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Pacific231G

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  1. I'm glad to see that's still on the late Carl Arendt's site. It was I who sent it to him having discovered it while exploring the remains of the line that ran between Fecamp and Dieppe. These are the photos I took of it at the time (a couple of which are on the carendt site) The former level crossing keeper's cottage the line ran across the road here but had been tarmacced pver. This was the view from the other end the yard was shunted using a powered capstan - quite common around small rail connected silos- with a couple of unpowered ones - including this one - for directing or reversing the hauilage cable. This was my plan of the site (scaled in feet for 1:87 scale) This is the same but with dimensions added from the rough sketch and pacing out of the yard I did when I visited it and measurements taken from Google Earth and IGN . The line marked as dismantled was the start of the station's passing loop. Finally, this was my suggested Microlayout based on it The yard was shunted using an electric capstan but I've seen similar silos - perhaps a little larger- with an old locotracteur, often a Moyse, apparently rotting away but actully used in the brief periods when the silos got busy. There used to be a lot of these small local silos in France and they kept a lot of secondary lines in business until the 1990s, decades after they lost their passenger services. They did though have a nasty habit of blowing up (grain dust, like many other small particles in aerosol, can be explosive) so were replaced with fewer much larger silos. The way this was worked would have been that the two points connecting the yard to the SNCF line were opened by the crew of the SNCF pick-up goods who picked up and dropped wagons as apprpriate. The points were then padlocked shut and the silo staff could shunt their private sidings to their hearts content as wagons were loaded or unloaded one by one. The station's LM (Limite de Manouevres - shunt limit) sign was just before the level crossing but that must have been passed when shunting to or from the private sidings.
  2. My tongue was firmly in my cheek but don't worry. the GWR (or possibly the South Devon Railway) used the plan a couple of generations before John Allen. If you look at Ashburton's track plan it was, apart from the locos shed road, a timesaver! In its American form, with just a coupler of freight cars in each siding, timesaver always seemed to me very contrived -which of course it was- it was a pure shunting puzzle and not intended to be in any way realsitic. Ingelnook Sidings, on the other hand could be a small rural goods yard. I have found though that if you add a run round loop and another siding facing the other way you get an awful lot of far less contrived shunting. This was what I came up with in five feet but I did some experiments and found that, with small radius points and a small tank loco, it could be crammed into 4ft 6ins which is only about three or four inches longer than a 5-3-3 Inglenook using the same European H0 wagons.
  3. Stevey, I think you may have just re-invented John Allen's "Timesaver". https://gdlines.org/GDLines/Timesaver.html Which is not altogether surpring as there are only so many ways to arrange five points (though as Timesaver was designed for 40ft American cars, you'd probablyy need to semi permanently couple wagons in pairs to make the puzzle work. I agree about making the front edge of the layout a quayside, possibly with an inch of "water" and just a couple of small boats. You can fit a layout with a run round loop into four feett. as Paul Gittins did it with his Enigma Engineering layout (BRM Nowember 2006) and in P4 to boot using two foot radius points. The fiddle yard to the right is optional with a level crossing gate closed during shunting . The sidings and headshunts will each take two wagons (limited in the case of the sidings by the wagon turntable and some rusting wagon wheels on the other siding . The run round is limited to three wagons (it will take four but that makes the puzzle too easy) I've drawn it using Peco short Streamline points and it clearly fits. The layout has six wagons on its visible section (the fiddle yard allows them to be changed) . "Enigma Engineering" followed his H0 "Peforia Narrows" (Continental Modeller Oct 2003) which had the same double crossover layout and was 5ft 6ins by 9ins with the same siding and loop capacities but for 40ft freight cars and no fiddle yard. With six cars on the layout the puzzle was set in much the same way as Inglenook Sidings by randomly dealing six "destination" cards (including the departure track and then the six freight car cards to be shunted into them. Enigma Engineering was opeated in much the same way but with the additional complicatiion of a brake van to be on the rear of trains arriving from the fiddle yard and departing to it. I think this arrangement, with two of the sidings facing in opposite directions, gives more interesting operation than Inglenook and it was used by Peter Denny for the first version of Leighton Buzzar (Linslade). With a little extra length it can also accomodate a passenger station.
