whart57

Where does that put Wasps? National 2 or the regional leagues, and which region of the several Wasps has bounced around in these last years?

Titfield Thunderbolt anyone? I should point out that my personal fantasy is not presented as a serious proposal. Someone , I think it was the late Bernard Holland, once said that in railway modelling you can sell two of anything, the challenge is selling more than two. The loco I did put on the form as a suggestion for Rapido was an On16.5 version of the Welshpool Beyer Peacocks. That would be interesting

The ply is 4mm ply cut into 100mm wide strips on the timber merchant's big saw table. The blocks are 50mm x 14mm softwood. Our carpenter did decide on solid wood though for the ends that would carry the bolts and locating pegs for joining to the next one.

I think "did" is the correct tense. The Bachmann website shows only an SR unlined black version. I'd agree that an O1 is a more adventurous option, but personally I'd love to see a Cudworth 118 class 2-4-0. The mainstay of SER passenger services in the second half of the nineteenth century it would push pre-Group modelling back from the Edwardian period it is stuck in. And, unlike most RTR pre-Group is actually a contemporary of GWR Broad Gauge.

The last engines on the EKR were straightforward O1s, either number 100 (given that number because no-one had told the Ashford paint shop what number to put on and they guessed the EKR didn't have more than 99 locos) or the trio kept after Nationalisation at Dover for the Tilmanstone run. O1s also ran on the K&ESR after Nationalisation too as well as being used over the entire SECR and former SECR network for light goods work. That said, Rapido are more likely to do a C

The worrying thing is that underneath it is probably a pipe direct into the sea which is allowed to let sewage overflow into it. Hampton pier is just over the hill from there and that had signs on it warning people not to eat the shellfish a couple of years ago

I checked with the Little Bus Company and unfortunately they have sold out of Puffin kits and as yet no plans to reintroduce it. A shame really but that is the way things go.

I made a joke.

After the Club's Open Day appearance, our target for April was to wire up the two baseboards we had. Additionally we had to do some prep work on scenic features. The wiring was done on the two "Long Wednesdays" in the month. The layout is to be wired for DCC operation so the first task was to lay in the track bus. This was created using thick power cabling salvaged from an office rewiring many years ago. The cable was originally intended to carry 60+ amps so is a little bit overkill on the power front but your blog writer had it lying around. The outer plastic shield was stripped off and the two inner cables were run through brass eyelets screwed into the underside of the track sub-bases. As the cables are each a single copper wire, they can be bent to shape and they stay like that. Dropper wires were then soldered to the rails. One of our junior members gained his first experience of soldering on this task and he did pretty well. On the second Wednesday the dropper wires were soldered to the track bus. A small section of insulation was removed, the copper cleaned up with a bit of emery and the dropper wire wrapped around and secured through soldering. All nice and robust and no loss of voltage detected in testing. Inter-baseboard connections use male/female terminal connectors, cut to provide four way connections Two connections are for the DCC trackbus and the other two reserved for a 12v DC power bus for things like point motors and servos. Other club layouts use 25 pin D-type connectors, sometimes referred to as RS-232 though that standard is not really an accurate description. Your blog writer has lived with those in the IT industry for decades and hates them with a passion, hence they are banned from this layout. A test run was done at the end of the last April meeting using an Electrotren 0-6-0T and success meant the April target was achieved. Horsham Stone roofing It's been mentioned before that our chosen area has a distinctive architectural trait, namely Horsham slates on roofs. These are locally quarried slates, a form of sandstone created aeons ago when a layer of calcium rich rock got pressed between layers of sandstone. It's unusual, not many quarries contain it and it is quite tricky to work. The key factor for modellers like ourselves is that Horsham slates are significantly thicker than tiles or Welsh slates and thus need a different approach to being modelled. The slates are also irregular in size which adds to the challenge. We do have a club member who has laid such roofs for real and he has given us good advice. One of the first buildings to be tackled is this row of cottages. Until around 1905 these cottages housed the Dog and Bacon pub, which still exists in the newer building next door. Our intention is to restore the pub to its original home. As will be noted, the left hand cottage is probably from a later date, being both taller and having a clay tile roof. The right hand cottages however have a Horsham stone roof. Various experiments were done, and it was settled that the slates would be modelled using textured paper and thin card. A bit of jiggery-pokery was done in GIMP to create a map of the roof from this picture and then a cutting plan created for the Silhouette cutter. This meant that the two layers of paper and card would line up perfectly. Once stuck together the roof could be built up in the normal way. It's a bit fiddly, but the result looks good. Our ex-roofer gave it the thumbs up, which is as much as we can hope for. Next month is grit our teeth and do track ballasting as well as make a start on landscaping.

That is until the English come along and try to forcibly ban Welsh ...... The experience of other languages is that they wither until a hated oppressor tries to impose their language. We see that happening in Ukraine where Russian speakers are refusing to use the language and instead trying to use Ukrainian, a language a minority had as first language before the invasion, instead. Over in Ireland too, Gaelic was resistant to well meaning efforts to keep it alive until Irish Republicans in the North learnt it and adopted it during the Troubles. Then it became more cool.

Well that would cause a dead zone, though it also depends whether there is a possible route to you via reflections. Round here we have a better signal in winter than in summer. Weather conditions don't seem to be the cause, but what might be are leaves on the many trees between us and the Midhurst transmitter.

It wasn't remarked upon much at the time, but Oldham's first home fixture in the National League back in August was against Dorking Wanderers. So a club that had spent the last thirty years descending from the Premier League met a club that started at the bottom of the Crawley and District League in 1999. Must be rare to have such vastly different club histories.

