Imaginary Railways

[The Johnster]

5 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

Can anyone advise which maps to look at? I've tried a few searches, but only seem to find surface geology.

 

I don't think there are any maps that show the stratigraphy that far down, it is inferred from the formations above it in the series.  The BGS OS-based maps only show the surface rocks along with some sections, especially where there is faulting or thrust folding which results in apparent anomalies at the surface, but not miles down.  The coal measures must tail out underground somewhere or be destroyed by ingneous intrusions or deep subduction, but as they are known at the surface not too far away in North Somerset it seems likely that they are still present at depth below the Jurassic formations around the Dorset coast. 

 

5 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

If only I could find the legend to explain what the colours mean, it might actually be useful! 😀

 

 

If only there were some sort of Survey, British of course and perhaps Geological in nature, a 'British Geological Survey', BGS, if you will,  that published maps of surface geology in conjunction with a national mapping organisation, say one that had it's origins in range-finding maps for artillery purposes, a Survey for the purposes of Ordnance, a sort of 'Ordnance Survey' if you also will,  and if only they showed the legend with the appropriate colours for each type of rock arranged into the stratigraphic series on such maps.

 

If only...

 

Oh, hang on, wait a minute!

[KeithMacdonald]

11 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

If only there were some sort of Survey, British of course and perhaps Geological in nature, a 'British Geological Survey', BGS, if you will, 

😀

 

T'is amazing what can be found on t'interweb - like this lovely BGS website - https://geologyviewer.bgs.ac.uk/

 

[Jeremy Cumberland]

On 20/08/2023 at 16:00, KeithMacdonald said:

 

Can anyone make out what the words in red say next to "Ry No.3" ?

Looks like the junction would be close to Penn Inn?

The red words are "double junction".

 

The deposited plan (included in your link) shows the triangular junction immediately north of Elsdon's Farm, by what is now the A35. There is a tunnel on the Lyme branch, and comparing field boundaries on the deposited plan with a modern 1:25000 map suggests that the tunnel is on the 125 m contour. The Lyme branch is about 2.5 miles long, and terminates very close to the present day museum, so far as I can tell, perhaps 10-15 m above sea level, so it would need something like a continuous 1 in 35 gradient.

 

It is really difficult to see any of the proposals in your link of railways to Lyme, or of railways between Charmouth and the Axe valley, being viable. The line that was actually built to Lyme had sinuous curves and 1 in 40 gradients, and even that terminated more than 200 feet above sea level, which isn't ideal for a seaside resort. Linking Charmouth with Bridport via the Marshwood Vale looks eminently feasible, but continuing west or north from Charmouth seems mad.

[Jeremy Cumberland]

6 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

Portesham looks like it's right on the edge of that red-hatched area from Abbotsbury to Osmington.

If only I could find the legend to explain what the colours mean, it might actually be useful! 😀

 

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=11.3&lat=50.67540&lon=-2.71426&layers=10geol&b=1&marker=50.6702,-2.5639

Zoom out and you'll find the key in the North Sea.

[KeithMacdonald]

10 minutes ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

It is really difficult to see any of the proposals in your link of railways to Lyme, or of railways between Charmouth and the Axe valley, being viable.

 

Err, well, yes, agreed. That's why it's here in "Imaginary Railways"! 😀

 

11 minutes ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

Linking Charmouth with Bridport via the Marshwood Vale looks eminently feasible, but continuing west or north from Charmouth seems mad.

 

I concur.

But isn't that's the beauty of this "Imaginary Railways" topic? We can propose and build completely bonkers schemes. 🤭

Like the electrification of the line from Exeter to Plymouth, with overhead power lines along the Dawlish Sea Wall.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Northmoor]

5 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

Like the electrification of the line from Exeter to Plymouth, with overhead power lines along the Dawlish Sea Wall.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well they manage OK at Saltcoats, Network Rail just need to remember to turn the power off and suspend services when the storms are at their worst.

[KeithMacdonald]

I've got a little list of my own on imaginary railways, they might have already been covered here though?

• Extension of the Kingswear Branch to Salcombe
• The line from Totnes to Dartmouth
• The missing links, Farringdon, Highworth Fairford and Cirencester

Any more suggestions?

[Ravenser]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

Zoom out and you'll find the key in the North Sea.

 

Actually the key for Southern England is in the Irish Sea. (Having spent a 5 minutes wondering why the N Sea key cuts off at the Jurassic before h5 , which is plainly the chalk....)

