whart57

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

True, but a picture was involved. Facebook and other social media organisations have made embarrassing mistakes when an unusual picture gets incorrectly flagged up as porn or some ####### thing by their algorithms

At the moment the station building is in hand, but I may get back to you in future.

If it's Facebook then are you sure you've been banned by actual humans? Facebook's algorithms can make some weird decisions

Could be worse, like the Welsh RFU ........ Not selecting English players who turn out to be good enough for a French Top 14 outfit does seem to be a bit of a shoot self in foot job. Those French clubs don't sign up anybody. As for the overseas players, they come in two sorts. One sort are the world class players looking for the best club to show off their talent in. The other are "made-players" who come cheap, cheaper than the costs of finding rough diamonds in the academy and polishing them up. The first sort enhance the English club scene, the second sort are the problematic ones. Reducing the number of fixtures reduces the income stream, that may not be helpful. The England team's record over the last four major tournaments has been runners up once, semi-finals twice and quarter finals once. Not only does that put Gareth Southgate on the same level as Sir Alf Ramsey, whose record would be mediocre without the single good result in 1966, but that record is as good as nearly anybody else's. The Germans and the Dutch haven't done as well. Southgate is severely under-rated as an international manager. Managing an international team is a different skill to managing a club side and it seems to suit Southgate. More illustrious predecessors have done less well despite having much the same material to work with, and a lot of England supporters seem to think that all the team need to do is play with "pashun". There is a reason why the banners around the ground at an international game are primarily from non-league and lower division clubs, the supporters of Premier League sides have better players to watch every week. Hardly any international side draws its players primarily from its national league these days. It's freedom of movement that has done that, not commercialism. The best players want to play in the best competitions, and those are the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga - though really for Barcelona or Real Madrid - and the Bundesliga. The international teams of other countries have to call players back from those leagues if they want a competitive side.

The RAF were also supposed to provide Singapore with air cover, but too few Hurricanes and absolutely no Spitfires were assigned to the Far East until well on into the war. In the Far East the British (and Dutch) were defending territory, unlike the Americans who went on the attack. However the French army was supposed to keep the Germans well back from the North Sea and Channel coasts. The war that actually came was different from the one planned for. In the 1930s German naval building was concentrating on submarines and commerce raiding surface ships, varying from heavy cruisers through "pocket battleships" to fully fledged battleships like the Bismarck. These were all built with enough speed to evade the Royal Navy's own battleships and the purpose of the RN carriers was to find and disable these German ships way out in the Atlantic with the main battleships delivering the final blow. As happened in the actions to locate and destroy the Bismarck. However in the Med the main enemy was the Italian air force, who weren't that well equipped.

Tracklaying started. So far the Finetrax bases are only temporarily pinned in place, but the webbing has been cut on the B7 and the base made to fit the desired curve. The club's N gauge exhibition layout, Battledown, is getting tweaks ready for the April Open Day in the background.

The subject matter was probably less important than the fact they were "official". The graffiti-ists probably regarded that as an attempt to take over "their" space.

It's like dogs peeing against lamp posts to mark their presence in the territory. Most graffiti falls into that category. The tags and shapes are meaningful to those who made them, even if just in a "look at me, I did that" sort of way.