Edwardian

I am very happy right now! These are superb Well done Rapido!

Recently I received, by way of a 'thank you' some new toys, for which I, and the management of the Bishop's Lynn Tramway, are profoundly grateful... Of course, this is a goods locomotive, in terms of usage if not designation, and I think one built later than CA is set (i.e. it's not one of the original 1903 lot), but these are mere details. I have a G15, and some brass coach kits for the W&UT and, armed with the correct RAL number for the Rapido stock, I will be able to paint them up to match. The detail and quality of finish of modern RTR can be very impressive, and I think these will be only the second RTR SG coach release in pre-Grouping livery (of a pre-Groupinfg prototype as opposed to generics). I have 2-3 of the 4-wheelers and the Brake Van in brass kit form and the older luggage van in a very good 3d print. So ....

In my youth I was captivated by a visit here.

This book ..... The trick is having the knowledge and skill to be able to do what he has done with whatever version of whatever software you have. But, yes, the principle is sound.

That's certainly been my thought for the WNR's liveries. So many areas could be designed as entire panels.

So, as will be seen, the repairs in addition to the pony truck are larglely cosmetic. Fortunately both 'pins' for a tender connector are present. The front spring and valance will need reconstructing, along with the rear of the cab footplate and handrails. All casualties of the the inadequate packaging. The coupled wheelbase I have not checked, but I think it's likely to be at least close to correct. Ideally the mainframe would be reset slightly forward to allow a better alignment with the splashers. This would also align the leading wheels better with their axleboxes. The obvious mistake is that the tender frames are the wrong way round! The shorter interval should be to the rear. These frames are already loose at the ends, however, so I should be able to prise these off with care and swop them round! I note the cut outs are not the D-shaped. The Y14s had both patterns, but I'd need to swot up on the T26s. So, there are some issues, even without the need to back-date, but with the damage refund we are looking at a model that set me back c.£57 plus postage, so it's worth the risk and the hassle to try to get it right! Assuming a sound working model results, as I say, the changes to GER condition will not be great. I need a nice dished smoke box door, with separate handrail to the face, and Alan Gibson's GER safety valve. The tender fenders need careful removal. Then some detail would not go amiss: Loco and tender guard irons, lamp irons , loco brakes, and sand boxes and pipes come immediately to mind. Then the challenge of the fully lined ultramarine livery.

So, spot the mistake! Those tender fenders will need to come off, too. It's been said of the Great Western that it could be run with just two types, the Hall Class and a Pannier. That always stuck me as a bit silly, but if you had to run the Great Eastern with just two classes, you might get away with it if these were the Y14 0-6-0 and the T26 2-4-0 'Intermediates'. So, clearly I must find my way to one of the latter for CA.

Yes, probably that next, and, after that, give that goon in Argentina enough time to fail and the Falklands will be invaded again. Brazil is an ally of Guyana, so it might intervene.

Right. Thanks to all. It's looking like araldite on a joint reinforced with brass rod pinning. I would be fairly confident that, if I bring enough care and competence to the task (far from guaranteed!) it should suffice and avoid more fundamental and traumatic options! There are a number of changes required, other than the repairs. On an initial assessment, I would say a back-dated cased safety valve and dished smokebox door. Also, I'm grateful that the builder used glue, because he's built the tender frames back to front! Hopefully I'll end up with a free running engine!

A quite brilliant conception and I look forward to developments Are your platforms low enough for the period? Worth checking, I suggest. Quite a bit of wheel showing on the engines, and the platform is a step down from the upper coach footboard.

So, today I received my quarterly water bill ... for £3,515 odd. So, after taking a deep breath, I 'phoned my supplier. I have had poor experiences with utilities suppliers, notably Scottish Power, who spent months trying to bully me via debt collectors and unlawful threats of disconnection before conceding their meter was faulty and producing a statement showing that I had not used the electricity consumption of a small town, but was in fact comfortably in credit. However, I had to listen to remarkably little of Yorkshire Water's 'brass band favourites' album before a very helpful man from Bradford told me not to worry, he'd have a word with his boss and sort it out. He rang me back within an hour or two, having sorted it out. I ended the day £23.65 in credit. No idea what caused all this, other than this was apparently an historic thing at their end. I drink Yorkshire water now ...