That might be because the signal was too strong, though if that were the case then I would have thought local TV engineers would simply have put an attenuator in line with the aerial. Another possibility is that as the signal strength from an aerial maps out as ellipses or lobes - depending on aerial type - you might have been in a dead zone.

Now that the final issues are being settled, should we have a call out for those clubs who are entering uncharted territory next season? I'd like to nominate Broadbridge Heath FC who have won the Southern Combination (formerly Sussex County League) and all being well will be in the Isthmian League next season (Not sure whether it will be South East or South Central division, could be either). This is a club that was in Intermediate football not that long ago. Any others worth a mention?

The H shaped aerial was BBC only (405 line VHF). For ITV you needed a YAGI, albeit a much bigger one than the later BBC2 one. All to do with the different frequency bands. Of course, if you lived in Telford new town, in the shadow of the Wrekin transmitter, a bit of wire poked into the aerial socket of the TV worked brilliantly ......

I'm pretty certain that if the promotion and relegation between Premiership and Championship were as automatic and treated as the normal rewards for success and failure as they are in round ball football that Jersey would be excited about having the top sides come down to play them. As would Ealing and Cornish Pirates. But I suspect you are right, they would be breaking into a clique that doesn't really want them there, and that can be toxic.

I was mildly surprised that Lebanon had an international rugby league side competing in the RL World Cup. Until I recalled that there was a sizeable Lebanese expat community living around Sydney and that these players were lesser lights in the NRL who happened to have a Lebanese parent or grandparent.

Following on from Championship clubs thinking the Premiership and RFU are hanging them out to dry, National League clubs are also asking for clarification on what the plans for the semi-professional game are. One thing, apart from promotion and relegation, that concerns them is the proposal to have a different tackle law in the semi-pro and community leagues from that in the Premiership and Championship. League One clubs, many of whom provide game time for young players from Premiership clubs, say this would mean players having to adjust to different laws depending on the competition they are playing in.

It's the other end of the National League where some strange things are happening. Scunthorpe and Yeovil were in the Championship no more than a dozen years ago, now they are dropping into the regional leagues. Torquay is also likely to drop down as Maidenhead, three points above them, have a superior goal difference going into the last games. Given that you do have to worry for Rochdale, could they drop straight through as well? Hartlepool and Crawley have recently experienced the National League so whichever of the two join Rochdale on the down escalator, the fans and management know what's coming, they are likely to adapt. Will Rochdale?

Indeed they did Not bad when you consider this was the South Eastern's Boat Train loco of the era

About fifteen years ago I was working on a project in Kansas. While I was there I thought I'd visit the two model shops listed in the online Yellow Pages. Not just out of curiosity, I was using Kadee couplings and they were tricky to get hold of in the UK at the time. Two very different experiences. One, which has an address of a hundred and something street, was a friendly place, carried a healthy amount of stock and had an 8'x4' layout in the middle of the shop which wasn't particularly brilliant but was available to try things out on or show off Walthers kits on. The other, closer in, looked to be on the way out. Half empty shelves, surly owner, nothing to entice you to buy anything. The most interesting thing about it was that a major railway line ran down the street outside. I had to wait for a long train of box cars to pass before I could cross the street to where I'd parked the car.

The Michael Crichton story The First Great Train Robbery is back on iPlayer for a bit. Roscommon is playing the part of Kent, and various Dublin stations play London Bridge, but the producers need a pat on the back for the effort put into recreating an early Victorian Boat Train out of Irish railway material. The plot is based on a real event, right down to the mark being the same - gold being shipped from London to Paris by train - but, oh my, what a bit of 1970s period hokum the film turns out to be, despite Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland playing the lead roles. Still fun though.

And fail just as camera and book shops did around the turn of the century. It's all very well buying stock in to show and demonstrate but your friendly retailer does the work and the customer then goes home, logs onto the computer and buys from Amazon or one of the big box shifters Elsewhere on this site people are bitterly criticising Hornby's sales strategy for TT-120. We may not like it - I don't - but Simon Kohler has devised a go to market plan that reflects current shopping habits. There are two sorts of model shops that will survive - the very big and the very small. I don't know Rails or Hattons, never been there, but I do know Gaugemaster. Shopping there is a pleasure. It has a car park and a railway station (OK not solely for Gaugemaster customers obviously, but Ford station is right by the door), and inside it is light, airy and well spaced out. As for the very small, my advice for local councils wanting to revive town centres, is to take an old department store they can't get a tenant for, and create an indoor market of microshops. No vaping outlets, the only mobile phone stores are ones owned and run by a lone techie, and encourage model shops, specialised haberdasheries, crystal peddling types and other New Age woo-woo stuff, to take 10 or 20 sq metre units which open on a full or part-time basis. Get Costa or Starbucks - or an independent - to open a coffee shop, and on the hard to let top floor, offer space to model railway clubs, art clubs, pottery schools and others of that ilk at a peppercorn rent. The fun needs to come back into shopping if town centres are to survive.

I don't know whether it is Covid or whether the top divisions are pricing themselves out of the "dad and lads" market but attendances in non-league are increasing quite healthily. Bay's gates have been double what they were getting pre-Covid, though being in a higher league has something to do with that. More noticeable is that the Sussex derbies involving Horsham, Lewes and Bognor have all had crowds of well over the thousand mark, and this is in tier seven. Crawley in League Two have had some gates that were no bigger than that.

The Guardian has some thought provoking articles on the future of the Championship, one of them reporting some pretty bitter accusations from Coventry RFC's chief executive that the Premiership and RFU are deliberately running the Championship into the ground so that it would be easier to get rid of. It is suggested that the RFU sees a future where there are only ten professional clubs in a ring-fenced competition and the rest of the clubs play in regionalised leagues with no opportunity to win promotion.