The Johnster

The chassis donor for mine was Baccy 57xx off the Bay, and when the Bachmann 94xx came out and this hybrid was withdrawn, it went back under it's original 57xx bodyshell and was put straight back into service; the 57xx was repainted and renumbered. So the purchase of the Bachmann 94xx, for £104 off Rails (Bachmann's RRP was £129.99 IIRC) was effectively of two locos for more or less the full RRP; IIRC the eBay 57xx cost about £35. Since starting Cwmdimbath in 2016, I have never paid full price for a new loco, and not often for rolling stock...

Certainly don't invade Russia in the spring. They know exactly how to deal with this; fall back, destroy crops and anything else you might use, so that when winter hits your supply and communication lines are stretched and flanking movements can easily isolate large parts of your forces.

I agree, I find a lot of RTR models to be overgeared, which messes up the slow-running and allows unrealistic speeds, though things are a lot better than they were 30 or more years ago! Looking at layouts at exhibitions and in videos, it is also fairly obvious to me that many modellers' impression of realistic speeds allows much faster running than it should. As a rough guide, for steam-outline, most locos emit four exhaust 'chuffs' per driving wheel revolution, and 3-cylinder types emit six. The Southern's Lord Nelson class put out eight chuffs per driving wheel revolution, but that was a one off. So, with a bit of observation of preserved steam or video of 'real' steam, one can gain a fairly accurate idea of how fast locos were going, and how they accellerated from rest. Bear in mind that locos with smaller driving wheels had lower top speeds but would accellerate more quickly from rest, and that not all video recorded the locomotive sound in sync with the image (tv & film are particularly guilty of this). The Lyme Regis branch, which was where the last 3 Adams Radials worked for many years, did not require high speeds and the Ox model's top speed is probably adequate. But these locos were originally used by the LSWR for fast outer suburban work out of Waterloo, and could probably be expected to run up to 50 or so mph; not sure the Ox will manage that with 20-odd 4/6-wheelers. But how many modellers have layouts on which a Radial will be realistically asked to belt through a station at it's top speed anyway; even in their LSWR days they worked traffic that stopped everywhere! But even the Hornby version probably performs more smoothy at low speeds than the typical 1980s offering with traction tyres and the pathetic combiniation of a feeble pancake motor driving through friction-lossy plastic spur gears; these were impossible to control below about a scale 30mph, make that 40 for express locos with big driving wheels. Real trains may stop quite abruptly and accellerate rapidly (and not just modern traction; a 56xx with 5 bogies on would be up to 50mph from a standing start before the last coach had cleared the platform, even uphill, and J69 accelleration was legendary), but they do not (unless something has gone badly wrong) do brick wall stops or stabbed rat starts; stopping and starting needs to be smooth and not sudden. OTOH. there is no need for snail-racing either. For some reason this seems to be a feature of 0 gauge layouts at shows. On the real railway, there is (believe or not) a timetable to be kept, and everybody wants to get the job done and go home/up the pub as quickly as they can, so long as they don't kill anyone or break anything in the process. If your train is passenger/NPCCS/fully fitted, get up to line speed or fastest wagon speed as quickly as is decent; that's what happens in real life! Part-fitted or loose-coupled goods needs to be slower and accellerate/brake more gently, softly softly catchee monkey is the name of the game here, and a dark art it was, too! Unfitted loose-coupled trains (the bulk of mineral traffic until the late 60s) are limited to 25mph and timed for 20, so that the driver has a little in hand to keep 60-odd couplings taut o'er hill and dale, so taking it easy with these is realistic. But it still isn't an excuse for snail-racing. Propelling stock into goods sheds is, and spotting wagons under loaders or on weighbridges, but not much eles; get on with it!

Try a 'deep clean'; remove the keeper plate (carefully so as not to put stress on the motor feed leads), and drop the wheels out. Clean the wheels and the chassis block with rattlecan spray electrical switch cleaner, which should be powerful enough to blast most of the crud away including the coloured grease factory lube, then scrub any remaining with an old toothbrush. Leave it overnight for the cleaner to vape off, and very carefully relube all the points in the manual sheet, using a suitable non-mineral light machine oil (your local model shop, not neccessarily railway, will have this) applied with a syringe, or a drop of lube on the end of a pin if you haven't got a syringe to hand. The name of the game is extreme parsimony with the lube, as little as you can get away with. Then re-assemble and test-run the chassis. If all is well, replace the bodyshell and... enjoy!

