Jim Martin

Hi Jo The runner looks super cool! That mesh looks pretty nifty too. As you say, it seems to be obtainable from Japan, but i think you'd want to work out what the other charges might be before piling in with an order. Can I ask how you cut the stuff? I imagine that cutting it accurately enough for an n-gauge project is quite hard? I have a Farish freightliner flat and a TPM detail kit that aren't doing anything; and I've been thinking of building a "tench" like this one for several years, so that diamond mesh looks like it would be just the job: Did you use the "medium" size? As far as I can see, the choice is that or large, although even the large size looks quite fine to me. Jim

Isn't Silent Witness meant to be ploughing the same furrow as the CSI franchise? I've hardly ever watched it (but been struck by the woodenness of the acting when I have). The almost instant returns of lab tests are a feature of CSI too. Murder on a preserved railway sounds more like a case for the 24/7 bloodbath that is Midsomer, tbh. Hell, they had a string of murders linked to the introduction of limited-overs cricket: I'm sure that railway preservation could have the bodies piling up.

Brilliant! Thanks very much. Jim

Are there any external distinguishing features, either physical or livery, between the SLE, SLED and SLEP vehicles? I'm thinking particularly about the period around 2006. Thanks Jim

Gosh, that's interesting. Thank you both. Did they have a big fleet of these things? Jim

Good looking model. I know nothing about Northern Ireland Railways (although I did arrange my one trip to Belfast so that I travelled by train from GVS to Sydenham: I mentioned that to a colleague from Belfast recently and she laughed and said "it's not that convenient for the airport, is it?", which is true). Does the "multi purpose" designation just mean that you can couple together as many as you need for different types of service? Were there examples with first class or catering accommodation? Jim

Sadly, both are true. As I tell the Divine Mrs M, my body is a temple: specifically, it's in ruins.

I've wondered about that, and also whether I couldn't just have an odd high-ended wagon in the planned rake (the plan, based on a train I saw at Edge Hill in 2005, is 7 OBAs and 3 OCAs carrying steel sleepers). I don't really want to do it, though, because (1) the prototype train didn't have one; and (2) it strikes me as one of those things that "looks wrong even though it's actually right". Jim

Thanks. That's 50 out of 900, then, which confirms my suspicions. Jim

Does anyone know how many OBAs were modified for Plasmor traffic with the high(er) extended ends? Also, when did they go back into general service? This question is motivated largely by my quest to acquire ordinary, unmodified Farish OBAs on eBay. The high-ended wagons are vastly more common on there, whether in Plasmor or EWS livery, than the unmodified examples. It seems clear that Farish produced a lot more modified wagons than the prototype numbers would justify; but I was wondering just how common they were. Jim

"Hand-me-downs from the capital's pampered travellers" was meant to be taken as a whole, as an example of something that isn't necessarily the case. It remains the case, though, that cascading of superseded rolling stock is a one-way street.

Those TUAs are among my favourite wagons, and I've been planning to do some in n-gauge for quite a while. Yours are really nice. Petroleum TUAs weren't built in great numbers because the design didn't come in until the early 1970s; and when the oil crisis of 1974 depressed the market, the oil companies had plenty of capacity in the huge fleets of 45-ton TTAs that had been built through the 1960s.

I was christened about a week after the JFK assassination. My parents were university-educated 20-somethings and I get the impression that a lot of that demographic saw Kennedy as sort of "President For The World", in the same way that later generations saw Clinton or Obama. I narrowly avoided being christened James Kennedy Martin as a result (although I sometimes think that would have been better than what I ended up with).

These look very nice. As has been said, the Farish OBA and OCA are both good models, but it looks like they've missed the bus with the OAA. THE 20'9" wheelbase vans are also on the table: the Farish VAA is very dated; the ex-TPM / now-NGS VCA, while as good as the VAA, is similarly aged; and there's no accurate VDA at all (although that's obviously linked to the different underframe, so it's not a gimme for Rapido even if they've done the OAA). That's a fair bit for an enterprising manufacturer to go at. Jim

Refurbished trains are used everywhere, are they not? The class 507/508s that operate the Merseyrail network (still, as the testing of their replacements goes on and on and on and on...) have been refurbished multiple times but are increasingly knackered nevertheless. I'm not saying that every train in the provinces is a hand-me-down from the capital's pampered travellers: both Northern and TransPennine have significant fleets of nearly new stock (although in Northern's case it took the entire lifespan of the franchise for them to arrive). The point is that trains are rarely cascaded to the South-East, are they? And I didn't compare the South East with the North: I compared it to everywhere. I'd put the Isle of Wight in the South-West, rather than the South-East, and certainly not in London's commuter hinterland; and people in the South West are every bit as voluble about public transport provision as those in the North: possibly with good reason.

Did the class 230s ever go into service on the Wrexham-Bidston line? Realtime Trains suggests that it's all class 150s (or, more accurately, a class 150) today. I've not been a fan of the whole D-train concept, simply because it would never even have been suggested for travellers in the South East (although I accept that Bedford-Bletchley, while somewhat off the beaten track, is in the South East). Even so, I'd take myself off to the Wirral if there was one to be ridden on, just for the sake of having ridden on it. Jim

