dibber25

I must take a look at that - just about the only one of her early films that I don't have on DVD. Does anyone remember the layout 'Hayley Mills' - based on Healey Mills? I believe she visited it a show on one occasion? (CJL)

And with the mv. Balmoral posing as the Channel Islands ferry, an obvious choice as she was often in the Bristol Channel for excursion work during the summer. Pretty good CGI destroyer doing the 'evacuation' too, most of the scenes being shot in Clovelly, not Guernsey. (CJL)

Have started reading Forever Young Hayley Mills's memoir, (family asked what I wanted for Christmas) and that prompted getting the DVDs out to watch in order, starting with Tiger Bay. Some glimpses of Cardiff's dockland in 1958/9, including wagons and a pannier tank, plus a transporter bridge (presumably Newport?). Nice historic dockland settings, too, apparently all long since bulldozed and replaced with modern flats - now called Bute Bay not Tiger Bay. (CJL)

I had this years ago on a VHS tape bought, I think, in Woolworths (remember them). It was part of a much longer programme which included the 'Gulflander' and it was that which really interested me. It was an AEC bus mounted on flanged wheels and running on a railway completely engulfed in grass, so you couldn't see the rails on much of it. I was so fascinated that I built a battery-powered model out of plywood to run on a friend's O gauge garden railway. Haven't seen that model for years - it must be in the loft. Merry Christmas Faulcon 1(CJL)

Why not insult everyone? Oh, you have. Merry Christmas.

Back when they were building the last bits of the M25 past my 'home town' (Chertsey-Runnymede and Yeoveney-Poyle) I was one of the journalists invited to come and look at work on the rail-over-motorway bridge at Lyne and the Runnymede bridge over the Thames. One of the things we were told was that the ONLY section that MIGHT need to be four lanes EVENTUALLY was Chertsey-Heathrow. It was fortunate that the surfacing on that section was initially a cock-up because, when they re-did the surface on the three lanes, they were able to add the fourth at the same time!

Painting the battens neatly is not easy. From memory I sprayed the walls with a Games Workshop aerosol can - an off-white with a strange name (all Games Workshop shades have strange names) - Just checked and its Corax White. I used a very dark brown mixed from Omen acrylics to paint the raised battens. (CJL)

Perhaps it's time for a new thread that doesn't have Model Rail in the title, since the magazine is no longer involved. (CJL)

That date 1967 must be a typo. It would be 1957. (CJL)

As subscribers usually receive their copies a few days before the magazine reaches the shops, it is likely that they will be the first to see the ordering details. (CJL)

All 16XXs bought new are covered by warranty.

....and I bet that you can guess why. (CJL)

Check the Model Rail J70s. BR-liveried ones are the ones that have sold out. The same with the USAs and the Sentinels and these even had second runs of BR liveries. (CJL)

I'm not a fan of sequels/prequels and all the other stuff they do these days and I don't think I've been to the cinema since 'Les Mis' but I shall certainly give this a chance and not condemn it on the strength of a few seconds of trailer. It looks to me like they've caught some of the 'feel' of the original, Jenny is as lovely as ever and I'll be interested to see what they do with the Three Chimneys as the last time I saw it, it had white UPVC window frames that'll stick out like a sore thumb in wartime Yorkshire! (CJL)

Let me know by PM (rather than via a competitors public forum) if you don't receive it. There are postal issues in many areas at present which are beyond the control of the subscriptions company. I may be able to get one sent from our office copies ( which hadn't arrived the last time I checked). I have already used my personal copy to replace a subscriber's copy which arrived damaged. (CJL)

The bulkheads and corridor partition on my chocolate & cream ones are mid-brown. The seats are patterned with orange and dark brown - reminiscent of the old London Transport bus seats. The coach interiors are pretty much exactly as I remember them. (CJL)

The head code discs look small. Presumably they were something the WR didn't normally have and must have been produced specially, as other region's discs wouldn't fit the GWR lamp irons? The discs are pretty much the only detail not provided with the model. I don't have a huge number of pictures - maybe a dozen, taken at different times - and from memory, only a couple show 18000 carrying discs. It would be interesting to know the trains indicated by the head code numbers - 450 and 455 being the most common, it seems, and 142 when the loco was in the late green livery. I'm waiting delivery of a copy of the Robertson book as I didn't buy it on publication because I had already done, and published, my own research. (CJL)

