well filled baps The Sheep Chronicles : These are the adventures of a Sheep, the Works Forecat and Naughty George,

[Stubby47]

Tinner's is a pure inglenook, and Trelothen will incorporate one.

 

During quiet spells at an exhibition they do help to keep the brain active.

[MrWolf]

1 minute ago, NHY 581 said:

Can't beat the addition of a loop for operational interest though* 

 

I contemplated a quicky inglenook jobbie a while ago but came to the conclusion I would find it too limiting.  

 

 

*The opinions expressed therein are those of the individual and not necessarily these

of the organisation. 

 

 

Rob. 

 

It was one of the reasons I modified the Shipston on Stour track plan for my layout. I ended up with a loop, headshunt and a couple of sidings.

It will allow for more movements to be carried out clear of the running line for starters. 

It also helps with the open space appearance of the layout.

 

 

 

 

[MrWolf]

6 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

Coal traffic was concentrated at Hove (actually) until well into the 80s.

 

It might seem a retrograde step, but with modern logistics organisation, a lot of traffic and pollution could be taken off the roads by reopening goods yards and forwarding from there in electric vans / 7.5 tonners the last couple of miles to the destination.

It might even create some jobs and revenue for the railways.

[MrWolf]

Back to cramped yards.

There's much discussion of the C&HPR  on here and the occasional Pannier invasion. 

This ex LNWR beastie at Cromford in 1933 looks like an unholy union of 517 class and a Pannier. 

Should keep most people happy.

 

 

 

[NHY 581]

19 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

Back to cramped yards.

There's much discussion of the C&HPR  on here and the occasional Pannier invasion. 

This ex LNWR beastie at Cromford in 1933 looks like an unholy union of 517 class and a Pannier. 

Should keep most people happy.

 

 

 

 

Ah! 

 

An L&NWR Dock tank or Bissell tank or 317 Class, call it what you will..

 

A favourite of mine, Von Wulf and perhaps more of which anon...........

 

Rob

[MrWolf]

I do like LNWR engines, especially the more obscure ones.

[Donw]

The point about the Inglenook idea is you have restricted siding lengths and headshutnt length with sufficient wagons on the layout to make shunting a puzzle.  You can also use a tiddlywink computer a different colour tiddly for each wagons pull out enough for the number of wagons to make up. There are rather a lot of combinations and you start from the last one so each shunt is different. You can rather get the hang of it but it is still way better than idly shuffling them round.

I liked Dave Cannons version  a loop with two opposing sidings. The were hooks to hang the tiddlies on so the audience new what you had to do. Sadley Dave died too early.

 

Don 

[MrWolf]

It would be interesting to know how many variations of movement you could have with say, ten wagons and a brake van. 

Almost infinite I imagine, but a loop with two sidings is also quite prototypical, Hatch on the GW springs to mind. I think Culkerton had a similar arrangement. It would also explain why the branch terminus has always been so popular.

[bgman]

54 minutes ago, NHY 581 said:

L&NWR

 

Even nicer in 7mm and I won't need any excuse to use it on my proposed GWR layout using 'that Rule' we all love and adore !

 

 

G

 

 

[NHY 581]

6 hours ago, bgman said:

 

Even nicer in 7mm and I won't need any excuse to use it on my proposed GWR layout using 'that Rule' we all love and adore !

 

 

G

 

 

 

 

Lush. 

 

 

[JustinDean]

9 hours ago, MrWolf said:

Back to cramped yards.

There's much discussion of the C&HPR  on here and the occasional Pannier invasion. 

This ex LNWR beastie at Cromford in 1933 looks like an unholy union of 517 class and a Pannier. 

Should keep most people happy.

 

 

 

This reminds me I’ve got a kit of one of these in the shelves of doom. 
 

[Nick C]

9 hours ago, MrWolf said:

It would be interesting to know how many variations of movement you could have with say, ten wagons and a brake van. 

