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And I have seen at least a couple of photographs where a nimble-fingered photographer has taken advantage of that fact to apparently picture the signal with the home on but the distant off.

I believe I am right in suggesting that you have become an old age pensioner today, Tim. Bon annif du Luxembourg belge, et bienvenue au troisième âge!

The station footbridge where I did my trainspotting some 65+ years ago had five motor-worked signals mounted off it, all of which could be heard to operate. The emitted sound was quite brief in duration - say a couple of seconds or so.

The actual speed record was almost certainly held by the single 4-REP unit that was used specifically for speed trials before the service started and which, apart from specific safety-related limits (like slowing at Micheldelver to make sure that the unit went round the island platform and not over it), was permitted to go as fast as it could. The arrangements for that included a man in the cab with binoculars and another with a walkie-talkie which was used to talk to men stationed by every droplight back through the unit, the droplights being lowered to add to any required braking effort! I was told most of the details by a very reliable RTC (and ex-Eastleigh drawing office) man who was on the train, he wasn't allowed to divulge the top speed reached south of Micheldelver but he did say that Mallard would have been left well behind. Apparently the thing that surprised him most, as it was his specialist area, was how well the unit rode at very high speed. One of the most obvious results of the tests was that 4-REP units running "light" were restricted to a top speed of 60mph to stop drivers trying to see how fast they would go, apparently it had been assumed beforehand that they would "balance out" at about 110mph but the tests showed that, at least with a favourable grade, that wasn't the case.

I doubt whether grain was handled there as it was usually sold direct from mills (of which there were more than you might assume in London). Beetroots perhaps?

A comment rather than a criticism, Tim, I suspect that your potato sacks are a little on the skinny side, see https://www.heritagesouthholland.co.uk/article/potato-railway/ and https://nocton.blogspot.com/2017/01/nocton-estate-railway.html , in both cases scrolling down to the relevant picture.

I think that your problem is that, although you don't intend it to operate, what you are proposing isn't a basic layout but rather a complex one with little plain track. As such you aren't going to find cheap 'ordinary' flexible track and much of it is going to be bespoke, made by hand.

I would add to Mike's analysis concerning the possible use of the warning arrangement by saying that it is sometimes possible to judge whether the arrangement was authorised by analysis of working timetables. If there were a number of scheduled what-might-be-called "near misses" then it is likely that the warning arrangement was authorised (as a reasonably safe way of keeping the traffic moving).

Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis was born in 1909. Even if he had observed some GWR red wagons in 1914, at the tender age of five it is unlikely that he was capable of reliably estimating their extent within the fleet. It is quite likely that some would have still been red even if the change of livery had predated the start of the 20th century, and they may well have impressed themselves more on the mind of a five-year-old than the (probably more common) boring grey ones.

One comment that I would add, given that there are various references to both light and dark red, is that the red paint would have contained a significant lead-based compound content and thus would have been susceptible to the lead sulphide blackening (actually dark graying) syndrome (well known from its similar effect on white roofs). It seems to me unlikely that goods wagons were given a general repaint frequently, probably less than once a decade, and that probably also accounts for the reports that wagons with cast numberplates never became anything like universal, even though wagons must sometimes have needed to have their numbers repainted (to keep them legible) without receiving a more general repaint.

I am sure that if Jacob Rees-Mogg has a model railway it will use traditional British stud-contact.

I noticed that too but came to the conclusion that it had been done deliberately to make it easier for a shunter riding on the steps to apply the brake if necessary.

The fact that the steam heating pipe has a bag on it suggests that at that time there was a regular working for which steam heating was required.

Are you sure that advertising hoardings on the railings would be prototypical Tim? It was unusual to fix anything to cast-iron railings (other than, sometimes, street name plaques) because the railings needed regular repainting and that meant that anything fixed to them had to be removed for the task. A newspaper or flower seller who had taken up an adjacent patch might well have temporary signs but at that location any such sellers would be the other side of the road in front of the tube station.

There is some useful information, including photographs taken under a van, on Keith Norgrove's website.

58xx ATC-fitted locos had a single battery box under the RH-side of the bunker, 48xx/14xx locos had two, one for the ATC and the other for rail-motor communication.

The alternative for the ceiling is to paint it a really dark colour in contrast to pale coloured walls. I think that I would probably go for a matt dark grey rather than black (and certainly rather than a dark blue). You would be surprised at how well that can work, not least in making the room seem larger.

Traditional skilled workmen such as signwriters always found the easiest way to do a job. They would almost certainly have had a series of simple stencils to aid them in marking up where the lining was to go - and that would suggest that its positioning was consistent.

It is possible that they ended up in special sets for race traffic, and IIRC there was still some ocean liner traffic at Liverpool in the 1950s so they may have been used for that too.

Oh yes, it was. While the Southern had a fair number of "nondescript" saloons which could be 1st, 2nd or 3rd as required where the class was indicated by paper labels pasted on the windows (and antimacassars added if in use as 1st), they also had a number of Maunsell carriages which were designated 2nd class boat train stock and whose doors did indeed display a painted "2".

Firstly, I found your contribution to last Thursday's MRC "meeting" interesting. Secondly, I have now had a chance to access some of my books which had been temporarily inaccessible and I couldn't find a single example of the use of single blade trap points by the GER, so if they existed they were rare. It was clear that the GER's preferred arrangement was a trap siding or head shunt complete with buffer stops, but where that wasn't possible they seem to have always used double-bladed trap points, most usually with the blade that lay inside the four-foot extended by a rail which then curved sharply across to end just short of the other running rail, rather as shown below:

The Swanage portion may well have still been "ironclads". The sets that in BR days were converted to pull-and-push units started life as two car Swanage-portion sets (although not just for the "Bournemouth Limited").

Horses are possible but probably unlikely in a quarry, so either pinchbars or ropes/chains were used. Good luck with modelling either realistically.

Lewis Carroll was also responsible for the Model Railway Club's first OO gauge layout, the Longridge, Brampton Sands and Calshot Railway, a massive roundy-roundy built shortly after the Club moved into Keen House and quite innovative (hand-built track using Fleetwood-Shaw's method, for example) for its time.

It is worth remembering that, incredible as it may seem today, there were still plenty of homes in the early 1950s that had no mains electricity supply - and they weren't all in rural villages, many were in suburban areas (even of London). So Porter may have had to adopt either clockwork or battery powered traction.