Northmoor

Thank you, I shall now go to sleep thinking of the young Belinda Carlisle.

Have we mentioned the Fowler 2-6-4T that may or may not be buried under Gateway Services on the M1?

The Upper Classes are notoriously sweary (but only when out of earshot of the hoi polloi), but for sounding pretentious when swearing, it is very hard to match the acting profession.

This is why late in life - and the diagnosis of our son who is on the spectrum - I realised that at school age I probably displayed many autistic tendencies. Poetry just seemed completely pointless. "What is the poet saying?", the teacher would ask and I would reply with exactly what was written. Nuance, double meaning, metaphor etc. was completely meaningless; I might has well have been asked to translate something written in Arabic. At that young age I understood things because they were exact and rule-based; people, body language etc. was a complete mystery.

Mmm. I get your point but tend to think application of law is like testing software, you cannot possibly test every scenario. Even experts can miss unintended consequences and politicians rely on the evidence of experts (like yourself). I believe there was an Construction Safety Act in the 1980s which was in it's second reading in the House of Lords before it was spotted that it was, inadvertently, making it illegal to erect scaffolding.

I had a comprehensive education. Unfortunately as it was at a comprehensive school, I understand very little of what you've written above. I think I can still remember how to make a dovetail joint though.........

We stayed in a few resorts (Corfu, Portugal, Majorca) when the children were young, which were very much set up for Brits. The menus would have four dishes on every lunch or evening meal, only one of which was a local dish, but come Sunday, the place across the road advertising British Sunday Dinners and Premiership football on the TV, was packed out. I know it's their holiday and they could enjoy it any (legal) way they liked, but I thought it sad how many simply couldn't go without exactly what was available at home. So no, travel doesn't always broaden the mind.

He seems to have taken a wrong turning and ended up on our garden store:

1 in 27 with steam, won't be too smoky, it'll be fine........, I was always fascinated by the process of keeping the Mersey tunnel dry. Pump the water into the Liverpool Echo printing presses to cool them, then pipe this warm/hot water into another office to provide central heating, then dump it back in the Mersey. I assume the water just goes straight to stage 3 now.

Trying to set your model in just one year, especially of a real location, well there madness lies. Surely it's part of the fun operating your layout over a period and representing the passage of time while avoiding the obvious clashes - the class withdrawn in 1957 passing the production Deltic - but it's your train set. It's surprising though how many layouts in magazines, treat 1948-1968 as one homogeneous period.

Unless that's smokeless coal in the firebox, there's smoke coming out of that loco..... Vaping is only steam too, but that's banned on platforms too (good). It does make you appreciate what went into running Steam on the Underground a few years ago, without resulting in several stations having to be evacuated.

"Green zone working" for track personnel might have been adopted a lot earlier.

Seeing the photo in the article, I never realised that Network South East had extended so far.

ISTR Rochester was the location for some of the UK's worst Bank Holiday weekend traffic jams in the 1960s, with stories of people taking three hours to go five miles or so.

RH&DR three or four-compartment coaches are 20-seaters.