[The Johnster]

4 hours ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

The line that was actually built to Lyme had sinuous curves and 1 in 40 gradients, and even that terminated more than 200 feet above sea level, which isn't ideal for a seaside resort.

 

Arguably even more so for a port and fishing harbour, albeit a small one, a much more important feature of Lyme Regis' economy than tourism when the branch was built.  Mind, Newquay station is pretty high up from the beaches as well, though it is handy for the hotels; so is Ilfracombe, which isn't.  A putative plan of mine years ago for a layout based on a fictional LNW/GW joint branch from Penclawdd to Port Eynon would have turned inland at Llanrhidian and been equaly steep, tortuous, and high above Port Eynon at it's terminus.  Traffic here would have been more agriculturally based, though.

 

My proposed Abergavenny-Brecon-Llandovery line, many pages back now, would have had a very severe gradient from Llandovery to Halfway, where there would have been a tunnel to Trecastle followed by an equally vicious drop to Sennybridge, and would probably have had to run along the southeastern side of the Tywi valley for some distance south of Llandovery towards Llandeilo before a junction could be made with the Central Wales, another scheme that looks almost feasible until you realise the gradients and civil engineering needed.  There is a route, following the A40 road, up the Usk valley.  Llandovery High Level station would have been even more out of town than Oakhampton!  My only excuse is that the Brecon & Merthyr and Neath & Brecon were actually built over a pretty uncompromising escarpment and with steep gradients, and even the Manchester & Milford, surely the pottiest idea of the entire Victorian age (and there were some doozies) was actually partly built...

 

Apropos Lyme Regis and geology, I've just been watching 'Ammonite', a somewhat lurid but sympathetic account of part of Mary Anning's life.  I have been impressed with Mary Anning ever since I first heard of her in high school geology, an amazing woman who should have had a lot more recognition than male-dominated Victorian society was prepared to allow her.  The Ichthyosaur she dug out and prepared herself when she was only 11 years old was a genuine game-changer.  Not sure that there is any real evidence for her having a torrid affair with Roderick Murchison's wife, though, she seems far too serious for that sort of thing...

Edited August 25, 2023 by The Johnster

[KeithMacdonald]

9 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Apropos Lyme Regis and geology, I've just been watching 'Ammonite', a somewhat lurid but sympathetic account of part of Mary Anning's life. 

 

I had to look that up (didn't I?)

 

Quote

In the 1840s, acclaimed self-taught palaeontologist Mary Anning works alone on the wild and brutal Southern English coastline of Lyme Regis. The days of her famed discoveries behind her, she now hunts for common fossils to sell to rich tourists to support herself and her ailing widowed mother. When one such tourist, Roderick Murchison, arrives in Lyme on the first leg of a European tour, he entrusts Mary with the care of his young wife Charlotte, who is recuperating from a personal tragedy. Mary, whose life is a daily struggle on the poverty line, cannot afford to turn him down but, proud and relentlessly passionate about her work, she clashes with her unwanted guest. They are two women from utterly different worlds. Yet despite the chasm between their social spheres and personalities, Mary and Charlotte discover they can each offer what the other has been searching for: the realisation that they are not alone. It is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.

 

Ooo-err!

A "wild and brutal" coastline and a "passionate and all-consuming love affair"

A bodice-ripper with fossils?

Just going to get beers and popcorn before I settle down for the excitement ...

 

 

[The Johnster]

Bodices are certainly ripped, enthusiastically and to good effect, and rather tastefully I thought.  Fossils and the 'wild and brutal' coastline (that's egging it a bit, to be fair, it's not Cape Wrath) are pretty much supporting characters, as is the great geologist Roderick Murchison, who is reduced to underlining the solidity of the simplistic message of the first part of the film, women good (stoic, uncomplaining, hard-working) men bad (credit takers, unsympathetic boors, insensitive)

 

But once the character building has progessed a little and Roddy the Rock Star has disappeared overseas with his geologists hammer never to be seen again abandoning poor misunderstood frustrated beautiful little wallflower Caroline to her nervous disposition, near-fatal pneumonia, and seething lusts once she'd recovered from it, things get a bit more subtle and intelligent viewing repays dividends as we start to understand the history and psychology behind the affair and the reasons each woman's motive for wanting to exchange bodily fluids.  The actresses' performances are understated brilliance (at least until the bodice ripping kicks off).  I enjoyed it, though I doubt much of it happened in reality.

