whart57

Point of order accepted. Nor was Stourbridge Town a typical branchline terminus. However I was thinking more of the spirit of a town terminus served by a short line from a junction station further away. Stourbridge is a place I am familiar with as I worked there - on the gas works site - for five years.

One more thought, given the long thin nature of the site. You could put the fiddle yard in the middle, but behind a backscene. That might seem awkward but surely you don't want to spend too much time fiddling in a fiddle yard .......... The sort of prototype I would suggest for an 0 gauge layout is the short - very short - branch from Stourbridge Junction to Stourbridge Town. It was a GWR branch, albeit in the grubby West Midlands rather than bucolic Devon or Gloucestershire, and the frequent passenger service was, in GWR and early BR days either a 14xx with autocoach or one of those GWR streamlined railcars. Apparently the short run drained the batteries of the railcars and they had to be given a run up to Wolverhampton (via Dudley) to get the battery charged up again. However there was, in steam days, also a healthy freight traffic serving the foundries and glassworks at the Town end of the line. For a model I would only model the bay platform the autotrain uses at the Junction end plus a couple of staging sidings for freight wagons going on and coming off the branch. From there the branch line runs to the other end in front of the fiddle yard because at the other end the fiddle yard doubles up as hidden private sidings for the heavy industry there. This set up would allow for a lot of shunting and shuffling of wagons with simple passenger operation in between. Larger locos might appear as light engines in the bay at the junction awaiting the expansion of your layout to fill the entire basement. Perhaps someone with more time could knock up an Anyrail sketch. However a pic from elswhere on the internet

Jeez mate, where do you live? In a stately home or an aircraft hangar? I have about half that for my home layout (not complaining 😁) and that is more than enough work for one person to keep up with. Club layouts are different but even some clubs have less space to dedicate to one layout than this. Here we are talking of one guy just starting out, so biting off more than he can chew is a real danger here. What you describe is either the result of very deep pockets or many years work. Or possibly both. I hesitate to recommend branch line termini to newcomers to the hobby, in my view BLTs are a choice, not an entry level. If they appeal, great, but no newbie should be made to feel that that is the apprenticeship to go through. However, unless you are a globally successful music promoter, 0 gauge is probably not the way forward if you seek mainline operation. Nor is a long thin layout space either. The first terminus to fiddle yard layout - Maybank - was developed that way because its builders only had a long thin space to work in. But terminus to fiddle yard is trains only going a short distance irrespective of whether they are a single coach auto-train or a long express. If that sort of operation is OK, then great. If not a rethink of the space is required. However, if our opening poster bought that Pannier because that is what he likes, then a good start would be the sort of GWR outpost where an auto-coach is the passenger service and the freight is half a dozen wagons to be shuffled around. That could be done in 0 in the space available quite nicely.

The wartime grey was a WW1 livery, but as E1s and D1s look very similar to the L1 one of those may be what has lodged in your brain

The space you have sounds generous even by North American standards. The danger with that is that you try to be too ambitious in your first efforts. Major city termini have been built in less space in 00 gauge. However what you have does allow you to give a home to a more modest first effort in 0, without having to resort to the shoehorning tactics of minimum space layouts. I would say that if your tastes are not those of running full length mainline trains through the countryside that you might well find 0 gauge is the better choice.

