Nearholmer

This is the wrong thread, but I haven’t bookmarked the other one, so …… I strongly urge the inclusion of this when the WW1 harbour scene materialises: The conversion might well have been made in France, but it probably came home looking like this.

Were these used close-coupled to “runners” with sprung buffers at the outer ends? If so, that might have taken the pressure off, in both senses.

Interesting stuff. I still wonder about the base electrification costs that they are using in these appraisals, whether they are really the “achievable low”, but straggly routes that can’t support more than a couple of trains an hour will always be at the margin.

This wouldn’t be a bad place to start, but it could go,paler and browner still. https://ak-interactive.com/product/olive-drab-faded-2/

I was going to say that the colour barely ever looked olive green, but the Woking pictures make the point (I’ve removed the fire bars and washed out the boiler, and done rope greasing on one of those cranes!). My firm memory of it is that it quickly , almost instantly, weathered to a very grey-brown version of olive, and that it was very matt indeed, almost chalky, so it seemed to absorb water, looking pale when dry, but much darker when it was wet.

If you go to that part of Oxford, you’ll experience the joys of railway reconstruction in progress!

Winteringham is a candidate; they made a lot of things that appeared under Trix and B-L labels. But, the B-L family of firms was so ruddy complicated that it’s not always clear who was doing what!

That’s the kind of thing I was thinking. What about the backs of advertising hoardings, would that work in context of whatever is(n’t really) beyond the yard? If there is room to put “whatever” at a very slight angle, that would make it less of a cut too.

Good stuff. I hope you won’t take it amiss if I say I’m not totally sure the new building at the end “works”. To my eye it seems too “sudden”, cutting across the scene like that, and (this is a bit odd) when I first saw it I instantly thought you’d decided to model one of those late-Georgian terraces that you see on what were then the SE fringes of London, Roupell Street sort of thing, and adding the strips actually reinforces that Georgian look. Anyway, feel free to consign these musings to the “ he’s bonkers” file.

The Manyways system was designed at the same time as this range of civic buildings in Northampton, the link being that W J Bassett-Lowke was the councillor who chaired the “baths committee” the nearest building being the town swimming pool. The preliminary architectural drawings for this lot were prepared by the same people that designed the model station. When you visit, you can really see how the same thinking went into both the real buildings and the model, and I’ve often thought that using a Manyways on a layout as a swimming baths would be a good thing to do.

I don’t know what the practice is on NR/TOC, but the normal thing to do on metros is to run “trial ops”, which includes running the full timetable as the final phase of crew training, plus a menu of abnormal and emergency scenarios, including some with “passengers” (volunteer staff) on board, all of which takes a few months. I'm just hoping they start running a service before the weather turns too autumnal, a start in May would be ideal, because I want to do a few “out by train; back by bike” trips while it’s warm and dry!

The whole cleaning business is a PITA. At this time of year, any “proper bike ride” round here involves some degree of mud, sometimes a lot of it, so I generally hose down on return to get the worst off, and I do clean drivetrains a bit more thoroughly indoors, to get the gunge and vegetation out, but I only tend to give my bike a “birthday bath” in the spring. Whats gone a bit wrong this year is that my main bike needs more or less a full service currently, and it seems wrong to do that now - I usually try and time things so that bike goes into the summer all nice and freshly done.

I got so fed-up with being cooped-up that I went for a nocturnal ramble, which was a teeny bit chilly.

I’m never sure whether the architects who went for these finishes in the 1920/30s were brave or daft. They don’t weather all that well in Britain, even now we don’t have a smoke-laden atmosphere, and they are either high-maintenance, or prone to look shabby. Personally, I think some of the best modernist buildings were the ones that used brick, which clearly isn’t so striking, but lasts better, and seems right under our, often grey, skies; they look modern, but not stark. Stockholm Central Library Which inspired Arnos Grove Station I can’t remember all the SR brick ones, but Seaton was a very neat design overall, seaside suburban, and a really functional things as a whole, track layout, signalling, the lot. Bishopstone, sadly wasted and fortified. Lullingstone I think was meant to be one, but never got off the ground (!).

Masonry paint has been around since pre-WW1. I can’t quickly find a 1930s ad, but here’s one from I think the late 50s. Maybe the we first time since before the war that they spruced the place up? The tin is precisely as I remember from when I was a kid. Snowcem was originally Earle’s Masonry Paint, and it’s now called that again, under a sort of heritage rebranding.