The Johnster

The fountain outside City Hall, Cardiff, between the clubs and where the students lived, was a frequent victim. Back in the 70s when it was still fairly new, I had a flat in the middle of student territory, in Colum Road, and was walking home from Canton shed at about 03.00 one balmy summer night in 1976, passing through the subway under Boulevard de Nantes that comes up next to the fountains, which were switched off for the night by a timer mechanism. It was a pleasant warm night, great to have some respite from the relentless heat of the day, and I was enjoying the walk, more a stroll. As I passed through the subway, I noticed a small inspection hatch door, about 5 feet up on the right hand side and open. I’d never noticed it before, and, being the sort of cove that takes in interest in things if I’ve never noticed them before, I stopped to see what amazing piece of secret subway technology was in there that had to be concealed from the great unwashed by a door. It was a brass tap, well weathered and a bit battered. ‘What’, I wondered to myself, ‘would happen if I turned it on?’. I turned it on, and to my mild disappointment, water came out of it; I was expecting some sort of magical brew or something, water seemed most mundane, why would anyone hide that behind a door. ‘I suppose I’d better turn it off then’, I continued my internal discourse; as I say it was a warm night and getting a bit splashed held no terrors for a ruffytuffy Canton goods guard! It was at this point that my control over events slipped a little; the tap was jammed open and could not be turned off. A puddle of water was spreading because this was 1976, it hadn’t rained for months, and the subway drain was blocked with dust and rubbish, so I decided that the best thing to do was to leave it in case I made matters worse; if it was hidden behind a door, clearly it was not the business of the likes of me, unqualified to deal with it as I was. So that’s what I did, went home, had a shower, and went to bed to sleep the off-duty sleep of the just and the guiltless… Later in the day, refreshed and content, I had occasion to go back into town by the reciprocal of the same route. As I passed in front of the City Hall I noticed that the fountains were empty, and a group of council workmen were clearing up the last of the flood that had closed the subway during the morning rush hour. ‘Woz ‘appened yer, then?’, I asked one of them, with my best completely innocent face on. ‘Firkin’ stoodents innit, emptied the firkin’ fountains, dinnthey, ‘stards thinks it’s funny, firkin’ useless the lot of ‘em’, was the reply, prefacing a general rant about kids deze daze and how a spell of National Service would do ‘em all a bit of good, teach ‘em some respect &c &c (and how to blow things up), which all seemed reasonable enough. I still think of this every time I pass the spot, and smile inwardly…

Let’s face it, any model is good so long as it’s close to scale. Supply it and someone will buy it! Big gaps in pre-grouping provision; no Midland, LNW, GN, GE, GC, NE, Caley, or NB coaches, and these were big companies whose stock remained in service for many years post-grouping.

It is. Rovex/Triang Princess (open axlebox trailing axle) with Britannia leading bogie (bogie steps). Looks like it’s been badly cobbled together to make a loco that works, but the front overhang is fearsome. Aligning the driving wheels with the Duchess splashers improves it up as far as the merely ‘dreadful’ condition; cobbling a new, longer, frame for the pony would lift it further, into the ‘fairly dreadful’ category. Two crude toys do no make a good model if they are combined in this way. I love this sort of thing, makes me feel better about my own dismal standard of modelling…

Not quite; the ordinary open thirds had central vestibules which the catering opens did not have.

It might have looked less silly if the Black Princess chassis had its wheels aligned with the splashers, which would have put the cylinders closer to their correct position.

They were BR vans and therefore common user, Fred, no reason they would not have found their way to Draculaville, both as Insulfish and SPV vehicles, with and without roller-bearing axleboxes.

Are we also not counting the 44xx (soon), 45xx, 47xx, 42xx, proposed Dapol 31xx, and 28xx? None of the other major pre-grouping companies have 10 classes represented in the current-standard RTR range. The Midland was a much larger company; I can only think off 3 RTR locos off-hand, and 2 of those are arguably not to current standards, likewise the LNWR, with only the Coal Tank and Precedent to it’s name, though you might include the Liverpool & Manchester engines via the Grand Junction. Just saying.

5633 has just got the road into the colliery exchange loop with a train of empties and, as soon as the driver has opened the regulator, the train will draw gently forward into the loop. The colliery’s 18” Hunslet stands outside Bethania Jc NCB shed; the crew are in the cabin gulping down the last of a cuppa; they have a few minutes before they are called into action, as the 56xx must run around the train and remove the brake van before the Hunslet can couple to the mts and haul them down to the weighbridge for taring. It’s 12.40 lunchtime.

