The Johnster

Min & 'Enery, Milligan and Sellars respectively, an elderly, deaf, and completely potty couple. 'Pull yourself together, Min, (she's a loose woman, you know...)'.

With fully operating crane equipment in DC, please...

I slogan I remember form the 50s/early 60s, before Rhymney were absorbed by Whitbread, was 'Rhymney; the best 'round 'ere', clearly intended to be vocalised in a Valleys accent. It was a lie, of course, nothing beat Brains'.

This evening's setrep, in full ersatz Glyncorrwg auto mode with a pannier propelling. The idea is that the morning miners', the first train up in the morning, will run in this configuration because the box is not yet open and the loco therefore cannot run around at the terminus; of course, this is rubbish as the train only needs to come up the branch one-engine-in-steam as far as the colliery platform. Now a full length coach with the right number of compartments, and I wasn't happy with the shape of the windows on the original cab end, so I did another one. Since the photo was taken an hour ago I've filed down a pair of the orignal Triang brass buffers to the small oval shape shown in the Hodge/Davies photo and fitted them; I'm assuming that the non-cab end had normal buffers. The bogies are to be replaced with Stafford Road Works 3D printed 8'6" Deans, which will enable the couplings to be converted to NEM. Works still o/s includes ballast weight, painting plain brown livery (workman's not austerity, and needs heavy weathering), glazing, interior compartment dividers and bench seats, cab details (brake setter, vac. gauge, handbrake standard, possibly pedal for bell), proper gas tanks and vac. cylinders, filling and finishing joins, auto bell, lamp brackets, handrails, and possibly some dim lighting. And a guard for the cab.

The logo was a common sight in my childhood and I rather liked it. Huntsmen wore white jodpurs, not bare bums, and the lance is his riding crop, for encouraging the 'oss and discouraging the saboteurs. He has a cigar in his mouth. Hunting was quite popular in the area, there being hunts at Senghenydd, Gelligaer, and Rudry.

I feel much the same about Midland 0-6-0s and inside cylinder 4-4-0s... If you want to find out the differences between GW loco, try accurately modelling one with the allegedly standard parts from another class, and see how easy it is to cope with different cylinder and boiler centre-line heights. I expect it's the same with the Midland 0-6-0s and 4-4-0s!

After The Cassandra Crossing, presumably...

All GWR locos are the same, except when they are different…

Have a look at the (Hornby) HM6000 system for DC and HM7000 system for DCC. These has units which supply power to the track but are simple boxex with all the gubbins inside and work through a Bluetooth connection from your smartphone, to which you download a free app and use it as the actual control user interface by touchscreen button and slider controls. Much less expensive than the solutions so far discussed.

The balance between interesting shunting/operation and boring is a fine one, and a bit personal; I'm sure some people would find my layout too restrictive to shunt, a BLT loop with sidings kicking back off both ends and a colliery branch, and others might find it too complex, but I find the level just right for my purposes. I operate in real time to a timetable and try to run at realistic speeds, and allow time for processes like examining trains, ground staff moving about at walking speed, and so on. The challenge is to run the timetable to time, and if I find it getting dull I have wild cards/spaniards in the works I can liven things up with (hotboxes, van in the way because the mileage customer hasn't unloaded it yet, urgent despatch requiring special working or tail traffic on a passenger train. no auto loco available so stock must be run around, &c). Other people like to watch the trains going around, and regard goods faclilities as scenic background, which is fine but not for me. Or run shunting puzzles like Inglenooks and Timesavers which are logic challenges in the form of a model railway but do not actually replicate railway operation; again, fine, but not for me... That said and my stall set out, the principle of a loop, either passing or BLT runaround, with siding emanating from both ends in both directions, is IMHO a good one. Thought must be put into the makeup of the trains to faclilitate shunting and, at a terminus, run around movements made to access both sets of sidngs. A single siding may provide more shunting fun than separate roads, unintuitive but you may have to move wagons out of the way to access cranage, undercover facilities/secure storage, or end loading dock for incoming traffic, or to dig out urgent outgoing. And your pickup goods will probably have traffic on it that you don't shunt, collected at or to be delivered to other stations on its run, and positioned in the train accordingly. This is realistic and railway-like, a representation of the day-to-day challenges and issues of running a general merchandise common carrier goods service on a traditional railway. And it is very satisfying!

