bécasse

I remember Roye telling me in 1964 (so not long after Madder Valley had come to Long Wittenham) that they hadn't been able to find anyone who had actually seen it being operated as a model railway, including JHA's wife, and certainly it wasn't then capable of anything like reliable operation even over short stretches at that date. I had been a member of The Model Railway Club since 1960 at a period when it had upwards of 600 members and I never found anyone there who had seen it operating either. I have always suspected that JHA was one of those people who was a builder rather than an operator of model railways and that building the MVR, rather than operating it, satisfied his ambition.

I rather suspect that you are wrong. The basic layout for the village had already been worked out when I was actively involved with Pendon over half-a-century ago and Roye would never have accepted anything that wasn't typical of the real thing. Some buildings may have been modernised or demolished but the vast majority of villages in the Vale then looked more or less as they would have done three or so decades earlier so there was plenty of raw material to replicate. I am not going to spend hours ploughing through Old Maps to prove the point, but I do it find it interesting that in the village that is my current home (a long way from the Vale, of course), buildings are all higgledy-pickerdy to the roads and architects designing infill structures go to great lengths to ensure that they too are at odd angles thus contributing to the interest of the village scape rather than detracting from it - the result is something very different from British villages of today. As to the other issue, I would consider totally reasonable that Guy's locos should be gradually retired rather than run to ruin. It is probably rather simpler today to reproduce models of such quality (although as critical manufacturers start to disappear that might not hold true for much longer) and there are probably competent modellers around who would be happy to build and gift potential replacement models if the need was identified.

..... and I reckon that in the good old days of through carriages from Waterloo more than a few passengers, particularly the younger ones, would have been saying just that!

No! There were separate painting facilities for locomotives, coaching stock and wagons and, once a decision on a livery change had been made, it would be implemented quickly. Paint, transfers, etc, no longer required wouldn't generally be wasted, but this would have been of zero impact for wagons where the same paint was used after the livery change and the smaller lettering would have been quicker (and therefore cheaper) to apply. The spread of the new livery within the total fleet would have been determined by the usual painting cycles, which probably would have been longer for wagons than for (at least passenger) locos and front-line coaching stock - although, ironically, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the roofs of vans were repainted quite frequently to help keep the canvas covering watertight.

I lay my track directly on to 4mm MDF (to which I have applied one coat of matt varnish) giving a beautifully flat surface. Mounting that on a sheet of cork (or other sound insulator), but not gluing it to it, will greatly reduce any unwanted sound transmission. Generally though my locomotives run quietly anyway, the one exception being a tiny O&K diesel which has a two-stage worm-gear worm-gear transmission which is noisy but sounds so like the prototype that I have had to answer a number of queries at shows as to how I managed to get a sound chip and speaker into such a tiny locomotive!

Is the prayer (photo 2) part of the usual set up procedure? and the final photo could well depict my last ever departure from Wadebridge up the North Cornwall line, the 122 is even the right way round (so I had to watch the line recede, much to my annoyance at the time).

Someone ought to tell the pub owners that that shade of blue is way, way out for the S&D.

...... and, of course, allowing a sufficient gap between the two rail lengths to allow expansion to take place. That is particularly important if you intend to exhibit the layout (you would be surprised at how hot halls can get) and/or if the layout is housed somewhere like a loft where there is a wide ambient temperature range.

I find it interesting that (presumably) professionals should come forward and defend NR on the basis that it is all down to "environmental" regulations. Those regulations have as their basis EU rules but the strange thing is that I can look at a stretch of Belgian Railways' track and there isn't a significant weed to be seen, yet I can assure you that weeds grow just as readily in Belgium as they do in the UK.

Railfreight livery (effectively) only appeared in 1983 so it can't be before that.

Don't forget that National Service (2 years) was obligatory until the end of the 1950s. This meant that the Army (in particular) was hugely larger than it is today - and that there was a massive training requirement as the idea of NS was to ensure that the majority of young civilians had already received basic training if they needed to be called up for yet another war.

Someone is going to get a Form One ("please explain") and probably a few days suspension from duty for that. Road vehicles, including tractors, should only have been forwarded to stations with highway docks (Bodmin North in this case), and if, in extremis, they had to be handled by crane a complex arrangement with the tyres supported on beams with further beams used above (see photos of ships being crane-loaded for details) had to be used - and almost certainly prior consent at District level would have been required.

While I cannot help with your specific query, I can say that these documents were compiled locally by the relevant SM's office. Division sent each SM a draft of each new WTT (which IIRC had been compiled at Waterloo) together with details of the stock intended to work each train, the SM then had to work out platform workings to fit the proposed timetable which wasn't apparently the easiest job in the world. The compilers had done a basic count to make sure that there were never more trains (or carriages) in a terminal than there were platforms to take them, but apparently the task of turning that into a workable set of platform workings could make championship chess look easy. I can remember Bill Woodyer, when he was SM at Cannon Street, complaining that the task (he compiled the workings for Charing Cross as well) could be nigh on impossible. One result of the local compilation is that, while copies were widely distributed to the station and signalling staff concerned, that was it. I don't think that even Control had copies, and, while there was usually at least one railway enthusiast who would gain and keep copies, there was no official archiving of them. I certainly used to have a few, thanks to the aforesaid BW, but they disappeared long ago during various house moves - and I suspect that that would have been common even when such things started to acquire a value. As relatively sizeable documents, they were printed by an outside printer, contracted for the purpose by Paper & Printing at Crewe, and it sounds to me as if the copy that you have had one of the sheets that were subsequently folded into 16-page sections before being stitched and trimmed, accidentally printed on one side only - hence the blank pages. Printers always printed (and charged for) more than the contracted print run in order to over come such problems.