Almost infinite I imagine, but a loop with two sidings is also quite prototypical, Hatch on the GW springs to mind. I think Culkerton had a similar arrangement. It would also explain why the branch terminus has always been so popular.

The 'standard' Inglenook puzzle has 8 wagons, of which 5 are formed into the 'outgoing' train - that gives, if my maths is right, 6,720 possible combinations. going up to 7 out of 10, you'd get over 600k...

 

Loop and two (or three) sidings is certainly pretty common - it's quite interesting (at least if you're me...) to flick though some of the diagrams on the SRS site to see just how many variations on that theme there are, with all sorts of odd combinations, presumably dictated by local geography and traffic patterns. 

[Captain Kernow]

10 hours ago, MrWolf said:

 

It might seem a retrograde step, but with modern logistics organisation, a lot of traffic and pollution could be taken off the roads by reopening goods yards and forwarding from there in electric vans / 7.5 tonners the last couple of miles to the destination.

It might even create some jobs and revenue for the railways.

I will now put my Retired Professional Railwayman's Pedant hat on for a moment.

 

A little under 10 years ago, I was part of a team looking very seriously into putting supermarket and other retail traffic back onto the railway in containers, to serve destinations in Devon and Cornwall (for which read Plymouth and Truro).

 

This would have been quite a fairly long haul, from either Daventry or (nearer) Avonmouth.

 

One of the problems (and there were quite a few) was that modern logistics dictated that the minimum length of train, that would make any economic sense, was 26 boxes, arranged two per bogie wagon.

 

This in turn affected the ability of what goods yard infrastructure remained, to handle trains of this length.

 

The planning initially centred around one train per day for Plymouth and a daily train for Truro (serving most of Cornwall).

 

Whilst Tavistock Junction Yard would have been capable of handling the Plymouth train (in terms of length, although it would have had to have been split once it was in the yard), the amount of space available there (whilst still accommodating the quite large local PW set up and other users) wasn't quite sufficient and there was a lot of talk of acquiring the speedway track immediately to the west of the railway yard, but this was on the flood plain of the River Plym and that opened up another large can of worms (to say nothing of potential local reaction, had this been progressed).

 

Cornwall was an even larger problem, because there was simply no remaining yard large enough and within Network Rail ownership (because this would have to start up with minimal infrastructure costs for the supermarket operators and actual freight haulier).

 

Burngullow would have been possible, but they wanted something nearer to Truro and in any case, most of Burngullow Yard was (or indeed still is) in the ownership of Imerys and securing a transfer of ownership and planning permission for such a large facility was by no means certain and would almost certainly have been too costly.

 

It could only really have been Truro Yard, because Truro is better located for the road transport portion of the operation from train to final destination, but all Truro really had was two sidings at the back of the yard. Many site visits were made and meetings held, but the operational constraints meant that the Truro train would have had to have been split somewhere in Cornwall on the way down, possibly in Par Down Goods Loop and the first half of the train worked forward, unloaded and then probably taken empty to Burngullow, just for stabling and the second portion worked into Truro etc.

 

The scheme finally died when individual supermarkets and retailers started to pull out of the Cornwall train, which never really reached the state of having 'sold' all 26 boxes on the train. We had about 67% take-up for the Cornwall train only and with retailers starting to pull out (because they couldn't agree on terms with local Cornish road transport operators), the scheme was never going to happen.

 

Hopes lingered for the Plymouth train for a while longer, possibly with one train serving both Plymouth and Cornwall (the Plymouth customer base was rather different from the Cornish one, with just two large retailers in Plymouth interested in most of that train). Then the initial freight train haulier pulled out and another, smaller operator got involved, but by then the odds were just stacked against the scheme and it all just fizzled out. Such a shame.

 

What all this impressed upon me, though, was the fact that Victorian railway goods infrastructure is rarely adequate enough to cope with modern day freight transport logistics and economics and that larger, modern bespoke facilities work much better.

 

[bgman]

Trago Mills !

