whart57

It's been a busy month for the still small team working on this layout. The first two baseboards have been built and the trackbeds cut out. As these tasks were done by two people and the pieces only came within touching distance on club nights, the process of fitting track bases to the open frames will happen in March. The construction of the baseboard frames using the sandwich technique has delivered light and strong baseboards. However some modification had to be made to the design to achieve the rounded corners desired. This shot is taken from what will be the viewing side. The fiddle yard will be to the right and the backscene will be given a curve on the grounds that the sky has no corners. A more detailed view shows the construction details better We've gone for DCC Concepts supplied baseboard aligners though stopped short of the super-deluxe version that also bridges the electrical track bus. The track beds were marked out by reversing the Templot design and printing it back to front. That meant the paper templates could be stuck to the underside of the ply leaving the working side pristine. Ballast and paint covers a multitude of sins, but the concern was more about difficult to remove glue splodges. Templot can print the lines for the edge of the ballast and the total width of the track bed including the cess. The decision has been made to model the cess as photographic evidence suggests that track work on the Colonel Stephens lines was still generally in good nick in our late twenties period. Ten years later things might be different, particularly on basket cases like the Selsey Tramway. The same technique will be used next month to cut the cork underlays representing the ballast and then track-laying will start. The kit building school One of the aims of this project is to create an opportunity for members to develop and hone new skills, and the most enthusiastic take up has been from our junior members. We bought a selection of Parkside (from Peco), Cambrian and Slaters wagon kits and three of our juniors have taken some and built them under supervision. Club rules require a responsible adult to attend alongside our juniors, and that adult has also been the one supervising when things like knives are used. We think that is probably better. These wagon kits are very good. The pieces fit together well, Parkside probably best of all, and some pleasing results are being obtained by these young and inexperienced builders. The first coat of paint was applied before the picture was taken. So from left to right, Midland Railway 8 ton van (Slaters), RCH 1923 seven plank (Parkside), LSWR 10 ton van (Cambrian) and GWR open (Parkside). And the average age of the builders is not even in double figures. Planning for scenery Some more detailed work has been done planning for the scenic treatment on the first three boards. The plan currently looks like this: Developments since last month are, firstly, that we have found a suitable prototype for the farm building. It's actually not far from the centre of Horsham and is today surrounded by the houses put up on what were the farm's fields in the 1960s. We found this atmospheric picture posted on the internet by our local newspaper The spire of St Mary's Church can be seen in the mist behind, so avid followers of our summer game will also know that Horsham's cricket ground where Sussex played at least one county game a season until a year or two ago, is also in that direction. The Historic England website has a picture from the 1920s of the farmhouse from the front which is viewable via this link: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/item/BL25327/004 The image on that website shows the farm with a clapboard front but today that has been removed and the original medieval framing with plaster infill has been restored. We in the club are not architectural experts but this farm does look to be a typical hall house found all across the Weald in Kent and Sussex. As such it fits our aims. One challenge it, and various other buildings planned, will give us is how to reproduce the local Horsham stone roofing. This is made up of sandstone slates 4 or 5 cm thick, so a bit over 0.5mm in 4mm scale. More on this next month. In our researches we found something else unusual which is now the subject of experiments in how to make a model. On the outskirts of Horsham, one road over from the real Wimblehurst Road, there was a "Wood Hoop and Broom Merchants" in the 1920s. The brooms were besom brooms, or witch's brooms to most of us, and they were made on site. The birch twigs for the sweeping bits were collected locally, presumably, in the form of coppiced branches some ten to twelve feet long, and were stored on stacks the size of haystacks. The completed brooms were bundled up in dozens or possibly double dozens. We have a photograph but unfortunately not in a form I can load up here. If we can solve the issues of how to represent this works in 00 scale then it will be a very unusual addition. Next month The club has an open day on April 1st (we've heard all the comments already, thanks) so March's two long Wednesdays will be dedicated to seeing if we can get a bit of track laid for then.

True, but if you want to operate the signals prototypically then the switches need to be there even if the signals aren't.