As I said at the top of the page, ‘Cwrfa’, approximately translating to ‘skirt place’. A single Welsh ‘f’ is pronounced like the English ‘v’, as is the Polish ‘w’. One of the best things about RMweb is the rabbit holes you get to go down. Why would a place (‘fa’) in a remote Glamorgan Valley be associated in such a way with ladies’ garments (‘cwr’ = ‘skirt’)? Perhaps in the days before the pit was sunk there was a woollen mill there where skirts were made, the pure, clear water of the Lechyd stream washing the raw wool off the sheeps’ backs and powering the looms, but, hang on, no, because there was a real, actual, forge a couple hundred yards upstream of this spot, the ruins of which are yet extant according to the current OS. It is commemorated on the layout by the name of the pub, ‘The Forge’, which is within a literal stone’s throw of the site. Even water powered this forge would have caused enough pollution to render the Lechyd useless for wool washing (could this be why the valley is called Dimbath, because you couldn’t bathe in the stream?), though of course dirty water can still power machinery! But it was served by a tramroad from Glynogwr and this suggests that it used coke for heating the iron, transported up from Tondu where there were ovens supplying the local ironworks before the turn of the 19th century. My model is semi imaginary; the place exists and the branch runs up the tramroad trackbed, not an unusual situation in the Valleys (there are still some stone sleepers up there), but it is a remote and forgotten corner that never had a mining village or a branch line in the real world. There was plenty of coal under it, good steam and coking stuff at that, but it was mined from pits in Gilfach Goch, Clydach Vale, and Ogmore Vale, which were connected underground, which brings us nicely back to… …Rabbit holes. Luvs ‘em, I duz.

That Meteor looks as if it’s coming in on a strafing run. Remember what happened to the FW 190 on the New Romney branch?

Crowd control barriers are heavy and awkward things to lump around when the show is setting up, and more so at the end when everything is being taken down and you’re tired and want to go over the pub. I’ve done my share of this joyful activity (remind me; why am in this hobby again) and objected vociferously to being told (not asked) to do it at one show back in the 80s by an officious and entitled member of another club, who got told where he could shove his barriers for his pains. Barriers are like putting the chairs away after meetings, or car park duty; the same faces get roped in every time and eventually it becomes their job, at which point they are likely to leave the hobby or at least the club. Not good enough; there will always be jobs nobody likes, but these need to be a) fairly shared, and b) seen to be fairly shared. Of course this happens in other hobbies as well; in my percussion band we found that the same people were putting the drums away at the end of practice workshops, which takes about 5 minutes if everyone pitches in and the better part of half an hour because they’ve got to be stacked properly to protect the heads with only 2 or 3 of you. When we’d had enough and refused one Saturday, the excuses poured in; got to pick the kids up from footy/ballet class/whatever, essential I get away before the traffic, meeting so&so up the pub in ten minutes, the match is starting, some relly is visiting &c &c &c. So what, Saturday’s my only day to do all that sort of stuff as well, I’ve got a life too and it’s just as important to me as yours is to you, if you can’t make the full commitment join a different band, what did your last slave die of (hint; now is a seriously undiplomatic moment to reply with ‘answering back’, even if that is a really cool answer!)

