Pacific231G

I needed to know the appropriate shade of green for a French post box in the 1950s - as you do - and remembered that a whole scene around a post box in Jacques Tati's Jour de Fete that had recently been released in its colour version (long story). The trouble was that when I examined the scene in detail it had been shot from several different angles and the colours looked totally different in each. I sometimes think that looking at paintings may be a better guide than photographs as at least you should then be seeing the colours and shades that the artist saw.

Oh I thought the director did a pretty good job. Knowing that the loco wasn't authentic (but no more inauthentic for the Balkans than the SNCF's 230G353 used in the 1974 movie) he avoided dwelling on it. The locos would in any case have been a matter of total indifference to passengers on the Orient Express in 1938. The CIWL attendants were dressed as such and I didn't notice too many other railway employees apart from the loco crew. The glaring errors were the colour scheme of the coaches in Pullman blue and ivory rather than the all blue that the CIWL used for normal sleepers and dining cars and the train heat going off - voiture lits had individual steam heating boilers looked after by the attendant. Despite those it didn't scream Nene Valley to me as so many other movies and TV dramas filmed on it have. I also thought the much darker treatment of the plot and Poirot's response made for a far better drama than the movie's representation of glamorous people on a glamorous train which the real O-E wasn't.

I was a teenager in the 1960s and using most of my pocket money to buy day returns to see and experience as much as possible while I still could- we also had a very active railway club at my school- and then when I went to college and starting work before I had a car using the railways a lot to get around the country. Although there probably was more variety than at almost any time with many branches still open, still some pick up goods to places like Witney and new things like diesels and fast electrics starting to appear, I remember it as a very depressing period with far more being lost than gained. In Britain railways really did seem to be regarded as an obsolete Victorian technology that apart from a few specialist services had no real future. The impression, rightly or wrongly, was that the job of senior railway management was to manage their orderly decline rather than to work really hard to find new opportunities and the morale of railway workers was incredibly low. The railways were rapidly losing their role as a universal transport system but hadn't yet found a new role and one of my strongest memories from that period was travelling to Woodford Halse on a Wednesday afternoon on a steam hauled train full of country people going home from Banbury market day. A few months later the line closed and that was the sort of thing with the railways part of people's everyday lives that seemed to be fast disappearing. On the Western Region, which was mostly what I was seeing, new hope didn't really kick in until the first HSTs appeared and you could then see some optimism starting to reappear. Even then the idea that by the turn of the century passenger numbers would be over a billion a year would have seemed unbelievable. I think Britain was unusual in that the transition from steam coincided with a massive decline in the role of railways (though that was probably also true for passenger services in the US during their 1950s transition) so the two came to be associated with an overall sense of loss. In the rest of Europe the end of steam came some time before the "rationalisation" of services so didn't have the same bad associations and in any case the transition was far more measured.

Hi Ceptic The station "Rive-Reine" where the staged accident etc were filmed was Acquigny south of Rouen on the former Pont de l'Arche- Dreux line. The final scenes were shot a few kilometre south of there between Acquigny and Heudreville but the area has become heavily wooded since The Train was filmed so the local area does look very different now. The section of the line between Louviers (which was St.Avold in the movie) and Heudreville was at that time a closed section between two stub ended goods only lines but the line through Acquigny reopened for a while until a couple of years ago to serve a large local paper mill and so far as I know is still intact. The line from south of the junction with the former Acquigny- Evreux branch (which still exists as far as the paper mill) has been lifted through Heudreville (now a private house with the goods shed a very large garden shed!) though most of it is a public footpath and the footbridge where Labiche was shot in the leg (to cover for a golfing accident to Burt Lancaster) and the girder bridge that you see the unmanned train rattling over before the crash are still in place. Track reappears at the next station south which is the northern end of the preserved CF Vallee de l'Eure based at Pacy though I don't think any of the filming took place that far down the line. One interesting thing about The Train was that it was set on the Est region but- apart from the early scenes in Paris- mostly filmed on the Ouest around Rouen. Yet the the locos used, four or five presumably withdrawn 1- 230Bs, were authentic Est machines that must have been brought over for the purpose. Unusual attention to accuracy for a film though the elderly 060 tender loco used for the staged derailment at Acquigny was a Ouest 030C. I wrote an article about the locations used for The Train for the SNCF Society Journal so PM me if you want a copy of the text.

