whart57

It's worth considering why wheel rims might be white in works' outshopping photos. Photographic technology a hundred years ago was not what it is today. Panchromatic emulsion for photographic plates was not available until 1906 and even then the need for total darkness for developing plus the much greater cost meant many photographers didn't immediately adopt it. Orthochromatic film could be developed under a safe light but orthochromatic film would be poor on distinguishing darker areas. Painting wheel rims white for a photograph would make for a better result, so that would be my guess why they were.

Two years after I snapped those pylons under construction the airport rail link was open.

This is in fact a City Line train which I got as the airport express was still only running an hourly service at that point. The only differences were that the City Line trains stopped at every intermediate station, had less space for luggage and said they were going to Phaya Thai instead of Makkasan even though they used the exact same station. I presume that today these trains run on further.

More pics of elevated lines under construction. These are from fifteen years ago and show the new airport rail link under construction near Makkasan station in Bangkok. (This is the SRT station, the Makkasan terminal of the airport link is further on at Phaya Thai)

Work on the pylons was complete in the opposite direction

I'm not sure how much of this will change as a result of building Bang Sue Grande.

3mm scale B7 points and crossing kits will hopefully be on sale at the Society AGM in May.

All the parties involved have created this problem by trying to avoid the logic of a sports club going bust. It was accepted that either or both clubs would have to drop into the Championship but from a financial point of view that was the least attractive option. Huge drop in revenue but the expenses of running a club at Championship level, especially if promotion back to the Premiership is expected within two years at the most, would exceed that likely revenue. Better would have been to reserve a couple of slots in National 2. For both these ex-Premiership clubs, recruiting a team of Championship and National 1 level players would be affordable, their gates would go a long way to covering the costs and the fans would get some rugby, albeit at a lower level for 3-4 years. Meanwhile the infrastructure could be built back. The problem for Wasps though would be a ground to play on, renting sizeable football stadiums only makes sense with five figure crowds paying Premiership ticket prices.

When Glasgow Rangers got busted down for financial irregularities they went to the bottom of what was then the Scottish pyramid. It took five years to get back but there was wholesale fumigation of the back office while the team took on Annan Athletic and Berwick Rangers.

30 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

 

Wrong sport - they won by two goals not out.

 

Dave

Four actually, you have overlooked the women. Or the reserve crews.

I know this is a rugby union thread, but Leeds Rhinos' comeback against Catalans Dragons is worth a mention. Five unanswered tries - the first two scored while Leeds had a man disadvantage - turning a 14 point deficit into a ten point win was quite remarkable.

While I'm here asking questions, any suggestion how to mitigate a stiff tie bar. Or what the causes of stiffness might be.

I can't see the description on the reel so I suspect I'm using 7 strand 0.2mm diameter copper, standard stuff for layout wiring. Holes are a sliding fit and the wire bent so that it matches the holes.

20 minutes ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

A by product of the 3d print medium I would imagine, it's more brittle than other manufacturers injection moulded plastic.

I find a tad more care is needed.

 

Mike.

Indeed, but that particular rail is held by two chairs, with a little bit on a third. It was the pressure in the up/down direction from the dropper wire that does for it.

13 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

Well, exactly. The main source of players for the national team are the schools and universities. 

 

The top clubs are trying to make a commercial sport by interposing themselves into the area formerly occupied by the Counties, Regions and England A teams. It isn't working. 

 

Look at the current England squad. Two of the three candidates for captain are in their thirties. There are three possible scrum-halves, all badly lacking development at Test level. There is no established #10/#12 pairing and no obvious preferred option. The scrum is consistently outmatched by teams like South Africa and their 6N record is frankly, pretty poor. 

 

The squad also lacks adaptability. There is an obvious problem (Owen Farrell personifies it) of players looking dominant at club level but unable to step up. I'm certain that this is because the lack of representative rugby stifles development, because players always play in the same line-ups. When a national coach has to experiment with possible combinations, he is doing work which should be done at County/Regional/ Possibles v Probables level. 

