Nearholmer

Anyone who fancies a bit of nocturnal train-spotting might be interested in this, between Bicester and Claydon: The “track settlement trains” will be in the Claydon - Bletchley section from 8th April.

And, I bet if I dredged through all my archives of obscure industrial narrow gauge “sprigs”, I’d find that they had some odd bits of 2ft or less too, because it was so common as a way of shifting bulky loads short distances “back in the day”.

It won’t. It’s the least-worst option for us, but it isn’t a solution to the UK’s particular flavour of the deep-rooted problems, let alone the roots of the deep-rooted problems, the things that lead inexorably to the destruction of the natural environment that we depend upon, resource wars, lebensraum atrocities. refugee crises, the corrosion of democracy where it does exist currently etc. The people who choose reactionary politics are choosing completely the wrong answer to the problems, one that actually makes the problems worse, and therefore harder to solve, but they aren’t wrong when they identify that things are badly, badly wrong, and in many cases they aren’t wrong to identify themselves as among the worst affected by that wrongness. The fact that they choose to put a fire out by throwing petrol on it is a product of a combination of lack of alternative options, a bit of personal folly/ignorance, and the fact that a tiny number of people worked out long ago how to lead the disgruntled by the nose for their own purposes by provoking their disgruntlement and offering false hope of relief from it.

I’m afraid that betrays rather a deep misunderstanding of how people refer to and use transport in London These lines don’t have fixed names now, and hard as that may be to comprehend from a distance, that is a practical problem, it even limits the use people make of them. For practical convenience they have to be called something; some cities use line numbers, some line colours, some names, but they all designate routes somehow, and in London it’s names, backed with colours on maps for rail, and numbers for buses. Its doing things like this that makes public transport work in huge conurbations, and it’s because the wonderful “national rail” model, with its confused fare structures, and inability to present a cogent picture to potential users, has done these lines no favours, wasted them to some degree, that they’ve been transferred to TfL, who know how to do urban transport properly. As to the actual names chosen, some I think will work well, but some are, as others have said, rather a mouthful, too many syllables, and that is a disadvantage when giving directions.

There’s a whole load of “stuff” going on with young people, where they’re trying to map-out places for themselves in the ever-emerging new landscape, and a part of it is visible through social media memes. - a lot of variously bitter and wryly funny stuff about the difference from the “boomer” generations in terms of personal progress and expectations. One good one runs “my parents at 29 vs me at 29”, with contrasts like “expecting their third child vs interviewing for a new third sharer in our apartment”; - a weird obsession with the Roman Empire, as the embodiment of a society in which progress was forever forward, great works were done, and men could do manly stuff (travel, fighting, killing, conquering, facing down wolves etc) and come out of military service with social respect, and a small plot of land. It’s a meme that attracts young blokes from all over the world, and not one of them seems to have spotted that 80%+ of blokes in the Roman Empire were colonised and exploited, and died before 35yo with very bad teeth; - outright “toxic masculinity”, including the deeply disturbing “involuntary celibate” line of thinking, and things like rolling-back abortion rights; - etc. My sense of it overall is that both young men and young women are spooked by the uncertainty of the future, the fact that about the only certainty is that it won’t be like it was for their parents, but that young women feel slightly “on the up”, that some of it not being like the past might actually be positive for them, whereas young men feel that it’s all negative …… any privilege stemming from being lucky enough to be born a boy is disappearing, there is no automatic passport to being one rung up from the bottom of the hierarchy simply by possessing a willy, so they turn to conservative politics, actually reactionary politics, because it offers the promise of rolling back some equality, giving them back someone to stand on top of. Obviously, this gets compounded where the equality point extends to race or religion, as well as gender, and if you look at the most toxically reactionary groups, they are ones who are being threatened by equality on all fronts, while simultaneously having their historic purposes and earning ability through physical work whipped away from them. The only people who like equality are the ones who expect it to raise their relative status, or at least not diminish it, those who have elevated status under the old condition, even if the elevation is as tiny as a gender pay gap in their favour, simply hate the idea of equality, and will fight tooth and nail to resist it.

