ruggedpeak

2 hours ago, Sir Roland Matthews said:

Thank you! You will Nene much more at shows than me for this year, and credit to her for thinking of the socks. It is a good partnership, I know about the about the trains and she knows the best way to use the artwork!

I did say to her I wanted a kids version of the Land Rover socks!

On 22/04/2024 at 09:25, Sir Roland Matthews said:

I will be attending with my On The Rails stand and bringing with me some new items and show exclusives such as a locomotive birthday garland and wooden pin badges of locos, aircraft and cars. I have drawn some of the stock operating on the WCML for a new t-shirt too and I am hoping that they will be ready in time. 

 

Thank you as always to anyone who has supported our small venture before and helped us grow to such a level where we are able to attend events of this size, including A.P. in March and then again with Warners for the new November show. 

I had a chat with the young lady on the stand and bought 2 pairs of socks for my daughter who was very pleased with them. I really liked the Class 37 entering the station Xmas card, will get some of those later in the year.

Just now, melmerby said:

I was really looking forward to seeing it.

I'm fairly local and can get there on public transport as I always did for the Warley Show.

 

Unfortunately I have done something to my back and standing up looking at layouts would not be possible.

Not being funny, can you get assistance at NEC? There were plenty of wheelchair users who got to see it, even during the record attempt. Be a shame to miss it as PW didn't seem inclined to replicate setting the whole thing up again.

18 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Only a problem if you are using wireless.

Shouldn't be a problem with solid wiring.

 

On the Midlands Today piece, the problems were random shorts, nothing system dependent.

It is all dependent on the wiring and interboard connectors.

Yes, and I overheard PW saying (if I heard correctly) they left one board behind! There are a lot of board joints in the layout and some trains were stopping on points at one end as well. The sensitivity of DCC to shorts in a layout full of joins etc is not ideal.

I seem to recall the WiFi issues being discussed after Warley due to similar issues.

However irrespective of this it remains a very impressive layout to see and excellent work by the team. It certainly attracted a crowd and the scenic work is fab. Pleased to see the whole thing.

9 minutes ago, Phil Himsworth said:

What are the food offerings like? We're wondering what to do for lunch tomorrow...

Usual NEC catering plus pulled pork stand and pie and pasty stand. You can leave and re enter if you want a Subway etc

6 minutes ago, melmerby said:

A strange comment.

It's better suited than DC.

Miniatur Wunderland has 16.5km of track and is entirely controlled by DCC with Train Controller using 64 computers, try that with DC.

Wunderland works, but is not a portable display layout like Making Tracks. I spent quite a bit of time watching it today and trains kept stopping. Glad they got the record though.

Took a last minute decision to fly in from Switzerland for the show, direct flights into Brum International early morning so ideal. Had to queue for a ticket as I didnt buy in advance but was near the front of the day ticket queue and in at 10am. Queues were not a problem, everyone got in.

Very enjoyable show, got busy late morning and lots to see. Good selection of layouts and the non-railway modelling was excellent. A good mixture and planes, trucks and other models probably helped with families and general punters. Good support from the trade, managed to resist only due to cheap easyJet flights with hand baggage only! Good fun to watch PW and the Railnuts get their record. However anyone else attempting a world record, go analogue! DCC is not suited to huge layouts.

Some deals that I couldn't take advantage of but plenty of opportunity to talk to the trade. The more I see of TT120 the more I think it works. Just a shame I have a huge OO collection.

Having the 37 and 2 armoured vehicles was good. Also fab to see Models4heroes - please donate as they do great work. I sent them a collection of unopened Airfix kits when I emigrated.

Definitely an addition to the show calendar.

2 minutes ago, LNER4479 said:

Fine in the MkIIs today; not sure what it would be like in height of summer with no air-con running ...

I was just referring to the fact that the doors themselves were locked out of use; otherwise free to walk through them (and in fact had to at both Glenfinnan and Mallaig, as the MkII at the rear was off the platform.

 

Oh yeah - doh! Sorry - not very good on diesels!

 

No. I wasn't doing any sort of audit(!) I was actually there leading a tour group and they were my priority. I grabbed the above photos as and when I could.

Oh, that would have been funny to do one of those really annoying Youtube "Auditor" videos!