You'd be surprised! Look at that scene shot by shot and consider how you could stage it safely. Think no rails live, no way for the performer to slip under the train and how would you ensure that his foot couldn't get trapped between the train and the platform- which is probably the biggest hazard there? Remember that the sketch is filmed one shot at a time on a single camera so what you thought you saw you did not see. I know one sketch that involved the classic heroine tied to the track by the villain with a train approaching while the "hero" who was untrained and not a stunt double ran along the roof tops of the moving train, jumped into the cab and stopped the train with inches to spare. The heroine really was tied to the tracks, the hero really was running along the roofs, the train really was moving and the train really did stop very close to the heroine. Yet the whole stunt was filmed perfectly safely and there was no CGI.

Three films that are almost all railway are La Bete Humaine starring Jean Gabin which was filmed on the Paris-Le Havre main line and starts with a terrific sequence on the footplate of a Ouest-Etat Pacific including the taking of water from troughs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QoNL_yf62A&feature=related. Bataille de Rail which is a fictionalised account made immediately after the end of the occupation and released in 1945 of the Resistance Fer (French Railway Resistance) particularly during the period after D-Day when they were doing their best to disrupt German communications. A lot of the action sequences inspired those in John Frankenheimer's 1964 film "The Train" starring Burt Lancaster but Bataille de Rail but there is a spectacular derailment and really good footage showing the behind the scenes operation of the railway in that era . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUY22ESzmEQ The Last Train 1973 ( Le Train in Fr) starring Romy Schneider and Jean Louis Trignitant as two people fleeing from the advancing Germans in 1940 on an evacuation train that crosses France to La Rochelle. Some really good shots of the the train hauled by ex PO 4-6-0 230G353 . The plot is based on a Georges Simenon short story but I think it is actually better than the original and the ending is incredibly moving. David

I've noticed that just about every single UK news report filmed in middle America includes a shot of a freight train going through the town. I think my favorite US railroad scenes are in Emperor of the North - which though unpleasantly violent does seem to depict steam era railroad operation quite well. It doesn't seem to get shown very often though. I also rather like the opening title sequence of Breakheart Pass though the film as a whole is not great. There is a very dramatic scene set to music of a military train being assembled in "The Mercenaries" aka "The Dark of the Sun" It's supposed to be set in the Congo during the violent period after the Belgians suddenly pulled leaving chaos in their wake but was actually filmed in Jamaica and the loco looks very Baldwin- probably one of the USATC S161s that were used by the American military in Jamaica during WW2 and bought by the British Government after the war. The Jamaica railway was apparently the first railway to be built outside Europe and North America in 1844 and though it closed as a public railway in 1992 reopened this year.

No, according to Lexx, that happens when we discover the Higg's Boson !!! I believe that Turkish and Persian carpet weavers deliberately weave at least one imperfection into their incredibly finely made carpets as trying to achieve complete perfection was seen as competing with the Almighty.

Soon after I started working in London I was at Bush House on the Aldwych so sometimes used the station there when it's opening times coincided with my shifts- which wasn't that often. I was really just being too lazy to walk down Kingsway from Holborn but it was a rather eerie place even then with only one platform in use. There were also enough odd side tunnels and locked passageways to make any conspiracy theorist faint with excitement. I did once after a night shift decide to go the wrong way on the Central Line and reached Ongar. That bit of line was really odd as it was very much country branch line with combine harvesters in the fields on either side of the single track and having not at that time ever been back to the Isle of Wight since the end of steam it seemed really odd to be seeing such scenes from the windows of a Central Line tube train. I think the UndergrounD expected that area to be developed like another Metroland but the green belt legislation thwarted that. David

We did think of operating one exhibition layout as a typical 1950s SNCF branch line in real time which meant running a pick up goods train in one direction in the morning, disappearing to the café for several hours for a decent lunch then operating the return working just before the show shut in the late afternoon. Passenger services would be a bus sitting in the station courtyard because the trains had been replaced by buses in 1939, temporarily restored during the occupation and then closed forever in 1948. Beeching had predecessors!! I came upon one French terminus about five years ago which would be even easier to operate authentically. It does still have a passenger service though no freight anymore and on the Saturday I saw it the Chef de Gare's duties consisted of closing a level crossing barrier and opening a signal- both operated by a two lever frame adjoining the station building- to let a sole DMU in at about 10AM, restoring things to normal once it had arrived then late in the afternoon closing the barrier, giving the driver- who also had nothing to do for about seven hours- a hand signal to depart and finally closing the barrier. She didn't even sell tickets though this was a Saturday and I think the number of movements climb to six on school days. The line used to go further south and that section has been taken over by a preservation group but their trains had to terminate a hundred yards or so short of the SNCF station- whose trains they do connect with- to avoid the dangers of entering such a busy hub of railway activity even though it does still have two platform lines and only ever sees a one or two car diesel unit.

