whart57

Once upon a time I had a copy (repro) of Whishaws Railways of Great Britain. It disappeared in a house move unfortunately. I seem to recall that aside from some excellent drawings of 1840-ish locomotives and stock, it also had a chapter on the author's system of "Reciprocating Railways". The idea was to save on track construction by using single track lines efficiently. Anyone know more about it?

It will be because C5 have taken the gamble of putting episode 5 up against Strictly.

4 hours ago, noiseboy72 said:

We did consider a skit on the Blockbusters TV show, but were told quite firmly it was feature films only!!

I sketched out a layout idea featuring a large demolition site with animations of buildings being knocked down and got a plaintive email from Pat saying "we never expected anyone to take it literally ....". Then I had to come up with something else

Btw, was I the only team captain who looked at the given track plan and thought "ugh, how much can I rip up in the time given"?

4 hours ago, noiseboy72 said:

We'd planned a Banksy-esque Dismalland theme park with various derelict rides and attractions, including an edible gingerbread house, an animated beanstalk and a slightly twisted "Babes in the Wood" scene using the Prieser Nude Bathers set and some strategically placed trees....

Not one of those Noch nookie animations then .........

I remember looking at the amended schedule and thinking that the Heat 5 guys really had pulled the short straw. One extra advantage for the even numbered heats (2 & 4) was that their semi-final was the one where the wild card would go, so we only needed to think of one semi-final design.

5 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

I'm afraid this all seems to be a manifestation of the adversarial and polarised spirit of the times - from which lunacy, I thought, an interest in railways of any sort was supposed to be an escape.

Sure, but we are discussing the dawn of the railway era here. Railways didn't just spring into existence fully formed, there was a prehistory before the opening of the Stockton and Darlington. And then there was the era from 1825 to c1850 when railways matured into what we recognise today. How that happened, and why all the earliest mechanised railways were in Britain has its roots in the political and economic environment of eighteenth century England and Scotland and how that had advantages for industry over how things were organised in France or elsewhere in Europe. It was after all the French who made the first steam powered "locomotive". However as it was the French government paying for it and they could think of no better use for it than pulling heavy artillery around fortresses, the inevitable failure didn't lead to an improved version.

That was very different in England where instead of there just being one government, factory and colliery owners were many and there were enough prepared to let the Trevithicks and Stephensons tinker away until they got things right. You can see in the development of steam power from James Watt, through Trevithick and onto Stephenson and Hackworth the chaotic progress as problems were identified, solutions devised and the results either incorporated or discarded. Only under the English (and Scottish) system could you have that trial and error approach that ended up around 1840 with the "Patentee" locomotive with its multi-tube boiler, horizontal cylinders, proper driving platform and the rest. Patentee and Evening Star have a lot more in common than Patentee and Locomotion have.

Other social and economic factors play a role in how those early railways operated. Railway operation demanded greater discipline than either coaching or the factories did. The gentry took a while getting used to the fact that they had to bend to the timetable, and that the timetable wouldn't bend to them. There was no room for casual labour in railway operations either, every worker had to be trained for the job and adhere to the rules. It took a few spectacular accidents before that was learned. We look back from 200 years later and we think that was obvious. It wasn't at the time though, and it is that sort of thing that makes the early railways so fascinating.

11 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

I totally agree with your response to that claim, of course they did - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_watermills for even the most basic coverage. 

 

As I said despite it being called a classicist view whatever that is, early to mid-18th century European technology was essentially not very different to that which was in existence in Roman times. The major advances in the post-Roman world had been until then essentially philosophical and artistic. The main building materials were still wood, stone and brick, power was still mainly human, animal, wind or water and consequently not capable of yielding the raw strength that steam and subsequent forms of machine derived power did. Agriculture was still practised in much the same seasonal labour way as it was in the classical world, which meant long idle periods with no actual monetary income, which in turn impacted on the growth of consumer goods production which was the driving force of the wealth created by the industrial revolution. People in general did not live very mobile lives unless in military service or the maritime trades, and literacy was really only within the access of a few.

