whart57

Can I say that one of the turn-offs for me is Streamline track, particularly on 00 layouts. It just looks wrong. It also grates when I look at pics on the "How Realistic is your Modelling" here on rmweb and see those underscale sleepers and overscale rail section front and centre.

British or foreign prototypes; present day, a generation ago or more generations ago - all have been represented by decent layouts, and all have suffered a lot of dross. It's quality of build, level of creativity and an eye for realism that counts no matter what the prototype. There has to be reasons why people would pay money to see a layout.

That said, if the prototype is unusual I'll cut the builder a bit of slack. Not least because building the unusual is harder work than building something that is well supported by the trade and by the techniques we use. The unusual is also likely to be less cliche-ridden.

3 hours ago, rockershovel said:

The last try is easily remedied. It needs a large placard in the dressing room saying "do not do this stupid thing". I was taught since my earliest playing days that "red clock" time is a very dangerous period when concentration lapses among some, though not all players and surprise scores are common. 

 

The goal should be to end the game as quickly as possible. By scoring if possible, but quickly. 

 

Otherwise.... England are chronically unable to finish. A team with the levels of possession shown on Saturday should be cruising to a solid win. This is nothing new. Borthwick won't fix it; it is a consequence of the static, stagnant Prem. 

 

It's also common for England to repeat basic mistakes in quick succession. Their whole thinking process seems to operate on some kind of "I tell you three times" basis. 

What makes "red clock" time dangerous is the losing side throwing caution to the winds, and forcing mistakes. It may be the aim to end the game quickly, but how. Kick for touch, sure, but don't ask a player who rarely, if ever, kicks to do it. Under pressure your occasional kicker can too easily screw the ball and hand possession over. A "stupid thing" in your definition. So get the ball to your full back or No.10. Except the opposition will be expecting that and the known kickers will be marked. A tackle and a turnover would be another of your "stupid things". The losing side have no need for defence in depth, so they will have everyone up putting pressure on. The calculation on whether giving away a penalty by making a risky intervention in a ruck is better than conceding a try changes too.

Possession is good to have, but how good depends on where that possession is. You can't score from your own half, rare 60 yard penalties and breakaway tries excepted. Possession inside the opponents 22 is good, but that is a crowded area, crowded with big blokes who these days have a bit of speed as well. What with fitness levels today and plenty of replacements on the bench, the old attritional methods don't work so well. Anyone can bulk up in the gym. The creativity needed to thread away through is a rare talent, and you are probably right, the Premiership doesn't nurture it.

15 hours ago, rockershovel said:

Nonsense. They gave Italy two soft tries in quick succession, adapted and dominated the last 55 minutes of the game. 

 

Had they not made a basic schoolboy mistake in extra time, exacerbated by  having seemingly  forgotten that Dingwall was still wandering around the backfield like a lost sheep, they would have come off win a 13 point margin and no-one would be saying "Italy nearly won"

 

 

But England did give up those opportunities to Italy. I've read several commentators give the opinion that this happens when England try and play a more expansive game. Perhaps it is inherent that when a team takes risks to win with style that a notionally weaker team can exploit those risks. The test will come when those opportunities come the way of a better side than Italy.

15 hours ago, tigerburnie said:

I don't recall any either, well not sober ones...............................

At least two of the Observer's sports writers did.

2 hours ago, tigerburnie said:

On that showing Italy are the most improved performers, England used a get out of jail card in Rome, they so easily may have lost that game.

That get out of jail card will probably be enough to beat Scotland and Wales, but winning a slam will require beating both Ireland and France which looks unlikely based on the evidence. Winning the title alone will require someone stopping Ireland getting the slam, and they have France disposed of already.

Looks like the early predictions from pundits have all been shredded. OK, not all, the ones who predicted Ireland finishing top, of which there were not many, will be quite smug this morning.

France were supposed to be all fired up ready to put World Cup disappointments behind them and with home games in front of provincial crowds be unbeatable. Hmmm.

England were many people's tip, but title contenders don't usually give Italy a sniff.

