PatB

Nobody seems to have been too bothered about all the eggs being in the petrol basket for several decades so I doubt if concentration on EVs is going to lead to insoluble difficulties.

That looks really good. To my eye it's a more convincing freelance industrial than Nellie in original form. Probably runs better too, t least at the all-important shunting speeds.

I'm of the understanding that a lot of Continental (and possibly US) H0 is overwidth, especially steam outline. How else do you maintain a correct scale/gauge ratio and still fit in overwidth wheels and overthick rods and motion that are inevitable if working to anything other than P87 standards?

I have to confess that the only CX I've ever ridden in was when I was hitching, back in 1987/88 or so. The car was a well worn example in, IIRC, a dark goldish metallic and had an interior that resembled a mobile ashtray. The driver, as far as I can recall, was wearing baggy grey flannels and an open necked whitish shirt displaying a big gold chain. Sort of Mediterranean peasant made good. Not saying he was likely typical though .

I'm fairly relaxed about inaccuracies in r-t-r. I guess that's what comes of having grown up with assorted early N gauge abominations and 0 gauge Lima 4Fs and Triang Hymeks hauling LMS liveried Lima Mk1s and PO liveried, vac-braked 16-tonners . I tend towards the "does it look sufficiently like the picture in my head?" school of thought. Given that I'm not sufficiently expert in any specific area of the prototype to make said mental picture a detailed and 100% accurate one, there's a fair bit of leeway. As an example, whilst the Dapol/Hornby Terrier is (quite properly) regarded by LBSC/Southern experts as a horrible amalgam of anachronistic features and dimensional compromises, to me it looks like a very small 0-6-0T with titchy wheels and a Stroudley cab. To me, that makes it a Terrier and I can exercise sufficient suspension of disbelief to make it so. Given what Hornby still seem to get away with charging and the daft money that even broken ones seem to achieve on Ebay I'd assume that quite a few others think similarly. Some r-t-r compromises do baffle me though. Why, for instance, did Mainline put the buffer beams on their Peak on the body? Not only is it rather obviously wrong, even to my eyes, but surely doing it right would actually be preferable in this case, bogie mounted buffer-beams being a time honoured way of easing the passage of big locos around train-set curves.

Of course tortoises are more prototypically carried on a lowmac, or a weltrol for larger specimens.

There was a thread on here 2-3 years ago about a shunting/photo plank with a scenified open sector plate. Unfortunately I can't remember enough specific information about it to conduct an effective search. Viewed from a scale eye level it looked really good.

Could preserved sleeping cars somehow be employed as a novelty static hotel? Again, I'm thinking of how a vehicle might provide a revenue stream when not actually operating a train service. Not that many preservation societies would necessarily want, or be able, to become hoteliers or restaurateurs, but there must surely be possible means of cooperation with people/organisations who do.

Sadly, an awful lot of Australia's most serious bushfires (as in the ones in populated areas that threaten numerous lives and homes) are a result of arson. It's telling that some areas burn year after year after year, suggesting that they're lit by the same person. A worrying number of arsonists caught turn out to be volunteer fireies, whether because of some misplaced hero delusion or because they like fire a bit too much I've no idea. Second only to arson seems to be people playing silly b¥$$€%s with angle grinders and the like. The various power companies have quite a bit to answer for too, with a number of serious blazes started by decrepit power poles/lines falling over. As a species, West Australians, at least, have a definite propensity for lighting things up. We spend the summer in mortal dread of fire, sensitive to the slightest whiff of smoke on the breeze. Then, as soon as the summer burning restrictions come off, everyone's out with the matches. Some are sensible and responsible, but enough aren't that the local brigades tend to be on high alert for the first few days of unrestricted burning. There's one block down the road from me which seems to require attendance pretty much every year when things get out of hand.

Whilst I can't say with certainty about railway crossing signs, I do remember many pre-Worboys road signs still in use in rural Somerset well into the 1980s at least. Some may even have survived into the 1990s, but by that time I was living in more technically advanced areas of the country .

It's not the condition so much as the moulded handrails that give it away as Lima's finest .

I suspect that the amount is AU$75000. If so it's not inequitable because, below that threshold, Australian businesses are not required to collect tax on behalf of the Federal government either. Edit:Beaten to it by monkeysarefun.

Australian governments at both State and Federal level have extensive form for implementing stuff without having the slightest clue how it's going to work in reality.

Two Triang Big-Big coaches and a Lima power bogie pretending to be a generic DMU. A Lima 4F chassis and some of its body, supplemented with some scrap plywood masquerading as something almost but not quite like a Midland Flatiron.

Not exactly a volume seller itself. Certainly not enough to make the power train economic to manufacture. Of course Leyland Australia used the engine in a mass market saloon, the P76, which might have made it work, given a bit of international cooperation, but... erm... didn't. Nor did fheir attempt at putting a slightly smaller variant in the Marina.

And I retyped that symbol at least 3 times, trying to get " instead of ' too. looks like my Shift key coordination needs some work .

Of course, something the British industry did do very well, and quite successfully too, so presumably there was a decent sized market, was the sporting small/medium RWD saloon, with all the big players offering at least one or two variants at one time or another, pretty much all of which were of at least some merit. Not that any of that's really relevant to why the Austin 3-Litre was a flop.

