whart57

4 hours ago, SvenL said:

Who is the murderer in the crime tv show.  

You can bet the first suspect is the foreigner. 

 

Agatha Christie has done some nice twists though. The narrator was the murderer in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and in And Then There was One (other non-PC titles are available) the murderer was one of the victims

But why is there always a murder? In Morse there are always more stiffs in a single episode than the real City of Oxford have in a year. And the colleges wouldn't be able to survive the attrition on senior academic staff.

11 hours ago, t-b-g said:

 

The thing is, I tend to treat all people equally. I don't make a big thing out of their skin colour, sex or age.

 

I fact, I don't make anything at all of it.

 

So when people start making a big thing of it, I see it as perpetuating the problem, not solving it.

 

I am lucky that I do know a handful of very good female modellers and one chap from a Jamaican background. I just see them as fellow enthusiasts.

 

I am not at all sure that any of them would want attention drawn to the fact that they are rare examples in our white, old, male hobby. They just want to be fellow enthusiasts too. I am happy to respect that.   

 

I am not saying you don't, however I am also aware from my own meanderings in the hobby that a true commitment to equality is a bit rarer. Model Railway enthusiasts, even the old white men among them, are not the Ku Klux Klan, but unthinking put downs of women or foreigners are common. No offence intended but no awareness of any offence either. That is the danger. If everyone is from a narrow social demographic then there is no-one who detects and tries to correct prejudicial attitudes. It's not about individuals, it's about the groupthink and whether that is unhelpful in expanding into a wider social environment.

22 hours ago, t-b-g said:

 

The white, male, age 65-75 demographic of the present membership was seen as a weakness. It is in the agenda in those words. If it is, then almost every model railway and model engineering group has the same problem. If it had just mentioned the age, I would have let it go and even agreed but to bring the sex and ethnicity into it was a step too far.

 

 

Could be worse, they could have said "pale, male and stale"

That describes me too, but I'm not going to take offence at it, because it is an issue, not just for the GOG but for most model railway and model engineering societies. Age, obviously, because no-one lives for ever and if there isn't new blood coming in then societies will die as their members do. The white male aspect is not irrelevant either because it indicates a narrow social demographic and that is also a problem. I don't want to get into stereotypes here but would I be far off the mark if I suggested there was a general belief among the older men that the primary function of women at model railway gatherings was to make the tea? Not a helpful attitude if you are trying to appeal to a wider - and younger - population.

Colin Powell once said that when he went to high level government functions he wasn't the only black guy in the room, but he was the only black guy who didn't have a towel over his arm and was serving drinks. No-one, I hope, in a model railway society is going to start talking of banana boats or say "goodness gracious me" if a black or Asian enthusiast walks into a meeting as a newbie, but I do fear a fair few will think it's the hall caretaker come in about something

So instead of taking offence because, on this rare occasion we pale, stale, males are on the receiving end. Better to ask whether us all being from a narrow social demographic isn't a problem for the future and why that might be.

14 minutes ago, t-b-g said:

 

It happens in the business world too. People want to exercise their right to vote but sometimes don't feel that they know enough about the situation to allow them to decide which way to vote so they pass the vote and their choice to the Chairman, who they feel should be doing "the right thing" in the interests of the Business/Society.

This is wrong on various levels in my opinion. If you are ignorant of the situation then the correct action is to abstain. If you are not entirely sure but feel you should cast a vote on the side of the angels then ask to have a trusted proxy vote on your behalf. That proxy could be the Chairman in an individual capacity of course but to have the Chairman collect proxy votes simply through the job surely exacerbates the sort of discontent I have been reading about on this thread.

I started this thread with a mention of the narrow gauge railways in the Netherlands province of Gelderland. I have just found a YouTube video of what looks like an amateur's visit to Gelderland in 1956, the penultimate year of operation. The attraction was that the tramway company revived the passenger service for a few weeks that summer and again in 1957 as a tourist attraction. However the video also shows some of the goods trains that were still using the line for real business.

I had my doubts about the way you were going but just out of interest I typed "telford churches shropshire" into my search engine (duckduckgo). The "shropshire" is necessary to distinguish it from the churches Thomas Telford designed elsewhere. The images that come up show that you are not a million miles away in style from the church at Dawley. Not quite the Dale but in the right area. Then a link took me to this piece about the church in Jackfield (just over the Severn for those who don't know Shropshire)

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/nostalgia/2018/04/18/ghost-which-made-a-church-change-direction/

It might give you an idea given it was a ruin in your 1960s period

It was sound that got me hooked on DCC, though given the problems I have fitting just a chip, never mind all the son et lumiere gubbins into my 3mm scale locos there are times I hanker after the simplicity of DC. Then I think of all the section switching I would have to wire up and I'm back in love with DCC again.

Just got AnyRail6 to work under the development version of WINE installed on Ubuntu 20.04. Has to be the dev version for 64 bit support. Not sure whether AnyRail6 is 64 bit but as it doesn't run on the old 32 bit Windows systems it might be.

Well I made that pitch in the middle of a number of posts whingeing about the post Windows7 versions of Gatesware. I quite liked Windows7, and I still have it running under VirtualBox for a couple of programmes - AnyRail and the Silhouette cutter software - that don't really work on Linux. Tried to run those two with WINE a few years ago but it was a bit flaky.

