Wheatley

Any rule or restriction made by a man with a big hat can be overruled or revised by a man with a larger hat, or in some cases temporarily by a specifically nominated man with a slightly smaller hat. That was the vertically integrated command and control structure which existed within BR regions and their Big Four predecessors. As an example I once closed a signalbox with a train still in section but I needed the express permission of the ROM to do it, which at 23.00 on a Saturday night amused him no end. (Those familiar with Colin McKeevor either in person or by reputation can imagine what a bum clenching conversation that was for a 20yr old.) The 1988 and earlier Rule Books were full of "where specially authorised" and "unless specially authorised" qualifications, the ultimate authority in BR days usually being the Regional Operations Manager or Regional Civil Engineer. Similar provisions existed before BR. In the case of route restrictions they were there generally for two reasons - weight and loading gauge. The first can usually be relaxed, the trade off being shorter asset life or an increased inspection and maintenance schedule. The latter is harder to relax - if it doesn't fit then it doesn't fit no matter how large one's hat.

This is the conflict which I suspect a lot of heritage railways are struggling with, some more publicly than others. On the one hand people are there because they are enthusiastic and passionate, but they are only enthusiastic and passionate about the things they are enthusiastic and passionate about, which probably doesn't include paperwork or sitting through compulsory training and competence assessment. On the other hand the railway is operating under ORR scrutiny on a T&W Order which sets out minimum standards to be met to operate legally. Those standards invariably include a Safety Management System, paperwork, courses and competency standards so if you want to play you either play by the rules or you dont play at all. The argument about whether complying with the SMS makes anything safer than just doing it the way you've always done it is irrelevant in this context - having a TV licence doesnt make the picture any better but it is what it is. If you don't play nicely the ORR take your toys away until you say sorry and demonstrate that you can play nicely. If you are the management team (paid or unpaid) who get interviewed under caution if one of your volunteers really screws up then your ultimate sanction with an individual or group who won't operate according to the SMS is to separate them from the toys before ORR do it for you. A friend charged with delivering safety training to a group of disinterested volunteers on a heritage railway largely solved the problem by teaching them in an inspection saloon tagged onto the regular service rather than expecting them to sit in a classroom. Ditto. I'm an on and off member of three or four heritage railways on a rolling basis depending on whichever one Mrs Wheatley fancies buying me for Christmas each year (occasionally I find I've sponsored something cute furry and endangered instead, or sponsored a goat somewhere). I've no intention of volunteering at any if them (maybe one day when I retire) but neither do I expect them to subsidise my membership. If they are subsidising it then more fool them tbh, that rather defeats the object of having paying members, surely ?

Back to the crossing. All the rails are soldered to the PCB and insulation gaps cut with a slitting disk where needed. Link wires have been added underneath to link sections with the same polarity, here coloured in to stop me getting lost . On each crossing two corners of the diamond could be soldered up solid because they were all the same polarity, but two required all the adjacent rails isolating from each other to prevent shorts. The easiest way to do this was to cut both rails back and epoxy a small bock of styrene in to form what is effectively the frog of a very obtuse vee. Code 100 track on this bit so a bit of 40 thou sheet was laminated to a bit of 60 thou, the frogs made oversized to be trimmed back later. If this crossing was on the scenic section I'd have had to add all the check rails from actual rail. But it isn't so I didn't. More 60/40 sandwich. Check rail gaps are about 1.5mm. Finished (apart from the bit where I was holding it with pliers to spray it black.) In the end the wiring wasn't as complicated as I thought. I had started off thinking that as the two running lines on the Goathland board and the Whithorn branch were all separate sections then I'd have three separate track feeds and a common return. But they don't need to be separate on this board - only one train can run at a time - so they are all wired to the same feed and kept separate from the adjacent boards.

This. Through running to Whitby has opened up the market to day trippers from Leeds and York, and to holiday makers south of Scarborough who would previously have gone to Whitby by car* and who would not have considered going from Grosmont even if they could find it. A substantial part of the West Riding decamps to the East and North Yorkshire coasts during the summer and Pickering is dead easy to get to from Scarborough, Filey and Bridlington. * Of which there are still plenty, but the train is an attractive add-on to those who don't want to fight their way through Scarborough or drive around in circles at Whitby looking for a parking space.

