whart57

The hopper wagon I photographed outside Mahachai (on the line from Bangkok Wongwangyai) was a bit different. Probably the most modern bit of kit on that bit of the SRT, which as many will know is completely isolated from the rest of the network.

The second picture was a BREL 158 (export model). A number of three car sets were sold to Thailand in he 1990s. Regarding livery, I have built a 3mm scale version and the Railmatch paints for Regional Railways are as good a match as anything.

I presume that with the new mega-station at Bang Sue that there was a bit of tidying up in the old marshalling yard. Back in 2010 there was some real old tat parked there

I haven't tried working this out, and I don't know N gauge anyway, but would a city terminus to suburban terminus work? The main run being a figure of eight - single or double track - and the termini coming off at each end. Put in a couple of passing loops and you can have mainline trains doing circuits while DEMUs provide your point to point wishes. The city terminus should be modelled only in part - the local platforms and some platforms at the back where the mainline trains pass through.

Just checked the pics I took, it was actually a completely different loco that took the train onwards from the two that had brought it up from Hualamphong.

The "old station" is for Northern and North Eastern line trains, the "new" station for Southern line trains. Or was then. I don't know how they are handled at the new station. I see you captured a time when an incoming train left its carriages in the platform while dropping off an engine for the shed. Yours was a Hualamphong bound train, when I saw that happen in 2010 it was bringing an engine up from Bangkok. One day I was there a massively long train was waiting in the Southern station, heading towards Bangkok. When it eventually moved it turned out to be full of Navy personnel, presumably headed for the navy base at Pattaya.

I'm really impressed with the Silhouette cutter. This is my second attempt at reproducing the very flowing motifs on the temple gateway. The drawing was produced by tracing over a sharp photo image and then cut out from metallic vinyl of the peel-off variety. My first attempt used the automatic Path Trace function of Inkscape but that proved a little bit too sensitive to variations in the photo. I did a manual trace on the second attempt. Bear in mind this bit of gold decoration is only 26mm wide.

Sure does

Is it my imagination or are the trains shorter than they were ten years ago?

Over the last couple of days I have built a prototype temple gate. This won't be the final version but it does prove the tools I have can reproduce the key bits.

This is the sort of thing you expect to see on April 1st. Worrying to have it on social media now.

Johnny Foreigner is actually wrong-footed by some things we've done over the last ten years - things they never expected we'd do.

The link to Whishaw I gave earlier might help as Whishaw describes the technical sides of the railways of 1842 in some detail. Unfortunately he does miss out the size of the stone blocks on the S&D. On the neighbouring Stockton and Hartlepool Railway though he does state these stone blocks were 2 foot square. The S&D was using wood blocks as well and, interestingly, used "small coal" as ballast.

Which more or less sums up Western defence policy of the last seventy years. Military strategists and Defence Ministry officials draw up detailed reports on future defence risks and requirements and then the lobbyists from the arms companies come in and work on the politicians. Politicians who are scared of what the media and their opponents will spin. Jobs in British shipyards and business for British arms and aerospace companies weighed more heavily in the decision for building two new carriers than any rational assessment of Britain's - and Europe's - defence needs.

It would be interesting to know what was being compared to what. Measure the right things and ignore the unhelpful and any conclusion is possible. The carrier programme was a political thing from the start and needed every justification presented to counter the sceptics.

That's the Israel-Palestine situation exactly. The events of the last century are the same but the two sides see them differently. There is no hope of a resolution unless each side is willing to accept that the other side has a different interpretation. Miles from that I'm afraid.

