whart57

20 minutes ago, Andy Kirkham said:

And as I also have another Powell & Pressburger movie recorded - A Canterbury Tale - here are a couple of scenes from that. I don't know the Canterbury area, but presumably the first shot is of the place where one line crosses over the other.

 

The other two show H Class No.1306 arriving at a station. I'm sure someone will be able to tell us whether it's actually at Canterbury.

The fireman's rather flamboyant gymnastics are notable (the train is still moving). I wonder if this was at the request of the filmmakers or just happened to take place when a routine arrival was filmed.

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.

The other two shots look to be at Canterbury West. As far as I can ascertain from my limited information H class 1306 was shedded at Ashford so might well have been used on Ashford-Ramsgate locals

What is interesting is the locomotive underneath the signal box gantry. I think it might be on the goods yard headshunt and is it one of the stubby funnelled R1s used on the Whitstable branch.

Canterbury Tale was made in 1944 so the Elham Valley and Whitstable branches were still open, albeit that the only trains on the Elham Valley line were troop specials (when they weren't playing with the rail mounted gun parked on the line). In World War One the Elham Valley line saw a lot of traffic as an alternative route to Dover, especially after the landslip in Folkestone Warren.  After the fall of France though there just wasn't the demand for traffic to get to the Channel ports and the Elham Valley was to all intents and purposes closed in World War 2

1 hour ago, 009 micro modeller said:

 

Not to be confused with Joe Works (Japanese H0n30), of course.

 

Well I do presume that Japanese Joe Works' processes do not involve a bucket on a rope. They are a class outfit aren't they?

I am also aware of cases where the production methods used in "Joe's Works" discourage others taking them on, or even frighten others off. There is a story of a wheel maker whose centrifugal casting machine was a bucket swung round his garage on a rope ........

Real problems I have encountered though are moulds that were for an obsolete machine and can't be used on current machines, excessively labour intensive moulding processes and worn out tools that were too costly to replace. I believe there was also a case where "Mrs Joe" was so resentful of the time "Joe" spent on his model railway stuff that the first thing she did after the crematorium curtains closed on Joe was throw all his stuff out so no-one else could have it.

41 minutes ago, Northroader said:

Mind, places like that were never connected to mains electricity.

Or if they were the amps came in over an overhead wire. As did the telephone if its an office. So, any suggestion that mid 20th century technology has reached it requires a means of connection to be modelled

On 27/07/2020 at 10:12, steve1 said:

Watched an older Poirot last night about a kidnapped Prime Minister, set in the early 1930s at a guess. The railway scene was supposed to be Charing Cross but passing that by, the coach the PM boarded was in SR green with Sxxxxx numbers and looked suspiciously like an EMU. It set off with the obligatory steam sound and clouds of smoke...

 

The rest of the programme was fine for period cars and such, so why get the railway scene so wrong? One little dud I did spot was a squaddie in one scene had his shoulder insignia upside down.

 

steve

"So wrong" is overstating it. As for using an EMU, surely that's because it's a lot cheaper to just blow smoke and steam into shot rather than hire a steam engine and crew plus fill in all the necessary forms and get permissions

This one's pretty ugly

Sorry, I meant the bloke in the driving seat .......

The shot of the cutting looks good.

Re: weathering mineral wagons, I'm sure there is reams of advice elsewhere on this website

Class 04 withdrawal didn't start till 1967 so PO is unlikely for your period. And cab numbers were usually the cleanest bit on an engine. I think you'll have to replace them and be a little less liberal with the thinners next time.

Still enjoying reading about this progress. One caveat, as always based on having lived in Telford in the 70s, don't make your station car park too big. In the 1960s, if you took your car to drive to the station then often you had to leave it parked on the verge of the approach road. Park and Ride was still about 20 years away.

On 21/07/2020 at 18:08, Horsehay Railway Modeller said:

I also fitted a super capacitor stay alive from ebay.

