bécasse

IIRC the C&L point templates are all of LNER point & crossing work. Rail would have been bullhead, still in 45 foot lengths, and the chairs on plain track would have been 3-bolt SI ones. The LNER was the poorest of the four post-grouping companies, mainly thanks to the economic situation, so there would still have been vast quantities of pregrouping track around, including 30 foot lengths, in the 1930s.

I have a vague recollection of having seen someone do it using "like-pole" magnets. It must have been a fair time ago though.

There are probably higher resolution satellite views somewhere on the web but they tend to be for obscure purposes that only locals might think of. Where I live I found a website intended to help align TV dishes with the various transmitting dishes and it offers a resolution several times higher than Google's best.

See this drawing of a lever at Witney Goods.

Have you tried looking on Google satellite view given that you know the location. The resolution won't be good enough for fine detail but may well be sufficient to put it into context.

I reckon that Frank must have started on Borchester Town before the Archers started on radio. By the time it first appeared at Central Hall in the late 1950s it was both complex and just about complete with a lot of hand-built stock. Frank was a professional model-maker but that doesn't necessarily mean that he was quick with his own modelling, Gordon Gravett was (is) also a professional but it still took him the best part of two decades to bring Pempoul to fruition even with some help from Maggie.

Just to very marginally correct Keith. The dolly would also be placed on the right hand side if there was something physically preventing its location on the left, in a "tight" area that is probably slightly more likely as a reason than sighting difficulties. A mechanically worked dolly would normally be placed with its disc-face orthongonal to the nearest running rail.

Sadly Robin Winter, Isle of Man enthusiast and modeller par excellence, died last Saturday after at least a couple of decades of chronic illness. I first met Robin, ably assisted by his wife, Susan, and children Tim and Annie, when he exhibited his exquisite IoM-based OOn12 layout Port Foxdale at the Brighton Model Railway Club's small exhibition at Dorothy Springer school, only a short stroll from my then home. Chatte ing with them, I came to realise that they, like me, could be classified as "sole" modellers so I passed on my contact details with an offer of assistance should they ever need it. Even so, I was surprised some months later to receive a phone call from Susan (Robin himself was already finding phone calls difficult) to say that they were having real problems getting their model of the IoM's ex-CDR back-to-back railcar to work. The model was made up, beautifully as it transpired, from a pair of Anbrico white-metal kits with a powered van marshalled between them. A formation that was fine in theory, and had prototypical provenance, but which was overwhelmed by the shear weight of the two Anbrico bodies. After giving some thought to the matter, I concluded that the only solution was to fully replicate the prototype with powered bogies under each driving cab and the "bus" bodies articulated on to the rear of each bogie so that traction would be more than adequate. Both the bogies would have to be constructed from scratch and, although Robin had made a superb job of building several Beyer-Peacock IoM 2-4-0Ts from kits, he felt that this would have stretched his expertise a little too far, so I ended up building the two powered bogies for him to fit into the Anbrico cabs, after which the railcar twin became a regular performer on Port Foxdale at the many shows it attended all over the country. By this time, Robin had become a regular contributor to Railway Modeller and we had intended a joint write-up on the construction of the power bogies. However, the only potential source of driving wheels was Sharman Wheels and, with the effective disappearance of that range from the market we decided that an article would have little point. Robin had also joined the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society and, post Port Foxdale, produced several micro layouts which appeared at EXPONG. In addition to his articles in RM, Robin also produced a couple of Railway Modeller Special books, one on modelling the Isle of Man Railway and the other a compilation of the photographs that the late David Odabashian had taken during the Isle of Man Railway's 1950s heyday. My condolences to Susan, Tim and Annie.

I could almost echo Chris Leigh's comments word for word. I too first met Adrian in the late 1960s when he was a natural choice to produce white-metal castings of a LBSC wagon axle box for which we had a critical and urgent need when building our pioneering Bembridge P4 layout. We met regularly after that at shows, managing a chat about this and that during the brief moments when his stand wasn't besieged by customers. He was an expert caster in white-metal, greatly helped by his personal knowledge of a very wide range of prototypes and his philosophy of perfection. It was no surprise that so many "cottage traders" beat a path to his door for the castings that they needed for their kits, and not just castings either as Adrian would wholesale other basic necessities, gears for example. When these traders eventually decided that enough was enough, Adrian was the natural buyer of their marque, although, sadly his quest for perfection meant that often the marque effectively just disappeared. If Adrian had a blind spot, it was in his failure to exploit multimedia techniques in kits. It wasn't that he totally eschewed etchings but certainly some of his offerings would have been better had more parts been in brass or nickel-silver rather than white metal even though it might have required more skill on the part of the modeller. Away from exhibitions, I doubt whether Adrian ever enjoyed retailing, but Kay Butler came to the rescue when she purchased the Wrightlines product range and offered to take over retailing for the whole range of the ABS group of marques, a partnership which worked well for a good number of years. In some ways though it worked too well as demand grew and grew, and Adrian told me that Kay rang him to say that she intended to retire at the very moment when Adrian was about to ring her to say that they had to find a means of curtailing demand because it was getting too much. There was another potential purchaser in the wings for the Wrightlines range itself, but with Adrian unwilling to supply someone else with castings, the range came back to him, effectively disappearing as stocks ran down. Not long after that I moved to southern Belgium and my trips to the UK became limited to duty visits to my aged mother-in-law in Reading. The pre-Christmas trip coincided with the annual Reading O gauge trade show where, when I could get near his small stand, I was able to chat with Adrian. An endearing memory of almost the last time that I saw him was that, while we chatted, he pulled a wad of banknotes from his hip pocket and started sorting them, there must have been several thousand pounds in that wad! Hopefully at least some of his range will survive as I know that various parties have expressed an interest in parts of it - they will have to find a comparable caster though and that, I suspect, won't be easy.

