webbcompound

Website appears to be down again

Saw the Swiss layout at Hexham the other week. It is a seriously excellent piece of modelling. Photographs do not convey the scale of the landscape, which is truly Alpine. Also the siding with turntable, plus the passing loop provide just enough operational interest.

sorry about repeat post. can't work out how to delete

Re Keswick: here is the hotel, the covered passageway and the station, from above. The station platform with its nice roof has been scrubbed up nice and now forms part of the hotel.

Re Keswick: here is the hotel, the covered passageway and the station, from above. The station platform with its nice roof has been scrubbed up nice and now forms part of the hotel.

presumably a latte branch would run coffee-pot locos?

Far be it for a "not from round here" with only 28 years residency to correct the venerable "Runs as required", but the drift mine at Beamish is an actual drift mine, and the coal seam is a real coal seam. The drift was re-opened for the museum and the concrete cased entry tunnel installed. The mine interpreters had (have) to be led by a Pit Deputy who was gas-test qualified, and they had to test the mine every morning for gas, check the stability of the pit props and look for any increased water ingress before it could be opened for public access. I'm not sure where they send them to renew their gas-test qualifications now that mining has effectively ceased in the North East. Regarding the access of the "just managing" population, I agree entirely, and unless things have changed drastically I would think many of the short seasonal contract site interpreters fall in this category. There are volunteers, but the majority of interpreters are paid staff.

I couldn't find anything on the Rennes statue either. Maybe Nearholmer has a photo?

Of course a museum of the 50s would not have tower blocks and concrete since most of that took place in the 60s. Hence the reason we need a museum of it as people are clearly forgetting it. Much of the 50s was simply an extension of the 40s without war. We still had bomb sites, and rationing, (and the NHS and free orange juice and rose-hip syrop in medicine bottles for children) but there was a little bit of brightness on the horizon, which developed into the "white heat" of the 60s technological revolution. The main Beamish town and colliery village dateline was c1913, the year of peak production in the North East coalfields, so unless there has been a massive turnover of exhibits it probably still is.

Get a chassis from a cheap non-runner and make it into an 0-8-0

24" cylinders. That is some serious power. Is it a banker?

just been checking up on colours. The first S&D coaches in 1825 were dark blue or green. By 1841 there were yellow coaches but in early 1842 all coaches were painted into lake. This seems to be similar to many railways, with a transition from blue/green to yellow by the early 40s and then into clarets/lakes/chocolates, with or without lighter upper panels during that decade

hmm. I havn't been around there for a while. Last time I was it was "riding" chaldrons (bad) and a reconstruction of the early S&D coach (good). I'm glad I never saw the coaches you rode in. Far too many diversions from the originals they clearly are originally based on. They look like the sort of thing a Hollywood film of the 30s might have produced for a British based costume drama. With the right colours even these pastiches would have looked a bit better. Blue/green for the second, red and black for the first? Of course it is easy to play the "when I was running things" card, and I think the current team is probably a vast improvement on some of the people in charge when I was there. That aside, running the tramway, the railway, and the site interpretation team was good fun when I was allowed to get on with it

The domed kiosk is the end of a Lancashire boiler, sawn off and created by Beamish. The kiosk, the signal cabin, and the engine shed are the result of an extended flight of fantasy (that included making passenger carriages out of chaldron wagons as well). One faction argued that this should be a mineral waggonway with authentic infrastructure, but were in a minority and over-ruled by the other faction who said this should be a visitor ride opportunity. The ride faction were also then incapable of grasping the concept of the passenger trains being accurate but early, and the mineral trains being hauled by the even earlier locos. Basically there were no railway historians with enough clout in position when the decisions were made. So the area is entertaining, and the locos are excellent, but they missed the chance to make a much better experience. The same factionalism led to the abandonment of passenger services in NER stock out of Rowley station. Jim, who did the research and drove the project to produce the steam elephant, went on to the NRM where he was responsible for pushing forward the excellent decision to re-streamline the LMS Corontation class.

How about these from the Dapol LSWR B4 0-4-0T? https://www.dccsupplies.com/item-p-113105/b4-oo-gauge-cylinder-assembly-black-part-18.htm

Your entry fee gives you unlimited visits. Obviously that is more beneficial to locals but it applies to everyone. This was decided when it became clear that you couldn't visit everything on site properly in a single day.