Just now, woodenhead said:

The fact it has been running two weeks would suggest WCRC have found a loophole and intend to use it to force the ORR into an exemption.

 

The Mk1s provide a retention toilet and the Mk2s the door controls - such a pity they could not be contained in one coach, but I expect they will push to be allowed to have passengers back in the Mk1s from some new risk mitigation regime they cobble from this lash up.

I doubt the ORR will be forced into anything. How is WCRC running the train going to force anything? Are the HSE forced into allowing things simply because someone persists in law breaking? Certainly be a new angle on UK safety law - safety law is not planning law, doing something unlawful for 4+ years does not automatically give you the right to keep doing it. Nor does ORR not taking action constitute tacit acceptance, again safety regulation does not work that way. If a regulator fails to act without good reason that may make them subject of separate action, but it does not in any way absolve the person/organisation in respect of their liabilities.

It is not the ORR's job to follow operators around wiping their snotty noses. They have better things to do, and will have some form of enforcement/inspection plan across the network to follow. That may or may not include keeping tabs on WCRC.

Doubtless they will take an interest in what WCRC are doing but IIRC WCRC have submitted an exemption request that is likely to take some weeks/months to process. If WCRC have done their own RA's etc and come up with this as a temporary solution it may or may not be compliant, but it is WCRC's legal responsibility to ensure it is legal and compliant, not ORR's. If there is no decision from ORR that does not give any consent AFAIK to operate under any form of temporary permission/exemption.

WCRC running a train doesn't set a precedent, although I have a suspicision WCRC will think it will. If the train is not immediately or obviously dangerous then ORR does not have to intervene. It will get around to looking at the detail of the operation and the regs if and when it decides to.

In the meantime, if there is an incident involving the Jacobite then they will get involved. If someone gets hurt it will be for WCRC to explain how it was safe and compliant to operate to ORR, NR and/or the courts, who will then decide whether it was compliant or not. ORR won't be criticised for not taking action in the absence of clear danger or a credible report of serious risk as it has limited resources and has already spent too much time on this one service and small time operator. It still has the rest of the network and millions of other journeys to keep an eye on. Running the Jacobite non-compliantly (and I am not saying it is currently non-compliant) is no different to driving an uninsured car with no MOT on the road - not the Police's responsibility for the consequences of that, they are the drivers. If the Police catch them great, but they can't catch every dodgy driver. Same with the ORR. For me the more interesting question is NR's role in this since they are facilitating the train operating.

The key thing is that there are signed documents from WCRC with named individuals responsible for the WCRC safety case and operation. I have seen from bitter experience the inability to prosecute following two fatalities, after a public body had not signed key documents and refused to identify the people who approved the lethal road layout contrary to expert advice.

29 minutes ago, LNER4479 said:

No seating allowed in the MkIs, but you can walk through. They really are towing empty coaches about.

 

 

Those toilets in use on MkIs are retention tank fitted (they were last year - paid for by Net Rail). Didn't check whole train, but MkII toilets I saw were either locked out of use or 'do not use in statio

More to follow...

Great photos, thanks. Glad you have good weather, how as it in the coaches?

Mk1's are not locked out of use as people can pass through them, and the toilets are available for use by passengers.

I zoomed in to see what the sign on the bulkhead says, "Please keep your dog off the seats, thank you".

1 hour ago, phil-b259 said:

As I said in another post leasing trains is in itself a perfectly sensible and can be a cost effective way of dealing with the problem of smoothing public spending / avoiding large one off hits to HM Treasury. The issue is the way the U.K. has gone about it…..

This!

The cheapest option is for the Government to buy something using a loan, the interest rates it pays are far lower than you get from any finance house. The problem is that loan appears on the Government finance stats, and if you are spraying money around the total number looks bad. So you hide it through privatisation, PFI and other stunts. Much of this was started by the Tories but dear old Gordon Brown exploded it (having basically given it steriods and got it addicted to crack!) because he thought he was being clever (same genius who allowed our gold reserves to be sold at record low prices) [not a political comment BTW but definitely an anti-Gordon Brown comment]. Since then every Government has just continued the same idiocy.

Politically you can announce new hospitals, trains, schools and things whilst knowing that the taxpayer will be paying 10x as much for the investment as they needed to. But you don't care as it will be someone else's problem as you will have gone.