Of course one will, almost certainly just a few weeks after you have irretrievably completed the cameo layout - and it will show for certain that that tiny but logical guess that you made doing it was wrong. Been there, done it!

Looking again at one of the photos, sadly unreproducable for both copyright and quality reasons, I now actually wonder whether the material might have been hessian sacking, possibly tarred, which would have been both cheap and readily available. What is certain is that there is something there.

I have a scale drawing somewhere of a type 6 box that I drew up over 50 years ago. There were in fact a number of minor variations, and several different casters of the basic metal structure, but the overall size was always the same. I will look it out for you, and post a copy, if that will help.

But the derelict buildings that I examined photos of and which showed clear signs of having had a soft material between the timber under-boarding and the slates, all dated from the latter part of the 19th century (and were at least semi-derelict by the 1930s). The material may have been canvas rather than felt but the tattered remnants of it could be clearly seen. The buildings concerned happened to be in mid-Wales where slate was, of course, the indigenous roofing material, but if the practice was used on minor buildings there (one was a stable), I would have expected it to be more widely used. If one draws the side elevation of a slate roof in large scale it becomes fairly obvious why a thin soft material helped make the roof more secure.

Whilst I haven't studied photos of (decaying) buildings from your locality, study of such buildings elsewhere suggests that the use of an underfelt was common practice even on quite minor buildings, stables for example. It probably meant that the slates were much less likely to lift in high winds as the "soft" felting prevented the wind from getting underneath. As you say, it is invisible on roofs in good state.

It wasn't so much that long timbers were disproportionately expensive but that wider ones were. As rails diverge through point & crossing work they cross nominally orthogonal timbers at increasingly obtuse angles and therefore the supporting chairs are also at increasing angles. In the early days of railways when chairs with two hole fixings were the norm this wasn't a huge problem, but as locomotives (in particular) became heavier and chairs with four hole fixings became necessary, sleepers supporting rails which weren't orthogonal necessarily became wider (12") and wider (14") to allow the chairs to be fixed satisfactorily. Some smaller railways seem to have actually continued to use two-hole chairs in such circumstances to keep the cost of sleepering within bounds but that wasn't a very good solution given that lighter chairs were being used at the very place where stresses were greatest. The use of three hole chairs reduced the problem to some extent which is why this type of chair eventually became commonplace (although they had other advantages too). However, quite a number of railways made a practice of using individual sleepers through p&c, the LNWR was probably the most senior of these.

While I reckon "yellow" would be going a bit far, there seems no doubt that only the lining on newly painted locos looked white and then only briefly. There exist contemporary reports that the lining was beige (but don't ask me to quote the sources, I have long forgotten the details) and, more importantly, experience on the IoWSR shows that the lining rapidly changes colour, probably as a result of cleaning with an oily rag.

The lining paint as applied was definitely white. However, contemporary reports, backed up by experience on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, suggest that the white rapidly turned a "beige" colour in use, so that was the normal colour seen - it is definitely far more subdued than white.

They would almost certainly have been general pool coal/open wagons after the introduction of pooling early in WWII. It is unlikely that the labour required for transhipment into LTPB wagons would have been available. As the 1950s wore on, coal wagons were more and more likely to have been one of the various varieties of steel 16-ton wagons. Both the prodigious deliveries of these and the drop in domestic coal demand as the smokeless zones started to bite meant that the number of ex-PO (and pre-nationalisation company) wooden wagons in use dropped off very quickly in the latter part of the decade.

If they were "members" of the company and it was a Company Limited by guarantee, they could be called upon to pay their personal guarantee - it is rarely more than £ 5. Otherwise, if they had contracted to make regular or as-called payments to the Company and had failed to make all their committed payments up to the time the Company went into liquidation, they could be required to pay the amount outstanding.

Indeed. I hope that I worded my reply in a way that indicated that, although it wasn't in the most likely position, there was nothing wrong with it being where it is. If it were ever to be seriously damaged (and sadly such things do happen on exhibition layouts), I would be inclined to either remove it totally or preserve it in situ but clearly out of use, rather than try to replace it.

A layout I remember well, so it is nice to see that it is being restored. I suspect that it would have been built as a light railway under the relevant (three) clauses of the 1868 Regulation of Railways Act, rather than under the provisions of the 1896 Act. The "signalling" is correct as presently laid out, although there would probably have been no need to provide signals at all (and certainly the starting signal towards the fiddle yard), there definitely wouldn't if the line had been built before 1873, but the provision of the two signals, although necessary, wouldn't have been either wrong or unlikely. Given that the line carried passengers, ultimately* subsequent to 1889 RoR Act points A and B would have acquired facing point locks (possibly economicals), probably with locking bars. It is possible (probable?) that there would not have been any interlocking if the line predated 1873, but this would have been installed post-1889 and would have required points A, B and E to lie normal before either signal could be cleared. The running line would have been considered as running to the buffer stops beyond point D, but it would have been quite acceptable for point D, as access to the run round, to be hand-worked - there were many examples of this on the "big" railway even where the relevant point lay alongside the platform. As this was considered as running line and not a siding no trap point would have been needed (or provided) - the line would have had to be kept clear and never used for stabling stock other than during a run round. Given that there was a home signal, there would have been no need for the ground frame to unlocked by the staff. The position of the starting signal isn't wrong, although I think that a lower-height starting signal at the end of the platform/toe of point A would have been more likely - or even no starting signal at all (the possession of the staff being sufficient authority). * Typically it would probably have been almost the mid-1890s before anything actually happened to conform with the 1889 Act.