[SteveyDee68]

10 hours ago, MrWolf said:

It would be interesting to know how many variations of movement you could have with say, ten wagons and a brake van. 

 

@Nick C already replied above, but I like the maths (and used to teach it, for my sins!) so here we go in full...

 

If you look on the Model Railway Shunting Puzzles website, you'll find that Adrian Wymann gives the formula for calculating the number of possible moves as:

 

 

 n is the number of wagons, k is the number selected. The exclamation mark means these are factorials ie multiply together the sequential numbers to make that number. So...

 

    10!   

   (10-7)!

 

Exciting stuff!!

 

10! = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 = 3,628,800

(10-7)! = 3! = 1 x 2 x 3 = 6

 

3,628,800 / 6 = 604,800 possible combinations (exactly!)

 

Or as @Nick C rightly said, "Over 600k"

 

Of course, that doesn't figure in the brake van but as that would need to be at the end of the train upon completion it will simply sit at the end of the dispatch siding.

 

As Adrian explains on his (brilliant) website, the late Carl Arendt worked out a minimum size as being 3-2-2 opposed to the 5-3-3 of the original Inglenook Sidings. He doesn't attempt scaling up, but to retain the Inglenook formula the sidings wagon capacity needs to equal the head shunt capacity including the loco...

 

I decided to try to figure out a method of calculating these from looking at the classic Inglenook and trying to apply the same method to the reduced Inglenook. I need to examine the train length (TL), the wagon capacity of a single siding (SSC) and the total siding capacity (TSC) and the total number of wagons involved, and see if there was a relationship.

 

First and foremost, both sidings had to have the same capacity. On first examination, the classic Inglenook had a train length of SSC + 2, but as soon as you examined the reduced Inglenook ... well, that didn't work! However, a relationship did seem to present itself so bore some further playing around with examination...

 

Classic Inglenook

Total Siding Capacity (TSC) = 3 + 3 = 6 wagons

Train Length (TL) = TSC - 1 = 6 - 1 =  5 wagons

Total Wagons (TW) = TL + Single Siding Capacity (SSC) = 5 + 3 = 8 wagons

 

So far, so good!

 

Reduced Inglenook

TSC = 2 + 2 = 4 wagons

TL = TSC - 1 = 4 - 1 = 3 wagons

TW = TL + SSC = 3 + 2 = 5 wagons

 

My calculations appear to have worked* so I'll try applying them to larger siding capacities, increasing them by 1 wagon length each time...

 

Expanded Inglenook + 1

TSC = 4 + 4 = 8 wagons

TL = TSC - 1 =  8 - 1 = 7 wagons

TW = TL - SSC = 7 + 4 = 11 wagons

 

So, it appears that selecting 7 wagons out of 10 doesn't follow the Inglenook puzzle formula after all - selecting from 11 wagons keeps the puzzle difficulty proportional to the original! Amazingly, adding just three extra wagons has added a lot more complication ie 11! / (11-7)! = 39,916,800 / 24 = 1,663,200 combinations!!

 

Reduced Inglenook = TWC = 5

Classic Inglenook = TWC = 8

Expanded Inglenook + 1 = TWC = 11

 

If (a big if!) this same pattern of adding three wagons to the Total Wagon Capacity holds true, Expanded Inglenook + 2 should have a TWC of 14 wagons...

 

Expanded Inglenook + 2

TSC = 5 + 5 = 10 wagons

TL = TSC - 1 = 10 - 1 = 9 wagons

TW = TL + SSC = 9 + 5 = 14 wagons

 

How many combinations now?  726,485,760. 

 

Well, that should provide a bit of variety!

 

I think my calculations hold true, both to siding lengths etc and to the relationship of total number of wagons (adding three each time) - I'll have to email Adrian and see what he thinks of them, and find out they've all been done before!

