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I wonder if that is an early Rice effort, Ian was certainly working for Hamblings around, or a little before, then.

That DCC command station may look daunting but actually putting one together, soldering in one nominated component at a time, is actually surprisingly easy. Indeed, considerably easier than putting a model kit together in my humble opinion.

BR paintwork on Gresley carriages, especially "second division" ones, rarely stayed perfect for long. I have always presumed that it was because it was difficult to get the preparation work right when the vehicles had once been varnished teak.

It isn't a hugely difficult task to solder two L-shaped lengths of brass together to form a tapered post, it helps to make up a couple of suitably sized "matchsticks" in wood to go in each hollow end while you make it up. Tack solder the two pieces together first so that it is easy to adjust the joints until you have the taper right, then run solder up each of the seams in turn. Subsequent soldering of detailed pieces on to the post may temporarily melt the soldered joints in their immediate vicinity but this won't affect the integrity of the tapered post.

I think that they were usually rotated by around 120° to tip their loads, the load starts to move well short of 90° but you need to go to about 120° to clear everything in the wagon.

Polishing them off with toothpaste might work. I have certainly removed unwanted marks from glazing that way in the past.

Roye England told me, back in 1964, that the Pendon team had failed to find anyone who had seen more than a nominal train running on the Madder Valley when it was still in John Ahern's ownership, and that was also true among the many Model Railway Club members of my acquaintance. It certainly didn't work effectively as relocated to Pendon and the fact that it does now says much for the efforts of the Pendon team over the intervening decades, restoring (upgrading?) the layout to a running standard without destroying its historical heritage.

And in my personal library - as handed to me at Penge East station on the relevant morning back in 1962. It was quite well produced, the only thing that it lacked was information on where to apply!

Definitely a dance-hall, the roof shape is very distinctive, and probably a popular choice with the gun crew as they were spacious inside (hence the nick-name) and the stove was adequate when required (often a failing with large vans), they rode quite well too.

There were a number of examples of junctions between single track lines in the UK where, in accordance with BoT requirements, the actual junction was double track and Wadebridge was one of them. As has been suggested, the railway company(its) concerned often (and quite quickly) realised that the expense of maintaining a junction "out in the sticks" wasn't justified and resited the actual signalled junction to the nearest station with two separate single tracks from there to the point of actual divergence of the two routes. Again Wadebridge was one of the examples. By the way, the reasoning behind the BoT requirements was that it was difficult (although not completely impossible) to ensure that trains weren't accepted from both ends of a single line route when there was a junction in the middle of that route. (In extremis, they could have been passed by routing one a short distance down the diverging route, and then reversing it back past the junction once the other train had passed. Quite rightly, the BoT disliked this solution, although I know of one instance of it happening regularly as late as the 1960s at Boscarne Junction where the afternoon Wadebridge-Bodmin General school train was recessed on the Bodmin North line to allow a Bodmin General-Wadebridge train to pass, there being no running loops.)

Post 1873 the Board of Trade required that remote junctions between two single track lines were made as double track junctions - so B, but you don't need the left hand end trailing crossover as part of the junction arrangement and, strictly speaking, the two double track sections on the single track branches should be long enough for trains to pass. The BoT might not have insisted on that though given the shared approach route was double track. Option A would be typical of the last 50 years.

It is, perhaps, worth remembering that Smokey and Cyril were close friends, albeit that Smokey lived in Brum and Cyril in East Devon.

Ah, that is interesting as the GER was certainly one of the railways where I had identified some stations with white-lined platform edges prior to the Great War. It can be very difficult to precisely date century-old photographs but I had the impression that at least one GER example predated 1913. Given that this poster seems to imply that this is a new practice to be implemented from September 1913 it may be that there had been earlier trials or even local initiatives. One forgets just how bad fog could get in the past, although I can only remember one occasion when it was so dense that I couldn't see the ground I was walking on (and had just got off a bus being guided by its conductor carrying a flaming torch). In the suburban area of the Southern Region, at least, it was the practice when a reduced "Fog Service" was in operation to place a lighted white oil lamp at the far end of every platform so that drivers could see where to stop their trains.

