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While we're still on the distractions.... I feel I'd be remiss to not post the bit of the network I get to play around with... "The Great Survivor" Car 14. Happily at its home, the Statfold Barn Railway. Looks like you saw the "Temporary" Bus station just prior to the installation of Civic Way. The planning for which took place in the mid 60s. Swad's had "three" bus stations to my knowledge. One was where the Fire & Ambulance Station currently stands, then the temporary one which was in preparation of Civic Way's construction, and then the current one between the library and council offices. All those roads still exist, and a bunch of other roads simply aren't on there for the sake of the Midland Red Map. I don't see a load which definitely exist at this time, mostly because my family was living on them from the 50s onwards!

Would that be the one that's now where the Fire Station is? Or the later one on what used to be Engine Field?

I'll have a bit of a wander through my books, see if I can find it for definite. It's piqued my interest as this is a rather brilliant layout of somewhere only a few miles away from me!

I was always under the impression the Station was built not in the Midland Railway Style, but as an agreement between four companies using Burton. The LNWR, GNR, NSR and of course, Midland. Hence the English Retro styling of the station and the cream and brown. The whole thing was timber. The first Burton Station, built by the Birmingham and Derby was in the early Midland/Trijunct style and looked very similar to Derby. There's lots of references to the "North Staffordshire Railway Booking Hall" in both the Burton Mail and by locals alike. It was a tragedy, what happened to it, as the building looked wonderful and I could see the old bus concourse being now enclosed in modern glass and turned into an arrivals area and small shopping promenade. But sadly the traffic that had justified such an enormous station had vanished nearly a decade ago, with traffic coming from all four compass points and many potential destinations to just two.

How'd you come about the R4 styling, Ruston? One such loco worked local to me, and I'd quite like some form of it in my own collection.

This seems very short sighted to me. Heljan had a chance to help shape the direction of TT in the UK (Like they have done with modern RTR) and have decided to abandon it to Kohler and co. There'll be some celebrations from Margate today.

One thing that has surprised me is they didn't reveal all of this at GETS... Wonder why?

1:104.6 according to the video announcement, if I remember right.

I'm in a similar boat, have a lot of older/kits etc for certain Midland Railway prototypes and dont want to invest that much into trying to chip and sound them all! But a new scale...

This range will also get aimed very squarely at the kind of people that follow the "Big stars" on the internet that, again, don't necessarily "do" model railways due to space. Think Francis Bourgoise (2.6m followers on Tiktok, 1.6m Instagram) Geoff Marshall etc etc.

Stuck it in a tumble dryer on high for 20 minutes.

You won't because they didn't necessarily exist until this morning. Kohler is right, as is Heljan and PECO by saying that houses are smaller and for 1/3rd less space you can put in so much more. N's way too fiddly having dabbled in it myself back in my 20s! They key is 1:120 is the same as every other TT manufacturer across the world, meaning there's no more "awkward" sales to europeans or Americans with oversized locomotives lolloping around H0 layouts. All of this will be nice, neat and unified. Also, online only means I can now order this in a half dozen clicks without getting up off my backside from the sofa. No wandering to the shops to find "oh no, it don't sell mate" or "Oh I don't have a trade account with them any more" or anything else awkward. Or in my case a 40 minute drive to park on a street I have to keep one eye out of so I dont get a ticket to my nearest brick and mortar store. It also means Hornby no longer loses 40% with the discount to shop sale. Meaning more money directly into Hornby's pocket. The range is exactly what the non-railway-modeller buys because they "like trains", they recognise the locos and rolling stock as either stuff they see on the railway they walk past or travel on. They know Scotsman and A4. Others know the Princess and Duchess. Everyone knows the 66 and HST. It also means they're betting big, meaning they smelt something from the way PECO and Heljan were making noises.

Back in the 1970s my mother had a mini this colour, my dad bought it her. She had it a week.

