whart57

Dancing Queen -- Abba

A Song of Patriotic Prejudice -- Flanders and Swann

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - Otto Harbach and Jerome Kern

Sir, the South Eastern Railway is a subject dear to my heart. I will not hear a word against James Stirling on engineering and efficiency grounds, he provided the SER with a number of locomotive classes that performed as well as the best and that lasted right through the SECR and Southern days. However aesthetically they left a bit to be desired. All his designs were improved visually by Wainwright's SECR putting on domed boilers and larger cabs, yet at the same time the aesthetics of Cudworth's designs were worsened by Stirling's re-boilering with domeless boilers. In evidence, here is that F class as reworked by Wainwright A dog? That Netherlands Central Railway 4-4-0T is quite a handsome engine in my opinion. The Midland and Great Northern had something similar and they were quite handsome too

The Girl from Ipanema --- Frank Sinatra (among others)

I live deep in Southern territory, I think my windows are safe. I think they have the same problem as the Met tanks, the big driving wheels mess up the proportions. The classic inside cylinder 4-4-0 has scope for smoothing things out, but outside cylinders mess that up too. In the hands of an artist the 4-4-0 can look very good Designed by someone with less of an eye for shape and form they can be awful The SECR livery didn't improve them much either.

Pretty Daughter of Mine. Gilbert and Sullivan, HMS Pinafore

Oh, What a Beautiful Morning - Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma

The large wheels puzzle me a bit. Speeds were never going to be high in the tunnels of the Met and District, but you might have thought acceleration would be important when stations are so closely spaced. Five foot drivers might have been more sensible or even 4'6" as on this rather more attractive 4-4-0T

Do You Know the Way to San Jose -- Dionne Warwick

Have the 4-4-0Ts of the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District railways been mentioned? To be cruel I'd say that hiding them away in tunnels was a kindness to Victorian Londoners. From the front they were bad enough But from the back .......

All along the watchtower - - Jimi Hendrix

All I Want for Christmas Is You -- Mariah Carey (Is that better @tigerburnie?)

All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth -- Donald Yetter Gardner

One Moment in Time -- Whitney Houston

On the Street Where You Live ---- Lerner and Lowe My Fair lady

It's probably worth restating my philosophy here since it is buried under a dozen pages of postings since. We are talking model railways here, so my purpose is to be able to run locos and carriages I like in colours I like. (Freight stock is a bit freer given a lot came from other companies through interworking and pooling arrangements). It's a bit of an antidote to the rivet counting philosophy that says A couldn't have run with B and C is the wrong colour for the time A was around, without going over to a completely anything goes approach. Now on a good model railway geography does play a role in terms of the scenery, the architecture of buildings and in what goods are carried in trains, but since few of us can contemplate the sort of American basement layout where a whole network can be modelled, we are unlikely to model multiple stations. So I don't think it's necessary to plot the route of a line that was never built. There were very few viable routes left unfilled in Britain anyway, certainly not after the last gaps were filled in with light railways. So my approach has been to take lines that were built and give them a different history. In the posting above I see @Regularity has a picture of Lydnam Heath, that junction where Bishop's Castle trains had to reverse. An alternative history might have been that the line to the Welsh coast was completed. Or, heading north a little, another alternative history is that what became Colonel Stephens' Shropshire and Montgomeryshire had been successfully completed in the mid 1800s and the vision of a mainline link between the Potteries and the Welsh coast via Shrewsbury had become a reality. A large number of lines in the mid-nineteenth century were promoted by independent interests and only when completed taken over by a major company. An obvious alternative history is that those companies remained independent. This the approach I have taken. Instead of the Redhill, Guildford and Reading line becoming part of the South Eastern Railway I have it staying independent. Similarly the independently promoted lines between Leatherhead and Horsham and Epsom and Mitcham Junction didn't fall into the lap of the LBSCR. As far as a layout goes, I am only thinking of a small model of one of the junctions near Dorking as a showcase for the stock I am building. Another possibility, but discarded as being too large and ambitious, is the terminus at Horsham. Anyone who knows Horsham will know there is a Railtrack engineer's yard and stabling for Thameslink trains beside the curve of the line to Dorking. A nice site for Horsham Nightingale Road, the terminus of my company's line. My first train is nearly complete, an 1850s era single plus five four wheel coaches of 1850s vintage. Quite suitable for a Horsham to Guildford via Dorking local. But devising the loco and carriage liveries has been fun

Baby Love - - The Supremes

Man of our Times --- Genesis

Who’s In The Strawberry Patch With Sally -- Tony Orlando

I did this map of my "Surrey Railways Joint Operating Company" network for a talk on a club Zoom call The pink lines are LSWR, Stroudley Engine Green colour are LBSCR (what else?). red is SER and brown is GWR. Dashed lines are joint lines, dotted lines where running powers are granted, the main colour being the owning company.

Strawberry Fields Forever --- The Beatles

A Whole New World -- Alan Mencken (from Disney's Aladdin)

Man of the World Fleetwood Mac

Still Crazy After All These Years - Paul Simon