  4. With that much space to work with and assuming a mainline set up, I wouldn't limit yourself to four coach trains which IMHO aren't really convincing as expresses. Visually, in 00 or H0, five coaches seems to just do it but I'd plan on a platform long enough to take at least a six coach train plus loco. It doesn't matter if trains are shorter than the platforms- that's pretty normal- but you might kick yuorself for not allowing for anything longer. The steam era expresses I remember as a teenager at Oxford were very typically eight coaches long - apart from the longer summer Saturday intergionals- so I think six would be a reasonable contraction. Obviously, the longer the platforms the less open main line running you'll get. It does also seem to be the case that the smaller the scale the less compression you can get away with. At normal layout viewing distances I find four coach expresses fairly convincing in O scale but not in 00/H0 and in N even a six coach train can look a bit short.
  5. When I was very young, probably in the late 50s very early 60s, I went to the MRC show in Central Hall two or three times with my father. In those days he could just drive into Westminster and park on a nearby side-street! The only layout I can actually remember was Wilbert Awdrey's Ffarquhar (Mk1) which he was operating. Though I'd had a couple of his books I'd never been a great fan of the Railway Series and, even as a child, thought locomotives with faces silly. However, there was none of that on Ffarquhar and I remember it being an interesting layout. I don't recall going to any other exhibtions in those years but they were far fewer then. If there was one in Oxford we didn't go to it (though we did have Howes in Broad Street then)
  6. It's very hard to tell the colour of SE Centre 3549. The side tank appears to be black but the front of the right hand tank appears to be green. That may be a reflection of local greenery but I'd guess that dark green was the actual colour.
  7. Ealing Broadway was the (or a) terminus for trains on the GWML for a couple of weeks after the Ladbroke Grove disaster. With two Underground termini there it provides good connections for central London though it was rammed. During that period I believe that a number of services also terminated at Reading.
  8. These are screen grabs from the colour (not colourised) version of Jour de Fête note how the shades of green vary between different shots of the same box. I'd probably go for the shade of green in the third and fourth frames but perhaps let down a bit. Tati's first feature film also includes a rather nice sequence of shunting on the metre gauge SE Centre at Marçais (a once important junction on the metre gauge network- it had all closed by 1951 - just a few years later- and the station building is now a farmhouse. More screen shots of that sequence here https://fdelaitre.org/lpf2/Jdf.htm SainteSainte-Sévère-sur-Indre never actually had a railway but the level crossing scene was shot where the now long dismantled line from La Châtre to Montluçon crossed the D917 road about eight kilometres north of the village while Marçais is about thirty three kilometres to the north-east in Allier.
  9. You can definitely see how far Da Vinci got it wrong. How much better his paintings would have been if only he'd had the support of Adobe. 🤣 A few years ago I wanted to know what shade of green a typically weathered French post box would have been in the 1950s. So, when I got hold of the colour (not colourised)* version of Jacques Tati's 1949 Jour de Fête I thought a scene where the local kids are taking the mick out of François the local postman around a post box would provide some kind of answer. How wrong I was. The scene involves about half a dozen different camera angles and in every one of them the colour looks significantly different thanks to different angle of the sun, lighting, background etc. I actually think that contemporary paintings might be a better guide to colours pre reliable colour film stock as though a professional painter may not have got the details right they probably would have been able to get the colours right as they saw them. *Tati shot the film using the new and unproved "Thomson colour" 3-colour process but had the good sense to also film it in parallel in black and white. Wisely as it turned out as Thomson could never get the colour to print properly so Tati edited and printed the filmfrom the B&W negative. Forty years late Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff, who was herself a film editor and director, and the cinematographer François Ede, were able to use digital techniques to recreate the film in authentic colour from the original colour negatives. The edit was somewhat different as colour films require a different cutting rate than B&W.
