Nearholmer

This looks like what I used as a basis https://www.hattons.co.uk/470463/bachmann_usa_52652bac_dockside_0_4_0_116_of_the_santa_fe/stockdetail The wheelbase is too short, which results in a waggy back-end, but the rest is very helpful, because the chassis casting/weight gives. A basis for creating the saddle-tank that is very much the right size and shape. It’s a long time ago, but I think I had to cut away part of the front of the casting to allow for an exposed smoke-box. Joe Works used to make a rather nice kit for a tiny one, which you might still be able to find if you hunt long enough, and Minitrains currently do an 0-6-0ST version, and I wonder whether you could divest that of its middle wheels and its bunker to get to a plausible 0-4-ST ….. it does have an incredibly short wheelbase. This might be good for thought: https://paxton-road.blogspot.com/2017/12/porter-0-6-0st-in-009.html And, here’s the job done for you! https://www.shapeways.com/product/V2ETGV8BF/009-porter-main-body?optionId=301294845&li=shops

I have no clear idea when track was lifted (in fact, I have an inkling that some of it never was - my dim recollection is that it was severed, but left in-situ) so when I saw the caption I wondered if there was an outside chance that a Crompton had staggered up there through the undergrowth on a scrap-recovery train at some stage, but I was highly sceptical, hence my question.

Ah, now, that seems a lot more plausible! I wasted a lot of time trying to work out where at Rolvenden there was a deep-ish cutting, and concluding that the answer is ‘nowhere’.

There have been several drawings in NG&SLG over the years (since the 1970s!), I think there are drawings in ‘Steel Rails and Silver Dreams’, and possibly one of the books about the Huntsville & Lake of Bays railway, but these are all rather obscure sources to access, some of the drawings are made from photos anyway, and as said there were different classes/sizes of the locos of the same general form, I think ranging from as small as 6 Ton, certainly 8 Ton, upwards, just as there were with the equivalent Bagnall 0-4-0ST in this country. I built one in H0e in the 1980s, using IIRC a Bachmann N-gauge mechanism and ‘innards’ from a B&O ‘docksider’, and that I simply “eyeball scaled” from photos, and nobody ever complained! PS: Try googling for a Grandt Line 8 Tonner kit in 0n3. There might well be a copy of the instructions for the kit on-line, and they contain a drawing. That model is incredibly accurate, and really fiddle to build! Earwigo! Whole Grandt Line catalogue, with drawings of several classes https://oscalecentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Grandt-200.pdf

When was that Rolvenden photo taken? I don’t think I’ve seen a photo of a Compton on the KESR pre-preservation, and TBH I thought they were too heavy for it anyway.

Have a look through the several photos here: Similarly utilitarian approach at Norman’s Bay: And at Aldrington: All the former LBSCR “motor train halts” were treated in a similar (lack of) style when the lines were electrified in the 1930s, so this is the look I’m after.

I’ve closed my “this could be the start of something small thread” now that the dimensions of small (scenic area 1800mm x 400mm), and the “something” (4mm/ft, Southern Region, 1970s) have become settled, and will try to keep this one more tightly on theme. We are at the seaward end of the Cuckmere Valley in East Sussex, just south of what is now the Seven Sisters Country Park Visitor Centre at Exceat, for those who know the area. The railway started life as the Cuckmere Valley Light Railway (a real scheme that was kiboshed at the public inquiry stage in 1899, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/8fcf6125-3f05-4f65-b829-909f96456d9b), palmed-off on the LBSCR, and inherited by the SR, who saw the opportunity to despoil the landscape with a seaside resort, so electrified and somewhat upgraded the line in 1936-37. The War put paid to the resort idea, as it did to several other similar SR schemes, and the line bumbled on, depending upon slowly increasing tourist/leisure traffic, and traffic from the ramshackle plant of East Sussex Transport & Trading (a very real sand and gravel extraction firm that had its own quite long 2ft gauge railway, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/5c7c5017-d884-4a9b-8e0d-4905c355e29a , the date of this agreement is a bit of a mystery, because their railway was in place long before 1950). We arrive about 1970, and depart no later than about 1982, during which timethe passenger train service is provided by successive generations of two-car EMU, and sand traffic from EST&T trundles up the valley, a few wagons a week, behind a shunting loco that is out-based on the line, to be attached to freight trains at Berwick, from where it goes to the midlands somewhere to be used in the making of very coarse sandpaper. The track-plan will look something like this (ignore the Terrier, imagine that the top left siding goes into the premises of EST&T, and that the passenger platform is on the right, where that hut is standing): The greatest inspiration in terms of aesthetic is to be Southease & Rodmell on the Seaford branch, which is to say SR concrete-economical at its best. I’m rather fishing for help with some of this, because I’ve not touched standard gauge in 00 or H0 since a US layout that I built c1990, and am all at sea when it comes to sources of parts, kits etc. The thing in my favour is that I knew the railways of this area in great detail in the 1970s, so know exactly what I’m aiming for in terms of atmosphere (faded glory!).

