whart57

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

The GWR timetables only show trains from Victoria to Kensington and Southall, which were probably standard gauge. However Alan Jackson's book, London's Termini, also states there were occasional services out as far as Windsor as well as a Sundays only service to Henley. I'll leave it to others to guess whether those might have involved broad gauge trains. However Jackson also mentions slip coaches from GWR expresses from Birmingham and Bristol being worked to Victoria in the early years. Surely the Bristol one would have been broad gauge.

Services on the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways are listed in the 1887 Bradshaw I have (facsimile copy). The traffic day is no longer than it is today with the first trains heading out just before 6 am and the last trains starting their last journeys just before midnight. Interestingly, when we get to 1910 and the first electrically powered tube lines are running, those tube lines start about an hour earlier and finish an hour later. The still steam operated lines of the Met and Met District have the same traffic day as they did 25 years earlier.

What would the purpose of a "Super-King" 4-8-0 be? In most of the world the 4-8-0 arrangement was for freight locos, and a lot were built for the meter and 3'6" gauges. The exception would appear to be a class of 4-8-0s designed by Chapelon for the SNCF, which were express passenger locomotives. The SNCF 240s (from the European classification for a 4-8-0) were specifically designed to take heavy trains up long gradients, and they didn't actually last that long. We could ask whether this Super-King 4-8-0 is only feasible because of the GWR's aversion to trailing pony trucks. Most other railways needing a fast eight coupled loco would build Mountain 4-8-2s which have more space for a humungous firebox.

Roll out the Barrel -- trad. drinking song

Shades of Gray -- The Monkees

Hanging on the Telephone -- Blondie

Keep your hand on your ha'penny -- Music Hall song (Sorry for posting twice in a row but I really wanted to put this fruity music hall song in)

Keep right on to the end of the road -- Harry Lauder (written in 1916)

Daydream Believer -- The Monkees

Summertime -- George Gershwin (sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, and many more Blues divas)

Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes --- Gilbert and Sullivan - The Gondoliers

Saturday's Child. - - The Monkees

I thought the Met and District kept locos in steam around the inner London network so they could react to loco failures and not snarl up the system