I was deliberately excluding Jags as they fell at the lower end of the prestige market rather than the upper end of everyone else (IMHO; I accept that the existence and position of any dividing line is open to debate). If you could afford a new Jaguar you could probably afford to fuel, tax and insure it without worrying overmuch. OTOH, those in the market for the products of Ford, Vauxhall, BMC/BL etc. may have needed to be more thrifty. As a corollary, if you had the budget to fuel, tax and insure a 3 litre saloon, you might very well be in a position to stretch to a Jaguar with only a little more effort, so why would you buy a Ford/Austin/Vauxhall with the same badge on it as Joe Bloggs' car next door? I'm not saying that the big cars didn't sell. Clearly they did. My point is more that the non-prestige big car market in the UK just wasn't big enough for all the manufacturers at the time to offer a model and sell enough to make money on it. Only Ford seem to have really succeeded post ~1970. The Austin bombed as even BL seem to have recognised the wisdom expressed by russ p above, and concentrated on the Land Crab and its Wedge successor, providing both with an upengined option, which, if I remember the relevant Which? magazine tests correctly, posted almost identical performance figures to the 3-Litre (103 mph top speed sticks in my mind, which was also the top whack of the Westminster when they tested it). Vauxhall, as previously mentioned, dropped the Cresta at the end of the PC's life. Humber disappeared except as a badge-engineered Rootes Arrow. Rover dropped the P5 and didn't introduce another true big car until the SD1 which also came with small engined options. Triumph stuck to the 2000, even if they did put a long-stroke crank in it to create the 2500. They could have probably built a 2000 On Steroids to take the Stag lump but, given that it would have been internal competition for Rover and maybe the cheaper Jags it wasn't going to happen. I suppose it could be argued that the British manufacturers could have sold big saloons abroad. Where though? Australia and Canada were making plenty of their own by 1970. Why would a US buyer want one when they could buy a homegrown really big car? Mainland Europe was probably an even more hostile environment for big engines than the UK at the time, and any market that there might have been would have been adequately covered by the likes of Volvo, Mercedes (neither of which seem to have been anything like as prestigious in their home countries as in Britain), Ford Germany (surprise surprise) and maybe FIAT with their bigger models that one sees in 60s Italian films but almost nowhere else . So I conclude that, below Jaguar level, there was only room for one or two players in the UK big car market. Ford got the lion's share and Rover eventually picked up the rest, and even they had to offer economy versions of their respective offerings to pay the bills. Something like the Austin 3-Litre which didn't have much major component commonality with its Land-Crab parent, or with anything else from BMC/Leyland UK for that matter, wasn't going to be well placed to succeed. Apropos of nothing very much, I think the last Austin 3-Litre I saw in the metal was a rather scruffy example, with the bodgiest Rover V8 transplant I think I've ever seen, at the Yeovil Festival of Transport back in the mid '80s. Lack of clearance under the bonnet had been solved by cutting a slot down each side of the panel with a blunt angle-grinder, lifting the centre section by 6' or so, and tack welding in triangles of (unpainted) galvanised iron to fill up the resulting gaps. Man but it was ugly, even by my standards, and I normally like ugly .

Realistically, the 3-Litre was almost certainly a better car than the Farina Westminster it was designed to replace. Whatever its weaknesses, II strongly suspect that its commercial failure was more due to the UK market being unable to provide enough sales of "non-prestige" big cars like the Austin, the big Fords and the big Humbers (sort of semi-prestige I suppose) and the Vauxhall Cresta to sustain more than a couple of models. It's notable that the only real continuing success in that market was Ford with Zephyr/Zodiac and the subsequent Consul/Granada family, both of which were, perhaps significantly, also available in small-engined versions which, I'd be fairly confident, outsold the big ones. Vauxhall, of course, dropped the Cresta and just up-engined the Victor instead. Given the number I remember seeing not so many years later I don't think the Ventora was any great success either. Thinking about it, Rover did OK with the P6 too but, again, the 2000/2200 provided the bread and butter, with the 3500 being an up-engined middleweight saloon rather than a true big car itself. Big cars just haven't been big sellers in the UK. Or weren't in the late 60s anyway.

Whilst I can see the advantages of not using water, I'm sceptical of the claims of low-cost infrastructure. As we know, reliable railway permanent way.is neither cheap nor particularly low impact.

When I first arrived in Perth a couple of decades ago I was astounded at how profligate with water West Australians were. Considering we're on the edge of what is, effectively, one enormous desert, chucking it about as indiscriminately as was being done at the time seemed a little unwise. Even though things have changed a bit, thanks to increasing costs and relentess government campaigns, its still coming back to bite us as South West WA becomes both hotter and drier. The reservoirs will probably never be full again and the groundwater which forms the main source of supply is being depleted. Mind you, if rainfall ever did return to earlier levels much of Perth would return to its natural state;a low lying, sandy swamp.

I'd be fairly confident you're right for the early plans. I think, by the time the later editions of 60 Plans came out he was referring to the Mainline Dean Goods.

Nothing sinister under that particular one. There are assorted bits of Land Rover and Triumph Herald under a few bits of Bristol though. We did once find an old Post Office Telephones manhole under some paving we were replacing. Lifted it, had a look and found what appeared to be some quite complex wiring. Looked at the slabs we were taking up. Agreed that nobody had seen that manhole for ~30 years. Paved back over it. It was a long time ago yer 'Onour.

I don't think they're exactly rare or desirable, even now. At the recent Perth (WA) show one trader had a tray of them at very reasonable (for Perth, so not truly cheap) prices. Were I more affluent I'd have scooped up the lot, if only for their X04 motors, along with the tray of Dock Shunters on the same stall.

I suspect those two were singled out because they represent the greatest volume of what might be called privately imported goods coming into Australia. At a guess anyway.