 

Actually no. Agriculture was not the same as practised in Roman times. Improved crop rotation in late medieval times, the move to cash crops in the 15th and 16th centuries and then the Agricultural Revolution in the early eighteenth century all preceded the Industrial Revolution. True, agricultural was still a seasonal thing, but then it still is today to a very large degree. We can't abolish the seasons.

Nor is it true that there was no consumer economy before the Industrial Revolution. Golden Age Holland had a flourishing consumer economy. It wasn't just the Vermeers and Rembrandts we see in museums, it was a small army of lesser painters turning out still lives and classical scenes for ordinary burghers' houses. Delftware pottery was originally cheap copies for the middle classes of the imported Chinese porcelain adorning the "elite's" tables. Porcelain, which the Delft potters - and those of Stoke on Trent - eventually perfected was also unknown in Roman times.

In the more democratic (the term used loosely here) societies of the Low Countries and England, literacy rates among males were high compared to Classical times, two out of three men had functional literacy. Not so high among women, but even there rates were higher than in earlier times. Since the invention of printing - with movable type, we need to make that distinction - the spread of information and opinion was hugely more efficient than in earlier centuries, alarmingly so in the eyes of traditional princes and aristocrats who sought to censor and ban.

It's true that before the late eighteenth century, industry could not harness the muscle of steam power, but one thing we must not lose sight of is that the Romans could not have built a steam engine even if they understood the principles. They did not have the metallurgy. Quality wrought iron was a late medieval development, cast iron even more recent, Abraham Darby starting to produce the stuff in the early eighteenth century. Lathes and boring machines needed to produce cylinders and pistons didn't exist till the 16th century.

But most important, though largely hidden, was the economic advances made since the Renaissance. Banking enabled many things. One of the first things was to allow agricultural specialisation. Every European ate bread made from grain, not every European lived where it was productive to grow grain. As early as the 15th century the Dutch realised they would do better to buy grain from the Poles and Lats and instead concentrate on dairy products they could sell in France and Germany. That was more than a straightforward trade and needed a money economy to enable it.

The link you provide suggests the first practical windmills appeared in Persia in the 10th century AD.

6 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

The railways were part of that great change called the Industrial Revolution. And it was a revolution because up until the late 18th century, apart from relatively minor advances in things like ship construction (e.g. wooden ships got larger with better sail technology, and things like firearms) Europe was essentially, as far as technology went, not much advanced over the way the Romans had left things. During the intervening 1300 odd years our major social and intellectual changes were essentially in non-technological areas and so the large majority of working people were still bound to the land, or trades and crafts not much changed for thousands of years. Jobs with little or no chance of personal advancement.

This is the Classicists belief, but it completely understates the developments in medieval times.

The Ancient civilisations of Rome and Greece were slave economies. Apart from weaponry, technology was pretty poor. The Roman empire did not have windmill or watermill technology, why bother when slaves were plentiful.

It's true that for some eight hundred years in Europe that technological advances were non-existent - not so in the Arab world and China where there were advances in metallurgy and other materials technologies and in chemistry - but then in the 14th century came the Black Death. The sudden drop in population and the resulting labour scarcity drove medieval mechanisation. Water mills and then windmills were developed and refined, improvements came in brick making and ceramics, and in glassmaking - many of these developed from knowledge pinched from the Arabs - and of course there was the invention of printing, a technology that would not have been possible without a good papermaking industry, another thing the Romans didn't have.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries banking and financing came of age in Italy and the Low Countries and that drove further advances. Agriculture went through the first of its revolutions and mechanisation of many processes took place using wind power in Holland. The Industrial Revolution in England took that a stage further, first with water power and then with steam power. Why in England? Because the key components of coal, water, iron ore and - often forgotten - finance, came together. France had the first three, as well as engineers and inventors every bit as good as the British ones, but ancien regime France did everything through aristocratic patronage, not hard nosed finance. Someone like Watt could team up with someone like Boulton and then find customers willing to pay for horsepower. Watt's French equivalent would have to get Marquis de Quelquechose to make an introduction to the Duc de Jenesaisquoi who would then make a recommendation to the Royal Commission for La Industrie. Not surprisingly the French fell behind .....