Possible I suppose, never thought of doing it that way. The big problem would I suspect be the 'sit' of the boiler, and therefore the smokebox and panniers, in the running plate, which is a little further forward than that of the 57xx, or is the running plate set further back. On the 2721 the smokebox door is directly above the buffer beam, while on the 57xx it is set back about a foot, which I thing means that the cyldinders are further forward in the frames than on the 57xx. The bunker would have to be started from scratch, as would the valance below the running plate, and the Bachmann worm might still protrude into the cab. The top feed and associated plumbing would need to be removed, not a deal breaker and I've done this on two of my Baccy panniers, awkward and a lot of filing and making good, but if it's within my comfort zone it's pretty easy, and a parallel chimney provided, again not a deal breaker. Not sure what needs to be done to the cab, but it's prolly a bit more than simply chopping through the roof to make a half-cab (of course, some 2721s had 57xx-type cabs, but I would want to represent a half-cab), I think some plastic would need removing from the top of the cab cutout. Whistles go through the roof, so to speak, on a 2721. You could use the Bachmann backhead, which is good because, with the open cab, full detail is essential. I would probably use the Baccy bunker coal/ballast weight as a former for the bunker and to provide bunker front detail, which would mean no chance of modelling the bunker other than full of coal. The next issue for some prototypes, including the one I woud want to represent, 2761, Tondu's last 2721 wd 31/3/50, are the coupling rods, which on this and many other 2721s were parallel and fluted. Not 100% certain that the 57xx wheels are correct either. I wonder if, by the same token, a 2021 could be created from a Baccy 64xx? Which raises the same question for an 850 from a 16xx. These smaller panniers also present the difficulty of H-section wheel spokes on some engines.

True of course, but hardly worthy of consideration as anything more than a crude toy, out of it's depth on a modern layout. I worked mine up with a Bachmann pannier chassis, new chimney/dome/safety valve bonnet, cast whitemetal buffers, lamp irons, smokebox dart, and real coal, but one still has the problem of hiding the Bachmann worm, which protrudes through the firebox door, the splashers aligned to the Hornby generic Jinty axle spacing which AFAIK is not correct for anything, certainly nothing British in 4mm scale, and, the final clincher that put it in the spares box and returned its chassis to the donor 57xx, the oversized bunker hanging off the back. Anyone producing this nowadays, and Accura are already in the process of a suitable chassis for their forthcoming 57xx/8750, would make a vastly better job of this prototype, and no doubt supply it in saddle tank form as well.

The brief answer is 'as high as you can make it'. Real railway bridges over streams have enough clearance between the water level and the underside of the deck to allow for floods, and what the stream looks like in flood can be roughly gleaned from looking at the banks. You don't want your bridge to be holding back floodwater, as at the least it'll wash away your ballast, perhaps for a distance either side of the bridge as well, and at worst take the bridge out! OTOH you don't want to be building ramps for the track to clear something as unimportant as a stream... So a common prototype solution is to have the bridge perhaps 3x longer than the span needed to clear the stream, so that it clears the banks and the ground either side as well, allowing a clear passage for any floodwater without raising the trackbed.

Bluebottle, cardboard and string hero, rides again, modelee modelee... 'You rotten rotten, you dedded me'!

