Ian Simpson

If there ever is a Model Railway Inspectorate, I'm certainly arrogant (and nosy) enough to volunteer to vet other people's layouts!  

But perhaps a simpler way would just be for us to recognise and recommend those layouts that attempt to capture and show working practices correctly and educate the rest of us on how railways really worked.

(I think modelling 1840s railways has probably made me more aware of operation because early railways were operated so differently to their later, safer successors.)   

TBH, I'm not too miffed by what other people do with their layouts, even at exhibitions. Perhaps especially at exhibitions, where stand-in operators like me are often running unfamiliar layouts in a rather heavy-handed way.

But I do see the irony of expert modellers spending hundreds of hours creating wonderfully realistic layouts only to operate them in a haphazard and unhistoric manner. I think there can sometimes be an unwillingness to spend enough time and effort trying to understand how the prototype worked, not just how it looked. 

My own modest attempt at realism is to try to run my shunting layout a bit like a computer simulation game - it takes two workers an hour-and-a-half to load/unload a box van, shunting vans too hard risks damaging fragile goods, a PO wagon left unloaded in a siding for too long generates complaints from the owner, etc.  (And yes, I find the 1955 Rule Book useful too.)

5 hours ago, uax6 said:

... 'I said I would make the difficult decisions' 

 

Well, even I can make the difficult decisions, as long as no one expects me to get them right as well.

So it seems the PM and I share at least one characteristic ....

11 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Perhaps I wasn't wrong enough.

 

:-(

 

Or perhaps it's certain other people who are wrong in their belief that their wishful thinking trumps the collective economic experience of decades.

Just substitute "science" with "economics" in the picture below (I think it's from a Florida March for Science).

I just use a couple of pre-soldered rail joiners pushed along the rails so that they are in the centre of the traverser,. The wires drop down under the traverser, with enough slack to allow the traverser to move from side-to-side without tugging on the wiring.

Edit: there's some photos here, most of them towards the bottom of the comments: "... lessons have been learned." * - Modelling the 1840s in HO - RMweb    Okay, it's a very small traverser - but the principle can be adapted for ones that are a bit larger. 

38 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

So you believe that on every topic, Newsnight should decide what is "right" and tell only that version of the "truth". 

 

Actually, I thought Compound did a good job of choosing examples where the evidence is firmly on one side of the debate. 

I think there are some issues where one side is much more likely to be true than the other. Setting up a false equivalence by treating them as equally plausible isn't just dishonest, it's confusing.

There are other issues where the evidence isn't so clear-cut and both positions really do need to be tested rigorously, and there are even the Does-God-Exist / Is-Capitalism-better-than-Socialism types of debates driven by beliefs and values rather than hard facts, where we probably have to accept that agreement is impossible. 

I think the BBC needs different ways to handle all three types of debate.  (And I think the rest of us do, as well.)

Ah, yes, that would be this Jacob Rees-Mogg:

2 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

That looks like  fun.

 

Yes, my first thought on seeing the clip was "well, at least she seems to be enjoying it".

My second thought was "oh ****, we really do not need another cheerful Prime Minister".     

5 minutes ago, alastairq said:

 

I really like Twiglets.

[Have they got shorter over the years?]

 

Or have we got bigger?

A Heart symbol just wouldn't be enough here. Thank Heavens they aren't trying to claw anything back.

1 hour ago, Dunsignalling said:

 

Are you perchance referring to the Member for the 17th Century?😃

 

And the wrong part of the 17th Century at that ...  ☹️

Edit:  I think that title is usually applied to Jacob Rees-Mogg, who represents a seat down in Somerset. 

God knows what's wrong with the voters down there, but I like to imagine they all model in Gauge 1 clockwork. 

13 minutes ago, alastairq said:

I'm thinking of going on strike for more pension! Is anybody with me?

You could always ask Sam Tarry to join you on the picket line. It's seems he'll have a bit more free time now:

Keir Starmer sacks shadow transport minister who backed rail strikes - BBC News

I think the Conservative Party members may be making a rational choice about what's good for them. They expect Truss to cut some public services, but not their state pensions, their bus passes, their winter fuel payments for well-off pensioners, etc.

Whether it will be quite so good for their children and grandchildren is a different matter.  Public policy is a bit like modelling; any fool can smash things up, but it takes a surprising amount of skill and effort to rebuild them afterwards. 

The problem is that Kier / Labour aren't exactly enthusing voters either. 

I'm usually fairly optimistic about the resilience of our political system, but I do think we're in a pretty bad place at the moment. The Conservative membership seems poised to select a second fantasist in a row and the main opposition party is unwilling to come up with any interesting or inspiring policies. I don't think the next two years are going to improve our dwindling trust in the political process.  

