Nearholmer

Off at a wild tangent, but IMO one of the most interesting and atmospheric NT houses is Chastleton, which is (a) preserved in “as acquired” condition, rather than restored, and (b) still quite close to its original C17th condition, because the family that owned it were financially ruined by picking the wrong side in The Civil War.

Ah, I get it. If you read back up thread, I actually said something similar myself, in that all decisions about how to teach/present/portray/emphasise-deemphasise/etc history are political with a small ‘p’. I’ll re-phrase then: it’s now fallen into the same swirling pit of angry polarisation that everything else even slightly controversial falls into these days.

Unfortunately, the topic has very definitely been politicised, as I found out when a load of very reactionary campaigning stuff started to materialise on my Facebook feed. You only have to read the comments under postings about the topic to understand that those opposed to the NT lifting the veil from subjects that people would rather not hear about regard this as a culture war to be fought very hard indeed.

By no means all of this is fixed down, and there will be a lot of fiddly stuff to do around the baseboard joint, but I hope it illustrates the general direction of travel.

Relevant reading: https://www.railengineer.co.uk/progress-with-the-four-lines-modernisation-project/ I’ve lost touch with which bits of this renewal/upgrade have now been commissioned, but relevant to this conversation, the article gives 32TPH as the performance requirement.

My instinct is: But, having bought track last week, I’m very sensitive to the point(!) made above. I deliberately buy anything that I need, and which he stocks, from the local model shop, which involves full catalogue price, and even for a tiny layout the price is very full!

I was always intrigued by that last point, which applied to the top half of the circle too, an incredibly intense service, especially because I’ve got a book with some antediluvian train planning graphs in it showing such frequencies, so I asked the Chief Signalling Engineer of LU about it. He explained to me that it had been achieved by having very short blocks, no overlap beyond signals, so trains might be separated only “by the thickness of a stick”, and if you delve through the accident reports available on Railways Archive, you will find that it all went horribly wrong fairly often, when trains overran signals and ran into stationary trains ahead. The collisions were at low speeds, and seem to have resulted in injuries and minor damage, rather than being catastrophic, which is possibly why they aren’t headline events in railway history. PS: by the time of electrification, the services on the Circle were legendarily slow and unreliable too, you can find lots of contemporary moaning and groaning from users, which suggests that the Met and District were struggling to deliver the timetable, that there were just too many trains on the line to allow resilience.

I’ve decided that the EST&T line will go into the FY, rather than simply wander off the edge of the baseboard. Now, the arc of movement of the turntable FY means that this road will only be useable in one position, but TBH that doesn’t matter a jot, and I’m even toying with the slightly radical idea of making the front bit of the FY scenic, to portray EST&T loading hopper. Imagine scenery painted on this sheet of plywood, and the “girder” at the front having been cut down to maybe c10mm high, so the siding appears to be running in a shallow cutting: That would only leave room for two FY roads round the back, and in practice would confine the FY to being used as a sector-plate, rather than a turntable, but given that I’m only ever going to need to store two trains (EMU and sand train) off-scene, that doesn’t seem to matter. Maybe if I’d thought this all through in advance, instead of making half of it up as I go along, I wouldn’t have bothered with a turntable FY at all, because one turnout would do the necessary! Incidentally, I subscribed to the Seven Sisters Country Park newsfeed, so now I get pictures of the locale every day. Here is one showing CVLRPS volunteers clearing undergrowth to allow work to start on extending a siding.

Wise precaution. Years back, I was involved in designing and testing SCDs, jointly between NR and LU, with the final functional tests taking place just south of Willesden Junction on the DC Line (naturally!). The guy who was actually applying the devices was an Irishman from the local pway, and before every application he would look up at a statue of the Virgin, silhouetted against the night sky at the edge of Kensal Green Cemetery on the far side of the mainline, ask for her blessing, and cross himself. It was evident that he wasn’t placing much faith in engineers!

If you like that one, you might appreciate it’s bigger brother.

To prove that this thread isn’t just about interesting diversions, here are some baseboards undergoing primer-undercoating, with the stowed-away 0 gauge in the background. I’d run out of my favourite primer-undercoat (Ronseal 10-Year Exterior Wood), and bought some Sandtex stuff that happened to be in stock, thinking it was a near equivalent, only to discover that it is oil-based, and truly horrible. It does the job, but the brushing-on quality, and ‘build’ is far less, and it stinks the place out!

If it isn’t looked after properly, yes, which is why there were “bond testers”, chaps with “ductors” (devices to measure very low resistances) allocated to look after each area. They went round checking the integrity of the bonding, testing any bonds that looked questionable etc, then arranging any remedial work. The guys who looked after this area were based at HaywardsHeath IIRC.

