Nearholmer

There is an accidental experiment going on about three hundred yards from our house, where the school was donated a parcel of land big enough for three football pitches, which they then fenced c20 years ago. Well, said land is subject to water logging, and they have the same trouble on the existing pitches, so it hasn’t been developed, just left to it’s own devices, and every proposal to build on it has been successfully opposed. So, now we have an area that has been pretty much undisturbed for c20 years, and the biodiversity and sheer energy of it is amazing. A few small deer do get into it, but only rarely and in passing, so they haven’t eaten the understorey. Most of the lower bits of southern England definitely want to be a very mixed forest. But, I’m a bit sceptical about the idea that managed planting is a modern idea - I suppose it depends how many centuries, or possibly millennia, you count as modern, because some degree of management of woodlands and what became hedges goes back possibly as far as the Iron Age in places.

Oddly enough, I was thinking about a very similar question in respect of the Brill Tramway yesterday, and the tree species that was grown (or allowed to grow) large in hedgerows in that area was the elm, of which there were some real whoppers “back in the day”. They must have been managed in some way, because they seem to have been “every so often” along hedges, so developing a full canopy, rather than in clumps with a restricted canopy, presumably for timber (elm was very valued for damp resistance) and to provide shade for grazing animals. The Brill area has different soil and microclimate from the W&U area, definitely good wood-growing and grazing land, so the above may not transfer, but I think I can see the same pattern in some photos of long, pre-tramway, roadside hedges on the W&U. Nearly all gone now, of course. PS: Doh!! The W&U ran along Elm Road, didn’t it …… so I guess there were elms. Picture commons licensed on Wikipedia. This is really typical of a whopper grown in isolation, just like the sporadic hedgerow trees.

Times have changed. We used to do all sorts of fire-related stuff* as kids, but fire is very unfamiliar to most children these days, so I’m not sure they’ve got the measure of it. * Our best effort by far was to make a mortar, using a yard of pipe propped up at about sixty degrees on some bits of wood, with a small fire under the lower end. Into this we would drop old paint tins, ones with a bit left inside, and the lid firmly stuck on with paint. After about ten seconds, there would be a loud bang and the paint tin would fly out. We got in a degree of trouble after launching one over a line of trees c60ft high into the front garden of a house beyond.

I know it doesn’t address the topic, but if people already have engines, or camping stoves, it’s not difficult to replace the tablets (which frankly aren’t much good anyway) with wadding and meths, and its not hard to make, if you can’t buy, a wick burner. Messing about with liquid meths and matches isn’t the sort of activity you’d really want to entrust to an unsupervised 14yo though, which is where the tablets do come in useful - they are about the safest way imaginable of burning something to rehearse heat.

LaBelle.

I’m fairly certain that when I first went (1969 I think), steam was still in use on some lines, but the lines just across the channel seemed to have been fully dieselised from what I could see.

I grew up in Sussex, in DEMU-land, but my maternal grandparents’ nearest station was Woking, and we also had family in the Redhill, Hayling and Portsmouth areas, and went to the London museums and the zoo quite often, so I got an early grounding in typically southern things, steam, diesel and electric, plus LT (including seeing a steam loco at Baker Street). My first “exotics” weren’t other BR things, they were SNCF. Unfortunately I missed SNCF steam by a whisker, but on a week-long school trip when I was 11yo, I got to see oodles of very interesting diesels, mostly 66000, 67000 and 68000 I think, plus lots of small shunters, some looking very antiquated. From a north of England perspective, it’s possibly counterintuitive, but northern France was both nearer, and quicker to get to, than much of England.

Doubtless we can divide into camps about that then.

I’m surprised you need to ask: - first we have a thing; - then we have another thing, which is a tiny bit different from the first thing; - then, to avoid confusion, especially among people who struggle a bit with ambiguity or gradation, we create a hard, defined boundary between the two things; - then we arbitrarily define one thing as better, morally superior, to the other thing; - then some people who engage in the declared morally superior thing can pour scorn , derision, and later perhaps even hatred, upon those who engage in the other thing; - this makes some people feel big, and others feel small, and all too often it gets taken to extremes and leads to physical as well as verbal abuse, and one day that ramps-up and someone gets killed; - then there is revenge, and more killing, and eventually a war, in which huge numbers of people get killed; - when enough people have been killed, and bestial cruelty unleashed, regret eventually sets in; - then everyone looks at the two things, and realises that the two things actually have more features in common than differences, so they decide to call them “one thing”; - return to start, and begin again.

Pretentiousness?

Surely one should use grease, with appropriate “fling resistance”, on fast-moving parts such as worms and spur-gears? Oil in toy trains is for bearings, despite the long and dishonourable tradition of using it for other things.

