bécasse

3 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

Thsre is also the fact that ERTMS on the Cambrian replaced the RETB system (which also lacks signals) and if you want to be really picky then you could go back to the first RETB system to find a railway without lineside signals…..

If one wants to be really, really picky, one would point out that a good few OES single track terminal branch lines were operated without any fixed signals beyond the junction station, especially post the mid-1920s (although the SR, at least, did provide illuminated marker lights). Where fixed signals existed on such lines, they often did no more than protect level crossings.

10 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Thameslink trains ran across London off-peak initially but during rush hours they terminated at Moorgate (or stayed on the Southern Region).  I understood this to be a deliberate policy to ensure that late running on one side of the river didn't infect rush hour traffic on the other side.  They were limited to 8 coaches by platform lengths, but because they wanted to run 12 cars, the platform at Farringdon had to be extended, and this was done by cutting off the junction to Moorgate.

Thameslink trains generally operated through at all times from the first day that the service was introduced, changing between third rail and overhead electrification during the stop at Farringdon. There were periods when various parts of the link were rebuilt when the service was split north and south (and was advertised as such) and there were also occasions when disruption of one sort or another, most commonly weather, also caused the service to be split, I suspect to minimise disruption to crew rosters.

The very first Thameslink departure from Brighton (to Luton in this case) arrives at Preston Park around 06.15 on a Monday morning back in 1988. I travelled though to Kings Cross Thameslink on it.

3 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

The second vehicle appears to be a former SECR First ( possibly downgraded to Third ) in an otherwise LSWR set.

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.

8 hours ago, CF MRC said:

The more you look the more you see…
 

 

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.

3 hours ago, Mikkel said:

From my "Trains worth modelling" folder. With apologies to Churchward 🙂

 

 

Pembroke & Tenby line. Source: Embedded link from Pembroke & Monkton Local History Society.

 

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

19 minutes ago, Olive_Green1923 said:

It’s amazing how many political scandals get poured over in such finite detail, leading to various books, articles, TV dramas or passing references in society, yet the scandal of Marples is little known or ever discussed, yet it led to one of the biggest acts of self harm ever committed on this country, yet Beeching always carries the can for it (not completely unjustifiably though).

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.

20 hours ago, Mol_PMB said:

As a child I remember the 155s replacing the 33s on the Bristol-Bath axis (my gran lived in Keynsham) so they were presumably on Cardiff-Weymouth or similar.

 

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.

4 hours ago, Graham_Muz said:

 

In fact it was from 1st Jan 1913 that the K14s were officially known as the B4 class by the LSWR, so the K14 term was only officially used for just over 5 years. 

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.

Here is a view of a 1959 Southern Region installation at Sheerness, it is a slight oddity as the point is a wide-to-gauge  trap (on a passenger line!) but doubtless Phil will tell us if there are obvious differences with the standard installation.

2 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Why  "so-called" ? ......... they were built against Works Order K14 just as the others were built against Works Order B4.

Because they were soon reclassified as B4s and seem to have been used indiscriminately with the earlier locos - and, of course, the boilers, the most obvious distinguishing feature of the K14s, sometimes got swapped with those on other locos (or new builds) on overhaul.

Having mentioned 94 and 103 earlier as being Adams locos that spent some time with tapered buffers and the smaller size buffing heads during the pre-WWII SR era, I note that both those locos were then allocated to Bournemouth shed to work on the Poole Quay tramway, however there is a well-known Stanhope Baker photo of 93 alongside the Custom House there in 1951 with the large buffing heads so there can't actually have been a positive reason for the relevant locos having small buffing heads pre-war.

The shot concerned is out of copyright so I have attached a scan of sufficient of the front of the loco to enable a reasonable estimate of the buffing head size to be made.

Can I suggest that wooden-bodied slab-sided vehicles such as Fruit Ds and Southern U-vans were painted crimson on both sides and ends (but had never been lined) whereas NPCS vehicles that were more akin to passenger-carrying vehicles in their appearance were painted crimson (originally lined), or occasionally crimson and cream, on their sides and black on their ends. That is certainly what my memory suggests and would have been logical in treating the former of vehicles as akin to wagons (which were, of course, treated in the same way all round) albeit in crimson rather than brown/bauxite.