[john new]

3 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Bodices are certainly ripped, enthusiastically and to good effect, and rather tastefully I thought.  Fossils and the 'wild and brutal' coastline (that's egging it a bit, to be fair, it's not Cape Wrath) are pretty much supporting characters, as is the great geologist Roderick Murchison, who is reduced to underlining the solidity of the simplistic message of the first part of the film, women good (stoic, uncomplaining, hard-working) men bad (credit takers, unsympathetic boors, insensitive)

 

----- snipped ---

The sea gets very rough regularly. My house overlooks Lyme Bay and is constantly in the spray zone. The contrast between a calm day with the sea off the Chesil safe to swim in and days with the breakers rolling in is vast. The Cobb at Lyme is unsafe to go out on due to wave action regularly. This is a link (hopefully) to a set of my images of the big storm a few years ago with 80 to 100ft waves overtopping the pub on the sea wall here at the east side of Lyme Bay. It isn't alternatively known as Deadman's Bay for nothing.

 

I think now I have changed the viewing option this link to the Facebook album of mine showing that storm works. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.523656804420492&type=3

 

NB My copyright is retained, please do not copy and redistribute.

 

Edited August 25, 2023 by john new
Link didn't work originally, viewing permission updated.

[Ben B]

A rather modest example/location/railway for me... a few years back, we took our Scout group to Brownsea Island, off Poole, where the first Scouting camp was held.  It's an eccentric little island (small settlement, castle, campsite, bird watching and nature reserve), and did once have a community there, until a previous landowner basically cleared everyone off the island as she was a bit of a recluse.  It's now run by the National Trust.

 

Where the railway angle comes in, is that a previous entrepreneurial owner of the island tried to establish a ceramics business on Brownsea, which ended up producing ceramic waste pipes.  There was a pier, and a hand-worked tramway (bizarrely, the beach on this side of the island is still covered in smashed pipes).  

 

When we arrived with the Scouts, after a mammoth train journey from Shipley, West Yorkshire down to Poole, we were met off the ferry by a battered LDV van with a trailer.  This drove us across the island to the Scout camp, a rather bumpy journey on the unpaved tracks.  Brownsea is odd, really, as it was heaving during the day (day trippers, birders, visitors to the National Trust-owned island, etc.) but of an evening there couldn't have been more than a couple of dozen of us there.  Given how many people were about though by day, it struck me that an extended tramway could have been useful, running from the pier, maybe circling the island... 

 

It wouldn't need to be massively extensive, maybe rebuilt/refurbished/extended in the 1980's with redundant equipment from the National Coal Board or similar; manriders and battery-electric locomotives, not as a preserved railway but a genuine public transport operation, transporting campers and visitors, serving the village, the bird watching areas, the beach, the Scout campsite.  An ability to carry kit and equipment as well as people, and in this day and age, using battery-electric former mining locomotives would give it a nice eco angle.

 

I sketched out a couple of plans for a model of it, using 009 stock, and even started a baseboard for it before getting distracted with other projects.

[KeithMacdonald]

3 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Bodices are certainly ripped, enthusiastically and to good effect, and rather tastefully I thought.

 

1 hour ago, john new said:

It gets very rough regularly.

 

I had to re-read that a couple of times to get the context aligned correctly.

Having had a very gentle upbringing, I'm not sure I could cope with rough bodice ripping.

[KeithMacdonald]

Here's a good example of why transport in Lyme Regis is still challenging.  By the way. Jemma Warren's YT channel is not only entertaining but very educational. She's a great communicator on what it takes to delivering things many take for granted.

 

 

[The Johnster]

5 hours ago, john new said:

The sea gets very rough regularly. My house overlooks Lyme Bay and is constantly in the spray zone. The contrast between a calm day with the sea off the Chesil safe to swim in and days with the breakers rolling in is vast. The Cobb at Lyme is unsafe to go out on due to wave action regularly. This is a link (hopefully) to a set of my images of the big storm a few years ago with 80 to 100ft waves overtopping the pub on the sea wall here at the east side of Lyme Bay. It isn't alternatively known as Deadman's Bay for nothing.

 

I think now I have changed the viewing option this link to the Facebook album of mine showing that storm works. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.523656804420492&type=3

 

NB My copyright is retained, please do not copy and redistribute.