The real things are around 3 millimetres thick, so 80 gm paper is still about five times thicker than (2FS) scale. Slate roofs actually look flat, even viewed more or less edge on, so, to my mind, you would produce a more realistic effect using the laser cutter to cut the slate outlines in card. The laser cuts will, of course, be too coarse, but paint tends to fill them and I have found that, even in 4mm scale, one can get a very realistic roof. The 80 gm paper technique would produce clay tiles of about the right thickness though.

The map is dated 21.iv.18 which is just over a week before Ludendorf ended operation Georgette, part of the German spring offensive of that year. The map appears to cover an area that the Germans had taken in that operation plus some adjacent territory that they had held since the front settled down in the autumn of 1914. Given its "intelligence" annotation it would appear to show the "new" German network of 60 cm railways, some of which would have been German in origin but some British, the two being linked quickly by German field engineers to help overcome supply issues with the German advance. It was in the Spring offensive that the Germans introduced their "stormtrooper" concept, crack troops whose job was just to advance and to do so quickly, leaving the follow up troops to consolidate the gains made. In the face of lightly defended areas, this was initially highly successful but quickly ran into problems of keeping the fighting front edge supplied, hence the need to rapidly link and repair light railway systems. I imagine that the main purpose of the map, which could only have been compiled from the air, was to identify potential supply line targets for long-range allied artillery.

While Mike isn't incorrect in suggesting that the term "lunars" was sometimes used on the Southern to describe position light subs, it is potentially misleading as the Southern also had official "lunar lights" which were indeed white but which informed pw staff in confined areas that a train was signalled. They were part of the signalling system, and indeed had to be proved alight before the relevant aspect(s) would clear, but uniquely(?) they didn't convey any message to train drivers. There were several of them between Borough Market Junction and Metropolitan Junction on both sides of the line but there were other locations too. Unofficially again, it wasn't unknown for the three-light junction indicators on the Southern to be referred to as "lunars" and that may indeed have been the first everyday use of the term, I have certainly heard drivers phoning the bobby to complain that "the lunar isn't lit" when they have come to a stand because the route ahead was wrongly set - despite a general practice in the electrified area of "following the signals" (providing that the route set was electrified and that the driver knew the road) and then stopping at the first station/major station on the diversion for further instructions. The first use of position light subs that I can be certain of on the Southern was at some or all of the new boxes opened in connection with the Kent Coast Electrification of 1959, Sittingbourne and the Sheerness branch certainly had them.

Between the end of the Great War and the grouping (and indeed for a couple or so years after grouping), there were a number of working parties looking at possible standardised practices for the future. There seem to have been at least two different working parties looking just at signalling. Lots of things came out of these working parties, some were adopted almost universally (yellow distant arms, for example), others in part (steel tubular posts eventually adopted, in not quite the same way, by the GWR, LMSR and LNER) and others not at all, at least in the precise way they had been proposed. Upper quadrant signalling lies in the middle group, adopted by the LMSR, LNER (including shunt discs) and SR but not the GWR.

South Eastern & Chatham Railway, of course! Eileen's Emporium sells both 0,5 x 0,5mm and 0,8 x 0,8mm L section brass. I imagine that the former is probably closest to your requirement (= 3" x 3" in 2FS) but I don't have a drawing readily accessible at the moment to check.

"Yes, laser scans don't do curves very well ............" Nor did original drawings, and therein lies the real problem for a manufacturer attempting any "modern"-image model, replicating how sheet metal was bent up by skilled craftsmen on the shop floor without any reference to drawings (which never made it to the shop floor in most loco works). I might add that even if the manufacturer does manage to create a perfect scaled-down replica, it can still look wrong because the pair of eyes viewing it haven't been scaled down in proportion and therefore the perspective of curves as seen is wrong.

