whart57

No it didn't need to be. You can see the same dynamic going on in women's football. There is a real push going on to create an elite women's game that can be monetised for paying spectators, be they in the ground or watching on TV. A push to create grassroots facilities for women's football, not so much. The result is that the small community clubs that basically created and sustained the women's game are dropping down the leagues and the sides funded by the major men's clubs are dominating.

I read somewhere the opinion that the amateur game was played for the benefit of the players, not the paying spectators. A typical RU crowd in the 1960s would be small, a few hundred at most even for a top club game, and would be made up of former players for whom a game - and several pints - on a Saturday afternoon was still part of their social round. Nothing wrong with that except that it is not a commercial proposition.

Interesting piece in today's Guardian which I draw to the attention of those who do not normally go there: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/jan/02/rugby-union-nostalgia-defences-space-tackles Basically he argues rugby is much better now than in the amateur days. Some may disagree but it's worth reading his points.

A bit rude about a guy who did a lot to keep 3mm scale alive in the 1970s. You miss the point though, the two of anything quote is about the phenomenon we see here, namely, that there isn't a loco built that someone somewhere doesn't want to see in model form. Success comes from identifying other factors. That Swindon Works loco is a successful RTR model because Hornby market it as a cheap, junior's starter set loco. I never realised it was actually a real loco, I'd always assumed it was some pattern makers fudge around an existing chassis. The Titfield stuff works because it has a hook and it's different. Less successful ventures struggle because not enough see the potential

The late Bernard Holland, a pioneer in 3mm scale, used to say you could sell two of anything, the challenge was to sell more than two. I am of the opinion that most of the suggestions here would fail the "Holland Test", lots of things the poster would like themselves but very few that trigger a metaphorical round of applause and cries of "me too". Another test I would apply if I were Rapido would be whether a suggestion was sufficiently different from something already available. A new paintjob is noticeable and relatively cheap to do, but a later version of a wagon that was a few inches longer and had the rivets differently spaced? Who'd notice?

There were a lot of resolutions suggested in the paper yesterday. One I particularly liked was: Don't fix anything until everyone knows it's broken

I find a test track like this to be a useful thing to have: The length of powered rail is not critical but it should be shorter than any total wheelbase of a six wheeled loco or motor bogie. The idea is that a loco has to run smoothly through even though pick up on one side is only through one wheel. It really highlights pick-up issues. It should go without saying that you test a locomotive both ways ........

Or a Colonel Stephens railbus set As a more general point it would help if people just put a descriptor in for what CVs are, particularly the higher numbered vendor-specific ones. We should know what most of the lower-numbered NMRA standard ones are but the vendors doing their own thing is another matter.

It should be remembered that after a momentary break in power on DC the volts come through as before. Inertia will help the motor through this particularly if a flywheel is fitted. On DCC though, a return after the break means the chip has to reboot and then wait for the next data packet, all of which may take a fraction of a second but is still noticeable. If acceleration/deceleration is programmed then it will be even more noticeable The "does it work on DC" test is an exclusive one - if a loco is a poor performer on DC then it isn't going to get better with DCC, not if it works on DC it will work with DCC. Temporarily wiring a light in to the chip might be a useful diagnostic. If the light is not lit steadily when turned on then it is a power supply issue.

If you can't do the prototype station then you aren't doing a real railway. There are limits to how far you can shrink a real prototype down without it losing realism.

Yuletide preparations plus the festive days themselves put the brakes on progress. So no further progress to report on the Henschel shunter. However three carriage bodies now have wheels under them as I completed the bogies as functional units. Still need the cosmetic axle boxes on them but these three carriages are nicely free-running. I also stuck in a load more windows on the 158 set. The tinted glass is represented by photographic acetate, the sort used to mask lights. I can't remember the exact reduction figure, 10% sounds familiar. The acetate was run through the Silhouette cutter to produce exact sized panes which are then superglued in place. A bit fiddly but because the bodies are 3D printed the window openings are consistent in size. Santa - aka Mrs Whart57 - left a new soldering station under the tree. Sending Santa the link to the right item on Amazon worked a treat. All set for constructing the railcar unit from the etch that arrived last month.

