Nearholmer

Yes, the Southern standard in the 1970s was effectively black and white, and on some stations is seemed to work well, and on others very definitely not, some of that being down to the individual in-charge, and how much “picking out” they did in the two colours, I think To my recollection there was some variation in the colour of doors, in that at some stations they were black, but at others either post-box red, or a mid olive/bronze green. If you hunt out Derek Hayward’s website (findable by his name), he’s assembled a very good gallery of East Sussex stations, which includes a lot of colour photos taken during the 1970s. The other thing to bear in mind is that repainting took an awful long time. Some Southern stations were still in very worn-out green and cream until the early 1980s, with old signage in place. Deptford is one I recall being re-signed very late, maybe 1982, and I don’t think it got a lick of paint until then either. Tunbridge Wells West was re-signed IIRC, but the booking hall was in glorious green and cream, in very good order due to lack of use, when it closed (and still gas-not-very-well-lit).

The “out in the field” loading, where Mr Cholmondley-Warner’s country cousin arrives in his car is, I reckon, Wissington LR, but I wondered strongly whether the shot from a moving train showing wagons being loaded was W&U.

What do we all think is the rational response that should be made to the current state of the world at an individual, personal, level? I ask, because I’m blowed if I can think of one, and would welcome suggestions. (I’m still reeling a bit from my accidental look into the mind of the US rightwing through Facebook, but even without that I think I’d still be asking the question)

On the western section, the footpaths have been maintained by putting in new bridges where necessary. I don’t think there were any bridleways crossing that bit on the level, just one west of Calvert which went over an occupation bridge, and I think that has been rebuilt (I will go and look sometime, but not until the weather is better!). Maybe this middle bit would best be dealt with by making the entire thing cut and cover, with a combined street tramway, cycleway and linear park on the “roof” at surface level. I can dream!

Yes, the retaining wall height is too realistic, perversely.

Yes, it’s, er, how shall we say, rather unengaging as an exhibition piece, far too high ratio off-stage-to-on-stage. Before the MRC made it into a circuit, it was a very good classic Minories.

There’s the bizarre situation of parliamentary candidates from the same party, one in MK trumpeting an empty promise to get EWR completed to Cambridge, because that plays well to MK votes, and one in Bedford trumpeting opposition to it. Plus all the easily foreseeable outbursts in places in between, the latest flare-up being at Lidlington. And, the nine level crossings only counts the roads, there are private crossings, footpaths, and bridleways aplenty too.

Either honesty, or ever bigger lies, to distract enough of the people for enough of the time from the difficult truths. If you look worldwide, The Big Lie, in whatever form suits each country, seems to be the most frequently chosen option.

Innocent questions, in an unthreatening way, to draw them into a long conversation, during which you lead them, ever-so-gently, to the deep contradictions within their own position, and within the utterances from their various front-benchers. This uses-up loads of their time, reducing the number of people they can seek to influence, and hopefully saps their resilience. It’s like drilling lots of tiny holes in the bottom of a barrel, rather than trying to smash it apart with one blow. If I were you, I’d start with something like social care, where they’re bound to say that they’re all in favour of it being done well, then lead on from that to the impact of Brexit on labour supply, the impact of cuts to local council budgets, how care staff can’t afford to live on what they get paid, how care home owners are shutting places down because they can’t make a living, moving in to how that is or isn’t consistent with cutting NI contributions, etc. Nothing confrontational, just an endless series of quizzical enquiries and “so, what you’re saying is ……”. Don't legal chaps get ninja-training in this stuff?

Now this has departed from Minories on a short(?) excursion, can I raise something that has always made me wonder about these more complex model termini? Would you really want to operate one on your own? I seriously wonder, because unless the capacity is effectively wasted, by running very few trains, the intensity of operation of a steam age, particularly pre-grouping, terminus ramps-up significantly as the number of platforms increases. TBH, keeping the show on the road with just a two platform terminus at each end of the run on my former layout was enough to keep me entertained, by the time light engine movements, adding and detaching vans, and shunting the daily goods train were included. For a one person layout, while I’d have loved to expand to allow better goods siding provision, and some carriage stabling, I’m not sure I would want to go significantly more complex topologically.

Oodles of place names have elastic spellings, and if you go back pre-ordnance survey there was no standardisation of spelling, likewise family names pre-census. Added to which, some places didn’t even have just one name, let alone one spelling of that name. You still see it in Ireland, where even on OS maps the names of some small rivers change at townland (parish) or county boundaries; the White River in one village can be the Ivy River in the next. In Ireland that is further complicated by anglicisations (literal or phonetic) and de-anglicisations (literal or phonetic), but that’s a different thing. A case I know of is a locality called Blackness (emphasis on second syllable, being Sussex), or maybe Blacknest. If you trace back through local usage, published maps, and old land titles it seems to have flipped between the two on multiple occasions, and I guess when the OS chap turned up for the first time, he asked somebody and they said “Black-ness”, which could have meant either, given that the “t” wouldn’t have been sounded anyway! That’s what he wrote on his map, anyway.

Building a goodly part of the Central Section your garage does seem a tiny bit beyond the purpose of Minories.

