Northmoor

You know your project stash is too big when....... you forget you'd bought a kit of the same aircraft as part of a job lot, only six months ago. SWMBO hasn't been told.

I'd have loved to be a spotter at Sheffield Exchange on this day. Even without the scenery added I can "see" the station and its environs. Is it the compressed perspective or is the access road to the goods depot incredibly steep? For the signal box; perhaps like Liverpool Lime Street the "modern" one would be up against the backscene.

Yes, held in place by "scrivets" and even on blocks, with the car half on/half off the sloping area outside our garage, it's a pain to access. Which is why the job's been delayed for so long and I've now bought a £20 oil sump pump off eBay.

Where they insist on eating some of them (and why do the French have no word for baguette?). Being asked the same question multiple times = Irritating. Waking up to find you've lost something you'd planned on making continued use of = rather more irritating I will stake a handy sum that it was the NHS's lawyers, not clinicians, who pushed for the multi-stage checks to be introduced. I believe it was these Aboriginal communities who talk of "The Day of the Cloud". Just another out of all-too-many examples of Government) being utterly callous towards these people. Anyway, just returned from Farnborough where the credit card groaned at the purchase of a new sofa and chair. I rewarded myself in Hobbycraft with an Airfix Lightning to add to the stash (I remember when they were about 1/10th of the current price). Since the weather has been traditional Bank Holiday, varying here between drizzle and biblical all today, the Freelander's much-delayed oil change will have to wait another day or two and I'm going to do some modelling. It's my day off, so there.

All these lovely images of the aftermath of interacting with bite-y things didn't put me off my lunch (be realistic) but I'm becoming strangely reluctant to renew my passport.

Bit of a snapshot but it was nice to test the limits of the camera after 9pm last night at Chertsey, while waiting for the BLS special returning to Eastleigh (which I'd missed on the Up run); 4500064 + 054 on the 2102 to Weybridge:

No particular comment to make, just wanted to get one in as near to #80,000 as possible. Wow this thread shows no sign of "terminating".

Not since "Seabourne Harbour" appeared in the RM in about 1980, have I seen so many MTK EMUs completed (and certainly not to this standard). Genuinely inspiring modelling @Darius43.

The ongoing status of the Carnforth Coaling Tower is one of very few issues where I have some sympathy for WCRC. It is built of materials that deteriorate badly over time - especially when so close to sea air - and it serves no useful function today. Restoring/maintaining it in working condition would be very costly (assuming it is even possible to restore a reinforced concrete structure such as this) while its means of operation if of largely academic interest to a very limited group of people. Even were it restored but not to operating condition, it would be exceptionally difficult to modify - within listed building regulations - to allow the public to safely access the structure. This is without even considering that it lies within what is now an industrial site; Carnforth hasn't been a publicly-accessible preservation site for almost 30 years. I can foresee a time before too long that the tower may be recorded in detail by a conservation body, de-listed and dismantled.

You're being deliberately facetious now; you think David Smith would scrap his Mk1s for about £2k each when he could sell them to preserved railways for £20k each? Or that he would scrap a restored main line steam loco he paid seven figures for, to recover 2% of that? The value of the land would also be nowhere near £100M, even with detailed planning permission. It's a long, narrow site and not that many people would pay a premium to back onto the WCML.

That wouldn't be a major obstacle but an absolute one. The nearest railway preservation has come to replacing missing infrastructure on that scale is probably the new link between the two sections of GCR at Loughborough. I recall that apart from being developed over in multiple locations (not a problem in this fictional scenario) that landslips were actually more of a problem on the northern section, than south of Bridgnorth.

A recent TV series about life on a Type 23 covered this. A young Muslim chef wondered about how he would go about handling pork; he consulted his Imam who showed an impressively practical attitude to such things, saying something like, "You've got those disposable latex gloves haven't you? Wear those. Any other questions?".

As the Flickr caption confirms for the last image, the first two carriages are from the XP64 set. Now that's some stock we almost certainly won't see in RTR.

Henry Winkler is a very interesting man who as US entertainment stars go, is not too far behind Dolly Parton for what he has done for children's education, specifically for children with dyslexia which he has himself. I think he has the MBE for supporting similar schemes in the UK.

A fellow student in Liverpool in the early 90s was ex-Merch and this was when the sinking of the Derbyshire was getting a lot of attention locally. He commented with a slightly weary cynicism that bulk carriers like that were sinking at a rate of about once every six weeks (don't know if that was correct?), but it got no attention in Britain (or anywhere else in the Western world) because almost all the lost crew members were Philipino.

Before the 1990s, if the script demanded any sort of Middle-Eastern looking bloke, there was a 50/50 chance you'd get Nadim Sawalha. From the 1980s onwards, if it was a Eastern European woman over 30 ("All sound the same don't they?"), you'd get Joanna Kanska. I've no doubt they had to battle to get on screen more than some others, but my childhood viewing would have been a lot less happy without Derek Griffiths and Floella Benjamin.