Yes, and that's the point, which is why I used the words "a British monoculture of her [Braverman's] own imagining" It's a right-wing populist trope feeding into conspiracy theories, so of course it has no objective reality! It's like the guy who interviewed MAGA Republicans at a Trump rally asking "so, you want to make America great again. When would you say it was last great?" A variety of answers were given. In response to each the interviewer asked, 'but what about such and such issue of that time', and each interviewee in turn conceded that, no, their chosen moment of greatness was not actually a time when the US was objectively great. Eventually they got back to Day 1 1776 and the concession that it's all been downhill since then! The point is that This England, to which immigrants are to assimilate, which is to revel at last in its hard-won sovereignty, does not exist, it has never existed, it is not a place, not a reality and certainly not a set of acceptable values, but a fictitious sentimental mental hinterland England where Daily Mail readers dwell in their alternative reality and Dame Vera neverendingly sings about ironically non-indigenous bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover. It's b0ll0cks. No, nor would it matter if they didn't, but the populist narrative does not require any of it to be true! This is why it is so hard to counter this nonsense; the truth, facts, have no impact on the belief. BREXIT, Johnson, Braverman, Small Boats, Take Back Control; these are merely the delusional totems of a cult.

Well, they weren't wrong, were they?

I have to say that I think that underlying this government's policies is White genocide conspiracy theory This might seem odd when we have a Prime Minister of Indian extraction, a black British Home Secretary and two rabidly authoritarian, anti-immigration ex-Home Secretaries who both have heritage in the Indian sub-continent. I think the clue lies in Cruella Braverman's mad rants against multiculturism prior to leaving office. I may be quite wrong, but bear with while I try to reason this one out. James O'Brien asked how could the Home Secretary, an asian woman raised to one of the high offices of state claim that multicultralism has failed? That, I suspect, is because Mr O'Brien and the then Home Secretary understand the term 'multiculturalism' in entirely different ways. As a term, I don't think that 'multicultralism' has a single settled definition, but a reasonably general definition would be 'the presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society'. I guess that Braverman believes it to represent diversity and pluralism, where the reality of the rich tapestry of British life is woven with threads from many cultures, preserving their customs and identities. In other words, Braverman sees multicultralism as the opposite of assimilation, and she hates it for that. She, I guess, believes in assimilation into a British monoculture of her own imagining, which is predominently white and certainly with inherited white anglo-saxon cultural norms. It is a world where the Notting Hill carnival is eschewed in favour of endless repeats of Midsomer Murders. If you are a well-to-do, middle class person with drive and ambition, or drive ambition and an incredibly wealthy spouse, and you embrace the culture of the establishment of the country your parents came to, you can be as brown as you like and that does not matter, this is not a rascist country, government studies have shown. Now that is not intended to sound snide. Such efforts at assimilation with the dominant culture of a country are a perfectly legitimate choice. The fact remains, assimilated sons and daughters of immigrants with wealth and access to power are not the ones Daily Mail readers are taught to fear. This is ironic, because these politicians, along with their multitudinous white colleagues, are those most likely to cause anarchy in Britiain by their cynically casual erosion of the rule of law and the conventions and institutions of our democracy in the pursuit of bonkers populist policies and their own personal corruption. The question is to what extent should immigrants be required to assimilate. Those of us old enough will remember how the waters of the metaphorical Tiber were prophesied to run red with blood because of a lack of assimilation, and, later, we had Norman Tebbit with his 'cricket test'. It remains a preoccupation of those on the right of the Conservative Party. Multicultralism says it's fine not to conform to the host country monoculture. And, well, it is fine. So is it more than a theorhetical problem, a manufactured issue? A strawman argument like the little boats themselves? We have never, I suggest, been comfortable with immigrants doing everything they did at home. Where cultural practises offend the laws of the land and the predominent morality that the law is created to reflect, we do require compliance; so-called honour killings and female circumcision are examples of this. By and large, though, within the fairly generous parameters of the law, people are free to continue their own cultural traditions and to pursue freedom of religion etc. Why is this, or might it be, a problem? Well, I suggest, it isn't. So, why should Braverman, like the Borg, abhor multiculturalism in favour of assimilation? Well, I think it is because of a populist fear of large numbers of poor, unassimilated, cuturally and ethnically foreign (for which read 'brown' by and large) migrants "overwhelming" an indigenous population and culture (for which read 'white'). In other words, if there are too many unassimilated poor brown people coming in who do not share our 'values', they will ultimately displace the culture of the host nation and its indigenous folk will ultimately become the oppressed minority. For this reason, having a wealthy assimilated brown prime minister and three successive brown Home Secretaries in no way lessens the inherently rascist spectre that is the sub-textual appeal of current Conservative policy to it base.

