pete_mcfarlane

Just got back (and finished my supper). Overall, that was quite a good show. It wasn't quite as general a 'general' modelling show as I'd expected - I'd say 60% model railways, 30% plastic kit modelling (mostly aircraft, smaller amounts of soldiers, vehicles, ships, sci-fi), a display of large radio controlled aircraft (including a really nice Sopwith Camel and a Hunter) and a RC truck demonstration where they shipped (real) earth around a track. Model engineering was confined to the gauge 1 steamers (which i can watch for hours) and a rather nice large scale Ruston 48DS. Layouts were a pretty good selection - 'Making tracks' was massive as expected, and is mostly a model of Milton Keynes Central and part of Watford Junction, with lots of watching the trains go by on either side. Seemed to run OK when I saw it, and was surrounded by big crowds. Got the World record, although that kind of thing always seems a bit lacking these days without Norris McWhiter and Roy Castle there to award it.... Trade was mostly railway orientated. Most of the people you'd expect (Squires, Bill Hudson, DC Kits, H&A, Bachmann, Heljan etc) were there. So a pretty good show for people who want model railways, and to look at some 'other' modelling. Enough model railways for people who only want model railways to not feel like they've had a wasted day. If you want to see dozens of 1:48 Sea Harrier FRS.1s then you are in luck. If you went wanting RC aircraft or boats, you'd probably be a tad disappointed. If you are me, who does model railways and builds a few aircraft kits as a sideline, and likes to look at other people's modelling of any variety then it's a pretty good day out. Hopefully the show becomes a regular thing.

My £6 sandwich and £4 sausage roll from the catering place in the Hall were very nice, but you'd hope so at double what you'd normally pay.

Once they let people in the queues rapidly vanished. Only took a couple of minutes to buy tickets and get in at 10am, and the show itself doesn't feel too crowded.

Which of course led to one of the less helpful/informed criticisms of Privatisation - that it brought in a load of complexity like this, as if BR was run by half a dozen people in an office somewhere and things only got complicated once it was privatised.

Of course there's nothing to stop that happening under the current system. I don't quite see the point of the Labour proposal. Eliminating the profit margins (which IIRC is something like 1 to 1.5%) won;'t make a massive difference to ticket prices. The only way to bring them down is to increase the subsidies to the operator(s) which they aren't going to be doing (and could do under the current system anyway). The whole proposal feels like a headline with nothing behind it. Exactly. I remember taking ages (nearly half an hour) to buy a S-Bahn ticket at Munich airport, as there were only 2 or 3 tickets machines (poorly located on the platforms) with a big queue. In a UK airport you could have bought your ticket in the airport building before you even got to the station with its dozen or so ticket machines. UK railways are actually really good at a lot of things.

The Tripadvisor reviews are also, err, interesting (if you ignore the 5 stars 'I LIKE HARRY POTTER AND THE HARRY POTTER TRAIN IS THE BEST FING EVA!" ones). Quite a few people moaning about how old the carriages are....

And his house is now a museum. https://www.olivercromwellshouse.co.uk/

Which is why I said 'mostly' to cover that earlier criticism. The real trashing of his reputation (with the wider public) came later on as part of the reappraisal of WW1 in the sixties ('The Donkeys' and so on). Otherwise he'd not have made the list of Britannia names ten years previously. The irony with Fuller is that the Germans did read his book and listen to his ideas, as they'd never had to work with him. Proof that being right isn't enough to get your ideas adopted- you need to be right, and not have fallen out with everyone you need to convince.

I'd say the the most interesting Britannia naming is 70044 Earl Haig. This was the 1950s when he was still (mostly) seen as a national hero, before his reputation was comprehensibility (and not entirely rightly) trashed by historians in the sixties. Nowadays most people just see him as Geoffrey Palmer with a dustpan and brush in Blackadder.

Footwarmers would be the traditional approach this problem. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/K6Xj_8O9Sk-xi2h2JfvOuw

It's all about nostalgia. In this case, bringing that distinctive damp railway carriage smell back to the mainline.

I like the way the Mail has used a photo of what looks like a Chinese or North Korean train to illustrate that article.

But Culloden and the '45 wasn't really England v Scotland. It was the exiled Stuart dynasty plus the few Clans who supported them verses the rest of the country. Most of Scotland supported the Government, much as they'd supported the revolution of 1688 that got rid of the Stuarts in the first place. Anyway, I'm not sure what relevance somebody who thinks they have a divine right to stick to their old ways losing to Government forces has to the current WCRC situation. Oh wait....

