Nearholmer

Cromwell lived for a goodly time at Ely, I think he had land in the area, and whether Cambridgeshire overall is or isn’t in EA, I’ve personally always thought of the fenlands as being so …. if they aren’t, I’d be interested to understand what region they are in (the very, very East Midlands?).

Scouring the sales stands at TCS and HRCA meetings.

Do some historians portray Cromwell as nothing but a tyrant? If they do, that’s a portrayal very much lacking in nuance, as is the one-liner portrayal of him as the bloke who cancelled Christmas, and their books probably aren’t worth reading. Some of the things that he put in train, notably in Ireland, were tyrannical, but some have acted as very effective protections against the possibility of tyranny, and in some respects he was, oddly enough, very much a liberal by the different standards of his times. As to whether the naming of the loco was controversial at the time, you’d have to look at newspapers (which often deliberately foment controversy to increase sales of course, so aren’t always a trustworthy guide!), but I doubt that it was significantly so, give the care taken over these things, and the fact that the basic naming scheme for the class was suggested by a prominent churchman, and reflected what might be called an “establishment view” of the world, flavoured with some regional inclusiveness, Cromwell being very much an East Anglian.

I was up there last summer, and the railway does seem pretty spruce and well run, but every time I thought about the amount of infrastructure involved, the cost of that, and the number of passengers, I kept getting a sinking feeling. One can only hope that as the inevitable increases in the cost of motoring continue, there will be a slow swing back towards more people using the trains, and fewer using cars, but that in itself poses big questions about the economy of the area, and how dependant that is upon car-borne tourism.

It was heavy, only had a single gear, and had no freewheel capability, so the primary means of braking was by using the leg muscles. There was a “spoon brake”, which rubbed on the top of the front tyre, but that was notoriously dangerous to use.

Self explanatory, really. The venue is very interesting if you ignore all the too modern things in it. Look out for the Starley Rover, the first production safety bicycle, which is near the entrance, and marvel at the leg-strength of Victorians.

9mm ply is about 3.5 to 4.5kg sq metre, depending on quality, so call it 4, and double the actual area to allow for the underlying frame of ply, roughly 6kg. Which doesn’t sound a lot, but actually becomes quite a devil to handle alone to the size/shape. I’ve got an 0 gauge layout that has to be dismantled and packed away when the spare room is needed, on White Rose 9mm ply base-boards, two of which are 1000x750 and fold together as a pair. Together, they are really awkward to handle by myself - I can’t lift them direct onto the trestles due to the combination of weight and bulk, so have a routine that raises them in stages (too complex to explain, but it works!). So ……. I’d think seriously about whether you might be edging towards what is practical to handle alone. Probably OK if there is plenty of space for manoeuvre, but possibly not if space is tight. The White Rose 9mm boards are truly beautiful quality, and built like the proverbial. For a small 00 BLT I’m doing, which is meant to be super-portable, I’ve used the G&H 6mm boards, and by comparison they are light as feathers. The G&H ply is not only thinner, but much less dense, so not quite as robust, but robust enough for practical purposes. Prior to these two layouts, I’ve always built my own boards, many down the years, some successes in terms of weight/size/portability, some abject failures! The failures have always been on grounds of size/bulk, not sheer weight, incidentally. A 10kg bag of spuds isn’t heavy, but a 10kg model railway layout board would be a serious problem.

Mud and wind are certainly major factors currently. Fortunately, we’ve got a right old mix of soil-types within easy range round here (thanks to where the ice sheets ended in that last ice-age apparently), so since the actual floods subsided a few weeks back, I’ve been able to choose free-draining ground, the chalk woods on the Chilterns, and the Greensand Ridge. I did go on a couple of trundles on the more clayey bits, but came back with about 2kg of mud stuck to the bike each time, so I’m not going that way again until it dries out more!

Maybe a day out to The Tate Modern, or the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford would help, especially because the latter was compared to a jam factory when it was built.

Where on the SR is this in the 1960s? I ask, because the installation might already be quite old, or it might be pretty much fresh out of the box.

We can’t tempt into any less usual stuff, can we?

Or, maybe seat belts were closely based on model “rough-shunt” wagons. There’s a diagram of how to make one in MR&L magazine c1910, and there is also a description of building a rotary interia wagon to make small scale live steam operation more realistic, which is another idea that gets reinvented periodically.

It still looks like a big, ponderous thing even in that livery

I’ve long thought that much of reality is rather overrated, and that even “the best” model railways require so much self-delusion to make them seem realistic when seen in the flesh, that I sort of don’t prize “realism” all that highly. Sometimes, I think that evocation does the job just as well, if not better.

Brilliant magazine, which covers both very interesting prototypes, and some very stylish modelling. When I was into NG, I subscribed, and had every edition up to maybe some date in about 2018. The other magazine to consider is Narrow Gauge & Shortlines Gazette, the much older US equivalent of this and NG&IRM, which I suspect inspired both to some degree. i hope that selling it proves to be a good decision commercially, because it does deserve to be better known. Next challenge must be to find and import an equivalent Japanese publication, because quirky NG modelling is a very popular thing there, but only gets very occasional exposure here. All three mags mentioned above have carried articles by Japanese modellers over the years, but there is a sort of untapped (by people who don’t speak Japanese) well of craft and aesthetic there. Victors imported a couple of Japanese books of photos of NG layouts way back in the late-1970s, but I’ve seen nothing since.