Continuing the thread creep, I always laughed at the election posters for our local MP of the time, Geoffrey Pattie, which proclaimed "Meet Pattie!" It reminded me of McDonalds and I thought they should do a similar one for Ed Balls! (CJL)

I did see it done once on an election leaflet. The candidate's portrait was flipped for the back cover. Only trouble was he had a rather obvious mole on one side of his nose - which side rather depended on which side of the leaflet you were looking at! (CJL)

Well, I started in publishing in 1963, and have been in it ever since. I've never come across that practice. It would be very obvious in railway publications as trains would be running wrong line and numbers would be reversed........and if anyone did it deliberately they wouldn't have been in the job for long! (CJL)

You are right, of course, regarding the CoH and the late crest. There was a bit of a 'thing' among firms at that time to get their emblem CoH approved. (Didn't BOAC try it with the Speedbird?) I was asked to write the BR story for Steam World back in the 1990s. I spoke to the Portcullis Pursuivant of the CoH (I forget his name now but his family have a stately home in Cambridge or Norfolk, the walls covered in heraldry). He was pretty dismissive of the BR heraldic device but the crux of the matter is that the CoH register is a written description, so you can't have two written descriptions or one that is ambiguous about which way elements face. I think I'm right in saying that these were what we used to call 'varnish-fixing' transfers in model terms? One assumes that, in full size, it was cheaper and simpler to have a print-run of one version facing one way, than to order them in opposite-facing pairs. Assuming that they were supplied in pairs, I wonder if any were ever applied in error with BOTH lions facing the back? The difficulty with working from photographs, of course, is that few photographers photographed both sides of the same locomotive on the same day. It is interesting that in the Times photo of 18000 on test in Switzerland she already carries the BR emblem, so that must have been supplied from Swindon along with the buffers, couplings and other standard fittings which BR provided to Brown-Boveri. (CJL)

I have never 'mirrored' an image in a publication to suit anything. The illustrations I supplied to Heljan were all scans of original black & white prints. The BR official shots (from the Swindon collection) having been obtained through the old OPC/BR arrangement. I have checked all the material I supplied and there are no right-facing early emblems visible on any of the photographs. I daresay they may exist in other locations such as Google but I could only use material that I had - all obtained by old-fashioned means, most of it long before I had a computer. Nor did I supply Heljan with any publications, since the material I supplied had been the basis of an article in Trains Illustrated which I wrote following a visit to the NRM to inspect a box of material which had been unopened since its arrival from Swindon Works. It contained, among other things, 18000's 'failures book' with photographs of all the failed components (mostly combustion chamber linings from memory) and a letter to Hawksworth from the Swindon engineer who had been sent to monitor the build at Brown-Boveri. It was a begging letter asking for some more money because the £ had been devalued and the poor guy couldn't afford his accommodation. Heljan may well have used other references besides the material that I supplied as I was only involved very early on in the process. (CJL)

So, RAILS haven't actually got it wrong, they've merely selected not to produce one minor livery variant which wasn't among the references with which they were supplied. (CJL)

The model follows, correctly, the photographs which I supplied to Heljan from my research into the gas turbines for Trains Illustrated back in the 1980s. The early crest lion DID face left on both sides of the locomotive. (Refs - BR official photo and Times newspaper photo) (CJL)

18100 was, however, pretty widely photographed on the occasions when it did work, which tends to give the impression that it did more work than 18000. George Heiron took some great pictures of it. When I researched my article for Trains Illustrated, I seem to recall that 18100 did more and was less troublesome than 18000, but that might have been because it was viewed more sympathetically having been British-built. The biggest problem for Swindon and the gas turbines was repeated failure of the combustion chamber linings (the NRM has the failures book for 18000 with photographs of combustion chamber linings which look like a garden incinerator after you've burned stuff in it too many times - bent, buckled and rusted and been jumped on!). Now, if the gas turbines had been later and able to incorporate the space shuttle type heat shields, it could perhaps have been a different story. (CJL)