Northmoor

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

The subject of assisted suicide was covered rather well (we thought) in the recent C4 drama "True Love". It presented the whole issue quite fairly - unlike many dramas where the writer clearly has an agenda which is laid on with a trowel - starting from a simple premise that no-one wanted to grow frail and dependent on others, but didn't shy away from the legal difficulties and possible situations where the vulnerable might be exploited.

They may be sympathetic, the families of the victims of the Westminster Bridge attacks certainly weren't cheering the shooting of the attacker. The issue in Hainault wasn't that he was shot and not tasered, but that police couldn't get to the location and taser the attacker before he killed someone with a sword. But I agree with @bbishop; there used to be secure facilities for these people but they were closed and the residents expected to live in the community, with a long list of justifications except for the one that really mattered: it saved a great deal of money. Anyway, onto much less serious crime. I wandered into my local Sainsburys earlier tonight to witness two people emptying the shelves of steaks and wandering out the door. There was one person working in the whole shop (two out the back appeared once they'd been told the alarm was going off because they actually had been robbed) and while she wasn't aware until I told her, understandably staff don't intervene. Recovering a few quids' worth of produce isn't worth being punched or worse. It was obvious what was happening as soon as I walked in the door, so I deliberately stood in the doorway making it pretty obvious I was watching them leave and noted the details of the car they got into. So, there's cheap sirloin steak for sale at a car boot somewhere near here tomorrow........

A good point well-made. You only hear about the "liberal left wet-wipe human rights lawyers" (other terms may be available) when they stand against someone you don't support. Usually when the Daily Wail doesn't support that person because they do seem to devote lots of time and energy writing about people they don't like. Those lefty lawyers are often challenging the police, who we're accusing here of being too soft...... If you don't like those who challenge those they agree with, remember the warning from Pastor Martin Niemoller: First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me Do I agree with the "liberal left wet-wipe human rights lawyers"? No, frequently not, but it's a price of a free society. I'll take that; I've seen the alternative.

Which is exactly what the local MP will have lobbied for, for his/her constituents, and they all presumably then whinged that HS2 cost a ridiculous amount of public money? The alternative outcome to all this mitigation would have been for some people's homes to have dropped in value. Unfortunately, this has become culturally intolerable in the UK (even if people could have been compensated by compulsory purchase), where everyone expects to profit from buying/owning a house. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of homeowner's capital gain being entirely unearned income and if it were any other asset, it would be subject to CGT.

I know not all of them were main line certified simultaneously, but a decade or more ago there were far too many locos available for the number of tours the market could support.

See: http://www.cs.rhrp.org.uk/se/CarriageInfo.asp?Ref=2384. Obviously a recent move.

@Murican It's plausible and implausible at the same time, but if you're you're going to let your imagination run wild, let it run I say! Maintaining the infrastructure for 35+ miles of the main line, plus the Highbridge branch, plus the train fleet to operate it, is going to require a volunteer army much larger than any UK preserved railway has ever managed to raise. This is comfortably twice the size of the West Somerset Railway; based on what you've described, it is likely that this and many other preserved railways even further afield may never have got off the ground, if the volunteers required were already fully committed to the S&DHR.

I completely agree about the necessity to preserve Pacers and to represent all aspects of railways. I would however, argue against the suggestion that Pacers "saved" rural lines; their costs of operation weren't significantly less than the First Generation units they replaced. Two things have more likely contributed to the retention of rural lines: by the late 1980s the public mood had become very resistant to further railway closures and by the 1990s - particularly after privatisation - traffic was rising on rural lines (in some cases, faster than on main lines). The franchisees were not constrained on what percentage of turnover they could spend on promotion, which BR were.

That's the exhaust, in a common position for industrial shunters. Need to go and dig mine out now (I think I have a production line of six Lima Plymouths, started about four years ago).

I thought it looked like twenty-five re-enactors fighting to erect a teepee.

You mean like this: It's painted yellow now as it's intended as Blue Circle-liveried loco, but still unfinished (also needs couplings, glazing and some sort of cab interior. The two biggest improvements you can make to these models are to reduce the size of the radiator grille and shorten the whole model, especially the cab.

I have previously commented that this thread tends to be both circular in discussion and less interesting than the less active "Imaginary Railways" thread. If you're going to imagine locomotives that never were, you need to imagine the railway that would have needed them first. Locomotives that never were, didn't exist because in the real life scenario, they weren't justified. If they were, the Big Four or BR would have built them.

Do you remember how the people keenest to give you that sort of advice, were always partially deaf?

Yes, these locos would be completely written-down assets, but something that has to be "started" and attended to for eight hours before you need it and probably an hour or two afterwards, is probably the complete opposite of what you would need on such a service. Steam would have still been quite efficient on short-haul unfitted coal runs into the 1970s (of which there were still a lot) where speed was limited by the wagons and not the locomotive. Diesels offered little advantage on such traffic.

That really would be an alternative universe! At the time of the pit closures which precipitated the 1984-85 strike, the annual subsidy to NCB from central government was eye-watering.

Only in Britain would we still have paid people to "shovel stuff from here to just over there", instead of having wagons that could be discharged by winding open a hopper door and the wagon sent back within an hour by the same loco that had delivered it. The Southern was using hopper discharge of ballast pre-WW2, so the tech clearly existed to do the same with coal. Having a wagon sat around idle for two days is a ridiculous waste of resources - no wonder there were thought to be a million wagons around at Nationalisation - and on this subject, Beeching's analysis was spot-on. I completely agree with the argument though, that there is no reason for ever larger and more powerful/faster freight locos, when coal, which made up much more than 50% of tonne-miles, mostly travelled no more than perhaps 40 miles from pit to end customer. A good proportion of pit to power station traffic in West Yorkshire, was less than 10 miles.

Can you please confirm for the tape, Sir, that you are quoting Jill, there?

During the pandemic, as many London Underground stations as possible had a sterilising hand gel dispenser installed near the ticket barrier. A disturbing number used to get emptied by the local, well, desperate. I remember a work colleague asking who would ever be so desperate as to do that. I suggested they've underestimated (a) just how desperate homeless alcoholics can be and (b) how expensive an equivalent percentage alcoholic drink would be.

Well, it has be cheap for women on "hen-do's" to down it by the gallon.

Not me, but early in my engineering career I used to park my car every day right next to three of the dead boats in Rosyth basin, as I worked at the South Arm. A couple of years later I spent a couple of days on HMS Vanguard inspecting its gear teeth (and being very, very careful not to drop anything into the gearbox....). The V-boats are massive; once onboard I found it easy to forget I wasn't on an older and slightly more cramped surface ship.

I don't doubt it's convenient, but what proportion of the KWVR's passengers arrive by rail (happy to be proved wrong)? Even the SVR with it's connection at Kidderminster, used to reckon less than 10% of theirs did. It's distorted by the running to Whitby now, but even before that was introduced I would guess that the proportion of passengers arriving on the NYMR via the Middlesbrough-Whitby train service, was trivial.

Presumably if you have sufficient to get into friendly territory, the option remained to put it down somewhere empty and straight (I'm thinking of what was allowed in pre-1990 West Germany)? If you got really short, hopefully you'd be as lucky as the Hawk pilot whose engine failed (just one Adour in a Hawk for the non-aircraft officianados) out over the NE North Sea over 25 years ago. Instead of banging out, he lowered his gear while he still had some power and knowing he was very close to the Norwegian coast, thought he'd look for somewhere that he just might be able to land safely. Coming out below the low cloud base, he found in front of him.......... a small private airfield! Landed safely, he saved himself half his "ejection allowance" and the RAF quite a few million quid for a lost Hawk.