Castle Aching

[richard i]

8 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Ha! Not so long ago, someone suggested I was possibly the last person alive to refer to one of these

 

 

as a 'bus. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I do too and to a ‘phone 

must be my job

richard 

[Edwardian]

45 minutes ago, richard i said:

I do too and to a ‘phone 

must be my job

richard 

 

Good for you Richard.  I now picture your job as that of Licensed to Kill Grammarian, an unlikely cross between James Bond and Stephen Fry.  

 

I always type 'phone.  When I do so in texts, my children despair of me.

 

Sometimes I suffer from 'flu.  

 

In other news, I believe that RADAR remains an acronym.  I also run a secret re-education centre where captured BBC correspondents are taught to say 'railway', not 'train station' and are forced to repeat the word 'harassment' until they can pronounce it correctly.

 

  

[TT-Pete]

The wife told me to shut up in the car yesterday because having seen a road sign I was having a rant about how it should be "Road Closed Ahead" rather than "Road Ahead Closed" and was just getting into my stride on my other bugbear about "train" versus "railway" station.

 

But I notice that some order has been restored to the cosmic balance as the shop "Bargain's" in Shaftesbury high street has had the attention of a signwriter and is now "Bargains". Perhaps somebody else did what I always wanted to do; walk in and say "Hello, can I speak to Mr Bargain please?"

 

[Edwardian]

10 hours ago, Donw said:

 

Put like that and you could justify anything

 

Don

 

Quite a bit, but not anything.

 

The willing suspension of disbelief is always necessary, to some extent or other, in this hobby.  This is true of all fictions. A model railway is certainly a fiction.

 

For OO modellers our tracks are too narrow, but even where that is amended, there are few dead-scale models or layouts of real locations that do not require some fictionalisation or compromise.  Our model steam engines tend not to produce smoke (leastways it's generally a bad sign when they do). 

 

Like all fictions, model railways tend to have a premise. One of the most popular types of premise, it seems to me, is the 'might have been'.  This is a line, or an extension of a real line, that was proposed and not built.  I notice nowadays many layouts adopt the premise 'Beeching didn't close it so I can run my blue diseasals somewhere nice'.*

 

Some premises people find harder to swallow than others.  I believe that one can be quite bold with one's premise in a fictionalisalised world.  The success of any premise depends not so much upon how inherently credible the premise is, but upon how credible and consistent is the detail that supports it. In short it needs internal logic and for all the details to be appropriate. Get that right and the audience should be able to suspend disbelief for the duration of its sojourn within your imagined world. 

 

Take the Isle of Tumm as a good example.  This is an extreme premise in that it depends upon acceptance that there is a large fictional land mass in the North Sea.  Yet, if for even a moment you can accept that as a possibility, the detail and thought that has gone into its history, geology, etc and the use of appropriate railway equipment, is such that it can create and sustain the audience's suspended disbelief. 

 

Everything, I hope, that we have evolved in these pages fits the premise of Castle Aching and either helps to sustain it or at least does not detract from it.  There is often a good reason for the extrapolations from reality. Extrapolations are necessary to sustain the myth; for example, in order to rationalise the existence of an 1860s Rifle Volunteer drill hall at CA and its occupants in 1905, I found it necessary to go as far back as the Napoleonic Wars in order to 'correct' the organisation of militia and regular infantry regiments in the county. 

 

In the case of Colman's, should I wish to build and decorate, say, a dozen PO covered wagons, the existence of a direct route east to Norwich on the WNR could have lead to the seed traffic using WN rails. The need to travel on the GER at each end and on the WNR in the middle of the route might, might, be a contributory factor in favour of a PO fleet.  The Harrison & Camm (IIRC) wagons are to a traditional design, and could easily have been built, to my mind, at any point in the 1900s. 

 

After all, we have already appropriated another interesting wagon and created the Norfolk Fish Oil & Guano Co. and Norfolk Oilfields POs. 

 

Turning to Harrison & Camm, before they were cited as the builders of the Colman's covered wagons (can anyone confirm that?)** the only thing I had known them for was as the builders of the infamous Spillers iron flour vans (1906-07). 

 

It seems that they supplied covered wagons to the Rhymney Railway.  If to H&C's own design, this is potentially interesting for freelancers.

 

 

 

*For me the need or wish to adopt this premise is simply a further reason not to model the post 1963 period, wherein the railway was either closed or made horrible.  Simply turn the clock back to a time before it was closed when interesting things ran there. But, that's just my prejudice. I think that, for convenience, I can simply lump together the post war railway scene into certain phases.  I know, let's call them 'Eras': 

 

Era 1: 1945-1948: Victory to State Expropriation

Era 2: 1948-1963: Botched Modernisation & Decline

Era 3: 1963-1982: Closed & Made Horrible

Era 4: 1982 onward; Isations

 

I think these sum up the essence of the thing, and pretty much describe Britain generally in the period.