Wednesday 18 January became the official start date of Horsham MRC's Chesworth project. That night there was a presentation - a complete Powerpoint jobbie beamed onto the wall with one of those computer driven projectors - to the whole club membership, and the following Wednesday work started in earnest. (Horsham club meet on what are called "short Wednesdays" and "long Wednesdays" in St Leonard's Church Hall in Horsham. Short Wednesday meetings are from 7pm to 10pm (clear up starts around 9.30) but on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays the meeting starts at 2.30pm and it at these "long Wednesday" meetings that most layout work is done.) The first long Wednesday projects on Chesworth concentrate on stock-building. Chesworth is intended to be set in the period from 1925-30, chosen as being a century before when the layout is aimed at being on the exhibition circuit, so rolling stock needs to be suitable for that period. It is amazing how much "steam era" freight stock available as RTR is therefore unsuitable. About half the kits available as PECO Parkside or from other kit-makers are from the post-1930s period too. However the first batch of wagon kits have been sourced and constructions started. The keenest constructors are the club's youngest members, which is heartening to say the least. Warhammer seems to be providing the early learning experience in the same way as Airfix did for the retirement generation. Photos of the results will appear in a later posting. Trackplans and Baseboard Design Your blog-writer has got to grips with Templot. The result has been to turn the outline Anyrail plan shown in the introductory blog into a working document that can be printed actual size. Templot also breaks the link to commercially available geometry which may or may not be a good idea. The purpose of the initial proof of concept layout is to test whether British Finescale's Finetrax kits can be used simply as crossings and switches. Elsewhere on rmweb there are postings from people who have done that but we need to try that for ourselves before over-committing to that approach. Currently the Templot plan looks like this: Turnouts are either A5 or B7 and there are no complexities such slips or diamonds. To begin with though only one of each will be required and the A5 in the yard of the small passing station has been deliberately kept as a divergence from a straight track as a familiarity test before attempting to put a curve through the neighbouring B7. Your blogger has worked with Wayne Kinney on developing the Finetrax range for 3mm finescale so there is a high degree of confidence in that product. The plan is also to use open frame baseboard construction. The scenic treatment requires some streams and rivers so although there will be no gradient changes other than the one required for gravity shunting, the ground to the side of the tracks will have to go both down and up. A flat baseboard is therefore unsuitable. A design has been drawn up for the framing of the first two boards. Next stop the timber yard Buildings For the proof of concept layout we will require three buildings. The station building will be based on Bodiam (K&ESR). This has the advantage that it is still standing and is accessible thanks the the K&ESR heritage line. It is also an easily recognisable Stephens design. Outside the station, and forming a place for the eye to rest and stop continuing into the fiddleyard will be a country pub. The plan is to recreate the Dog and Bacon which is on the edge of the last little handkerchief sized bit of Horsham Common, and close to the junction with the real Wimblehurst Road which will be the station name on the layout. The difference is that our pub will not be the Edwardian pebble-dashed pub of today but the row of three wooden cottages that held the pub in earlier years. A Wealden hall house style farmhouse is also desired, but at the moment no suitable candidate has been settled on. Work on Bodiam has already started, and drawings for the Dog and Bacon are being prepared. Lastly An idle conversation led to the suggestion that a coal merchants steam lorry might look good in the goods yard next to some guys bagging up a heap of coal dumped from a wagon. By coincidence a member saw an unbuilt Keil-Kraft kit at a swap-meet a weekend or two later, parted with a couple of coins and then put it together. That prompted another member to recall his grandfather had actually driven one of these in the 1920s for a local coal merchant. So all is looking good.

It's not what people voted for though. No one said Vote Leave for more red tape and hassle.

The difference is that you aren't going to sell your old socks, but the guy on the border might suspect you are coming back with more goodies than what you went out with. Those of us who are old enough to remember the pre-Common Market days might recall the tricks our parents had to play. Cameras were a big problem. My dad had a German camera, a Voigtlander. He deliberately scuffed the case to make sure some customs guy who was having a bad day would find it hard to say it was new and liable for import taxes. Likewise we bought a tent in the Netherlands once - British camping gear at the time was basically army surplus stuff, not nice lightweight stuff like the continentals used. We had a week camping in Zeeland simply to make sure it looked used when we got to Dover. Remember, whatever the rules are, it's the grumpy sod at border control who is interpreting them. The cost of a lawyer to correct a bad decision on their part is more than most things are worth. So stay cool, don't let yourself get provoked and make sure you know how to point out it's your goodies and not stuff you are going to sell. Nothing like a bit of wear and tear to support your case. Nine times out of ten you'll get waved through, it's knowing how to handle that tenth time that is important. (And to be political, I don't recall all this being on the side of the bus)

And Wayne has already delivered a decent range of 14.2mm gauge items to the 3mm Society

I'm glad you mentioned the NS 600s, I got burned for suggesting they were 08s ...... 🥵 Not mentioned of course is that someone who happily runs Flying Scotsman while a Merchant Navy Pacific is going round the other track and a Pannier shunts the yard is not going to be fussed about having a German or American loco in the mix as well. As long as it doesn't look silly by being too small.