12 hours ago, andyman7 said:

Yes, but in a perfect retailer's world they would be steadily selling the stock and successfully restocking with new supplies. What instead happens is they have shelves of (say) 1st class or Brake end coaches they can't sell, but can't order any more of the 2nd class ones that are needed to shift the others as they sold out straight away.

I agree. Which raises interesting questions about retailers stocks, turnover of those stocks, cashflow etc that we won't get answers to, but comes back to my earlier point about retail premises.

If the bulk of sales and margin/profit is from pre-order or rapid sellout items, what is the point of a retail store full of stock on shelves which only moves very, very slowly as you describe and what are the economics of that? In theory it is a financial drain on the business, Hornby have a financial drain on the business from excess/wrong stock and pass some of it onto retailers who end up with some of that excess/wrong stock costing them retail space and cash. Hence retailers moving into the secondhand market etc en masse and finding other ways to generate profitable revenue streams.

Could be worse though, could be trying to sell EV's 🤣

3 hours ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

There are no absolute requirements, but it isn't entirely irrelevent. GTR were fined £1 million under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 section 3(1) in 2019 when a passenger was killed by putting their head out of a window. This clause is a general duty of care by employers towards third parties.

 

A statement by ORR in 2019 (https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/safety-first-droplight-windows-heritage-and-charter-trains) says:

 

I don't think ORR has issued any specific guidance, and as you say, there is no specific legislative bar to opening windows, but if anyone is injured by sticking their head out of the window of a moving train, the operator can expect to be prosecuted.

The various general duties under HASAWA are often not well understood, but are a catch all for safety incidents. There is a statutory duty to protect employees and one to protect third parties regardless of whether they are directly part of the activity (e.g. pedestrians walking past a building site). Another one not well understood is the legal requirement for employees to protect themselves and comply with employers instructions - plenty of case law of employees being prosecuted for not protecting their own safety, often where they were injured and the employer is prosecuted for not ensuring their safety by not dealing with poor safety behaviours, whilst the employee is prosecuted for not wearing the provided PPE or following legitimate employer procedures.

There does not need to be a specific regulation for someone to be prosecuted due to the breadth of general duties under HASAWA. The duty GTR was prosecuted under for a head out of a window was the same duty used against the Met in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. So the general duties are wide ranging and cover situations even where there is no specific regulation.

UPDATE: as a safety practitioner covering H&S and fire safety, amongst the wider management population the existence and risk associated with the core general duties under both safety regimes is not well understood and I've had plenty of arguments with colleagues who don't understand or even accept this. If you manage people or activities with any risk you need to understand all the general duties as that is where the HSE starts looking to find ways to prosecute.

35 minutes ago, AndrueC said:

..and is carrying far more passengers 😉

 

I'll admit that I posted that graph more as a cheeky discussion point than because I believe that it shows a definite causal relationship. But still I'd be interested in whether you think that is 'more cost per passenger' or just 'more overall cost to run'.

 

Because those are two different things and depending which you believe (or maybe both?) surely affects future planning.

The latter, if you have armies of managers, lawyers and others employed by each TOC, NR etc etc all negotiating, haggling etc over decisions that is a massive inefficiency not just in terms of salaries and related costs (office space, paperclips, pensions etc) but also in poor decision making. The @Stationmaster has, in other threads, referred to the impact of this. Outsourcing lots of things also creates huge amounts of admin in the public sector, that is armies of people not delivering on the front line.

A simple example - DaFT had a directly employed headcount of 2,026 people in 2016 - that is civil servants pushing paper and excluding those in front line delivery exec agencies like DVLA, Trinity House etc. In 2023 the figure is 3,666. Clearly not all will be railway related but what is it about transport that requires 80% more Whitehall civil servants over 7 years? During the same period the same exec agencies doing actual frontline delivery work (DVLA, Trinity, MCA etc) have only increased headcount by 14%. So it is clearly not a huge increase in management and oversight of frontline operational activity.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dft-workforce-management-information

The cost per passenger is in part dependent upon passenger volumes, so will fluctuate in part due to external factors like working from home and wider policy and other factors. 

39 minutes ago, GrumpyPenguin said:

Interesting discussions.

 

However, where is the money coming from ?

(unless I've missed that bit).

