Wheatley

You could try asking Bachmann, we're all just guessing.

Because apart from the 500% increase in shipping costs linked to by Metroland, the market for model railway bits (especially the minority interest which is British OO) is miniscule compared to other consumer goods. Apple sells between 40 and 50 million Ipads a year that's a lot more units to spread any additional cost around.

It gets easier, they get more independent and can be left to play on their own, and eventually you adapt. I lost my weekend afternoon modelling time because the bench is in the living room but switched to evenings, theres nothing worth watching on the telly anyway. The biggest problem is staying awake !

Buying enough Met Camm Pullmans for a full Queen of Scots set, on a whim. I even bought the Hornby Railroad brake coaches to go with them. They've been sat in the stock box ever since and never turned a wheel on the layout. Of course the first thing I do with any purchase is to chuck the box out...

Omicron appears to be causing as much havoc if not more in terms of absence as lockdowns 1-3 did, albeit with less serious illness. The difference is this time everything is trying to operate as normal instead of half the national infrastructure being locked down. I work for a TOC, my first job in a morning is to read the Control log from yesterday. On a bad day pre-covid there might have been half a dozen traincrew diagrams uncovered at start of day, to be made good by stepping up crews through the day. One day last week there were more than a hundred uncovered, all down to people either testing positive or isolating because a close contact had. You can't come to work with a negative test every day when there are no tests to be had. On the subject of RM, we're still getting Saturday deliveries, he's just walked past ! So any issues are likely to be local and short term, the problem being that all these short term local issues are rolling around disrupting different bits every day and making any kind of contingency planning impossible. Doesn't matter how many posties are sitting around at your local DLO waiting to go out if the bloke who drives the lorry which brings the post from the main sorting office knocked a couple of hours ago.

No-one made him sell the rights.

And why, in the 1990s, my local PWME was interviewed under caution as to why atrazine was showing up in drinking water boreholes in properties alongside the railway at levels way in excess of a safe dose. BR hadn't used it for years ago that point but it was still in the groundwater.

Very nice ! I did something similar with a DJH Black Five a few years ago, albeit on a non-DCC Hornby chassis. You need to remove an awful lot of metal from inside the boiler ! It'll pull the house down though ... In my case it was because the Kemilway chassis is was on was the only EM chassis I ever got to work properly, and I couldn't bear to dismantle and regauge it when I went back to OO.

There's an extra piece of glazing and one more masking operation to paint the yellow ends. Clearly the price of masking has gone up exponentially.

The real train service on my line was Black 5, Black 5, Black 5, two Black 5s, Clan, Black 5 .... But at £230 each the upside of this announcement for me is that I'll have more second hand ones to choose from. I'm aware of the inflationary pressures but I can paint my own crew (better than Hornby if their cows are anything to go by) and I don't need gimmicky lighting up stuff. There's not a lot wrong with the old that a new tender chassis and some decent bogie wheels wouldn't fix.

The Scottish one were a mixture of lined and unlined black. 46467 was certainly plain black when it moved north in 1963 but I also have a photo of it in plain black at Cambridge in (I think) 1957.

Thanks I've got a feeling they stand on a goods line or loop at Knottingley but its a long time since I've been there. Goole was not originally a turnback siding but that's what it's used for unless something's changed recently. I once had a very interesting conversation there with the local Environmental Health officer about a complaint from a local councillor that trains standing on it behind their house were causing a noise nuisance. Cllr Whatsisname's solution was that they should stand further along the siding where they were annoying other ratepayers instead.

Horsforth between Leeds and Harrogate. Goole. Not sure what the arrangements are at Knottingley.

I know the railway isn't at the same level as the surrounding streets (I'm reasonably familiar with Ingrow as it is now) but if you look at the benchmarks and spot heights on the surrounding roads the land falls quite steeply towards the goods yard and presumably the railway does too. It's quite possible that, having hooked off at the scissors crossing as SM describes, it was gravity shunted. Of course on the model the most practicable way of doing it is to run round as already described.

That's about to become a reciprocal problem, as of today the rules have changed for all imports to the UK. The new export rules in place for the last year have already killed 70% of small retailer food* exports, now imports are about to go the same way. A lot of small traders will no longer ship to the UK, and not just from the EU. Belcher Bits (Canadian retailer of resin bits for model aeroplanes) ceased supplying UK customers last year because our VAT rules are "too stupid to deal with". *(I could only find figures for food).