The first thing I do with a new PC is shunt the Gatesware aside and install Linux. Ubuntu now but it has been SUSE or Mandriva in the past. However if the problem exists with no OS at all then this is irrelevant. Best answer I've seen is the one that suggests you may not be looking at the right video output.

What are "undirected proxy votes". I hope they aren't what I think they are.

15 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

No, it isn't. No democracy (or in this case supposedly democratic organisation) can work properly with such a low turnout.

20% isn't a bad turnout for an election like this. I wonder sometimes what the turnout is like for elections to my pension fund's board of directors, I certainly put the notice through the shredder soon after it comes as I don't recognise any of the names.

I wonder what the turn out was in previous years

2 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

After WW1 it certainly gradually decayed until it finally sagged into the mud.  But from 1876 to 1911 or so it was a primary route to Holland and Northern Germany.  Used by lots of British, Danish and German royalty (practically all related to Queen Victoria of course) and a lot of other well-known people including Bernard Shaw going to Beyreuth as a music critic, Theodore Roosevelt and Randloph Churchill (travelling under the name of Mr Spencer).  You wouldn't think so to look at Queenborough now.

The attraction for royalty, especially the 19th century Prince of Wales - the later Edward VII, was that Queenborough was not a primary route but a bit more of a discreet back route.

6 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Very interesting, even if not via Sevenoaks.

 

Queenborough was such a non-event in the longer term that it’s hard to believe it had such ambitions in its youth.

Ambitious enough to get the rival SER build a pier across the river Medway at Port Victoria along with a branch line to it

I'm not sure what the prototype situation was but what if the Minories like goods station was serving an inner city market - Billingsgate, Covent Garden, Leadenhall, that sort of thing. Could well be a cramped site, and at certain times of day would be busy and the porters would have to be pretty smart in unloading

Does a Minories style of layout have to be a passenger station, or could it be a goods-only job?

That might work quite well.

You could, but one thing to bear in mind is that many East Shropshire communities were given churches through a major charitable effort in the 1840s and 1850s to spread the word of God to what were seen as benighted godless communities in the newly industrialised parts of Britain. I think said communities might have preferred to be granted running water or even a gas supply but that is the godless me speaking. Anyway these churches mimicked the traditional English country church but they are in fact nineteenth century

I see where you're coming from. As a suggestion though think about modelling it in something smaller than 4mm scale to give a bit of false perspective. There might be something in the Faller or Kibri ranges to a nominal HO scale - but more likely to be 1:100 - which could be Anglicised. Generally it's the windows that set the region, German Lutheran churches tend to have more open windows than English ones, but you can turn the sort of window you find in the kits into more English ones by making a Plastikard pillar go up the middle. I've done that before.

Churches also have grave yards around them but if you don't fancy that here is a way to get round it. Years ago when I was a student teacher I took a class of kids on a field trip to the church at Ketley. The vicar was really helpful, the kids were his parishioners after all, and kids being kids they were interested in the dead bodies. At Ketley there is (or was) an open space in the graveyard, and the vicar was asked why they didn't bury people there as things looked full elsewhere. He told us they planned to but they always rod the ground first to make sure it wasn't used before. Sure enough the rodding indicated the soil had been dug before and an experimental dig turned up human bones. They then went back through all the old records they had, both there and in Shrewsbury and discovered Ketley had suffered a major plague outbreak in the 16th or 17th century and that open space was in fact where the plague pit was. Now back in 1976 there was no memorial or anything at Ketley but of course there might be now. So you can have an open space behind a church without needing to make lots of tombstones

Do you actually have room for a church on the hill?

On 15/08/2020 at 10:11, whart57 said:

 

The first shot could well be Harbledown Junction. The junction that the signal box controls however is between the Ashford and Elham Valley lines and not with the line the engine is on.

 

According to Brian Hart in his book The Elham Valley Line it is Harbledown Junction shown in the film

I am scratchbuilding most structures as my aim is to model real buildings. I am able to do so because on my regular trips to the far East I was able to find time to tramp the streets of Bangkok looking for and photographing suitable prototypes. With Google satellite view and knowing where the location is I can estimate size and from that produce a workable drawing and thus model. That's OK for houses and shops, but when it comes to silos, gantries and other industrial clobber I prefer to use kits

On 28/06/2020 at 19:41, Sturminster_Newton said:

 

Horsham Station has a similar arrangement on platform One to stop the unobservant from getting off onto the the wrong side of the train and dropping onto the conductor rail or the narrow parapet with the archtypal Exmouth Concrete wall topper...

 

 

But there isn't a similar thing on platform Four, which is where you'd expect to find it given that platforms three and four are both used for trains from London and when there is disruption the other one from the one normally used is pressed into service. Platform One is only used for services from Dorking and Epsom so regular travellers would know that.

I didn't know about these. I've had a look at their website and most are too German for my use, but I'll bear them in mind. Industrial plant and things like fencing and steelwork are pretty international so I might make use of some of that.

I don't think there is a simple answer to this. I model Thai railways to 3mm scale on 9mm gauge track. The scale-gauge combination is a little out but not actually much worse than HOm (HO scale on 12mm gauge) is as that is closer to Cape gauge. What runs on the rails is only part of the issue, and when it comes to what is beside the track then HO scale is much better provided for than 3mm scale. Whether that commercial stuff is suitable for Sri Lanka is another matter of course. I find that there is very little suited to Thailand and bizarrely quite a bit of the bits that are may say HO on the box but are in fact closer to 1:100 scale.