Castle Aching

[Talltim]

Have you joined a model railway club?

[Edwardian]

3 minutes ago, Talltim said:

Have you joined a model railway club?

 

I rather suspect that I have.

 

 

[St Enodoc]

As the parishioner who posted the eBay link in the first place I think that it was only fair for the vendor to point out to the vast number of viewers and potential buyers of the ESLR stock that they would not run on an 00 train set, which would probably have been the first thought of 99% of them (price notwithstanding). I think we're looking at this from a different position, namely that of an informed person rather than the man person on the Clapham omnibus.

 

By the way, for the record, although the items were built by Iain Rice he is not the vendor (and, for the avoidance of doubt, neither am I!). 

[Talltim]

What I find interesting is the low price. A Danish modeller of US prototypes of a similar cult status (although I would say, with lower engineering skills) has been selling off items due to change in circumstances. A single lightly modified and very nicely weathered RTR loco of his seems to go for 3/4 of the starting price of the Rice auction purely because of his name.

Mind you, I would love the East Suffolk stock, but I could not do justice to them even if I had the money. I can remember reading the story of building the buckjumper well. That said, the NCM stock would be even better.

Edited April 30, 2019 by Talltim

[RedGemAlchemist]

2 hours ago, Talltim said:

Have you joined a model railway club?

 

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

I rather suspect that I have.

 

 

Congratulations! 

[Martin S-C]

7 hours ago, Edwardian said:

I simply detest snobbery in all its forms, and believe it to be alive and well among self-styled finescale modellers.  Many have their funny little prejudices, I find - If I had an overbridge on my layout, I'd park a 'bus on it, just to annoy them - but it's in the sin of overweening pride that they sometimes truly offend.

 

The inclusion of the 'train set' comment seemed a 'just can't help himself' remark, betraying a less than inclusive attitude to the wider hobby. 

 

Only recently, at the NRM, I came across an unutterably insufferable young man (P4 modeller) who had a lot (of negative, ill-informed and incorrect) criticisms of the Rapido Stirling Single, which proceeded from a place of immense arrogance.  He had that stereotypical lack of the social graces and self-awareness associated with the nerd, yet managed to combine this with a massive superiority complex - a most unattractive combination - like some teenage computer nerd who could hack into NASA but who couldn't get a girlfriend.  Or find the soap. 

 

Iain Rice appears rare in being able to communicate successfully with ordinary mortals.  Several others I have come across in print seem to betray an assumption of superiority in all that they write. 

 

I note that the Scalefour Society has toned down it's home page in recent years, but it used to say something horribly smug. 

 

With all respect to Webb Compound, who remains most welcome and whom I have no wish to offend, I stand by my earlier quip in as much as his brethren can often display off-putting attitudes. I am struggling enough with OO bodgery, and I, while I appreciate hand-built track to fine scale standards as giving a far better look than traditional proprietary track, I never notice whether it's OO or EM, or even, on occasion, P4, so the effort to get to a less inaccurate gauge is largely wasted on me. If I did want to travel that road, however, I'm not sure I'd find this most self-consciously finescale sub-culture particularly conducive fellow travellers. 

 

There may be something of a self-created image problem here.  Funnily enough, I have never detected similar snobbery emanating from the 2FS culture, or S scale modellers (who must be more eccentrics than fantatics, surely?). 

 

But, hey, no particularly segment of the hobby needs to justify itself to me, and this is a generalised impression that doebtless does not apply wholly or even partially to many fine chaps ploughing the P4 furrow, so I am sorry to have been dismissive of them as a whole, and apologies to Webb Compound in particular.   

Hear, hear, James. I absolutely agree,

[Martin S-C]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Last night, I found myself alone on a street in a town.

 

It was a short street. A quiet street. It was a street that nobody seemed to visit for its own sake.  It was a street that existed to take you from the road you found yourself on to another that you wanted to be on.  The steady night traffic of a thoroughfare crossed the end of the vista. The street was quiet and still.