Page 16 of this gets into soup:

Jam, or tinned fruit pie filling, the latter being a very “period” thing, and either would draw upon local produce. Baxter’s (iirc) had a soup factory in Kent that sent stuff out by rail into the 1970s, possibly even 1980s. PS: To get right on theme for the train spotting community, how about it makes Lyon’s Fruit Pies? Somewhere, there must have been a factory supplying about a zillion a week to Travellers Fayre.

Cam Prysor has an obscure, but important, place in model railway history, because back c1938, when a model railway was all track, signals, and stations, often lots of each crammed into a small space, and no scenery, someone (under a pen name) wrote a very far-sighted article in MRN or MRC (I’d have to ferret it out to check which), proposing a room-sized, fully scenic layout in 4mm/ft scale, featuring this simple location, and a lot of damp mountains. The proposal was to have only a couple of trains for the layout, modelled in detail. It was an utterly revolutionary concept, decades ahead of its time, the sort of thing that if built now would be straight into MRJ. This was pre-Madder Valley, and I think before news of the Gorre & Daphetid reached these shores. I only hope that someone picked-up the baton and built it.

Does anyone now exactly when steam did finish on services from Calais, Boulogne, and Dieppe?

Half way there: where in the photo is the shed? At the same time as the Listers, they also had a plate-frame MR, which I was always impressed by as a kid when we went fishing there, because it was a “convertible”, in that they used to unbolt and remove the cab when the weather was nice. They also had a habit of driving locos about off the track, especially the smaller of the later BEVs; if they wanted to take a short cut with a loco, they would nudge it to one side and set off across open ground.

SR one peeking into view at the left. I think this is an earlier design than the flat roofed hut at Groombridge, but ‘Southern Nouveau’ would tell for sure. It had a door in one end, facing the ‘box steps, I don't remember any widows, and iirc there was a bench down one side, and drum stand on the other, and a big sign on the outside of the door warning ‘no naked lights’, An incidental thing I’ve just noticed is that there is a loco shed in this picture. I offer a prize of a photo of a five pound note to the first person to identify it.

I have a feeling that, like milled peat, it can self-ignite as it decomposes in the presence of the right amount of moisture, at the right temperature, too.

Sports bodies will define “sports” to be what they fancy them to be. Dictionaries will define “sports” in accordance with common usage, allowing a bit of latitude for change over time. Historians and etymologists (entomologists too, if butterfly catching counts) will have things to say about how we got from one meaning to another, the social settings, and a heap of other stuff. Me, you, our former PE teachers, and a bloke at the bus-stop will all have opinions. To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty: sport means what I say it means.

Funny lot PE teachers; some strange ideas.

Slightly off-piste, but: In the early days of railways, many termini, including some quite small ones, were arranged to have an “arrival side” and a “departure side”, and such point-work as there was (a lot of shunting of trains was by turntable in the very earliest days) was arranged so that only arrivals could arrive on the arrival side, and departures depart from the departure side, a feature that was especially important before facing point locks were invented>reliable>mandated. Such termini often had carriage sidings between the arrival and departure roads. Some stations hung onto the basics of this layout for a surprisingly long time, even though it was inefficient in space and shunting terms. I think Euston was one that did for long-distance trains, for instance, probably because nearly all main-line trains went to and from the carriage sheds/sidings between turns. Departure-only platforms sometimes also existed to deal with one-way traffic like newspapers, where the empty vans were propelled in from nearby sidings.

Are these the ex-LSWR coaches that have been discussed in respect to the IoW? Or, are they GER ones?

There always seemed to be a cultural divide among enthusiasts in the early 70s: those from the southern regarded DMMUs and DHMUs as utterly uninteresting, almost beneath contempt, and certainly not worth the bother of learning class-designations, spotting features etc; those from elsewhere were similarly disposed towards EMUs, they just didn’t “get” them.

Oddly enough, that would complete the change of meaning that has been going on since the middle-ages, because hunting with a primarily pleasure focus was top of the list of sports back then, certainly among the well-off.

We just have to live with the fact that the meaning of the word has changed, narrowed greatly, over time, and that things which acquired the label “sport” some time ago, while the meaning was much broader, and have kept that label, now seem incorrectly labelled.

Nay, Sir! At least, not for the amounts in question here. Try “Al’s Hobbies” at Wolverton. He specialises in materials for model boat and ‘plane makers, and his prices for plywood are very good indeed. Multiple thicknesses, several board sizes, and the best quality he can source (be prepared for a very long chat about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected quality!).

What happened to good old plywood? I love the stuff.

As in hairdressing?

Sport as a word comes from ‘disport’, which meant a pastime or entertainment in a broad sense, and that in turn came from ‘desporter’, meaning to take pleasure. Not necessarily competitive, and not necessarily entailing getting puffed-out. So, I’d say that ‘sport’ covers a whole lot of things, but not coarse fishing, because that’s as dull as staring at ditchwater, and therefore a penance, rather than a pleasure.