woodenhead

I remember the minitrix ones, a revelation at the time.

When you think of it over the years N gauge has not been badly supplied with HAAs even if some weren’t quite the right length.

2 hours ago, DaveF said:

This is really just a trial.  I'm scanning a batch of Dad's photos from an album I've found of whole plate (8"x6") prints to see how it works.  They are quite different in many ways from the postcard prints I've scanned from his main albums and put on here.  Many of them are sepia toned and they all have his notes handwritten on the black album pages.

 

 

David

There might be some methods to clean them up digitally but pictures of trains from 74 years ago are pictures of trains from 74 years ago - hard to come by.  It's a perfectly acceptable image to me.

This afternoon I have been mostly cutting up Amazone cardboard packaging.

To form three supporting walls and 28 roof trusses for a mock up.

Quite therapeutic and I apparently have more knives than I expected.

Anyone reading this thread and hoping Ellis Clark might be reading this thread and thinking what if.......

Bit history for the Scenery van, as I didn't know what one was and how the name matched it's purpose.

Except for the three Elephant vans - which were also named appropriately.

https://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/pic2/sceneryvan.html

2 minutes ago, montyburns56 said:

Now that Bachmann have announced an OO scale RB, we should see an N Gauge version as some point in the future. Having said that I wouldn't hold your breath as I'm still waiting for them to downscale their MK1 POS Stowage van.

Possibly more chance of the RB than a P.O.S stowage van (oh you didn't mean that P.O.S 🤣).  It might be a POT.

Would hope that any OO item being done right now would have a corresponding N gauge version designed even if not immediately tooled.  And more use for an RB, and FO and a BSO than a POT.

2 minutes ago, Wheatley said:

Viz. buying a new car from a dealer. Has anyone ever managed to get a full refund or exchange on a substandard new car without being passed back and forth between dealer and manufacturer ? I expect the answer is 'yes' but not very often and  not without an awful lot of effort. 

 

You need to catch somone at the dealing taking a whizz on your car, put it on social media and then the manufacturer will replace the car with great haste.

8 minutes ago, MidlandRed said:

It certainly could do dependent on what the stock in hand is and how skewed the cycle of transit, sale and delivery is. However I suspect the Red Sea issue, which is affecting many other industries and also competitors (unless their orders have been pre paid) has not been something anyone could predict. 

The red sea issue might delay stock in transit, but once in the warehouse it's Hornby's responsibility to get it out as quickly as possible.  Without knowing what it is they have that they have not sold it's difficult to understand if this is SteamPunk, Beatles or some other tat they ordered but cannot shift, and maybe not all related to model trains.

@The Stationmaster Perhaps the thinking here is that private companies are paying for their access to the railway whereas nationalised services are not, in a world where the trains and the track are owned by the same team it would be wooden dollars unless it was a private sector train.

So similarly any open access TOC should get the same service a LUMO or Hull Trains service should get priority if being impeded by a late running nationalised service.

If it were all a level playing field it might discourage private operations if they felt that the government run trains had no incentive to run to time.

I guess the devil is in the detail - a timetable is a timetable and a private company should get no better than to arrive on time and if it is the cause of the delays then it should not then be able to demand preferential treatment to get back on time.

Equally, should charter services remain free of punishment for running late if they also got some sort of priority.

6 minutes ago, MidlandRed said:

You seem to be continuing and restating an assumption that the £20 million of ‘stock in hand’ is sitting in a Hornby warehouse somewhere unsold.

 

It's still a significant wadge of stock - even if it is a moving beast of ins and outs it still represents a large amount of assets sat in a warehouse.  Really Hornby want to produce something, have it delivered and pretty quickly disseminated from the warehouse to customers and retailers not have it gathering dust in someone else's warehouse because they are paying for that space.  The longer an asset is sitting in a rented/outsourced warehouse the more of it's value is being eaten up in storage costs and thus the potential margin of selling the item being lost to overheads.

We've always kept an old style corded phone simply because it will work as long as the land line is working.

The problem is that the landlines require switching equipment and whilst that is also digital now, it still requires power and it also can wear out and need replacing.  Perhaps the issue is not so much that BT want rid of it, but that the Government don't feel the paying BT to retain a network of copper wires.  At the end of the day BT are a private company, they see the usage of landlines going down but are expected to manage their upkeep and network, if we want to keep the landline we need to petition the government to invest in it and I don't see that happening.

17 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

Is it because according to one website, they are not keen on flying and were originally bred for meat and eggs?

I did think that myself, and I could be wrong as I am not an ornithologist.

I wondered though if perhaps they'd escaped from domesticity.

Certainly it's usually Mallards, geese and swans on the Bridgewater with irregular Herons or Cranes every few miles.

