whart57

I was told thirty years ago by my manager, who to be fair was merely passing a message from the Chief Exec down to the minions, that our job was not service to the customer but it was to increase shareholder value. If you want to know the reason why everything is so these days that's it in a sentence.

It would be hard to do it worse. But this is the Vote Leave campaign running the country, why is anyone surprised that they aren't any good at it.

I can't help but think though that the government thought this was too unpopular a decision to implement in the year before the next election/

A couple of lines on the fringes of the Black Country are in that grey area between a light railway and a street tramway. One is the Kidderminster and Stourport, which connected those two towns. It ran as a street tramway within the towns but in between it ran over a reserved track beside the road. Today Kidderminster and Stourport have virtually merged but a hundred years ago it was open countryside in between. Had the K&S followed up on the proposals to build a line to Bewdley that would have been even more interesting. The Bewdley line was authorised under an LRO, unlike the main K&S which had an Act of Parliament, and was authorised to carry goods, minerals, parcels and animals as well as passengers The other one is the Kinver Light Railway.

American football used to have rolling mauls, they called them the turtle. They made them illegal after a couple of players were killed. Tackles in American football have been a sort of barge ever since.

A very old joke in football is that you can make a small fortune from owning a football club but it helps to start with a large one. Those late Victorian administrators at the FA saw two dangers and tried to plot a course between them. One danger was that paying players would lead to some clubs using money to recruit the best players and those players then becoming amoral hedonists. Something the theatre had already had examples of and something football would experience a century later when money was no object. The other was that if payment at levels similar to what a skilled worker could earn in industry was not allowed, clubs would be owned by local businessmen who created fake jobs for skilful players in order to recruit them to the club. Something I think Welsh rugby union got to be notorious for. The point of the maximum wage was to ensure professionalism was to maintain the concept of compensating for lost wages in mill or mine. There was also a sort of moral resistance to the idea of people getting paid to play games. The maximum wage also meant good middle class players weren't tempted to turn professional which meant the standard of the amateur competitions was kept up. When the maximum wage was lifted in the early 1960s the result was not revolutionary. Clubs simply didn't have the money to pay high wages. In the Fourth Division Accrington Stanley folded mid-season because the directors weren't willing to take the losses incurred because of slightly higher wages, and all through the bottom divisions clubs trimmed their playing staffs. In the mid 1960s a Fourth Division club might have only 15 or 16 players on the books. Fortunately only one substitute was allowed at the time so they only needed 12 on match days. At the top level Johnny Haynes of Fulham became the first £100 a week player (the Fulham chairman had jokingly said he was worth £100 a week some time before the maximum wage was lifted and Haynes held him to it). To put it into context this was still at the level that senior managers in industry were being paid. The lifting of the maximum wage had ordinary players in the top two divisions paid at the rates professionals like bank managers and doctors were paid, rather than that of skilled mechanics, but when football's income was primarily gate money and the cost of admission to a top level game was still shillings. Not until the crazy money from global TV rights came in did player pay go up to the eye-watering levels of today.

There is precious little there though, and no way to sneak in to Newhaven or Eastbourne that way. The late Peter Bossom was working on a model called Alfriston when he died, though I'm pretty sure with Peter it would have been either a Southern Railway or a BR(S) depiction.

Why not continue to Oxted and link up with the Oxted and East Grinstead line? The line would offer another bypass route and the LBSCR would be very touchy about anyone else - yes you SECR - playing around in the Sussex and Surrey valleys. The problem with suggesting believable light railways in that part of the country is that if a line could be built for the sort of money a light railway company has then one of the mainline companies would already have done so. The LBSCR built a line through every river valley through the South Downs, most of which made little money, and if the SER went no further than Caterham it was because the costs would have been enormous. The Oxted line was first proposed in the 1840s but it was late in the century before it finally got built.

