whart57

A correction - I do run Templot as a WINE app. I have Virtual Box, in which I run a Win7 instance for the Silhouette software. I just find it a faff to fire it up if something works with WINE.

There's a touch of nostalgia about what we do in railway modelling. Why else would that horrible BR Blue period be so popular as a layout subject or - ugh! - the 1980s diesel depot. Or late BR steam among the septuagenarians. And many of those modellers who don't recreate something from their own past go for something they wish they had experienced. So as a long term seed in the hobby for our grandchildren start by getting them to experience the railways. Not just the heritage railways, the real day to day railway. Here in Sussex we are fortunate in that senior railcards and family tickets make taking grandchildren on the train to London or Brighton quite affordable, certainly once you factor in the eye-watering car parking charges. Other parts of the country might find that more difficult. But speaking personally, I still have a hankering for the railways of the 1960s and 70s, largely because I associate them with holidays and those first steps to adult independence.

Or: https://archive.org/details/railwaysgreatbr00whisgoog/page/n612/mode/2up This is Google books scan of Francis Whishaw's Railways of Great Britain and Ireland written in 1842. It's got some inspiring drawings in pages 600 or so on as well as contemporary reports of all the railways operating or under construction in 1840-42.

Well I took the shunter down to the club where there is an N gauge test track. Unfortunately the club used set track for this and thus the curves are a bit tight for me. OK for the N gauge guys and their RTR, and 009 and H0e is OK, but my 3mm scale mainline sized diesels and carriages won't get round. Pity. However this shunter can, so it got to stretch its legs for a bit. So what did I find? Things started off well, it did about 5-6 laps very smoothly so I left it running and went to do some work on the Chesworth fiddle yard. Ten minutes later it had come to a stop. I found that the back wheels had gone out of gauge, the BTB was about 5mm. Corrected that and it ran for a bit before doing the same thing. Ran it the other way and the wheels went out of gauge faster. I'm guessing that the sharp curves are pushing the wheels over and that is causing friction with the frame, particularly as one wheel wasn't square on the axle. It was also noisier than I remembered from the first tests. Examination of the gearing found that when I soldered the wires for the pick-ups I must have brought the soldering iron to close to the big nylon gear wheel as some of the teeth had melted. So back home, and replacing the wobbly wheel and the big gear. I took the opportunity to do a proper continuity test on electrical pickup while the chassis could roll. I have a little test track for that. The short bit of N gauge track has two cuts in one rail resulting in a section about 15mm long being isolated. A choc block is wired in so that that short section is connected and so is the other rail. The probes from a multimeter can be screwed down on the other side. I make my locos DCC-ready by creating an 8 pin socket wired up to the appropriate standard. This is useful for testing as well as for DCC running. Inserting the legs of a 330Ω resistor into the track-side sockets gives the multi-meter something to measure. I learnt many years ago when I had a job testing long computer cable runs in an eight storey office block that testing to a short can give false results. Testing to a known value resistor is much safer. So a chassis is rolled along the track, and every wheel is tested individually. First one side, and then the other. If any pick-up is not making connection this will, well, pick that up. So, now I just need to put in a new gear wheel - fortunately they are almost literally ten a penny on eBay - and then back down to the club on Wednesday for another spin.

I can use my scanner. Try Skanlite, I've used that with Kodak, HP and Canon scanners. As for "proper software", what is that? I retired from IBM six years ago, but just before that IBM standardised on Red Hat Linux for all new machines and upgrades from Windows 7. (Since then IBM has bought Red Hat the company). I think we can surmise from that that anything you need for business is covered. Your WP, Spreadsheet, Presentation software, browsers, email, and more. I use all of that now at home - Libre Office, Firefox, Inkscape and GIMP for drawing and photo-shopping. Even Templot works though AnyRail requires the WINE emulator The one frustration I have had is that I have never got the Rosegarden MIDI music program to work. At least not with the MIDI hardware in my machine. A 3D CAD program for 3D printing artwork is another missing thing. I, or rather my daughter, has had success with Blender - an open source drawing programme meant for animations and on-line graphics - producing files for Shapeways to print, but frankly, my will to live fades when I try to use a 3D CAD program, so I don't see that as a major shortfall. So, what have I missed?