 

It's only tiny however it keeps the wheels turning for six seconds off the track! 

 

How do you fit those keep-alives. I thought you had to solder wires to the DCC chip itself which has always put me off.

On 14/07/2020 at 03:40, SteveyDee68 said:

My idea of a “simple” kit would be: resin cast details, a screw-together idiot-proof chassis (sideframes, spacers, wheels, pickups etc), a fold-up gearbox to make use of a readily available motor (eg the Hornby 0-4-0 mechanism), and full size drawings with the appropriate thickness plasticard from which to cut components! Soldering should be limited to wiring in the motor to the pickups, but if possible a non-soldering solution should also be devised. Such a kit could be a gentle introduction and palpable benefit to joining the Guild, a step away from RTR but not requiring a rocket-science skill set!!

That's precisely what I hoped to produce for the 3mm Society when I was chairman for seven years. Actually trying to do it was a different matter. History says that in TT and OO, back in the 1960s there were white metal kits that fitted on standard Triang or Hornby Dublo 0-6-0 chassis, but to modern eyes the compromises to match prototype to the mechanism's wheel size and spacing are unacceptable. So before you start you are faced with a choice of prototype. Pick the wrong one and you can't sell the result.

Then there is the definition of "idiot" in idiot-proof. How much scope for cack-handedness do you design out? Do you assume people can fit screw-in spacers correctly or do they need a complete milled or 3D printed chassis block.

Which motor? Will your choice still be available in five year's time?

Saying you want a "simple kit" is easy. Turning it into reality isn't.

23 hours ago, Will Crompton said:

It might just be a statistical fluke of the locations mentioned so far but I am struck that quite a few are coastal - Wemyss Bay, Bexhill West, Littlehampton, Swansea and Weymouth.

That might be because an awkward layout on dry land could usually be mitigated by buying a bit of land. Not so easy when a river or the sea is the cause of the problem

Have a look at this, your gf might appreciate it

https://www.telford.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/3151/coalbrookdale_-_discovering_lincoln_hill.pdf

If you are out and about, my fading memory thinks it's near Rose Cottage that the remains of the Coalbrookdale plateway were found

1 hour ago, DavidCBroad said:

The L shape with branch in front of FY does not work well as either the curve has to be very sharp on the inner radius or the curve gobbles up a lot of length.   Loco from one end appearing at the other station while shunting is also an issue.  Buckingham had a Canal Wharf in front of the main line as it curved away from the station at one time which may be something better than a station to hide the FY with.  

The intention of this layout design strategy is not so much to hide the fiddle yard as to make it less important for operations. The amount of space available will obviously also have an effect. After all the distance from Lydd to Dungeness scales out as around 250 feet in OO. More pertinently from the start of the run round loop at Dungeness to the buffer stops scales out at just over 11 feet. Compromise is always necessary and on a home layout the sneaking appearance of a loco at the throat of the "wrong station" may well be the trade off between realism in appearance and realism in operation. (On an exhibition layout you can just make things bigger)

You mention Peter Denny's Buckingham. Would that layout have achieved iconic status if it hadn't grown into a complete railway system which could be operated with minimal input from the fiddle yard? I doubt it would have achieved its fame as a simple terminus to fiddle yard design.

23 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

Depending on date, you could also include the Lydd Ranges Railway connection at Lydd. The ranges railway seems to have been standard gauge in its first incarnation (1890s-1920s), although the later version (WW2 onwards?) was/is 2ft gauge and didn't connect to the station so far as I know.

Apparently the 60cm gauge was more for shifting targets around the ranges. Shingle is not easy to move around on

The Middleton Press book covering the New Romney branch has some great pictures of the Military railway before WW1. Artillery on flat trucks, whole regiments of horses, massive amounts of straw and hay to feed said horses. Goods traffic of the most esoteric sorts. In fact Lydd camp is almost a layout on its own. Or it could be part of the overall plan

Of course I have forgotten the classic one - Lydnam Heath/Bishops Castle

Actually there was a sizeable rail-served gravel pit at Dungeness. Rail-served because that's where the SER and SECR got their track ballast from.