The earliest white-lined platforms that I have been able to definitively identify and date from photographs were GWR rail-motor halts opened in the first decade of the 20th century, not all of them had white lines and it may be that those that did were (at least when first opened) unlit. I have also identified that a number of major stations on the LNWR, GNR, GER and possibly other railways had white lines on at least some of their platforms prior to the Great War, but I have been unable to fathom any logic as to why it was done at some places and not others. (A search through the LNWR postcard series will identify a number of their locations.) White-lining was certainly not applied generally during the Great War and it doesn't seem to have been done in response to aerial attacks by zeppelins and (more rarely) aircraft, even though some semblance of blackout was. However, I do strongly suspect that white-lining was applied in at least some areas where a naval blackout was imposed; certainly most, if not all, stations on the Isle of Wight had white lines applied during the Great War and retained them afterwards. White-lining was rare during the inter-war years, except where it had been applied earlier as noted above. One specific new example, though, was that the Southern Railway applied white lines to those platforms of its London terminal stations that had third-rail electrification (so at Waterloo, for example, some platforms had them, some didn't, and doubtless more gained them with the Pompey line electrification). This principle may have been extended to a few other major SR stations but it certainly wasn't applied generally. Quite a lot of Underground stations in London had white-lined platforms but insufficient photographs exist to be certain as to whether this was a general or limited policy (and whether it applied only to the Underground Group prior to the formation of the LPTB). Come the Second World War and its generally-applied ARP regulations and one finds white-lining (and white bands or marks on vertical obstructions) applied much more generally, but even then there were probably more stations without (admittedly with light traffic loads) than with. In some cases, intermittent, rather than continuous, white lines were applied. After the war, white-lining (but not the other ARP white bands/marks) continued to applied, both before and after nationalisation in 1948, and the practice may have become more universal over time (although never totally so).

There was certainly something "holier than thou" about most of the group that built Heckmondwike, which wasn't a bad fictional layout for its day but which, to my mind at least, failed to meet CJF's challenge. I seem to recollect Essery himself, somewhere in his writings, criticising a "much vaunted fine scale layout" of that era (which he didn't actually name) for making the craven mistake of painting a white-line on its platform edge when it was supposed to set in 1937 when everyone knew that the white-lines were an ARP feature of the second war. Unfortunately he fell at the first hurdle having failed to consult period photographs which not only showed that that particular station did have a white-line in 1937, but that most if not all Isle of Wight stations had had such white-lines since the naval blackout imposed during the Great War, and that a number of companies had been using such white-lines in particular circumstances as early as the Edwardian period. Although Essery was a particularly bad example, the "saintly" attitude, or lack of humility, wasn't uncommon in Scalefour circles at that time. One of the reasons that, although I was one of the pioneers 50 years ago and have continued to dabble ever since, I have only actually joined the Scalefour Society in the last few years, well after my move to Belgium.

Yes and no. Stock and (especially) locos could become quite dowdy in a few months if they weren't cleaned properly and we are talking about a period when manpower was becoming a significant problem. On the other hand, there was a lot of modern (Bulleid) rolling stock which had been painted in malachite just before the change to crimson and cream came in and considerable attempts do seem to have been made to keep those vehicles looking clean and tidy - indeed, most managed to survive in malachite until the change of BR livery policy in 1956 (which specified green for Southern Region stock) and so were never painted crimson and cream.

