Ozexpatriate

Seeing it again on a TV ad over the weekend, it certainly is 6106.

And the engine shed and coaling tower at Didcot are quite recognizable as part of a German munitions factory, despite all the CGI fill in. (Not a power station cooling tower to be seen!) It was funny to see Swindon's finest decked out as German, late-Victorian era steam in the dark. Lots of tapered boilers in the back of one scene that looks like it was shot inside the shed. I'm guessing that the German markings were added in post-production. At one point there's a very visible shot of a GWR number plate as bold as the brass it was cast in. There is just no mistaking a Swindon cast number plate. (I wasn't quick enough to commit the number to memory, though it might have been 6106. Guy Ritchie's editing doesn't linger over an action shot.) When it is available, this is a DVD where I am going to spend a lot of time freezing the image. There is a lovely evocative recreation of what I assume is meant to be London Victoria station. I assume it's mostly CGI. You never get to see the full coach livery, but unlike the earlier movie which featured the South Eastern and Chatham Railway, I think the main featured train purports to be the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. (They are headed to Brighton after all.) Lately there's been a lot of commentary on the whole steampunk vibe of Game of Shadows, but there is certainly a lot of steam trains in it and it's nice to see *some* effort applied to recreating pre-grouping railways. I can't comment on the locomotives. Most of the scenes are dark and you don't see the locomotives for more than a second or so at a time. There is also scene with a large viaduct. (Smardale? Oldbury/Daniels Mill??? on the SVR?)

In CinemaScope no less - the perfect format for shooting trains! Some great helicopter shots there. This must have been a big release back in 1955, but I've never seen it before. Nice find!

In a broader space (not limited to the UK) there are countless movies that significantly feature railways. Dr. Zhivago (1965) Lawrence of Arabia (1962) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) The General (1926) The Train (1964) Burt Lancaster Paul Scofield North by Northwest (1959) Planes Trains and Automobiles (1987) A League of their Own (1992) The Polar Express (2004) The Silver Streak (1976) Around the World in 80 Days (1956) David Niven Rain Man (1998) Some Like it Hot (1959) Pride of the Marines (1945) Pennsy GG1s in Philadelphia White Heat (1949) James Cagney - starts with a SP train robbery Murder on the Orient Express (1974) On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) Goldeneye (1995) - armoured class 20 command train Octopussy (1983) - circus train And Westerns which deserve a whole category of their own: 3:10 to Yuma (1957) High Noon (1952) Red River (1948) The Train Robbers Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West) (1968) Back to the Future Part III (1990) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) - circus train How the West was Won (1962) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) ...just to begin. I guess the 'international' movies are off topic because this is the "UK Prototype" thread.

I think we did something similar to this before in the "what would you recreate" thread. Nevertheless, here's a start: The Ladykillers (1955) Alec Guiness, Peter Sellers - King's Cross? Two-Way Stretch (1960) Peter Sellers, etc Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) Oh, Mr. Porter (1937) The Great Train Robbery (1979) Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland The Railway Children (1970) Richard III (1995) Harry Potter and the *** (multiple) The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) - GWR The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) - LT Underground I haven't touched the non-UK ones.

Add a Walmart (sorry Asda) and you've hit the 'box mart trifecta'. A US suburban cliché is the 'white (substitute the US word for garbage*) trifecta' - which is a strip (mini) mall with three of the following stores: Bail bonds Paycheque cashing Liquor store Pawnshop This is an ideal location for seedy activity that fits the cliché category. Mugging, drug-deal, car search by police, etc, etc. A 'Clerks' montage would work - Jay and Silent Bob outside the Quick Stop and video rental store. * apparently 'trash' prepended with 'white' triggers the rude word filter.

Halloween themed items are probably a lot more common on US layouts. Timely comment too! I think pandering to an unsophisticated exhibition crowd is fair game here in the US. Here most exhibitions seem to be intended to attract newcomers, rather than serious enthusiasts. Organized home layout visits are done for serious enthusiasts. For the public, the more clichés the better, and even at home, puns seem to be more tolerated here. It would be hard to pull off Linus in the pumpkin patch waiting for the "Great Pumpkin", but that sort of thing would work. For those of you who like US models, a layout set in the fall is in scope - lots of pretty trees and houses decorated for Halloween with trick or treating children would be an interesting gimmic. With some restraint, it could work here, but perhaps not in the UK.

Yes, ninety year old Mr. Harold Camping is hoping that the third time is the charm. His first prediction was September 6, 1994, followed by May 21, 2011 and now October 21, 2011. Apparently we can anticipate earthquakes as a precursor. He was able to survive a stroke since he pushed out his earlier prediction by some five months. I feel like I can predict with some confidence that we won't see either an RTR Leader or the end of the world next Friday. Won't I look silly if we did? Perhaps a bit sarcastically, I'd rather ask 'will we see a plastic moulded, RTR, as-built Merchant Navy before we see a Leader'?