 

It was an anonymous street. Aloof, almost. And you would not stop do do anything there; there was nothing to do. It was a street from which even the buildings were withdrawn.  It featured only the sides of buildings, not their fronts. As I entered there was the side of a day-care nursery to my left and the side of a factory to my right. Both quiet and unlit at this hour. After the factory came the blind gabled ends of terraced rows and the roads and cobbled alley between.  To the left higher ground, separated by a high stone wall, which shielded some overgrown Victorian industrial landscape from the road, and, towards the further end, a tall stone early Victorian house; graceful, quiet, and distanced from the pavement by a bank of shrubbery; with no door and but two windows at ground floor, set above head height, offering no intimacy with the street.

 

Then I saw what I had been looking for. Between the tall stone house and the tall stone wall, masked by tree and shrub growth spilling over the wall and down by the pavement, forming a green, sheltering bastion, was a door.  A plain. planked wooden door.

 

I had a sudden urge to run up to it, bang loudly, utter improbable passwords and enquire if, indeed, this was where the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night met of an evening?  Instead, as a silver haired old gentleman had just appeared, I followed him to the door, introduced myself, and was taken inside  ....   

 

H G Wells wrote a short story of which this passage very much reminds me. I am sure I do not need to tell you which one, or what the unhappy outcome of the story was for the chief character.

[Martin S-C]

2 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

As the parishioner who posted the eBay link in the first place I think that it was only fair for the vendor to point out to the vast number of viewers and potential buyers of the ESLR stock that they would not run on an 00 train set, which would probably have been the first thought of 99% of them (price notwithstanding). I think we're looking at this from a different position, namely that of an informed person rather than the man person on the Clapham omnibus.

 

By the way, for the record, although the items were built by Iain Rice he is not the vendor (and, for the avoidance of doubt, neither am I!). 

I think the issue is that if he had written "these are not 00 gauge models and will not run on 00 gauge track. They will also require some skill to re-gauge them from P4 to 00" that would have been extremely helpful advice, wholly neutral in tone. It was the inclusion of the phrase "train set" that was both un-necessary and in fact can be taken as snobbish and/or offensive. Those two words are the entire reason we had the discussion.

I, in addition, picked up on the point that from their condition it very much appears they have not been cared for and have been stored carelessly while in the sellers ownership. I do not care what the items are, I skip past models that have cobwebs on them.

If they are models with important provenance and a 4-figure value then they should be stored somewhere warm and dry away from spiders and other small wildlife.

[Edwardian]

9 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

I think the issue is that if he had written "these are not 00 gauge models and will not run on 00 gauge track. They will also require some skill to re-gauge them from P4 to 00" that would have been extremely helpful advice, wholly neutral in tone. It was the inclusion of the phrase "train set" that was both un-necessary and in fact can be taken as snobbish and/or offensive. Those two words are the entire reason we had the discussion.

 

 

Well, rightly or wrongly, that is also how I took it.

 

Whether the apparent sense of superiority came from the possession of a finescale credo or the possession of a collector's fat wallet, I could not say.

 

19 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

H G Wells wrote a short story of which this passage very much reminds me. I am sure I do not need to tell you which one, or what the unhappy outcome of the story was for the chief character.

 

Yes, I would surely have hesitated had the door in question been green!

[Compound2632]

Chacun à son goût. I'm glad I've been at work today so only come home to find the field littered with the wounded rather than cudgels at full swing.

 

David Hunt builds some exquisite models of Midland locomotives - I have been fortunate enough to see his S7 model of Smith-Johnson compound No. 2631 at close quarters; I'm a long way from achieving or even aspiring to his standards of model-making. Moreover, he has never kept his knowledge of the prototype or of model-making to himself; without the monographs on Midland Engines and LMS Locomotives that he has co-authored, there is much model-making both domestic and commercial (i.e. RTR) would be less well-informed. Certainly a good third of the things I've said in this thread on Midland-related subjects are based on his research, as I hope I've indicated through the references I've cited.