Yes. The loop resistance is that of the conductor rail in one direction, plus the parallel sum of however many running rails can be bonded on the return (which aren’t grounded in a conductor rail system, BTW). Without going and unearthing lots of old paperwork, I can’t remember what the resistance figures are for 106lb/yd conductor rail, or 95lb/yd BH, or what the starting currents or no-volt relay settings (400V iirc) on the old trains were, but I know without checking that such a long, single-track section would be a challenge, even limiting to two cars. The other issue is providing short-circuit protection, so being able to circulate enough current through a fault at the remote end to trip the circuit breakers at the feed-in end. The breakers installed in the 1930s were the most elegant and ingenious contraptions imaginable, but their lowest settings were quite high compared with the sort of short-circuit currents that would be involved here, and when long single-end feeds were involved, protection got quite tricky. Later, devices that monitored current, then later still current and voltage, part-way down the section and signalled back to the substation were introduced, but I don’t think that was done until the 1960s, maybe even 1970s.

Thats with disc brakes!

Chalk is absolutely treacherous in winter, incredibly slippery, so descents are potentially quite dangerous. Having had a couple of “exciting” moments on the Dunstable Downs, I now won’t go on chalk in winter at all.

Mud up the back. It’s very clayey in places near where I live, and fitting mudguards just causes everything to jam solid with mud, whereas with no mudguards, it mostly self-clears, or can be poked clear with a handy stick. But, sometimes it all just turns into a giant mess:

Not only happy people, but happy bikes. Here’s mine sunbathing after thrash up to the top of the Downs.

Last time I drove back from visiting family, early December last year, the A27 was flooded at that point and multiple others, not deep flooding at that point, maybe three or four inches, but up to sill level in others. Traffic was being permitted on a single-file basis down the crown of the road. It would be super boring to go into more detail, but that trip took seven hours , including a half hour PNB, for 130 miles, and the previous few were similarly dire, so I have now sworn off driving it at all, and will use train, or train and bike if I’m on my own and weather is good, for all trips. I do not intend to build a small layout set during winter flooding, BTW, because I want the little plastic people to look happy.

I’ve got a couple of photos, very poor ones, that I took of D7018 sometime around then at Redhill, where it used to materialise fairly often on the freight from Reading. It lives at Minehead now, I think, but I seem to remember it spent a while stored at the old gasworks at Reading along with another loco (or am I getting mixed-up with D7029), then went to Didcot, after it was withdrawn from BR. PS: D7029 and D821 were the ones at the gasworks.

A lot less. Even the TfL journey planner, which sets a really low walking pace, says 1h32m to walk. I’d say an hour is more like it. TfL gives the train trip time as 21m, including a 4m allowance at each end that I think is “street to train”.

We had spring on Friday, and especially yesterday; today it is early February again, steady rain, so although I’ve just run a couple of miles errand on the bike, I wasn’t motivated to extend it.

I’m highly sympathetic to that line of argument, but despite arguing with Phil about the particulars of various crossings, I agree with him that LCs are a potential safety problem, and that when they are as close together as on this line, the signalling arrangements necessary begin to restrict the throughput of trains, in this case by pulling the speed ceiling down, so they aren’t by any means great things to have around.

Well, you’ve drawn a lot of red lines on aerial photos, and an entire team of designers at EWR did much the same, but at a far greater level of detail, to preliminary engineering design and costing, and the upshot of your red lines, or their work would be the same: lots of cost, and lots, and lots of construction time, in several instances in the teeth of very firm opposition. Which isn’t the way to get a project delivered. As I keep saying, my bet is that some of these flyovers will come back on the agenda once people get fed-up with sitting in their cars at level crossings. Some of the ones towards Bedford might also go, one at a time, because the number of new houses, and other things, planned in that area is huge, which may push road traffic levels over the brink for LCs. Incidentally, Ridgmont baffles me; I can’t see why the LC is now needed there at all, because there is road access out to the main road on either side of it already.

Of course it’s not SW London, but neither are several of the busy LCs in places where a flyover could be put in without massive intrusion, which is the key point, and why the flyover proposals created such opposition. The busy LCs aren’t in the green bits, they’re in the brown bits. Woburn Sands is possibly one of the more challenging, in that the road is plenty busy, and this is what is looks like: Fenny Stratford is a much less busy for through traffic, but gives access to several large builders merchants, so a lot of lorry movements, and the space for slopes up either side is very restricted (there’s a junction with the old A5 just off the bottom of the photo): Some of the others aren’t so challenging, and one, Bow Brickhill, could probably have been created already with a bit of forethought, because an area of land there is currently being developed as yet another warehouse estate, and a road realignment etc could probably have been terraformed into that, but there are reasons why EWR has backed-off from the earlier proposals: cost, time, and the opposition provoked by intrusion of big, tall structures in low-rise places. The service now proposed on this section is 3TPH in each direction, so even with a more modest line speed and very smart signaling the barriers will be shut for a fair proportion of each hour, so things won’t be painless!

SR power supply department used to use them for concrete troughs too, but ours were the ones with a centre door, rather than drop sides, and were hand unloaded. I spent many a night supervising such operations in the early 1980s, and have plenty of memories, good and bad, for instance a wagon that, as it was gradually emptied over multiple stops proved effectively not to have a floor - there were so many bits missing that it’s a miracle the load hadn’t tumbled down onto the track. Mind boggles at the mentality of whoever loaded it at Taunton.