Northmoor

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

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).