 

 

Lyme Bay is in a prime location to catch the worst of it coming up off the Western Approaches, and I've seen pretty dramatic footage of the Cobb in rough weather, but 'wild and brutal' for the section west of the Cobb, Chippel Bay under the slumpy cliffs where Mary Anning did her fossil-hunting, and where she foud the Ichthyosaur, is hardly appropriate.  Exposed in a Southwesterly or Southerly, certainly, but fairly easy walking unless you try to get anywhere up the loose and muddy slopes as Mary often had to.  It is of course the very looseness and mucky instability of these slopes (they hardly warrant the description 'cliffs') that makes them so fruitful, as the constant erosion is like a conveyor belt of new fossils coming out of the face and falling to the beach below.

 

Mary would make a point of going there as soon as she could after the big winter storms, often before they'd died down completely, to look for fresh material.  Fossil mining for a living must have been a pretty tough, filthy, and not especially safe (if you needed to be scrambling around on the loose steep slopes seventy or eighty feet up) existence in a way that summer tourists cannot easily visualise, and she was a pretty tough cookie! 

 

It's a lovely spot, though, one of my favourites on the English Channel coast.  The vista east and south with Golden Cap all the way around to the Chesil and Portland Bill is stunning, and Lyme itself is a friendly little place in my experience.  First went there when I was ten, as part of a car daytrip from a holiday in Swanage, during which we visited Portland Bill as well.  The 'rents had had some sort of row, the details of which I was not party to but which Father had lost, of course, and the atmosphere was somewhat fraught, but it worked in my favour in the event.  In 1962, (and maybe still, I've never been back to Portland) there was a restaurant at the actual Bill with hoists into the sea to bring up live fresh lobsters if one was ordered.  Mother rather fancied one and, from the look of one some fellow diners on another table were tearing into, so did I.  Fresh lobster was several quid, probably equal to twenty or thirty now, and Father objected to my having one to myself 'he's not old enough to appreciate it, it'll be wasted on him, he won't finish it'.  Not a wise move for a man with a brownie point deficit, and just the look mother shot him got me my lobbie, and I can assure you I did finish it and fully appreciated it; it was the best thing I'd ever eaten in my life!

 

The lobsters cheered mum up as well as me and the atmosphere was much better for the rest of the day...

[KeithMacdonald]

That lobster is much better than the conger eel I encounter in Beer.

Edited August 26, 2023 by KeithMacdonald
.

[The Johnster]

4 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

 

I had to re-read that a couple of times to get the context aligned correctly.

Having had a very gentle upbringing, I'm not sure I could cope with rough bodice ripping.

 

Well, you can't be gentle if you're ripping a bodice, can you, you need at least a degree of assertiveness, I'm not condoning brutality, mind...  What is 'gentle' bodice ripping, anyway, bodice gradual unpicking? we don't want her to go off the boil, do we?  We need buttons and hooks pinging off the mirrors, that sort of thing.

[The Johnster]

28 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

That lobster is much better than the conger eel I encounter in Beer.

 

Congers are better in salt or at least brackish water, they'd probably make beer go flat (sorry, couldn't resist).  That said, I'm partial to a conger steak, grilled in butter with a bit of tomato pesto on top.  Not a patch on a lobbie, though; I could identify with Homer Simpson's crisis of concience when he cooked and ate Mr PInchy...

 

Had a very acceptable half-lobster in the pub in Polkerris, near Gribbin Head, a few years ago.  They're pretty good when you get them in the market here, but really fresh ones straight out the sea, now that's good eatin'!

 

On another of my Cornwall jaunts, I spent a very pleasant afternoon in Padstow because I'd never been there before.  In what I think is the old goods shed building, there is a lobster hatchery, open to tourists, which I duly visited.  Lobster fishermen who bring up female lobsters with eggs remove the eggs and post them from all over the country (well, probably not Birmingham) to this hatchery, where they are, um, hatched and grown on in tanks until they are big enough to survive in the sea, tagged, and returned by post to the fisherman who originally sent them in to be released into the sea; this maintains stock levels in the lobster fisheries.  I bought a plastic one to bring home with me and he is at this moment perched on the edge of the fibreglass planter that contains my goldfishes out on the patio, hopefully scaring the herons.  He seems reasonably content with his lot, probably because he got his annual scrubbing last week.