The alternative is to create fictional towns served by real railways.

Something I have said to Rapido a number of times on their surveys, pointing out that Earl and Countess were long-lived, both survive in preservation, could be done in pre-Swindon (OK, Oswestry) and post-Swindon versions with liveries varying from Cambrian, through GWR to BR and Preservation liveries. (I think I'm right in saying that the Cambrian livery has been applied to at least one loco without unrebuilding the loco by the Preservation Society). Done in 0n16.5 with an accompanying coal wagon and brakevan - again feasible in many liveries - they could make a decent collectors set as well as giving proper modellers (😁) something.

The Championship clubs have told Bill Sweeney where to stuff his franchise Premiership 2 plan https://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/other/bill-sweeney-s-plans-for-second-tier-are-flawed/ar-AA1lVMZz

In local government elections too the turn-outs are on the low side and because only a few wards change hands each time politicians know that a concentrated push on a wedge issue can deliver results. (The May elections this year were an exception but it's rare for one of the main parties to have generated so much disgust among voters).

Which basically comes back to politics and political will. Without a broad consensus that alternative transport arrangements to private cars are needed in towns and cities and that the funds need to be provided then English provision of cycle paths is going to be the half-arsed waste of time and money of painting a white line a yard from the kerb and filling in the form for Whitehall that a target has been met.

Now that might be a valid point if the combined widths were the same but the much more important factor is the separation from the main carriageway. Aside from the fact that Amsterdam made the decision to ban all motor vehicles, other than local access, from that road and give it over to cyclists and pedestrians, there is a raised paving section to enforce separation. Unlike the painted line that is the norm in England. Now we are starting to do similar things here with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods but, oh my ears and whiskers, what a political row they cause. I'm not saying that Amsterdam city council don't run into problems with voters when they propose traffic schemes but the political climate is totally different. The main differences are, in my opinion anyway, that "every driver is also a cyclist" thing instead of an undeclared war existing between car drivers and cyclists, and secondly the fact that Dutch elections use PR so councils don't change direction completely because of a few hundred votes in a handful of wards. A cycle network, Dutch style, is more than a cycle path next to the main carriageway. It involves designating some streets for bicycles, others for cars. It's also common for a minor road or street to be part of a cycle route without banning cars but then a 20 kph (15 mph) speed limit is applied which becomes a compromise between motor access and cyclist safety. That seems to work. I presume you considered all these when you were working but, truthfully, were the reasons for not following through because they were impractical or because the local elected representatives feared grief at the ballot box? Or because central government, in hock to the car lobby, weighed in?

Cycle paths put in in the last dozen years or so: London: Amsterdam: I rest my case

Politics is about choosing which facts to present to support the path you want to go. It is rare that facts are unanswerable.

This is getting pointless because you are now telling me what I think. You could enhance this debate by sharing some of your real experiences as to why the Cambridge situation has evolved into what it is rather than try to bully us into silence with it. I'd be interested for example in understanding how councillors have to be swung behind a plan. The guided bus system is obviously a controversial one - or was at the time - so what did the decision-making look like from the inside? Our neighbours in Crawley also have such a system, put in with a lot of fuss and froth. Speaking of Crawley though, that too was a blank sheet of paper like Stevenage, but it is far from a cyclists' paradise. And not many hills to use as an excuse.

You are being far too defensive. I accept many of your points, particularly that you were working with what you inherited and that the road transport lobby is very influential. We might note for example that a few months ago a Westminster byelection turned on a dishonest representation of a transport policy which was spun to be a "war on motorists". But we created the political climate of the car is king, that was our collective choice. We can't go back to the 1930s though and design things differently, we need to work with what we have, and that's not easy. Let's be honest with ourselves though, it's not because the Netherlands is flat and we aren't.