Is that sky background actually attached - or just added in with the magic of photo editing? I only ask because, while I don't want to be a pratt, the clouds look upside down to me. Shouldn't the darker bits be on the bottom and the lighter bits on top? I've been enjoying your thread. Thank you for sharing.

If by 617 Squadron, you refer to the dambusters, then no, nothing like that, but there were lots of low-level raids carried out by American aircraft, though not so much by heavy bombers, excepting Pete's example of B-24s at Ploiesti (and perhaps others). Like the Mosquitos and Beaufighters, the two-engined B-25, B-26 and A-26 aircraft carried out lots of low altitude raids in many theatres during the war, medium bombers being much more suited to this than the heavies. Success and required accuracy varied, but the 1942 Doolittle raid on urban targets in Japan was famously a low-level raid, and B-25s were used to 'skip bomb' Japanese naval convoys in the south Pacific at attitudes of 100', without the requirements for Barnes Wallis' contraptions. The USMC flew B-25s as the PBJ-1 for interdiction of Japanese shipping. Of course the PBY Catalina was extensively used for submarine hunting by the USN, RAF and mutiple Commonweath airforces including the RCAF and RAAF, two Victoria Crosses being awarded in U-boat encounters. The RAAF also used Catalinas as low altitude (200') tactical minelayers, dropping mines at night on long-duration raids to bottle Japanese ships in ports all over the western Pacific. I imagine all the tank and train-busting activity in 1944 and 1945 by a variety of aircraft like P-38s, P-47s and P-51s, not to mention Hawker Typhoons etc is out of the scope of your question.

Thanks for your kind observations. The Lanc is indeed a purposeful, brutal looking machine, bristling with angry bits. I will suppose that only a few of us here were alive in, or at least aware of, the 1930s - I certainly wasn't. It's an era of great contrasts, crippling depression, the ascendency of totalitariansim, frothy cinema and wonderful industrial design. The concept that a fast car, aeroplane or locomotive should not only be fast but look fast too seems to have been very important to the design ethos of the time, elevating the mundane above what I imagine might have been a grim world. Even the staid old GWR used the shirtbutton monogram to show what hipsters they were. This was true for fountain pens, toasters or even pencil sharpeners. Love or hate them, Apple Computer has inherited the flame of converging form and function today. Pete, the T1 is a nice looking machine indeed. I hope you treated yourself to the Broadway Limited model.

Apparently there was a recent rear-end suburban train collision in Shanghai. Signalling is again suspected. CNN video story: "Are rail accidents in China damaging public confidence in the nation's rail system? CNN's Eunice Yoon reports"

Perhaps, and Boeing has been strong in civil aviation since its earliest days, as it is today with the long awaited first customer delivery of the 787. The B-52 though never looked like a commercial airliner to me. To any aviation fans visiting the Seattle area, in addition to the area's railfanning opportunities, I would recommend the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field (King County Airport). Tons of great stuff including a 707 used as Nixon's Air Force One, and a Concorde, not to mention the Red Barn - Boeing's 'spiritual' home. In the US and overseas, the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space is deservedly well known, but off the beaten track at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Akron, OH (the home of military aviation) is one of the world's best collections of aircraft, the National Museum of the US Air Force. The collection is staggering. Sure, they have a B17, and a B29 and a B24 too. Want to see a Convair B36 Peacemaker and B58 Hustler, MIGs a B1B, nukes? Yup, they've got 'em. Akron, which is not far from Dayton (home of the Wright brothers) has a lot of aviation history going for it. It's also the home of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and its former subsidiary, the Goodyear Zeppelin Company. At the Goodyear Airdock, (a large blimp hanger) the USS Akron and USS Macon were constructed in the early 1930s. The building still stands. All this is a bit off topic, but as this is wheel-tapping anyway ...

I think it's a school of design sort of thing. There's is a distinctive aircraft aesthetic in the 1930s (more common in the US West Coast design shops - Boeing, Douglas, etc) that the B17 belongs to. Look at the shape of the B17, DC3, and Boeing 314 (the Clipper flying boat). All have more evidence of 'voluptous' oval shapes in fuselage cross-sections, the side view of the vertical stabilizers, and plan views of the horizonal stabilizers and wings. (The Spitfire and the Hughes H1 - the plane Hughes crashes in "The Aviator" movie - share these attributes.) By the time of the P51 there was a move away from this aesthetic. In comparison, the Lancaster contains more straight line segments - and therefore fewer continuous curves. I think the eye is drawn to the the organic shape of the curved surfaces versus the more 'artificial' straight segments. The same appeal is true of locomotive streamlining, which not coincidentally, had it's forte in the 1930s. By comparison, the Germans built very little that looked like this until the Me262. Except for some Heinkels, most of what they built looked very angular.

I like Wikipedia. I think it's generally accurate, though of course there are exceptions. Peer review is the same process used by most reputable publishers, with Wikipedia the definition is just broader which can arbitarily be good or bad.

