to survive as a premier sport. You may deplore that, but it was inevitable.

I think you are nostalgic for a golden age of Five Nations competitivity that never existed. The truth is that most seasons only one match mattered, the one where the first and second favourites played each other. For many years that was Wales and France, then England and France. Ireland and Scotland were the perennial wooden spoon winners, Scotland only rousing themselves for the Calcutta Cup game against England. I worked with a bunch of Scots back then and that was the only game they cared about. Expanding the Five Nations to Six made sense because to the casual supporter one team having a weekend off jarred, and Italy were the obvious addition because at the time they were the best of the rest by some distance. Given that part of the 5/6 Nations ethos was supporters making away trips for the beer and the banter, Rome was also an attraction. Easyjet flew there and it doesn't to Johannesburg or Auckland. Nor could the hungover lads be back at work on the Monday. What went wrong was professionalism. England and France had obvious advantages of size and the depth of the club game, Ireland hit upon a model that worked for them, but the other three got left behind. Wales and Scotland had more reserves to draw on but Italy could not improve as fast as they needed to because the infrastructure wasn't there. The first question is, would the quality of the Six Nations improve by cutting back to five? It might but it wouldn't make a dramatic difference. It's never been a competition where anyone can beat anyone on their day, there have always been the punchbag sides, the ones every real contender beats and the aim is to get the bonus points or boost the points difference. Would someone other than Italy be better? Well there is absolutely no reason to think Georgia or Romania would offer an improvement, so now you are into discussions about promotion and relegation which would cause major panic in Cardiff and Edinburgh. Then you might think of southern hemisphere nations. A serious suggestion was to base Argentina in Barcelona for the duration of the tournament. The hope was that the Spanish would take to supporting their Hispanic cousins but Argentina really wanted home games in Buenos Aires and then the Kiwis and Wallabies came to make an offer. International rugby will always suffer from not having enough countries playing it at an elite level. So does cricket. The difference is that cricket has one very large country - massive country in fact - who regard it as their national sport. And who have in fact changed the way it is played. The only country for whom rugby is the national sport is a very small one. In the rest rugby is a poor second, or even third, to round ball football. In Australia it's even fourth or fifth behind cricket, rugby league and Aussie Rules football as well as the round ball game. And the future is not bright because the unfolding crisis of long term brain damage to players is already having an effect on the number of boys taking up the game. Where rugby is not part of the sporting tradition long term risks from concussion injuries has put the kibosh on expansion.

Well the problem for Italy's detractors is that this was the season that was supposed to seal Italy's fate and, oops, it turns out they have been quite competitive.

The Silhouette cutter has come up trumps again. It would not be unfair to say that those who decorated the windows and walls of Thai temples didn't know when to stop, and the arches over the windows usually contain a complex design. The temple I am using as my example certainly does: The idea of painting that to 1:100 scale was a bit daunting, but letting the Silhouette cut out a slightly simplified version from vinyl and sticking that in place seems to do the job nicely.

It's not a quick job, but the painting of the temple buildings is proceeding satisfactorilly. Colours are as the Wat Chai Monkol on Rama I Road, and according to some stuff on Thai architecture I found, the colours are typical of a central Thailand temple. The deep blue and gold that adorn some of the larger ones is apparently a Northern speciality, though Bangkok obviously has ones like that as well.

I photographed one of these trucks at Ban Laem on the Maeklong line in 2010. But then when the PW gang left, following the morning train to Maeklong (I wasn't on it on this occasion) they had something much smaller

Not in my grammar school. We had a Welsh physics teacher who tried several times to set up a rugby team but to no avail. We didn't even have a rugby pitch. The round ball game ruled I'm afraid.

The British Medical Journal identified twenty five reports into head injuries in schools and youth rugby. Twenty were dealing with union, three with league and two where the code was not specified. That mismatch in number of reports is largely down to the difference in the numbers of young people taking part in each code, and, given this is in in class conscious England, the difference in status. Rugby union is the sport of choice in elite fee-paying schools, rugby league second choice behind the round ball game in a minority of northern comprehensives.

The curse of the gym affects rugby league too. The professional era - rugby league was a semi-professional game until the 1990s - has resulted in players having a lot of time on their hands and nothing better to do than spend a lot of time with the weights. The result in both codes has been wings have got bigger and props got faster. Moving the ball fast to find a mismatch in physique to exploit no longer works at elite level. Unimaginative tactics of run-and-collide to use up the tackle count in league are matched by similar tactics to induce penalties in union. In both codes these tactics are coaches deciding to play percentages and they work through pressure from the attackers causing defenders to lose their shape and make mistakes.

People who don't read the Guardian might be interested in this report on developments in schools rugby driven by the need to cut down on concussion and other injuries. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/02/there-is-another-way-how-schools-are-tackling-rugbys-head-injury-crisis