Taking the Treweryn/Trawsfynydd/Tanygrisiau schemes as a whole, there were a lot of local conspiracy theories at the time. Some of them turned out not to be theories...

There's one that turns up on Pinterest called 'Upwey' that might be an inspiration. A stick, sector plate, or cassette fy will release a turnout from the country end of the runaround, so 3 sidings, one of which can be a kickback in front of the hidden area.

It means that the motor it hasn't got is analogue. It would be digital if the motor it didn't have was digital, obviously. Try and keep up...

History lesson, pay attention at the back, there'll be a test later... Samuel Plimsoll, 'The Sailor's Friend' (didn't have that sort of connotation then), 1824-1898, was a Liberal MP who campaigned against the shipowners' of the day (as a group of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists these 'stards made mill-owners and mine-owners look like safety campaigners) all-too-common practice of deliberately overloading vessels and heavily insuring the ships and the cargoes ('coffin ships) which made them good profit when the ships were lost at sea, irresepective of the death-rate amongst crews. Some captains were complicit in this. He managed, against serious and powerful opposition (he once had to be restrained from punching Disraeli in the House) to introduce the 'Plimsoll Line', a series of marks on the side of the hull of a ship that indicated the level of safe loading, slightly different for open sea, sheltered waters, and fresh water, that could not be legally ignored. This has been adopted world-wide. Dunlop devised rubber-soled canvas top shoes for light sports wear, suitable for the wooden floors of school and other gymnasia, in the 1920s and the distinct decorative line at the join between the rubber sole and the canvas upper resembled the Plimsoll Line on ships, resulting in these shoes being generally called 'plimsolls' Dunlop marketing jumped aboard with 'Dunlop Athletic Plimsolls',= daps, though for many years I thought the name came from the noise they made when someone was chasing you; dap-dap-dap-dap-dap... Also called 'pumps', no idea where that originated, and, if they were white and had to be blancoed, 'tennis shoes'. Pumps, IIRC, were always black, had elasticated sides and were 'slip on', daps/plimsolls were lace-up. 'Deck shoes', with canvas in non-monochrome colours, TTBOMK originated in the 80s as a marketing term for expensive designer daps; you're in the shoes aisle at Sainsbury's, mate, you don't own a yacht! Valleys vernacular usage; 'Dew, look a' rer, nawr te, she gorra face like a ripped dap on 'er, inni', the cow'. 'Trainers', proper, seemed to arrive with the popularity of jogging, but have become conflated with general casual footwear of the sort that Americans would call 'loafers'. Another category not yet discussed is basketball shoes/boots. A basketball shoe is basically a dap, and a basketball boot is basically a high-sided dap that supports your ankles a bit when it's laced up, but both have to have a white plastic toe-cap. They have very thin soles that do not wear well in street use, but are often cheap and replaceable (as are the other catergories except 'deck shoes', which are only a marketing delusion anyway).

Daps for all South Wales kids. The name may have come from Dunlop Athletic Plimsolls, one of the first types marketed, later Dunlop Green Flash.

Don't you mean 'many time's'... Coat?

I rather like Heinkel 111s, (aesthetically as an aeroplane shape, not in formation over the skies of Cardiff, you inderstand). But I’ve packed all the modelling gear away in boxes as well, and will not unpack until it is ‘safe’ to do so…

Shacking up with The Squeeze, whose own language, Polish, is ferociously difficult, has made me much more aware of such issues, which I never thought about much before she moved in. Oh, yes. I did not mean to infer/imply/impute that 'nucular' was a specifically American feature, plenty of folk here call it that as well, in a variety of accents. But you don't hear 'aluminum' in the UK at all, and while it has just as much cromulence as 'aluminium', it does not convey the meaning correctly here. Why o why can't we all just call it bauxite... 'Nucular' might be acceptable from a hillbilly or a rough Scouser, but I object to it from Presidents (Reagan and Carter were both guilty IIRC) or Generals (thinking of Westmoreland but may be wrong, at least McArthur got it right), or British politicians, military, and Electricity Board people who ought to know how to say the word since they are capable of using the stuff, which needs a level of competence for safety reasons. Not being able to say the word does not inspire confidence in this competence!