 

Bear in mind that the total length will be TL + PL (point length) + HL (headshunt length*) and must include some extra for clearances past stock around points. The last example would be 9 wagons for the train length + point length + 5 wagons plus loco. Even using short wheelbase stock and a small loco, the total length quickly grows to a point where a more interesting track layout can be fitted into the same space; after all, the Inglenook is a simple back and forth shunting puzzle in the same direction, whereas a loop gives opportunity for sidings to be shunted in opposite directions.

 

HOURS OF MATHEMATICAL FUN!

 

 

 

* At the point of typing, I didn't know if this was perhaps a mathematical "fluke" as sometimes happens under particular circumstances (I vaguely recall one with perimeter and area where a false relationship can be seen with a particular set of figures!)

 

[MrWolf]

I'm not even going to attempt to calculate the permutations having had a quick count up over the morning tea break, coming up with:

 

Goods road: Ten wagons

Back road: Thirteen wagons

Headshunt: Manor/Mogul +Toad 

 

Add to this the toing and froing of passenger and maintenance traffic, I should be kept busy.

 

 

 

[Ramblin Rich]

1 hour ago, Captain Kernow said:

I will now put my Retired Professional Railwayman's Pedant hat on for a moment.

 

A little under 10 years ago, I was part of a team looking very seriously into putting supermarket and other retail traffic back onto the railway in containers, to serve destinations in Devon and Cornwall (for which read Plymouth and Truro).

 

This would have been quite a fairly long haul, from either Daventry or (nearer) Avonmouth.

 

One of the problems (and there were quite a few) was that modern logistics dictated that the minimum length of train, that would make any economic sense, was 26 boxes, arranged two per bogie wagon.

 

This in turn affected the ability of what goods yard infrastructure remained, to handle trains of this length.

 

The planning initially centred around one train per day for Plymouth and a daily train for Truro (serving most of Cornwall).

 

Whilst Tavistock Junction Yard would have been capable of handling the Plymouth train (in terms of length, although it would have had to have been split once it was in the yard), the amount of space available there (whilst still accommodating the quite large local PW set up and other users) wasn't quite sufficient and there was a lot of talk of acquiring the speedway track immediately to the west of the railway yard, but this was on the flood plain of the River Plym and that opened up another large can of worms (to say nothing of potential local reaction, had this been progressed).

 

Cornwall was an even larger problem, because there was simply no remaining yard large enough and within Network Rail ownership (because this would have to start up with minimal infrastructure costs for the supermarket operators and actual freight haulier).

 

Burngullow would have been possible, but they wanted something nearer to Truro and in any case, most of Burngullow Yard was (or indeed still is) in the ownership of Imerys and securing a transfer of ownership and planning permission for such a large facility was by no means certain and would almost certainly have been too costly.

 

It could only really have been Truro Yard, because Truro is better located for the road transport portion of the operation from train to final destination, but all Truro really had was two sidings at the back of the yard. Many site visits were made and meetings held, but the operational constraints meant that the Truro train would have had to have been split somewhere in Cornwall on the way down, possibly in Par Down Goods Loop and the first half of the train worked forward, unloaded and then probably taken empty to Burngullow, just for stabling and the second portion worked into Truro etc.

 

The scheme finally died when individual supermarkets and retailers started to pull out of the Cornwall train, which never really reached the state of having 'sold' all 26 boxes on the train. We had about 67% take-up for the Cornwall train only and with retailers starting to pull out (because they couldn't agree on terms with local Cornish road transport operators), the scheme was never going to happen.

 

Hopes lingered for the Plymouth train for a while longer, possibly with one train serving both Plymouth and Cornwall (the Plymouth customer base was rather different from the Cornish one, with just two large retailers in Plymouth interested in most of that train). Then the initial freight train haulier pulled out and another, smaller operator got involved, but by then the odds were just stacked against the scheme and it all just fizzled out. Such a shame.

 

What all this impressed upon me, though, was the fact that Victorian railway goods infrastructure is rarely adequate enough to cope with modern day freight transport logistics and economics and that larger, modern bespoke facilities work much better.

 

Very interesting Tim. I've linked your post into the thread on getting freight onto railways as it's relevant.