Quite. You can do anything with a cordless impact driver than you can with a normal screwdriver, and a lot more a lot quicker. The second most useful tool for working on Land-Rovers was Tony S's hammer-powered impact driver (the most useful being the hammer), I wish I'd had an electric one when I was trying to hit the damn thing at arms length wrapped around a chassis rail.

The thing with the broom is a bench I think, the thing between the lamp post and the bench fence looks like a wooden wheelbarrow.

A relative of mine was once rescued by the police after parking on a roundabout, completely lost, because she figured that if she sat there long enough a policeman would turn up and direct her to the correct exit. 1960s.

Most stations kept an "Idiot of the week" page in the help pages on CRS, in amongst other more officially approved information. The themes were depressingly similar across the country.

It was more to do with the fallout from the May 2018 timetable change where the DfT increased capacity through the Castlefield Corridor by simply requiring the new (2016) TPE and Northern franchises to tumetable more trains through it than it could physically cope with rather than all that tedious mucking about building more infrastructure. And possibly some political manouvering because putting it back under direct DfT control made Rail North Partnership (prop. A Burnham) somewhat redundant. The Northern driver training programme didn't fall apart until Covid, which kicked off the month after DOHL took over. To maintain diversionary route knowledge for the various Transpennine Route Upgrade overnight blockades currently taking place.

Barnsley, 1990s, Mrs Richards out of Fawlty Towers approaches the window: "I want to go to Scotland" "Certainly madam, whereabouts ?" "Scotland" "But where in Scotland madam" "The railway station of course" "Which station madam ? There are several" "The main one" "Glasgow or Edinburgh ?" "Yes" "Which ?" "Which ever of those is in Scotland" (Changes tack, colleague is ringing the hospital to see if they've mislaid anyone) "Can I ask why you're going to Scotland madam?" "None of your damn business young man !" "If I know why you're going I can sell you the right ticket" "I'm going to see my sister although I don't see why that's any of your concern" "And where does your sister live ?" "Scotland." "OK. Do you have your sister's phone number?" "Of course" "May I have it? So I can sell you the right ticket ?" "Well I've never heard such nonsense" (reluctantly scribbles number down). I rang the sister, who was somewhat surprised but said her sister was definitely 'a character' and could we sell her an open return to Pitlochry please. I did, and arranged disabled assistance at all the changes. I bet no-one's ever sent a TVM a box of biscuits and a thank you card.

You're right. The one from Exchange had wider staircases with a landing halfway up.

In fairness, what they're demolishing is this ramshackle collection of pretend railway architecture pastiche (behind the footbridge), so provided they don't just weigh all the recovered ironwork in for scrap* I don't have a problem with them knocking down the rest. https://maps.app.goo.gl/F9KhBjKTrYPNpMuD8 The only bit of that that looks anything like the old Barnsley Exchange from where it was recovered, is the bridge; quite frankly a recreation of a 1980s Acme deck and bus shelter halt would be an improvement. *As well as their collective Tuscan acid trip, BMBC also has form on 'removing' old structures for conservation and then mislaying them - https://www.pinterest.jp/pin/this-is-the-tithe-barn-that-stood-in-barnsley-for-over-600-years-in-2023--900508887973998758/

"The replica station was newly built in the 1990s, on the site of the historic ironworks. There was no station there before. ... The only historic parts of the station are the bridge and parts of the ironwork, brought here from elsewhere in Barnsley". Yes, brought there from the ... er ... Victorian railway station before they replaced it with some ghastly 90s generic business park / leisure centre architecture. At least its not a Will Allsop creation - it's not nearly that bad - for yes, this is the same Barnsley Council who spent millions in the middle of a global recession paying Mr Allsop to reimagine the town as a Tuscan hill village.

158s have (had ?) at least two different types of engines within the class, AFAIR it was the First Class section which changed the classification. But then didn't some 319s have first class and others not, but they were all still 319s ? Which brings us back to my earlier point about looking for consistency where there wasn't (always) any.

Not just me who's incompatible with them then. Bizarrely the only way I can get the ones in the York branch to work is by switching them to another language and back again, after which they work fine.

Paint the Pacers green with speed whiskers - problem solved. I'm only half joking...

This is one of those things where enthusiasts try to classify or define or otherwise codify something which the actual railway either didn't, or did inconsistently, or did and then changed its mind. They were allocated set numbers in the 253/254xxx DMU series with the traction units numbered in the 43xxx series until somebody with a sufficiently large hat (or a sufficiently august committee behind them) decided that it made more sense for them to just be Class 43 locomotives and sets of coaches. The numbering system was simply a way of keeping track of assets, it wasn't handed down from a celestial power.

