whart57

The new season starts on Saturday when 416 clubs play in the FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round. The draw for this round is on the FA website: https://www.thefa.com/-/media/thefacom-new/files/competitions/2023-24/efac/the-emirates-fa-cup-extra-preliminary-round.ashx?la=en

I see the National League have given Southend the go ahead for next season. Just the taxman to square off now.

You have "metro-centric" planning because that's where most people actually live. I could also be cynical and say that the problem with most rural gripes is that the moaner wants to live in a quiet, beautiful, rural location with few neighbours and none of the dirt and noise of towns and cities but still wants superfast broadband and a frequent train service.

A bit of history from fifteen years ago, when Thailand's railways were still suffering from the neglect and hostility of the Shinawatra governments. Phaya Thai station on the SRT's Eastern Line photographed from the platforms of the BTS Phaya Thai station in 2008. The building site to the left was holding material for the new Phaya Thai station on the Suvarnabhumi Airport Link. One question I have, which maybe someone has the answer to, is whether the line here is double track or whether it is (was) operated as parallel single tracks. My sketch of the point work at Makkasan suggests the latter.

The analogy I had in mind was that Eastenders and Corrie are not exactly like life in East London or Manchester.

Accurately observed and replicated operation means utter boredom for most viewers. The skill lies in recreating the essence of accurate operation while still engaging the viewer. In any case I still wait for someone to replicate loose shunting in a believable way on a model, so even on the best layouts bits of the operational day are left off.

Isthmian League fixtures for 2023-24 have been released. Pre-season friendlies have of course already started and two wins out of two isn't bad. Who knows, maybe a return to the heights of the Premier Division may be possible.

Locally produced clay tiles come from Thakeham, and they had a narrow gauge railway inside the works until 1980. When closed the management donated the lot to the nearby Amberley museum. A couple of photos of the system are in the Middleton Press book on Industrial railways in the South East.

I had forgotten to take a picture of the bridge under construction for last month's update. I have now redressed this and updated the blog

I'd forgotten to take a picture of the bridge under construction in time for the monthly update. I have now taken one at the first "Long Wednesday" of this month.

In the best traditions of popular English novels, and a very long-running radio serial, Chesworth is a fictional Sussex town which bears more than a passing resemblance to Horsham. A fictional town needs a fictional railway, and Chesworth is the terminus of the North Sussex Light Railway, one of the less ramshackle Colonel Stephens affairs. From Chesworth the line meanders through fields and woods until it joins the LBSCR mainline at Gatwick. Not the airport, that is still a score or two years into the future (it opened in the 1930s) but the racecourse. An imagining of this imaginary light railway is being built by Horsham model railway club, and monthly progress reports are posted on the blog: I am opening this thread as a link for ease of navigation between the two sections of rmweb, but feel free to comment here.