None of us have room to do signalling justice. Just a simple Distant - Home - Starter sequence needs about twenty foot of track in 00 and then there are the lengths of blocks. It is possible to build a layout which is fully signalled and operated as such but that requires severe compromises on pointwork (no long flowing points) and train length (hello, three coach express and six wagon heavy freight). Even then most of the signalling activity is small stuff you can barely see, like ground signals, or can't see at all like unlocking point locks. My personal opinion is that unless you are really building a signalling demo layout, that the aim regards signalling is to make signal operation consistent with reality. No running through red lights, semaphores reset to danger after a train has passed. Where appropriate the use of calling on signals and the like adds interest. But pinging bells is rarely more than unwanted noise.

Has any more progress been made on this, Ray?

I see you have a Royal Blue coach outside the station. Presumably that's on the South Coast Express, a joint service between Margate and Bournemouth run by East Kent, Southdown and Royal Blue. There is a model of Chichester bus station out there that has the East Kent contribution in among all the lime green of Southdown buses. When it comes to buses though what you really need is an East Kent "puffin", a Regent V with full front cab and sliding entrance door with reg numbers starting PFN - hence "puffin". These were pretty unique but were iconic for bus services on Thanet in the 1960s as nearly the entire class were allocated to Margate and Ramsgate sheds in the summer months. The Little Bus Company once had a resin kit and I've emailed them to ask whether it will ever be rerun. Otherwise, if you ever get the chance to acquire one, do so. For a bus enthusiast it means Thanet in the 60s.

The opposite experience for me was a BA flight in cattle class back from Singapore. It was the day after the rugby world cup final in Sydney - the one settled by Jonny Wilkinson's boot - and as those who have done that run will know, the BA flights from SE Asia have come up from Oz. So the plane was already full of England rugby supporters, all big guys, and I had a middle seat. By the time of the Singapore to London leg these guys had done the drinking and carousing and were now comatose. So that was twelve hours wedged between two immovable lumps.

You mean like the "bubble" on 747s?

As someone has already pointed out in this discussion, what the MR was really offering was second class travel at third class prices. At least on the expresses out of London. The MR was in a position to do so as it didn't have too many third class carriages that would need bringing up to second class standards, and as it was also the upstart incomer when it came to routes from London to the North - the GNR and LNWR had better and faster routes - it needed something radical to break-in. As for the other railways, many couldn't afford to drop the premium on second class travel. The LNWR was I believe very reluctant to make the move, and south of the Thames three classes survived until the Grouping. By then however the First World War had radically changed British society and the finely graded class distinctions that was the raison d'etre of the three class system had been swept away. It would be interesting to analyse more closely which railways followed the MR's example and ask whether it was the same combination of competitive advantage and relative ease of implementation that was behind it.

Yes, but it's a very simple equation to figure out that one big brakevan with one guard saves on a guard's wages over two brakevans requiring two guards. The tools to determine whether you would save on ticket clerks wages by abolishing one class of ticket didn't exist, and wouldn't until the 1970s and computers

You do realise that this is orders of magnitude less difficult than determining which aspects of a clerks job are taken up with issuing second class tickets. More than a century later, with all our computing power, that wouldn't be an easy question to answer. Think on to the early 1960s and Beeching. The absence of data far more basic, for example how many passengers on a branch line train go on to use a main line service at the junction, wasn't available to Beeching and his team. It's why they had to resort to a crude census over one week to determine which lines to mark down for closure, and why the figures never matched between prediction and result.

Maybe they were, but systems for measuring the costs of human operations didn't exist. Staff wages were cheap compared to coal to fire engines so when railway companies went on efficiency drives it was to see if they could get more miles out of a pound of coal. In any case the operational costs of having two men on every footplate, a guard every three or four carriages, porters on call for fetching and carrying luggage, never mind a fully staffed signal box every few miles would far outweigh the costs of a ticket clerk having three columns instead of two on his ledger.

As the people running railways at the start of the 20th century had never attended the Harvard Business School or followed any of its spin-off courses I doubt management had any idea whether operating a three class ticketing system had any extra admin costs.

Ahrons wrote that the SER board regarded a well-heeled traveller travelling third class as performing an assault on the property of the shareholders. That might be a bit harsh but as second class fares were 50% higher than 3rd class fares but the number of passengers accommodated in a second class carriage was 80% of a third class coach, second class travellers were more profitable. If the trains were full, which during the morning and evening rush hours they were. The bitterest complaints in the late nineteenth century press were from second class season ticket holders at the SER not putting on enough second class capacity.

