Jump to content
 

Recommended Posts

I worked in the criminal justice arena for 30 years and never came across a comparable crime without a clear personal motive.

 

I really feel for those whose life's work was destroyed. 

  • Like 1
  • Agree 3
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium

I had a vague notion that the Caledonian were involved in the construction of the armoured trains shown above and I managed to find this additional info;

 

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/february-1919-first-world-war-armoured-trains/

 

Mind you , If I modelled a pair of them in transit behind a Dunalastair I folk would just assume it was Friday night in Partick again....... 

 

 

  • Like 1
  • Funny 3
Link to post
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Donw said:

Dreadful news of a model railway show smashed up by vandals at Stamford. It would be heartbreaking if it was your stuff.

 

https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/photos-of-the-damage-vandals-broke-into-stamford-welland-academy-9070669/

Sacrilige. They should be burnt at the stake.
Seriously though, this is dreadful and I hope the little s***s get thoroughly punished.

Link to post
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Dave John said:

I had a vague notion that the Caledonian were involved in the construction of the armoured trains shown above and I managed to find this additional info;

 

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/february-1919-first-world-war-armoured-trains/

 

Mind you , If I modelled a pair of them in transit behind a Dunalastair I folk would just assume it was Friday night in Partick again....... 

Back in the 1970's, while researching for his book on Railway Guns, the late Geoff Balfour found a wagon at a military site in the south of England (can't recall where) which he believed to be Caledonian and asked me for help in identifying it.  It turned out to be a Dia 30 30Ton Heavy Weight Wagon, one of 5 built of which 4 were requisitioned by the army in 1914 and used as the gun wagons at either end of the trains shown in the photograph.  As a result it was preserved and was on display at an army museum.  I would need to look for the article he wrote for the HMRS Journal at the time to get more details.

 

Jim

  • Informative/Useful 2
Link to post
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

Not quite true about the effectiveness of the armour of the period. The first British tanks were armoured in what was first considered to be effective protection. However like many military advances their deployment revealed that while many projectiles from small arms and also small shrapnel did not penetrate the armour the tanks and their crews were casualties of the process of spalling.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall

 

This occurs as that page shows when while the actual projectile does not penetrate the armour, the shock wave created by its impact does which causes flaking off of the internal surface resulting lethal sprays of high speed metal particles. This was such a problem that the tank crews had to be issued with forms of body armour especially around the face and eyes -

 

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30013368  

 

This spalling was also sufficient at times to destroy engines etc. I imagine that this threat would have also applied to the crew cabins of armoured locomotives which would have therefore been quite sufficient to disable them. Also Edwardian is quite right when he cites the infrastructure as the principal weakness. All a determined enemy had to do was lift some track sections and set up an ambush and the armoured train would have been rendered impotent.       

 

Armoured trains featured prominently in the Russian Civil War of the 1920s, a conflict characterised by relatively small, highly mobile formations operating over very large areas and distances. 

 

I would suggest that the comparison with tanks is misleading. The tanks of the period moved very slowly over quite short distances, their crews were in close proximity inside the cramped working space and the vehicle would be the focus of concentrated fire of various calibres.

 

  • Informative/Useful 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

Reading that item linked-to by DJ, the function of the trains becomes a lot clearer: to be something like a movable shore-fort.

 

This makes some sense, with a very long coastline to defend, and it makes the objection of "attack on infrastructure" largely irrelevant ........ they were only meant to trundle to the site of action, then sit still.

 

Mind you, it only makes some sense, not complete sense, because, surely, an attempt at invasion would involve a force a lot bigger than could be repulsed, or even contained, by the number of troops that the trains carried, and, with the best will in the world, trains aren't really all that fast, so by the time one got within striking distance the enemy would, surely, be well-ashore and pouring men and weaponry in at a fair old rate.

 

Wouldn't they have been better defending the shore from the sea, or did they envisage doing both at the same time?

 

Mind you, I suppose warfare was a lot slower in WW1. Relatively poor means of communication, very basic means to detect the approach of an enemy, barely any air cover, barely any remote-control of anything, deployment at <10mph etc.

Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold
11 hours ago, Donw said:

Dreadful news of a model railway show smashed up by vandals at Stamford. It would be heartbreaking if it was your stuff.

 

https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/photos-of-the-damage-vandals-broke-into-stamford-welland-academy-9070669/

An update on this, with a more positive side:

https://deepings.nub.news/n/fundraising-campaign-for-market-deeping-railway-club-smashes-target

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Donw said:

Dreadful news of a model railway show smashed up by vandals at Stamford. It would be heartbreaking if it was your stuff.

 

https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/photos-of-the-damage-vandals-broke-into-stamford-welland-academy-9070669/

 

I have given up trying to understand why these idiots do that sort of thing. I have often thought that the most effective form of punishment would be to find these kids' parents and make the parents do the clean up and restoration/restitution while making the kids stand and watch. I imagine after that that these little horrors would probably be grounded for life.  

  • Agree 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

I have given up trying to understand why these idiots do that sort of thing. I have often thought that the most effective form of punishment would be to find these kids' parents and make the parents do the clean up and restoration/restitution while making the kids stand and watch. I imagine after that that these little horrors would probably be grounded for life.  

Indeed. It's the reason I'm scared about ever taking my stuff to shows or exhibitions.

Link to post
Share on other sites

I was shocked and saddened by the reports of the destruction at the Market Deeping show.  However, I refrained from commenting after reading a request elsewhere on RMweb for no "hanging and flogging" style posts.  Personally, I'd get in touch with the blokes in bowler hats and flat caps...

 

Perhaps we could do with a #MeLikewise tag?

 

12 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Mind you, I suppose warfare was a lot slower in WW1. Relatively poor means of communication, very basic means to detect the approach of an enemy, barely any air cover, barely any remote-control of anything, deployment at <10mph etc.

 

In terms of speed of action, the order would be aircraft, naval units, troops deploying to concentration areas by train and finally horse&cart and footslogging, so unless you had your own aeroplane, or were being chauffered about by the Navy, rather less than 10MPH was definitely your lot.  In fact, the slower  the better...

 

Aircover wasn't "bare", it was (perhaps up to the spring of 1918) not even a concept.  Aeroplanes were originally deployed for reconnisance and artillery spotting.  Fighters were developed first to shoot down recce and spotter planes and then to shoot down each other too.  Bombers were deployed to try to wreck airfields, destroy ammunition dumps and disrupt troop concentrations, not to bomb trenches during a ground attack.  Lack of instantaneous communication meant that control for "calling in an airstrike" was nonexistent.  Considering that powered flight only started in 1903 and radio valves were invented (the triode) in 1906, its not surprising that battlefield communications and tactics continued to rely on the telegraph, the telephone and finally a messenger on a motorbike or on foot. It is surprising that technology only 10 years old found a use in WW1.

 

Edited by Hroth
Link to post
Share on other sites

Indeed.

 

I was thinking that the biggest problem might be knowing that an enemy landing was in progress at all. If they picked the right, quiet spot, and managed to sneak inshore under the cover of darkness, landing at first-light, things might be well underway before a local spotted something odd happening, ran/cycled to the nearest police house, and the whole process of response was initiated.

 

I know that inshore waters were a lot busier with small vessels, and that there were more people out and about in the countryside then than now, but even so.

 

Back to all that Riddle of the Sands type stuff, I guess, and the fact that the enemy would have struggled to keep-up a meaningful flow of troops to the beach-head, because the RN could block their route across the North Sea quite effectively.

  • Like 1
  • Agree 2
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold
49 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Is that the Keyser kit? I've got one to build.

 

Yes it is, and it turned it's wheels under it's own power for the first time last night, the kit definitely has issues, but the build hasn't been anywhere near as bad as I was expecting!

 

Casual plug, the whole build has been done live on my YouTube channel during my Sunday night livestreams! (9pm UK time), old streams are still there and can be watched back at your leisure if you want to see what has been needed. The build was started during episode 6, and bar doing some transfers at the start of episode 7 has been the sole project.