Here at Horsham club we have started a layout based on a Colonel Stephens line. You can follow progress on our blog - https://www.rmweb.co.uk/blogs/blog/2640-chesworth-horsham-mrcs-00-finescale-project/ Our backstory is completely fictitious but to give it some foundation we have re-imagined the history of Horsham, the name Chesworth comes from a farm and manor house just south of the town. That approach sets the location, and our line is imagined to make a junction with the LBSCR mainline at Gatwick (the Racecourse station, not the Airport). Buildings are local examples and the general landscaping is the Sussex Weald. We are going for K&ESR style locos and stock but as others have pointed out, other prototypes are available. The Colonel Stephens empire contains two examples you might like to consider as hooks to hang your story on. The Shropshire and Montgomeryshire was a failed mainline that was supposed to connect Stoke on Trent with North Wales. Only the bit between Shrewsbury and Llanymynech was built and it closed in the 1880s. Stephens revived it as a Light Railway thirty years later. Light railway trains had their own terminus at Shrewsbury Abbey so your mini layout could be an urban location. Imagine a Railway Mania era line connecting Southampton to, say, Bristol. It builds a temporary terminus in Southampton before it goes belly up. When the light railway revival happens decades later this temporary terminus becomes the Southampton end. Being a cramped location the engine sheds and other space chomping paraphernalia are elsewhere leaving you to provide a small platform and a couple of sidings in a backstreet location of a city. The best example of a "where the money ran out" terminus has to be Wingham Canterbury Road on the East Kent Railway. The EKR was intended to serve the Kent coalfield, and indeed one short part of it did do so successfully up until the last collieries in Kent closed in the 1980s. The Kent coalfield turned out to be much smaller than the speculators imagined and the bulk of the line headed out to serve collieries that turned out to have little coal in them. One of those was at Wingham, and having got that far Stephens decided to strike out for Canterbury, and the traffic he hoped to get from there. The money ran out in a field the far side of Wingham. Canterbury Road is a challenge for a model as there is no run round and the short trains - one coach and a couple of wagons - were gravity shunted. However for a backstory perhaps you could imagine some late Victorian speculation that there was coal under the New Forest and speculators started to sink test shafts. Other speculators used the Light Railways Act to plan lines connecting these collieries, aiming to monopolise the shipping out of the black stuff. When the whole speculation collapse the light railway was left with an unfinished line and little traffic. Your terminus then could be a real middle of nowhere location.

No rugby isn't football. Football managed to resolve the tensions between those who thought you should play the game for the love of it and those who saw you could make a living from it, without spinning off a closely related form of the game that was sufficiently different to make reunification well nigh impossible. There are some historic and cultural dimensions right there. Football accepted professionalism in the 1890s, largely because the FA was in the hands of more liberal patriarchal types who accepted that working class men didn't have the same opportunities to take time off to train and play and needed financial compensation to do so. Their solution was to allow clubs to pay players but set a maximum wage which remained in place till the 1960s. Rugby Union's administrators however dug their heels in on the question of compensation payments for lost shifts at the mills. Partly this was because they had seen how professional clubs quickly came to dominate football - no amateurs won the FA Cup after professionalism was allowed - but also a simple class prejudice, the English disease. The result was Northern clubs made up of working class players breaking away and over time making rule changes that created the separate game of rugby league. If you look at rugby clubs in Leeds you can see that class divide. The industrial south of the city had clubs like Hunslet as well as all the small town clubs of the heavy woollen district (which was also the name of the bus company serving it), your Batleys, Dewsburys and Castlefords which were rugby league clubs and the leafy suburbs of the north had union clubs like Moortown and Roundhay. (Roundhay was not, and is not, the grim north Liz Truss claimed it was). Leeds two biggest clubs, Leeds RL and Headingley (now Leeds Tykes), sat where industrial Kirkstall merged into Headingley, Leeds' first middle class suburb. The All Blacks are consistently good because rugby is embedded into New Zealand identity , and the Boks were similarly embedded into Afrikaner identity. The modern Boks owe a lot to Nelson Mandela making rugby acceptable to South Africa's black majority, because they weren't going to manage that themselves. (An interesting letter in the Guardian this week posits that the "white c*nt" accusation from the semi finals is actually the England player mis-hearing the South Africans giving each other instructions in Afrikaans, a language on other RWC team would understand). Until a few years ago you would have said that rugby was similarly embedded into Welsh culture but Wales is changing and rugby is losing ground to football. The historical and cultural backgrounds of France, where the union authorities collaborated with the Nazi occupiers to try and stamp out rugby league, Ireland and Scotland are also interesting sociological topics. As is that of Australia. However it all comes back to the same problem, rugby has a very narrow base. You have three countries, New Zealand, South Africa and Wales, who are consistently good because rugby is the national sport (if only just in the case of Wales), and two - England and France - who are consistently good because they are so much bigger in terms of population than the rest. Australia competes because Australians are obsessed with winning at tiddlywinks never mind anything bigger than that. But you can't sustain a modern sport like that, not as an international sport anyway. And rugby union's achilles heel is that it is utterly reliant on the money and coverage that international games give it. Now more than ever. So it needs a World Cup and it needs its other international tournaments. And they can't just be the same seven or eight sides playing each other.