 

It's often remarked by commentators hat England players look as though they have never played together before; this is why. 

Sorry mate, but that amateur era has passed. I suspect you have to be well into your seventies to remember a time when county games had any significance. Possibly rivalry between the Rose counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire kept that fixture alive beyond the 1950s but nowhere else paid much attention to county level games. At best they provided warm-up opponents for touring international sides.

Apologies if this has already been raised, but I have hit a problem constructing a 00 A5 and B7. In both cases one of the closure rails has snapped out of its chairs when - carefully - locating the point on the baseboard after soldering on the green wires. The wires go through a hole in the baseboard and it only takes a little resistance from the wire to snap the chair. Superglue does a repair, but it is an annoyance.

The problem with saying the money is in the international game is that the national sides don't find the talent, nurture it, coach it, and provide enough game time for players to stay sharp. International coaches scout the top end of the club game for their players, they don't take nine year old kids and develop them, nor does the international game provide regular games every weekend for the hundreds of players who try and make a living from rugby. Yet the international game cherry-picks the results of the clubs' work. The problem in England is that for a large part the Premiership clubs also cherry-pick the work of the community game.

11 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

As I understand it, there were experiments with rams on ironclads in the 19th century. They proved surprisingly effective in the Battle of Lissa in 1866 between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian fleets and were a design feature for several decades after.

I suspect that was because the way Lissa turned into a series of duels between individual Italian and Austrian ships appealed to naval commanders a lot more than the technical issues of gunnery. Lissa occurred at a time where improvements in ship armour - ironclads - outstripped the power of most gunnery of the time, rifled artillery and large calibre guns were only just being developed. But the result was that more ships were sunk through accidental collision than through a hostile ramming action. And the ram was a drag on speed and manoeuvrability as well.

2 hours ago, Schooner said:

With pleasure, as soon as RTR manufacturers see the light :)

 

Something about the sloping front end puts me in mind of

In a very satisfying manner.

Wasn't that sloping front end because of some RN belief that a ram like Ancient Greek triremes had was still appropriate for the 20th century? The benefits of a Classical education! 

If you like small tank engines, or the smaller tender engines like the Ilfracombe Goods or the Stirling O class, then model a light railway. If you like the intermediate sized engines like the Woolwich Mogul, then a light railway is not the place. Unless you have some implausible argument that a line that started out as a light railway needed an upgrade in the 1920s. The main objection to seeing a Maunsell N - to give it its SECR monicker - in an independent railway's livery is that any railway that could have used one would have been swept up in the Grouping. If the Grouping hadn't happened then it might be believable to think that a railway like the Cambrian or the Furness would have been interested in cheap kits of a pretty damned good loco. For the other three members of the Big Four though, that would have just been another non-standard loco class at a time when they had to make sense of the loco fleets they had inherited.

Six Woolwich Moguls did make it onto the lines of an independent British railway, one that avoided the Grouping, albeit finished off at 2-6-4T tank engines. That railway was the Metropolitan which had a healthy level of goods traffic up to the end of the 1920s.

36 minutes ago, tigerburnie said:

Why would the higher leagues club financially support the lower leagues? Name me a sport in the world that does that?

Football's Premier League does. The arguments are over how much and in what form that payment should be and a new deal over TV money being passed on is being thrashed out between the Premier League and the EFL right now.

36 minutes ago, tigerburnie said:

Do championship clubs support National league clubs, of course they don't they can't afford to. The clubs at all levels do support each other using the dual registration system where players are loaned by the clubs to each other, benefits clubs and players. Players from higher clubs assist coaching clubs in lower leagues, again to assist all parties. The RFU use clubs players raise money, pay for the use of their players under a mutually agreed system and should then support the lower levels of the game. This is not unique, the only difference is in some countries it's the RFU's who hold the contracts and pay the players, something the English RFU point blank refused to get involved with.

