rogerzilla

There are lots of stations a short and inexpensive ride from the NEC.  Avoids the queues on the M42 and to get into the car park, which can be horrendous.  The time/aggravation saving was more important than the cost saving!

One issue with the original layout is that it can't go against the wall, because you won't be able to reach manually-operated points at the back.  I did my 6×4 with all the points on one side.

10 hours ago, micklner said:

All Black Locos lined Red prior to 1928, and theron until a general repair, then plain Black if a goods only.

My Big Four stuff is sort of eve-of-WW2, so it'll fit.

Well, I ordered an LNER unlined black one to replace my ancient Hornby version.  The lined one is a bit fussy for a shunter - how many were actually lined?

https://www.world-railways.co.uk/general-photo-161

With lining and a nice cast double arrow.

The VoR locos actually looked pretty good in Rail Blue, once they added a bit of lining later on.

Well yes, the two controllers have to be set in the same direction, but it doesn't cause a short or anything.  It's also when you find out 50% on track 1 of a Gaugemaster DS is not necessarily the same as 50% on track 2!

Large Logo for the win.  I can hear the screams already.

18 hours ago, regme said:

Good point (sorry)

I hoped this would turnout well.

If you take the front couplings off tender locos, as I do, the slower loco has to go at the front.  I have two Hornby Kings (James II and Henry II; I mean to renumber Henry as William III as an in-joke).  Even though the models are otherwise identical, Jim is a bit faster than Billy.

I'm not sure how many trains would have needed two Kings, but that's another question!

If you use normal insulfrog points, there is no special wiring except for using plastic fishplates (aka IRJs) in the middle of any crossovers between ovals.  Then wire each oval to its own controller.

The sidings will only be powered when the points are set into them.

If a train straddles a crossover and picks up current from two controllers, it doesn't matter - it still works.

You can use a bus and droppers for more reliability as the layout ages, but mine works fine after 9 years with one feed per oval.

Very tempted by the LNER one.  I have the old Hornby model (I painted the injector brass colour as the red seems to be a preservation thing) but it's quite crude.

35 minutes ago, papagolfjuliet said:

 

With this repaint rail blue will have disappeared from the NYMR's operating loco and carriage fleet - not counting the visiting 31 128 - and only the 08s will remain in blue. The EWS 31 will probably be staying that way but that seems to be a better aesthetic  fit, somehow.

The recent SVR diesel gala was wall-to-wall with blue hydraulics.  Personally I like Warships in green with SYP, but where was the maroon - surely the classic colour for Warships and Westerns?  And Hymeks had quite a nice bespoke green livery, a bit like Deltics.

The Chapel-en-le-Frith disaster could almost certainly have been avoided if the banker had been coupled, but that wasn't the normal practice there - it was just used to give trains a shove over Dove Holes.

The steam leak occurred on the way up, so in theory the banker could have been warned to stop pushing, and the train stopped, before the summit, but the train engine whistle relied on the broken steam pipe.  It really was a cursed series of events.

6 hours ago, Railpassion said:

I'm now told it will be green. 

Oh good.  There are rather a lot of blue preserved diesels at the moment (presumably because the owners or the target market remember them like that).  I grew up with BR Blue and didn't like it except for the later Large Logo version.  It was always dull and dirty.  HSTs were the exception, as they seemed to be cleaned more often, but HST livery was halfway to Large Logo anyway.

On 17/12/2020 at 15:55, Compound2632 said:

 

I don't think so. A smidgin is, I think, larger. Also, I feel sure it's a unit of volume - "Oh go on then, just a smidgin more."

There's an amusing passage in Lothar-Günther Buchheim's novel "Das Boot" where the very bored U-boat crew start measuring everything in "jets": nautical distances, cups of  coffee, absolutely everything.  Somehow it works.

I bought an N gauge Dapol class 22 last week.  No photos at all, but it was like new and runs as it should.  I may have been lucky, but the three or four used items I've had from Hattons have been perfect.  I've had less luck with brand new items, not just from Hattons, many of which have been DOA!