  10. Or just bulld a model of the actual sea wall the Pendon scene is also a model of!
  11. There was, it was in 2007 (the plan's anniversary) and was organised by DEMU but that's not what I'm remembering. That competition, defined "Minories" layouts as a terminus with three platforms in seven feet and, as far as I recall, entries included Birmingham Moor St. in scale four (which I think won), Ripper Street and a couple of others. The year I remembered was 2017 (so the 60th anniversary) and there were three or four layouts at Alexandra Palace much more closely based on CJF's actual Minories plan with the characteristic 'diamond' arrangement of crossovers. Hallam Town was the 2mm scale example but I'm not sure what the others were except that one was 3mm scale and another was 4mm scale- possibly Tom Cunnington's EM Minories (GN)
  12. There have been other Borchesters including an RM railway of the month based on plan 24L in "Plans for Larger Layouts" . I think Frank Dyer (Borchester Town and Market) always wrote for MRC and one has to remember that, in those days before the internet, if you subscribed to one magazine you could be in complete ignorance of very well known layouts offered in the others so modellers coming up with the same name might be doing so entirely independently. I knew nothing about Frank Dyer's work until comparatively recently. I can remember being very frustrated that Mike Bryant included a lot of photos of his 4ft x 2ft layout in his "Modelling in TT-3" book but no plan to tell me how he's done it. My father and I took Railway Modeller and I had absolutely no idea that a complete step by step series of articles by him on building the "pint pot" layout had been published in MRC in January-June 1958. Had I seen those I might well have made far more progress in TT-3 than I ever did.
  13. John Charman housed it (the two boards - each 5ft 5ins- stored upright behind a curtain) and brought it out to operate, in a large (27 ft long) residential caravan, probably not the sort you'd be stuck behind on the A303 but still cramped. Whether he actually built it in the caravan is less certain though in his first article he did mention his wife putting up with a lot of sawing and drilling over a year. That was in 1955 and, by 1959 the caravan had been sold and he'd moved into more spacious accomodation(RAF Married quarters?) with Charford extended as an L.
  14. It's not a problem. At Ally Pally a few years ago there were three Minories, in 4mm/3mm and 2mm scale respectively. They all used CJF's track plan and they were all different. Ashburton is an odd one as it was a lovely station (I visited it when the DVR was still planning to have it as their terminus before the Vogons decided to demolish the track to make way for a bypass) but it's a very limited one and very difficult to work - in reality and in model form. I thought Peter Denny had the right idea with Buckinham mk 2 which was based on Ashburton - Great Centralised of course- but with the mill move to the other side and the kickback mill siding turned into a goods loop. Though he never seems to have acknowledged it, Derek Naylor's 00n3 Aire Valley was effectively a close copy of the 00 Madder Valley. The original version of Saltaire was Madderport less one siding and, in the final version (RM July 1972), most of the scenic features are drectly lifted from the final version of the MVR - though without John Ahern's artistic flair. Even the sawmill in the corner with the watermill on the other side of the railway and the branch on the near side of the river. I seen nothing wrong with that but I do think that if you base your layout on someone else's you should acknowledge it. I can't imagine building a Minories and describing it with no reference to CJF or using the Inglenook name without acknowledging Alan Wright.
  15. The new train was being tested again today. I watched, and heard, it passing on the embankment just south of South Greenford and, though not "eerily quiet" it was quieter than normal Distric Line stock. I then walked down to Castle Bar Park to get the train to W. Ealing (I was enroute to Ealing Broadway) . I'd hoped to see and photograph it coming back towards Greenford before my train arrived but found it still at W. Ealing on the charging rails. The Lizzie line train arrived as the Greenford train was pulling in, so I only had time to get a couple of snaps.
