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As I recall he commentated 'live', as seen here at Central Hall in 1973 (I'm the kid peering in at bottom left😀)

If your calipers are digital, they won't have a vernier scale 😀

I'm not sure what you mean by 'professional', but everyone at Pendon (including Stephen) is a volunteer.

Two arms one above the other would, in British practice, be a junction signal with the top arm reading left and the bottom right. And there are no circumstances, even on the Southern, in which a distant arm would be cleared with the stop arm above it at danger. Failures and momentary aspects excepted, of course 😮 However, I don't think the thing in the advert is a British signal.

Although that advert dates from the 1960s, the RSCo had been part of Westinghouse since 1920. It continued to make "traditional" equipment at Fazakerley until closure in 1974. Badge engineering was not just a motor industry practice!

No- S&F were at 53 Victoria Street, and McK&H at 58. However, a company formed in 1901 acquired a controlling interest in both companies, and many others in the UK signalling industry (including W R Sykes) under the name of the Consolidated Signal Co, so they were all part of the same group from then on. Merger with Westinghouse followed in 1907, but various trading names continued in use for many years.

I'd be more worried if they had said the derailment was on the wcml, rather than half a mile away.

The Hornby website images show several Mk1 Brake Seconds, but the captions call them Brake Composites. Which one are they actually making?

Domes?? On a Manor???

If you are referring to Hagley Hall in the new shed at Bridgnorth, it's freshly painted and (presumably) varnished- and very nice too!

Maybe the theory was that if you couldn't see something fourteen feet high and bright red, a little thing like a reflective numberplate wasn't going to make much difference 😮

How do you know that? "Astonishing" is a quotation from the auctioneers. I didn't get that impression at all. Why this violent reaction to what appears to be a serious piece? It's nice to see decent prices paid for high-quality models, given modellers' normal reluctance to pay the going rate for skilled workmanship.

Oh dear. There's a lot of mythology there. The Regulation of Railways Act 1871 gave the Board of Trade power to appoint inspectors to inquire into accidents (previously they had relied on force of personality alone), and also the opportunity to appoint additional persons "with legal or specialist knowledge" to assist an inspector in their investigation, and in such cases the appointed group was known as a court of inquiry. The power was first made use of for the investigation into the Wigan derailment of 1873, and was used on a handful of further occasions in the 1870s. It fell out of favour, probably because it was cumbersome and added little to the quality of the investigations carried by Inspecting Officers alone, and the Tay Bridge inquiry was the last time it was used in the Victorian era. In that case the additional expertise employed was in civil engineering, and not law. The Court of Inquiry process was revived for the Hixon investigation because of the high level of public concern about automatic level crossings, which were seen as a foreign-inspired novelty which had been endorsed by the RI (which did not become HMRI until 1990), and the multi-agency failings which the accident had shown up, involving the police and the Ministry of Transport as well as the railway itself. The use of the procedure at Clapham and subsequently reflected the growing realisation that there was a conflict of interest between the role of the RI as safety regulator and investigator. Stanley Hall was not BR's safety director: he retired in 1982 as the Board's SIgnalling and Safety Officer, long before Clapham. After the Health & Safety Executive absorbed the RI in 1990 it completely revised the legal framework for railway safety. The provisions of the 1871 Act for public inquiries (both by individual inspectors and by courts of inquiry) were repealed in 1997: the last 1871 Act inquiry was into the Ais Gill collision of 1995. All the inquiries held under the 1871 Act were theoretically public, even those into minor personnel accidents. In such cases the public had little chance of finding out that the inquiry was taking place, and the resulting reports were (after WW2) no longer published by HMSO, but only circulated within BR. In 1871 Act inquiries, whether or not there were any lawyers present rather depended on the seriousness of the event. The Unions would often provide legally qualified representation for their members in fatal cases. The expectation, though, was that issues of blame would be gone into at the Coroner's inquest. It was usually following an inquest that prosecution of railwaymen took place. The creation of RAIB made it possible for the safety investigation to be completely separated from the inquiries of the regulator and the police. The inquest process remains as a controversial legacy of the old way of doing things. Stuart J RAIB (retired)

Absolutely not. The RAIB does not become involved in criminal prosecutions in any way. If expert evidence is required it must come from other sources. Stuart J RAIB (retired)

Oh yes they are- RAIB staff who are on-call (normally one week in three) are expected to be on the road within thirty minutes of being deployed to an accident, regardless of the time of day or night. It's an onerous requirement given that the Branch covers the whole of the UK, and investigators can be sent anywhere at a moment's notice. The on-site phase is only the first stage of the investigation. The need to tease out the causes and underlying factors, and prepare a report that is thorough, accurate, complete and makes recommendations based on the evidence, plus the obligation to consult interested parties on the proposed recommendations and the final report, means that the process may seem slow. As Mike has said, if something is discovered that requires urgent action, it will be dealt with quickly. Legal proceedings may or may not hold up the publication of the report, depending on the circumstances. There are several events in recent years for which reports have been published, but for which prosecutions of corporate bodies are still outstanding- RAIB has no part in those. In the nineteenth century reports were completed very quickly, often within a week. In those days the sheer volume of investigations (over 200 a year in the 1870s) meant that the Inspecting Officers had to strictly limit the time they could spend on each case. More recently, from the 1960s until the start of the RAIB era in 2005, reports could take up to seven years to appear, and in the 1990s and 2000s very few were published at all. Hopefully the present system deals with those deficiencies and presents the public with the facts of the event and the lessons that have been learned, in a clear and consistent way and in a reasonable timescale. Stuart J RAIB (retired)

As indeed they are, and were identified at the time:

It really depends how fussy you are. I would say that a GWR signal is as like a Midland signal as a Hall is like a Black 5- they do the same thing with the same basic components, but they are recognisably different shapes 😮

Well-written books about railway preservation are not common. I don't know of any about the Bluebell, but then I'm not a Bluebell person. Those I can recommend are all rather old. The Little Wonder by John Winton (1986), is about the Festiniog and the Deviation. One Man's Railway by John Snell (1983) tells the story of the RH&DR up to the point where he became involved with it in the 1970s. Brian Hollingsworth wrote Great Western Adventure (1981), which covers the organisations which aimed to preserve the GWR. All three include the sort of material you are after. There must have been other books published since then, but they have passed me by!

Almost there...

Kennington Junction box was between the up relief and up main lines, and I suspect the photographer was standing at the foot of the box steps.

And of course Littlehampton and Bognor Regis are still semaphore.

Nice foliage but the tramway looks a bit strange. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-61361864?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

On further inspection the pictures for May 2021 are all there, but January - April seems to be missing. I've put some more of mine back. Very frustrating.

Anything after 31 May 2021 (around the middle of page 50 of the thread) appears to be affected- before that date they are fine. I have replaced the (few) pictures that I had posted since then.

The Mersey Railway lettered all their signal boxes, starting at A (Liverpool Central East, see https://janfordsworld.blogspot.com/2014/02/railways-around-birkenhead.html ). When the new box at Birkenhead Park was opened in 1938 it retained its designation as cabin H under the Mersey scheme.