I keep looking at these (and stablemates) If you can live with the clumpy bits the only bit that looks wrong to me is the chimney which looks too short and squat, but would be fairly simple to put together out of tubes. Buying without examining first is always a risk. I just bought this nice looking LNWR single, which I thought would suit with a bit of work and a new chassis. On arrival I find it is too big vertically, though not far out horizontally. The boiler does sit horizontal, it is just lens distortion that gives it a slope. I will examine it for ideas as to how to make a proper one myself. Then I will clean it up, give it a paint job, and offer for sale for someone who wants a semi-fictional 50s loco as it looks pretty nice, just not a true scale model.. I need it to be attached to a directors inspection coach, so if it is the wrong size it will look really wrong, but pulling a train it would look pretty reasonable.

It is a GCR 9K 4-4-2T, LNER C13. 40 built 1903-05

Re the "well aimed shot through the boiler" the whole point of the armoured train was that it was, how shall I put this, armoured. Before tanks there was no land based anti-armour artillery, or anything serious in the way of bomber aircraft, Here is a pre-grouping armoured train, used in the UK. Built at the LNWR Crewe works. The loco is a GNR tank, the armoured vehicles are built on sundry NER and GWR chassis, and I'm fairly confident it was supposed to operate along the East coast, so maybe even visiting Castle Aching.

Interesting. My understanding of the development of railways is that they were a prime example of how attention to improving health and safety regs could improve (and lengthen) the lives of your workforce and passengers. As a retired archaeologist I know that in London in the seventies there were lots of deaths on construction sites, and we came close ourselves on several occasions as we worked on those sites. I also have severe tinnitus and jack hammering out the concrete slab in deep basements without being provided with ear protection won't have helped. As H&S improvements took place through the 80s the number of construction industry deaths drastically reduced. Maybe you don't need high vis and helmets on a shallow site out in an open field. But if you have heavy machinery on site that high-vis helps the machine driver notice you before they accidentally squash you. just to be difficult, but technically pre-grouping, when I was supervising on Great War battlefield sites my team used to change into black high-vis, which we referred to as Mess Dress, for lunch breaks. The guys from 11EOD Regiment that we worked with thought this was jolly good form. Also to confuse people they were quite happy to wear camo AND high-vis at the same time. And generally H&S was quite useful when we could (and would) be dealing with chlorine, phosgene, white star, and general high explosives every day

As far as I am aware chocolate and plum are two descriptions of the same thing. The difference amounts to the varnish rather than the colour. Chocolate is not really a brown, and plum is a very dark purple/red.

I fear Mr Hroth may be soon gulled into a scheme of some sort. The babies are "adopted " from the city and "looked after" by the baby farmer at a distant salubrious location. The mothers, but more likely their guardians, or employers, pay for their upkeep as the babies live a life of Riley in the countryside or near the sea. Unfortunately the mortality rate is quite high, and generally fairly rapid, but we don't want to trouble the mothers with that detail, so we just keep sending letters explaining how they are getting on.

I should think the age of the writer is also an issue. Very few older authors today understand how the internet and enabled devices impacts on the younger segment of the population. Consequently anything they write will look strange to readers in a generation's time (in whatever form they exist). They know it exists, they may even use bits of it, but they have no conception of its true impact and penetration. The same probably goes for railways initially. Few people will have really grasped the impact on the society and economy that railways were going to have before the latter half of the 19th century. Equally those who did often included those who could immediately see them as a way of making money from criminal endeavour. This indicates the similarity between the role of the railways then, and the internet now. Though unpalatable it seems to me that Castle Aching would be the ideal base for a baby farmer, with its rail connections to the centers of population where "adoption services" could be advertised in the daily press.

Which reminds me of the street theatre performance "Chuffing Locomotion" wot I wrote, whose backdrop was a not quite life sized roll-along Locomotion with wooden wheels. According to the chorus concerning Mr Edward Pease "He brought 'railway to Stockton which, is why we're all so chuffing rich" which sentiment was received with great delight by the Stocktonians.

Well he isn't a P4 modeller is he, just a collector. He bought a load of kit years ago, then didn't make use of it or build anything new. As for the "up himself" comment, well whenever a new RTR comes out plenty of "up themselves" 00 gauge collectors come out of the woodwork to nit pick its accuracy here on RMweb. The difference in approach is probably between collectors and modellers. Lets not get divisive on here. I follow this and a couple of other threads to imbibe the skill and ingenuity of the work. They are all 00 modellers. I model in P4. We model railways.