Perhaps from not having to pay profits and management fees to third parties, for not having massive duplication of administration across multiple TOCS and quangos to oversee them, having potentially more joinned up long term decision making on major spend and investment. As Phil-B has pointed out, the railway now costs far more than it did under BR to operate, so the money is there, just needs to be better managed.

This is the big lie around public services, that they need more money. They don't, they need competent management.

11 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

Try adding the level of state subsidy to that graph!

 

Its a FACT that towards the end of its exsistance British Rail was very efficient in terms of using the subsidy extracting the maximum it could from every pond it spent.

 

However HM Treasury realised that the level of subsidy BR was getting was far too low to make privatisation work - all these extra players with their contractual interfaces and a need to return a profit to shareholders would increase administrative costs and start taking money out of the industry as dividends.

 

Therefore the level of subsidy the privatised industry got was something like 4 times that British Rail received - yet in fact progress in many areas like new trains electrification and resignaling schemes stalled - sometimes for decades!

 

Although the original intention of HM Treasury may have been to wind the subsidy levels back down - that was in the assumption there was lots of ‘waste’ and ‘public sector inefficiencies’ which the private sector could eliminate. In reality (and something which caused several of the original franchise owners to almost go bust) BR was VERY efficient and there simply wasn’t any ‘waste’ to cut - so subsidies have remained way above what British Rail received - with a good chunk of it wasted on legal / administrative costs or taken out as dividends.

 

Roger Ford, the very respected of modern railways magazine fame has tracked these extra post privatisation costs (including factoring into account inflation etc)

 

Back in 2003 he said the following to a Transport select committee

 My submission is that a railway costing twice its historical average cannot represent value for money, even if quality of service had been maintained. While this submission has focused on infrastructure costs, the subsidies to franchises are also increasing. As an indication of the likely scale of the problem, the recently signed Southwest Trains franchise will pay more subsidy in each of the three years than the whole of Network SouthEast—that is, all London commuter services—received in 1990-91.

 

Just stop and think about that for a minute - ONE TOC was costing the taxpayer MORE than it cost BR to run the WHOLE of NSE for a year!

 

In subsequent years he had contracted to track this trend calling it the ‘Ford Factor’ and has shown that for every £1 BR would have spent the privatised industry now has to spend £4 to achieve the same result. That extra £3 is not coming out of the private sector - they existing to make money for shareholders - not lose it! Thus it is the taxpayer who is ultimately paying for this extra cost - something persons of a certain political perspective completely refuse to acknowledge when they bang on about passenger rises or ‘record investment’

 

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmtran/145/145web50.htm

This is spot on, my only remark is that this is a general issue across all aspects of the public sector, not just railways.

The consultancies have worked with the private sector over several decades to convince simple minded or corrupted politicians and venal senior civil servants that the public sector is inefficient and wasteful with lots of powerpoints and charts. Yet the costs of carrying out even simple tasks under these privatised operations are far higher than doing it in-house. PFI is another example, but there are plenty of others. This is in part why the despite the alleged efficiency of the private sector public sector borrowing continues to grow. As part of the game the civil servants and public sector managers hand over their actual management responsbilities yet have seen substantial pay rises on various false pretexts. Yet as soon as something goes wrong it is amazing how many senior civil servants have to have an operation that happens to coincide with a public inquiry etc.

4 minutes ago, Olive_Green1923 said:

On topics such as this I feel a duty to be the Cassandra. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Labour announce, the railways will remain vastly under-funded and therefore will not become the system that we enthusiasts dream of, nor the land of milk and honey that Labour will promise it to be. 

 

Firstly, because they will have numerous other promises which will need money, and secondly, because as we all know, the DfT is actually the Department for Roads, and the Treasury too has a culture of being anti-railways. These dispositions and dogmas will remain engrained within them, regardless of which political party is in power.

I think it is more than that now, it is the EU style tecnhnocratic approach that some over-promoted civil servant thinks they know more than experience, competent people and a refusal to tackle the real issues as that means hard work and tough decisions that require them to take responsibility. Ideology and personal belief are the driving forces, not reality, proper research and competent management etc.

The current shenanigans north of the border are a good example - political meltdown over gender ideology and ridiculous Net Zero targets. No one of any party is really focused on the real issues that matter to real people like the serious failures in health, education, building a boat to service remote islands etc. And this is not a political comment, the same problem is replicated across all parts and levels of the UK, whether devolved, national or local governments. The Scottish thing is just a relevant high profile example today. 