 

** EDIT: M&GN Joint Railway Society gives the number (4807) and the builder and date as H&C 1908.  As it came from Colman's one might assume they had some record, but I should think a surviving builder's plate might give a works number (4807 seems more likely as an H&C works number than as a Colman's fleet number!), as well as builder and date. 

 

 

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Edwardian
Grammar

[Regularity]

15 hours ago, Edwardian said:

I have been so focused on the site of the WN Norwich terminal, I was thinking only of the RC Cathedral.

 

And me an Anglican!

Which explains you not knowing that it wasn’t a cathedral until 1976: East Anglia, being somewhat keener in the pursuit of Protestantism (Oliver Cromwell, for example) didn’t have many of us “left footers” (as you might see it!) and was part of the RC diocese of Northampton, which still reaches down to the Thames at Reading.

 

At the time of the WNR, it wasn’t a cathedral.

[drmditch]

Re: Ancient Structures and Railways.
Perhaps Norwich was fortunate not to be visited by one Mr R Stephenson FRS, of Newcastle, Berwick, and Conwy fame.

Re: Ecclesiastical Titles Acts of 1851 and 1871.
According to Wikipedia there were no prosecutions under either of these Acts.
Would Mr Edwardian care to comment?

I am concerned lest such xenophobic legislation be promoted by the current government.

 

[Edwardian]

7 minutes ago, drmditch said:

Re: Ancient Structures and Railways.
Perhaps Norwich was fortunate not to be visited by one Mr R Stephenson FRS, of Newcastle, Berwick, and Conwy fame.

Re: Ecclesiastical Titles Acts of 1851 and 1871.
According to Wikipedia there were no prosecutions under either of these Acts.
Would Mr Edwardian care to comment?

I am concerned lest such xenophobic legislation be promoted by the current government.

 

 

The 1851 Act was very much travel in the wrong direction.  The 1871 Act that repealed it did so with a glorious bit of erastian fudge:

 

And whereas no ecclesiastical title of honour or dignity derived from any see, province, diocese, or deanery recognised by law, or from any city, town, place, or territory within this realm, can be validly created, nor can any such see, province, diocese, or deanery be validly created, nor can any pre-eminence or coercive power be conferred otherwise than under the authority and by the favour of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors, and according to the laws of this realm; but it is not expedient to impose penalties upon those ministers of religion who may, as among the members of the several religious bodies to which they respectively belong, be designated by distinctions regarded as titles of office, although such designation may be connected with the name of some town or place within the realm

 

And, quite right Simon, though clearly built as a Cathedral-like power statement at the behest of the Realm's premier recusant, the then Duke of Norfolk, we should not name the church of St John the Baptist as a cathedral in the context of 1905.

 

So, the cathedral, the only cathedral, as appropriate to the 1914 Norwich station map, has to have been a reference to that dedicated to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, constructed after the pre-Conquest Diocese of Elmham had been transferred, via Thetford, to Norwich in 1094.

[Hroth]

23 minutes ago, drmditch said:

Re: Ancient Structures and Railways.
Perhaps Norwich was fortunate not to be visited by one Mr R Stephenson FRS, of Newcastle, Berwick, and Conwy fame.

 

He also has the offence of the Water Tower corner of the Chester City Wall to be taken into account.

[Andy Hayter]

James, shouldn't " 'flu " be " 'flu' "?

 

I'll get my pedant's cloak of invisibility and go.

[Caley Jim]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

I also run a secret re-education centre where captured BBC correspondents are taught to say 'railway', not 'train station' and are forced to repeat the word 'harassment' until they can pronounce it correctly.

Can they also be taught that the surface on which one stands outside a building is 'the GROUND'. 'The FLOOR' is the surface one stands on when inside a building.!  Please, pretty please? 

 

Jim 

[Northroader]

Using floo powder?

[drmditch]

13 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

And, quite right Simon, though clearly built as a Cathedral-like power statement at the behest of the Realm's premier recusant, the then Duke of Norfolk, we should not name the church of St John the Baptist as a cathedral in the context of 1905.

Is it correct to use the term 'recusant' after 1888?

[Edwardian]

1 minute ago, Andy Hayter said:

James, shouldn't " 'flu " be " 'flu' "?

 

I'll get my pedant's cloak of invisibility and go.

 

Yes, believe it or not, I had thought about that. 