  16. I bought one by mistake on eBay once thinking it was H0. It found a good home. It wasn't one of SNCF's "Unifiée" (standard) locos but, as in Britain, the majority of its steam locos were inherited from the former main line companies on nationalisation. The difference was that there had already been quite a lot of commonailty between the major companies before SNCF was created, far more than there ever was from the RCH. That was mainly on coaches and wagons through OCEM but applied to some extent to locos as well. The real problem is that, though there were quite a lot of ex German, "reparation", locos in France from the end of the First World War and to a lesser extent from the Second, there were never enough, except perhaps in Alsace. to make them typical and German steam locos did have a distinctly different "look" when compared with French. This probably won't change so far as steam is concerned as enthusiasm for it is far less marked than it is in Britain and the most popular epoch seems to be IV/V (when steam no longer reigned but "tradtional" railway operation was still the norm with wagonload goods and making and breaking of long distance passenger trains still very much a feature. Judging from exhibitors and attendees at shows, the average age of modellers is also a lot younger than it is in Britain
  17. It depends of course on where in London Bridge and Victoria your end points are. From the main concourse at LB it's a fair walk to the Jubilee platforms which are fairly deep. The District/Circle Line platforms at Victoria are of course cut and cover so closer to the surface than the tube lines. All this rather reminds me of the old gag about telling a visitor to London that you can get around on foot faster than the tube and demonstrating it with a journey from Queensway to Bayswater. They look well separated on the Beck plan and involve a one stop journey on the Central and District lines with a change at Notting Hill Gate but are in reality a 3-5 minute walk.
  18. four MPH is a pretty fast walking pace and, according to Google maps, the distance from Ealing Broadway to Shepherd's Bush station is 3.9 miles. You'd probably also need to add ten minutes for the four major and umpteen other road junctions. I used to cycle most of that route to work along the Uxbridge Road from Ealing Common to Television Centre and it took about 25-30 minutes - I gave up because I fancied staying alive! The "Super Loop 7" express bus (previously known as the 607) that stops at about every four bus stops does Ealing Broadway to Shepherd's Bush railway station in 30 minutes.
  19. I travelled on the Greenford Branch on Friday (For me it's a handy way to get to the Waitrose in W. Ealing on the site of the old goods yard) and they were testing the new train then. It was running in counterpoint to the service train but I think they were doing other tests enroute as well as on the battery banks at West Ealing. There was pobably test equipment aboard that would have made it impossible to carry passengers and there will also have been a load of testing of doors, emergency functions and so on as well as driver training before they can be brought into service. I understand the way it works is that the battery banks at the charging station are gradually charged from the ordinary public supply but deliver charging power to the train at a far higher amperage within the five minutes or so that the Greenford Train turns around in. This system will obviously make sense for GWR's other branches such as Marlow, Henley and Looe (to name just three) that are fairly short. The Greenford Branch makes sense as a test site as there are alternative public transport services covering all five stations it so a failure would only leave prospective passengers inconvenienced not stranded. some pictures of the installation at W. Ealing one of the two charging rails with the battery banks behind fast charge battery bank no 1 optical ? train detector 2nd charging rail (closer to buffers) On Friday, I only saw the train in motion from a service train going the other way but others who've seen it say that it's eerily quiet- far more so than even a normal electric train. I assume this is because of the distributed power.
