pete_mcfarlane

Not been in the Newark shop, but they used to have a branch in the Market Place in Grantham, but that closed about 10+ years ago. Nice little general model shop.

There's a pressure group dedicated to the reopening of the line, who come up with laughable cost estimates (of the 'clear the bushes from the track bed and plonk down some track, job done' variety). It wouldn't be the first time that a pressure group's press release announcing their latest 'study' has been presented by a newspaper as 100% proof a line is reopening. Also, what happens when the trains get to Croydon? Where is the extra capacity coming from? I reckon we should write a press release about 'HS5', the new high speed line to be built from London to Brighton (through the Weald on a 20' high concrete viaduct' with a spur right into the middle of Tunbridge Wells) and send it to all the local papers. They'll present it as really happening, and the NIMBYs will be in uproar.

I wager that HS2 will kill far fewer construction workers. A lot of the increased build time is probably to spread the construction costs over a longer, and easier to absorb, period and to use a finite amount of skilled construction workers.

But the customers aren't always located where they'll use the stuff the shop sells. There are two or three winter sports shops within walking distance of my office, hundreds of miles from the nearest piste. They'll get trade from people buying the gear before they go on holiday - I bought some ski boots in my lunch hour once.....

Pretty much all of the small traders I buy stuff from by letter in the post are the same traders I was buying from that way 20 years ago. So I don't really see it as an issue, it's just how you deal with them. Ultimately we just need to accept that we are dealing with somebody doing this as a part time hobby business, and not somebody whose livelihood depends on the sales. Those two retailers are at the upper end of the price spectrum when it comes to selling S/H items, so I'm not sure if they are an accurate indicator of an item's value.

The problem then is that poor suckers see the great looking finished result and buy the kit on the back of it.....

The P must be one of the few locos where you can see this from platform level.. So the tank top extends to meet the boiler, but with a small raised lip where they meet. The other thing I'd never noticed before is that the splashers appear to be pressings. And no need to worry if you can't get the dome to sit properly on the boiler......

The Hornby European ranges seems to be conspicuous in their absence. Can we have an episode where Simon ponders over what dubious livery do the Electrotren 0-6-0T in next? Or the word 'iconic' is over used 47 times to describe an orange liveried TGV?

It took them about 2 months to tell me that a post I'd reported (somebody comparing a black politician to a monkey) didn't breach their community guidelines. The moderation on a lot of social media like Facebook is a token gesture designed to show politicians that they are 'doing something' and don't need any kind of external intervention.

This seems to be the problem with groups - it's all down the admin(s). So you either get over zealous moderation, or nobody stopping spam/porn posts.

On my build I Araldited a length of Brass tube into the pony truck to hold the axle (with the axle inside the tube, as you won't get it in later). It's 2.5mm diameter inside to there's a small amount of slop. What I can't remember is how I got it accurately aligned, possibly by masking tape on the wheels to hold it in place as the glue set (or did I superglue it in first in the right place, and then flood with Araldite to hold it permanently?). I think the chassis kit comes with a little cast retaining plate that you glue to the bottom of the truck, but that would have allowed the axle to slop around too much.

I couldn't see an existing thread dedicated to this, so I thought I'd start one. As somebody who's developed an interest in Johnny Foreigner's railways over the last few years, I'm slowly reading up on European railways. Mainly French and Belgian, as my D in GCSE French allows me to just about wade my way through French language books, with a bit of help from Google translate (and Google lens, which can take a photo and translate the text in them). I'm currently reading French narrow gauge album - despite the 'Album' in the title there's a fair amount of text and background information with a focus on British enthusiasts visiting France in the 1950s. Large format, nicely produced, with mostly colour photos. I'm really enjoying reading it, and it's a good overview on something I don't know much about (yet). It also has a lot of references to Bryan Morgan's 'The end of the line'. I'd seen recommendations for this down the years, and got finally hold of a copy last year (for a reasonable price, it seems to fairly rare and valuable, possibly because nobody wants to part with their copies). It's more of a travelogue than a detailed history, but is fantastically written (as you'd expect from a professional writer) and details his travels around European by secondary railways in the years after WW2. Finally, I've discovered the Belgian photo albums produced by Editions PFT - I've read a couple of their 'Une siecle de vapeur' series, with another in the pile. Nicely reproduced, lots of large format photos, mostly post-war, but with some coverage of the earlier Belpaire weirdness (pannier tanks with Square chimneys and so on). The captions are in French (and Flemish) although they are fairly basic (locomotive XX.XXX is seen entering the Gare de Somewhere. It was built in 1900 and withdrawn in 19522) https://www.pfttsp.be/index.php/fr/publications/livres-et-dvd/66-livres-du-pft/1246-un-siecle-de-vapeur-tome-8 Does anyone else have any recommendations?

It's worth pointing out that not all train ferry wagons were UK loading gauge - there were train ferries in the Baltic (linking Scandinavia with mainland Europe) and between Italy and Sicily. Supposedly the odd Berne gauge wagon would accidentally turn up at Dover or Harwich.

But will they open the pod bay doors?

And if you want to read about the British civil nuclear programme, CN Hill's 'An Atomic empire' is very good.

There was a local fuss a decade or so back when it was discovered that the factory in Derby that made nuclear reactors contained a working nuclear reactor. IIRC one of the universities in central Londhad one as well.

Another option is to join a local club that caters for finescale modeling and pick up tips from the members. Probably on the wrong side of Nottingham for you (I assume that your near Lincoln from your username), but I'm an occasional member of the Scalefour Society's East Midlands Group. https://www.scalefour.org/ag/emag/ Another vote for phosphoric acid - I use Carr's yellow label.

HR are of great value if they do their job properly - at my employer some recent minor changes to people's job descriptions came with clear instructions from HR on what to tell people, and to make sure they were comfortable and didn't read anything untoward into it. With a script to read, to make sure that everyone got the same message. Somebody had put a lot of thought into how that was communicated out. This was on the day that Elon Musk sacked thousands of his Twitter minions by text message.

Am I right in thinking that the Rivarossi Royal Scot isn't actually HO, but somewhere around 1:80 scale?

My late Grandmother, who served on anti-aircraft batteries during WW2, made the point that multiple batteries would engage the same group of attacking aircraft. So five batteries firing, one aircraft explodes, five kills claimed.

Maybe BR had a spare loco that they swapped with the destroyed one, and then quicly built a replacement for the spare so nobody noticed? (Like the RN did with HMS Invincible after Argentina sank it for the fifth time?)

There's a charming bit of naivety there. Presumably a rocket launcher attack on a passing nuclear flask train can only be made from the station platform (in possession of a valid ticket?) and not from a random bit of wasteland half a mile up the line?

There's a documentary on this (I think narrated by John Craven). There were a load of preceding, far less spectacular but probably more useful, tests where they did things like drop the flasks from a height with them landing on one corner. All of these took place with the flask pressurised with gas (and the pressure monitored, so it was possible to tell if the flask had leaked on impact, which it didn't).

Finally, the S scale model of Agenoria that we've all be waiting for.....

Yes, the first batch (which my model is from) was originally turned out in Green and Maroon (for the ER). I'll do another of these in green if I can find decent photos, all the ones I've seen are too small to be useful.