I don't think Hornby and PECO are interested in creating a whole new finescale hobby segment with half a dozen modellers in it. Simon Kohler goes on about exact scale-gauge being possible with TT-120 as a marketing soundbite. His designers will have told him about the compromises they have had to make. However as it is as near as spot on as makes no difference (1440mm as against the real 1435mm) it shuts off alternative interpretations. Anyone bothered by fat wheels will put on thinner ones. It won't be easy but it is possible. Most won't bother though. There is one other issue though, namely international compatibility. At the moment there is not much cross-over between British railways and continental ones, Class 66s being the main one. However given that these days only a handful of companies are behind all the world's trains it's likely that in future there will be more.

A century later hay was not only being carried, it was being collected and loaded from the track side

Re: the tanks. It seems to be overlooked occasionally that NATO is not actually at war with Russia and that Ukraine is not and never has been a member of NATO or had a mutual defence treaty with NATO. Nearly everyone wants to keep it that way, and Biden and Scholtz especially so. Scholtz because the Germans would be the main provider of European land forces and Biden because the Americans would end up being the ones making all the hard decisions. The only tanks that are any use to the Ukrainians are the German-built Leopards, either direct from Germany or from other users like Poland. The British government has been playing a peculiar role here. While for Biden, Scholtz and Macron the politics are that they all see the need to support Ukraine to the hilt, they all face domestic political opponents who don't accept that and none of the three are likely to win political support through supporting Ukraine. In Britain however, Boris Johnson made a big thing of flying out to meet Zelenskiy every time he was in domestic political trouble, Liz Truss' Instagram was groaning under the pictures of her in tanks or with pilots and while Sunak is less gung-ho, his Defence Secretary is still on a loose rein when it comes to showing Britain is backing the Ukrainians. Now Britain can't offer Leopards, they don't have any. So they have to offer the tanks they have, Challengers. Logistically though that would be a nightmare for the Ukrainian generals. The best use for these would be to backfill the Leopards a small army like the Estonians are proposing to supply Ukraine with. In the end it comes down to politics. Biden and Scholtz are wary about provoking Putin into expanding the war. It's not just Putin himself, it's the chain of command under him as well as the families of the conscripts being called up to fill the Russian ranks. Providing the Ukrainians with defensive weaponry is hard to depict as NATO threatening Russia. A tank however is an offensive weapon, so supplying them crosses a line. It comes down to Scholtz. It does not seem to be an issue about money, the Germans are spending billions already on restructuring their energy supplies as well as providing less aggressive military equipment, but it does look like Scholtz not wanting to be the guy who tipped Putin over the edge. Particularly as a lot of the Leopards are in store or in bits and are unlikely to reach Ukraine in time for any spring push. The offer of unsuitable tanks from Britain and the call for the Americans to supply similarly unsuitable Adams tanks is aimed at making Scholtz feel less alone. We'll find out in a week or so whether that works.

You know what, you are right. My trouble is that I only visit Gaugemaster in conjunction with going for a walk along the beach at Climping or Littlehampton (West Beach). Sorry about that, guys.

Actually you would have gone right past it 😉

It's been there at least ten years, probably longer. It's on the minor road to Arundel so you wouldn't see it if you approached Gaugemaster from the coast.

It could be a funny old 6N. France should win it, possibly with a Grand Slam, and Italy are probably the other with a settled side and a clear direction, though they will do well if they match last time out for results. As for the island sides, it depends which team turns up on the day. They could be brilliant or they could have a shocker. With the same XV.

This could tempt me, were it not for the fact I have enough projects for three lifetimes, never mind one. Locos and carriages are the easy bits though. PECO Streamline surely not for the track though. I suspect Whishaw has the trackwork of the L&M set out in chapter and verse, along with any primitive signalling

There is a Hawker Hunter mounted on a stick at the entrance to the former Ford airfield in Sussex (Simon Carey / Entrance to Ford Airfield / CC BY-SA 2.0 - Creative Commons use) It's about half a mile up the road to Arundel from Gaugemaster's shop, and much of Ford open prison is on the former airfield site. (Actually half a mile down the road if you tend to think of North as up and South as down)

The trouble with a peacetime standing army is that it isn't the army you need when the war actually comes. As Putin found out when his army ran into someone who could shoot back. The Ukrainians proved better at improvisation, learning as they went along and making best use of what they could beg or borrow from friendly neighbours. British military history is also full of examples of when the army that had only to deal with poorly armed African and Asian forces proved inadequate to the task when faced with a foe as well equipped as themselves. The BEFs of both world wars; the force sent to South Africa that got kicked from pillar to post by the Boers until a larger, better, army was assembled; the Crimean debacle; even the military expeditions of the Napoleonic Wars when Wellington was not involved.