Italy were most people's nailed on prediction for the wooden spoon, but maybe not.

All good fun.

I wrote an article for Continental Modeller on the Maeklong Railway's Krauss tank engines, together with drawings based on measurements taken in Bangkok. That almost rusted away example in the coach park near Bang Sue provided most measurements for the 2-4-0T while the loco that was then in the Ekkamai Museum of Science was the basis for the 0-4-2T. That loco is now in Paknam I believe.

And the 2-4-0T

I think five out of the seven survived to their centenary, albeit only just in the case of the Bang Sue car park example. The one by the loco depot fared better as did the one outside the SRT's HQ at Hualamphong. When I submitted the article to CM the editor, Andy Burnham, emailed me back to say that they had a photo in the files of one of the 0-4-2Ts plinthed outside a country club near Pattaya and would I mind if they put it into my piece. I didn't so that meant four of the seven were depicted in that article. I'm not sure if the Pattaya one is still there or what condition it is now in. The one at Ekkamai was in very poor condition the first time I saw it, but since then it has had a bit of tlc. Photos of it on display at Paknam seem to show it in reasonable nick.

The hopper wagon I photographed outside Mahachai (on the line from Bangkok Wongwangyai) was a bit different.

Probably the most modern bit of kit on that bit of the SRT, which as many will know is completely isolated from the rest of the network.

1 hour ago, ColinK said:

Looks just like a BR 158, even the same livery.

The second picture was a BREL 158 (export model). A number of three car sets were sold to Thailand in he 1990s. Regarding livery, I have built a 3mm scale version and the Railmatch paints for Regional Railways are as good a match as anything.

I presume that with the new mega-station at Bang Sue that there was a bit of tidying up in the old marshalling yard. Back in 2010 there was some real old tat parked there

I haven't tried working this out, and I don't know N gauge anyway, but would a city terminus to suburban terminus work? The main run being a figure of eight - single or double track - and the termini coming off at each end. Put in a couple of passing loops and you can have mainline trains doing circuits while DEMUs provide your point to point wishes. The city terminus should be modelled only in part - the local platforms and some platforms at the back where the mainline trains pass through.

20 minutes ago, whart57 said:

I see you captured a time when an incoming train left its carriages in the platform while dropping off an engine for the shed. Yours was a Hualamphong bound train, when I saw that happen in 2010 it was bringing an engine up from Bangkok.

 

Just checked the pics I took, it was actually a completely different loco that took the train onwards from the two that had brought it up from Hualamphong.

The "old station" is for Northern and North Eastern line trains, the "new" station for Southern line trains. Or was then. I don't know how they are handled at the new station.

I see you captured a time when an incoming train left its carriages in the platform while dropping off an engine for the shed. Yours was a Hualamphong bound train, when I saw that happen in 2010 it was bringing an engine up from Bangkok.

One day I was there a massively long train was waiting in the Southern station, heading towards Bangkok. When it eventually moved it turned out to be full of Navy personnel, presumably headed for the navy base at Pattaya.

I'm really impressed with the Silhouette cutter. This is my second attempt at reproducing the very flowing motifs on the temple gateway. The drawing was produced by tracing over a sharp photo image and then cut out from metallic vinyl of the peel-off variety. My first attempt used the automatic Path Trace function of Inkscape but that proved a little bit too sensitive to variations in the photo. I did a manual trace on the  second attempt. Bear in mind this bit of gold decoration is only 26mm wide.

On 27/01/2024 at 22:29, kevsmiththai said:

Bang Sue sure looks different to when I was last there!

 

So much Concrete !

 

Kev

 

 

Sure does

Is it my imagination or are the trains shorter than they were ten years ago?

Over the last couple of days I have built a prototype temple gate. This won't be the final version but it does prove the tools I have can reproduce the key bits.

This is the sort of thing you expect to see on April 1st. Worrying to have it on social media now.

Johnny Foreigner is actually wrong-footed by some things we've done over the last ten years - things they never expected we'd do.

