Liam

I came across a video on YouTube the other day about Railnet, and how it seemed to be a waste of money. What caught my attention though is 6 minutes in, when mail workers are shown shifting parcels clearly showing the Amazon label. We won’t know if those particular parcels were put on a train during their shipment, and I now acknowledge that my book wasn’t, but it is still interesting and shows that Amazon parcels, if they’ve been sent by Royal Mail, are likely to go on mail trains.

Same issue with me Andy, and I’m on EE and currently using Virgin WiFi.

The M5 seems to have a high concentration of awful motorway services, although Sedgemoor and Michaelwood do the job. The only exception to that is Gloucester which is fitted out wonderfully but try eating there and you’re looking at a fiver for a small fancy sausage roll. Can’t comment on their pasty situation though @Captain Kernow.

You’d need a holiday after visiting Gordano services - once stopped there on my way back from Devon and found it awful!

Bless you!

Last week I picked up ‘The Flock’, the pack of six Black Sheep beers, from Morrisons for £9 and one of them was Holy Grail. I shall mention to my housemates that drinking it may cause one to say ‘Ni!’ randomly, or that there might be spontaneous requests to cut down a tree with a herring...

In July I did an All Line Rover too. It began on the day that face coverings became no longer mandatory in England, but I still kept a few with me and would go by the rule that I would wear one if I couldn’t stay socially distanced from other people. I started my rover ticket in Scotland, where face coverings were still mandatory, but once I crossed the border in England I went by the rule that I would wear a face mask if I couldn’t space out sufficiently from others. Despite this being mid July, a lot of the trains I travelled on weren’t terribly busy so in the course of the week I’d say that I wore my mask around 20% of the time.

Yes, have just had a closer look on my phone and the date listed underneath the washing out programme appears to be 24/4/1958. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating way to discover what motive power was around on the Brum-Stourbridge-Kidderminster-Worcs route among others, and also what workings Stourbridge provided traction for.

I too had a shed-related blast from the past yesterday Phil, as I visited the Engine House at Highley for the first time in two years. It’s looking a lot better now having changed some of the exhibits and in my opinion improved the presentation. Anyway they’ve now made a display of the running board from Stourbridge Junction shed, which includes a working to Norton Jn that if you put the layout back a few years you could try and replicate, but frustratingly it doesn’t reveal the allocated loco!

Wonderful photo Rob. Very atmospheric and for me it perfectly resembles the essence of Mountain Ash.

Visited the show yesterday with @Phil Bullock. It was an easy journey for me, 350 direct to MKC then hopped on the free shuttle bus to the Marshall Arena. I had pre-booked my ticket and sailed straight in having had my wristband given to me at the entrance door. The layouts on display were superb, and my favourites were Chilcompton Tunnel, Old Elm Park and Melton Mowbray North. Here are a few photos of them: Being a student, I knew that I shouldn’t be spending lots of money, but I did manage to come away with a Hattons mug (will come in handy!) and a Hornby 21T mineral wagon. Perhaps the most significant part of the exhibition was when I got to hold the EP of Accurascale’s GWR Manor. Looks a very worthy replacement of the old Bachmann ones.

I’ve just got in from GETS and personally I wasn’t very put off by the practices people chose to follow (or not follow). I’m 19 and double jabbed, I used hand sanitiser plenty of times and tried to ensure that with the exception of the people I was visiting the show with that I wasn’t rubbing shoulders with anyone else for more than a few moments, but with masks, if the people around you aren’t wearing one then you are no better off wearing one yourself. I’ve got some lateral flow tests with me and I’ll do a couple in the week to be certain that I haven’t picked the virus up at the show. As for the organisation of the show, the aisles seemed quite wide but inevitably there was the odd case of someone blocking them and causing congestion. At 15:00 the main hall began to empty out and you could certainly feel that it had become cooler and more spacious; not that I found the hall stuffy but one of the balconies definitely was at around 12:30/13:00.

My bad - not on tonight after all, instead there’s a programme about unearthing German submarines from the North Sea.

Which is back on tonight - by the looks of things there won’t be many RMwebbers watching!

Much as though I find canals interesting (we did a narrow boat holiday in Cheshire back in April this year), we have drifted quite a way from the original topic of Ian Hislop’s Trains That Changed the World.

In my OP I said how I liked the show but that was with my average TV viewer hat on, which we must remember is the hat which the majority of people watching it last night would have been wearing. As members of this forum we have pretty good railway knowledge, but the wider public are probably wouldn’t have such knowledge, and I guess that this was who Hislop aimed the programme towards. A previous episode covered the Flying Scotsman, and whether you’re a fan of the loco or not (personally I am) its history has been covered by other programmes hundreds of times before.

Been watching this for the past few weeks. I do like Ian Hislop, and on the whole this is a very good programme. He focuses on topics which would be of interest to the average viewer, such as how the railways brought fish to inland areas for the first time, along with enabling the introduction of a national football league. The one slight downside to the programme is that it is not exempt from those annoying Channel 5 competitions, and this one is ambiguously styled as ‘win £3,000 for a rail adventure’, with no further details on where you might go and what you might do.

Glad I found this thread. Back in March I ordered a copy of Steph Gillett’s ‘The Midland & South Western Junction Railway’ from Amazon, and it’s a very good read. The historical background is fascinating; it strikes me that the builders of the railway went for cheap above speed above quality, such was the urge to get a route into Southampton Docks as quickly as possible to allow the passage of goods from the Midlands via Southampton to Europe and beyond. I noticed there was discussion about when was the last time a train ran over what remains of the MSWJR to Ludgershall; this book mentions that in 2017 an army vehicle was taken from Ludgershall through the Channel Tunnel to mainland Europe.

Of course I do - but being Mayor of London a few years ago is very different to being Prime Minister during the Second World War, or alas a global pandemic. My previous post was rather tongue in cheek as I was trying to relate to the Tube scene from Darkest Hour.

Yes, somehow I can’t see our current Prime Minister jumping out of a car to hop on the tube and ask what the passengers think of COVID-19...

Thought I’d add to this, despite 18 months passing without a post. On BBC One on Sunday night they showed Yesterday, a film set in the present day which follows a songwriter who as a result of a coma is the only person who has heard of the Beatles. While it was the present day and not a lot of effort was required, trains passing in the background included DRS class 57s and Greater Anglia 153s. I guess the advantage of being given permission to make a present day film at a location on or close to the railway is that any trains that pass will be prototypical.