Deliberately Old-Fashioned 0 Scale - Chapter 1

[Nearholmer]

I've probably bored with this before, but there is a fair body of academic literature looking at why/how the tolerability of risks in "westernised" societies has reduced over time. The broad thrust seems to be that as the risks that an individual  and their children are exposed to but over which the individual has no control (infant mortality, severe diseases of childhood, malnutrition, being worked to an early grave, poor-quality housing, warfare etc.) have fallen, then the tolerance of risks that can be reduced by the application of simple safety measures has also fallen. Its as if the "natural" risk level sets a benchmark, against which everything else is measured, without most people even realising that they are making the comparison.

 

Basically: life was cheap; now, in "westernised" societies, it is less cheap.

 

Be interesting to see whether The Present Plague resets risk-appetite subtly.

 

All a bit serious. Toy trains have led to several million times more joy than sorrow, and the "high voltage period" actually only lasted about thirty years, during which the vast majority of toy trains were still clockwork anyway.

[Donw]

50 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

As I would frequently remark to my children as they were growing up, pain and dismemberment is how we learn.  

 

In general one learns a lot from life's disappointments. You know instinctively that the mother giving in to the toddler pestering for some piece of rubbish will be given the wrong message and that finding out that you will not be given everthing later in life is much harder to bear. I fear many have reared children unfit to deal with the realities of life.

However since Dads often took over the running of a train set. 'You're a bit too young to handle electricity yet'.  It may well have been Father who got the shock. 

Don

[Keith Addenbrooke]

57 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Afraid I'm of the 'don't come running to me when you've crushed both your knees' school of parenthood. 

 

Essential preparation of for the School of Hard Knocks. 

 

EDIT: Sorry, I realise I thought I was posting on the Deliberately Old-fashioned Opinions topic. 

I was actually present at a School Assembly where our Headmaster - commenting on how badly we were crossing the main road outside the school - really did say: “If you get knocked over and break your legs, don’t come running to me.”  
 

Restoring order in the Hall took a while.

 

(It was the kind of School that had had a Model Railway Club, which was still in the Prospectus, but had folded by the time I arrived)

Edited April 28, 2021 by Keith Addenbrooke

[F-UnitMad]

1 hour ago, Ben B said:

Maybe the upper-middle classes buying such sets for their offspring back in the day considered it would be character building, give little Johnny the required backbone and moral fibre to go ... pacify foreign armies in his later life,

Armed of course, with just a cricket bat. 

 

One's servants carried the Gatling gun for back up.

[Edwardian]

25 minutes ago, F-UnitMad said:

Armed of course, with just a cricket bat. 

 

One's servants carried the Gatling gun for back up.

 

 

[Hroth]

32 minutes ago, Keith Addenbrooke said:

(It was the kind of School that had had a Model Railway Club, which was still in the Prospectus, but had folded by the time I arrived)

 

My school had a Transport Society, a sort of guilty secret.

We had an OO layout and a TT layout.  I used to use the OO layout as a testbed for my weird-bodied constructions from card and hacked up Airfix kits on Triang motorbogies and Jinty chassis...

 

The TT layout was an academic exercise.

 

Going back to O gauge (on topic!), I've just found the baseboard for a Hornby tinplate layout I got at a jumble sale for five bob.  I've still got the track and the nuts and bolts to secure it to the baseboard. We can rebuild it!

 

 

[Donw]

If you were really fortunate your parent would have sent you to the the Downs a school at Malvern. It has its own 9.5inch gauge railway which pupils can be involved in . No I didn't go to the school but I have driven a train round the line with passengers.  

 

Don

[St Enodoc]

17 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

My school had a Transport Society, a sort of guilty secret.

We had an OO layout and a TT layout.  I used to use the OO layout as a testbed for my weird-bodied constructions from card and hacked up Airfix kits on Triang motorbogies and Jinty chassis...

 

The TT layout was an academic exercise.

