pete_mcfarlane

I'm not sure I'd want a battery loco on the RHDR*. The steam locos are a big part of the draw. (*Unless they made a battery powered replica of their Rolls-Royce loco. That would have a certain appeal.) For the full WW2 experience they have to sit out on the Marsh for several months in the rain waiting for the Germans to (not) show up, like my Grandfather did in late 1940.

Jackshaft shunters are fairly straightforward, you just need to make sure that the jackshaft has exactly the same crank throw as the wheels and is quartered correctly. Which shouldn't be a problem if you are building the chassis from scratch (top tip - use a set of dividers to get the crank throw of the wheels and then use them to mark the jackshaft cranks for drilling). I rather like those home made motor bogies. I might try something similar in 4mm.

You can of course book yourself on the monthly guided tour of the VT half of Tyseley and check all this out in person. It's about a tenner and well worth doing.

ISTR that electronics of that generation not liking vibration was also the cause of problems with certain late 1960s locos that relied heavily on electronic control systems (50s, 74s).

And if you are going to get the users to test updates for you, at east do a 'canary' release to 5% of them first and look for errors.

But the external relations people aren't going to be involved in any of the actual fixes, and there should be a load of incident management and senior leadership monitoring what's going on who can provide updates to them. Telling stakeholders what is going on during a major outage is really important, if only because it stops the number of people asking you what is going on ("We're fixing it. Update in 30 minute. Please leave us alone"). If the BBC are offering to do this for you, you want to bite their hand off. Not doing this speaks volumes.... I heard a similar story about servers in a data centre in Germany having problems at a certain time. The eventual cause was found to be a former DR electric train which ran one service a week on the line running past the building, and was electromagnetically very noisy.

And only betweenTonbridge to Hastings. The Marshlink line from Ashford has always been able to take standard width stock, even if it was sometimes worked using narrower restriction 0 carriages.

If you are a manager used to employing an ever revolving door of fairly low paid staff (for whom its a summer job not a career) then it might come as a surprise that there isn't a never ending supply of volunteers.

I visited Eastern Europe once in the 1980s. The toilet paper would have been a good material for card modelling, albeit a bit thick and coarse.

There are quite a lot of cardboard models available from Eastern Europe. I guess this may be a legacy of the limited materials available there back in the days when they were communist.

I thought one of the P2s was sent to the French loco testing station at Vitry? That should have generated a load of data on them.

As a visitor, Peak Rail now seems unrecognisable from a few years back when they had those problems. Gone are the days of an Austerity and the same 4 carriages shuttling backwards and forwards ad infinitum. The joint diesel galas they've had with the EVR for the last couple of years have been really good, and they've even got visiting locos. It shows how things can turn around.

Is it an outbreak of plumbum oscillans?

Never saw it with loco hauled Mk3 stock on the ECML. There weren't any apart from the sleepers. I certainly remember it regularly working with one of the HST sets with a buffer fitted power car acting as the driving trailer. At one point it had a regular commuter working from Peterborough (and later Grantham) using a HST set. This was the period where the power cars were all in InterCity but a lot of the coaches were still blue and grey. It also worked the InterCity charter set of Mk1s at least once, for the Mallard 50th rail tour. There's a photo here and I remember watching it go past my house in 1988. I also have a vague memory of seeing it with Mk2 stock, that's supported by photos online. I don't recall seeing it working with Mk4 stock until GNER brought it back to life, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. There's a load of videos online of Grantham in the 1980s, so search for "89001 Grantham" on Youtube and you'll see videos of it in action.

I wonder how long it took that class 31 to get to King's Cross with a dozen coaches behind it.