Nearholmer

Imagine the impact on the military and community services!

What utter bollox. (apologies for the poor spelling, it got auto-censored when spelled correctly)

A TPH would be OK if this is/was double track, maybe also if it is where it goes from double to single, but if it’s single except through the platform, there’s nothing to parallel, so a bit unlikely. Personally, given that the factory is going to extend to there, I think I’d make it something to do with that. Continuing the electrical theme, maybe a switchroom containing the intake from the Area Board, with metering, and a switchboard with breakers feeding various parts of the factory. Equally, something like a pump-house, a bin store, toilet block, or even the back of the bike shed. Basically, any sort of little utilitarian structure that might be part of a factory complex, behind which people lurk having a crafty fag.

I wouldn’t get too concerned about having to jump off and push on some hills; we all sometimes bite off more than we can chew, or at least I sometimes do, and some hills have definitely got steeper and higher since I was a lad.

One morning a couple of summers back, my daughter and I had to go to Woburn on a Saturday morning to collect something from a shop, and as we waited to cross the road, one of these came puttering along the road. What impressed me was how tall it was - not a small vehicle at all.

What scale is the old Matchbox lorry, which used to come with Osram lamps transfers on it?

An engineer’s yard? Although most will instantly think “civils and p.way”, both S&T and power supply also had yards. I was very familiar with the SR power supply setup at Horsham, which had a serious variety of cranes and wagons, and which had a shunting loco available, with a crew rostered iirc three days each week. We often had several trains out at the weekend, and apart from concrete troughing, which often went direct Taunton to a siding near the worksite, everything else had to be loaded and marshalled, and the marshalling was very detailed, to get things facing the right way, in the right order, for the job. One day would be spent breaking trains down and positioning wagons for loading/emptying (often Tuesday), and another (often Thursday) making trains up. The trains would then go to a siding close to site on Friday, and come back on Monday. Chipman’s weed killing were next to us, and their trains had to be shunted too, and if we or they had a job locally, within about twenty miles, the dreaded shunting loco and a brake van were used on the possession, which made everything really tediously slow!

There’s a clutch of voters out there, maybe 10-20% of the population, who are p!ssed-off because their lives haven’t turned out as they’d have liked them to in all sorts of ways, are deeply xenophobic to the point of racism, would like to be able to vote in a referendum with the question “Should we have a pogrom of all dusky people, and reset time so that it is 1957 again? Yes [ ] Very definitely yes [ ]”, and who might just decide who gets the keys to No.10. So …… both main parties are prepared to sacrifice whatever principles they may have once had to appeal this minority. Which is in the nature of practical electoral politics. To me, the scary bit is the way this inches things further towards authoritarian nationalism, making the most bonkers people into sort of “tractors” that drag everyone else behind them. My continuing observation of Facebook brings up examples of the mindset every day. Yesterday, I saw a poster commenting that Britain would be in a better place if Germany had invaded and triumphed in 1941, because “at least that way we’d be more English now than we are”, and there is a steady drip of people who simply don’t accept the outcome of the London Mayoral Election, because they don’t like it, real MAGA “storm the capitol” thinking. The fact that neither Sunak nor Starmer “takes the moral high ground”, and has the courage to say “no, you aren’t having that, because it’s not what I’m offering, and I never will” is very, very disturbing.

If you get hold of an old General Appendix, you will find oodles of rules about the process.

Old hat, or maybe old Stetson.

Most small station cattle docks only had one or two gates for embarkation, and the docks were often situated in quite odd places, even spanning point-work, and sometimes on the outside of quite tight curves, although the “dock front” was straight, so you’ve got a lot of freedom of positioning. It only took a few minutes to load or unload a single cattle wagon, which could be manually moved into position and then out of the way. Places with cattle markets (like Welshpool) had facilities on a different scale.

Yes, I’ve been following the “winding up” of operations, and Ted made a post on Facebook on the day. There is talk of some sort of tourist operation being created, a bit similar to the two that operated before but focusing on the history and ecology, plus ideas for a velorail being kicked around.

I live close to the (Great) Ouse, and when I left this morning that was shrouded in thick mist too, in fact the whole journey down was shrouded in thick mist, except the bit on The Underground.

I thought I’d share a panoramic view of the majestic South Downs, towering above the upper part of the Cuckmere Valley, which I took from the train in-passing this morning.

I would respectfully suggest that if you are contemplating spending hundreds of pounds on locos then “cheapest” might not be the best criterion to apply to the purchase of a controller. Personally, I would strongly recommend Gaugemaster, who supply various very good controllers of different ratings.