bécasse

S°d's law suggests that most of the other complete numbers will be for vehicles withdrawn from normal service to form part of the Bournemouth electrification fleet and renumbered in the process!

In the 1950s and early 1960s the farther flung parts of the Western Region made a lot of use of ex-LMS and similar stock. I have always suspected that they were popular because they were fitted with slam door catches (whereas ex-GWR vehicles weren't) - although that wouldn't be significant for a BG.

Reversed back with the driver looking back from the front cab, not significantly different to how it had been worked in steam days (which, of course, were only a couple of years or so previously).

1980 - BR corporate identity, just the name of the box in black lower case letters (initial letters upper case) on a white background, with the sign mounted on the front of the box. The station name boards mounted at intervals along platforms were all but identical. No doubt someone with a copy of the design manual will come along and tell you the precise size of both letters and sign, I managed to mislay mine years ago.

Aylesbury was effectively a significant node point so it may have been repurposed as a base for RCH checkers.

For much of the Victorian period Dolgelley was an absolute frontier station, the Cambrian worked to the west, the Great Western to the east, with through passengers having to change trains. Towards the end of the Victorian period, and more so during the Edwardian period, through carriages started to operate, mostly of GWR origin but with at least one CR corridor composite working (with other GWR stock) to/from London Paddington. These carriages were transferred between GWR and CR trains at Dolgelley. There would have been occasional through excursion trains and these would have changed locos at Dolgelley - it isn't impossible that some excursions off the GWR to Barmouth were worked through using a suitable GWR loco and a CR conductor between Dolgelley and Barmouth, but this is only speculation and I have seen no photographic evidence. Goods wagons would have been transferred between the two companies at Dolgelley but, as I have indicated before, the Cambrian would have tried to route originating traffic via Welshpool to maximise its revenue and the LNWR would have tried to do the same in the opposite direction. Special through rates would have been offered for regular traffic to help influence the choice of traders. (This wasn't limited to this particular location, of course, but happened all over the pre-grouping, and to a lesser extent post-grouping, railway network.) There is a topic elsewhere on RMweb which (when you have ploughed through its multitudinous pages) contains a lot of useful information about traffic on the line in the pre-Great War period, in particular that the GWR unsurprisingly operated class F express goods trains to/from Dolgelley, these would have conveyed traffic for Dolgelley itself, the CR and also for the Dolgelley-originating GWR pick-up goods.

You are right, of course, I was thinking of a stopping passenger train possibly picking up a van (return empty newspaper van?) , but for the pick-up goods such shunt moves would be a normal activity, dropping off as well as picking up.

Isn't it a bit dangerous referring to the preserved locos? They almost certainly aren't still in their original LT finish and what they carry now will be their signwriter's interpretation of what was there originally - very close but almost certainly not precisely the same. I have wondered about the original train number plates. There must have been thousands of each of the ten single digits and, no matter where one saw them, they always looked precisely the same, furthermore they must have all been precisely the same size to fit the slots. That suggests to me that they must have been produced using a mechanical process rather than being sign written. The E-plates for bus stop flags were certainly sign written but there there were small numbers required of what must have been several thousand different plate designs of at least three different sizes.

Yes it definitely needs to be further back to protect the down sidings exit. It would allow a train to draw up to 21, detach the loco to collect a (fitted) van from the down sidings and attach it to the front of its train before proceeding.

Old-style galvanised pressed steel bin mounted (temporarily for the purpose) on a sack-barrow. Ashes then dumped in the goods yard, different spot each day.

The vast majority of LNWR signal boxes were built (in multitudinous sizes) to what has become known as the type 4 or 1876 design which remained that Company's standard design for almost thirty years. While no one would call them commonplace there were a fair number of the overhead boxes as you have identified from the OS map at Huddersfield. You might find this page and its links from John Hinson's excellent website helpful. I don't know the answer to the question about the joint station at Leeds New but if you can find contemporary photographs which have even distant views of the signal boxes it should be obvious whether or not they are LNWR design. It might be that the one that controlled the link from the LNWR's line into Wellington was to LNWR design while the box at the other end was to a NER design.

The lattice in the drawings of post was done by someone who, despite the magazine's title, wasn't an engineer. The front and side view of the lattice should be almost identical, they are only displaced from each other vertically by a just sufficient amount to allow the fastening bolts to function, an inch or so. I can't remember now which is the higher* but from a modelling point of view it doesn't matter as at modelling scales they appear aligned whereas lattices formed as in the drawing look all wrong (and in reality would lack a lattice's inherent strength). Unfortunately at least one model manufacturer got it wrong (although I believe on the basis of another erroneous drawing, not this one). * I have subsequently found a photo which shows that the side lattices were mounted marginally higher than the front and back lattices. It isn't impossible that there were examples of signals where the orientation was the other way round (after all, the very initial installations of SR rail-built signals had the rails mounted orthogonally to the track and very odd they looked too, not something I would repeat in a model unless I were modelling one of the specific locations concerned).