One of our local MRCs had, may still have I think, it’s club rooms in the former chapel and groundsman’s building at a cemetery, so a crypt might not be entirely unsuitable.

One of the best places to get bikes round here is the bike recycling charity, which takes in any, literally any, bike or component anyone no longer wants, refurbishes, or strips for parts if too far gone, and sells at a knock-down price, or even gives bikes away. It gets a lot of c3yo road bikes from club members who have to have the latest thing, plus all sorts of others, and most go for c£100 fully serviced, with posh ones for maybe £200. I’ve donated bikes, in fact I have one waiting to go there now that I found abandoned on the canal towpath (I did leave it a few days, and put a notice on the parish Facebook site in case it was a stolen one!), and have bought multiple useful things like racks, bottle cages etc, at pocket-money prices, the best being a whole bundle of klick-fast brackets and fixings, plus a ratty old klick-fast bar bag, which I dismantled for parts to support my Carradice bag, all for a fiver! https://mkchristianfoundation.co.uk/cycle-saviours/

Worth a read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_transport_executive

Terminus-circuit-terminus is the ultimate model railway configuration IMO, it’s very satisfying to operate, and if it isn’t heresy in this thread I’d say that the best use Minories could be put to would be as the city terminus on such a layout.

They’ll need to build-up faith in it, which I guess is what the three months is about, because it was forever being bustituted even before the trains evaporated completely.

I think synthetics first arrived in the 1970s (I vaguely remember changing to synthetic two-stroke oil in my motorbike at some stage in the late-70s) but you can still get both types now. Do you know what exactly you’ve got? Mine is a LaBelle product, a known synthetic. If yours has not separated or begun to smell sour after 30 yrs, you may well be onto a winner.

A fantasy ideal would probably involve a light-rail system from St Albans to Ricky, rather like Wimbledon-Croydon, using a combination of existing infrastructure and town-centre running.

Modern synthetic oils last for absolutely ages. I’ve got both synthetic oil, and grease, at least 25yo, and both fine. The old mineral oils and greases were very different.

I think you’re right, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen photos of them doing just that, but Bradley is the man for a definitive answer, and I’m not near my copy. This looks as if it might be in passenger service, for instance:

Yes, the nature of the railway - very few dead-end branches, relatively short distances compared to other railways, and sheds at all the significant terminating points.

Yes, well, every loco hauling a pick-up goods train engaged in shunting. They were goods engines, and although they didn’t work the ‘trunk’ goods trains between the nodal sorting yards, in their day they were used very widely (hence so many), with some runs of very decent distances (c30 miles each way, with lots of station yards along the route). But, by the 1920s they were old, and the key issue was that loads had outgrown them. The coal capacity clearly worked for the LBSCR at the time (1870s and 1880s) because the D1 was the same, and again they weren’t short-range locos. I can only guess that coal was topped-up at each end of a run. As I said earlier, I think the reason that 0-6-2T weren’t transferred was probably that they had radial axle boxes, rather than rear pony trucks, so might not have coped very well with the curves, added to which even the E3 were still gainfully employed, doing what the E1 had been doing before them, in the 1920s. The others were very much in demand, and probably too big and heavy anyway.

E1 tanks weren’t shunters, they were road goods engines, but by the date in question had become well-outclassed by the traffic and were being withdrawn. Electrification had nothing to do with it, because the goods trains remained steam-hauled. I think you’re right that they weren’t “fully balanced”, because the job they were designed for, and did very well, didn’t need it. The E1R was in many respects an “action replay” of a much earlier locomotive, because the first of the very large fleets of “radials”, the Brighton 0-6-2T, was an E1 with extended bunker. I presume that it was decided to create E1R, rather than simply ship a batch of the existing 0-6–2T across for a combination of axle-weight and flexibility-on-curves reasons (radial, rather than pony-truck). The other option must have been D1 tanks, 0-4-2T, which were good on tight curves at low speeds, and could go fast when the opportunity arose, but they had driving wheels too big for the job, and the same bunker size as the E.

I know exactly who could have told you, but he retired some years ago. Mr Mole (I kid you not), who was the man in charge of “vegetation management” for the Underground. My instinct is that you did see something real, because the whole business of preventing mass overgrowth of the line-side, trimming trees etc is quite a thing.

Exactly what I thought, but there are wafty words in the letter which imply to me that they have got so much work to do in the daytimes, requiring people to be on the track, and maybe OTP too, that night is the only time. The way it’s phrased hinted “behind programme and trying to catch up” to me, but maybe that’s my ex-professional suspiciousness creeping in.