At all levels of sport those at the higher levels fight to maintain their status. In non-league football the issues of ground facilities has been used to keep the ambitious down. Shamefully the rules about ownership and tenancy have not been applied equally to incumbents and newcomers, something I believe has happened in rugby's Premiership recently too where incumbents' murky ground share arrangements or temporary shortfalls in capacity have been glossed over but the same issues have been used to deny Championship clubs the opportunity of promotion.

The informal support by the big clubs of small clubs creates issues however, which are currently playing out in women's football. In the two fully professional divisions of the women's Premier League a divide is opening up between the teams that are a part of a major men's club and those that are either independent or, like WSL2 side Lewes, set up as an equal opportunity community club where the men of the Isthmian League side and the women of the WSL2 side are paid on the same payscale. Lewes is a well run outfit, well supported and well rooted in their local community, but they are struggling to match what the sides funded by a mens' Premier League outfit finding a bit of spare cash in the vault can raise. Sneaky extra requirements like a demand for undersoil heating - not usually found at non-league grounds - start to look very much like a cartel flexing their muscles. Ironically Lewes' men's team were themselves denied promotion to a higher league twenty years ago because their ground didn't have the number of turnstiles ground regulations demanded for the higher league and though that could easily be addressed in the close season, that didn't matter.

On 17/03/2023 at 15:17, rockershovel said:

The whole point of a reduced fixture list is that IT REDUCES THE NUMBER OF FIXTURES, thereby solving the problem of playing League fixtures on International weekends. This was understood in amateur days but discarded by professional owners, intent on maximising the return on their outlay.

It becomes an inherent problem when you organise the season around leagues. Back in those "amateur days" the clubs just played the fixtures they'd organised for themselves. Promotion to more challenging opponents was nigh impossible for unfashionable clubs whose fixture secretaries hadn't been at the same school as the ones from the elite clubs. International days did give an opportunity to try out a new fixture, but more often it was the Saturday to put in the Old Boys' fixture the club committee didn't want dropped but was usually an embarrassing walkover.

4 hours ago, halsey said:

 

That's about right - thanks!

 

Right selection but resin I really wanted a wooden kit

 

Are "we" saying that my 1:60 find isn't going to work??

It might. I would check the hull measurements - length, beam, draught - and see whether in 1:76.4 scale they are still within the bounds of possibility. If that is the case then it may be possible to make adjustments to make it fit 00 scale. I'd be looking at reducing the height of the cabin, and the cabin door in particular. Likewise the entrance to the fo'c'sle. And replace the fittings like the lifebelts, winches etc with smaller 00 scale ones.

A boat is a large object. A 1:87 model will work on a 00 scale layout because we also scale down things like platform lengths, siding lengths and turnout dimensions beyond the strict scale. Going the other way I doubt will work so well.

Artitec do a number of 1:87 kits (H0 scale). Check out their website. They are a Dutch company so the focus is on that side of the North Sea but Dutch vessels have to operate in the same waters as British ones so they aren't going to be that different. They also do bits and bobs to scatter around the dock and the small boats the in-shore fishers and crabbers use.

https://www.artitecshop.com/en/ships/h0-187/kit/

And yet the biggest hole in the credibility of the English club game is that Premiership clubs are expected to fulfil fixtures while their best players are on international duty. The clubs haven't had things all their own way.

You only need to look at the list of clubs once considered to be top drawer but who are now lingering in National One or even lower to see that the impact of professionalism has turned out to be not what people thought it would. Cricket too was only just embarking on central contracts for Test players and of course rugby league had been professional for a century or so without needing to employ the best players on central contracts. As they say, hindsight is 20:20 vision.