I’m not sure they sneaked in covertly; they were built for the line, after all.

If you are really keen to find out, there’s an article about the horrible things that were done with and to the tooling in the 1980s in issue No.69 (12/2023) of Train Collector (TCS magazine). Your soapy-plastic loco was almost certainly part of that sad demise. I’m another one who is deeply disturbed, traumatised almost, by the fact that they haven’t re-tooled to create proper ones. Maybe a good thing they haven’t though, because if one was released with a good, modern mechanism (able to run reliably at <90mph), I might accidentally overdose on them.

I mentioned No.27 back up thread, and here she is. This was the first loco I bought new myself, with money earned from my first paper round, having previously got by on presents, and things from jumble sales, 40/- iirc. The Dock Authority is actually my youngest brother’s nostalgielok, and the two of them, plus a jumble sale HD R1, very badly repainted into SECR livery, operated a sort of chipboard and dowel-rod wharf-side layout that we built. I keep thinking about, and have once or twice nearly bought, a HD 3-rail ‘Silver King’ set, because that was my very first, bought for me on the day I was born (which was possibly a bit too soon!), and I’m definitely in the market for one of these: One of our uncles passed down to us his 0 gauge, all Hornby No1 range other than this, which our dad fairly quickly identified that we were about to destroy with over enthusiasm (given that I was <5yo, he was right), so he gave it to one of his pals who was a “proper enthusiast” (he was, his HD layout was loft-size, and fully scenic). The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that the nostalgia toys of boys who are 5yo now won’t be trains. My youngest nephew is that age, and he and his mates are all into various forms of superhero action figures, so I’d invest in and carefully store some of those for 25+ years if I were you!

And, if you think LR legislation and guidance is complicated, try tramways, as in passenger-carrying, usually street, tramways. The legislation relating to them managed to fill a 600 page textbook! The first part of the KESR, incidentally, was authorised not under the LRs Act 1896, but it’s own Rother Valley (Light Railway) Act 1896, which cited the 1868 RoR Act as definitive. The initial act was abandoned and permission obtained to apply the LRs Act 1896 as soon as that was enacted.

The term Light Railways, as applicable in Britain (things get complicated as regards Ireland) I think first came into use under the 1868 Regulation of Railways Act, and that very definitely put a limit of 8 tons on the axle-loadings of locomotive and stock: The 1896 LR Act didn’t include prescriptive of proscriptive requirements about construction or working, it enabled (actually perpetuated the enabling from the 1868 Act) the Board of Trade to make Regulations about these matters. It also didn’t repeal the 1868 Act, in fact it cited specific safety-related clauses from it in an Appendix. Without a half-day reading fine print in multiple documents, I think it left the “8 tons, 25mph” formula from the 1868 Act standing. So …… the axle-loading of rolling stock, and hence the design criteria for structures was, in theory at least, limited, as was speed. But, and it’s a big but, two important things came into play: a sense of risk proportionality, which the BoT Railway Inspectors “had in spades”, and the detailed requirements stated in particular LR Orders, which were granted by the LR Commissioners after hearing submissions from people with local knowledge, and with the advice of the BoT inspectors, often included a range of particular limitations, or what amounted to permissions. Added to which, the LRs Act was revised later, and the published BoT Guidance relating to LRs evolved over time. Upshot: many LRs started out with very tight axle-load limits and infrastructure that could barely take more, so had to use very light locos, some using tender engines to spread the weight where tank engines were a nuisance due to limited water capacity, but some were less restricted from the outset, and some were later upgraded, and some weren’t. And, even after the 1896 Act, some LRs were authorised by individual acts, rather than by LR Orders made under the 1896 Act. The delight of LR’s is the local and particular!