I think much of this largely academic, regardless of what any politician wants, it is the Civil Service that has to deliver it, and any concept of a properly run railway means taking control away from DaFT. We've seen repeated examples of the Civil Service actively undermining Government policy and pursuing its own agendas, or just not bothering to work at all. The DaFT turkeys aren't going to vote for Xmas. So even if Labour have a suitable plan, DaFT will probably not implement it.

13 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

Exactly. I remember taking ages (nearly half an hour) to buy a S-Bahn ticket at Munich airport, as there were only 2 or 3 tickets machines (poorly located on the platforms) with a big queue. In a UK airport you could have bought your ticket in the airport building before you even got to the station with its dozen or so ticket machines. UK railways are actually really good at a lot of things. 

Gatwick station is exactly the same as Munich despite having many machines, partly because many passengers are newly arrived foreigners fresh off a plane and struggling to work out the ticket machine. It is telling that the quickest sales are via rail staff with their handheld ticket machines who provide additional capacity to the machines.....if ever there was a location needing proper ticket offices Gatwick is it. As a Brit it is frustrating to have to stand in a large queue knowing I can buy a ticket in a few seconds if I could get to the damn machine!! Why has no one got to grips with this and realised that self service does not work when you have large volumes of passengers not familiar with the system?

26 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

its not that long ago… mk3 cdl slam doors only retired during covid, even in 2021 thousands of passengers a day were using slam doors.

A valid point, Greater Anglia were using Mk3 push pull sets with 90 haulage until the new Stadler units took over in 2020. For some reason in my head I don't equate a Mk3 door as slam door like a 312, but you had to open the window and lean out to get the door open, and slam it shut so the guard didn't have walk down the train to close it!

I guess the amount of people in recent history who used those services and were familiar with them probably only had a limited overlap in the Venn diagram of the wider population who visit heritage railways?

Some internet research may help give an indication of the extent of the issue.

In Kernow's Bargain section they have 118 different SKU of Hornby OO coaches alone - that is just individual product lines, quantities vary from 1 to "more than 10" aka shedload! The overall total number of Hornby 'bargain' SKU's at Kernow is 285. However put a guesstimate of the average quantity of each SKU and an average value of each item and you don't don't actually get much total value - a rounding error on the £20m accounts figure (say av. quantity 8 per SKU and £30 per item = 8 * 285 * 30 =£68,400). Even if a quarter of the £20m is OO gauge trains (£5m) then the total number of retailers carrying large quantities of these items will struggle to get to a £1m.

This is comparable to Bachmann who have 256 SKU's in the Kernow bargain section. Obviously quantities and values will vary so actual value of stock in the bargain bin would require a lot more work (or someone with some good coding skills to scrape the data).

But we can conclude

1) it is not just a Hornby issue and perhaps calls into the traditional blue and red business model for trains

2) even with a number of retailers carrying or having access to significant amounts of the surplus stock, it may not even be touching the sides of the problem.

12 minutes ago, Gallows-Bait said:

 

It's interesting, because in some ways I feel like I am part of that new market Hornby was attempting to tap into.  I only have the vaguest memories of model trains.  My dad had a model railway when I was very young, but I had limited interaction with it and never had my own model trains.  His layout was packed up in a house move before even my teenage years and I've not seen it in thirty plus years since.  My youth was instead lining up lego soldiers and the like before moving into wargames and other miniatures.  I literally chose to look into this hobby because I'd seen TT120 on Youtube and had a vague feeling of nostalgia for grubby BR blue diesels and naff catering sandwiches that kept it nagging in the back of my head for months.  Driving past the Doncaster show by random chance back in February and seeing hundreds of happy faces, mostly clutching bags of purchases, made me look into it properly.