 

Obviously, if the word was fluenza, it would be flu'.

 

As it is, a word unusually abbreviated at both ends, 'flu' just looks odd, and I've not seen it in practice.

 

In usage terms, I thus compromised on 'flu. 

 

However peculiar it may be, there is room for common sense and compromise in my world. On a good day, for instance, I will admit the legitimacy of the United States of America as a sovereign nation (though, obviously, only from 1783, and, frankly, sometimes, I feel that that I should adopt the position of Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and deny the USA statehood until 1852) .

[Caley Jim]

19 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 The 1871 Act that repealed it did so with a glorious bit of erastian fudge:

 

And whereas no ecclesiastical title....... 

Only a lawyer could get away with a sentence that long! 

 

Jim 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Caley Jim
Predictive text (again!)

[drmditch]

3 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

Can they also be taught that the surface on which one stands outside a building is 'the GROUND'. 'The FLOOR' is the surface one stands on when inside a building.!  Please, pretty please? 

 

Jim 

Also please ensure correct use of articles. Some modern practice I can ignore, but 'the HMS Victory' makes me scream and shout.

 

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

Era 1: 1945-1948: Victory to State Expropriation

Era 2: 1948-1963: Botched Modernisation & Decline

Era 3: 1963-1982: Closed & Made Horrible

Era 4: 1982 onward; Isations

 

 

If I may be so bold, I think the flaw in that characterisation is at the very start of it. "Victory" might have been an event (or two?), but it doesn't describe that state of the railways/nation, which might be summarised as "exhausted, skint, and deluded". I could unpack the "deluded" part, and one really needs to, because IMO there were multiple, very different, delusions in play simultaneously.

 

Once the position in 1945 is better described, my view is that what followed begins to make some sense, and is "unfinished business" that we really, desperately, need to deal with.

 

Whether you want to build models of any of it is a matter of taste.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Edwardian]

7 minutes ago, drmditch said:

Is it correct to use the term 'recusant' after 1888?

 

As the Duke is head of a traditional recusant family, I thought it culturally descriptively appropriate to a Roman Catholic power-dynasty such as the Howards, as opposed to, say, converts or immigrants of the same denomination.  

 

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

If I may be so bold, I think the flaw in that characterisation is at the very start of it. "Victory" might have been an event (or two?), but it doesn't describe that state of the railways/nation, which might be summarised as "exhausted, skint, and deluded". I could unpack the "deluded" part, and one really needs to, because IMO there were multiple, very different, delusions in play simultaneously.

 

Once the position in 1945 is better described, my view is that what followed begins to make some sense, and is "unfinished business" that we really, desperately, need to deal with.

 

Whether you want to build models of any of it is a matter of taste.

 

 

 

 

 

I quite see that, so:

 

Era 1: 1945-1948: Knackered to State Expropriation

Era 2: 1948-1963: Botched Modernisation & Decline

Era 3: 1963-1982: Closed & Made Horrible

Era 4: 1982 onward; Isations

[Hroth]

9 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Whether you want to build models of any of it is a matter of taste.

 

I agree, it depends on personal feelings about the "era", but it all should be modelled, its part of the history of the British railway system.

 

And while we're all feeling fin de siècle, lets revisit

 

 

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Hroth

[Compound2632]

7 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

As the Duke is head of a traditional recusant family, I thought it culturally descriptively appropriate to a Roman Catholic power-dynasty such as the Howards, as opposed to, say, converts or immigrants of the same denomination.  

 

22 minutes ago, drmditch said:

Is it correct to use the term 'recusant' after 1888?

 

I think one is only actually recusant if one practices recusancy: that is, refusal to participate in those rites of the state religion that one is legally bound to do so, accepting the obligation to pay fines or suffer other penalties in lieu. Although the Recusancy Act was not repealed until 1888, they were effectively a dead letter following the Catholic Emancipation Act  of 1829. By mid-century it was becoming clear that Parliament's ability to legislate on matters of religion was becoming increasingly tenuous. The Ecclesiastical Titles Act, in response to the establishment of Roman Catholic dioceses, was the last blast of Parliamentary no-Popery. 

 

One has to remember too that at this period, the Westminster Parliament was the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In Ireland, the majority of the population was Catholic without being either immigrant, convert, or recusant, at least in the English sense. The same applies to the remoter parts of Scotland.

[Edwardian]

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

 

 

I think one is only actually recusant if one practices recusancy: that is, refusal to participate in those rites of the state religion that one is legally bound to do so, accepting the obligation to pay fines or suffer other penalties in lieu. Although the Recusancy Act was not repealed until 1888, they were effectively a dead letter following the Catholic Emancipation Act  of 1829. By mid-century it was becoming clear that Parliament's ability to legislate on matters of religion was becoming increasingly tenuous. The Ecclesiastical Titles Act, in response to the establishment of Roman Catholic dioceses, was the last blast of Parliamentary no-Popery. 