I sometimes wonder what if an IT-savvy minister in the New Labour governments of the noughties had standardised government systems on Linux, using someone like Red Hat to provide a government-flavoured distro with appropriate security, management and other stuff to use around the civil service, whether we'd have the systems promised for the NHS and the like by now. Instead of being amazed at the PC in the nurses' station still being booted up into Windows XP. Or would MS' lobbyists have got him sacked in the first reshuffle.

Netware? That's a blast from the past.

I found these two photographs that give some idea of the pier structure as they are taken from underneath. These clearly show that the main load bearing structure is two hefty girders close to the outer edges which rest on the supports and regular smaller cross girders. The pier decking goes across the pier though so there must be something between them and the cross girders, presumably wood to allow the decking planks to be screwed down. The screw or nail heads are visible on the 1960s picture above and that suggest the spacing is not that for the rails.

Can you lay things out so that the tracks aren't parallel to the baseboard edge in the scenic section? Also I'm not an expert on track design but which are the up and down platforms? Can a train reach them and leave from them with a minimum of point shifts, and can they do so without a single mistake putting them on the wrong line?

Still a closed system. Apple controls what can be downloaded and I'm pretty certain Apple also controls the interface developers have to use to make their apps work. Linux and Android are open. It is possible to install Android apps without requiring Google Play, users of Huawei phones do it all the time since Donald Trump's decision to start a trade war with China. Linux is open as part of its licensing. Microsoft has to be squared with folding stuff but it's very rare that Microsoft do more than sell the hooks. Apple though is different.

Pick-ups fitted and wired up on the Henschel shunter. Now for a lengthy burst on the club's N gauge test track. Some tweaking is going to be required though.

Apple is a closed system. IOS only runs on Apple hardware and only runs applications sold by Apple. Microsoft software on the other hand is designed for hardware supplied by others. It's an anti-trust issue if Microsoft uses its market dominance to deny that hardware to others. Similarly it's an anti-trust issue if Microsoft uses its dominance to close off opportunities to competitors who might provide an alternative choice to customers. Apple has never achieved the sort of market dominance that would let it assume a monopoly.

True, Windows 98 was the last of the DOS based OS.

I might have some tram pictures from Riga. Unfortunately they are from before my first digital camera so on the loft somewhere. If I find them I'll scan them.

It will call it March 0th

UNIX architectures like Linux were designed from the outset to keep users separated, Windows, which for a long time was really the older DOS with a graphical interface on top, was not. DOS and Windows assumed the "personal" bit of a PC applied and that there would only be one user. Which was fine until people started hooking them up to the internet. UNIX systems however were servers and networked from the outset. That meant Linux offered far fewer vulnerabilities, as did all UNIX systems. As an aside, back in the 1990s, the main competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2. OS/2 was developed because the engineers at IBM had already twigged that the security holes in MS/DOS were unacceptable for business machines that were networked together. Unfortunately at that time IBM's executives were not very imaginative and wouldn't back the personal computing teams with the funding and marketing they needed to compete with Microsoft's aggressive price points. And if the sales force - and IBM had a much larger sales force than Microsoft - could make more out of one small mainframe software upgrade than out of selling two hundred copies of OS/2 then you know where their focus is going to be.

We've been here before. Microsoft's first run in with monopoly and anti-trust law was when it used bundling to try and kill off Netscape, the most popular browser back in the 1990s. Microsoft lost the legal battle but did manage to strangle Netscape. Microsoft then went on to use its OS dominance to squeeze out rivals in the far more lucrative office productivity suites.

I spent the first three years of my life just a bit further up the Middenweg too. Still got line 9 into the centre when my grandma moved into a new build just outside the Afrikaner-buurt when line 5 was turned into a rush hour only line because of reconstruction of the Weesperstraat around 1960. (That area had been the Jewish ghetto during the Occupation and had been gutted both by the Nazis and by desperate Amsterdammers looking for fuel during the hongerwinter). I remember line 9 mostly for the six wheel trams that were the mainstay up until the early 70s.

I'm a bit puzzled by the picture you have of a tram on line 9. If I didn't know better I'd say it was at the so called "Ajaxlus" or Ajax loop. So-called because until 1996 it was the tram stop for the Ajax football ground before they moved out to the ArenA. The 9 had been extended to Diemen by then but the loop was still in use on match days and for extra services in the rush hours. However I thought that the Ajaxlus has been taken out of service by 2004. I was always fascinated by the Haarlemmermeer station when I was young and we were visiting my grandma in Amsterdam. It was clearly a station but you couldn't catch a train from it. I remember once seeing coal wagons there and if we went to the Amsterdamse Bos then you crossed the line (single track) over an unguarded crossing on the walk from the bus. No electrification either which was unknown to me in Holland. Of course I know now that then, late 1950s/early 60s, the Haarlemmermeer station still handled domestic coal traffic for south Amsterdam and that once a day a diesel would bring a dozen or so coal wagons up the line. Never saw that though.

