Castle Aching

[brack]

20 hours ago, sem34090 said:

That said... without resorting to CGI they'd be hard pushed to find real vehicles enough to make complete trains of LSWR, SER, LNWR, MR and GNR stock these days.

Couldnt they get their carpenters/set designers to build a rake of suitably generic 4 wheel stock which could sort of look the part for most railways if relettered or repainted. I believe Messrs hattons might have some drawings they could use....

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

14 hours ago, Annie said:

In Colonial times 3ft 6in gauge suited our landscape well, - especially in the hilly and mountainous North Island.  However in the South Island with their wide plains country they could have done with something wider.  Our railways have been got at by modernists and corporate jargon speakers in the same way that occured in Britain and they are now a shadow of what they once were.

 

 

Well in Australia every separate colony demonstrated that it was its inalienable right to have a separate gauge to every other colony.

 

In Victoria, for what reason God alone only knows, we have the 5'3" Irish gauge,  while our fellow colonists in NSW colony wisely went for standard. That meant that everyone who travelled to Sydney for the next century on the overnight train had to wake up at the Victorian/NSW border and change trains. It was only in the 1960s nearly 60 years after Federation) that this idiotic anomaly was overcome by standardising the main rail link. By which time air travel and buses had cut the number of people using rail so it became uneconomical. As you sow, so shall you reap.

 

In our smallest state Tasmania, the gauge is 3'  something probably because it's the smallest state and the locals aspire to be cute and cuddly, if their fatuous local Green politicians are anything to go by.

 

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing but believe me getting woken up at 1 in the morning just after you've finally nodded off to sleep to change trains because of ancient colonial rivalries is a pain in the posterior.

Edited November 12, 2019 by Malcolm 0-6-0

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

12 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Can't argue with the will of the People!

 

So would that be another way of saying that in intellectual terms the will of the people is a will of the wisp? 

[Hroth]

13 hours ago, wagonman said:

We tried Militant Centrism under Blair. It didn't end well. So, in the words of Pte Fraser: we're all doomed!

 

 

 

Given the policies followed by the BBC when first broadcast, I feel that Fraser was excessively bowdlerised...

 

8 hours ago, brack said:

Couldnt they get their carpenters/set designers to build a rake of suitably generic 4 wheel stock which could sort of look the part for most railways if relettered or repainted. I believe Messrs hattons might have some drawings they could use....

 

Given that the forthcoming BBC adaptation of TWOTW was filmed in Liverpool and its environs, it wouldn't surprise me if a well known "Liverpool" retailer wasn't approached for some model railway stock to include in the production (cast your mind back to the railway scene in Ripper Street...).  This may well have influenced the proposed production of "generic" 4 and 6 wheeled stock!  Of course, TWOTW might end up with a rake of "suitably" painted Hornby 4-wheelers hauled by a Terrier....

 

 

[Donw]

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

 

 

Well in Australia every separate colony demonstrated that it was its inalienable right to have a separate gauge to every other colony.

 

In Victoria, for what reason God alone only knows, we have the 5'3" Irish gauge,  while our fellow colonists in NSW colony wisely went for standard. That meant that everyone who travelled to Sydney for the next century on the overnight train had to wake up at the Victorian/NSW border and change trains. It was only in the 1960s nearly 60 years after Federation) that this idiotic anomaly was overcome by standardising the main rail link. By which time air travel and buses had cut the number of people using rail so it became uneconomical. As you sow, so shall you reap.

 

In our smallest state Tasmania, the gauge is 3'  something probably because it's the smallest state and the locals aspire to be cute and cuddly, if their fatuous local Green politicians are anything to go by.

 

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing but believe me getting woken up at 1 in the morning just after you've finally nodded off to sleep to change trains because of ancient colonial rivalries is a pain in the posterior.

 

Wouldn't it be easier to get an earlier train so you changed trians before midnight ?

Don

[Tom Burnham]

17 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Almost certainly not - all the civil engineering and in particular the width of the formation - the foundation layers for the track - will have been built for the narrower gauge and require widening. Where re-doubling is being done in Britain, it isn't as simple as just laying new track on the old formation: to meet current standards, the entire line has to be re-engineered. 

Also one of the key advantages of using narrow gauge (ie less than 4ft 8 1/2 in) as expounded in the late c19 and early c20 was that smaller radius curves could be used, enabling the line to follow the contours of the land more and reducing the volume of earthworks.  Clearly this would be a greater problem in hilly terrain than over flat plains.

[runs as required]

May I recommend  some clever lyrics here  to CA Parishioners

dh

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

4 hours ago, Donw said:

 

Wouldn't it be easier to get an earlier train so you changed trians before midnight ?

Don

 

There were only two - the daylight which left at the crack of dawn and the overnight. It was a long trip from Melbourne to Sydney. But on both you still had to change at the border which made it even longer, but that was fixed when they finally standardised the line. Personally I prefer to fly.