Goole goods yard was fully signalled right into the 1980s, and there was no tunnel. It was a bit more complicated than your plan as it was essentially the exchange sidings between the docks and the main line, but the layout was more complex than just a fan of sidings. I can't find a track plan on line unfortunately. It was a field trip on the Eastern Region signalling course (along with Gilberdyke and Broomfleet) because between them the three sites included most of the operating oddities we were learning about (short sections, multiple running lines etc) but wouldn't necessarily see at our own boxes. No-one dared take a camera, partly because we'd been employed three weeks at that stage and no-one wanted to break cover as the closet enthusiast, and partly because our instructor was terrifying and you would have been victimised and ridiculed for it. Can't see a problem with a goods yard and loco shed being co-located, although you've made the loco shed a bit more operationally interesting (i.e. a PITA for the crew) to get in and out of than would usually be prototypical.

Avanti are not short of drivers (or at least they weren't), they had the number set out in the bid they submitted to DfT when they were first awarded the franchise. What's gone wrong is that the bid relied on drivers working a certain amount of overtime, which wasn't an issue because ASLE&F have always been amenable to a Rest Day Working Agreement or two provided it contains enough palm lubricant. Paying drivers overtime is always cheaper than increasing headcount, even on drivers' rates. (How I wish I was in ASLE&F). What's gone wrong is that the drivers have taken their collective bat in and there is now not only no RDWA, there is very little cooperation on ad hoc overtime either because of the ongoing dispute. Hence the arguments in the press where Avanti blame "industrial action" and Mr Whelan pops up to point out that (most of the time) his members are not on strike, they're just doing exactly what they're being paid to do. Which on their rest day, is not driving. Inter-TOC hires used to happen all the time, as others have said the limiting factors are route and traction knowledge so as fleets have become specialised it happens less. So whilst Northern could previously hire a 158-qualified driver from EMR to cover a Sheffield- Lincoln/Nottingham service easily enough, they can't now hire a 195 qualified one.

My congratulations to anyone who managed to sit through a whole half hour of that !

Selectively quoting Sabato there but this supports my "maybe they were craned on/off" theory. If you have something on wheels which is self propelled then absolutely an end/side loading dock and a wagon with drop sides/ends makes perfect sense. But anything arriving on the back of a lorry or on a trailer/cart is either going to be craned off or is going to have to be double handled. By far the easiest way to do that is to crane it off the lorry/trailer/cart directly onto the wagon, in which case the fixed sides/ends are not an issue. It's unlikely that you would crane it off and then push it round to the loading dock, and most railway loading docks would not be able to offload things from a road vehicle unless you drive it onto the track. Same applies at the other end getting it off. The Handbook of Stations listed the goods handling facilities in detail, it would be the work of seconds for the goods clerk/agent to check that the receiving station could get whatever it was off again. This "How exactly did they ... ?" type of question is the sort of thing which relies on first hand testimony, often not recorded because it was blindingly obvious at the time how it was done and no-one thought to record for posterity how to do something as dull (sic) as loading or unloading a disc harrow. It can sometimes be deduced from carefully staged official photos but more often than not it survives almost as background clutter in records of something else. The G&SWR Association magazine had a a series of articles some years ago written by a member who spent summer holidays with a relative at Sorbie station when he was a child. It includes possibly the only recorded account of timber handling operations at that station during the war, in particular how to tell that you've overloaded a Scotch derrick (the back leg starts to lift its massive granite block anchor out of the ground !)

Mostly done in house by people co-opted as required off their day jobs, but a change this big falls within ORR's Common Safety Method which can require risk assessment by an independant body. So there will have been a cost.

Eventually yes, but as built (from memory) they were intended to supplement the ramshackle collection of pre-grouping one plankers which the LMS was happily roping containers to. Apart from the skeletal ones for FM/BM containers and a few oddities for beer/glue/Loch Katrine Water, the LMS seems to have regarded proper Conflats with shackles as something for soft Southerners/Westerners. Unless you have a crane, which many goods yards had. Maybe not cars and tractors etc but most agricultural implements and similarly awkward loads were well within the capacity of a goods yard crane or Scotch derrick, and roping and slinging would have been within the competence of the goods yard staff.

Ah, got you. 2+2=214 indeed.

My Carlisle contact has come back with "Does he mean the oil siding at Dalston ?", so no apparent joy there.