[MrWolf]

2 hours ago, Captain Kernow said:

I will now put my Retired Professional Railwayman's Pedant hat on for a moment.

 

A little under 10 years ago, I was part of a team looking very seriously into putting supermarket and other retail traffic back onto the railway in containers, to serve destinations in Devon and Cornwall (for which read Plymouth and Truro).

 

This would have been quite a fairly long haul, from either Daventry or (nearer) Avonmouth.

 

One of the problems (and there were quite a few) was that modern logistics dictated that the minimum length of train, that would make any economic sense, was 26 boxes, arranged two per bogie wagon.

 

This in turn affected the ability of what goods yard infrastructure remained, to handle trains of this length.

 

The planning initially centred around one train per day for Plymouth and a daily train for Truro (serving most of Cornwall).

 

Whilst Tavistock Junction Yard would have been capable of handling the Plymouth train (in terms of length, although it would have had to have been split once it was in the yard), the amount of space available there (whilst still accommodating the quite large local PW set up and other users) wasn't quite sufficient and there was a lot of talk of acquiring the speedway track immediately to the west of the railway yard, but this was on the flood plain of the River Plym and that opened up another large can of worms (to say nothing of potential local reaction, had this been progressed).

 

Cornwall was an even larger problem, because there was simply no remaining yard large enough and within Network Rail ownership (because this would have to start up with minimal infrastructure costs for the supermarket operators and actual freight haulier).

 

Burngullow would have been possible, but they wanted something nearer to Truro and in any case, most of Burngullow Yard was (or indeed still is) in the ownership of Imerys and securing a transfer of ownership and planning permission for such a large facility was by no means certain and would almost certainly have been too costly.

 

It could only really have been Truro Yard, because Truro is better located for the road transport portion of the operation from train to final destination, but all Truro really had was two sidings at the back of the yard. Many site visits were made and meetings held, but the operational constraints meant that the Truro train would have had to have been split somewhere in Cornwall on the way down, possibly in Par Down Goods Loop and the first half of the train worked forward, unloaded and then probably taken empty to Burngullow, just for stabling and the second portion worked into Truro etc.

 

The scheme finally died when individual supermarkets and retailers started to pull out of the Cornwall train, which never really reached the state of having 'sold' all 26 boxes on the train. We had about 67% take-up for the Cornwall train only and with retailers starting to pull out (because they couldn't agree on terms with local Cornish road transport operators), the scheme was never going to happen.

 

Hopes lingered for the Plymouth train for a while longer, possibly with one train serving both Plymouth and Cornwall (the Plymouth customer base was rather different from the Cornish one, with just two large retailers in Plymouth interested in most of that train). Then the initial freight train haulier pulled out and another, smaller operator got involved, but by then the odds were just stacked against the scheme and it all just fizzled out. Such a shame.

 

What all this impressed upon me, though, was the fact that Victorian railway goods infrastructure is rarely adequate enough to cope with modern day freight transport logistics and economics and that larger, modern bespoke facilities work much better.

 

 

That's a very interesting perspective from the sharp end as it were, thanks for putting all of that down.

When we consider that key sites were sold off for development with undue haste, preventing any future changes of direction (The Great Central route or HS1, as I like to call it springs to mind.) and the fact that the tax revenues generated from thousands of freight vehicles running on public roads far outstrips the monies that could be demanded from railway companies doing everything in house, such schemes to revamp the railway system will always hit the wall.

We've already witnessed the fact that nationalising industries not only means that they are less flexible towards market demands, innovation and progress, having no rivals, but they are also vulnerable to industrial action, infighting amongst management and are effectively bled dry by the state as a cash cow to support less profitable areas of government controlled affairs.

 

 

Call me a cynic if you will! 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 28, 2021 by MrWolf

[NHY 581]

1 hour ago, bgman said:

Trago Mills !

 

 

Bless ewe !