One feature on Thai religious buildings are the highly decorative roof decorations. Those and the decorative arches over doors and windows generally have a flame like motif which makes them hard enough to draw, and near impossible to cut out consistently. Technology comes to the rescue. The temple's eaves decorations have been etched in brass - there was a bit of space on a larger sheet I was preparing - and more of that later. However etching is a process with a slow turnaround because you need firstly enough items to fill the minimum size sheet an etcher will deal with, and secondly it is not a fast process anyway. So I then experimented with the Silhouette cutter. The much smaller decorations on the bell tower were produced that way. Having satisfied myself that the Silhouette could make a decent stab at the flame-like shapes I wondered if the arches over the windows could also be handled that way. This is the challenge. I figured that a lamination of two or more layers of Plastikard might give a decent result, and made up a prototype. As these decorative features require no physical strength - they are backed by the main wall - I felt the result was more than adequate. There is after all a limit to the amount of detail you can do at one hundredth of full size. So the windows and doors on the main temple have been treated that way. Now I apologise to anyone who has a deep understanding of Buddhist iconography, but I am working on my observations here. In this particular wat the main temple building stands apart on a floor of white marble with a balustrade around it. From my observations that seems to be quite typical at other wats too. That meant I had to figure out a way to make the balustrade. 3D printing seemed to be all the rage and my daughter was experimenting with a free 3D drawing package called Blender for other reasons. A bit of research determined that Blender could output in a format that Shapeways could handle so I asked my daughter to produce a 3D file of the balustrade sections based on photographs and measurements. That she did and I sent the output to Shapeways who then printed it out. As that was successful I then set my daughter the challenge of producing the chedhi as a file for Shapeways. Chedhis are a very striking feature so could not be left off. After all this high tech stuff, the plinth of the chedhi was made in the traditional manner with just knives, files and sanding boards. Small beads were used for the balls in the wall decorations. This temple will sit on a removable board as it is sited over a join between two baseboards. There will be a wall around the complex with decorative gates at each end of the through road. That is the next step.

Time to get back to the scenics. One thing that is a must have is a temple since that will ground the layout into its Thai setting. There are a couple of temples near the real Thonburi, a small one on a footpath behind the loco shed and a much bigger complex on the other side. There is a nice photo in Ramaer's book of a C56 2-6-0 in front of that large temple taken in the 1980s in the last years of steam and I tried and failed many times to reproduce that shot for myself. Back in 2016 I managed it, sort of. I've posted this pic on another thread but it does no harm to post it here too. That particular temple is way too big for my layout, and the other temple is too small to be the statement I want. In Christian terms it would be a cathedral on one hand and a baptist chapel on the other, when what I want is a small village church. So the search was on for a suitable prototype. After many walks around Bangkok I came across one on the Rama 1 Road that seemed about right. The Wat Chai Mongkol was a small complex that contained what I wanted, namely a "typical" temple, a chedhi, a sort of spire on its own platform and a bell tower, and all in a fairly cramped space. On my last visit to Bangkok I took loads of photographs and with the help of Google's satellite view, was able to produce some sketches to work with. Where we are currently at is that I have the basic temple and schoolroom/monk's dormitory built up in plastikard plus the chedhi and bell tower completed as far as the painting stage. I'll come back to the challenges of building this and ways to meet them - including some home-brewed 3D printing - in the next instalment.

Less easy when they started building the new airport link though.

When you were at Bang Sue did you catch this little gem?

The day (Saturday) I took those pictures was the King's birthday, and the run to Ayudthaya and back was apparently a fixture in the calendar. Whether it still is with the new king, I don't know. However the day was also marked in the hall at Hualamphong station by an exhibition by architecture students at a Bangkok university of railway buildings and other infrastructure they had recorded as part of their course. I bought a tee-shirt with a side view of a C56 and a clutch of post cards they had made from their drawings. I also had a long talk with one of their supervisors, having introduced myself by showing her a couple of my Continental Modeller articles. She was in her forties I guess but her father was one of the mechanics on the steam run, having been a driver on the SRT in the steam days.

My preferred route to Thonburi was BTS (elevated metro) to Saphan Thaksin and then the river boat to Thonburi. On my last visit in 2016 the Thonburi Railway Pier had re-opened which made it a shorter walk. Some poor shots, it was well after dusk and I hadn't figured out all the features on my camera, but these were taken at Hualamphong with the arrival of the steam special that had left for Ayudthaya that morning and had now returned. Several hours late. But it's proof those Thonburi locos do get steamed.

That C56 really needs something to pull though 😁

Same person 😊

In Michael Crichton's Timeline a tech billionaire funds the creation of a time machine with which he hopes to record the great moments and great men of history to replay to the modern generations. It works but the results are disappointing - Washington's crossing of the Delaware doesn't have the great leader standing in the prow of the lead boat, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address is a guy standing in a field barely audible beyond the first half dozen rows. I wonder whether those expecting to see great feats of steam engine performance will be similarly disappointed by the reality. Does anyone remember the British Rail advert of c1980 which had an aerial view of Flying Scotsman being overtaken by a blue diesel. The point being made was that normal services on the ECML - then diesel hauled - were 20mph faster than they had been in steam days. Beware of the rose-tinted specs.