bécasse

I suspect that it is a former 1st/2nd class SECR composite (formed 2/2/1/1/1/2) some of which had been downgraded to 3rd class by the late 1930s.

Fruit vans would have regularly been unloaded in the early (usually) pre-dawn hours of the morning. They often carried a very time-sensitive perishable load which had to reach that morning's markets which themselves were very early. Obviously the van interior didn't have to be lit for the load (typically pummets of some description) to be unloaded but lighting would have helped speed the task without damaging anything.

The photo is pre-1913 at least. Horse tram tracks can be seen crossing Maiden Lane bridge over the Regent's Canal in the foreground and they had been removed by the time that Ordnance Survey resurveyed the area in 1913. The clothing being worn is reasonably typical for working class folks in the Edwardian era so the photo will probably have been taken during the decade prior to 1913.

It is after 18 October 1936 when the new signal box opened with colour light signalling, one of the new Westinghouse signal heads can be clearly seen. The train's composition strongly suggests that it is an outer-suburban via Woking service and two of the three possible routes (Portsmouth Direct and Alton) were electrified from summer 1937, however the Basingstoke service remained steam worked for another three decades.

This photo "popped up" on Facebook. Doubtless Tim has seen it before and, of course, it was taken perhaps a couple of decades before the supposed era of CF (although the world moved at a slower pace then), but it's a nice reminder of the goods area north of Kings Cross itself. Next extension to CF the canal perhaps?

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.