  20. My pleasure Robin Hammersmith (H&C) was essentally a GWR station and even now there are still GWR benches on the non Island platform. It's therefore a reasonable assumption that, had the GW built their Shepherd's Bush terminus of the Ealing and Shepherds Bush rather than agreeing with the Central London Railway for them to operate it as an extension from Wood Lane/White City, that might well have been a rather similar three-platform affair but one operated by conventional trains, steam then diesel, into modern times. This is more of an "almost was" than a "might have been" and, if the CLR's original plan to extend itself by looping south to Hammersmith then back into the City via Kensington, Hyde Park and Fleet Street had come to fruition, might well have been built. The GWR wanted the line to provide a more direct link to the City and, in the end, it made more sense to make that connection at Ealing Broadway rather than establishing a new suburban terminus at Shepherd's Bush. At yeserday's Wealden Show, someone had a layout based on how that terminus might be now rationalised and cut back and there was a 3mm scale Minories based ( but single track) layout based on it. OT but, while looking for more about the proposed Shepherds Bus terminus, I was highly amused by this from TrainLine Travel from Shepherd's Bush to Ealing Broadway by train in 1 hour 20 minutes If you want to know more about the journey from Shepherd's Bush to Ealing Broadway by train, look no further! The average journey time from Shepherd's Bush to Ealing Broadway by train is 1 hour 39 minutes, although on the fastest services it can take just 1 hour 20 minutes. You'll usually find 6 trains per day travelling the 4 miles (6 km) between these two destinations. You'll need to make 2 changes along the way to Ealing Broadway. You'll be travelling with Thameslink, London Overground or Southern on your way to Ealing Broadway, as these are the main rail operators on this route. Or 15 minutes by tube! The perils of automated journey planning. I also found this piece of nonsense. Thinking about taking the train from London Bridge to London Victoria? We've got you covered. It usually takes around 34 minutes to travel the 3 miles (4 km) from London Bridge to London Victoria by train, although you can get there in as little as 56 minutes on the fastest services Their 34 minute route is Thameslink to Blackfriars then the Underground, but the Underground alone via Westminster (Jubilee + District/Circle) takes just 11-16 minutes. The 54 minute "fastest" route is the "direct train" that offers an unguided tour of South London. This is all a useful reminder that computers and AI systems don't do common sense.
  21. I'm not sure that any fulfil all those parameters. Birmingham Moor St. was the obvious example of a three-platform terminus with a busy service. Windsor (Riverside) also had three platforms off a double track and would be quite an interesting prototype though not so intense. Of the other London termini, Marylebone had four platforms and wasn't just a suburban service but I think Fenchurch Street,. also with four platforms, was about the most compact of them. Although the terrminal road at Liverpool Street (Met) and certain other aspects of the station were Cyril Freezer's direct inspiration for Minories, he said that the idea in Minories of a suburban route worked entirely by tank engines came from the LT&S line out of Fenchurch Street. There were three terminal roads at Blackfriars with loco layovers but also two through platforms for High Holborn and the Widened lines. The suburban section of Kings Cross with its overall roof and a solid wall between it and the main line station had three platforms and the air of being a separate station. Ealing Broadway's District Railway terminus was (and still is) a three platform terminus and, with its short overall roof and original station building (now shops and offices) at street level with stairs down to the platforms is worth looking at as a model if not as a prototype. It must have had some turnover pattern of operation between its opening 1879 and electrification (still partly loco hauled) in 1905. It was originally a two platform station and I don't know if the third platform road was added with its electrification but the 25 inch OS map (National Library of Scotland) definitely shows a loco layover road with what looks like a coaling stage. The same thing must have also been true of the Hammersmith and City terminus at Hammersmith which is also a three platform station (and even now quite Minories like in its appearance) though there was a loco depot there in steam days rather than just a layover track and it too may have been a two platform station before electrification.
  22. But the 040TX- though built in France- were, like the 150X, a German design (a KDL4 - Kriegsdampflok 4) that had been ordered i 1943 by the occupying Germans from the French builder Schneider in Le Creusot. Apart from the first four (which were sabotaged but later repaired) they were completed by Schneider for SNCF after the liberation. The first time I knowlingly saw a Nez Cassé, it was an ONCF diesel in Morocco!