I tried a quick exercise this morning, based on what I described last night. My 2006 Freightmaster has a 24-hour listing of freight trains through Eastleigh, which captures most, if not all, of the container trains to and from Southampton (you'd know better than me). Headcodes do change from year to year, but not that much, so I picked 4M61, which was (and still is) a lunchtime Southampton to Trafford Park train. Searching on Flickr for "4M61 Freightliner Southampton 2006" (I put Southampton because some headcodes are reused in different parts of the country; and 2006 because I was doing it on my phone, where date options seem to be non-existent) gets you four hits, including this one taken at Worting Junction in August 2006. As @njee20 said, the locomotive takes centre stage as usual, but there's quite a lot you can make out about the train. The first wagon is a single - you can see the back of the raised buffer beam at the far end. Practically all of Freightliner's wagons are multi-wagon sets, so this must be a KFA (if you look at one of the UK wagon galleries like Martyn Read's or Gingespotting, you'll see that it is). Next up is a twin set of FSAs. Again, the clues here are at the far end: the deck slopes up to the buffer beam, with two large holes cut in it; also, the two inner longitudinal deck members on FSA/FTA curve in towards one another at the ends of the wagon. You can see it here and it's just visible on our train, if you enlarge the photo a bit. Next, I think, is another pair of KFAs. It could be an FSA twin, but the single big placard on the leading one suggests a KFA, and if that's a KFA then the other one must be too. After that is a KTA/KQA pocket wagon. This doesn't really need any comment: they don't look much like anything else. Next is another FSA twin, then something low decked (see that the bottoms of the containers are clearly lower than those on the FSAs ahead of them). It could be an IKA megafret twin, but the deck length of a megafret leaves a noticeable gap at either end of a 40-foot box, and I'm not seeing that. I'd say this is an FLA twin: these can only hold a single 40-foot box each, which is consistent with what we can see here. Then there's an empty wagon followed by two more loaded. This could be another KFA and an FSA twin, or maybe an FSA/FTA/FSA set. After that come three more pocket wagons. At the far end of the train are eight more wagons which can't really be identified, apart from saying that they aren't pocket wagons and they aren't low-decks. My guess would be that they're all FSAs or FTAs. That's a 24-wagon train with five different wagon types (assuming that you work in an FTA or two). While other photos show less varied formations, it's clear that FSA/FTA, KFA, KTA and FLA are all valid choices, probably with the FSAs making up the core of your fleet and the others mixed in. Other routes might have different wagon mixes (particularly if there were clearance issues for hi-cubes en route) and other operators used different wagons altogether: FSA/FTA were unique to Freightliner, for instance. Jim

I wouldn't go overboard on the FFG/FGA flats. They were on the way out by 2005. There weren't that many of them left, and those that were still around were rarely marshalled in the "classic" 5-wagon sets: you'd see 2- 3- and the odd 4-car sets. For a Freightliner service, I'd go with mainly FEAs and FSA/FTA sets; and maybe add a couple of KTA pocket wagons (there might still have been some coded KQA in 2005), KFA single wagons and megafrets (not sure what the position re. an RTR megafret is in 4mm - I work in N). I've been going through a similar process to you, except that I'm looking at the WCML in Lancashire in 2006. What I did was to get a copy of Freightmaster for the appropriate period off eBay, identify the train IDs for services in my area, then search for every combination of headcode, operator name, the word "train", various key locations, even individual loco numbers (I did all of the class 92s one at a time, for example) that I could think of on both Flickr and Google image search. On Flickr you can set a date range, so I went for 01-01-2005 to 12-31-2007 (Flickr uses mm-dd-yyyy date formats). This took a long time, but I have a large spreadsheet showing dates, train headcodes, loco numbers, train formations (not easy for container trains, but you can pick out some types and the containers themselves are fairly easy to identify in most cases) and a link back to the original photo for future reference. This isn't everyone's cup of tea, I appreciate; but I found it enjoyable in itself, as well as really useful in understanding what would be key wagon types and what would be luxuries (or just plain inappropriate) in my chosen place and time. Jim I just remembered: I think the FLAs were in use by 2005, too. Maybe just the early ones. I can't remember which came first: the two or five car sets.

Hi Grahame I'm just catching up with this. It doesn't look all that "ramshackle", to be honest! Jim Ps. It was great to meet you at Sutton Coldfield!

Oh that's just great. I've just spent 40 minutes waiting at Manchester Victoria because the 16:22 TransPennine service was cancelled. Now I'm going to have to get a bus to Sandhills so that I can get back to Blundellsands & Crosby? Tremendous. A fitting bookend to a day where I had to catch the 07:05 from BLN to get to Manchester in time for a 9:30 meeting.

I've never done jury service - for a long time I was exempted as "a commissioned officer of HM Customs and Excise" and I haven't been called since they changed the rules to remove the exemption - but I did do a couple of days observing in court as part of my training. We were in Luton Crown Court, watching the closing stages of a sexual assault case. We weren't there for the bulk of the evidence, but heard the closing arguments by each side. What I learned was that QCs are professionally persuasive people. After the Prosecution's address, I was ready to vault over the barrier and string the defendant up myself, so obvious was his guilt. By the end of the Defence's, I'd have joined a protest outside the court against this grievous miscarriage of justice. Looking at the jury, it seemed pretty clear that they were in the same boat. When I mentioned this to our trainer, he said: "don't worry about that. The judge will tell them if he's guilty or not"

I thought Mod-Roc was a thing in its own right. Wasn't it some sort of plaster-impregnated sheet?

Units on the Stockholm t-bana (underground) carry girls' names, in much the same way as Eddie Stobart trucks used to. Just yesterday I, ahem, rode on Philippa and Madelaine.

More great work on those vans! Do you know why 200155 was painted green in the first place? Jim

This is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, I took the envelope with photos in it to a restaurant to show my sister (in fact I started this topic while we were still in the restaurant: I told my wife and sister that I knew a group who'd be bound to know about old registration numbers but would probably go off on some tangets as well... and as you can see , I was right!), and on the way home they were put in my wife's handbag, and now the whole lot have vanished. As soon as I find them, I'll post the photo. Jim