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Northmoor

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  • Location
    Camberley, Surrey
  • Interests
    Railways - Real & Model (well why else are we here?)
    Motorcycles and Classic Cars
    Photography
    Single Malt Scotch Whisky

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  1. Since the train is turning round without passengers, surely you can employ a pilotman who HAS signed the crossover ("Ooh no, I've never driven that 20 yards!") to supervise the reversal, who once the train returns to the departure platform, crosses back to the arrival platform to await the next service and to repeat the process. Of course this would require one or more people to take their thumb out of their <ahem>. So much easier to hide behind process as an excuse to do nothing and yet continue to draw your full salary.
  2. Definitely not the Snailbeach as that's over 30 miles away on the opposite side of Shrewsbury.
  3. There was a stall at Ally Pally yesterday selling multiple unboxed (but presumably working) Caley Pugs for £25. I actually think that's at the very top end of realistic prices. While you are in the clear if your description is accurate, it is still a hassle when the winning bidder has clearly failed to read your listing. Never underestimate how often people see what they want in an eBay picture and just hit Place Bid without reading any further. I sold a collection of VHS videos a couple of years ago, making explicitly clear that they were collection only as postage would be way more than the item's value. There was a winning bidder from nearly 100 miles away who paid up then asked when they would be posted. Once I'd reminded them to read the listing I never heard from them again, even when I offered a refund or to meet up in London where I work, if they or someone they knew, could get themselves there. I sold a car on eBay for £400 and the winning bidder lived over 400 miles away. They never got in touch, but fortunately the second highest bidder lived 12 miles away......
  4. The views of (at least some of) the American public on political funding can be deduced from an interview David Cameron gave to David Letterman, not long after he became party leader. He said that under UK law, he was limited to spending what amounted to about $100k on his leadership campaign. The audience applause was notably long and vocal.
  5. Got home not long ago and I would endorse the above almost word-for-word. My only problem was not getting there early enough, just under four hours left me rushing round towards the end, obviously I'm entirely to blame for that. It quietened down a lot after about 1430 but there was one 009 layout I had to miss as the crowd didn't clear. Not really a problem for me as it's often scenic detail or static stock I'm looking at, but I noticed a few layouts appeared to have given up operating by mid-afternoon with nothing moving. If I did see a common theme this year it was a lot of long and narrow layouts representing very little beyond the railway boundary; I find that "width" greatly helps with creating a sense of place so a few of them didn't grab my attention for long, but the quality of workmanship was consistently high. Keeping with tradition at model railway exhibitions, I found that the layout that kept my attention longest (and it would have been longer but I was trying to make sure I'd been right round both halls) was one representing an era other than one I'm modelling myself and in a different scale: Newchapel Junction. It was wonderful to see an "old-fashioned style" operating-biased layout with trains being signalled from place-to-place and to hear bell codes between operators. A round of applause to the group exhibiting this. Compared to the "vast volumes of overpriced tat" all too common with traders, there were some genuinely good prices being asked. As it is I've limited myself to one HO locomotive I've wanted for about 40 years and a single pot of paint, but if I weren't being so strict at NOT buying more projects, I could have come home with bag-fulls.
  6. The reason the GCR and SVR needed to do onerous paperwork is because they're public railways with old fashioned fencing (designed to keep animals, not people, out), plus path and road crossings on any of which, the public might intrude during high(er) speed operations. When they are doing those operations, I would put money on every path crossing being manned (that's even if they have got temporary closure orders). Old Dalby meanwhile, is an industrial site effectively sealed off from the public, who as I suggested earlier, could be catered for in specific, segregated locations within the boundaries of the site and under plenty of supervision. Whether such an event would cover its costs I wouldn't like to guess - I'm sure for every enthusiast who paid to enter there would be two getting thrown off private land they were trespassing on to get photographs without paying (probably after driving 300 miles to do so) - but the paperwork is probably not an onerous as you think. I work with the people who got a steam train to safely run through parts of the Underground fitted with signalling systems 100 years newer than the locomotive. It's amazing what can be done if you start with a mindset that there will be a way of doing it safely.
  7. Off today to the Ally Pally Show. With a small rucksack (whose position relative to my body, I'm well aware of). Wish me luck.
  8. I have an idea that it's not the easiest stretch of track to see from the lineside*, so perhaps with access to particular viewing points sold as if it were a photo charter and you could have a day of run-pasts, Lay on catering and some seating and you could sell 100s of tickets for £50 each no problem. *Farnborough Airshow used to tie screens onto the boundary fence to prevent viewing from the A327, not to force people to pay for tickets, but to discourage them from wandering back and forth across the road without looking.
  9. But not as expensive as not getting it dealt with......
  10. Nail, head etc. Unfortunately the NYMR is not the only railway in this position at the moment.
  11. Except that as it's not a depot, locos don't come and go very often so it would make a very "static" layout.
  12. While clearly you have considerably more knowledge of the NYMR than I do, it's seemed to me that in the last decade, it's been one of the (all too few) railways that has invested in its infrastructure, such as some very expensive underbridges. In defence of the recent management team, what you've described about the tunnel lining hasn't suddenly developed in the last ten years. It's similar on the WSR, the very unpopular management team have spent money on infrastructure that had clearly been neglected for too long.
  13. I have long suspected that while they do make a profit, the margins are not that great. It is unfortunate that the railway press is so uncritical and unquestioning; they frequently print four-page photo spreads of a railway's "enormously successful" gala weekend, while a small news item on page 17 reports that the same railway is losing money hand over fist and is selling off assets to fund something that should be normal maintenance.
  14. Tony, when you run the sequence on Little Bytham, do you just run each train from fiddle yard to fiddle yard with one circuit, or do you send each round several times? I've always thought much of the pleasure of a roundy-roundy (and LB so much more than that!) is, sometimes, to just watch a particular loco and train go past, over and over again.
  15. My career has been a roughly 50/50 split between private/public sector. From what I have seen in terms of getting rid of the incompetent: The private sector is more likely to sack the person* regardless of the law and run the risk of being sued (knowing that most can't afford to); The public sector is less likely to sack the person because middle managers don't know their job and employment law well enough, at least not as well as the Union Rep. If they did, in most cases the Union would do very little to defend their affected member. It's not that Unions are strong, it's that managers are weak. I think it was @br2975 who wrote on here about the PF supporting officers who they privately accepted should have been thrown out of the service, but who knew the law better than senior police officers. *I once came very close to being that person....
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