15 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

After all the lives of paying passengers would be put in danger if unskilled driving staff were employed, not to mention the risk of damage to complex machinery if unskilled or scab mechanics were employed.  

 

Didn't middle class train buffs like O S Nock and J Maskelyne do stints on the footplate during the General Strike in 1926?

Wasn't the Joint Stock Company Act satirised in one of the less well-known Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (Utopia Ltd)?

And then of course there is the story of the Welsh line that was spared when it was pointed out to Harold Wilson that it ran through four marginal constituencies

15 hours ago, noiseboy72 said:

And that was what happened to us. We scored more points than the winners of Heats 1 & 4, but the wild card rule let us through, so I think it was a fair result all around.

 

I think it was a fair result that Muddle and Go Nowhere got the wild card, but fairly early on I got the impression that the judging in Heat 5 was remarkably generous compared to previous heats. I suspect that was Team Grantham dragging everyone else up, if the other two teams had been judged as in previous heats there wouldn't have been much of a contest.

Anything can be turned into a layout part, not everything can be turned into a part of the layout you are building

What's often overlooked with Beeching is that the lines primarily built to carry passengers got off pretty lightly, it was the lines built for freight and which carried passengers almost as an afterthought that were axed. Lorries had already cut into their traffic in a big way.

In urban areas Beeching was also working with the flow that had closed Britain's city tram networks, the last one - Sheffield - had closed just two years before Beeching got to work. If there was a failing there though it was in not looking abroad. In Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, the modernisation and expansion of tram networks and/or the re-purposing of urban branchlines to become suburban metros was already underway. In Britain that wouldn't start for another quarter century, an opportunity lost.

17 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

Without getting into politics, our membership of the EEC/EU has always been strained and nothing has changed.

Only for some, which is why the debate is so divisive. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to when "Europe" was number eight or nine on people's concerns at election times.

I'm not sure which will be more contentious on here, Beeching or Brexit

I read that piece by Larry Elliott at lunchtime in the print version. It strikes me that he is stretching a point rather a long way here, and he also takes the rather nostalgic view of Beeching that many in Britain do. He seems to forget that most of the lines closed by Beeching had infrequent services, were slow and had stations some distance from the communities they were supposed to serve. The real failure was failure to provide a good national bus network, and to let the bus network that existed shrivel away

I was hoping my grandchildren could come along to the preso, so I distinctly remember that over 18s only rule.

On the contrary, KBG had an approval system where you couldn't order your kit until your design was signed off by the producers. All team captains also had to submit their designs for the semifinal and final as well as there was a very short turn around for the later heats. Our design for Heat 4 was accepted by return of email - in fact the design preceded the formation of the team - but my designs for the semi and final were knocked back initially. One because I had interpreted the theme too literally ("we never expected anyone to take it literally" they said) and one because I had read the theme in a different way, and referenced something else completely. As we didn't get past the heat I can safely bin those designs ;-)

43 minutes ago, Legend said:

As to themes . Why would there be a sparkly shiny new city in planet 16 , but the train be a Coronation Pacific ?  Doesn’t really go does it.. and what sort of backward community are they on Mars that use Radial Tanks, Fowler 4fs and a Coal Tank to shunt the rocket .  Where’s the Triang Battlespace Turbocar when you need it . 

 

I once sketched out some ideas for a railway layout set in the 2080s. It's amazingly hard to do, and thinking up suitable locos for a Space City or Mars colony would be the same. At least the Coronation Pacific was streamlined, and thinking about it now the radials and coal tanks were at least from H G Wells' time.

Steve did, but most of it didn't make the final edit.

1 hour ago, LNER4479 said:

One detail not previously mentioned is that the full title of the challenge for Heat 5 as presented to us was: 'The sky's the limit. The space race. To infinity and beyond'.

Ah, that explains it. We had a nice snappy two word challenge, no extra phrases. I wondered why all three teams had rockets and why no-one thought of something like "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" which would have tied in more with railways. Given that those early flyers followed railway lines for navigation purposes you could even have dragged a biplane behind a train .....

The flooded farm that Martin built was inspired by this archive picture

The little signalman popping up with his flags, too, was utterly prototypical. (Those present at Fawley Hill would have seen an archive picture on the backboard)