Coal in tenders/bunkers at termini; the amount in the tender/bunker on arrival will depend on how far the loco is through its day's work. Tenders/bunkers are full when it leaves the shed, and are supposed to carry enough for the full day's work or, if the duty is a long distance one, to get to the end of the run where it can be replenished. At Sheffield Exchange, this would suggest a variety of fill states on arriving lcoos; a loco arriving from London will be nearly empty while one from a Birmingham or Manchester shed might still be half full. Locals will visit several times during the day and should in theory get emptier each time. There is probably no perfect answer to this as applied to models. Tender driven locos will always of necessity have full tenders (remember the old Airfix Dean Goods, which had a mountain of coal up to the loading gauge to house the pancake inside), but kit-builds give you a choice and loco-drive engines can usually be modified; a modeller who habitually cut'n'shunts dmus in the way you do will have no trouble with this! I try to get the level of coal in the bunkers of my tank engines at least below the parapet of the bunker, so that you have to look down into it to see the coal; the locos have a variety of coal levels from almost empty to nearly full, but all have real coal. This is driven by photos of real engines in service, as opposed to shed portraits; most photos were taken from ground or platform level and one cannot see the level of coal. Incidentally, it is in my view high time that RTR manufacturers stopped filling our tenders and bunkers; new models should have them empty, and a bag of (preferably real) coal supplied in the box. Only real coal looks like real coal. The nature of layouts is that our normal viewing angle is that of a bird about 60 feet up and at least 60 feet away, and at Cwmdimbath I think of myself as being up on the side of Mynydd y Gwair, the mountain that rises steeply to the west of the Dimbath valley. I have paid some attention to the angle of the lighting, because I like my trains to be side lit and many layouts fall into what I think is a trap of having the lighting directly overhead so you can see the roof detail but not much else very well, fine for the tropics but not for British modelling. Lighting coming in at an angle over my shoulder helps to disguise what may not be strictly realistic levels of coal in my bunkers, as it's pretty shaded in there especially at the lower levels. This is correct and prototypical, and I find it an acceptable compromise. I work to the same principle Persian Master Carpet Weavers, who always include a single false stitch in their products because, as is well known, 'perfection is for none but Allah'. I just duz me best. Coal wagons are much easier. In nearly a decade of working on the railway I never, ever, saw any mineral wagon that was not either empty or fully loaded; the little yellow stickyback panels gave you the 'light' and 'medium' loadings, but they were an academic consideration as coal traffic (and for that matter Limestone, Iron Ore, or any other mineral traffic) didn't work like that! Ever. Never saw a light or medium loaded tank wagon either; that would have been a 'live load' and very dangerous. They were either full or empty, nothing in between; that was reserved for the world of general merchandise wagons.

Most interesting and an illuminating comment, thanks Deeps. I’m assuming that the reactor, once commissioned, runs more or less continually until it is decommissioned at the end of the boat’s service, and supplies all the electrical needs of the boat once it is at sea, and that the backup diesel powerplant drives a generator in the same way as on a loco of it is ever needed, but surely that would compromise the boat’s ability to stay submerged and quiet (don’t answer if any of this skirts the boundaries of Official Secrets!)?

Friend of mine, Tina, an inveterate stoner and as usual high as a kite on this occasion, was a passenger in my car on a drive home from a band jolly in Cornwall. The car had got mucky over the weekend and I took it through the car-wash at Exeter services when we got to the M5. Watching her spliff-induced reaction to the experience (she was a car-wash virgin) was, well, wonderful. Like, woah, dude, amazing…

It is, beyond doubt, the oil that makes the Polish language run smoothly…

It does on the face of things seem strange that a power unit so universally unsuccessful in locomotives should have had such a good reputation in submarines. After all, the last thing you want in a submarine is an unreliable power plant! The difference, aside from the constant throttle and load changes of railway work compared to the hours of constant revs and load at sea, is of course the ERAs. And, possibly, the culture of the Royal Navy, in which officers expected performance from the men, and the men strove to provide it. It may be that the Crossleys were rubbish in the submarines, but that in order to have a quiet life, the ERAs coped without complaint, so the officers were not ever fully aware of any significant problem. They therefore reported up the line that the power plants in the submarines were performing perfectly and can we have some more like this, please... Rum, , and the lash.

That would make complete sense, and be in line with the formation of the Red Dragon at this time. IIRC this train also got mk1 catering stock in 1958.

Cwrfa sounds a bit more Welsh, but it is established as 'Dimbath no.1 Pit' (see what I did there, called into imaginary but necessary existence a 'Dimbath no.2 Pit) and nameboards have been printed. Note the pit manager's name and phone number. Kurwa!!! It is a superbly explosive and expressive expletive, and I have come to use it a lot.

