RichardT

But, as my maternal granddad worked at York Carriageworks from 1915 to 1966 I’d also be there under the family rule, so if I bumped into you would the resultant RMWeb paradox loop result in our returning to the present to discover that TT-120 narrow gauge was the only legal modelling scale allowed by our Guinea pig overlords? Yours in timely-wimey confusion Richard

Not sure that’s an exact parallel. For me 3D printing is still at the CBA phase: it’s moved beyond the pioneering daguerreotype stage to being well established for professionals and accessible to informed amateurs. But it’s still too much like amateur photography was when that required you to make your own glass plate negs and then have a home darkroom to develop and print them. Or home PCs when you had to learn DOS commands. When 3D printing develops to the point and shoot stage - I can buy an ordinary-consumer-friendly domestic unit and consumables on the high street (real or virtual), and instead of designing things myself purchase downloadable files for models that have been tested and work (and where the designer/creator gets a return for their effort), and then just hit “print” - then we’ll see what effect it has on the hobby. That said, I don’t think that stage is too far away. The Shapeways model for obtaining 3D prints already has a smell of MySpace or Friends Reunited about it. (What I personally would like to see are more properly designed 3d printed *kits* instead of whole body shells. Far too many of the railway model vehicles on Shapeways seem to be simply miniatures of whole vehicles, with no thought given to robustness (e.g. buffers and boiler fittings printed as part of the body shells instead of being left for the builder to fit in a more suitable material) and especially as to how they could be motorised (no thought given to adapting the print to take a commercial chassis, or printing a chassis with provision for an actually existing motor and gears). RichardT

That’s the nub. This system is optimised for buying tickets on the go using the LNER app. I live in Darlington and travel regularly to York, Durham and Newcastle for leisure/volunteering purposes (I’m retired) two or three times a week. I have a choice of LNER, TPE and XC for most of these off-peak journeys. I usually buy the ticket for these journeys as an e-ticket on my phone as I’m walking up to the station. The LNER app shows you the next trains (all TOCs, not just LNER) and the ticket prices available on them, including the cheapest Advance singles (again, from all TOCs not just LNER) and I pick the one that suits me best. The app shows live train running times, so I can avoid buying an Advance and then discovering that specific train is now 30 mins late. (This currently applies most to TPE services! They offer noticeably cheaper on-the-day advance singles but are not as reliable. XC tickets are always the most expensive.) If the ticket is for an LNER train (not just advances, any ticket) you get 2% “Perks” credit to your account, redeemable against any future LNER Advance tickets bought through the app. I also buy nearly all my tickets for longer distance/further in advance journeys through the LNER app, regardless of the TOC I’m using, having checked a ticket split app first (longer XC journeys are nearly always significantly cheaper using split tickets.). For some cross-London journeys the LNER app will generate a paper ticket for collection rather than an e-ticket (so you have something to operate the Tube gates). If I’m not sure what train I want to come back on I either repeat the “buy on the way to the station” process when I’m coming back, or just buy an Anytime off peak single for the return journey. It looks like that type of ticket will be threatened by the new system. However, I’ve just bought tickets for a visit to friends in London in March: outward Advance single, but return using an Off-peak single because there are engineering works that day and I want some flexibility. And I was able to get both via the app. So it looks like the change at the moment is restricted only to the routes where there’s direct competition with LUMO (KX-NCL or EDB) RichardT

I’ll wait and see how this pans out in practice for Darlington, but one thing that irritates me is the continued use of the weasel phrase “simplifying fares” by LNER in the article. They’re not “simplifying fares” - they’re reducing (simplifying?) the number of *ticket types* to three. There’s still a multiplicity of fares charged such that you don’t know what your journey will cost until the moment you book it (unless buying the Anytime ticket). RichardT

Sometimes, that’s all you can do. I’ve decided to regard this as some kind of not-very-good lottery. CBA cancelling the order now: just wait and see… Richard

Must….not…get…drawn…into…this…thread…will…never…escape… RichardT (Oh, alright then. Watching Raven Pacifics at York in the 1920s followed by a local train to Alne to catch the Easingwold Railway)

Hole, digging, stop.

And see also the Derwent Valley Light Railway - now Derwent Holdings (FTSE 250 property company). RT

The problem was the early issues of YMR, where they had about 16 pages of a list of RTR and kits etc in 4mm and later N Gauge. Yes, that was the thing. After CJF retired there were a few issues containing some veiled criticisms of his editorship (not a good look) and then the YMR rebrand. I stuck with it to the Dec issue and then they’d lost me. I did pick up a copy a couple of years later (after they’d reverted to the MR brand) and it was much improved, but by then I had a big mortgage and season ticket costs so spending anything more on model railways was out. Richard

Out of interest @Nearholmer where did you find that births graph? I'd be very interested in getting an attributed copy to show to the students that I mentor (and to some younger friends). One of my pet peeves is that we are too ready in this country to uncritically assume that US social trends also apply to the UK, and allow policy, politics and attitudes to be influenced by issues that apply differently in this country. (For example assuming that identifying a series of generational cohorts starting with "baby boomers" between 1945 and 1965 makes sense in the UK context. Or, more seriously, that the issues behind US racial tensions automatically map onto the British/Commonwealth experience. See "This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter" by Tomiwa Owolade for a nuanced critique of that assumption.) Dragging this back OT: as former exhibition manager's assistant for the York Show many decades back I saw then just how much effort organising even a medium-size show takes. As Mike Cook said it's "the show that never ends". Warley have done amazingly to keep up that effort for 30 years, and the whole point of being a volunteer is that you can say "that's it, I'm done" and that's theoretically all the reason you need. Going back to the (current) York show, a couple of comments. I find it very difficult to get round York in one day and apparently it's a lot smaller than Warley. (I never went to Warley.) And yes, York doesn't have many trade stands from the large and medium-sized RTR manufacturers other than Bachmann, but it has loads of smaller "bits and pieces" suppliers. Well, that post roamed around a bit. Apologies! Richard