 

I don't really get the impression that any of those who post here frequently are genuinely content to wallow in mediocrity; it's very evident from the variety and depth of discussion on here that the general desire is to improve both understanding of how the Edwardian railway worked and skills in reproducing it in model form. We all want to build better train sets.

[Edwardian]

A worthy contributor to the hobby, no doubt, and that at least answers one rhetorical question ("who the Hell does he think he is?").  But it rather feeds my critique of some finescalers when someone who has never darkened the door feels he can descend from his Olympian heights just to tick me off. 

 

Coming it a bit high, as Jack Aubrey might say. So, however important and brilliant this bloke is, he bog off out of Fantasy Norfolk and leave us to move on from a potentially divisive subject that he is entirely responsible for making into a mountain using my tiny molehill of a faux pas in a most trollish way.

 

If I live long enough I might, eventually, master track construction and etched brass kits, or, painting and lining like an utter goddard, so I'm all for progress. I doubt I'd ever achieve a "finescale" standard at my rate of progress, but it would be nice if I could.  My diffidence chip would prevent me from ever thinking of or calling myself a "finescale" modeller, but that's just due to my funny little ways. At least that way I'll never need the little guy crouching at the rear of the footplate repeating "remember you are mortal".

 

But if you see the little fella, tell him he's needed in Shropshire.

 

 

[Caley Jim]

14 hours ago, Edwardian said:

....... Funnily enough, I have never detected similar snobbery emanating from the 2FS culture, or S scale modellers (who must be more eccentrics than fantatics, surely?). 

On behalf of the 2FS fraternity, I thank you for that, James.  After speaking with a member of the press at the Glasgow Show some years ago, her piece described us as the 'Wee Free's' of the modelling world.  We were happy to go with that!  

 

(For those not familiar with the history of Scottish Presbyterianism, PM me and I'll give you a lengthy explanation)

 

Jim

[Edwardian]

You know, all the 2Fs chaps I've met - both online here and at shows - have been so friendly that I could easily have got sucked in had I not been so committed by then to my OO project. I'd definitely consider it if I felt in the position to model something in a different scale at some point. Why wouldn't you want to do stuff with guys like that, who are approachable and have infectious enthusiasm? 

[Nearholmer]

Actually, a Christian-denomination-based explanation of the different 'camps' in railway modelling could have far wider application.

 

Might it start with rtr 00 as mainstream CofE, noting that there are traditionalist (Big Four?) and modernist (post-privatisation?) variants in that fairly broad church?

 

The Reformation could, perhaps, be when scenery became important, in which case I must be following a pre-Reformation creed, but I would think that Gauge 1, outdoors would probably be Roman Catholicism, with current-production British Coarse 0 perhaps being some sort counter-reformationists, English Mystics maybe.

 

 

 

 

Edited April 30, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

Don't nobody bring Papal Infallibility into the discussion...

[Regularity]

Only in England would the first thought about “mainstream Christianity” lead to the CofE, the youngest and smallest of the major catholic divisions.

(The small c is important there...)

 

Infallibility is a an example of a Papal Bull.

[RedGemAlchemist]

As an atheist I see all of this as irrelevant.

[Compound2632]

H0 might be thought analogous to the mainstream European tradition, 00 being a rather Anglican thing. It all breaks down with EM and P4 hardly being broad church - more like High Church Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism respectively. Simon, I do think S is the Recusant scale. So the analogy doesn't last long...

 

[nick_bastable]

8 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

H0 might be thought analogous to the mainstream European tradition, 00 being a rather Anglican thing. It all breaks down with EM and P4 hardly being broad church - more like High Church Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism respectively. Simon, I do think S is the Recusant scale. So the analogy doesn't last long...

 

No S is probably Agnostic  and if i ever changed scale would be my next choice  ( much like the 2mm people very nice to know)

 

Nick

[Nearholmer]

Red Gem

 

How can something where great numbers of people profess to be united around a common principle, yet fall to dispute, sometimes very bitter dispute, over how best to enact that principle, be irrelevant to model railways?