The big problem with international football tournaments (and I include rugby in this category here) is that while the top sides are consistently the same, the second tier are very variable. In round ball football for example you have the Netherlands. With four World Cup finals and a European Championship under their belts they can clearly mix it with the best, but they can also be very mediocre. The difference lies with players and the coach. In the good years the Dutch could put four or five players of the very highest calibre out on the pitch filled out with a dozen players who would still walk into a team in one of the major leagues. In fallow years barely one top class player and out there with him half a dozen who can't get out of the middling quality Dutch league. And on the bench some years they'd have a world beater, Rinus Michels or Louis van Gaal, other years someone who couldn't even get a job in the Dutch league. So it is in rugby. This time everyone is enthusing about Portugal and Fiji. As far as the Portuguese are concerned everything seemed to click with a coach who got a team to play to, indeed above, their individual strengths. There is no guarantee that they can repeat that in four years time or that they can sustain that level and grow further. After all we've had similar enthusiasm in the past for Georgia, for Romania and indeed for Italy before they joined the six nations. Fiji of course have a long history of oscillating between being a bright sparkler and a disappointing dud. And where were the Americans this time? These proposals smack of a cartel - the Six Nations and Rugby Championship - thinking about their own privileges first before considering the wider good of the game. Rugby doesn't need another tournament, it needs wider access to its existing ones. However because the second tier nations are so variable there has to be annual or biennial qualification so that when a golden generation appear they can get to the top table while they are at their peak. Suggestion? Well take the Six Nations. Keep it as it is as a six week long bash in February-March. However only the top four automatically qualify for the next 6N. The bottom two don't get the All Blacks or Boks in the Autumn internationals but have to play in one of two four team qualifying groups for the privilege of being there next time around. The other six teams will have earned their places in a previous round of qualifiers the previous spring.

I read this morning that Wasps are sizing up a move into Kent, not a county noted for any great rugby prowess or indeed much love for the game. So for a club that started out in London's western suburbs, played at QPR's and Wycombe Wanderers football grounds, moved to Coventry, now starting out again in Worcester another 200 mile move would appear to make absolute sense. And given that they would have to shift from the pyramid under National League 2 West to National League 2 South's pyramid that would be fun as well. Whatever they are on at Wasps I do think they ought to bottle it and sell it to cheer up a distinctly miserable world.

Who knows, but that issue would get resolved reasonably sensibly. The one that would cause real fur to fly would be if Scotland or Wales fell through the trapdoor, not impossible scenarios.

Sorry, it's just on my phone

Unlikely but it might make the present Princess of Wales a bit more interesting

Australian rugby union would certainly suffer, but they would still play rugby league professionally, that is well established. As for New Zealand, rugby union and the All Blacks are part of the culture. They would find a way to stay competitive.

Possibly, but my point about the innards of the model still stands.

The fact Bamburgh has small splashers means that the footplate is the same height irrespective of whether 3' or 3'6" wheels are fitted. The problem for us modellers is that it won't be a case of just fitting larger wheels, the undergubbins will need some modifying to get the body to sit at the right height. The internals might cause problems, and I recall an earlier comment from the Rapido guy that they did an L rather than an I or K because there was enough trouble getting all the works inside already. There may therefore not be that extra millimeter available.

Apologies if I have missed this mentioned before, but what class was Bamburgh of the North Sunderland Railway? My books say it was a Manning Wardle loco but not which class and the photos show a larger loco than an I or K

It shouldn't be forgotten that Italy was getting good results against 5N sides in friendlies, expanding to an even number of teams was a sensible step and bringing in a non-European team was not sensible then. Argentina was no better than Italy, South Africa still had the stench of apartheid over them and Australasia simply too far away. What happened was that professionalism moved faster in the existing five nations than in Italy and that caused the gap to widen. One way out of the dilemma is to have a proper second tier international competition in Europe. The old guard won't wear relegation though because they are all at risk. Over the years Italy have been in the 6N they have finished above Scotland a few times and think Wales too when Wales are having a bad year.