Yellow shunt discs/arms (other than on the Great Western who didn't use them) were introduced as part of the agreed post-grouping signalling reforms c1930. You won't find them before that date and it took a year or two before they became commonplace. BR(W) started using them in the early 1950s, seemingly reluctantly as they never became widespread on ex-GWR lines. The GNR was a yellow pioneer in another respect, though, as it started to paint distant signals yellow (with a straight white bar rather than a black chevron) just before the Great War. It would be another dozen years or so before yellow distant arms became the norm elsewhere.

Wild Swan's Great Western Railway Journal no 23 (summer 1997) contains an article entitled The Kingham goods. Written by Michael Clifton who was a fireman at Banbury, it describes the working of the pick-up goods from Banbury to Kingham and back on a typical day, including the detail of the shunting undertaken at each stop. If there is a better description in print of the everyday work of the thousands of pick-up goods trains that ran each day on Britain's railways, I have yet to read it, and it is particularly pertinent to you as it covers the work on a GWR cross-country line much like Ruabon-Dolgelley (Barmouth was on another railway - the Cambrian Railways - in 1910 which fell under the LNWR sphere of influence). The pick-up goods would have conveyed all the goods and mineral wagons to and from all the stations with goods facilities along the line together with any wagons destined for transfer to the Cambrian Railways at Dolgelley. Given the length of the line and the fact that there would have considerable mineral traffic (slate) from the Blaenau Festiniog branch towards Ruabon, Pick up goods workings in the area may well have been something like Ruabon-Bala, Bala-Blaenau Festiniog and Bala Junction-Barmouth, all of which would have been a reasonable day's work for a round trip. Although there were collieries in the Ruabon area, wagons of coal for domestic and local industrial purposes would have been conveyed by the pick-up goods trains, there would have been no dedicated mineral trains except, possibly, for outbound slate traffic, as there was nowhere for them to have run to. (There were no major cities along the mid-Wales coast and, even had there been, mineral trains would have been routed over LNWR and Cambrian Railways metals and not over the GWR.) Incidentally, the working of pick-up goods trains was only ever a slow, gentle process if the train had a fair booked time at the station waiting to pass (or be passed by) another train, normally shunting was carried out as rapidly as possible, very much a case of crash, bang, wallop and something that most modellers get wrong. Given that you mention a cattle market close by your station it is possible that this generated some special market-day workings, either passenger or cattle, or possibly both together in market-day mixed train workings. The provision of the cattle dock to serve the market makes it even more important that the dock had direct shunting access. If that physical location of the dock was important because of direct access to the market (and I certainly don't disagree with that analysis) then the yard layout would have been reversed giving direct access from the "London" end. However given that the track layout is built (and I have to say looks quite nice from the photo), the simplest thing would to just move the cattle dock and notional(?) market to where you have "goods" marked. It is probably unlikely that traffic levels would justify any greater provision for general goods than a large lock-up shed (probably in corrugated iron) on a small platform and that could easily be located elsewhere. I still think that it is unlikely that a company horse would have been provided, one would be more likely in a town location, but it is immaterial, there would have been a local carrier doing much the same work (and quite possibly with "G W R" on his cart), and his horse, or the coal man's, would have been used on a tit-for-tat basis. Incidentally the coal man (or men) probably did other work other than just delivering coal, quite possibly farm work. None of this is intended as a criticism but merely as information, which you say you were lacking, to help you get your layout, and its operation, as right as possible. Your avatar suggests that you are based in Malaysia, in which case you are particularly brave to even try. I only live across the Channel in Belgium and even that makes modelling Britain's railways very difficult despite many well-filled "goody" boxes. I do, though, have the advantage of being old enough to remember pick-up goods trains (and even before the 1955 ASLEF strike destroyed much of the railways' general goods traffic).

While you are undoubtedly correct in assuming that a yard as small as the one you propose wouldn't have had a dedicated shunting loco, it almost certainly wouldn't have had a dedicated shunting horse either. The vast majority of shunting would have been carried out by the train engine, picking up empties (assuming there was no originating traffic - which would be true of the majority of rural yards) and dropping off (and positioning for unloading) arriving wagons, all typical work for the daily pick-up goods. During its first sojourn of the day at the station it may well also reposition some empty wagons (perhaps in the second loop) so that they are ready to be conveniently picked up on its return working. During the absence of the goods train, there might be some need to reposition wagons (especially to/from the kick-back road that you have marked "cattle" and which would be inaccessible to the goods train loco), and these movements would typically be carried out by using a "borrowed" trader's horse or by men using pinch-bars. The latter becoming almost universal by the 1950s as traders' horses disappeared. It isn't impossible pre-c1930 that there was a company horse for a delivery cart and obviously that would be used in preference to a trader's horse when available. One final point is that it is unlikely that the cattle dock would be situated on a relatively inaccessible kick-back road, cattle vans (when loaded) needed to be handled as quickly as possible and docks were usually located to facilitate this (albeit that they also needed good road access), alongside the second loop might be a possible location on your plan.