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Ma3oblCBkUmeQTE9_movQ

 

Gary

  • Like 2
  • Thanks 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

On 17/05/2019 at 13:11, Edwardian said:

We have to wait until the 1950s for the first really good British tank, the Centurion.    

 

 

We actually had some fairly solid tank designs right from the early war. The Matilda II was good and had a better a/t gun that the contemporary German tanks and far superior armour. It lacked only in maneuverability. Later the Cruiser Mark IV or Crusader was a very good vehicle and once it received the 6pdr gun had an excellent balance of the three requisites for armoured warfare. The Infantry Mark III Valentine was also good and although slow, had a turret ring of sufficient diameter to allow it to carry a 75mm gun. Later marks of Churchill were excellent machines, again slow, but well armoured and gunned. By late 1944 we had the Comet, which with its 77mm gun and excellent turn of speed was a very good vehicle. By that stage however with General Motors and Ford churning out Shermans by the mile, the Comet wasn't produced in useful enough numbers, and arguably wasn't really needed. Comet however was the useful design step from Crusader to Cromwell and finally to Centurion.

A very small number of Centurion Mk.1s with 17pdr gun were sent to Germany in spring 1945 but fighting ended before they saw action.

British armour in WW2 suffered mostly due to incorrect design theory (cruiser vs infantry tank concepts and not a maid-of-all-work design that would finally become the MBT of the 1960s) but more than that, very poor tactics. And I mean dreadful. We suffered many thousands of casualties and equipment losses quite unnecessarily due to not grasping the proper concept of how to use armour and it was misused again and again in France 1940, throughout the western desert and right into 1944 in Europe.

Britain however was not alone in this, early American armoured tactical thinking was also lacking, as was French, Italian and Soviet. About the only combatant who grasped the correct use of armour were the Germans and they realised it was merely a component of an overall tactical system involving all arms. Where the Germans suffered was in over-complex designs that were simply too well engineered and they suffered through mechanical issues with some designs rushed into service too soon, and of course later on their obsession with bigger is better, when what they really needed was average in quantity. The Sherman provided such a vehicle for the Allies by the war's second half.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

Remembering what my friend's father had to say about the tanks they were given before the Sherman, his biggest complaints weren't about armour strength, or engine power, but: armour faces that were too flat, especially on turrets, because (without the armour being pierced) they caused shock-waves that "turned the poor s*ds inside to a bag of jelly"; poorly designed and defended track-drives, which allowed the tank to be imobilised by lightly armed infantry who could then get grenades or a flamethrower into it; and, being armed with "pea shooters". His descriptions of how tank crews perished were utterly appalling, but from what I could understand taking a direct hit from an armour piercing shell wasn't the main issue, and was regarded as one of the better ways to go. No wonder the survivors came away hardened.

  • Informative/Useful 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold
1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Remembering what my friend's father had to say about the tanks they were given before the Sherman, his biggest complaints weren't about armour strength, or engine power, but: armour faces that were too flat, especially on turrets, because (without the armour being pierced) they caused shock-waves that "turned the poor s*ds inside to a bag of jelly"; poorly designed and defended track-drives, which allowed the tank to be imobilised by lightly armed infantry who could then get grenades or a flamethrower into it; and, being armed with "pea shooters". His descriptions of how tank crews perished were utterly appalling, but from what I could understand taking a direct hit from an armour piercing shell wasn't the main issue, and was regarded as one of the better ways to go. No wonder the survivors came away hardened.

 

Too right. There is a very good display about this aspect of tank warfare in the Bovington Tank Museum (where coincidentally I am going later today for a Dorset Tourism event).

Link to post
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, RedGemAlchemist said:

Indeed. It's the reason I'm scared about ever taking my stuff to shows or exhibitions.

There shouldn't be a problem at the major shows where they are held in exhibition centres or the like which have their own 24 hour security.  Model Rail and the Perth Show spring readily to mind.   Smaller local shows in local halls are perhaps more vulnerable.  In this respect I would be concerned that others of that anti-social ilk might get the idea and try it in their area.

 

I recall being at at least one exhibition where the hosting club provided a measure of security by some of their members staying in the hall overnight.

 

Jim

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...