June was a hot month, but we still got quite a bit done on the two "long Wednesdays". The first Wednesday, a short one, was a distraction night. No work was done on Chesworth - or the other layouts - while club members headed out in the fine evening air to play with live steam. Unfortunately the footpath was the only surface smooth enough to get a decent run on. To be fair to the little Mamods though, the gravel on the car park was scale boulders. Maybe play with model tanks next time ........... More serious work for us started on the second week. Much is still work in progress so this month your author will concentrate on what we plan to achieve. The three boards we currently have take a single track light railway past a water mill and farm before taking a curve into a wayside station. The wayside station is ultra-simple - a single platform, no loop and a couple of sidings. The prototype we are basing this on is the K&ESR's Frittenden Road, although the station building will be one of the corrugated ones on the K&ESR's southern section. However the non-railway buildings will all be models of real locations around Horsham and for the watermill we have chosen Warnham Mill, about a mile out from Horsham town centre on the road to Dorking. Horsham museum have an archive of pictures and the curator found us this one of Warnham Mill in 1905. The mill is still there, apparently with the mechanics still in situ, however its most recent use was, we think, a dog grooming parlour. However as some remedial work had to be done to the dam holding back the water fairly recently, some plans were downloadable from the council's planning portal. From that work could be started on producing plans to 4mm scale. Our railway line has the same relationship to the Mill as Warnham Road does in real life, so the line has to bridge Red River and Boultings Brook. Boultings Brook goes through a culvert but Red River is a more substantial waterway. Apparently it was dug out by French POWs during the Napoleonic wars. Some idea of the scale of the works can be seen from this picture taken fifteen years ago from the Warnham Road. The road bridge needs to be replaced by a rail bridge, and again we have gone to the Colonel Stephens railways for inspiration. This bridge near Eastry on the East Kent Railway is our inspiration All that is very much work in progress so photos of their rendition in model form is for another time. Tree Workshop We estimate we are going to need twenty to thirty trees on this part of the layout. Sussex is after all a county with a lot of trees, a legacy of the former iron industry. Before Abraham Darby, up in Shropshire, pioneered smelting iron using coke, wrought iron was made smelting iron ore with charcoal. The process required a lot of hammering to force out the impurities, as well as a lot of charcoal. Hence the trees, which were once regularly coppiced to produce charcoal. It is also believed that Warnham millpond once drove water powered hammers for a forge before the mill was built. Whatever the case, this month we held a tree making workshop. We are going for model trees created with a wire armature. Florists iron wire is one possibility, but we are also experimenting using stranded copper wire salvaged from old mains leads. Four or five strands of wire are twisted together using an old fashioned hand-drill, a number of those twisted groups are then twisted together and the large bundles tied together with thin brass wire. Branches are bent to shape, the fine ends teased out and then trimmed to length. A mix of Polyfilla and PVA glue is splodged over and then the whole lot given a coat of primer. That's where we are right now, colouring the trunk and branches and adding foliage is next month's project. Most club members had a go on a short Wednesday night. An example of the bare tree shape possible: We are attempting to make our trees recognisable species. To begin with we are concentrating on ash and birch, and we don't have room for a fully mature oak. We will need to attempt some oaks but they will need to be half relief trees against the backscene.

Gordon Gravett makes a number of suggestions in his book on landscape modelling. Talc, wood ash, chinchilla dust and sand all give different levels of texture.

This is quite parasitical isn't it? This tournament would be contested by the best professionals, yet the clubs that provide regular employment of those professionals are going to the wall - except in France and possibly Ireland - and the structures for finding and nurturing the talent of the next generation are in a bad way too, except in France and New Zealand.

A lot of government action and inaction in this country was blamed on "EU rules". It was a useful cover. With the privatisations of rail and utilities however the underlying purpose was to create steady revenue streams for investors. With manufactured products people can and do stop buying them which not only knocks share price but is unpredictable, however people don't stop using water, gas or electricity and people don't stop having to travel for work. Predictable revenue means stable shares and that means shares that can be traded. Tory housing policy of the time also aimed at creating large numbers of mortgage payers, repayments on mortgages being another reliable revenue stream.

Exactly, that was my point. But because we now get bogged down in justifying returns on investment to people who are implacably opposed because they simply hate trains, we end up doing half-arsed projects.

London to Manchester and London to Leeds are both around 200 miles or 320 km. Newcastle is a shade under 300 miles and Glasgow just over 400 miles. Most French TGV lines are around 300 miles from Paris to their further destination, much the same as London to the North East, the long one being to the Riviera, Paris Marseilles being a bit over 400 miles. Of course France has neighbours so let's add Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Frankfurt, both of which again are 300 miles or so. There are differences though. Britain only needs one stem high speed line, London to Edinburgh via Leeds and Newcastle with a branch off that to Manchester and Liverpool - the last bit on normal tracks. France has six going in different directions. Yet that one line connects five of the UK's seven biggest cities directly - assuming it passes Birmingham - with the other two potentially served by running on from the end of the high speed line. The overall length is about the same as the longest French TGV line, so is that "we are too small for high speed railways" doesn't really work does it?

Concentrating on the last dozen miles into London in that way has effectively killed the project though. It's just waiting for a politician to come in who has no stake in it to apply the final blow. By not making it a true high speed line to the North from the outset it has struggled politically, to the extent that serious consideration has now been given to truncating it before it reaches its London terminus. But it's a classic example of how things go wrong these days. Focusing on which bits have the best return on investment led to the whole purpose of the exercise being forgotten. High speed rail is meant to bring provincial cities closer in time to the capital and to each other. The competition is the car and domestic airlines. The distance from London to Birmingham is too short to let faster trains be more effective competition to cars, existing trains only lose out through poor reliability and too high fares, but Manchester to London and Leeds to London can benefit. At least if they get HS2, which now seems not to be the case because we are over-focused on the London end.