The fireman would be expected to drive the train to the next open signal box, at reduced speed if he is not passed for driving but even inexperienced men would have spent time driving under the tuition of their drivers, where he would report the incident. The priority would be to stop traffic and search the line at reduced speed for a man who may be injured and could be saved. The next stage depends on the location, so let's assume we are out in the country somewhere. The now driverless train must be provided with a driver, or, if the fireman is passed and signs the road, a new fireman. Is there a goods that can be put in a siding or a loop and the crew commandeered to take the train on? If not, a crew must be sent out to the location to relieve the fireman with a fresh driver or provide him with a fireman if he is qualified to drive the train. Exingencies of the service prioritise such a move, which might be on a train passing in that direction or, in extreme cases, by taxi. If it's a passenger train, there may be crew travelling home on the cushions that would be available, or even off-duty men volunteering their services. Once the initial report of the incident is made, Control will be informed, and it is they who will make whatever arrangements are necessary to replace the missing driver with a man who is passed for the job and has the requisite route knowledge. In steam days traction knowledge was not an issue, as all steam locos were similar enough to each other to enable any driver to take any of them on at any time without prior notice (which sometimes didn't work out as well as everybody thought it should), but diesel and electric traction is more complex and a man who signs the traction as well as the route is needed or a traction pilot found. In the case of MAS signalling, the train will be driven to the next signal, where there will be a telephone to the panel signal box. At that point the procedure becomes very similar to the above, but instructions are relayed by telephone. One of Prof. Tuplin's novellas about the Great Central has a tale in which a driver leaves the footplate of a loco on an up winter evening express from Leicester to climb around the tender with the intention of perving on a young couple who had installed themselves in the leading compartment of the train and were clearly going to play 'beast with two backs'. He instructs the young fireman to leave the controls as he has set them and blow the whistle to attract his attention approaching Rugby, where the train was booked to stop. It was more than a fireman's job was worth in those days to question your driver, and the fireman carried out the driver's instructions. Upon blowing the whistle approaching Rugby on time, and finding that no driver returned to the footplate, he shut off steam, put the loco in mid-gear, and braked to a standstill at Rugby. No sign of the driver, who by now had been missing for some time. Of course, it had to be reported immediately, and another driver found to take the train on to Marylebone. Plenty of staff around at Rugby and the train proceeded without any delay incurred. The original driver, what was left of him, was found when the line was searched, only a few yards from where he'd left the cab. The point Tuplin was making was that GC 4-6-0s could be left to run at certain gear and throttle settings and required little attention from their drivers, or from their fireman beyond putting an occasional round on, but I would point out that a) so could most classes so long as the regulator handle is secured in position, and b) Tuplin is entertaining as a writer of fiction. Nobody knows what happend to the young couple, but one hopes their journey was pleasant... Tuplin does not comment on whether the fireman was reprimanded or praised for his action; he should of course have reported his driver missing immediately, but had been instructed not to by a man authorised to instruct him and in charge of the locomotive.

Coming back to the habit of leaving the cab to 'oil around', I would expect drivers to wait for an opportunity to present itself just after a train had passed on the opposite line before venturing out on to the rh side, as there would at least be a few minutes before another one passed. As this applies to the Ais Gill accident, I read it as the driver going out on to the rh side of the loco approaching Birkett Tunnel, as you wouldn't want to be on the lh side in a tunnel, just after traffic had passed on the adjoining running line, to make his way widdershins around the running plate. I once read the job of the engine driver described as 'stopping the train at the times and places specified in the working timetable', which is a somewhat different way of looking at it (can't remember where I read it, it sounds like Tuplin) . He has to start the train and make it move at a speed consistent with the timings in order to do this of course, and his responsibility is to obey the speed limits and the signals, as well as to manage the engine. It is not diffiuclt to imagine situations in which these responsibilities conflict with each other. The fireman's job, as I read at the same time, to ensure that there is a sufficient level of water in the boiler at all times, which is again a somewhat different perspective. He is also of course required to provide the driver with enough steam at enough pressure to perform his function of stopping the train at the times and locations specified in the working timetable, and to assist the driver in observing signals. But his first responsibility is to the fusible plug, and failure to discharge this particular responsibility will not only require the train to be stopped and the fire dropped as a matter of some urgency, but make him a marked man for comment and ridicule for the rest of his railway career. Drivers will be reluctant to work with him, and the stigma will never leave him; I worked with a Canton man who had dropped a plug on a Britannia at Llanharan in 1954 who was still hearing all about it a quarter of a century later... There are plenty of things that can happen in a steam loco cab that might be reasons for missing signals, and injectors were always dodgy things which sometimes required expert persuasion to work properly, which took time and sometimes the attention of both fireman and driver. Reasons for missing signals are not excuses for missing signals, however. One begins to see the value of the GW ATC system, when a crew might be distracted by injectors or other problems over several sections and at speed, but are re-assured by the bell that the distants are off, or alerted by the hooter to one being on, and a glance at the sunflower would confirm the situation. This was cutting edge stuff at the time of the Ais Gill accident, but this was not to be last occasion on which crews were distracted from signal observation by problems in the cab. There is a sense in which crews were being asked the impossible, to manage the loco and to observe the signals, and getting away with it most of the time, but to absolutely guarantee successful loco managment and 100% signal observation is a very big ask. I think most people would say that signal observation trumps loco management, but it is not such a clear-cut call aboard the loco! The blunt fact is that, at Ais Gill, Caudle missed the signals he was responsible for observing, but one has to have some sympathy with him; he was under pressure, doing his best, and got it wrong when on a thousand other occasions he'd have got it right. Apportioning blame in accidents was rarely as simplistic as either the BoT reports made it out to be, and never as simplistic as press reports; railway accidents seem to generate a plethora of instant experts!