Quite right Ian, and it's only going to get better over time. Looking at it (or trying to look at it) from a manufacturer's viewpoint, the idea is to sell stuff at a profit, in a competitive market. We, the consumers, only have a rough idea of how production costs are calculated and disbursed, but clearly some models are going to be less profitable than others unless they are more costly, which will reduce demand and hence turnover; to take no.18 for example, as running in BR crimson/cream livery at Llantrisant many of the panels covering the drive shafts and gears are missing so producing this would something akin to a Shay; you'd need to be able to see things turning. So we wishlist for what we want for our particular layouts and suggest things that we think will sell well. The manufacturer, of necessity, views things a little differently if he/she wants to stay in business, has to continually assess the potential profitable income from new models, because whatever we like to think this is in fact a hobby driven very much by a 'bright shiny new thing make it all better' mentality, as evidenced by the repeated calls for new toolings of perfectly good existing models. Therefore, the manufacturer must introduce new models, or new toolings of older ones, or duplications of other manufacturers' products, but in order to survive he/she must produce new models, keep swimming or drown. So prototypes that have not been previously produced, or not for many years, will appear as what is considered low-hanging fruit moves higher up the tree, It appears that almost any protoype can be successfully marketed, but there seems to be a hangover from the 80s concept that, in order to sell well, a model must be of something that lasted a long time in service, BR if it was steam, and was widely geographically distributed; that vein has largely been worked out. Models that blatantly break this supposed rule have sold well and been successful for those producing them; prototype diesels, one-offs like the Hush-Hush/60700, small geographically restricted classes like Adams Radials or Beattie Well Tanks. So, IMHO (which I freely admit is worth exactly what you are paying for it), any manufacturer thinking of introducing, say, a Churchward 3150, would probably be able to sell it in sufficient numbers to make an honest wee bobee off it, but might be inhibited by it's similarity to large prairies already on the market. Dapol are apparently thinking about it, but would it not be to some extent in competition with their own 5101/61xx? Would not an 81xx for that matter? The question, for Dapol, becomes whether or not 'bright shiny new thing make it all better' trumps 'but I've already got one that looks the same as that!'. For another producer (and we are probably about Accurascale here because I can't see Hornby doing it and I reckon Bachmann have given up on new UK steam) the equation is different, as there is nothing in the range that it would take market share from. I mention the 3150 as an example because it is a forgotten engine that does not appear high in the McDermott lists, which seem to be a cromulent guide to what we want for those manufacturers that read it (so probably not Hornby or Bachmann, then), but might illustrate the 'bright shiny new thing make it all better' syndrome. If we wait long enough, the models we want will appear in RTR form; of course, for the likes of you and me who are on the home straight, we might be a-moulderin' in our graves before they appear, but it won't matter then, not to us anyway. My hopes are for a 2721 or 1854 half-cab pannier in the next few years, which seems not impossible in the way that it would have been 20 years ago. I know you'd be up for these as well, along with an Aberdare. I seem to have been tolerably successful in my wishlisting here, four models I want have turned out to be hits, and are in the process of being produced; 57xx and 8750s without topfeeds, the Diagram N auto-trailer, and a 44xx. So there is no harm in continuing to mention models I still want; we know that Acc and Rap look at these topics, and keeping them in their minds may have some effect... SNTMIAB!

Tommy (Horizontal, that's another story*) Rees, my old hill-walking chum, once commented that, while the map is static, the ground is dynamic, meaning that there is no such thing as an up-to-date map, it is only as good as the latest survey. It was not a problem that affected hillwalking much, but was something to bear in mind when using road maps and plotting routes where new estates had sprung up... He was dead right, of course, and exactly the same thing applies to satnav, although in this case updates cane be included in the database much more quickly than the next OS survey. This is a two-edged sword, though, since the impression is created that the satnav is necessarily accurate and up to date precisely because it's a satnav and has this capacity; in the real world, the ground is still dynamic! *Nickname acquired while he was working as a loco fitter at Nantgarw NCB. He had a habit of 'resting his eyes' in the cabin on nights, booking on, doing whatever work was needed, banking the fires, and getting his head down. This backfired one night when he left one of the Hunslets in reverse gear and failed to ensure that the regulator was fully closed and the handbrake was on properly; the story writes itself from this point. Pressure eventually rose, and eventually the Hunslet moved, slowly at first then a little more quickly, gently demolishing the rear wall of the loco shed, a brick wall, and the surface manager's brand new Rover 3.5 litre coupe before Tommy, awakened by the noise, ran after it, climbed into the cab, and stopped the loco's escape bid before it was out through the gates and off up the Merthyr Road. This was the end of Tommy's NCB career, but he always maintained he'd have got away with it if not for the damage to the car...

I lobbied Dapol for years for the N, simply (!) a matter of putting the 7mm through a shrink ray, with eventual success not that I am claiming that I am responsible for it's appearance, and am now starting to gennerally lobby for an A10, another panelled 56'11" type so unlikely Dap would be interested. In the meantime my intention is to kitbash one from the generally similar A31 Keyser whitemetal kit, not the best solution but will do for now. I reckon my best hope for a proper A10 is from a company that releases a Metro, 517, 2021, or even a 48xx, and since Bachmann have (I reckon) given up on new previously untooled steam, and possibly new UK outline in general, and Hornby are vested in the Airfix-derivate A30 and 48xx, I am looking to Accurascale or Rapido for light at the end of this tunnel. And I know both those companies engage here, so come on, guys, go do that voodoo that you do so well...

