Michael Hodgson

Yes, but how many of us can tell the difference in noise between one diesel and the next? OK, I could tell a deltic when I heard it (4 miles away!), or a gronk from a mail line loco, but mostly one main line loco sounds pretty much the same as another to me.

Probably still lower quadrant semaphores.

Just a thought but it might not be necessary to use a fictitious tunnel to disguise the hole, the clue is in that more recent photo. Provided there are enough tall foreground trees with the line in cutting anyway, the hole may become invisible to the viewer from any normal viewing position in the operating well. As for the bridge, I have to say I prefer the earlier photo!. That bridge is unusual - I don't think I've ever seen underwater pillars supporting brick piers like that before. They would become invisible when the river is in flood, and the gaps between them must offer less resistance to flow than having piers all the way down to bedrock. Would piling go all the way up to the concrete capping just below the girders, in which case the brickwork is presumably only provided as a cutwater ? The brickwork is much wider than necessary to support the bridge girders - might there once have been a walkway at that lower level? Was it maybe built with the thought of a possible future additional track?

Absolutely! That gets more difficult once you've got arthritis and had knee replacements. I have to use a mechanics' creeper to get into one of my operating wells.

I would say it wasn't legally yours to sell - it belonged to his next of kin as he'd paid for it. But I doubt that they would have wanted an item like that anyway, other than possibly to resell it themselves - they've got a big enough job as it disposing of everything else he's left behind. The same applies to most railway modellers - the family usually isn't interested in our hobby. It is also most unlikely that they would even be aware of his transaction with you.

Thanks, first I've heard of that, but I've not bought or sold anything on a collection basis lately.

Amazon is an interesting case because of its market. It started as a bookseller, which was a particularly difficult business. The problem is that a good bookshop in order to satisfy everybody has to carry a very large range of products (which is also a problem in model railway retailing), and because such specialist products tend to be slow-moving it is a serious financial drain in times of high inflation. There is a need for significant investment in stock, and it has to be readily located when required. Demand is very limited (compared to say a grocery which sees its customers very frequently). That means there's not room for large numbers of competing outlets and either the customers have to be able to travel specially to the store, long distances for those who live in more remote places, or the store has to deliver. In the UK, there were few bookshops that stocked everything, and they tended to be in the longest established university towns, while bookshops in the rest of the country tended to be much more reliant on higher turnover pulp fiction. Amazon moved into this market by bringing new technology into mail order, so displacing the relatively stuffy image of conventional bookshops, and making the whole range available to everybody. I think this is why "catalog shopping" by Sears Roebuck and others became so successful in the USA, where residents of "small town America" had little choice other than their local dressmakers, haberdashery and hardware store. It came to the UK after WW2 through Littlewoods and others. Amazon's later move into selling everything made them the equivalent of both the catalogue shppoing market and the department stores (which have now largely gone to the wall), working on the same "Pile it high, sell it cheap" than made Cohen's Tesco chain so successful. Local outlets struggle to compete because they still have to hold stocks but on a smaller scale, and have high urban rent and rates they need to cover as well as the wage bill. Lower cost and higher volume businesses can compete on price. But Amazon's stranglehold on online shopping is dependent partly on price but also on having developed a delivery system that is significantly faster and more reliable than the traditional services of the GPO and the more recent courier networks. This the world that Hornby and other manufacturers now operate in - I wonder whether they may end up as just another supplier to Amazon. Modellers want access to all of the products that are available, and no retailer can now do that. Gone are the days that if I can't the loco I want locally because they sold out, I'll visit a model shop in some other town in the hope that they still have some left. We aren't as fussed about about next day delivery, but we are very price sensitive. Whilst the manufacturers can cut out the middle man with direct sales to improve their margin, quality and price are likely to be the deciding factors in which of the competing manufacturers survive in the long term.

The USA has a lot more level crossings than we do, and one of the problems is that many of them are not in fact level - especially in rural areas and entrances to industries. They have a lot of ungated crossings, which is to be expected when compared to our traditional gates which made sense in the context of our requirement to fence off our railways. Grounding of long vehicles is indeed an issue in the US, because minor roads were built in the days of horse & buggy and neither railway nor highways authorities seem to be expected to do anything about it. Many drivers are not really familiar with railways as many places are not rail-connected. Some of their road junctions seem to be so poorly designed such that long vehicles can have to give way to other road traffic without clearing the tracks. As to the value of the vehicle and its load, that just seems to be seen as a matter for the insurance industry.

TrainController was also written by a German, so I would expect that to follow their practice too. If you are writing software to handle signalling for a global market, the problem is that every country has its own rules, and within each country the practices have also changed over time. Most of Europe has systems based on speed signalling, and I suspect that is what is easiest to implement in iTrain. We have an approach which is more route based (we tell the driver which line he's going to take rather than merely telling him how to adjust his speed and place a lot more reliance on his knowledge of the route and its speed limits). British signalling isn't even one system; the rules on semaphore practice are quite different from multiple aspeect signalling. That's quite apart from the various oddball systems such the LMS Mirfield scheme of the 1930s. In the USA there seems to be great number of different systems, though I suspect there is lot more commonailty if you look at the principles behind the numerous aspects their signals can show.