Hectopascals- the CAA (following the meteorologists) have just decreed that the aviation world must now fall into line with SI units and use hectopascals instead of the familiar millibars and we're not allowed to abbreviate it. It's a far more awkward word to say though the actual numbers are exactly the same. I find these units far less obvious that the previous bar (roughly atmospheric pressure as a standard sea level atmosphere is 1.013 bar) I've got a sense that four bar is a modest boiler pressure but if I saw 400 kPa (kilopascals) on a pressure gauge would have to think twice whether it was four atmospheres or some enormous pressure that would blow apart anything in its path.

Very few Pete. I know this because I once travelled from Calais to Innsbruck on the weekly overnight "Tyrolean Express" which offered a special attraction in the shape of a "dance car". This was a very loud carriage as it not only had speakers inside that played loud music over its dance floor for most of the night but also external speakers to share the fun with people sleeping in lineside communities, platform staff, cows and sheep etc. At no time though did I see anyone actually using this carriage. I have a feeling that a lot of the music was of the Tyrolean Schmaltz variety so people along its route must have really looked forward to Saturday night.

No problem for the cat, the stupid apes will soon refill his bowl!!

Most of the spam phone calls I'm getting these days seem to be from the "computer services" fraudsters so TPS seems to be working fairly well for the UK as these are all from abroad. I usually give these very short shift and warn them that they're employed by a criminal conspiracy before putting the phone down and I never confirm that I'm the name they've got. I've tried the pretending to go along with them to waste their time but they usually put the phone down very quickly if they don't get whatever response they're after. I think in future I'll just say when they ask if it's my name - they invariably mispronounce it- that we have a Mr. so and so in the fraud department and would they like me to put them through. What I could do with is something that plays the sound of a fax line or a computer connection or better still something that makes them think they've dialled somewhere they'd wished they hadn't.

I'm slightly curious about this thread as surely isn't half or more of the satisfaction of building your own the fact that you have done so not that you have a model that's not available RTR.

Thanks. It makes interesting reading. I wouldn't say that the pilot flying (the 1st officer) was at fault as he clearly thought the aircraft had handling problems at around V1 and you really don't want to take off with those. There is of course no rule in aviation that can't be set aside if the pilot deems it necessary for the safety of the aircraft. There is an odd one here that the decision to reject the TO seems to rest with the captain even when the FO is the pilot flying. If something is wrong with the handling then the pilot actually controlling the aircraft may have to make an instant judgement with no time to discuss it with the captain. I did note that the 737 stopped with 500M of runway to spare which while not generous is quite a long way from an overrun. I also don't know what sort of overrun area that runway has but the FO wold have done. Do you have a reference for the AAIB's report on Stansted ? David

Do you have a link to this report? I'd like to read it: which carrier was it?

Apart from the pre -Beeching steam railway that would take you to and from any reasonable sized community, one thing I really do miss are the small ports that used to be all around the coast and often surprisingly far inland. Unlike the large docks they were usually open to wander around, were full of scruffy atmosphere, had proper quaysides often with rails inset into them and even goods trains till quite late, and a fascinaing range of shipping from dirty British coasters (and clean Dutch ones) to Russian timber ships all worked by good honest Stothert and Pitt cargo cranes (the type Airfix should have modelled but didn't) and, unlike the current dehumanised wildernesses of concrete and containers , would have seemed quite familiar to Drake and even the ancient mariner who would both have found the local tavern in no time.

And employers could kill and injure them with impunity. It's always amused me when they announce on the cross channel ferry that "this vessel meets all the latest safety standards". Well yes, it would be illegal for it to leave the berth if it didn't.

But but, how many people would be strong enough to stand up - especially to their boss - and say "this practice is dangerous, we shouldn't be doing this." I thought the lady from the HSE's "Our job is to stop people being killed and injured at work" was entirely sensible and she clearly sees the dangers of a tick box compliance rather than sensible hazard assessment culture. In my own industry all producers and directors had to have H&S training after a member of the public Michael Lush died on the Late Late Breakfast Show during a stunt in 1986. It was actually quite shocking to realise just how cavalier we'd all tended to be before then about safety and anyone who did query it was generally dismissed as a wimp. Nowadays I fill in a hazard assessment form everytime I go filming and they do make me think about potential hazards- not all of them obvious- though I'll guarantee that's not universally done. Other industries were even worse. Before going to Uni in 1970 I worked for a while in ships' engine rooms. We had no hard hats nor safety shoes despite a lot of overhead work, no hearing protection despite noise levels of about 110dB in some areas and the electrical distribution panel had open bus bars with just a single wooden railing as a barrier (think ship, pitching around in heavy seas, water, exposed terminals ..shudder) and just as a bonus we had machine tools in the workshop powered by open belts. David

