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. 

2 hours ago, Phil Himsworth said:

What are the food offerings like? We're wondering what to do for lunch tomorrow...

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. 

4 hours ago, woodenhead said:

Glad I didn't go then, after Milton Keynes last year no thanks.

 

However, well done to Key, big crowds are what they needed to pay for this and big crowds they have got then.

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. 

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

I'll tell you one thing Phil - one of the best things to come out of privatisation was contracts.  As an operator contracts actually gave me protection - protection against Railtrack carrying on with its increasingly daft levels of stupidity, protection which simplified a number of our work procedures, and protection which avoided wasting hours and hours of management time as we'd had to in BR days before we had the protection that Access Contracts gave us.   And as teh railway industry had been going on & on for years about separation og f infrastructure costs from other costs privatisation also gave people that.

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. 

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Some very good things could come out of it, especially in terms of presenting a cogent set of “products” (fares, timetabling information, integration with other modes etc) to potential users

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. 

2 minutes ago, AndrueC said:

Maybe. But if it's not-for-profit where is the pressure to improve?

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....

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Cromwell lived for a goodly time at Ely, 

And his house is now a museum. 

https://www.olivercromwellshouse.co.uk/

10 hours ago, Morello Cherry said:

 

That just isn't true. He was being criticised in the 1930s. Whatever you may think of them - Lloyd George's memoirs were 1936, Liddell Hart's was developing his critique from 1930 onwards.

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. 

9 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

Look on the brightside, his fellow armoured war pioneer JFC Fuller was full on bat turd bonkers, but still had a few good ideas.

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. 

11 hours ago, Railpassion said:

It seems those travelling on the Jacobite will be enjoying a heat free experience. Will WCRC provide blankets and complementary hot drinks?

Footwarmers would be the traditional approach this problem. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/K6Xj_8O9Sk-xi2h2JfvOuw

35 minutes ago, 5944 said:

I really feel for the passengers today. You have two hours in cold, very wet and very windy Mallaig, and your train back is a set of cold, dark Mk2s that have been parked up for years until this week. 

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....

5 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Reality is WCRC has a humungous amount of stock… way more than 130, perhaps 200..

But a lot of it is rot.. mk1 sleepers, lnw sleeper from steamtown days, RES PCVs used to be at Helifield, abandoned mk2es in Southall.

Some has been stripped for scrap already in recent years.

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

14 hours ago, roythebus1 said:

There was a delay report I saw many years ago at Victoria, something like "we regret the 0820 to orpington is delayed due to an avalanche in Switzerland". I asked at the time, who explained the Night Ferry from Paris was delayed awaiting a connection from Switzerland, so the Night Ferry meant it ran in the path of the inward 0820 to Orpington.

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). 

10 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

UK customers who did find the seller would probably do the math to add VAT and the handling charge and decide they'd be better off buying from a UK dealer (or in the EU from their German dealer). 

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. 

3 hours ago, Mallard60022 said:

If you think that's bad...don't bother going anywhere else. Even Railway related ones are full of very odd stuff.

Yes, I know I shouldn't even be there either.

P

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. 

39 minutes ago, john new said:

Isn't the answer blindingly obvious? 

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). 

1 hour ago, John M Upton said:

I did the same error of looking at the Dapol Facebook thread on the subject.  Good grief, that place really is the wild west of social media!!!!

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. 

7 hours ago, kevinlms said:

Lets say a manufacturer pays for a tool to make a genuine product and is designed to make X numbers of items, before the tool is retired and a new tool used.

What happens if the old tool continues to be make items illegally, but gradually the tooling is breaking down and the items are not as crisp.

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. 

3 hours ago, 11B said:

https://westcoastrailways.co.uk/news/jacobite-letter-from-mps-re-wcr

 

Just found this on WCR web site

 

So still no exemption, but now getting MPs to try and get one 🤦🏻

 

Ian

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.

12 hours ago, 009 micro modeller said:

I suppose the other issue, as alluded to in that article, is that someone who has the experience and drive that prompts them to set up a charity doesn’t necessarily have the skills or experience needed to run it when it grows into a huge organisation (whereas somebody hired specifically to run the organisation generally would, as they’d be selected on that basis).

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. 

1 hour ago, Nick C said:

But "encourage them to come back to the office" isn't the correct aim - it should be "facilitate them working in the most productive manner"  - which might be giving Fred task A to do on his own at home, but Mary and John tasks B and C to collaborate on in the office. A good manager should know their team's individual strengths and how to make best use of them - and that includes not just how you divide up the tasks but also how you shape each individual's working environment.

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.). 

47 minutes ago, Nick C said:

As for your second example, just accepting that different people work in different ways would be a good start - something that many people and companies seem to find hard to understand - just look at the discussions on here about flexible working for example (and yes, I'm well aware that this is something I keep banging on about) - I'm the kind of person who can focus best in a quiet environment without a lot of distractions, so I prefer to work from home - but I can guarantee you now I've mentioned those three words, someone will be along to argue that either (a) They prefer to work in the office and therefore everyone must do the same, or (b) some jobs can't be done remotely, so none should be allowed to.

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.) 

57 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Exactly. Even if the original comment wasn’t meant in an offensive way (and I genuinely don’t think it was) the phrasing does have that unfortunate implication, which as a neurodivergent person I dislike. It’s 2024 and it’s Autism Awareness Acceptance Month, we can and should do better.

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)