The three class system lasted longer on the railways south of the Thames because they were far more reliant on revenue from passengers too.

That Economist piece doesn't surprise me. Those who fly on a company expense account are finding it harder to justify upper class travel, those who do not need approval for spending take private jets. Asia is a bit behind the curve on that, hence first class still being heavily marketed by the airlines of the Gulf and SE Asia.

Wagons-Lits services were very much the equivalent of international services. In 1957, when the two class system was normalised all across Europe on a 1st/2nd basis, international trains with only first class, but charging a supplementary fare, were started - the Trans Europ Express. Effectively the three class system still existed. Even today TGV supplements exist to fares in France and the Low Countries.

There is long haul and very long haul. An eight hour flight across the Atlantic is a different matter from a thirteen hour one to SE Asia, with or without another eight or nine hours to Australia. There is also the matter of who's paying. Company policies cutting back on travel expenses reduced a lot of demand for first class across the Atlantic, but wealthy Asians and the extra justification through that extra five or six hours in a seat kept demand more steady on the Asia routes. That and the fact that the distance is too great for private jets to do in one jump. It's true that business class is getting closer to the first class of old, but on the Asia routes first class is trying to ape private jets with private cabins around those flat beds.

As I've mentioned on another thread, the reason for Britain retaining first and third class but dropping second, while on the continent the two class system became second and third, phasing out first class on nearly all trains lay in the different treatment of aristocracy in the class systems of various countries. Nineteenth century Britain was already used to nouveaux riche industrialists buying titles and rubbing along with the dukes and earls of the old aristocracy, so first class was for the rich, and not necessarily just the titled. Britain after all had not wheeled out the guillotine and had a cull of its nobility, like France had. After Napoleon the old aristocracy in Europe were a lot less tolerant of upstart new money and as a result those with money but no title stuck to travelling second class. The consequence was that first class was barely patronised, while second class produced a decent revenue. This could lead to some strange situations. The three class system survived longest on the international services, but also on one Dutch light railway operated by the Netherlands Central Railway. The NCS had a couple of first class carriages for use on their local lines. Why? Well those lines served the royal palaces, and might thus be expected to maintain the proper social distinctions as they were maintained within those palaces.

When the South Eastern Railway extended its line from London Bridge to Cannon Street and Charing Cross all trains - including the Boat Trains - called at both stations, even though this required a reversal at Cannon Street and the train had to cross the incoming trains at Borough Market junction. This did mean though there was an uninterrupted ten minute run between two central London termini, which acquired a new market in passengers. Namely ladies providing a certain service and their gentlemen clients. The first class fare was but a fraction of the fee for the services and a relatively comfortable and private accommodation was secured without having to use some seedy hotel up some dodgy street. The SER put an end to the fun by opening an intermediate station at Waterloo (today's Waterloo East)

This bucket of fish travelled on the train to Maeklong in Thailand in 2010. The woman who put it on the train didn't even travel with it.

Before World War One first class passengers on cross-Channel ferries were spared tiresome passport checks at Dover and the other Channel ports, the assumption being that the first class ticket proved their bona fides. Then too the joke was that top notch swindlers, foreign spies and high class courtesans were the only ones who could afford the South Eastern Railway's first class fares.

One point that came out of that BBC4 programme was that in the 17th century most paintings were collaborative ventures. The Breughel workshop was that, a workshop. The experts concluded that the Breughel landscape found in bits in the Birmingham art gallery store was mostly by a collaborator of the Breughels called Joos de Momper. He did the basic hills and trees while one of the Breughels, possibly Jan the Elder but more likely Jan the Younger, did the figures. I suspect I need to find my Joos de Momper.

And Wales rugby adopting Yma o Hyd

Is that with or without the band playing the opening minute or so of Pomp and Circumstance No.1? With or without the band playing the main theme quietly once through first? Or just the drunken yahoos in the Twickenham stands murdering Elgar by bellowing out some of the most pompous words set to music? Jerusalem is a much better English national anthem. Musically Elgar is probably better than Parry, but William Blake is a couple of divisions higher than the hack who penned Land of Hope and Glory

Did Rembrandt do that? Seriously mate, how big are the shoehorns in your house?