Does France have the same problems between club and country? The policy of centrally contracting players creates enough problems in professional cricket. The county game - long game version especially - has been made absolutely subservient to international cricket. Until the IPL came along that is. County cricket is messed around with something awful. In rugby the Premiership's own competition gets undermined as clubs are expected to fulfil league fixtures while losing their best players to the Autumn internationals and the Six Nations. In cricket though there are only eighteen counties that would produce players fit to be considered for a central contract. Ireland, and Wales and Scotland effectively, have created a level between internationals and ordinary clubs. Works very well for Ireland. Clubs identify and nurture young talent, the regions polish them up - Leinster and Munster in particular are top level outfits - and Ireland as a whole benefits. Your suggestion of sidelining England's biggest clubs, and penalising the international careers of those players who seek to improve themselves in France will leave a huge gap between English international and club rugby. Will that improve things?

"Is it EM?" That question, asked two or three times, was the least expected one. Our layout isn't but the question is a ringing endorsement of PECO's Code 75 bullhead track and how that is a major advance on what was offered before for 00 gauge modellers. The gauge may be wrong, but nearly everything else about this track is right. The result is that the trackwork of a steam era branchline can be reproduced effectively. Good track means that it is worth getting the ballasting right as well as things like platform edges, bufferstops and that tricky area of the cess between ballast and vegetation. We are still getting to grips with some of that, but Holbrook station has shaped up very nicely. A few passengers were temporarily placed on the platform for the Dorking show, but a more accurate representation based on pictures of Northiam and Bodiam taken in the 1930s will be there next time. The station building was completed in time for the show, and included the guttering, with downpipe that provided the sole flush for the gents urinal. Interior details included a 3D printed stove to keep the passengers warm while they waited for the infrequent trains. On the yard side the groundwork was roughed out and given its first surfacing. Like the station platform, the yard needs a less generic scenic treatment. Coal is not surprisingly the primary form of inward goods, so a coal merchant's steam lorry and an open wagon in the process of unloading have been made. Bedding them in and adding the details such as scales, sacks and labour is work for the next few months. Overall the view into the yard seems right for one of the smaller Stephens stations The Stephens railbus attracted a lot of interest as it trundled back and forth. It is now DCC chipped - a single function decoder lying in the trailer car. The motor is a very small can - only 8mm diameter - and there is an issue in that it surges when first starting. Once on the move it is very controllable but it does behave as if the driver had a heavy foot when starting. Possibly a chip designed for N gauge and thus more sensitive to low levels of back EMF might improve things as might adopting 2mm scale practice of light wire pickups pressing on the axles rather than relying on electrical connectivity through the bearings. Interior details, light fittings (no actual lights) and the roof racks are needed to complete the vehicles. Visitor interest was also shown to another bit of rolling stock. A 3D printed body for the loco "Gladstone" from the film Oh Mr Porter has been purchased from the Will Hay Appreciation Society along with a second hand Hornby Electrotren 0-6-0T from a well known Liverpool model railway supplier. Light Railway aficionados will know that Gladstone was in fact the K&ESR's Northiam with a half cab and a ludricrously tall chimney with a serrated crown on top. The Northiam cab has been restored with some Plastikard work and the chimney shortened to normal size. Additionally the buffer spacing was widened to 00 gauge spacing - the maker of Gladstone had clearly used the Electrotren H0 dimensions - and a lot of grinding and carving done inside the body to get it to sit at the right height. It was hoped that converting the Electrotren chassis to a 2-4-0T would be straightforward but sadly that is not the case. For now it will run as an 0-6-0T. At the show the body was unpainted, but perhaps that is what drew people's attention to it Not very good picture I'm afraid, it's a snapshot from a video. The two wagons are of interest as they are the first efforts of two of the club's junior members. Trees have started appearing. The construction method has been described in an earlier blog entry, but many visitors at the show asked about that. At the moment the trees are in their leafless winter state, that too is something to be worked on over the next few months. One thing we learned is that our baseboard alignment needs refinement. Although the boards align accurately we found that variations in height between opposite ends of two boards opened up gaps at track joins. That caused derailments and while we got those sorted at the show a more robust approach was needed. That will be this month's work.

Perhaps controversially the merger of the Premiership and United Rugby Championship should be considered, only those clubs with a sustainable base invited to join. Leicester, obviously, then probably Bath and Gloucester, Harlequins, Saracens if they can fumigate their affairs, Northampton and possibly Sale and Newcastle.

The problem with Italy is that they sit in that huge gap between the 6N and the rest of Europe. They were outclassed by France and the AB - no surprise there - but dealt with Namibia and Uruguay comfortably.

We had a good show in Dorking this weekend. A constant stream of people asking questions and appreciating what we have done so far. I will be updating the blog over then next week or so.