So I popped down to London this week and as it's spring for the first time in a long time I was doing this able to see out of the window.

Two things that intrigued me:

1. On the way down, somewhere south of Tamworth and north of Watford was a hut at the side of the railway next to the fast lines.  It was an old hut but it had a full pantograph attached to the roof.  I am guessing it was not be used haha but how did a full pantograph unit end up on top of a hut alongside the WCML.
2. On the way home after leaving Stoke in the CCE sidings there appeared to be a couple of old coaches, one possibly a Gresley in poor condition and what looked like the rusty remains of a large steam loco.  Where have these come from?

House buildings and contents renewal - 43% increase, still under £400 but ouch that is a big increase when nothing has changed in the past 12 months.

This is an article on a couple of recent deaths where the health care pendants had failed in the days leading up to their death.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/deaths-spark-concern-over-digital-phone-line-rollout/

I think it's a little difficult to attribute their death to the switch off, especially as in these cases the service that had switched over was not linked to the telecare provision.i.e no direct link to the performance of the pendant.  It would also suggest in these cases the Virgin service was still operating and it was the pendant that failed.

It's easy to use rumour to fuel concerns and whilst no doubt there is a lot of work for BT to do to mitigate much of the valid concerns for people who depend on a landline we cannot pin every incident on BT and other providers who are migrating away from copper wire.  If anything throwing everything in muddies the water where real incidents might become buried under a storm of unrelated matters and get missed by the media.

5 minutes ago, Roy Langridge said:

With respect, that is not a particularly fair question on a public forum and puts McC in a very difficult position. 
 

Roy

The only people who know are Accurascale.

I am not putting  @McC  in a difficult position as I expect at worst a very non committal answer because you are correct he cannot answer the question.  I wouldn't call it unfair, he and everyone at Accurascale get bombarded with such requests all the time, at shows and on forums, it's part of the territory with running a successful product company.

But if he cannot answer the question, and he cannot without giving the game away, then how can anyone else comment confidently for the OP that he should either buy Peco CDAs now or wait for a possible but not guaranteed Accurascale model in the future.  That's the point I am making here.

Or we might be in for a revelation 😄

2 hours ago, Tony_S said:

So, basically my mother and I were telling lies. It wasn’t the 50s or 60s. I think the consultant was bullying an older woman and backed down when she said someone had read the information about the trial. I think he deserved to have an interview with an ethics committee. The whole treatment environment changed when she moved  to Worcestershire. 
I have signed up for loads of research projects and I have been fully informed before consent with no pressure. My mother’s situation was utterly different. 

There is an ongoing case about children in the 1970s being used for experiments without known consent and the blood was infected with HIV and Hepatitus.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63569463

2 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

 

 

Urban legend and as someone below remarked, why would a pilot risk his life just to make a point with a wooden bomb. 

In flying to deliver the wooden bomb the enemy flak certainly would not be confetti.

https://www.forces.net/heritage/history/did-allied-pilots-really-drop-fake-wooden-bombs-fake-wooden-decoy-airfields

6 minutes ago, YT-1300 said:

Moving back to the subject matter, if someone is building a layout where the CDA is a signature model, is it worth holding off in case a better one comes along?

 

 

Let's ask the big boss @McC, would you care to comment?

What is missing are junction modules so this particular module set is restricted to a single circuit, but I guess if you add a junction you'd need a second table and it's no longer a table top layout.

I'm pleased this exhibition appears to have gone down well, after the shock of January things are rocking and rolling again in the world of modelling.

I would have liked to have gone, but as I've probably mentioned I don't so much like crowds these days, Key seems to attract them (which is good) and after the last Milton Keynes I am a little more reticent about attending, though the comments here suggest that the extra room that the NEC can offer has meant it wasn't so crowded perhaps in the halls.

This is the person making the module bases, looks like special runs and one man band so not always available but the idea surely must be something someone in the UK using a laser cutter could make too.

https://toypooom.thebase.in/

It's proper table top stuff isn't it, and I imagine a lot easier to store that a flat baseboard, then there is the ability to change it all about - a sort of model railway scalextric.  I know you can do that with Kato unitrack, but the modules allow scenery into the fray which elevates it above basic track laying.

When I first became aware of model railways as a child my dad operated to a timetable, it was all written down and I learnt to follow it too.

For me aimlessly operating trains soon leads to boredom, I feel the timetable/operating sequence offers a purpose to the scene being modelled i.e. when you design a layout somewhere in your head is a reason for the station or sidings and that needs to be fitted in to the rest of the world in some way to justfiy the trains, the services etc so a timetable is a natural development of that.

I'm not playing trains at the moment and I think it's because I don't have a sequence, it's too random for me.