Reorte

No idea if this will work or not (if it does it'll depend upon the layout) but how about a mirror with a hole for the trains, to reflect back at some of the scenic section? It'll look odd when a train's going through or near but should help give an impression of depth the rest of the time.

That'll no doubt get my dad worked up if he ever sees it. Not because he's anything against such renumbering but he grumbled that when he was a kid every other train he saw seemed to be hauled by Alberta (so the model of it was an instant buy for me - appropriate for the S&C too).

That answers a bit I've been wondering all along about in this discussion - why not just let the ash fall out? Obvious really when you think about it that dropping hot ash on wooden sleepers impregnated with creosote isn't a great idea.

There will be plenty of other details that separate the eras. Some of the signals have modern cages on them, there are the roadsign-style speed signs, flat bottomed (CWR?) track, and that's just a few of the things within the railway boundary. Probably one rivet changed somewhere too.

There's a photo on Wikipedia on the page for Par station of an 802 passing the semaphores there; if they've gone it must've been very recently.

Another power station to gypsum plant train was Drax to Kirkby Thore, when that started it was the first regular freight on the Settle-Carlisle for quite some time and I suppose in hindsight a good sign of the renaissance of the line's fortunes.

Considering the state of the track to my house (road track, not rail track!), quite possibly.

Even the diesel backlash strikes me as another case of oversimplification, rather than encouraging the right tool for the job - petrol for cars that spend most of their time pottering around cities (and which are also the easiest to change to electric), diesel for the ones that spend most of their time going up and down the motorway.

Looks like Meldon.

Hard to tell from the video but don't they have rollers on the back so they can be deployed and recovered without making a mess? So it shouldn't be as bad as just dragging a metal trailer along the ground, but more use (and speed) than the rollers are intended for.

I was thinking from the point of view of the new legislation, although I also get the impression that quite a lot of people who have started burning wood in recent years don't actually know it.

Agreed, it's just not at all clear to me in this case that anyone's even tried to work that out. And I'm also getting more and more concerned that an increasing obsession with very minor improvements to physical health are having much greater detrimental effects on mental health.

Is it likely to have come out of the blue? There may have been things going on that mean they'd have been looking elsewhere, or at least keeping their eyes open.

That's not relevant to how significant coal burning is though, which is what I mentioned. There are good arguments for getting a bit stricter on some of the ways around the smokeless zone rules, but that's a separate subject. If wood burning is an actual problem then I do wonder just how many people are burning unseasoned wood though. As for "serve no purpose", anything that improves quality of life serves a purpose. If something makes you happier then it improves quality of life and therefore serves a purpose. Everything else is merely a means to that end otherwise why do it? When you dig your way through to the bottom of it that's the only reason for doing anything, even the those that are essential for survival (we want to survive, which I'd argue is an entirely emotional response, even if it's an almost universal one).

Better than I managed - got quite a clunk over the Furness Vale crossing this afternoon, something's getting worn there.