For coaching stock, the SR/BR(S) painting cycle was repaint after 6 years, revarnish with paint touch-ups after 3, although stock that was little used and whose paintwork remained OK would go longer. Obviously this hadn't been followed during the war years but I doubt whether much remained in olive green for very long after the post-nationalisation red livery was introduced in late 1949(?). Carriages that had been repainted in malachite would have retained that colour throughout your period although the insignia may well have been altered to one extent - there was real mis-mash of lettering and numbering schemes on stock at that time. An M7 would have been in BR (not SR wartime) unlined black bearing the insignia BRITISH RAILWAYS, there may have been a handful in malachite with BRITISH RAILWAYS either in "sunshine" or on Gill Sans lettering - it depends precisely when they passed through works, unlettered is also a possibility as are s---- rather than 3---- numbers (and numbers on front buffer beams and bunker backs). To be certain, you really need photos, but it does mean that it is difficult for someone to challenge what you choose to do unless they have photographic proof that you were wrong.

While I have no direct experience of building these, can I remind you that LNER/BR(E) ground signals, unlike those of all the other companies, were upper quadrant so the red or yellow bar went to the NW-SE diagonal, so as to speak, when the signal was pulled off - quite a distinctive feature.

"Not a staff station" means that the station can't be used for passing trains travelling in the opposite direction (whether passenger or goods), whereas "not a block post" means that the station can't be used either for passing trains in the opposite direction or for breaking up the block section and thus allowing two trains in the same direction to follow each other (using, for example, staff and ticket or divisible METS).

Such levers were often the key to much simplification of the interlocking for the whole layout, the term "direction lever" often being used for the FPL lever concerned.

So far as I can remember there were no signals of this type along the length of the Quarry Line which was largely in broad cuttings through chalk - and the only place where there was a narrow "cutting" was through the erstwhile covered way at Coulsdon and there were no signals there. I have remembered, and found an online (lower) photo of, the girder-based colour light signal gantry at the southern end of Penge Tunnel which was erected during the winter of 1958-59 as part of the Kent Coast scheme, but, although in a tight cutting, it still had upright supports at either end of the horizontal.

Because that is what the Southern Region were fitting to their colour light signals at that period - and it makes them very distinctive. Incidentally, at that period colour light signals were as distinctive to their BR Region as the semaphore signals had been before them, so, although you might get some inspiration as to how a problem was solved elsewhere on another Region, the detail of that solution would be all wrong for your location and would have to be rethought - rather like ARP hoods! Note too, that the Southern had their own distinctive black on white number plates for colour light signals, which were prefixed C for the Central Division and W for the Western Division (and not prefixed for the Eastern Division - they got there first) followed by the one or two letter signal box code, while automatic signals were prefixed A, CA or WA. Plates for automatic signals also carried a black horizontal bar and those for semi-automatic signals the symbol SEMI .

If you assume that the signal was erected in the first half of the 1950s, a rather neat solution would have been to let a concrete bracket into the brickwork. I don't think that it was actually done anywhere but it would certainly have been possible and, incredibly, a few of the (free standing) concrete brackets are still in use today. This webpage gives historical details, including a dimensioned drawing, but be careful with the photos which show the current signals (and safety barriers) mounted on them and not what would have been there in the 1960s. Three things to note are that there would have been a ladder fixed to the cutting wall to allow S&T technicians to access the signal head(s), there would also have been a "signal post" telephone recessed into the cutting wall, and finally the red lens would have been the lowest of the three or four in the signal head (which would also have had long "ARP" hoods). https://hydeparknow.uk/2020/12/05/seventy-years-of-main-line-signalling-in-london-2/ This page, from the same group of web pages, includes a number of contemporary photos of the concrete brackets: https://hydeparknow.uk/2020/10/01/seventy-years-of-main-line-signalling-in-london/

It definitely had both box and signals up to passenger closure (although the signals may well have been oou by then) - the box retained its SE&CR name board (blue condensed lettered on white enamel) right up to the end, it wasn't the only example but they were very rare. Colyton, on the Seaton branch, was another example but only during the summer months and I have a sneaking suspicion that it was set up in such a way that two identical tablets could be out for the long Seaton Junction - Seaton section with trains carrying the same tablet right through rather than giving up a tablet and receiving a new one at Colyton.

Surely the answer with at least the more common and semi-standardised road vehicles (buses and taxicabs in particular) would be 3D printing.