  23. I've had a slightly odd experience about this. I designed my small French terminus layout to be capable, for casual use , of being shunted with its three road fiddle yard replaced by a blanking piece in which state it fits neatly on the back of my worktable. The idea is that the daily goods train has just arrived and I can spend a pleasant half hour or so shunting it and replacing incoming with departing wagons until the loco is at the other end and the train is ready to depart. It is then only necessary to run the loco round and move the brake van to the other end to repeat the cycle with the formerly outgoing wagons becoming the next day's inbound. This is much the same principle as shunting an Inglenook but with rather more variety in the shunting. This idea worked fine but, rather to my surprise, I found that I still really wanted the train to enter from offstage and exit offstage right as well, The fiddle yard (which adds passenger and other workings) made the layout a bit too long for my table so I built a "fiddle stick" with a single piece of track the length of a train (loco and five wagons) . The departed train still needs to be brought back for the loco to run round the train before propelling it off stage during the "interval" ready for the next cycle. Somehow, this seems far more satisfying , even though I can see the train lurking in the wings, but I'm not sure why. It's possible that exchange sidings would avoid this desire as the trains on your short line railroad complete their journeys and the class 1 fairies come and take the wagons away (or just change their cards) during the night. Though for a very different footprint this may give you some ideas for a complete short line. with two termini, one of them with an exchange siding, rather than a terminus to fiddle yard. I've always rather liked this plan designed by Charles Small in 1951 to fit on a standard 9ft x 5ft table tennis table which, rather to my surprise when I re-drew it, fitted this small area using ordinary Peco track with a minimum 18 inch radius. The track that ends at the G of Gulf is obviously the exchange siding. Nowadays one would build this as a shelf layout which would allow for more gradual curves and avoid the spaghetti bowl appearance and,for a diesel era layout, you wouldn't need the turntables. Nevertheless it creates plenty of work for the train crew as this extract from Small's description of a trip for the daily "peddlar" freight run makes clear. It looks like he was using trains of five cars plus a caboose and they'd probably be 40ft cars. Small also assumed passenger as well as freight working but "mixed train daily" was a thing then and not only the title of Lucius Beebe's famous book on short lines. “Upon arriving at Gulf Siding, the train holds the main track. The brakeman then cuts it one car ahead of the caboose. This car and the caboose are left standing on the main while the engine and the other four cars pull down to clear the far switch of the siding. When this has been set for the siding, the engineer horses over his Johnson bar and pushes the four cars through the siding track and tunnel and on into Jone’s Mill. Here three cars are set out. The engine and one car (the one picked up at Bayou) come back, reverse the previous moves to couple onto the car and caboose left on the main line and the train departs, chugging on to complete its run at Lake Creole” With short trains anf maybe a branch, I think you could get this sort of multi depot approach into a 19 ft x 11ft 6in L
  24. I think that approach may have reflected a world (which I'm just old enough to remember) where, if you wanted to watch steam hauled expresses on one hand or the shunting of a marshalling yard on the other you could just go out and do so but what you couldn't do was to experience the actual operation of a railway. Modelling the operation of a railway is just as valid an area of modelling as recreating a railway scene. They're not of course mutually exclusive and many of us at least try to do both but the degree of each will inevitably reflect our own interests. I do find that the layouts that most appeal to me at exhibitions are those that present me with a credible railway scene in which trains do more than just run through it. Good examples of this for me have been the late Geoff Ashdown's Tower Pier (with its Widened Lines atmosphere and operation effectively from a lever frame and block instrument equipped signal box), Bradfield Gloucester Square, Peter Denny's Leighton Buzzard (as exhibited by Tony Gee and also operated with block instruments), Borchester Market, and a number of others. Though I'm not sure if I'd describe it as a layout, one of the exhibits I found most attractive at Abingdon was Peter Boyce's GW Broad Gauge "Parlour Railway" with its mahogany panels, velvet curtains and green shaded brass lamps. Though trains (all beautifully modelled in 7mm scale) just shuttled back and forth .It rather reminded me of the fully signalled training railways (usually Gauge 1 or even 3 ) used by railway companies mainly to teach signalling staff LNWR training railway 1910 (on a table 20' long in two sections of "sound mahogany, French polished") but also the display railways presented at major exhibitions by several pre -grouping railway companies. LMS display 1925 I think such approaches could well still have their place. I also find it interesting that, of the model railways, that seemed most influential in the 1950s and 1960s, only the Craig and Mertonford didn't have a heavy dose of operation. The many articles from the builders of Buckingham, Charford and Berrow (to name just three) all included detailed accounts of their operation and timetabling.
  25. Versions of German locos that ended up in France, mostly as reparations after the First World War, have long been fairly common in H0 as well. So have coaches such as "Bastilles" and thunderboxes and standard European wagons in SNCF markings. All have been fairly simple for manufacturers to add to their ranges requiting little more than relettering. However, while these are useful additions to models of native French stock they are no substitute for it in creating a French themed layout.
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