 

The shorter leg of the journey was at the Victorian end running from Melbourne to Albury on the Murray River which was the town on the border between the two former colonies where each colony/state's line met.. The NSW part was several hours longer. We aren't dealing with the sort of travel as on relatively short trips like the ECML or the WCML as in the UK.

[runs as required]

3 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

Also one of the key advantages of using narrow gauge (ie less than 4ft 8 1/2 in) as expounded in the late c19 and early c20 was that smaller radius curves could be used, enabling the line to follow the contours of the land more and reducing the volume of earthworks.  Clearly this would be a greater problem in hilly terrain than over flat plains.

An excuse to post one of my favourite Cuneo paintings: "The climb to Asmara".

You can find 3 tunnel mouths in the composition. 

Alan Moorhead's "The Blue Nile" is also worth reading about the Expeditionary Force of Indian railway engineers under General Napier who spent 3 years building  a railway up from the Red Sea as a punitive assault on Ethiopia to rescue a party of (presumably Anglican) missionaries from the Ethiopian Coptic Christians.

Their railway was dismantled as the Force withdrew from the highlands.

dh

[drmditch]

Re: Track Gauges.

 

Although this subject is easily 150 to 200 years pre-grouping, people might like to be aware of the recent archaeology and research in two recent publications:-

'Setting the Standard' ed.Dominique Bell - Reports on the Willington Waggonway of 1785                           - ISBN 9780905974989

'The Railway Revolution' by Les Turnbull - Early Railways of the Great Northern Coalfield - 1605 to 1830  - ISBN9780993115158

 

To summarise - the extent of waggonways in the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham was much greater than I had supposed. By the early 1800s, many of these were inter-linked and using similar equipment.

Gauges varied but tended to be between 4'3" and 4'8 1/2".

Principal factor in determining gauge was the width of a horse's backside, with room for shafts and/or haulage ropes, and the wheels had to be outside those.

By 1811 the Killingworth Waggonway and some of it's connections was working on 4'8" (and possibly 1/2).

George therefore used a gauge for which there was already a considerable mileage and a lot of equipment.

 

Like many people I had tended to date the 'Railway Revolution' from the S&D in 1825, but in fact the S&D marked an important transition to the '2nd Railway Revolution'. 

Mr Turnbull gives quantities and values for the amount of coal moved, and the wagons, horses and men involved.

No wonder there was commercial incentive to use coal/steam haulage. The names of Blackett and Hedley were familiar, but I didn't realise that there was a Blenkinsop engine (cogged wheels and track) running at Coxlodge in 1813.

 

So, perhaps Mr I.K. Brunel was accurate in calling 4'8 1/2" the 'coal-cart' gauge, but by 1824/5 it was already a proven concept with experience and engineering in support!

What a shame he didn't manage to think through the requirements for track engineering more thoroughly!

 

(Of course even Mr G Stephenson didn't do that - the stone block sleepers of the S&D, and most of the L&M were meant to be solid 'like the foundations of an hoose'.)

Which is ironic since all the waggonway experience was with timber cross-sleepers!

 

 

[Talltim]

On 11/11/2019 at 11:00, Edwardian said:

 

Well, that's a map of the 1906 General Election results. The yellow represents the Liberal party and, hence, a landslide. It ushered in a period of social reform, yet, represented a high point from which the Liberal party sank to its present relative obscurity.  A strange death indeed, the story of which is part of the current A Level History syllabus, I recently discovered.

 

 

Where do the universities come into it?

[Compound2632]

20 minutes ago, Talltim said:

Where do the universities come into it?

 

The universities returned their own MPs until the 1950 General Election (Representation of the People Act 1948). Members of the Universities (i.e. graduates holding the degree of Master of Arts)* could vote in their university constituency as well as in the constituency in which they were resident. Pitt the Younger and Palmerston both represented the University of Cambridge; Peel and Gladstone Oxford, at various times in their careers.

 

*I'm not sure whether the electorate was all MAs or just resident MAs - i.e. those with a nominal function in the university (was hesitates to say job, at least prior to 1871).

Edited November 12, 2019 by Compound2632

[Nearholmer]

One thing to bear in mind is that the franchise was still quite narrow in 1906, no women, and only about half of adult men, I think, so the outcome of the general election was even less representative than it is now.

 

The country probably wasn’t the mass of consensus that the outcome suggests, it might even have been a seething mass of discontent with no outlet through democracy, or an un-seething mass of cowed discontent.

Edited November 12, 2019 by Nearholmer

[runs as required]

3 hours ago, drmditch said:

Re: Track Gauges.