In the 1960s some crusty military types were convinced Harold Wilson was in the pay of the Soviet Union and plotted a military coup which would install a "businessman's government". Never got anywhere because they were batshit crazy and the guys really running the army didn't believe in the army taking part in politics. There was also that little matter of the lady in Buck House who certainly would not have approved, and after all she was the one generals and others swore allegiance to. Harold Wilson's "crime" in the eyes of some military types was that he was realistic about Britain's place in the world and was trimming Britain's military commitments accordingly. And of course several thousand "boomers" and their descendants owe their lives to Harold keeping Britain out of the Vietnam War despite American pressure.

I have heard some very fine modellers describe themselves as "bodgers". Isn't self-deprecation part of being English?

Sure, but in my mind this topic is limited to the designs that were coming into service when WW2 came West in May 1940. The Lancaster was after all supposed to be the Manchester

We should also consider the development of heavier fighters with twin engines, a crew of two and heavier armament than carried by single seaters. The design drivers were varied. Rifle calibre guns were deemed insufficient as higher speeds of bombers meant the opportunity of getting in a sustained burst of fire was shrinking. Heavier guns needed to be carried. A longer range was required for an escort fighter role, a flawed idea since heavier twin engined fighters could not be expected to be as agile as the single seat opponents they would encounter when escorting bombers. Army generals liked the idea of fast ground attack aircraft the act as highly mobile artillery so that was another role. The final role, and the one where most designs found their niche, was as a night fighter, particularly when radar could be taken up into the air. However, all those roles did make the designs appear to be the camel as horse designed by committee implementation. As with the single seat designs too, engine limitations and limitations of supply or development of chosen engines hampered production and deployment. The British Air Ministry issued a specification for a twin engined fighter in 1935, but with Hawker and Supermarine fully committed to Hurricane and Spitfire development it fell to the Westland and Bristol companies to come up with serious solutions. Westland came up with the Whirlwind. Initially promising, problems with its RR Peregrines delayed things and when they were resolved the Spitfire had already been developed to carry 20mm cannon, thus negating the main value of the Whirlwind. The Bristol company had responded to a challenge to develop the world's fastest civil airliner, and that led in turn to the Blenheim bomber. The speed of the Blenheim compared to the existing biplane fighters of the RAF resulted in a fighter variant of the Blenheim being produced. Obviously a stopgap but further development of the basic plan eventually led to the Bristol Beaufighter This entered service in mid-1940, just in time to prove its worth as a night fighter during the Blitz. RAF Bomber Command had in the meantime given up on daylight operations to Germany so no longer had need of escort fighters. Across in Germany, Hermann Göring was a big advocate of the heavy fighter/bomber destroyer concept and that led to the Messerschmidt Bf110. As an escort fighter it proved wanting against Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, but its range and heavy armament made it a formidable night fighter and ground attack aircraft. It too would carry radar once the Germans had developed it. The heavy fighter concept was also taken up by the Dutch Fokker company as a private venture. This resulted in the Fokker G.1 The Dutch airforce would eventually take it up and order 36 to equip two squadrons. Considering that Fokker was limited to using the Bristol Mercury VIII engine rather than the more powerful ones available to its rivals the G.1 acquitted itself well enough in the very uneven contest of the five day war in May 1940. The Americans would bring the P38 Lightning into the war a couple of years later, but the heavy fighter concept didn't really excite other aircraft building countries.

The two cross-code games between Bath and Wigan in the 1990s didn't tell us anything we didn't already know about union players being good at union and league players being good at league, but there was still quite a gap in physicality and fitness then between Wigan's full time pros an Bath's mainly part-timers.