Circumstances at the time have had a great impact on how professionalism has been handled. Ireland has managed the change very well, but Ireland started out with the great good fortune that the Gaelic sports had already set up a regional structure fans could relate to and as Leinster, Munster. Ulster and Connacht were already playing each other at hurling and Gaelic football, fans reacted quickly and positively to the provinces playing each other at rugby union. When Wales tried to graft a regional structure onto a much stronger club base the result was the disaster we see today. The situation in Scotland was different again. The club scene was rural, mostly in the Borders, and none of the clubs really had the infrastructure or fanbase to be properly professional. As the two big cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh didn't really have rugby clubs that had city wide appeal, Scotland decided to set up two pro clubs where the mass of the people were. It's taken some time but they seem to be getting there. In France of course professionalism already existed under the covers so not much change was required.

The other thing no-one had really twigged back in the 1990s is what difference the arrival of Sky Sports and other dedicated sports TV channels and their money would make. You can see the impact on football by looking at the last first division table before the Premier League was formed:

1 Leeds United (C)

2 Manchester United

3 Sheffield Wednesday

4 Arsenal

5 Manchester City

6 Liverpool

7 Aston Villa

8 Nottingham Forest

9 Sheffield United

10 Crystal Palace

11 Queens Park Rangers

12 Everton

13 Wimbledon

14 Chelsea

15 Tottenham Hotspur

16 Southampton

17 Oldham Athletic

18 Norwich City

19 Coventry City

20 Luton Town

21 Notts County

22 West Ham United

Clearly the way the clubs dealt with all the extra money differed. Two of those clubs are currently down in the National League (fifth tier) and Manchester City would be in the third tier (briefly) five years later. The same rearrangement happened in English rugby, but if football, where professionalism had existed for over a century, underwent radical change as a result of TV's billions and there were very different outcomes at different clubs, then no wonder that rugby union in England also struggled to stay upright in the flow. It would have been great clairvoyance on the part of the RFU if they had foreseen all that.

I don't think it's so much the Society discontinuing etched brass kits in favour of 3D printed bodies as the stocks of brass kits running out. The LNER kits were commissioned during the time of my predecessor but one as Chairman of the Society so that was probably in the last century given how long Peter White served as Chairman. At that time most etched brass kits were shot down modifications of 4mm scale kits and I would be surprised if that wasn't the case here. Worsley Works kits were the exception in that Allen Docherty produced his own art work. The arrangement then with the owner of the art work was for a batch of kits - 10 or 20 - to be produced, but ownership of the stencils stayed with the copyright owner. In many cases the owners have retired or even died since the initial batch was produced so it isn't possible to go back and ask for more. It's been a decade or more since I had close oversight of the Society's affairs but back in the day I know the shop still had more or less the full range of these LNER loco kits albeit only two, three or even just one example of each. Sales had dried up as members likely to want one had already bought theirs when the kits first came out, so there was no justification for re-ordering, even if that were possible.

In the round ball game though it is the club competitions that generate the TV money and bring in the advertisers and sponsors. That isn't true in rugby union. The club game may be the more important to hard core supporters, but not to the much larger number of casual watchers who form the basis of the seriously sized TV audiences.

16 hours ago, tigerburnie said:

These clubs are now all businesses, often stripped of their best players whilst England play games during the league program, name me another major sport that does that, can you imagine what soccer club owners and their fans would say to having their best players missing and over played on summer tours, just to make the RFU money. Without the clubs there is no RFU.

Cricket was the same, the County Championship and other county competitions went on regardless during test matches, with the same effect that counties providing most players could fail to win trophies. Cricket mitigated the problem by putting the test and other international players on central contracts and lending them back to their counties. Now of course there is the IPL and that has completely changed the economics of the game.

Comparing rugby with Association Football is futile, because in the round ball game it is the clubs and their competitions that generate the money and the international game is the poor relation - though that truth doesn't seem to have got through at FIFA's HQ. It's the other way about in rugby union and cricket (rugby league is more like football with the club game being the more important), and in most other sports - hockey, athletics, swimming etc. - the international side in the form of the Olympics is about the only source of significant exposure and revenue.