No, I didn't forget it. An earlier post talked about comparing the Lancaster with the B17 so I confined the comparison to the heavies. (I could have included the Short Stirling and others too.) As you say, the Mosquito was a phenomenal design. Super fast, with a heavy bomb load and a small crew. For comparisons though, it belongs in the multi-role aircraft category like Beaufighters and the A26.

I do miss this night sky from the southern hemisphere. I don't know if the Milky may is necessarily more visible there. The ambient light from cities makes such an enormous difference. Even when it's not raining, night sky viewing here in Portland is not nearly the same as just 100 miles away. Head for the desert!

Both were very effective designs, according to their parameters. Interestingly the B17 was developed several years earlier than the Lancaster. The Liberator (before) and the B29 (after) are closer to the Lancaster in development cycle. In overload circumstances the B17 could carry 17,600lb. It is my impression that when carrying the grand slam, Lancasters must have been range limited. It's certainly interesting to see, in general, a much heavier bomb load on the British bombers. Here's some data, courtesy of wikipedia: Aircraft .......... 1st flight ... production .typical bomb load* B17 Flying Fortress ... Jul 35 ... Apr 38 ... .4,500lb @800 miles Halifax ........... ... Sep 39 ... Nov 40 ... 13,000lb B24 Liberator ..... ... Dec 39 ... ... 41 ... .5,000lb @800 miles Lancaster ......... ... Jan 41 ... ... 42 ... 14,000lb B29 Super Fortress. ... Sep 42 ... May 44 ... 20,000lb * Not thoroughly researched by me. (This is data from the wikipedia pages) The amount of focused (and overlapping) development and the progression of technology that resulting in the B29 in such a short period is staggering.

Pete, I know, I'm lucky to have had a very mild summer - no heat waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, or hurricanes. There are a lot of people suffering hardships across the eastern seaboard right now. I haven't lost sight of that. I hope you and yours are well and things are back to normal soon.

I think it's interesting that we collectively (I don't want Pete to feel singled out here), now consider broadband access as being in the same class of essential services as electricity, water/sewer and natural gas (for those that have it) and certainly more important than traditional wired telephony (twisted pair). Indeed, given that there are alternative sources of electricity to the grid (portable generators, solar, etc) broadband access might even be rated by many (most?) of us as more essential than electrical grid connectivity. Broadband access of course is a very loose term. There is a plethora of wireless access modes, 4G (LTE versus WiMax or whatever) versus 3G / WiFi and the bevy of physical connections like FIOS, cable and even T1 and on top of that, satelite. It is a testament to the nature of the internet - conceived as defence infrastructure, it was designed to function with local disruptions - that this system could be thought of as not only more essential than the electrical grid, but pragmatically, more reliable ... up to a point. All the media for broadband access have wide variations in their availability - particularly in the event of natural disasters. Even if cell towers stand and base stations are equipped with some kind of uninterruptable power supply, most of this infrastructure is eventually at the mercy of the electrical grid. Even the satellites need a ground station somewhere for the internet point of presence. It is natural for 'infotainment' infrastructure to get a lower priority in the recovery to a major disaster than the more basic services. Yet I have lots of colleagues who depend on the 'infotainment' infrastructure for connectivity to do their jobs and might prioritize this even over electricity (if a backup solution is avaialble).

Brilliant - very creative and amusing. They're all good; randomly, looking at Birth Kind Eggs, I would never think of Knightsbridge - or vice versa. I like Queen's Park. It's not a difficult anagram but it's funny.

No real updates on the actual failures that caused the collision but it now has rammifications in terms of speed reductions on China's high-speed rail. CNN: China recalls bullet trains, slows down high-speed rail

Yes, I remember that the original pricing for the Garratt was much less expensive. Plus, Eureka had to change suppliers when Kanda San dropped them.* I suspect that transition factors into their new pricing along with what are probably relatively small volumes. The Australian dollar continues to be strong. Today the AU$1.00 = US$1.02 = £0.62. (*Mike I think you started a thread to that effect.)

At one point I tried to order the NSWGR Garratt from Eureka to add to my collection of articulated steam power (US prototypes, also in H0). Unfortunately my compatriots in Victoria don't appear to be particularly well organized in the mail order deparment. (Eureka is a small operation.) They took a deposit from me for a 3801 that hasn't materialized and my Garratt order disappeared into the void, but that's just me whinging and I haven't 'done' anything about it. Pictures of that Garratt look sensational. I think I'll be able to resist the pull off the LMSR Garratt as much as I have avoided all those Princesses in Crimson Lake over the years. (At least for now. We'll see when preliminary images start to appear.)

Nice link. Thanks Keith! That caption has the train at Clifton - which was on the Canadian side of the Niagara suspension bridge. The ties back to Britain for railways in the colonies are not surprising.