Neasden, once transferred to the LMR (it had, of course, been an ER shed), was allocated to Cricklewood's district which would make a loan from Willesden unlikely (but probably not absolutely impossible in an emergency). The other, perhaps more realistic possibility, is that a Willesden loco may have been seen on the High Wycombe line heading a train diverted away from the WCML during electrification. There was certainly a period in the early 1960s when the up overnight Manchester-London service turned right at Bletchley, left at the Calvert Spur and then ran via High Wycombe to Marylebone! Doubtless that wasn't the only such diversion.

As I have already said, the frame was along the back wall - and therefore the signalman (signal woman was possible in wartime) worked it with his back to the track. The SR seemed to have already adopted this arrangement for new works sometime prior to the war, possibly from 1923.

One might have expected the Annett's patent route indicator to have been used by the LBSCR, but it wasn't as that railway normally provided a single home at the approach to the throat of a terminal station together with platform homes mounted back-to-back with each platform starting signal. The pulling off of the relevant platform home informed the driver which platform he was routed to while the pulling off of the approach home gave him the authority to actually go there. At some stations there were also platform distants mounted under the homes, the road being completely clear to the stops if both home and distant were pulled off but partially occupied if only the home was. I have attached two of my photos of the standard LSWR/SR indicator at the entry to Ryde Pier Head which, by post-war years anyway, was electrically operated even though the actual home signal was wire worked. The black cover disc operating arm can be seen going to the bottom right quadrant so that too (despite my previous doubts) was operated from that quadrant, I have struck out the reference in the previous post. More distant views of the same signal show that the electrically operated and lit version of the indicator had a plain metal back sheet without the frosted glass window required when the indicator was back lit from an external oil lamp. It should also be noted that the electrically worked version required a switch attached to the spectacle plate of the main signal which is clearly visible in the from view above.

Don't forget that all the discs would be "upper quadrant" ones, a distinctive feature of the LNER and its constituents, not only do these discs move "off" in the opposite to those on other railways, but the glazed holes to provide night-time aspects are in different places on the discs too.

Envy! Walker, alone among the big four GMs was spending money (carefully) left, right and centre to modernise his railway and was getting excellent financial results in return, even in those straitened times. While I was at Oxford in the mid-1960s, the Southern Region starting timing some of its trains in the WTT to ¼ minutes, a fellow OURS member (who went on to be a highly respected railway manager) was heard to comment that the Western Region could apparently manage no better than timing to hours and quarter hours - or so it seemed from the punctuality of its trains.

But that Annett's design one on the H&BR not only doesn't resemble the standard LSWR/SR indicator, it doesn't work in the same way either. The indicator discs in the LSWR/SR version swung up and down through a right angle approximately as shown on the appended drawing below (although I think the blanking disc was pivoted the other side to the indicator discs). The operating mechanism was effectively concealed within the box but was quite simple with the operating wires emerging through a slot in the base of the box.

The owning partners tended to be parsimonious so far as capital expenditure was concerned which would tend to support the provision of cheaper cast-iron plates. The white highlighting of characters in relief on these wouldn't have stayed white for very long - regular wiping with an oily cloth would turn the white a pale buff colour.

And just as pertinently, the 25" OS maps show land ownership boundaries (and acreages) and there is no indication that the land concerned was ever in railway ownership. Irregularities in depicted boundaries are often important clues to the one-time existence of railway facilities, in this case there is absolutely nothing to suggest that there was ever anything other than plain single track through this area, even the previous existence of a single platform would normally show up as a slight widening of the cutting and, perhaps, an adjustment of the land boundary to facilitate access to it from the road. As a passenger facility, whatever was provided must have been inspected by the BoT, I wonder what their inspector's report said (assuming one can read his handwriting).

John Hinson's excellent signalbox.org website doesn't seem to actually include any photos of Southern Railway WWII ARP boxes but looking at the photos of SR and BR(S) boxes built either side of that war will demonstrate that the basic internal layout remained consistent with the frame and instruments along the back wall of the box. These photos of the 1939-built New Hythe box by the late Norman Cadge are probably the most helpful.

S originally stood for second (and T for third had been used instead on older vehicles until June 1956). Standard only replaced second as a class designation in the mid-1980s at about the same time as passengers became customers, and for much the same reason.