 

Going back to O gauge (on topic!), I've just found the baseboard for a Hornby tinplate layout I got at a jumble sale for five bob.  I've still got the track and the nuts and bolts to secure it to the baseboard. We can rebuild it!

 

 

So did mine, although during my first year it changed its name from Transport to Railway.

 

We had a 00 layout that ran from a shed to an outside terminus, with bell codes sent using old Army field telephones. This had replaced an earlier 0 gauge layout (on topic). Later, an N gauge layout was built in a spare room in the main building. I took part in several Society trips, most notably to Bowaters just before it closed - I had a footplate ride on the fireless loco "Unique" - and to the final Longmoor Open Day in July 1969.

[Nearholmer]

Yes, we had both a "model railway club", and a "railway society", but both were rather flash-in-the-pan things.

 

As an MRC, we did concoct a (very poor) layout, but the metalwork teacher who had been prevailed upon to organise said club didn't have his heart in it - his heart was firmly focused on finishing a forty stretch and collecting his pension. The RS was excellent, but wholly dependent upon a French master and his exceedingly delightful fiancee, and once they were married and, surprisingly soon after, had a baby to care for, spending Sundays driving a bunch of grubby teenagers to signalboxes and loco sheds in the school minibus was off the agenda.

 

Both groups (which had 99.9% overlap in membership) did act as very good recruiting grounds for a proper MRC though, one which is still going very strong - BlueLightning will know the one I mean.

[St Enodoc]

8 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Both groups (which had 99.9% overlap in membership) did act as very good recruiting grounds for a proper MRC though, one which is still going very strong - BlueLightning will know the one I mean.

Do tell...

[Nearholmer]

Uckfield MRC.

 

The "catchment area" for UMRC is now a large chunk of East Sussex, but in the very early days it was pretty much confined to Uckfield and Crowborough, with Norman Edwards, who lived in one and worked in the other, and Roger Bradgate, now club president, acting as link-men. All the keener members of our school MRC/RS were very early recruits, at the time when the whole club fitted into one guy's loft, along with his layout - getting up and down the ladder was always a bit of a squash!

[BlueLightning]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

The "catchment area" for UMRC is now a large chunk of East Sussex

 

We've got a few members from across the border in West Sussex as well, we were discussing catchment areas last night, and trying to work out if ours still centres on Uckfield, we think it does, and yes, still going strong, and getting ready to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the club being formed soon!

 

Oh, and we aid the running of a model railway club at the local secondary school.

 

Gary

[Florence Locomotive Works]

Being in Oklahoma, my school is utterly derived of either transport or model railway clubs. Thankfully, neither an interest in transport or railways is thought of by my classmates as being complete lunacy. I don’t think one will ever start though, as the audience simply is not there. We do have a robotics club though, and I have given thought to forming a model engineering society, the only problem being the acquisition of a lathe and finding and interested teacher to chair it. 
 

 

Douglas

[Ian Simpson]

My school had a model railway club back in the 1970s. One day the chemistry teacher looked in, gave our 00 layout a brief once-over and asked why the main line seemed to have been diverted to avoid a telegraph pole. Forty-five years later I'm still trying to think of a plausible response.

[Simond]

Presumably for the same reason it was not diverted to avoid the hill which subsequently had to have a tunnel dug through it...

 

 

[GRASinBothell]

The model railway at my school got Beechinged (at around the time much of the real railway was getting the same treatment)!

Anyway, back to Nearholmer's question, I found this in the HRCA supplement on the HV Metropolitan set:

When the HV Metros returned after the suspension of sales they were supplied with a revised rheostat, now with an overvarnished dark red enamelled case. Tubular, ceramic core resistor elements replaced the earlier flat type, and the switching arm and contact studs were covered by a metal plate attached to the top panel. The revised rheostat also featured different mains-to-track wiring connections. Whereas the previous rheostats were supplied with a detachable 2-wire input cord (with a plug for attachment to the power supply light socket on one end, the connecting plate at the other end, and another socket part way along the cord that is pushed onto two vertical pins on the top panel of the rheostat) the revised design had the input cord wired into the rheostat case with a separate flex for the output. Unlike the two early versions, the re-introduced rheostat has an OFF position that isolates the mains supply.