Be careful of this exchange siding business, J; mine expanded into a colliery by order of The Squeeze... It happened like this, I had a colliery exchange loop where empties were left by BR locos, then collected and taken to the colliery fiddle yard (you'd call them staging roads) by a colliery loco. In town one day I saw a rather nice Hunslet 'Austerity' saddle tank in a 2h shop for a reasonable price, and it came home with me. No hiding railway purchases at my place, which is a small flat, The Squeeze is supportive, and I was about to find out just how supportive... The layout lives in the one bedroom, and perhaps germane to this is that The Squeeze is Polish and her father is a Silesian coal miner, both facts of which she is rightly proud. I explained the purpose of the new loco to her, and the response was 'but where is colliery?'. 'No room', quoth I. 'Build colliery', she says, 'I want photos for my father'. 'But it will have to go here, and the fiddle yard will go here, in your way to get to your dressing table and the wardrobe'. 'How big you think is my dupa (bum) (I know the answer to this, it is silence and keep your head down), build the kurwa (not translatable on a family forum) colliery!'. So I built the kurwa colliery; this one's a keeper!

I believe so, but the Class 28 Crossleys came out in one lift as a complete power plant, with generator, a feature inherited from the submarines. When the HSTs were introduced on the WR, we were told that a complete power plant exchange could be accomplished in about 20 minutes with an overhead gantry crane.

Quite. But at least some are honestly and obviously incorrect, like the minerals with stretched bodies on the wrong wheelbase (Hornby, Airfix, and Lima were guitly of this as well).

Well, bits of it are! Hopefully without the Mittelengelander marketing. Once you leave the village and walk down to the castle itself, it is a properly spectacular place, on it's headland above the Atlantic. It is almost a shame that it is conflated with all the Arthurian stuff, itself mangled beyond any hope of getting any solid facts out of it by various medieval writers of both psuedo-history and romances. My view is that there very probably was an Arthur, The Bear, who successfully resisted the Saxon overlordship of what is now England for a generation in the late 400s/early 500s. The battles of Badon Hill and Camlan probably really took place, Badon Hill being very probably at Solsbury Hill, Bath, a location that makes sense strategically, but the medievals have done us no favours. Tintagel is the sort of visually impressive location that is almost bound to become associated with legends, and there was an Iron Age structure there that preceded the current Norman ruins, which are of course far too recent to have had anything to do with Arthur. Iron Age fortifications on Cornish North Coast headlands are more or less obligatory, and appear at Port Isaac, Trevose, Bedruthan, Newquay, and other places as well, all of which could easily be associated with Arthur, but the ruins at Tintagel give it the edge in this regard... The clincher, IMHO, is the poem 'Y Gododdin', a bardic account of a very real historic 6th century battle in which a warband of elite warriors are feasted at Dunedin (Edinburgh, then part of the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde) for a year before unsuccessfully besieging a Saxon stronghold at 'Cathraeg', quite possibly Catterick. The Briton warband is wiped out. The bard, Aneurin, writing in old Welsh and transcribed into later copies, names the heroes individually but ends each description with 'but he was not Arthur, and he fed the ravens on the walls of Cathraeg'. This seems to relate to Arthur as a more accomplished warrior who had perhaps existed within the living memory of older people at time of the poems' writing. If this battle took place at Catterick, then the resounding victory for the Saxons should be celebrated to a much greater extent in English history; certainly to the extent that it is mourned in Welsh-speaking history (it is little known amongst Welsh monoglot English speakers like me). It would have broken the back of Brythonic domination of the island, clearing a path of Saxon-occupied territory to the Irish Sea in what is now Lancashire, dividing Brythonic territory into southern and northern parts. Not long after this, the Saxons had advanced to Gloucester, and within 50 years to Exeter, dividing the Britons into three areas; Strathclyde/Cumbria, Wales, and Cornwall. Only two of those remain as distinctly Brythonic in character, and their borders are in much the same locations as they were at the end of the 6th century.

Had one as a teenager, great little guy, natural comedian, highly affectionate. B*gger for pulling on the lead, though, never really got the hang of that.