4 hours ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

I am about to jaunt off to Amsterdam (home town on my Pa's side) for the first time on Eurostar. I so wanted to do this while working but the timetable was completely useless. Now at liberty, no problem with getting there at noon.

 

I spent most of my career in a large American multinational, which during the 1970s woke up to the fact that the Japanese were about to eat their (extremely plentiful) lunch. The board picked up the Total Quality Management technique, guided by the work of Drs Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum (US citizens) who had been sent to Japan as expert consultants, as part of the US led recovery programme to restore Japanese industries 'the American way'. 

 

What perhaps wasn't anticipated was that with a few rare exceptions, most major US businesses hadn't bothered with all this management discipline and the iea of reliable data gathering and statistical analysis as a guide to decision making . (Read Deming's 'Out of the Crisis' if in any doubt.) In 1962 the American motor manufacturers association annual conference in Detroit were addressed by Dr Juran, who told them that Japanese manufacturers were about to pull their cosy house down. They laughed him off stage...

 

We spent a lot of time on this technique, and by the 1980s our manufacturing units were matching the Japanese. Doing it right works wherever you are in the world. There was no cultural barrier of any sort: we learned quite early on that much of thinking behind the technique was based on statistical methods originating in - the UK. What further emerged was that a few British businesses had taken this on board from the 1920s , and quietly made it work. When we encountered them and asked why they hadn't been able to propagate this successfully in the UK, they were unanimous: if your board are all obsessed with 'maximum profit, preferable yesterday', it's a non-starter.

AIUI the Deming Cycle and all the other TQM stuff came out of wartime "Operational Research", which is still a discipline, if a rather dry one for non-statisticians.  I used to sit next to a massive OR fan who was a member of the OR Society and everything.

According to the HS1 chief, the reasons HS1 was under budget and on time were:

- Using proven TGV Nord infrastructure design, unchanged

- Lower design speed, makes a huge difference to curve radius, noise abatement, etc

- They never revealed the total budget during the project to avoid a feeding frenzy from contractors.

HS2 forgot all these lessons.

Shame D1000 wasn't kept for the National Collection, in desert sand with the cast lion emblems.

Watch Von Ryan's Express (1965)?  Not just because it's a ripping yarn or because Frank Sinatra stars: it's a train enthusiast's dream.

From Wikipedia:

"The Ferrovie dello Stato/Italian State Railway closely cooperated on the production, as reflected in the film's closing acknowledgment credit, providing a complete train headed by the specially-bulled up FS Class 735.236. The train which the Nazis commandeer to pursue the escaping POWs is headed by a Franco-Crosti boiler-fitted Class 743."

The Crosti-boilered SS train seems to run really well, unlike a Crosti 9F.

We had to abandon plans to visit today due to one of the cats going AWOL since Wednesday.  He predictably reappeared last night, too late for us to set off for the hotel.  Hope it was well-attended!

On 29/08/2023 at 12:47, rodent279 said:

I wonder how common that sort of failure (little end/crosshead failure, or separation of con rod & piston rod) was during steam days? Obviously there is the Settle accident already referred to, but was this a common occurrence, or a very rare one?

It seems to me that the little and big ends, and the crosshead/slide bar, are safety critical items, as a failure there clearly makes a serious accident possible.

The original Britannia design, based on LNER practice, I think, had a new flaw in that it was very difficult for fitters to check the tightness of the fasteners due to the location of the bolt heads.  So they didn't bother.  The design was tweaked later to make inspection and maintenance easier.

On paper, a Nova 3 is ludicrously overpowered for most routes.  However, I don't know to what extent twiddling its thumbs at part load on flatter routes would impact efficiency, compared to a typical DMU.  Some modern DMUs also have a lot of power per coach.

I saw 60009 at Didcot after it had run down from York, and it was definitely grimy.  No rust or water stains, but a thin layer of soot on everything, especially along the top of the boiler.

So light weathering, soot only, is appropriate, but nothing that indicates neglect.