Luckily, I have one of the ones I would have, the green No.27 version of yours, but the other I’m still on the look out for, being an 0 gauge Bassett Lowke 2-6-4T in BR livery. I wonder whether toy trains will feature much at all in the nostalgia of the future, because toy trains aren’t anything like such a big part of childhood (mostly for boys) as they were between say WW2 and c1970. Possibly something Thomas related?

Just struck me that it would also permit “over dangle” at the outer end, which might be useful if the distance between bolsters was fixed by the intermediate wagons.

Was it carried “disconnected”, i.e. tree trunks carried on two short bolster wagons, not coupled together? If it was, they may have felt it best not to take the traction and braking forces through the logs, especially if the bolsters were tall, although TBH plenty of other NG rail operations involved doing exactly that. The other possibility, although it’s more an industrial railway than a public railway thing, is that they felt that if a coupling parted it was better not to have the guard involved in the ensuing crash and pile-up. Where crew/shunter vans go in trains on things like logging railways, they go directly behind the loco for this reason, and having seen what happens when a coupling parts on a long train of loaded bogie peat wagons, I certainly wouldn’t want to be in a little hut on wheels at the back!

What does the manual have to say about painting stations? I’m guessing whatever it says is very broad-brush(!) leaving the regions to decide from the standard colour palette.

Some of my many cousins lived in a house the back of which overlooked the line just north of Salfords, where the Quarry Line converges with the old route via Redhill, and that was definitely a hood train/watching location. I was rather envious of the fact that one had both a bedroom window overlooking the line, and a layout in the same room!

Visits to grandparents, which involved passing through Waterloo, truly the most interesting and exciting place on the planet to a small boy, from a small country town. If you’ve seen “Terminus”, that little boy was me, although thankfully I never got separated from my family.

EPBs ventured as far as Eastbourne, and possibly even Hastings, in the wee small hours as newspaper and parcel trains, IIRC. From this conversation, I’m thinking that pure, unmolested, 2-HAP probably provided the coastway services from about 1971-1976, but we’ll see what else turns up.

But, I’m thinking of earlier, after the COR. My memory is telling me that they ran as HAP-ordinaire, pre-CAP.

I’m suffering memory weakness, and would be grateful for a reminder or two ……. Early to mid 1970s, what services were HAPs used for on the Central Division? I think I recall Brighton (Slow) & Reigate, dividing at Redhill, but did they also get used on the “coastway” (don’t think they were called that then) and Seaford services? I recall those going BIL>COR>??HAP??>VEP, but maybe I imagined the HAP phase. No, I didn’t imagine it: Anything else?

Anyone who dislikes all foreign layouts is a blinkered fool. Anyone who likes all foreign layouts is lacking in discernment. Anyone got anything to add?

1894, which I think matches the 1902 photo well. I’m a bit confused by your 1909 date. What was opened then? Crossed in the ether - I don’t know when the curve opened, but long before 1909, and in the photo you can see a loco from an ELR service that has presumably got there that way, via St Mary’s Curve.

When I was a trainee with CM&EE, one of my oppos in S&T told me very wide eyed one day that he’d been out on a job at Longhedge Junction, and while they were doing whatever in the box, the signalman spent the whole time playing chess by block bells with a similarly bored chap next along.

Witjout checking, I’m not sure exactly what the configuration was at Aldgate in 1884, but this 1902 photo gives a bit of atmosphere (sulphurous).

Turn right at Loughborough Junction.

Except that, having been inspired by the Circle Line in the first place, having goods facilities sprig-off is “in keeping”, and oddly enough carriage sheds aren’t. Similarly Broad Street was on top of its own goods facility, and Fenchurch Street had goods facilities on the door step. The only London terminus where the carriage sheds were close to the station platforms that I can think of quickly was Victoria, and in several cases the run to the carriage servicing facility was quite long. It depends a lot on what one has in mind, which city, and which railway.