I'm posting this as a bit of a spin-off from the Theory of Minories topic. That topic started delving into having more than one terminus, which was not really the Minories concept. However I think the ideas are worth pursuing.

The classic example, the ur-design if you like, is probably the Berrow-East Brent layout of c1960, though possibly Peter Denny's Buckingham-Stony Stratford preceded it. The basic design is something like this:

How many real life examples of this are there? Not many I think. In the Minories topic there was mention of the lines on Sheppey where until WW1 trains ran into Sheerness Dockyard and then went back out again to go on to Sheerness on Sea. However it was possible to run directly from Sittingbourne to Sheerness on Sea as indeed trains did when the Dockyard station was closed for security reasons during the war.

The reason for pursuing this layout design is to allow more operation between small stations rather than in and out of a fiddle yard. So a variant might be a junction where the normal operation is a train running first to one terminus and then returning to run back out to the other. Sounds crazy? Well it's how things worked on Romney Marsh.

I can't think of other examples of this sort of operation, though I presume there must be.

The idea is to minimise the use of the fiddle yard in operations.

2 hours ago, Il Grifone said:

 

You weren't supposed to eat it!

Of course not, but what do teething babies do?

19 hours ago, tubs01 said:

so a few days ago i opened up some Hornby pullman coaches and i saw some weights inside. i didnt touch them, but i used my scissors to grab them and put them under my bed. i really need to know if Hornby use lead weights because right now im scared of going near any of my model railway stuff

Lead as silvery grey metal is not much of a problem as it takes quite a bit of transfer and ingestion to be poisonous. Lead as part of a chemical compound on the other hand is way more dangerous. Like all those bright reds and greens painted on 1950s Meccano for example. And my cot was painted with lead containing paint .....

The real killer though was the anti-knock stuff put in petrol. All that tetra-ethyl lead that car exhausts used to spew out at pushchair height. Banned some thirty years ago, but you wouldn't believe today how angry the petrol heads got over that

53 minutes ago, phil_sutters said:

'Whitemetal' kits, figures and parts are cast from alloys with different mixes of metals, that often include tin and lead, which is why they come with warnings about not being toys and so are unsuitable for children. A good hand wash after working with them in the construction phase is obviously recommended, but once painted the toxic content should be sealed in. 

The antimony in typical white metal is far more deadly than lead I think.

And has no-one mentioned solder? Lead-tin alloy is back as it just happens to be better than most lead-free alternatives. And it didn't even need Brexit for that .......

4 hours ago, lanchester said:

At the end of that episode, when they are in the perp's railway room, among his impressive collection of artefacts is a smokebox numberplate with a totally spurious number - from memory, something like 91XXX.

You are assuming the numberplate came off a British loco

Bit of a Super-Minories this, but as a bit of fun with Anyrail I've drawn out the throat to St Pauls (aka Blackfriars). Like the present day Blackfriars, a lot of it is on a bridge over the Thames, only the platforms were over terra firma. I've simplified it a bit by leaving out the two through platforms as well as the through lines to Ludgate Hill and Moorgate.

Squares are 50cm

1 hour ago, Pacific231G said:

*(Grand Vitesse was an interesting name for a London goods depot because Grand Vitesse (GV)  was the official French designation for the type of fast priority goods the Ewer St. depot handled including fruit and veg. for Covent Garden and Borough Markets along with wine, silks and even bullion as opposed to Petit Vitesse (PV)  which included all the coal, timber, stone and everything else that trundled around on ordinary goods trains at normal shipping rates)    

Might have something to with the fact that to the South Eastern (and later SECR) their most glamorous destination out of Charing Cross was Paris and the top link trains were always the Dover and Folkestone Boat Trains. Ordinary trundling goods would go to Bricklayers Arms, but the top link goods may well have come from France.