John_Hughes

Got it! Thanks!

Another one I'm barred from! And no, I don't use an ad-blocker.

And the Pullman name and livery survive on the Welsh Highland, and very nice the coaches are too. I wonder if they've paid royalties?

Thanks for those interesting thoughts - checking the existence or otherwise of IR with a mobile phone seems an excellent idea and I'll try it out. I'd already worked through some of the other suggestions, and can confirm a total lack of sticky liquid, an absence of any new equipment emitting IR, and no old remotes stuck in the sofa or anywhere else. It would have been odd enough if only one remote for one appliance had been affected, but two were, at the same time and in the same way. The third, which operates the CD player and radio, has continued to work perfectly throughout. My current best guess is ghosts putting their hands between source and receiver After all, When you've eliminated the possible, whatever remains....

Ten days or so ago I got home from an evening meeting to find that SWMBO was having all sorts of trouble with the hand-held remotes for both the telly and the freesat box; neither was working properly, and in fact the former seemed to have given up the ghost entirely though it was only a few months old. 'No prob,' said I, 'I can change the batteries.' However, new batteries made no difference to either device, and a quick check on the meter showed that the old ones were fine anyway. For the next several days we limped on using the push-button controls on the telly and getting a very occasional acceptable response from the freesat box. Then two days ago both controllers suddenly came back to life and now work perfectly again. Can anyone suggest a sensible explanation for this? I confess that I'm totally stumped.

I believe the guard was supposed to walk along the outside of the coach checking tickets while the train was on the move, hence the need for the long top step. Safe enough at the speeds the WC&P got up to, I suppose, though I can't imagine that the Inspectorate would have approved.

Mea culpa - I meant broaches. However, a 1/8" reamer is useful for making sure that the axles are a proper fit in the bearings (some bearings are a tad on the tight side) but broaches are really what I had in mind. Check out the Eileen's Emporium website for a number of options; my preference is for sizes up to 2mm, but others may disagree. (I have no connection with Eileen's other than as a very happy customer, and one who is constantly amazed at the speed of their delivery service. They do a lot of shows, too!)

High Level kits are brilliant and - very important - have first-rate instructions which really do need to be followed! However, even their 'simple' chassis kits do have rather a lot of bits, and so can be a relatively slow build; Comet are good (though not in the High Level class admittedly) but much quicker to build, and substantially less expensive, which can be a relief if it all goes pear-shaped (though it really shouldn't).. Everything that others have said above is good advice; I'd only add Get a decent set of reamers, they're invaluable for the myriad times you'll need to make an etched hole accept the wire that's supposed to go through it.

The Labelle kits are lovely, the real Rolls Royce of the 'bundle of sticks' type of kit. Take your time and they will surely turn out beautifully.

My experience of French rural bus services is that in very large areas of the country they simply don't exist at all, other than the school run - which may or may not take ordinary travellers, sometimes depending on whether or not in you're in good standing with the mairie. Typically French, in other words!

Got it, thanks - that does make sense.

That's very helpful, many thanks. But how will there be a station at Gabalfa, which I understood to be in the plans?

There was a major PoW camp at Henllan (Italians mostly, men who built their own lovely chapel from scratch, and many of whom stayed in Wales and married local girls after the war). I suspect there were army camps in the area as well.. There was a large one south of Aberayron (sorry for the GWR's illiterate spelling!) so the Newcastle Emlyn area would seem a possible candidate as well - and don't forget the air base at Aberporth, still in operation.

There are promises of 1tph on the coast line, with some 'express' services - presumably that means limited stop, though I seem to remember that even the old Cambrian Coast Express stopped on request almost everywhere once it was north of Aberhelig Halt. The question now becomes one of capacity, especially with so many passing loops taken out of service over the last half century or so. And does anyone have any more detail about the Cardiff on-street running? I can see the main road from Gabalfa into the City Centre being turned into straightforward chaos while work goes on - not that the trams aren't desperately needed, and I for one will be delighted to see them.

Shouldn't, possibly, but there's nothing to physically stop the VoR from using the crossing whenever it likes, surely? And the ng crossing has no road barriers either, unlike its big cousin furher down the road.

That's nice, but I never found the Spuds to behave very well on DCC. Perhaps it all depends on the chip you use - I'd be interested to know how it works out for you.

Another idiot nearly got into trouble on the Llanbadarn crossing in Aberystwyth yesterday, when a car simply accelerated through after the barriers had begin to fall He nearly managed to snag the barrier on the exit side as he was in panic mode and not too bothered about other road users or anything else. Fool!

Well, it turned up shortly after my slightly-tongue-in-cheek moan, and it is indeed well up to expectations. Simply brilliant, and it would be invidious to pick any one article as being more inspiring than the others. Full marks for this one!

Really this persistent delayed posting of sub. copies is my main gripe about MRJ, though failure to meet publication dates comes second; it must be galling to pay for an ad for a show and then find that the mag. only gets into the hands of the punters either just before it opens or - worse - after everything's been cleared away until next year. And I too have noticed that they tend to turn up on schedule when it's renewal time, though that may be a simple coincidence. But I agree that a world without MRJ would have a significant hole in it, so I keep subscribing and keep enjoying it. And this one does look interesting.

Better blame the Swan of Avon for that usage! Your water is a sore decayer of your *** dead body. (Gravedigger in Hamlet).

Romford / Markits of course have precise quartering built in and are therefore dead easy. For some reason I've never had a problem doing Sharman and Ultrascale wheels by eye but never managed the same trick with Gibson's efforts, so I finally bought a GW Wheel Press, which solved all my problems instantly. But you do need to check the axle length before you mount the wheels or the back-to-back measurement may well be out; and in my experience once mounted they're best left firmly alone and never removed from the axles again.

IIRC, the Croydon trams have their speed limits designated in KmH - can anyone confirm? I was living in Canada when metrication happened there. It was done and dusted in literally a single weekend, and on a drive to the Rockies we actually saw a group of workmen fastening the metric equivalents over the Imperial figures on the road signs. Why on earth Britain has to make such a silly fuss over something so easy to do and so obviously beneficial is a total mystery to me. Or do people believe that schoolchildren are still being taught how many furlongs there are in a mile and how many poles there are in a perch? Lord preserve us!

BR blue was - in my opinion - the only livery the VoR engines have ever worn which looked absolutely hideous on them; indeed, I don't think it ever suited anything at all. But then, I don't think that blue suited the A4s either, though they looked really smart in lined green. Just goes to show you can't please everybody, I suppose!

Whether the proximate cause of the derailment was a stone trapped in the rack as HMRI claimed (I don't think there was any physical evidence for it - certainly no photographic evidence seems to exist) or inadequate support at sleeper-ends (which certainly was the case) causing a simple derailment and the subsequent dive over the cliff-face, was fiercely argued about at the time, with the Abt engineers contending that the HMRI 'cure' wouid cause more problems than it would solve. But in fairness it must be said that nothing untoward seems to have arisen on the line since the grippers were installed, though other Abt systems round the world do seem to work perfectly safely without any such modification.

This is done on some rack lines in Switzerland, too, and since that's where the original Abt equipment came from it's hardly surprising that the operating practices were derived from the same place. And didn't Abt engineers work on the Snowdon line as well? I'd be surprised if they were less expert than the Railway Inspectorate at testing a rack line, given that they had ample experience of them and the Inspectorate had none at all.