Although this subject is easily 150 to 200 years pre-grouping, people might like to be aware of the recent archaeology and research in two recent publications:-

'Setting the Standard' ed.Dominique Bell - Reports on the Willington Waggonway of 1785                           - ISBN 9780905974989

'The Railway Revolution' by Les Turnbull - Early Railways of the Great Northern Coalfield - 1605 to 1830  - ISBN9780993115158

By co-incidence I collected my copy of Les Turnbull's new book just this afternoon from the new Technical College in the Stephenson Quarter  The transaction was completed on what appeared to be the exact site of the Stephensons' old Forth St works  where I used to buy building materials from the old Doves builders' Yard " Behind Central Station but ahead on Service" when I first arrived on Tyneside 43 years ago. 

'The Railway Revolution' follows very much the format of Les Turnbull's earlier books: "Railways Before Stephenson" and "Rails of the Derwent Valley". But this collects all the of the early railway map documentation together into a coherent west to east detail survey of the the 'Great North Coalfield'. And the text spans the replacement of the lumbering road wains to chaldrons running on wood railways,  the 'pit to seasales' build up of the transport industry and the market for the re-use of relatively  standardised rail technology components - all of which, he argues, amounts to 'The Railway Revolution'.

I'd love to have some framed enlargements of his beautiful little illustrations of the maps, pits and staiths. Cracking good value for £15.

dh

[Northroader]

If you’re going to start banging on about climate change, you might have to change the patron saint of this thread, have you thought about that?

Edited November 12, 2019 by Northroader

[runs as required]

All this fury about academics drawing students' attention to their right to register both in their place of study and in their parents' constituency is because oldies seem scared stiff of the youth vote.

As an octogenarian I'd have it the other way round: if Brexit is going to take at least another 6 years before "we can get our country back", then I think old farts like me should be relieved of the vote.

Cos it'll make nay difference to me one way or t'other, hinny ✌

dh

Edited November 12, 2019 by runs as required

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, runs as required said:

All this fury about academics drawing students' attention to their right to register both in their place of study and in their parents' constituency

Although they can register in both places, they can only cast a vote in one of them.

i am not sure how they enforce that in practice, though.

[Compound2632]

The United Kingdom section of the Wikipedia article on plural voting makes entertaining reading.

[Annie]

5 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

The United Kingdom section of the Wikipedia article on plural voting makes entertaining reading.

Where's the wide eyed shock and surprise button in forum posts?  It's like an episode of Monty Python except it's true.

[Edwardian]

Vote early, vote often!

[Hroth]

10 hours ago, runs as required said:

As an octogenarian I'd have it the other way round: if Brexit is going to take at least another 6 years before "we can get our country back", then I think old farts like me should be relieved of the vote.

 

Unless we could sign a paper before voting, pledging us not to vote for anything so silly.

 

Ummmm.......

 

Perhaps we could also invoke the spirit of Campbell-Bannerman to obtain an election result similar to that of his administration?  Given the fantasy spending war thats going on at the moment, and the equally fatuous tactical candidate war, it might be the best outcome, though not very likely.

 

[Donw]

22 hours ago, drmditch said:

Re: Track Gauges.

 

(Of course even Mr G Stephenson didn't do that - the stone block sleepers of the S&D, and most of the L&M were meant to be solid 'like the foundations of an hoose'.)

Which is ironic since all the waggonway experience was with timber cross-sleepers!

 

 

 

I cannot agree with that statement. The early waggonways such as Wilinson's in 1605 used wooden rails on wooden sleepers. By 1767 the Coalbrookdale company was using Iron rails and selling them. Later the wooden sleepers were replaced with stone blocks which were sturdier.

In the Forest of Dean the tramways using plate rails were laid on stone blocks these were not totally replaced by the railway and as late as 1946 stone was still be taken down Bixslade on the plateway by Horse drawn waggons. The stone blocks were still in place when I walked down around 1990 and there still existed the stones in the ground for a plateway turnout near the Mushet ironworks. So both types of formation were known and used.  

 The addtional stresses of heavy locomotives and faster speeds would of course be fairly new when Stephenson and Brunel were first building railways.

 

Don

[Regularity]

The point about stone blocks is that you can have an even surface between them on which the horses walk...

[Nearholmer]

I think Benjamin Outram needs to be mentioned here; wasn't he the chap who effectively standardised the horse-drawn railroad in the form that has become archetypal, and set the pattern that very early locomotive-railway engineers, rather to their regret, followed? Before Mr Outram, I think construction of the track was more varied in form.

 

As mentioned before, stone-blocks from those very early days still lurk about the railway infrastructure in odd places, most notably as the facing wall of an abandoned loading dock at Watford Junction. Oodles of them from the London & Greenwich used to rest at New Cross Gate, but I think they've gone from there now.

[Tom Burnham]

2 hours ago, Donw said:

In the Forest of Dean the tramways using plate rails were laid on stone blocks these were not totally replaced by the railway and as late as 1946 stone was still be taken down Bixslade on the plateway by Horse drawn waggons. The stone blocks were still in place when I walked down around 1990

Still quite a few stone blocks to be seen when I walked along the Bixslade tramway route last autumn.