Seems like they tried to put something between little Johnny and the high voltage...

There are, of course, pictures in the supplement, but they don't seem to be amenable to a simple cut and paste!

Gordon

[Nearholmer]

5 minutes ago, GRASinBothell said:

Unlike the two early versions, the re-introduced rheostat has an OFF position that isolates the mains supply.

 

Many thanks, that's the important change that I was thinking of.

[St Enodoc]

12 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Uckfield MRC.

 

The "catchment area" for UMRC is now a large chunk of East Sussex, but in the very early days it was pretty much confined to Uckfield and Crowborough, with Norman Edwards, who lived in one and worked in the other, and Roger Bradgate, now club president, acting as link-men. All the keener members of our school MRC/RS were very early recruits, at the time when the whole club fitted into one guy's loft, along with his layout - getting up and down the ladder was always a bit of a squash!

 

11 hours ago, BlueLightning said:

 

We've got a few members from across the border in West Sussex as well, we were discussing catchment areas last night, and trying to work out if ours still centres on Uckfield, we think it does, and yes, still going strong, and getting ready to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the club being formed soon!

 

Oh, and we aid the running of a model railway club at the local secondary school.

 

Gary

Thanks. I thought it might be.

 

I used to enjoy the Uckfield show when I lived in Sussex. I'm still a country member of Brighton MRC and I hold the current record for the longest distance travelled to operate a club layout, set at Tinker's Farm in 2018 (which broke the existing record, also held by me, set at Brighton Centre 1998 when I'd just arrived from Hong Kong).

[Florence Locomotive Works]

We may be interested in this.

 

https://www.themodelrailwayclub.org/shop/models/o-gauge-7mm-scale/7mm-scale-track/vintage-o-gauge-layout/

 

It's a i'd say 1950s build Southern region EMU layout for sale on The Model Railway Club website. It seems very well built, the pictures aren't the greatest though.

 

 

Douglas

[Nearholmer]

That’s been notified elsewhere, and it is a really interesting piece of work, well worthy of conservation - if only I had time enough, and space.

[Florence Locomotive Works]

This looks interesting, although the front bogie could use a bath in some rust remover! Estimate looks very good as well.

 

https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/tooveys/catalogue-id-srtoo10300/lot-b97c1cb3-afb8-4a07-ae0e-ad1a00baccdb

 

There's also a originally Hunt for Bassett Lowke King class which is in bad need of a good owner.

 

https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/tooveys/catalogue-id-srtoo10300/lot-66c63e9c-e2bb-4a91-bf77-ad1a00baccdb

 

 

It should look like this.

 

http://www.tcawestern.org/images/bl54.jpg

 

Douglas

Edited May 6, 2021 by Florence Locomotive Works

[J. S. Bach]

But it's green!

[PatB]

On 30/04/2021 at 14:48, Nearholmer said:

That’s been notified elsewhere, and it is a really interesting piece of work, well worthy of conservation - if only I had time enough, and space.

it's got to be worth the asking price, just for the track components, although dismantling would be a shame.

[Nearholmer]

The track is arranged on ‘tiles’ of board, and it is all designed for easy dismantling and reassembly. It’s a work of genius.

[Compound2632]

7 hours ago, Florence Locomotive Works said:

There's also a originally Hunt for Bassett Lowke King class which is in bad need of a good owner.

 

https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/tooveys/catalogue-id-srtoo10300/lot-66c63e9c-e2bb-4a91-bf77-ad1a00baccdb

 

 

It should look like this.

 

http://www.tcawestern.org/images/bl54.jpg

 

Douglas

 

One of those can't be as described since there are numerous differences - the Saleroom one has longer front framing / footplate, different frame cut-outs ahead of the cylinders, different position of the steampipe, cruder and less well-proportioned cab, and the front end of the boiler appears to be of larger diameter than the smokebox.