tynewydd

In the film “The Long Drag” - 1963 - the Appleby Dairy cheese drying shed and its chimney are shown along with the attachment of ?six? 6-wheelers full of milk to the rear of a stopping train of about 4 coaches bound for Carlisle. The commentary says that they would there join the train to London. The Express Dairies sign says “Milk for London”.

Its also a question of the size of the non-platform areas being related to the choice. Those long trains will probably need staging/fiddle yard unless you are roundy-roundy, and its also less than convincing to have your 10 coach train with only 10 coaches space before arriving at the next station unless each one has a proper scenic break. I personally like the look, as others have said, of 5 or 6 coaches plus tender engine in OO. DMU 6-car Pullman is also fine. They substitute in my minds eye for the 11 or 12 coaches I would count out on the Irish Mail as it went about 1/4 mile away through my summer-cottage window past the Valley down distant signal to meet the boat in the 60s. I think the factor has got something to do with the length relative to the size of the human viewing it. That may explain why 3 or 4 looks fine in O to me, but 8 or 10 coaches is better in N. On an OO branch line? Platform for 3+, actual train only 1 or 2, please. Of course if we go back in time to the Edwardian era the prestige coaches were about two-thirds to half our modern length - a reason Buckingham was set then as the consideration there was the Denny rotating fiddleyard length needing to have a clear rotation path and not need too much engineering of the pivot while still allowing a realistic semi-fast train. Even with long platforms in a nice space, I agree with the late Rev., I think it important to have some visual break in the un-interrupted platform if possible with things like station buildings, roofs, overbridges, footbridges, gantries, signalboxes, etc to prevent the viewer easily seeing everything at once. A gently curved platform is also very helpful, this allows the mind to do some work and it will increase both the actual "coaches" length in the same space and even more increase the perceived length. This is especially true when standing nearer one end than at the middle, so having one or more of those visual "breaks" split the platform up into at least two if not three mini "scenes" will help a lot.

Apparently for steep enough hills, an extra lever could be added to prevent roller-coaster runaway type incidents - https://www.old-bus-photos.co.uk/?cat=212 I don't know if it was a Foden, but my dad remembered the issues when the single decker bus in Denbigh was converted to coal gas during the war, with a coke furnace towed at the back and a giant bag of gas on the roof. At the foot of the steep hill in Denbigh, first all the passengers had to disembark at the bottom, the fire was stoked up in the generator - which made it belch copious amounts of smoke - and then the bus would inch up the hill finally meeting up with the passengers who had all reached the top well ahead of it and were sitting on their parcels.

As I recall, the original impetus for the South Hams railway was the LSWR wanting a competitive way to get from Plymouth to Newton Abbot/Exeter in the 1860s - that scheme eventually got as far as Yealmpton only in, but even that was built as a through station as the initial terminus on the modified scheme was supposed to be Modbury. Given that the ambition was a link across the Dart to the Kingswear side - and with the Admiralty usually being sticklers for unimpeded navigation to 100ft (e.g., Menai and Royal Albert bridges), it seems to me that a crossing near Ditisham at a high level was a likely outcome using the local topography of very steep sides to the estuary to help level the approaches to the bridge. Perhaps it could have added a spur to a terminus/docks nearer Dartmouth, although Kingswear already supplied that to a great extent. This would also have avoided the need to breech the town itself. Many a station was sited several miles away from its nominal place after all. But in any case, the idea of a line from Totnes by the GWR, although easier from an engineering standpoint, would not have met the competitive case except as a pre-emptive strike - potentially leading to a dueling Dartmouth stations. From a modeling POV, the vista of through trains passing by a terminus but at a higher level is available. Of course, just as at Yealmpton, the scheme could simply have run out of money at any stage desired.

I have 122 points/turnouts all Seep motor controlled and ElectroFrog wired into the (in my case DCC Concepts Digital) point motors for switching. There are two powering wires from the accessory bus to each motor and one short wire from the frog to the included switch on the motor and two wires to from that switch to the secondary bus. In some cases the switch is the other end motor (double slip) or is an auto-electronic switch (diamond). It is a process, but by having the switch with onboard DCC, it is manageable where for me, wiring everything back to a central point is not. Chaçun à son goût. The point is you need to pick a systematic approach and follow through. In my case two DCC buses to every board, and then dropper wires to each point motor and the electrofrog special dropper to the point motor. It took about an evening a baseboard to do on average - but some of them had 20 motors. I guess my total count was about 600 dropper wires. Looking back now, I would have used a different joint system to make the bus to dropper wire connections rather than soldering each one, but at least I always worked with the board inverted or on its side. In full disclosure, then there are the detection sections wired via windings on DCC detectors to do as well if you intend to be able to automate or semi-automate sections. And you will need more for signals.... Still the aim should be, IMO, short wires to the common DCC accessory bus. Adam

In V5 flextrack is automatically transition curves and if you set Easement to "Cornu" then Joins are as well. If you set that and then take out the last curve section on each curve and replace with a Join, you'll get a result you can adjust. By adjusting the end points along the fixed and curved ends, the program(me) will fill in the gap with a dynamic transition curve rather than fixed radius or fixed transition. Hopefully the improvements in UI highlighting in V5 have made the learning curve just a little easier.