HS2 was never proposed as a track widening to Euston project.

The London bit is also the one with the most problems regarding land, costs and political pushback. However you give a great example here of the narrow minded accountancy thinking that has screwed up so much in the last forty odd years. HS2 is not and can not be a glorified fast suburban line to Birmingham. Nor will it be a trans-Pennine route, that needs a different project. HS2 needs to connect the northern cities to London. If it has to use existing tracks for the last ten miles to London initially, so be it, but if trains from the North can still cut 45 minutes or an hour off the journey time then it's worthwhile.

Very few Victorian investors made much money from those shares, many lost everything. It was a Wild West business. Even successful lines like the London and Birmingham provided returns of 2% or less most years, certainly after the mergers and expansions that created the LNWR. Then there was Hudson and the Ponzi scheme of the Midland Railway. The second great expansion of the 1860s was driven by the big contractors who needed new projects, and few of the lines built then ever showed a profit - LCDR anyone?

A point Ben Elton made a number of times during the programme, and stressed in his conclusion - but not raised here - is that the value of an efficient railway system is not visible in railway company accounts. It is the value of the connections that railways enable and they are not just monetary values. Since Beeching railway investment has been stymied by accountancy thinking about returns and costs with the result that lines were closed that needn't have been, new projects were starved of the funding needed to make them successful and every decision argued over in very narrow terms. The exception is the Elizabeth Line, but that was in London so had the ear of politicians and senior civil servants tuned to different frequencies. Accountancy thinking has screwed up HS2 to the point you think the politicians are manoeuvring things towards cancellation. (As an aside, wouldn't HS2 have been a different project if construction had started from the Manchester and Leeds ends towards London)

There was of course a bit of a change in Singapore in 1942

Before I say any more can I stress that the rule of "your model railway - your rules" applies even more strongly when it comes to personal computing choices, so while I may come across as a Linux evangelist at times, I'm not, everyone else's choice is theirs to make. Except Bill Gates when he keeps coming round asking for more money. That said, if you can emerge from Windows Device Manager and the Registry with sanity still intact, then 95% of what you need for Linux is there, and the other 5% you probably don't need. You seem to have fixed things but if you get into a similar bind again maybe try a thread on Wheeltappers on getting started with Linux. Or if you have an old PC try an install of something like Lubuntu or Linux-Lite as an experiment.

Actually, no. What you need is a basic set of CLI instructions, not so much under your fingers but so that you recognise them. Most things you can use your favourite search engine to describe your problem, add the terms "Ubuntu" or "Linux" and there will usually be someone providing a potential solution. At first glance that may appear to be written in Hungarian but if you recognise the commonest commands then you can see what the solution proposed might be. Key ones these days are (in Ubuntu systems) sudo - this gives you root (aka administrator) privileges for the command you type immediately behind it and you will be prompted for a password. apt - this is the command line version of the software install programme. You will almost certainly want to "sudo" this to make sure you have write permissions in all the locations needed. For example sudo apt install mypaint is a command line instruction to install a programme called "mypaint" (an interesting art application incidentally) ps -ef - this lists running apps. This will return a huge list so you want to "pipe" it to another command | - the "pipe" command. This is found next to the "Z" key on UK keyboards but will be somewhere else on others. Put between two commands it outputs the result of the first to be the input to the second, so: ps -ef | more returns that list of running apps one page at a time and you advance by pressing the space bar. grep - is a simple word search, very useful connected to ps -ef via a pipe: ps -ef | grep -i firefox will list all processes associated with Mozilla Firefox. It's useful to discover a zombie left by some badly behaved javascript in a web page. Unix systems like Linux - but unlike Windows - are case sensitive. the "-i" switch makes grep case insensitive. top - lists the top resource hungry applications A little bit of play is needed to learn how to use cd, cp and mv to navigate directories and copy and move files A decade or so ago it would have been necessary to know how to unpack an archive, unzip a compressed directory or link files, but I haven't done that in years, the graphical application managers do the job well enough. It's been a while too since I needed to use vi to edit a set up file, and as for complicated scripting using sed and awk, I never needed that in my personal computing, only in my work stuff. I couldn't do it now anyway. Any command in a solution can be checked using the internet so you can decide how uncomfortable you feel with something before proceeding.