Maybe some will come here, in the way that some Jewish people fled Nazism in the 1930s; might do us good if they did. I was very tired indeed today, as a result of the dog being poorly and restless all night (on prescribed meds and beginning to feel better now), and as a result made several mistakes, one of which was to look at my “feed” on Facebook at length. For those who don’t know, a “feed” is a load of stuff the bots fire at you based on which groups you subscribe to, in my case one on collecting old toy trains, one about my particular niche in cycling, and the local history club for the area I grew up in, so all apolitical, anodyne sorts of stuff. Based on this, the bots have somehow decided that I need to see things in multiple languages from protesting euro-farmer groups (actually, quite interesting), and from the redneck side in a massive culture war going on in the USA between the meat farming lobby, and, so far as I can work out, anyone who ever ate a balanced diet, vegetarians, and vegans. It’s basically wall-to-wall hatred and incitement to even more hatred, very nasty stuff indeed. Genuinely. And, this, bear in mind, is about what people choose to eat for dinner. How the @*^# anyone managed to turn lunch into a politically polarised issue I cannot imagine. The rot in that country is very, sadly, deep, deep, deep, and the trouble with rot is that it spreads.

Is there any possibility that she could somehow cause the final implosion, or fracturing into sub-parties, of the Tories, maybe by taking her particular tribe of the lost (touch with reality) through the wilderness to The Promised Land of Faragistan? If there is, I wish her every success, because a split party is a weakened party (which reads a bit like a weekend party, but isn’t).

Quality is superb technically and compositionally too, so definitely a top public information film team on the job. I love this sort of stuff from when “the ministry” (whichever one it was in question) managed to employ artists and technicians of high order. Lost art!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1338873163469587/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v Not a long film, in fact a very short one, but worth looking at all the same.

Ah, I meant passenger trains. None of that honking and tooting at level crossings if you’re going across after bedtime, by the way. It disturbs my sleep.

It’s gone into confusion-land again, because of strikes I think. The buses have run throughout, so oddly enough a “faux train service” on days when there’s been none elsewhere, but no actual trains for several days.

Bit of a sign-fest! At least when the one I showed was tidied-up, a new ‘unified’ sign was fitted on each side, listing all the hazards, ‘dos’ and ‘donts’ in one place.

Slightly OT, but an example of a bridleway crossing, renewed and upgraded with the past three or four years, with no “cattle grids”. It’s a strange old crossing, because the railway in on an embankment, so there is what amounts to a staircase up each side, and where you wait clear of the line while you check for oncoming trains is inside, on the track side, of the gate. It’s a bit of a faff with a bike, and must be more of a faff with a potentially skittish horse, but it is regularly used by equestrians. Bridleway crossings are different in status from occupation and accommodation crossings because, like footpaths, they are for a public right of way. Nothing to stop someone herding animals across them though.

As I’ve said before though, if you operated it as it was designed to operate, it would rapidly become a job, rather than a relaxing hobby, so maybe you need to find somewhere with a different pace, and greater variety of trains - I’m sure this thread has been round this oval on the carpet a couple of times before.

Four platforms, rather than three (OK, two were through, but that didn’t matter for these porpoises, or dolphins), and operable to an incredible intensity. And, a very good theme tune. Oh, and a poem (which was better read by Betjeman himself, but I can’t find a copy of that recording for free on-line):

Interesting variant that, very slightly different from the paper to the IEE that I’ve got, but clearly the same plan at the grand level. Notice that he talks about the 400 to 600hp diesel as having an electric transmission, so it seems that the GM had better loco ideas than the CME! I don’t know whether anyone (Simon Lilley or Kevin Robertson maybe?) has delved into the SR motive power committee minutes in this postwar, pre-nationalisation period, but if they have I’d love to read their summary. I find some of the things that happened quite difficult to ‘square’ with the overall strategy, and I still wonder whether Bulleid was a bit “rogue”. His involvement in the CIE diesel programme is equally mystifying, not well covered in the biography by his son, so the CIE motive power committee minutes would be interesting too.

Yes, that’s the loco, and it wasn’t a pure shunter. IIRC it had a gearing arrangement that allowed one of two sets of ratios to be selected, effectively one for shunting and one for hauling unfitted goods trains over reasonable distances. It seems to have been intended as a successor to the 0-6-0 tender engines that were used on local goods work, the same niche that the various BR Type 1 classes were aimed at, and it was certainly tested on some of the longer circuits (e.g. Norwood to Tunbridge Wells, which including all the shunting at stations on the way out and back was something like a 14 hour trip!), before being used in shorter trips in the suburbs. Personally, I think it was a misguided design, having a mechanical transmission, probably resulting from a combination of theoretical purity and a love of innovation on the part of Bulleid (mechanical transmission offered the possibility of being lighter and more efficient than electrical at that date in time) and prompting by eager designers and salesmen at the gearing manufacturers. A compact diesel-electric in the same sort of power was perfectly feasible at the time, wouldn’t have been prone to all sorts of teething troubles, and would probably have chugged on happily until unfitted pick-up goods trains ceased to exist in the 1960s. Basically, 10800 was the better concept, despite its overly complicated engine, and at the time EE was already selling the predecessors to what became Class 20, with simpler and more rugged engines, overseas.

I’m using the US term road-switcher to express what the 500hp 0-6-0DM was meant to do, a combination of haulage and shunting. I doubt anyone on the SR used the term. The Hastings units, and the 2 and 3 car versions, were all DEMU, no capability to take juice from the third rail, and were configured so that they couldn’t MU with EMUs because of their different performance characteristics.