I think Shepherd's Bush Market is simply a recent renaming of Shepherds Bush (Met) to avoid having two stations with the same name at opposite ends of the green but it's the same station. The original Shepherd's Bush station on the Hammersmith line was between that and the present Goldhawk Road stations and was replaced by those two stations. Its site was swallowed up by the development of BBC Television Centre - which employed enough people to rather make nonsense of closing it in 1959. Though you can still see traces of it behind the multi story car park there wasn't a lot left and Wood Lane is a very welcome addition as is the overground station at Shepherd's Bush especially as I can now get to Brighton without having to go into central London.

Thanks very much Arthur that's incredibly comprehensive. From what I saw from the road I'd had no idea the rail operations were quite so extensive but I do remember the electric locos looking very odd - far more so than those I saw at South Shields a few months later- and from these pictures I finally know over forty years later what I did see. Apart from the slag dumping would there have been a process in DL's works that shot large gouts of flame into the night sky in a particularly dramatic way?. I vaguely remember seeing that from the ship. It's hard now to remember just what an enormous scale some of these rail served heavy industrial sites were on. It reminds me of the line in Night Mail about "the fields of apparatus set on the dark plain like giant chessmen" though that was the Clyde of course. David

This may start to answer a question I've been wondering about for years. In 1969 not long after the moon landing I was working on a cargo ship that had docked at Teesport- roughly where the white rectangle- is to load bagged fertiliser from ICI. It was an utterly bleak place even for an industrial quayside- nearest bus stop about a mile away, nearest pub about three miles away, nearest railway station (Grangetown now closed) about two and every so often on the tips behind the port a train would appear with two or three wagons and dump a load of white hot slag. This was quite impressive particularly at night but it was an inhuman landscape and I pitied the inhabitants of the few houses in the area. Anyway. One day I walked from the ship down the road along the edge of the river (right to left on the photo) and after about a mile or so passed a wharf that was connected to the works behind by a SG railway with OHE and I saw at least one fairly massive electric loco. I'd not seen industrial electrics before (though I went to college in South Shields a month or so later where the Westoe Colliery railway was still in full swing) so I've always wondered what it was that I saw on Teeside. Can anyone shed more light? I think the location where I saw this chunk of heavy industrial railway was roughly where I've marked the circle Our next port of call was Hamburg and that was a far better place to be. David

Apropos of Liverpool Street Station, a friend invited me to go on the Globe Theatre's "Sonnet Walk" on Saturday- a walk through the City interrupted by actors posing as as passers by who break into Shakespeare's sonnets- and the route took us through Exchange House Square which is built over Liverpool Street's approach tracks . On the south side of the square there is a glass screen that provides an excellent view looking down on and into the train shed from the opposite end to the concourse. I'm sure everyone who knows the station well knows all about this vantage point but I've been there often and had no idea that this existed. From the concouse it's most easily accessible by walking up the western side of the station. Andrew, will your layout be exhibited when it's completed? It's looking great. David

It looks to be standard embedded track of the type generally used on quaysides with a continuous check rail. I'm pretty sure that at the time the Weymouth Harbour Tramway was in use this was almost always laid on conventional sleepers with a double shoe (for bullhead rail) to enable the continuous check rail to be laid often with a lighter rail. The road surface would have been built up around the track originally with stone setts or cobbles which could be removed for maintenance or from about the 1920s with concrete which definitely did make track maintenance harder. I assume that there would be enough of a gap between the running and check rails to get at the fishplate bolts but any heavier maintenance did involve breaking up the concrete. This is one reason why embedded track on quaysides tended to get left in place long after it fell into disuse and is often still there covered in tarmac: the cost of lifting it and remaking the road surface simply wasn't justified by the scrap value of the rail. Being confined to very low speeds, quayside track probably didn't need a lot of maintenance and point levers and mechanisms were generally protected by concrete slabs or metal covers that could be removed fairly easily. There is a good description of this type of track on http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gansg/2-track/02track1.htm. If you want to really research this it might be worth getting in touch with the Bristol Industrial Museum who operate the Bristol Harbour Railway as a lot of this is inset into the quayside and they must have met any track maintenance issues.