 

One has to remember too that at this period, the Westminster Parliament was the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In Ireland, the majority of the population was Catholic without being either immigrant, convert, or recusant, at least in the English sense. The same applies to the remoter parts of Scotland.

 

Indeed, and the 1871 Act mirrors the position of 'non-enforcement' following Emancipation. I hold, though, that 'recusant' remains a culturally appropriate, if not technically current, term for families such as the Howards.

 

If anyone feels it to be pejorative I will, of course, desist.  I'm not aware that it is, and would not intend it so.  Rather, I would have thought that among the Roman Catholic laity it might be a rather chic designation, rather like the pride some French families take in having a guillotined ancestor.  Now I know that a peasant could just as easily have been a recusant as a lord, or have been guillotined for that matter, but few of us can resist such an intoxicating blend of snobbery and romance, and I imagine it's rather more chic to hint at one's forebears hiding Jesuits in priest holes in their moated manor house than it would be to claim a quarrelsome Navvy as ancestor.  Human nature, sadly, being what it is. 

 

The famous recusant artisan-made-good is, of course, Gillow, the furniture maker.

[Nearholmer]

40 minutes ago, Hroth said:

but it all should be modelled, its part of the history of the British railway system.

My toy train set seems to have got itself stuck part way through the botched modernisation, not because of the history of real railways, but because of the history of toy ones: the 1950s were the time of the last hurrah (a very muted hurrah, as it happens) of old-style 0 gauge.

 

Of course, I airbrush-out the fact that my railway is carrying ever-less remunerative traffic, costing the taxpayer a fortune, and paying its staff pathetic wages, in the same way that it is necessary to airbrush-out from models of Edwardian railways the even more pathetic wages, rampant snobbery, etc etc. Start representing real reality and it all gets far too complicated!

[Edwardian]

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

My toy train set seems to have got itself stuck part way through the botched modernisation, not because of the history of real railways, but because of the history of toy ones: the 1950s were the time of the last hurrah (a very muted hurrah, as it happens) of old-style 0 gauge.

 

Of course, I airbrush-out the fact that my railway is carrying ever-less remunerative traffic, costing the taxpayer a fortune, and paying its staff pathetic wages, in the same way that it is necessary to airbrush-out from models of Edwardian railways the even more pathetic wages, rampant snobbery, etc etc. Start representing real reality and it all gets far too complicated!

 

Yes. 

 

Railway modelling is one's 'Happy Place'

 

Most see that as their childhood and, so, modelling is a rose-tinted exercise in nostalgia.  That is not a criticism, because that is its purpose. 

 

For me, the 'Happy Place' is a somewhat idealised past.  It is a past that never existed, so, in a way, setting it in a place that never existed seems reasonably honest and consistent!

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Turning to Harrison & Camm, before they were cited as the builders of the Colman's covered wagons (can anyone confirm that?)**

 

The photo of the covered wagon and of coal wagons Nos. 19 and 35 posted in the Colman's thread all show Harrison & Camm axleboxes. The general features of the coal wagons are those of wagons to the 1907 RCH specification though that does not preclude them having been built earlier. Overall there's nothing in those photos that would cause one to doubt the quoted 1908 date for Colman's wagon-procurement spree, though I agree the covered vans could easily have been built some years earlier.

  

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

It seems that they supplied covered wagons to the Rhymney Railway.  If to H&C's own design, this is potentially interesting for freelancers.

 

 

Is it known when the Rhymney bought these? And is there a date for the photo (evidently post-1925 by the 16" GW.) There's not a great deal there that is common with the Coleman's vehicles. The round-bottomed axleboxes are characteristic of the 1880s/1890s, though that doesn't preclude them being used on later new construction. (The Harrison & Camm axleboxes on the Colman's wagons are of the Ellis' Patent type as used by the Midland from c. 1890.) It's an eclectic design - the body framing has a rather Midland look to it while the doors are reminiscent of LCDR (etc.) practice. There's no sign of a builder's plate.

[Donw]

4 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Quite a bit, but not anything.

 

The willing suspension of disbelief is always necessary, to some extent or other, in this hobby.  This is true of all fictions. A model railway is certainly a fiction.

 

For OO modellers our tracks are too narrow, but even where that is amended, there are few dead-scale models or layouts of real locations that do not require some fictionalisation or compromise.  Our model steam engines tend not to produce smoke (leastways it's generally a bad sign when they do). 