 

Anyway, I had a few beers in Padstow and a good few more in the pub in Harlyn with the gang, and then, admittedly somewhat in my cups, attempted to explain to them about the 'habster lotchery'.  'They get the habster eggs in the post from the farmers (no idea what farmers had to do with anything, but apparently I'd insisted that the habster eggs were sent in by farmers) and then they lotch them', I told them all, confidently.  After a while, I sort of drunkenly became aware that something wasn't quite right with this, but nothing I could put my finger on, so I carried on manfully with my tale of the lotchery and it's habsters, even showing off my new plastic souvenir habster.  One of the girls, also a bit 'refreshed', failed to understand me (I could sympathise, I have difficulty with understanding me myself at times, especially times like this) and the following morning asked me what was this hamster lottery I'd entered and what was I going to do with the hamster I'd get in the post if I won it, wasn't sending hamsters in the mail a bit cruel, how did they breathe? so I had to explain that it was a habster, and not a lottery, and in the morning befuddlement got pretty confused myself...

 

It just got a bit surreal after that.

Edited August 26, 2023 by The Johnster

[KeithMacdonald]

8 hours ago, The Johnster said:

They get the habster eggs in the post from the farmers

 

Appropriately for the "Imaginary Railways" topic, an imaginary animal.
 

Quote

 

Habsters are a shy nocturnal animal, found only in the most rural parts of the West Country counties (Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall). Unconfirmed sightings have been reported from Hampshire and Gloucestershire. Uniquely among British mammals, they are a monotreme. Namely, a mammal that lays eggs.

 

Their proper scientific name is Echidna, from the Greek ἐχῖνος, anglicised as ekhînos, which means a "hedgehog or sea urchin". Indeed they bear some similarities to hedgehogs, and from a distance are usually mistaken for hedgehogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echidna

 

They are believed to have been introduced into Britain from as early as 1787, after Transportation to Australia had begun. Sailors would bring them back to West Country ports as pets or curiosities. Some escaped and breeding groups were established. They are now a protected species, but like hedgehogs, they are under constant threat of predation from native badgers. As a result, farmers are now encouraged to send the eggs to the National Habsters Conservation Center for safe hatching and later re-release into the wild.

 

The National Habsters Conservation Center was previously at Trenance, near Newquay, in buildings that had been owned by the GWR (on the Trenance branch line from Roche). But with the growth of aviation at nearby Newquay Airport, the National Habsters Conservation Center decided it was too noisy for these delicate creatures and moved to a quieter location in Nempnett Thrubwell, in Somerset.

 

 

All found on the Wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habster

[The Johnster]

I was starting to think it was all not quite as surreal as I’d thought, then I got to the four-headed bit.  
 

Not I sentence I ever thought I’d encounter in my life, but there you go…

[KeithMacdonald]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

the four-headed bit.

 

Ah, just wondering whether we need a separate thread especially for "Imaginary Tools". For all the weird and wonderful contraptions and devices we would claim to have invented (if we could). Heath Robinson cartoons to follow.

 

Quote

The four-headed bit was invented by Armstrong Whitworth on April 1st 1905 at their Elswick works at Newcastle. Instead of a single bit, it combined four bits of different diameters. They later produced an eight-bit version as well, which was used to assemble the first IBM PC with an eight-bit processor.

 

 

 

[Jeremy Cumberland]

1 hour ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

Ah, just wondering whether we need a separate thread especially for "Imaginary Tools". For all the weird and wonderful contraptions and devices we would claim to have invented (if we could). Heath Robinson cartoons to follow.

 

 

 

 

I don't know about imaginary tools, but for anyone who has ever had problems with poorly positioned or misaligned holes (that's most of us, I expect), an inventive engineer has imagined some ingenious solutions:

[The Johnster]

This is getting more surreal now, an' I likes a bit of surreal, I does.  I didn't originally type the word 'bit', this is a product of the sites naughty word replacing system, the original word, verbatim from the linked wikipedia article, was one that can be extracted from 'Penistone' (and it isn't the 'tone' part), and a four-headed one is unsual in my experience...  But the word 'tool' is a reasonable substitute, segueing into Kieth & Jeremy's erudite submissions (I nearly typed 'emissions' but that could lead us down a whole nother path in these circumstances), which include 8-bit IBM computers.  This is turning into an interesting ride!

[KeithMacdonald]

I was waiting to see if anyone noticed the "Trenance branch line from Roche".

(As suptle as a brick through a window)