4 hours ago, Fair Oak Junction said:

Does anyone know the dimensions of the stone block sleepers used to carry fishbelly rail? I know there are some surviving examples in a few places around the UK, but none near me AFAIK.

The link to Whishaw I gave earlier might help as Whishaw describes the technical sides of the railways of 1842 in some detail. Unfortunately he does miss out the size of the stone blocks on the S&D. On the neighbouring Stockton and Hartlepool Railway though he does state these stone blocks were 2 foot square. The S&D was using wood blocks as well and, interestingly, used "small coal" as ballast.

5 hours ago, burgundy said:

If you wished to induce apoplexy in certain quarters, you could suggest that we should have ordered a couple of squadrons of Rafales for our naval role and that the French, in exchange, should have ordered a couple of squadrons of Typhoons for air defence.  

Best wishes 

Eric

Which more or less sums up Western defence policy of the last seventy years. Military strategists and Defence Ministry officials draw up detailed reports on future defence risks and requirements and then the lobbyists from the arms companies come in and work on the politicians. Politicians who are scared of what the media and their opponents will spin. Jobs in British shipyards and business for British arms and aerospace companies weighed more heavily in the decision for building two new carriers than any rational assessment of Britain's - and Europe's - defence needs.

4 hours ago, 2750Papyrus said:

I believe that, in the carrier programme trade-offs carried out in the days of Blair and Brown, if air support to Poland was required, it was considered more cost-effective to operate from a carrier in the Baltic rather than from land bases.

It would be interesting to know what was being compared to what. Measure the right things and ignore the unhelpful and any conclusion is possible. The carrier programme was a political thing from the start and needed every justification presented to counter the sceptics.

On 24/01/2024 at 01:31, jjb1970 said:

 

Absolutely, a truth many either ignore or don't get. People can view the same events from different perspectives and arrive at very different conclusions, and for those individuals their conclusions are perfectly reasonable.

 

That's the Israel-Palestine situation exactly. The events of the last century are the same but the two sides see them differently. There is no hope of a resolution unless each side is willing to accept that the other side has a different interpretation. Miles from that I'm afraid.

One feature on Thai religious buildings are the highly decorative roof decorations. Those and the decorative arches over doors and windows generally have a flame like motif which makes them hard enough to draw, and near impossible to cut out consistently. Technology comes to the rescue. The temple's eaves decorations have been etched in brass - there was a bit of space on a larger sheet I was preparing - and more of that later. However etching is a process with a slow turnaround because you need firstly enough items to fill the minimum size sheet an etcher will deal with, and secondly it is not a fast process anyway. So I then experimented with the Silhouette cutter. The much smaller decorations on the bell tower were produced that way.

Having satisfied myself that the Silhouette could make a decent stab at the flame-like shapes I wondered if the arches over the windows could also be handled that way. This is the challenge.

I figured that a lamination of two or more layers of Plastikard might give a decent result, and made up a prototype.

As these decorative features require no physical strength - they are backed by the main wall - I felt the result was more than adequate. There is after all a limit to the amount of detail you can do at one hundredth of full size. So the windows and doors on the main temple have been treated that way.

Now I apologise to anyone who has a deep understanding of Buddhist iconography, but I am working on my observations here. In this particular wat the main temple building stands apart on a floor of white marble with a balustrade around it. From my observations that seems to be quite typical at other wats too. That meant I had to figure out a way to make the balustrade.

3D printing seemed to be all the rage and my daughter was experimenting with a free 3D drawing package called Blender for other reasons. A bit of research determined that Blender could output in a format that Shapeways could handle so I asked my daughter to produce a 3D file of the balustrade sections based on photographs and measurements. That she did and I sent the output to Shapeways who then printed it out.

As that was successful I then set my daughter the challenge of producing the chedhi as a file for Shapeways. Chedhis are a very striking feature so could not be left off.

After all this high tech stuff, the plinth of the chedhi  was made in the traditional manner with just knives, files and sanding boards. Small beads were used for the balls in the wall decorations.

This temple will sit on a removable board as it is sited over a join between two baseboards. There will be a wall around the complex with decorative gates at each end of the through road. That is the next step.