What on earth makes you think "before the days of D&I", casting always picked the right actor for the job? It's pretty dodgy to suggest that when casts were all White-British, everyone was there on merit but once they have become more ethnically diverse, there must be "quotas"? The entertainment industry has long been dominated by "Who you know" behaviours, so just perhaps occasionally someone unknown was allowed through the door and not just to get the "right" people their coffee?

I'm sure I heard on the ITV4 highlights that there was a record crowd at Jerez. When you consider they used to get 300,000 in the late 1990s (locking more people out than attended the 500GP at Donington Park).......

I completely understand and it's not just for steam haulage Mike. Back in the mid-late 90s I went on a few of HRT's "Merrymaker" tours. One repeated itinerary was Kings X - Newcastle - Carlisle - Leeds - York (reverse) - Kings Cross; in 1996/7 this was £19.50 in Standard although it quickly went up to £22-24 (still unbelievably cheap per mile). In real terms that fare should now be about £60, but equivalent tours would cost me over £100, so fares have gone up by 65%. I won't criticise HRT or other operators for charging what the market will bear; it's non-essential travel but the days of cheap railtours are gone forever. Pile it high and sell it cheap doesn't work when you can't build the pile high enough.

A recently retired colleague has the surname Kyan and is a direct descendent of the inventor.

"Viewers should be aware that the following programme will be Sh1te"

I spoke to Ian Futers a couple of times when he exhibited his layouts and agree they were interesting. Sometimes I think he has built about 25 versions of the same layout, but I certainly wouldn't class them as identi-kit; he has worked in at least two scales (both finescale) and the standard of his work is very high indeed. His "Lochside" was one of the first modern traction layouts I remember that really impressed me and I suspect a great deal of diesel era modellers copied it to some degree in their modelling careers.

I spent nine years as a consultant to defence procurement projects in the early 2000s. Much of SMART procurement - which came in during the half-decade before I started the job - was and is very sensible, like defining what it is you are trying to achieve and let that define what you purchase, rather than just opening a weapons catalogue and deciding You Like That One. The bit where government decided that the MoD didn't need to be an intelligent customer - it just needed people who understood how to buy stuff - not so much. I did come across a few Civil Servants (I'd started out as one but we were privatised in 2002) in the MoD who clearly resented employing us (or indeed any consultants) to advise them and were grudging at every step. I met a lot more who genuinely tried to do a good job, but were hamstrung by a system contrived to put barriers in the way of procurement, because otherwise the Treasury would have had to treble the defence budget. The former group, on more than one occasion myself or a colleague (one, Mike was a famously blunt former Flt Lt) came very close to telling them that if they weren't so effing useless at their job, we wouldn't need to be paid to do it instead of them. All they needed to do was really simple stuff like: talk to their opposite number in other project teams to see how their plans were written, write one version of a plan and keep it in a shared location so that everybody knew what the single source of truth was, etc. I would very gladly have trained Integrated Project Teams - in fact my colleague was kept very busy teaching them how to apply their own guidance - in doing our job and been equally satisfied at putting my own employer's consultancy and many, many others, out of business. The feeding trough for consultants in MoD was genuinely becoming embarrassing by the time I was made redundant from the industry, but the system that they can so easily exploit was put in place by politicians. It is the same system that now sees government departments spending eye-watering amounts on consultants to provide routine activities that the department should be able to do itself, but politicians who baulk at paying a decent middle-ranking CS a grand a week to get work completed, are quite happy to pay private sector consultants to create work, quadruple that amount for year, after year, after year.

To be fair most people won't get past the tinkering stage so I'm grateful even for that. Not impressive are the "How to recreate this sort of train" articles which always list the RTR locos and rolling stock available so you just have to get out your credit card, open the boxes and couple them all together. Train formations involving significant kit building or modification don't seem to get written about anywhere near as much.... What I did find better in magazines from 30+ years ago was the layouts; so many had been built over long periods by clubs who wanted a long term project they could devote time to getting right. Too many layouts in the current mags (which I virtually always put back on the shelf these days) seem to have been built in a year, have an operational life of a couple of years then get dismantled (often to be replaced with a very similar layout). They have often been built for a specific exhibition deadline and even with some good weathering and scenic work, are still obviously full of RTP buildings. While I don't want to criticise their hard work, these "identi-kit" layouts don't inspire me enough to want to pay to read about them. These layouts always existed, but it's the Pendleburys, Chee Tors, Chiltern Greens, Dovey Valley Railways etc. that are logged in my memory.

But that sort of thing won't satisfy the vocal complainers about the loss of main line steam in the UK for the following reasons (not necessarily in this order): Narrow gauge Foreign Wrong class of loco Right class but wrong member of the class Right class, right member of the class but wrong livery