Nothing to do with Parkway stations, but quite a lot of people drive to the station and park. I need a residents' parking permit just to park in the street because I'm walking distance from the station - I chose this house because it meant I wasn't dependent on the car to catch the train to work. The parking restriction is only for one hour (11.00 to 12.00) Mon-Fri, but it's necessary to stop the street being cluttered with commuters' cars. The station does have a car park, although it's not cheap (you can add another £1500 to your annual season ticket) and it does fill up so people park in such nearby streets as permit it. Hardly surprising that those who are in a position to do so get their wives to drop them off.

All's well that ends well. 🙂

I read that as bullshitness. Sorry! I'm just a bit cynical about company chairmen's statements in annual reports.

I too would be interested to learn what TC can do that iTrain can't, or does in a better or easier way. When I looked at the products available, it was down to iTrain or TrainController. There didn't seem to be a great deal of difference between them in overall functionality, and the issues discussed upthread were alreaady apparent at the time. There may well be some such, as comparison isn't straightforward as there's a big learning curve with either. Xander, the developer of iTrain is talking of a future uograde (release 6.0), but I can't help wondering what features he's found to write that are not in the current verion.

When first built Bristol Bleakway would have been a better name. The wind fairly whistled through that station and for a main line station its facilities were not much better than bus shelters - my recollection of its architectural features is of a large black station clock over each ots its two platforms. It certainly lacked the character of Temple Meads. As a location however it was particularly well chosen, as it was close to the M4, the M5 and the M32 in road terms, and the NE/SW main line and the S Wales Main line. It didn't serve only the Bristol/South Glos area, it was very useful from the other side of the Severn Bridge (what is now called the M48) if you wanted to go to London from Chepstow/SE Monmouthsire - it made little sense to travel in the wrong direction to Newport to catch a train, and the service going via Gloucester was slow, and if memory serves parking was originally free.

My approach with MEK on plastics is to try it and see. If it sticks, it will do so quickly. If it doesnot show any signs of setting within a couple of minutes, it's time to dig out something else such as the supergloo.

Going through sideways is all very well within reason. But do make enough allowance for a future increase in that dimension as you get a little older ! And some of your visitors may be more "portly" than yourself. The fat controller might not be able to get through! And you are likely to find that you need to be able to move large objects into/out of the room from time to time.

What you can see depends on your vantage point - I am used to seeing York station either from the inside (having arrived by train) or looking down from the City wall. You can see next to nothing if you are on Leeman Road under the bridge, and if you walk out through the main entrance you are at street level and see fairly little, other than the immediately surrounding buildings and the medieval wall, whilst the view from one of the upper rooms of the hotel will be different again. We get an aerial view of most layouts as a visitor at an exhibition (but often only from one side) as though we were in a helicopter some little distance away. This particular layout is inside a building, so you don't get that view - you see it from inside an operating/access well, but as our heads are well above baseboard level, still at a high level. But the layout covers a vary large station and its environs, including junctions at each end, and the loco shed, and the actual view from the South end of the station is very different from what you can see at the North end where the Scarborough lines diverge. Should the view of the surrounding area be from one single point, such as one would see from the inside of a camera obscura? Or perhaps it should somehow combine the views from such a large geographical area? I would suggest that there is no single vantage point for a layout like this, and that means there are inevitably visual compromises to be made with the background scenery. I think part of what makes this layout so realistic is that it combines views from different places, and it manages to be convincing from both sides of the very large station building.

I would have thought that less likely than fatigue. No doubt everybody in Harrow was awake as it was in the morning rush but the express had been travelling all night and was nearing London so the crew would have been well into a long shift. The weather was foggy though I don't think fog working was in force. It would have been very tiring peering through the murk looking for semaphores. With the heat from the firebox, might they not merely have dozed off? In the absence of detonators or AWS to bring them to their senses they could easily fail to notice the signals.

Even if he were, he'd have to be looking at his emails to arrange a delivery time - you don't turn up with a layout and shove a card through the letter box saying sorry you were out so we left it with the lady across the street! 🤣

It's strange what one remembers, but for what it's worth, the station buffet still made a decent cup of tea in the days you couldn't find a proper brew, and of all the unlikely things to do remember, I can tell you they had green cups and saucers.

Don't let the cat out of the bag!

It was never normal railway practice in the UK. There were one or two exceptions in the very early days of the railways as accidents of history, but usually a train carrying passengers was always hauled by a steam locomotive rather than propelled, otherwise the crew could not see where they were going and whether there might be an obstruction ahead of them. "Push-pull" steam trains were later developed where the driver could sit in a cab at the end of a short train (1 or 2 coaches) using special control equipment while the fireman remianed on the footplate to look after the boiler. With modern diesel locos or units with cabs at both ends, a driver would stop and walk to the other end when changing direction. Goods trains or empty passenger trains could be backed into sidings though, with the Guard giving hand signals.

As our Irish friends still haven't got round to it, pehaps it will be a Listowel & Ballybunion loco?

Clothing factory sized moth balls

I know a signalman who collects wagon numbers. Gets a list of numbers by looking up trains as they pass his box on TOPS/TRUST or whatever system has that data. 😋