 

As someone new to the hobby I also face challenges I'm sure many people have.  Mainly the big barriers to the hobby are time, money and space.  Luckily my kids are growing up fast, so I'm getting my free time back and my job is at least comfortable enough that I can at least start out bit by bit into the hobby.   So it's only really been space that's the major hurdle, which was why the idea of TT120 appealled at first, but then I realised that N gauge ticked that box as easily, if not better, so it really came down to what products were out there for me right now.  As such, yes potentially whilst a new customer drawn in, if I had gone into TT120 it would only really have been over N gauge, so there is that potential cannibalisation of the market.  But unlike some people, I suppose I knew that not everything in the hobby is Hornby, so I wasn't limited by that perception and gave the N gauge ranges a look over too.  It feels like Hornby could just as easily have given all the same reasons and justifications for tooling up and joining in a big push for N gauge as much as making TT120 as I really don't see that much difference between them. 

 

However I can appreciate for Hornby that an entirely fresh market would be more tempting if bold enough to try it.  On the positive side for Hornby, if customers come in to TT120, if they want almost anything, they're very likely to buy the Hornby version if it exists. Track, lineside, locomotives, rolling stock and so forth.  The only problem is, they can only do it if it exists.  I almost feel that Hornby have actually been too cautious.  They're released a lot, but, for me at least, not enough.  A bit more in the range at launch and I think they could have seen even more success.  But hindsight is 20:20 as they say.  They could just as easily have ended up having to write off millions in unused toolings if it had sunk without a trace.

I think you just returned to the hobby 2 or 3 years too early! In a couple of years it should be very different.

Personally as a piece of high risk NPD i think they have done an excellent job with TT and would guess sell through etc is probably noticeably better than OO. As they say, overnight success takes about 10 years!

40 minutes ago, GordonC said:

 

But no-one wants the cost of holding stock on shelves for any length of time now whether its retailers or manufacturers. Maybe in the past there was more of a steady trickle of purchases over a longer period of time but I get the impression of there being more purchases of train-loads when new tooling appears and probably far less sales in future years.

Except that traditional physical retail (i.e. actual shops) requires stock sitting on shelves otherwise people won't come to the shop.

32 minutes ago, Gallows-Bait said:

As a newcomer, both these poor ranging decisions by the perennial manufacturers and the limited runs of smaller pre-order focused entrants does make it much harder to get into the hobby when you realise that modelling even half of what you see on the railways around you in real life means months of scouring ebay for second hand products or waiting six months to a year for a pre-order.

That beautifully sums up the current dysfunctional nature of the UK outline model railway market, except for missing out the extensive duplication of a limited range of items whilst many others that have never been modelled remain unproduced.

Hornby and Bachmann should perhaps, if their business model remains limited batch production, focus some more effort on those prototypes that the newcomers will not attempt as they seek to cash in the high volume pre-order items (noting that not all new entrants are heavily into the duplication business).

33 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

I think classes 411, 421 and 423 were all cheerfully serving Kent less than 25 years ago, and plenty of kids went to school on them. I am not aware that any had CDL fitted. 

I was commuting on slam door bouncy seat non-CDL 312's on the Southminster branch in the very late 1990's.

According to Wikipedia "The last slam-door stock was withdrawn by South Eastern Trains in December 2005" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam-door_train

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/4163768.stm

1 hour ago, phil-b259 said:

The fact you haven't done so and stuck it on this thread speaks volumes....

I do have a half decent prototype thread in the Swiss Railways section, which includes some comparisons with the UK. Seems to be appreciated by those interested in the contemporary Swiss scene.

15 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

 

The implicit implication that because other countries don't seem that bothered about things which are prohibited in this country and that the ORR is somehow acting unreasonably / getting carried away / overreaching itself etc!

 

What other countries may or may not do has zero relevance to the actions of the ORR - whose actions are framed by British legislation and nobody elses!

 

Now you can of course argue the British legislation is too stringent - BUT if you do then you need to remember what / who put the legislation into law in the first place, members of the houses of Parliament.

 

Hence, as with many things railways if you don't like the ORRs actions then you need to actually start discussing UK Politics and Parliament - both of which shape the entire legal / regulatory environment ion which all railway entities - including WCR MUST be in full compliance with. 

 

 

 

Total figment of your imagination and very bizarre given at various times on this thread i have been accused of spreading hate against WCRC and being part of an anti-WCRC mob!

When you have calmed down read my post again. Nowhere have I criticised ORR or made any comment that remotely implicates that.

I am genuinely interested in comparisons and offered it simply on that basis, as the way the Swiss society does things is very interesting (to me at least) compared to the UK. If it's not of interest to you just ignore it