Good luck with trying to find a justification to avoid taking out PLI. No-one will touch you without it. RichardT

FTFY, as I believe the young shavers say…😉

I’m not entirely confident Jason that if you asked all RMWeb participants to post a photo of their layout *right this minute* you’d get anything like a 100% response. A lot of people who are self-described railway modellers do seem, when pressed, to be “still in the research stage”/“gathering equipment for a future scheme” etc etc (Puts up own hand…) RT

Absolutely. In responding to another thread on here about the various editors of “Railway Modeller” I was leafing through my bound copy of RM volume 1 1949-50 (not available in the digital RM subscribers’ library) and what did I find - a clarion call to model railway clubs to think about encouraging youngsters because otherwise the hobby was doomed. Doomed! And I suspect that the wing-collared, waistcoat-tie-and watch-chain committee members of the model railway clubs of the late 1940s also couldn’t work out why younger modellers were reluctant to join them. (Or why they wanted to listen to that be-bop jazz racket.) Richard

https://www.ianallan.com/ Still going. We all think of it as a railway publishing company but that’s the part of the business they decided to let go in favour of their other - presumably more profitable - lines. Just goes to show that our perspective isn’t always the full picture! RichardT

Yes sorry - it was the Ian Allan/Peco involvement with magazines on which I was focussing. I must admit that I moved over to Model Railways from RM when CJF jumped ship, dropping it when it became the exacerable “Your Model Railway” by which time Model Railway Journal was fortunately hoving into view. In later years I’ve backfilled my MRN/MR collection so I now have a complete set. Some of the articles in the pre-CJF 1970s MRN are very much in the style/spirit of early MRJs. Richard

I know. Receiving toy trains two days quicker is pretty much a matter of life and death. Richard

GH Lake announced his retirement as RM editor in Vol.1 No.4 (May 1950). CJF was announced as the new editor of RM on the cover of Vol.1 No.5 (Jun-Jul 1950) “as from the next issue”. He then edited RM in London under Ian Allan’s ownership until Vol.2 No.12 (Sep-Oct 1951). From Nov 1951 the magazine went monthly under the new Peco ownership and CJF went with it to Devon. MRC was a later development after Ian Allan realised they’d made a mistake getting out of the model railway magazine market. Richard

This, 100%. We may (probably are) going through one of those sea-change moments that come along in any sphere of human activity once every generation or so. One way of doing things gives way to another. Change is often disturbing and upsetting but it’s not necessarily the end of the world. The hobby has previously survived the loss of Beatties & Railmail of Watford, the MRC exhibitions at Central Hall & Wembley, the ME exhibition at Ally Pally, the closure of at least two national magazines and several manufacturers, and the deaths of many significant figures. We should be pleased that Hattons and the Warley team are managing the change in an orderly fashion and with openness and integrity. I suspect Hornby is also going through the pain of long term changes for the same reason. Many heritage railways are similarly facing up to the challenges of a different future - but often in the teeth of opposition and conspiracy theories from long-standing volunteers who can’t understand why it isn’t the 1970s anymore, so we’re lucky. The phoenix will rise again in a different form: in the meantime thank you Hattons and thank you Warley MRC for all you’ve done. Richard

I can’t help feeling that you’re over-thinking this a bit! Richard

And also bearing in mind that, unless you are made of money (or use a traverser fiddle yard), it’s much more economical to have your hidden/fiddle yard track & pointwork in 2FS or finescale N made the old fashioned way. Richard

Yes, fair enough. The data matching point made above is the key thing. Either way, it's aimed at undeclared professional traders. Richard

Being serious for a moment, the acid-free tissue suggestion for wrapping is a really good one. You can also get archival-quality closed cell foam for padding e.g. https://www.preservationequipment.com/Catalogue/Conservation-Materials/Other-Materials/Archival-Polyethylene-Foam (other suppliers are available) Richard

Be aware that if you’ve lost the plastic film you’ve reduced the value of the loco to a collector by 50% 😉 What’s that you say? You tear off and throw away the tissue paper wrap around the box 🫣 <faints> Happy New Year Richard

They’ll catch commercial dealers (in all goods) who are dodging tax by selling on eBay from a private address and pretending to be casual traders. As everyone has pointed out above it’s not aimed at private individuals selling unwanted personal possessions. Where I agree with the wibble is that the £1000 pa sales revenue trigger is too low - evidence that HMRC don’t understand what hobby items cost. Dispose of some unwanted O gauge locos plus a Dublo limited edition (the kind of thing a collector would do to upgrade or thin out a collection) and you’d hit that quickly in several years. As others have said, I’d expect that limit to be raised to £5k or so pretty quickly once the volume of paperwork becomes clear to HMRC. And if they don’t - it’s an election year: complain to your MP about it. Raising the limit would be a practically cost-free pledge to make for vote-seekers! Richard