30 minutes ago, Regularity said:

I disagree.

Partly.

Taxation is also a social tool: it effectively serves two purposes.

One is to pay for things like defence of the nation - which is how it came into being. That is purely an economic tool, necessary because people don’t fight wars: governments do.

The other is to redistribute wealth via public services, paid for by progressive taxation, so that those with more to spare pay a greater share, so that the basics of a civilised society such as education, health, support in old age, are available to a decent level for everyone without having to worry about paying for it.  ...

Thanks, Reg. I think we probably are in agreement on this, it's just the sloppy language I used makes me look obsessed with the economy.  I do think equality and fairness are economic issues as well as political ones, but they aren't completely separate spheres and in a mixed economy there's got to be a lot of overlap. The theoretical argument that free markets always maximise social benefits looks like smoke-and-mirror rubbish, so I don't have any problems with democratic governments using economic tools to achieve politically desirable outcomes like greater equality. 

In fact they should be doing this. As an aside, Marx thought the tendency of free markets to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands made the eventual collapse of capitalism inevitable, so there's a left-wing social policy perspective that argues the State has no choice but to keep redistributing some of the dosh to the rest of us to keep the show on the road. So there's an economic argument for redistribution as well as an ethical one. Oh for the days when well-read Conservatives knew their Marx (and well-read socialists their Hayek)...

Taxation's just an economic tool; sometimes it needs to go up a bit, sometimes it can come down a bit.  I'm sure most of the leadership contenders know this, but it seems only Sunak is willing to hint at it in the debates.

How did we get to such a ridiculous position? I've always thought New Labour made a strategic mistake in the 1990s and 2000s when the Blair / Brown governments preferred to fund public services through stealth taxes and dodgy public accounting instead of making a strong political case for a high tax, high welfare regime. It might have been electoral cowardice by the Millbank policy wonks, it might have been intellectual dishonesty by the politicians, it might have been a pragmatic response to the household-economy rhetoric of the Thatcher years; it was probably all of them. Since then, the Labour Party has always preferred telling us that other people should pay for our improved services. No wonder the comfortably-off now have a baseline belief that they (we) somehow deserve tax cuts, and that paying our taxes is a burden rather than an investment.

So when the Conservative Party (who are basically the weirdly dysfunctional family across the road that holds noisy arguments between itself over batsh:t stuff no one else cares about) tells us that we need tax cuts, Labour can't offer a coherent counter-argument to the economic stupidity.

I suspect I might be more sympathetic if Bozzo made DMUs out of wine crates, rather than buses:

Boris Johnson says he makes models of buses to relax - YouTube

2 hours ago, alastairq said:

 

Besides, can Rwanda be any worse than parts of London???

 

Yes, of course it can, and not just because London is one of the great cities of the world.

It might be unfair to modern Rwanda to harp on historical events, but I don't remember any major genocide in London during the 1990s. 

Okay, I admit I fled London myself around this time. But I was a refugee from high house prices, not machete-wielding bigots. 

A remarkably good recording, if it really is from 1894:

Ed Favor was a popular singer in the 1890s and 1900s, so it probably is an accurate date. 

38 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I suspected those were the only places in "the North" she'd heard of, having been obliged to go to party conferences there. 

 

I guess no town is going to impress you if you're judging it by its conference centre. Certainly not Brighton:

Anyway, here's a cheery little railway story to help us get over it:

'Caring' Great Western Railway conductor lets Ukrainian refugee girl on train without ticket in brilliant gesture (msn.com)

Now I have to go and fake up a Ukrainian passport. Have a good weekend, everyone!

That is very nice, Javier! 

Is there a commercial chassis that could be bashed for this loco?

I'm going to second Johnster here.

Although I see it's possible to apply on someone else's behalf, so I suppose none of us is completely safe.  

Next time Bodge gets caught out doing something dodgy, he'll probably suggest going back to £ s d. 

I expect we'll be back to groats and hides of land by 2025.

If I sound a bit grumpy today, it's because I've just found out I model in a scale of 0.1378 inches to the foot.

NSWGR Class N67,  [Class N67 No.71 locomotive] | NSW State Archives

Looks as if the class was even more flexible than the Terriers:

Just now, Edwardian said:

 

That's an important point, but it is subject to the will of Parliament, rather than an absolute right and that difference is probably critical here.

 

It allows Parliament to decide if and when the citizenry should bear arms. 

Yes, absolutely (apart from it being an important point, of course!)  If the Glorious Revolution was about anything, it was about Parliamentary Sovereignty.

Whereas a hundred years later the American rebels had become suspicious of both the Crown and Parliament.

Hence the Constitution and the separation of powers to take away the pre-eminence of parliaments.