I wonder if the scrap value of all that rotting stock would pay for CDL on a few coaches?

In the other direction there are stories of French rural metre gauge lines being delayed due to problems on the Southern Region (which delayed the boat train, and all of its onward connections).

Some of the eBay seller's feedback is from people who got hit by VAT, presumably not having realised that this would happen (or noticed that the item was in China). So not everyone is that clued up. There is some good railway and railway modelling stuff on Facebook. Random examples that are in my most recent views: https://www.facebook.com/groups/287574851395841 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063285277206 https://www.facebook.com/groups/178540989016069 But yeah, there is a lot of weirdness on there. The recent fun with Jacobite central door locking seems to have brought out a lot of badly spelled rants. I think it depends on how well moderated the pages are - some of them are a lot better than others.

Not to people on Facebook it isn't. If you look at the post on Dapol's page it's full of people demanding to be told exactly what to 'avoid'... (And in fairness, there are some people talking sense on there as well).

BuT wHy WoNt Dapol pOsT tHe LiNk To ThE cHeAp FaKeS sO i CaN aVoId ThEm?

Colorblindness runs in my family. Only an hour ago I was googling the numbers on Humbrol paint tins to work out what colour they were. These days there's a mobile phone app called 'Colorgrab' which tells you what colour things are - really useful.

I suspect that's less likely given the production runs involved in model railways. Injection moulding tools should last for years if looked after - witness all those Airfix 'classics' reruns of 1960s kits or Hornby churning out stuff from the 1980s and earlier. Maybe this is part of the problem, as Chinese factories are sitting on large quantities of no longer used (by their Western owners) but perfectly serviceable injection tools.

I lost interest in that letter when they started talking about 'huge costs'. And as for saying that WCRC's fleet is '60% of the heritage rolling stock in the UK' without any qualifications. I don't think those MPs grasped the key point that accepting a time limited risk by giving operators an exemption whilst they fit CDL is not the same as letting WCRC carry on ad infinitum without it. Assuming that they wrote the letter themselves.

This is of course true of any organisation. The kind of people who are good at driving startups aren't necessarily the kind of people who can run the business in the long term. You can see that with some of the more prominent Silicon Valley types, who are good with the 'cool' innovation stuff, but less good at giving the impression of being a steady hand on the tiller.

Going back to jjb1970's comments on Managers vs leaders, the problem is that Managers tell people to come back in the office, because their Manager has told them to make it happen. What you've described is what a leader would do. (I'm sure that a lot of Managers could be replaced by an email forwarding rule, that simply forwards emails from their manager on to their team. It would be a lot cheaper.).

Thanks you for that reply - very interesting. As for flexible working, that is a whole can of worms at the moment. Weirdly I was going in the office 5 days a week, as I found it less distracting sitting in a virtually empty office on Mondays and Fridays than being at home. But that's just me. One thing I'd add to the list is the tendency of some managers to shape their team's work in a way that encourages lone working* and then wonder why these people aren't that interested in coming back to the office to work collaboratively. Something interesting I read recently was that some people can view things (in this case 'how I allocate work' and 'my team coming back in the office') as isolated islands, rather than linking them up in their heads. I wish I'd known that 25 years ago, as it explains all sorts of stuff like how it can sometimes be difficult to explain stuff to certain people. (* Because if you give task A to Fred to do on his own and B to Mary to do on her own, it's easier to see what people have delivered when you come to writing their end of year review. Rather than having Fred own task A to won, and asking him to involve other people, which would encourage them to work together and come back in the office.)

OK then, how should I have phrased it? My intent being to convey the idea that the manager was possibly behaving in a particular way (not understanding other people's situations being different from their own) because of who they were and how their brain was wired up, rather than due to any deliberate malice or failings. Which is important in understanding some of these culture clashes within organisations, where everyone means well in their own way, but they all somehow end up upsetting each other due to mutual lack of understanding. I'm temporarily 'resting' between jobs, so wasn't aware that it was Autism month. If I was in a job I'd probably have had a bulk email from HR telling me all about it, with stories from a couple of employees about their experiences and so on, as I've seen in previous years. What I've never seen in any of the past communications is something on how to talk about neurodivergent people in a way that doesn't make them uncomfortable(*), which is food for thought. So now is the chance for somebody to educate me. (* Because as a manager you want to be able to say to people "Fred likes to work in a particular way because of who he is, which is different from your way of working, so be understanding" without upsetting Fred)