As to the "rise of the different name". Could it have had something to do with the War? A number of artillery peices were named "Big Bertha" during the Great War, and the name has certainly stuck about in the general cultural lexicon, so a similar "big weapon" could've become known as such by veterans from the War who went back to train spotting?

Isn't that just generally controversial anyway? The LNWR certainly didn't seem the happiest having to slap red on a lot of their locomotives and it seemed to fade quickly as a practise for the LMS. I was at GETS yesterday and got to have a natter with Micheal a couple of times. KR Models was swarmed with happy looking punters who'd come to see the EPs of the Leader, DHP and the Shay. They're working with the MR Study Centre, so it likely will have as much "accurate" data as humanly possible more directly from the source. Published books are second hand sources, somewhat, while iirc the MSC has drawings and plenty of more direct first hand materials and photographs. Though as someone else pointed out at the show. The drawings really are not the be all and end all of a design, while it may be from the draughtsman's table there's no telling if its the "correct" or even "final" version which went out into the wild world. It's a perpetual issue for a lot of model manufacturers when you haven't got an extant example to scan. They have a set of drawings which is what they're using as the basis. The more "weird and wonderful" liveries tend to be produced in smaller numbers as a bit of a novelty... and its a novelty which sells. Only 500 GT3's came out in the BR Corporate Blue and all of them sold. So a Bertha in BR Railfreight Sector sounds like a good novelty to me...

Glad to see you're still at it.

What sort of chassis do you use, Eddy?

What an utterly superb bit of modelling, So much of it 3D printed and utterly inspired use of failed prints.

I'm still alive. Barely. Development of the further sprockets, guts and gears has been interesting as initially my partner was having to justify spending time on this away from juggling family life and his own general work committments, but by chance he happens to know somebody that also required a similar e-commerce platform for his own business. Since then he's been busy surprising himself with how well this system scales: There's currently a Beta version running a staggering 250,000+ listings without breaking a sweat. He built the security side of it, and it temporarily locked him out, so the security is going to be pretty good. We're now on the "how should this look on the front end" part of the discussion which means we're getting closer. It also means we intend to promote and push this system to anybody of pretty much any scale of business requiring an ecommerce platform which will hopefully be easy and intiuitive to use. His own estimation will be a basic site up and running sometime during August/September. So, to whit: What does it mean by "basic"? Likely it will be various fantasy minature files I hold the rights to for sale and for those who will trust me to handle their files for them directly initially. We will then increasingly roll out all the other gizmos and gadgets we're promising and hoping to see. This will probably mean me doing the listings for everyone initially and then we can slowly move to just final approval of a listing being done manually to ensure nobody's pilfering stuff/selling copyrighted materials etc. This may be something to be considered and to keep things simple we'd probably just flip the commission prices around and take 25%. But this would put us in eBay territory and I'm not sure on that for the time being.

God no! I'd never do that. Our aim's flat postage and packaging (£4 as of writing this post). Obviously 1) I'd quite like to live please and 2) I want the creators to get a good chunk of change from each print. Considering Shapeways kickbacks pennies, we're talking pounds. Randomly jacking prices up during checkout is one of the things I hate the most.

Why is it the small producers are going to be the ones to drive me to bankruptcy this year?

There was always something close to 900 Panniers on the GWR's metals at any given time. Suspect even Swindon didn't have that much capacity!

Any chance you can dig through the archives about the first loco to arrive?

More! More! Brings the whole layout to life in a lovely different way.

Certainly no logical reason for it to not have happened. However, there's also a logical reason it wasn't so widespread. Generally your post/parcels arrived in one van or wagon on a morning train in branchline situations. Mainline terminii had their own dedicated parcels platforms due to the sheer and utter weight of traffic arriving. Most places had dedicated goods yards, and goods sheds, for the reason of keeping the potentially "dirty" nature of goods away from passengers. As well as them keeping people safer by providing lifting facilities and protecting the mainline from any issues.