Ah, was it not Hoffnung with his mistranslated continental hotel brochures who said "Every room contains a french widow offering inviting prospects"

This does, indeed, illustrate the farcically cruel nature of government policy well. I think the significance of these new rules is not that they are only now introducing something obnoxious in principle and deleterious to our economy in practice; I don't believe that injustice only arises at the point when something inconveniences white middle class privilege and, from a pragmatic stance, I also believe that people who work in lower paid sectors, particularly social care and nursing, are as necessary to us or, dare I say, more necessary to us than academic publishers. It does underscore the absurdity and injustice of the system in a way that brings it to the attention of the chattering classes who probably never even imagined that anyone was stopped from bringing a spouse to live here. In other words, the chatterati have now noticed and are chattering about it! So, a further musket ball to the foot by our inept populist regime.

BTW, I still need another x3 1st compartment 70' composite if anyone comes across one.

He did Dreadnoughts. I once had three of them built.

Quite right. I should have qualified my original post. Government policy is to stop dirty poor foreigners coming to our shores! As to my second post, as you guessed, only the first option was my policy reccomendation!

Well, you tell me! Could that explain the pattern of the break?

Or just accept asylum seekers because our basic humanity demands nothing less and recognise that economic migrants are a self-selecting and highly motivated group of hard working over-acheivers whose skills or labour we sorely need and who will enrich our nation culturally. Or, if you prefer, turn the Isle of Wight into a vast prison camp and just carpet bomb it every time it approaches capacity.

Thanks all. Food for thought. I see what is meant by the break looking more like mazac, however, I suspect it must be white metal; it's a component in a (Stephen Poole) white metal kit. To me the break looked a bit metal fatigue in nature. I think I would need to drill out the pivot to remove. It could be a bit of a messy job with uncertain results. I would need to have something suitable with which to replace the broken component, and be confident of a means of fixing it. For this reason, and because the broken component is clearly the correct fit and designed to work the the spring installed to keep the pony truck in contact with the rails, it seems to me that the best course is to repair the component if that proves possible. I have never tried low melt solder and probably don't have the right iron or solder. The prospect is worrying. Perhaps pinning with brass rod and araldite and a shim or staple!

Love that oriel in particular. Seeing this project come togather gives me joy.

"Stop the boats!" The Conservative government has been trying for years to stop dirty foreigners coming here. Nevermind strikes, and collapsing concrete schools, underfunded health, education, transport, courts, the lack of childcare or social care provision, the cost of living crisis, instutionally corrupt, homophbic and racist police forces, legislative curtailments of peaceful protest and civil liberties that sometimes even the Met refuse to implement, renaging on net zero committments etc etc. I could go on. The ways in which this country is f-ked are endless. The ability to distract the electorate from all of this by pointing and shouting "look over there, people in small boats!" has been remarkably effective for an astonishlingly long time. But even the Daily Mail readers among us might have started to notice that the government cannot even solve the invented problem of choice. We tried bribing the French to stop them. We've denied legal routes of entry and criminalised asylum seekers. We tried to fly them to Rwanda (and we're trying again). We tried to put them in prison hulks. We even painted over a cheery mural in a children's reception facility to stop it looking friendly and welcoming to distraught child refugees. Basically, if Paddington Bear tried to come here today, he'd be f-ked. Yet. none of this has worked. They keep coming. Worse, we've lost 17,000 of them. That's right, 17,000 of those to whom we have refused asylum have disappeared. The fact is, the "people in small boats" are a fraction of those we need to let in legally to pick our leeks, wait at table, and change the nappies of our care home residents. Thanks to ending Freedom of Movement by leaving the EU, we've actually had to let more people in than before we "took back control" Perhaps this is why, as the BBC reported on 23 November: Net migration into the UK was a record 745,000 last year, figures show - far higher than originally thought. Office for National Statistics data published on Thursday show that experts have revised up previous estimates. In May, it said net migration - the difference between the number of people coming to live in the UK and those leaving - for 2022 had been 606,000, 139,000 lower than the true figure. No wonder another government project is to run the BBC into the ground. Speak truth to power and power f-ks you up and then gets a job on GB News. So, the Supreme Court said the Rwanda policy was unlawful. This is because it found as a fact that Rwanda was not a safe third country. Our Glorious PM's immediate response was to promise a new treaty with Rwanda and legislation that would deem Rwanda a safe vcountry, yes, parliament would simply change the facts. So. with proposed immigration legislation released in draft today, Robot Generic MP, the minister responsible has resigned. Why? Because it does not pass the Bravaman test, it does not disapply European Convention and other Human Rights protections that form part of our international treaty obligations, because that is too mad even for this government, at the moment at least. So the headbangers on the backbenches are frothing because, yes, legal challenges will still lie in the Strasbourg court of human rights and the policy will fail to reduce net migration despite the needless cruelty it inflicts and the further erosion of our constutional norms and international reputation it represents. This is precisely why I consider right wing populists as dangerous idiots. How much longer?