It does, but the contemporary plan for Ballachulish shows the loco release crossover and the pair of attendant dollies worked by the box. The proposed model is a bit larger than Ballachulish but much smaller than Oban, so I suspect that the latter is a better guide than the former. A ground frame would have been substituted eventually (as it was at Ballachulish), either in late LMS or early BR days, depending on when renewal became necessary (or the points had to be moved because of increasing loco sizes).

I totally agree, and, since it is in print as far as I know, and you are modelling a Caledonian Terminus in the pre-grouping period, it really should be part of your library. Even if it doesn't answer a particular question, you should soon get a feel for how the Caley went about things (especially since most Scottish companies had significant idiosyncrasies). Like Mike, my own shelves groan, and I have the added problem of hefty postal charges (living outside the UK), so, sadly, it doesn't form part of my personal library and I have to extrapolate from what I can see from other published information.

I must admit that I assumed that the connection to the loco shed commenced almost immediately after the level crossing but even if there is some distance in between, I am not certain that Mike is right in respect of Caley practice. I don't have the books to check, but I don't think that the Caley did "running shunts" (which would have required a second dolly for "main line") and certainly the diagram for Oban on the link Mike kindly gave shows a lot of pointwork facing arriving trains without any protection beyond the home and the standard fpls (whereas the SR would have surely had at least one, and perhaps more, running shunts as protection). If there is a fair distance between the level crossing and the engine shed point, then the simple answer is to provide a ground frame for that too, again released by the tablet, which would obviate the need for any dollies or for an outer home signal because both connections would be within the single line and protected by the tablet. It would, of course, require returnable tablets, the earlier Tyer's ones weren't returnable, but that certainly wouldn't have been a problem by the twentieth century.

I must admit that I wondered that too but it is a very long time since I last travelled that way.

Two things missing now, firstly an outer home to protect the exit from the engine shed and secondly dollies alongside each of the platform starting signals to permit access from those roads to the engine shed. If you want to run trains past another train locked in the siding, it would be better to move the outer home (and distant) further back past the siding point and then have the ground frame locked by an Annett's Key released by a lever in the signal box (and physically carried from the box) rather than by the tablet.

It appeared at the MMRS 1964 Christmas exhibition at the Corn Exchange at Manchester - and an excellent model it was too.

Sorry, I was slightly mislead by the favoured location of my youthful (and somewhat green) spotting days, the main line footbridge at the south end of Hither Green station which had two starting/distant pairs mounted on it, all of which were motor worked - it took me some months to work out where the regular "whirring" noises came from! Of course the Southern had motor-worked distants mounted below wire-worked stop arms - however, there was no mechanical slotting but a switch worked in tandem with the stop arm which cut the power to the distant arm whenever the stop arm was on, thus ensuring that the distant couldn't be (powered) off when the stop signal was on. As Mike has rightly pointed out weights could be added to aid the speedy return of the distant arm to the horizontal if necessary - all four of those signals at Hither Green moved quite slowly whether being pulled off or returning on but at least they did the latter in tandem. The measured motor, incidentally, was situated at Shanklin even though it was actually Sandown's up home!

With the layout shown, this would never have been a passing station. However, given that it lies on a single cross-country line, it could have been a block-post allowing two (or more) trains to follow each other without waiting for the complete Mistley-Thorpe or vv section to be cleared. Single line instruments would have been required for this (although by the late 1950s tokenless working would have been possible as installed east of Acle* in Norfolk). No signals other than the homes and distants required anyway for the level crossing would have been needed, and the three local GFs would all have been released by the token for section to the right (or released by the frame in the box if tokenless block was in force). * My recollection (which I haven't checked) is that an IBS was used at Acle to allow trains to follow each other, but given the need to man the crossing box anyway, that wouldn't have been appropriate here. I mentionned previously that I had once had an idea based on this line. One concept I developed which might be of use to you was to have a connection to a canning factory (cf Tiptree Jams), which in your case could have come off the hidden section of the goods "loop" east of the road bridge. Even in the late 1950s/early 1960s it would have provided a legitimate excuse for freight traffic, particularly vans for taking away product but also coal and perhaps even steel rolls.

With the exception of tunnel distants which, as banner signals, were a totally different "kettle of fish", all the combined starting and distant signals that I can remember on the Southern where the distant was motor worked had the starting signal motor worked as well. I can't see how the slotting would work if this were not the case. In both cases the motor would have been mounted, say, a clear foot below the respective arm - on the doll if it was a bracket signal. I am not sure how you would route (hide) the operating wires from the servo, it is one of standard dilemmas of modelling.

Below is a drawing of the signal motor, a signal wire connects the (rotational) operating arm to the signal arm much in the same way as would be the case with a mechanically operated signal. There is a clip on Youtube showing the operation on an ER signal at