I think the fundamental difference between model shops and general retail is that model shopping is done for fun whereas general retail isn't. My groceries come in a van from whichever supermarket has a suitable slot, because it means I don't have to fight my way round Sainsburys with the rest of humanity, and I have no particular loyalty to one supermarket or the other. But model shopping is a leisure activity which I enjoy. That said, I'm fortunate to have a very good LMS just down the road from home, and another ten minutes walk from my office (when I'm allowed in it). Both get most of my custom because generally the cost of p&p offsets the smaller discount to a degree. (I'm not going to quibble over a tenner extra on a £200 purchase). It also means I can pick things up when I can see they're in stock rather than having things on backorder for goodness knows how long, and I can pick up things I didn't even know were out. I do use Hattons and the others where its convenient as even the best LMS doesn't stock everything. Same goes for garden centres. You can buy everything you need for a garden online but where's the fun in that ? The problem other hobby retailing has is simply one of scale - gardening (in its very loosest term as meaning any activity accommodated by a modern garden centre) will always outweigh every other hobby because almost every household with a garden does it.

The chalk inscription on the cart reads "Uckfield parish Church bells before being recast 1905" which might explain the lack of straw packing and the one lying on its side - these are the scrap ones.

The order (from BTP) to remove bins at stations came after a passenger was killed by a bomb in a bin at Waterloo, and was re-issued after the Warrington bombing when a child was killed by a town centre bomb in a bin. In both cases shrapnel from the metal bin was a factor as well as the ease of hiding the bomb in the first place. After the Good Friday Agreement it became the subject of long running correspondence between Stuart Baker, then Ops Director of RRNE/Northern Spirit, and BTP, as was the BTP budget generally. Stuart was particularly fond of taking photos of bins outside BTP jurisdiction but within known terrorist targets and sending them to BTP, in particular I recall him sending photos of bins at Belfast Central and asking them to explain why it was OK to have them there when (at the time) he still wasn't allowed to put one at Goxhill. The rules were later relaxed hence the hoop and bag design. Whether a station has these or no bins is down to the TOC's own risk assessment, and some may find it more cost effective (on paper and in the fantasies of their bean counters) to pay someone to sweep up rather than pay them to empty bins.

About £100/tonne at todays prices but that's based on the scrap steel/iron price. Any copper or brass bits will be worth more but there will be less of them than iron and steel. A Barclay 0-4-0ST weighs about 30-40 tonnes.

Yes. For nearly 35 years now.

Unfortunately it's just as easy to kill passengers and staff/volunteers on a heritage railway as it is on the real one so I have no problem with ORR and RAIB taking a robust approach with them. Shunting has historically been an extremely dangerous job - I suspect the heritage sector now carries out a significant proportion of 'real*' shunting, maybe even the majority of it by the very nature of its operations. Let's face it, keeping the bloody paperwork straight is the easiest bit of managing competence ! *(i.e. getting in between as opposed to just moving units from one siding to another).

PBM (Parcels Business Machine) was less great. It used three letter codes for stations, but not the same ones as CRS so Barnsley was BNY on one and BSY on the other. Endless fun with multifunction clerks who spent most of their time on CRS and sent the occasional parcel. As explained by our Chief Clerk to a trainee: "Run the arrivals list every morning, that tells you what's due. If someone comes in for a parcel and it's on the list but not here then ring Sheffield because odds on its there. If its not on the list then it's been misdirected so start by ringing Barnetby then Barnes, Barking, Barnstaple, Barnham ..."

CRS was great. As well as seat reservations you could send messages ('XUM') between stations or to all stations, and you could set up information pages on a sort of prehistoric Internet. You were supposed to show things like opening hours, directions to the bus station, hospital, taxi rank etc but most stations had a jokes page and Passenger of the Week page. Several had story pages or a diary, and Ashley at Chippenham wrote a comprehensive and very funny history of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their pages. We had a pub crawl on the Barnsley pages guiding readers around the various pubs near stations between Barnsley and Huddersfield, but then we got carried away and started running a dating agency on it where station staff could send in dating profiles for themselves or colleagues they wanted married off. Unfortunately one of us accidentally XUMed all stations with some particularly ribald comment meant for one individual, relating in a visit from our SM. "I don't know what Matching Mates is, and I don't want to know, but if I get any more snotty memos from CRS User Control you'll all be carriage cleaning. Stop it ." You could also set it up as a TOPS terminal if you knew how, and tie it up for hours running a query for the whereabouts of every Class 37 in the country in advance of a weekend bashing/spotting session.

To save the additional maintainance costs associated with two crossovers to allow access to platforms 2, 4 and 5 and the maintenance siding. That would require two extra sets of switches and the line capacity does not justify them. It was a cost saving measure when the station was remodelled for electrification but there has (so far) been no requirement to change it.

Good heavens. Bog standard wagons at a sensible price ! I bet it isn't catching.