I wonder if you were aware that the coloured square to the right of the large number on the trams destination screen is an Amsterdam feature that goes right back to the horse tram days. Each line has its own square and there is some logic to it, though re-routings over the years have broken the pattern a bit. Originally a single colour indicated a line that went around the city rather than in and out from the centre. There was a major re-jigging of routes when the North-South metro line opened in 2018 but before that the two lines that had a single square and fitted the pattern were 3 - yellow, and 10 - red. Line 7 was originally a blue square but as that didn't show up in the days when these coloured squares were glasses in lamps on the corners of the roof, the glasses for line 7 were given a white band top and bottom. Line 13 was originally a white square but again, in the early days this did not differentiate from the empty glass of a service vehicle so a blue square was drawn on the white square. Pre-war, line 13 crossed the city, so counted as a perimeter route. Line 9 always had a green square, but it was not a perimeter route. It might be that it inherited this from its horse tram predecessor, which was I believe. Radial routes were given two colour squares. Routes to the West and South West, using the Leidsestraat or the Vijzelstraat, were divided diagonally, routes to the South vertically and routes to the East horizontally. Re-routings over the years broke the patterns but the pics you show of lines 16 and 24 with diagonally divided line colours is right for those lines to the south west of the city. Finally the infill lines were given two colour squares but divided into three horizontally or vertically, the outside two being the same colour. Line 7, as mentioned above, was of this pattern but for a different reason. As I said, originally these colours were in the form of glass lenses on corner lights. The large line number is also a long running feature. Amsterdammers were used to seeing the line numbers carried in the bow collectors and that had to be carried on when the first trams with pantograph collectors came in in 1957 This image from wikimedia has all the colours listed.

Thanks for the PD Marsh link, that is the Tividale kit I have and potentially want more of. I don't know how you are off for books. I found some on the second hand market. David Voice, who lived in Kidderminster back in the day, has done a couple but one that might not be on your radar is J.S. Webb, Black Country Tramways. It's a two volume affair and volume 2 covers the Kidderminster and Stourport in some detail, including some good descriptions of every known item of rolling stock. I got mine second hand a few years ago.

Ah, the K&S, a tramway I have been interested in since moving to Stourport in 1980. (Not there anymore btw). I have looked into this, and the first point to make is that the single decker and trailer you present a drawing of were very shortlived. At least one of the motorcars was given a top deck - with reversed stairs - around 1905, and the others redeployed elsewhere in the Black Country system. A couple of the trailers were put on motor trucks and used as relief cars on summer Sundays. For post WW1 there was a white metal kit of a Tividale car. A good kit for white metal and I'd actually want a couple more myself but recent trawls on eBay and elsewhere haven't turned any up. For pre-WW1 there was a BEC kit of a Glasgow car like the No.15 you post a picture of. However if you can get hold of one you really need to slim it down by about 3mm because of the K&S's 3'6" gauge. I never identified any other kits back in the 1980s and I doubt any later ones appeared.

The Dutch didn't build any railways on their islands, other than a short lived temporary line on Terschelling installed for a road building project and removed afterwards. A tramway was planned for the largest island, Texel, but nothing came of it. The German occupiers did put a railway on Terschelling in WW2 and a photograph of the German troops leaving after their surrender in 1945 shows a lot of feldbahn track stacked on the quayside. About half a mile was retained for a few years after the war for carrying building materials from harbour to a house building project but it had no locos and was solely push-power.

No it didn't need to be. You can see the same dynamic going on in women's football. There is a real push going on to create an elite women's game that can be monetised for paying spectators, be they in the ground or watching on TV. A push to create grassroots facilities for women's football, not so much. The result is that the small community clubs that basically created and sustained the women's game are dropping down the leagues and the sides funded by the major men's clubs are dominating.

I read somewhere the opinion that the amateur game was played for the benefit of the players, not the paying spectators. A typical RU crowd in the 1960s would be small, a few hundred at most even for a top club game, and would be made up of former players for whom a game - and several pints - on a Saturday afternoon was still part of their social round. Nothing wrong with that except that it is not a commercial proposition.