 

Like all fictions, model railways tend to have a premise. One of the most popular types of premise, it seems to me, is the 'might have been'.  This is a line, or an extension of a real line, that was proposed and not built.  I notice nowadays many layouts adopt the premise 'Beeching didn't close it so I can run my blue diseasals somewhere nice'.*

 

Some premises people find harder to swallow than others.  I believe that one can be quite bold with one's premise in a fictionalisalised world.  The success of any premise depends not so much upon how inherently credible the premise is, but upon how credible and consistent is the detail that supports it. In short it needs internal logic and for all the details to be appropriate. Get that right and the audience should be able to suspend disbelief for the duration of its sojourn within your imagined world. 

 

Take the Isle of Tumm as a good example.  This is an extreme premise in that it depends upon acceptance that there is a large fictional land mass in the North Sea.  Yet, if for even a moment you can accept that as a possibility, the detail and thought that has gone into its history, geology, etc and the use of appropriate railway equipment, is such that it can create and sustain the audience's suspended disbelief. 

 

Everything, I hope, that we have evolved in these pages fits the premise of Castle Aching and either helps to sustain it or at least does not detract from it.  There is often a good reason for the extrapolations from reality. Extrapolations are necessary to sustain the myth; for example, in order to rationalise the existence of an 1860s Rifle Volunteer drill hall at CA and its occupants in 1905, I found it necessary to go as far back as the Napoleonic Wars in order to 'correct' the organisation of militia and regular infantry regiments in the county. 

 

In the case of Colman's, should I wish to build and decorate, say, a dozen PO covered wagons, the existence of a direct route east to Norwich on the WNR could have lead to the seed traffic using WN rails. The need to travel on the GER at each end and on the WNR in the middle of the route might, might, be a contributory factor in favour of a PO fleet.  The Harrison & Camm (IIRC) wagons are to a traditional design, and could easily have been built, to my mind, at any point in the 1900s. 

 

After all, we have already appropriated another interesting wagon and created the Norfolk Fish Oil & Guano Co. and Norfolk Oilfields POs. 

 

Turning to Harrison & Camm, before they were cited as the builders of the Colman's covered wagons (can anyone confirm that?)** the only thing I had known them for was as the builders of the infamous Spillers iron flour vans (1906-07). 

 

It seems that they supplied covered wagons to the Rhymney Railway.  If to H&C's own design, this is potentially interesting for freelancers.

 

 

 

*For me the need or wish to adopt this premise is simply a further reason not to model the post 1963 period, wherein the railway was either closed or made horrible.  Simply turn the clock back to a time before it was closed when interesting things ran there. But, that's just my prejudice. I think that, for convenience, I can simply lump together the post war railway scene into certain phases.  I know, let's call them 'Eras': 

 

Era 1: 1945-1948: Victory to State Expropriation

Era 2: 1948-1963: Botched Modernisation & Decline

Era 3: 1963-1982: Closed & Made Horrible

Era 4: 1982 onward; Isations

 

I think these sum up the essence of the thing, and pretty much describe Britain generally in the period.

 

** EDIT: M&GN Joint Railway Society gives the number (4807) and the builder and date as H&C 1908.  As it came from Colman's one might assume they had some record, but I should think a surviving builder's plate might give a works number (4807 seems more likely as an H&C works number than as a Colman's fleet number!), as well as builder and date. 

 

 

 

 

I understand and share your willingness to fudge facts. Really it boils down to artistic licence and the degree to which it works depends on the skill and artistry. Stated as a list of variations from reality your fudges sounded  like  some dictator rolloing in and saying this is the new truth. Whereas as a follower of this thread I admire the artistry used to weave facts and fantacies together so that Castle Aching is believable. Nothing jars. Your bald statement was the Magician revealing his trick and a little of the magic disappears.

 

Don  

[Edwardian]

3 minutes ago, Donw said:

 

I understand and share your willingness to fudge facts. Really it boils down to artistic licence and the degree to which it works depends on the skill and artistry. Stated as a list of variations from reality your fudges sounded  like  some dictator rolloing in and saying this is the new truth. Whereas as a follower of this thread I admire the artistry used to weave facts and fantacies together so that Castle Aching is believable. Nothing jars. Your bald statement was the Magician revealing his trick and a little of the magic disappears.

 

Don  

 

My dictatorial moment was by way of joshing with Stephen, who was insisting (both here and on the Colman's thread, that I could only run seed traffic in sheeted cattle wagons.  Which is correct, for the real world. 

 

I'll put the curtain back. 

 

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Edwardian
spelling!