[NHY 581]

On 28/10/2021 at 10:58, SteveyDee68 said:

 

@Nick C already replied above, but I like the maths (and used to teach it, for my sins!) so here we go in full...

 

If you look on the Model Railway Shunting Puzzles website, you'll find that Adrian Wymann gives the formula for calculating the number of possible moves as:

 

 

 n is the number of wagons, k is the number selected. The exclamation mark means these are factorials ie multiply together the sequential numbers to make that number. So...

 

    10!   

   (10-7)!

 

Exciting stuff!!

 

10! = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 = 3,628,800

(10-7)! = 3! = 1 x 2 x 3 = 6

 

3,628,800 / 6 = 604,800 possible combinations (exactly!)

 

Or as @Nick C rightly said, "Over 600k"

 

Of course, that doesn't figure in the brake van but as that would need to be at the end of the train upon completion it will simply sit at the end of the dispatch siding.

 

As Adrian explains on his (brilliant) website, the late Carl Arendt worked out a minimum size as being 3-2-2 opposed to the 5-3-3 of the original Inglenook Sidings. He doesn't attempt scaling up, but to retain the Inglenook formula the sidings wagon capacity needs to equal the head shunt capacity including the loco...

 

I decided to try to figure out a method of calculating these from looking at the classic Inglenook and trying to apply the same method to the reduced Inglenook. I need to examine the train length (TL), the wagon capacity of a single siding (SSC) and the total siding capacity (TSC) and the total number of wagons involved, and see if there was a relationship.

 

First and foremost, both sidings had to have the same capacity. On first examination, the classic Inglenook had a train length of SSC + 2, but as soon as you examined the reduced Inglenook ... well, that didn't work! However, a relationship did seem to present itself so bore some further playing around with examination...

 

Classic Inglenook

Total Siding Capacity (TSC) = 3 + 3 = 6 wagons

Train Length (TL) = TSC - 1 = 6 - 1 =  5 wagons

Total Wagons (TW) = TL + Single Siding Capacity (SSC) = 5 + 3 = 8 wagons

 

So far, so good!

 

Reduced Inglenook

TSC = 2 + 2 = 4 wagons

TL = TSC - 1 = 4 - 1 = 3 wagons

TW = TL + SSC = 3 + 2 = 5 wagons

 

My calculations appear to have worked* so I'll try applying them to larger siding capacities, increasing them by 1 wagon length each time...

 

Expanded Inglenook + 1

TSC = 4 + 4 = 8 wagons

TL = TSC - 1 =  8 - 1 = 7 wagons

TW = TL - SSC = 7 + 4 = 11 wagons

 

So, it appears that selecting 7 wagons out of 10 doesn't follow the Inglenook puzzle formula after all - selecting from 11 wagons keeps the puzzle difficulty proportional to the original! Amazingly, adding just three extra wagons has added a lot more complication ie 11! / (11-7)! = 39,916,800 / 24 = 1,663,200 combinations!!

 

Reduced Inglenook = TWC = 5

Classic Inglenook = TWC = 8

Expanded Inglenook + 1 = TWC = 11

 

If (a big if!) this same pattern of adding three wagons to the Total Wagon Capacity holds true, Expanded Inglenook + 2 should have a TWC of 14 wagons...

 

Expanded Inglenook + 2

TSC = 5 + 5 = 10 wagons

TL = TSC - 1 = 10 - 1 = 9 wagons

TW = TL + SSC = 9 + 5 = 14 wagons

 

How many combinations now?  726,485,760. 

 

Well, that should provide a bit of variety!

 

I think my calculations hold true, both to siding lengths etc and to the relationship of total number of wagons (adding three each time) - I'll have to email Adrian and see what he thinks of them, and find out they've all been done before!

 

Bear in mind that the total length will be TL + PL (point length) + HL (headshunt length*) and must include some extra for clearances past stock around points. The last example would be 9 wagons for the train length + point length + 5 wagons plus loco. Even using short wheelbase stock and a small loco, the total length quickly grows to a point where a more interesting track layout can be fitted into the same space; after all, the Inglenook is a simple back and forth shunting puzzle in the same direction, whereas a loop gives opportunity for sidings to be shunted in opposite directions.