On the original topic, I was told by my father that the road from Valley to Wylfa was improved a lot for construction traffic - especially as some especially heavy components such as the transformers were sent by ship to HolyHead and transported to the site along it. There were one or two very large cranes at Holyhead opposite the station near the dry dock and I recall they were also used to put locos stranded by the Menai Bridge fire onto ships to get back to the "the mainland". So given that road was being improved anyway - adding to the yard at Valley was probably a natural for a road/rail transfer when compared to reinforcing and in some cases widening the Amlwch branch. My Dad has an interest in both areas as his father had been a curate at Llanerchymedd and had bought a cottage near Valley (before the days of Y Fali or Y Dyffryn) in the 1920s.

There is a Group dedicated to talking about BR carriage workings (including catering) which has posted many useful files to Google Drive - You can start by subscribing at https://brcoachingstock.groups.io/g/main - the links to the carriage working timetables is at the top of the messages page. Prepare to spend a lot of time reading!!

I have usually used the soldering iron bit on the side to melt the insulation for a section. Any hot item will do. Adam

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/starcross-engine-house-and-brunels-atmospheric-railway States that some of the exhibits may have moved to the Newton Abbot Town and GWR museum

And XTrackCAD does work on a Mac without needing an emulator or a VMware/Parallels setup. Completely free to use (open source). Adam

For folks who are not building their own track, XTrackCAD (free) has a flextrack tool that produces eased transition curves that minimize the rate of change of curvature along the entire path between the ends using some heavy duty maths. The ends of the eased section can be straight or curved (fixed radius) as desired. Further tricks allow additional constraint points (equivalent of adding track pins in real-world flextrack) such as requiring the track path to "slew" to give clearance past an fixed obstacle like a signal, bridge abutment, etc. The eased path changes dynamically as the ends and constraints are adjusted so you can play with it until you have the result you like. Full disclosure - I wrote the code but borrowed the maths.

Wow! -> Limerick Junction is like old Chester General with the central platform crossover welded to Templecombe Junction for the "all passenger trains reverse" part on steroids - but the crossing is on the level to boot rather than with a bridge over the S&D. A wonderfully Irish layout!

The Summer 2021 SRS Signalling Record had a detailed article on the Bridge of Dun station. The station had an island platform on the Down side, and in the article there was mention of an intriguing working practice. Several times a day, three trains would converge on the island until at least the 1950s - a Down train to Montrose and an Up to Brechin would meet a Down Aberdeen express with the Brechin train being shunted backwards from the Up main over to the outside of the island the other end of which was already occupied by the Down Montrose train facing the other way. The Down express to Aberdeen would then arrive on the other side of the island and all the passengers and luggage could quickly transfer between trains without using the bridge or a level porter's crossing. The express would leave, and then the Brechin train, and finally the Montrose train following the express as far as Dubton Junction. This seems like an interesting "move" operationally and I have such an island with the right sort of multiple lines joining and leaving to mean that Up and Down trains might benefit from a transfer - in my case I could actually see 4 trains meet as the local branch has a dock in the island as well. The question is - was this a one-off for BoD or were there other examples of creativity in use of an island platform to minimize passenger transfer time so that this would look interesting rather than out of place? Adam

This is what has happened to the US Post Office as well. They have to deliver to everywhere and have a social contract that the cost only depends on distance door-to-door, not on degree of difficulty. Companies like Amazon can and do pick or choose and just use them for the most uneconomic deliveries of the "last mile(s)". One can observe, however, that when the boot was on the other foot and private companies on rail were the only way to go in the US, they operated as you would expect giant monopolies to do - they price gouged the little guy when there was no competition and acted to stop any new competition. There were similar complaints about the LNWR and then the LMS (and probably all the big four) in the UK in areas where they were effective monopolies like North Wales. When my father travelled to school in Leatherhead from St Asaph in 1940 he went via Wrexham and observed that the LMS and GWR trains were perfectly timed to miss each other to reduce the convenience of the route to Paddington compared to Euston. I think two major problems with Beeching were the lack of understanding of the value of the network effect to traffic, which leads to devaluing the "twigs", and having a planning horizon that didn't properly value returns from investments in efficiency to reduce the overall cost. The same standards were not applied to the road network, of course, either in the ROI for all the rural roads per mile or in setting up a true comparison of different investment strategies for how freight and passengers would most efficiently travel the longer routes once the novelty wore off. But the overall sentiment is correct - Beeching just reaped the whirlwind as a totem of the policies implemented both before and after him. He was asked to do a job - he did it and he was not about to produce something that was not PC.