I never made that claim, but explain how every medium sized Dutch town has a safe cycling network but hardly any British equivalent has. The climate is the same, few British towns are clinging to cliffsides, most have hills that can be tackled by a reasonably fit cyclist, the populations have similar needs for schools, shops, travel to work. Yet I last rode a bike here thirty years ago because I don't like sharing road space with impatient motorists cutting me up at the lights and not seeing me at junctions. The difference does come down to political choices made decades ago. Political systems are part of that but it is choices made.

Those boulevards are rarely in the centre though, the centres of most European cities are as twisty and windy as any British town or city. I come back to my point about political choices - when cities expanded in the 1920s and 30s most European cities decided to lay in those boulevards and separated motor and human powered traffic from the start. I never said it was easy, but I would reiterate again that it is an excuse to hide behind an excuse like the Dutch don't have hills - you don't in Cambridgeshire either - or that European cities have plenty of space. I'm not surprised you found it very difficult to design a cycle network for Cambridge but trying to retrofit one on top of sixty years of car-centric planning will be difficult. I say again, it's the choices we made fifty or sixty years ago that are now coming to bite us.

Have you ever been to Amsterdam? Or Utrecht, or any number of Dutch cities? They had more cities in medieval times than England did. The centre of Amsterdam is full of narrow winding streets - many with a canal down the middle - alley-ways and a few, congested, main roads. To make that cycle friendly required making decisions unpopular with motorists. Reducing car parking space for example, closing roads off to through motor traffic. That approach has been taken for the inner suburbs too, the streets that were laid out before WW2. Only in the estates laid out in the 1960s and later do you have wide thoroughfares. But on these estates the cyclist is still the priority. I don't know Cambridge but where I am we could have a network of cycle tracks that link the town centre and our high schools to the main residential areas without demolishing anything. However it would mean doing things car drivers wouldn't like. So that comes back to my point of political choices. Our high schools have large car parks and drives laid out for parental drop off and pick up, the sixth form college even has a car park for students. As I said, claiming the Dutch have a country laid out for cycling and we don't is an excuse. It's an excuse to hide the fact that the Dutch chose to have a country like that and we chose to choke our towns and cities with short distance car journeys. And more historic buildings have been demolished to make space for cars and trucks than have ever been knocked down for bikes.

Having cycled in both the Netherlands and the UK I get a little irritated by that "Netherlands is different" excuse. It is, but the difference, and reason why I'd still consider using a cycle in NL, is infrastucture. The Netherlands is much more cyclist-friendly, and that has been because of political choices. Your 1 in 3s to Grosmont are a rarity in Britain, our hills are much less steep than that. The Netherlands also have steep inclines, nearly everywhere in the west there are height differences between roads running along the tops of dykes and those running in the base of a polder, and the transition between the two is as steep as any normal hill in Britain. And then there are the long drags into headwinds. The Dutch adopted bicycle gearing just as fast as the British, price being the main driver there as here. Back pedal brakes have one advantage over the wheel rim brakes favoured in Britain, namely that they work just as efficiently in the wet as they do in dry conditions. In the Netherlands they have a different voting system, one that favours centrist coalitions rather than swinging from right to left and back again, and they have a reinforcing virtuous circle that encourages cycling. Mums - and sometimes dads - take the kids to nursery on the bike. When the child has learned to ride a bike themselves they ride to school along safe cycle paths escorted by parents and then on their own, safety coming from the herd effect of dozens of kids following the same route at the same time. When those kids learn to drive in late teens - or get mopeds - they don't stop being cyclists, and when they become parents themselves the cycle starts again. Because nearly every Dutch motorist also keeps a bike for weekends and short journeys, they don't have the vicious politics dividing car drivers and cyclists so putting in a cycle lane on a new road is seen as a perfectly normal thing to do. We should be like that here too, but to make that happen we should have started sixty years ago when car use started growing.