bécasse

The "four-way" point at Kemp Town was there when the station still had passenger trains. The fpl arrangement must have been interesting.

Faced with a similar problem (albeit in HOe rather than 2FS), I borrowed an idea from Tortoise point motors and had the basic point operating system at a low level and then transferred the actual normal-reverse movement to the point blades by means of a vertical lever pivoted approximately at its mid point. In fact I took a further leaf out of Tortoise's book by making the lever from suitably stiff spring wire with the pivot just a hole in a piece of horizontally mounted brass (the hole needs to be just a tad greater diameter than the wire to allow movement but not excess movement). The system works brilliantly and is remarkably easy to make and set up, the most difficult task is choosing a piece of wire with the right stiffness for the vertical distance.

When we were building Bembridge half-a-century-plus ago we had full-plate prints of three more or less contemporary Aerofilms aerial photographs which showed the station (and a limited amount of its surrounds). I used to sellotape them up on a window so that they were effectively back-lit and then carefully worked my way around them using a botanist's magnifying eyeglass. It was astounding just how much information could be picked up with this technique and it contributed greatly to the accuracy of the final model. Those prints came from full-plate glass negatives loaded in a camera with a top-notch professional camera but even with much more mundane photography it is often surprising how much extra one can learn if only one looks carefully - and the more one does it, the more one learns to avoid the pitfalls.

The GNR was a very early adopter of yellow arms for distant signals, starting before the Great War, whereas elsewhere the conversion didn't take place until the mid/late-1920s. There was one fundamental difference in the painting scheme of these distant arms - the stripe was vertical (instead of being a chevron) and it was white on the front face of the arm rather than the black that later became standard. I realise that CF is effectively set in the very early 1930s, albeit with some "elasticity", but it would rather nice to see those distant arms painted in GNR style which could just about have lasted to the turn of the decade. Painting a vertical stripe would be easier too!

The Southern Railway wartime equivalent of The Grove was Deepdene House near Dorking (which remained in use for many years after the war as a railway accounting centre) and that lent its name to the telegraphic code DEEPDENE for trains conveying VIPs other than Heads of State. Although it was a long while after the war that one attended courses and the like at The Grove, the classroom huts around the garden still sported their wartime camouflage paint.

Never use actual steel wool for foliage or other scenic effects on a model railway, the synthetic stuff is OK though. The trees on our P4 Bembridge layout built over half-a-century ago used steel wool as the base for the foliage, but while it looked good we were having to continually clear away the "beards" (actually tiny fragments of the steel wool) that grew on the locos' motors each day.

A very typical GWR train, no two carriages the same, modellers please note!

In 1964 I worked as a vacation student at a Consulting Engineers based in Westminster (as many were at the time). They specialised in work associated with road traffic, indeed I was taken on to help with traffic counts, and their two major clients were the Greater London Council and the Department of Transport. I was therefore somewhat puzzled by continued comments from engineers to the effect that they were just popping over to Marples Ridgeway for a couple of hours to discuss something they were working on. Eventually the penny dropped and I realised that they were actually heading to the DoT in Marsham Street which they thought of as being a branch office of Marples Ridgeway. Interestingly, the lads weren't a bunch of radicals and probably some at least voted Conservative, and yet they clearly considered the DoT to be furthering the commercial interests of its Minister. Once his moral values became public knowledge it is clear that they were right.

They worked the Cardiff-Bristol-Portsmouth/Brighton services too.

Powdered lock graphite in a small plastic puffer bottle can be a very effective long-lasting lubricant for model locos and one that I use extensively. There may be occasions when it doesn't do the trick and a liquid lubricant is required but in my experience they are few and far between.

It is always good to know that one of my drawings has proved useful. That point lever at Witney was carefully measured up almost sixty years ago!

I really think that it was more to do with the fact that relatively few open wagons moved between the two countries at any period. There were some very weird "pooled" open wagons circulating in England including some without any doors - they had always been emptied on a tippler by their previous owner.

The "fleet" of pooled open wagons gradually got totally mixed up although choke points on the national network (between England and Scotland for example) slowed and localised the process to some extent. By the early 1950s when a goodly proportion of ex-PO wagons was still in use and their fading liveries were still partially discernible, a train delivering household coal to south London would include wagons that had originally come from all over the place but ex-Scottish wagons were rare.

The doorway of the tool shed was central in the end with a narrow panel either side and, as has been said, there were no windows. Lamp huts, of whatever design, always had a "SMOKING PROHIBITED" sign on the door and ventilation was provided, typically by replacing one window pane with perforated zinc sheet. Although these prefabricated Exmouth Junction concrete designs were Southern Railway, possibly intended to reduce the amount of steel reinforcing used at a time of severe steel shortage, few, if any, actually appeared out and about prior to the 1948 nationalisation, so they shouldn't be used on any Southern Railway layout. The general station storage hut was the concrete building used as a lamp hut in prewar SR days, I have added a drawing below.

That was my understanding too but, many decades ago, I was led to believe that the men on the ground saw no practical difference between the twenty B4s and the five K14s from the moment the K14s were delivered, and they probably called the whole lot something like "dock motors" - I think I actually knew once what the actual vernacular was but have forgotten since and it might well have been different for those locos allocated to the Southampton Dock company. Certainly work seems to have been shared reasonably indiscriminately between the two groups.