A hit, a palpable hit, well played sir! American colloquial English is arguably 'purer' and more correct than British, because it retains more of the language and usage (it is, so, true) of the original 17th settlers, and this, even if most of them bowdlerised (bowdlerized?) it being low-class poorly ejumacaterized, is the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, some of the most magnicent writing ever penned anywhere. So, while I use 'ColoUr' &c because they are colloquial to my home, I would not dismiss 'Color' as incorrect. I have trouble with 'nucular' and 'aluminum' because the sound of the word, and hence it's meaning, is compromised; 'nuclear' and 'aluminium', please.

At around the same period as the above Felixstowe adventure, I went to a house party in Chelmsford, by train being able to use privilege tickets. This was also a winter thing, and Chelmsford can probably be thought of. even then, as in the London commuter belt; certainly my friends sharing the house up there were all London commuters. Even so, I was struck by the deep and unrelenting blackness outside the train windows compared to, well, any other direction out of London. Significant lack of, well, much of anything beyond a very occasional isolated farm past Romford; Ingatestone, but that was about it! Reading, Redhill, Deptford, Basingstoke, Watford, Hitchin, all ballpark about as far out as Chelmsford and, in the 70s as now, brightly lit and densely populated all the way. Yes. it's a city-dweller's take on a bleak and empty part of the country, but I wasn't oblivious to what things were like after dark outside my city. I was a frequent camper in remote mountain fastnesses, sometimes what would now be called a wild camper, and can assure readers that, even 50 years ago, nowhere in the Brecon Beacons (as it was then) was as 'empty', unoccupied and unlit as the last 10 miles into Felixtowe from the west were except perhaps wildcamping at the Neuadd Reservoir, and this is a 'dark skies' reserve; I imagine there are lit traffic junctions and housing developments that have changed all that now in darkest Suffolk... But Black Shuck's still there in the shadows, of course... I don't believe in Black Shuck, but he's there, just the same...

Time for an update. It got worse. The landlord has (after some time) decided that my complaints about the floor in the railway/bedroom needed to be taken seriously. There are problems with the house's underpinnings, which I think may be related to wartime bomb blast damage*, and the whole building is moving perceptibly northwards. As far as the railway room goes the floor is dropping away from the skirting boards, and I have had to periodically pack up the terminus end of the baseboard support table; the gap is now about 2" and not going to get any better. And there's damp in the bay window (bay windows always cause trouble in older buildings). So, he intends to sort the floor out. The previous landlord did this in 2016, and of course cowboyed it, his bloke put a wooden support framework under the joists to restore floor level, but the ground under this is still dropping and heading for Newport Road. His plan echoes the 2016 arrangement in that he intends to temporarily move us into flat 2, currently unoccupied, across the hall, and use our living room to store the stuff (including Cwmdimbath) while the work is carried out. But, he is going to do work in flat 2 first, as the shower base has been leaking in there for years and the floors, as well as heading the same way as mine, are rotten. There's a structural crack as well, the blast damage probably. It's all taking a good bit longer than he'd reckoned, and costing him a lot more (sometimes, I think renting was not a bad idea). The layout has been taken down since August, and I am not a happy bunny in this respect; if it hadn't been for this forum and my taking up drone flying I'd have gone nuts. Everything's stacked against the walls or in boxes, so the damage I caused when I climbed in the window is pretty much irrelevant now! It's all very depressing... Anyway, that's the current sitrep. I suspect he wants us to move into no.2 permanently, though he's playing his cards close; this would be swings and roudabouts, a separate kitchen, bigger patio, and bigger storage area, but smaller railway/bed room. Smaller but arguable better laid out for a layout (!) with doors in different places. It would probably mean a re-design, but the fundamentals could be restored. It's a good chance to relay in Code 75 chaired, which would be a massive visual improvement. *Lone Heinkel 111 came over from Brittany early '44, long after the main blitz, with 'land mines', big nasty b*ggers dropped by parachute, and intending to hit Pengam marshalling yard and Cathays wagon repair/shed. The result was a line of flattened buildings which can be traced by their red-brick late 40s replacements, more or less due east-west from Newport Road (two of them, one just west of the Roath Branch bridge and another just west of the funeral parlour over the road from mine,) one at the Croft pub in Roath, one at the New Ely pub (formerly the Coburn) in Cathays, and one just short of the bottom of Cathays Terrace. These things exploded about 100' up and relied on blast damage for effect, and my opinion is that my building, on the end of a terrace and within the blast effect of the funeral home bomb, was shook up by it. End of terrace buildings were prone to blast damage from a domino effect as all the other buildings shuffled up against each other but the end only had fresh air to support it.