 

Kevin 

[Regularity]

I think S is probably the Quakers: quietly getting on with doing things sensibly and properly, being contactable and open to anyone interested, but not actually telling anybody else that they are wrong. 

And pretty much the pioneers of going it alone and doing it yourself.

 

But yes, 00 is a good analogy for Anglicanism, with H0 as Catholicism. I suppose that makes Märklin the Lutheran Church?

 

PS Our Vice President is a Reverend Canon of the CofE, and my predecessor in the Chair is an Anglican Deacon or similar, so I don’t think S Scale is particularly agnostic. 

[Nearholmer]

I'm not at all sure that H0 can be Catholicism, given that it arrived late on the scene. I'd see it more as the German Reformation, with 00 as the English Reformation ........ this, of course, conflates the arrival of the small scales with the rising importance, triumph almost, of scenery, as marking The Reformation.

 

If, as I proposed earlier, Gauge 1 is the first established church, this puts Maerklin in a very interesting position, because it was they that first codified the gauges, which sounds pretty Old Testament to me. Perhaps it was A R Walkley, who might possibly have nailed a note to the door of Wimbledon MRC in 1925 ("Gone to look for the key - back shortly." that sort of thing), who really started the Reformation, although even he was building on the teachings of Greenly and Bing.

 

 

Edited April 30, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I'm not at all sure that H0 can be Catholicism, given that it arrived late on the scene. I'd see it more as the German Reformation, with 00 as the English Reformation ........ this, of course, conflates the arrival of the small scales with the rising importance, triumph almost, of scenery, as marking The Reformation.

 

If, as I proposed earlier, Gauge 1 is the first established church, this puts Maerklin in a very interesting position, because it was they that first codified the gauges, which sounds pretty Old Testament to me. Perhaps it was A R Walkley, who might possibly have nailed a note to the door of Wimbledon MRC in 1925 ("Gone to look for the key - back shortly." that sort of thing), who really started the Reformation, although even he was building on the teachings of Greenly and Bing.

 

 

 

Does that mean that Southern Baptists are unable to build reliably safe viaducts?  

[Hroth]

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I'm not at all sure that H0 can be Catholicism, given that it arrived late on the scene. I'd see it more as the German Reformation, with 00 as the English Reformation ........ this, of course, conflates the arrival of the small scales with the rising importance, triumph almost, of scenery, as marking The Reformation.

 

If, as I proposed earlier, Gauge 1 is the first established church, this puts Maerklin in a very interesting position, because it was they that first codified the gauges, which sounds pretty Old Testament to me. Perhaps it was A R Walkley, who might possibly have nailed a note to the door of Wimbledon MRC in 1925 ("Gone to look for the key - back shortly." that sort of thing), who really started the Reformation, although even he was building on the teachings of Greenly and Bing.

 

 

 

At least no one mentioned The Spanish Inquisition!

 

According to Wikipedia, the first person to be executed for heresy was Priscillian, a Spanish Bishop, in 380, and the last a Spanish schoolmaster in 1826.  I was browsing medieval heresy to see if I could link Greenly and Bing to a suitable heresy.  Bing could perhaps be an example of the Bretheren of the Free Spirit and Greenly a Lollard, though neither could possibly be Neo-Adamites, though in modern times Noch seem to embrace this with some of their figures....

 

 

[Edwardian]

If OO is good old fairly relaxed mainstream CofE, which would always rather offer someone a cup of tea than set fire to them, you might then have an analogy for a series of increasingly puritanical and extreme breakaway protestant sects. 

 

Then again, some of my wariness of 'sects' within the hobby proceeds from the letter pages in a stack of old MRJs I once discovered; it reminded me of nothing so much as the internecine strife of the Zealots in Life of Brian (see also Josephus, The Jewish War). 

 

Of course, West Norfolk features its own wacky non-conformist sect in the form of the Memonites, whose idiosyncratic approach to personal hygiene proceeds from a misreading of the text of the apocryphal Book of Macademia.