 

HOURS OF MATHEMATICAL FUN!

 

 

 

* At the point of typing, I didn't know if this was perhaps a mathematical "fluke" as sometimes happens under particular circumstances (I vaguely recall one with perimeter and area where a false relationship can be seen with a particular set of figures!)

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 5, 2022 by NHY 581

[NHY 581]

OFFICIAL OVINE COMMUNIQUÉ

 

 

And with that rather surprised look, I also note that The Sheep Chronicles has hit 500 pages..........!!!!

 

 

 

Thank you all for your contributions over the last six and quite a bit years, and five layouts ( to ) date. 

 

I shall post a few retrospective images in due course. 

 

I thank ewe. 

 

Rob. 

[bgman]

[MrWolf]

Congratulations Rob and might I say that it's nothing short of a miracle that you managed to get a word in edgeways AND secure the first post on the 500th page of your thread! 

[The Stationmaster]

59 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

 

That's a very interesting perspective from the sharp end as it were, thanks for putting all of that down.

When we consider that key sites were sold off for development with undue haste, preventing any future changes of direction (The Great Central route or HS1, as I like to call it springs to mind.) and the fact that the tax revenues generated from thousands of freight vehicles running on public roads far outstrips the monies that could be demanded from railway companies doing everything in house, such schemes to revamp the railway system will always hit the wall.

We've already witnessed the fact that nationalising industries not only means that they are less flexible towards market demands, innovation and progress, having no rivals, but they are also vulnerable to industrial action, infighting amongst management and are effectively bled dry by the state as a cash cow to support less profitable areas of government controlled affairs.

 

 

Call me a cynic if you will! 

 

 

 

 

What most people don't know or appreciate is that the Treasury was very loathe to allow any 'investment' money to BR for years and BR was instructed to raise the money from its own resources - without borrowing.  So the only choice it had was to sell operationally redundant land etc in order to pay for things like resignalling and station modernisation (to name but two beneficiaries of such sales).  Don't ever blame nationalised industries without first ascertaining the extent to which The Treasury, or other Govt depts,  influenced or controlled policy although invariably it would be denied that was the case.  On one occasion I was instructed to carry out certain action which it was considered might well produce an unofficial strike - the final decision to go ahead (to get certain staff to do what they were already paid to do) was actually made at Secretary of state level, way beyond even the BRB.   But of course as walways the politicos kept their noses clean by never acknowledging their involvement.

 

It was amazing to move from the situation where any investment money had to fought for to one where it was ladled out as if there was no tomorrow.  I became involved in two projects where money was almost on a 'no object' basis.  In one if them I was able to create exactly the track layout I needed at a new terminal because the customer was paying and BR didn't have to find the money and the customer also paid for resignalling plus re-doubling a previously singled line.  That line involved a new underbridge which contractually - from the date of singling - the Dept of Transport were committed to funding if the line was ever re-doubled but they moved heaven and earth to try to avoid that and it was only when they were threatened with legal action that they relented and paid for the bridge.  

 

Later I became in involved in a major state founded project where, once again, money was available on a very different basis from the normal Treasury constraints because the project suited political ambitions.   No money was wasted because being seasoned railway managers we had long experience of working on a financial shoestring but and in fact spent very carefully - even though I had a personal travel budget of £5,000 p.a. (the accommodation was in a separate budget - the $ £5K was just for travel) but even then I tended to do things the cheapest way if it would fit my requirements.

 

Back to sheep - of which plenty are now appearing in our part of the wolrd as they are being sent down from the hills ready for winter.

[MrWolf]

That was my point, as a nationalised industry, the government of whichever persuasion could bleed the railways dry whilst they had to fight for enough investment just to stay in business. 

Which is one reason why the former Soviet Union was in such a mess in the 1990s.