The first of the mk2 airconditioned stock on the ECML (1973?) had sealed door lights, and a handle on the inside for the passengers to open the door at stations with; this was an aluminium lever-type normal door handle. At the time, a coach was sent to Canton for staff training on the eth and airco, which I underwent, and I mentioned the handle as something I thought was an accident waiting to happen, which apparently several others had commented on. Sadly, we were proved right within days when a passenger on an up train lurched into the handle and decanted himself onto the down line at 100mph between Thirsk and York, hopefully dying on impact as he was almost immediately run over by a down train. The train was stopped by a passenger pulling the cord, and the coach locked out of use while the train proceeded to York; the door had been damaged by contact with the down train. At York, it was decided that all such stock should be taken out of service immedieately, something I don't think had happened since the knee-jerk blanket ban on the River class after the Sevenoaks accident in 1927. The doors were replaced with the standard mk2 wraparounds that had opening droplights but no handles inside, and the coaches were all back in service in a fairly short time. This affected the design of the mk3 coaches, then approaching the construction stage with the HST project, as they were intended to have doors with sealed windows so that passengers could not upset the airconditioning with the train running at high speed, It seems incredible now that, by the late 70s, BR was running a fleet of 125mph trains with door windows that opened, but AFIAA nobody ever fell out of one... But it does show that the matter was given consideration in the 70s, though we had to wait for the PEP clone Sprinter stock to introduce proper CDL. This is not a new problem, BR had fought a losing battle for many years agaisnt Darwin Award contender passengers who opened doors before the trains stopped. It is not a matter of the ORR, whose postition in this matter I wholly support, coming along all nanny state heavy-handed and preventing Harry Potter from arriving at Hogwart's on his magic steam train, this is a long-standing issue that has, in general railway usage, been solved pretty effectively by CDL over the last 50 years. WCRC do not know better than the ORR, and there are several questions not yet resolved over not only the condition of their rolling stock but over staff training as well in regard to AWS and observation of signals. Not good enough, needs to be better and seen/proven to be better.

And no flat-ended non-gangwayed; these would provide an opportunity for the 1953 A43/4 auto trailer rebuilds with tooling slides. A retooled A30 trailer is long overdue, (or an A27), and the auto trailer provision is poor, admittedly soon to be made a little less so by Dapol's new diagram N. No 70' trailers, no matchboard, no Clifton Downs &c compartment (there are Roxey kits for the Clifton Downs). The most numerically common trailer was the A26, a 70' rebuilt railmotor, never produced in RTR or TTBOMK kit form, but there are none of the gangwayed 70' sets for the Plymouth area either. My personal favourites, the very elegant ex-TVR gangwayed sets, are to be fair a bit niche and unlikely to ever be available even in kit form. Staying with the auto theme, no 54xx or any of the locos converted to auto such as the Metros, 517s (Fair Rosamund would fly off the shelves with a name like that and the romantic historical story that goes with it), 2021s, and such.

To be replaced by something that is a more profitable use of their resources, presumably, But what? And where is this CDL-free profitzone? West Coast have proven over time that they have an embedded cultural reluctance to accept legitimate instruction from the ORR, and are looking increasingly like poorly funded cowboys, while other players in the industry such as Swanage Railway's Wareham service (had it come to fruition) have proved that it is possible to operate slam-door stock with CDL. There now seems to be a concerted and ill/uninformed media effort to present the withdrawal of the Jacobite, usually described as the 'Harry Potter train', with an emotive picture of it on Glenfinnan Viaduct as Big Brother elf'n'safety gorn mad. As a good proportion of the Jacobite's passengers are not conversant with the operation of slam-door stock and the provision of stewards to oversee the use of each door is probably not a practicable solution (6 stewards per coach), it is unsafe to operate the train; this in definitly not elf'n'safety gorn mad, it's elf'n'safety doing its job properly and protecting the paying passengers from the highly likely results of their own lack of understanding of the necessity to not open doors on moving trains. It is now more than a generation since slam-door stock without CDL was used on our railways, and the chances of someone who should be enjoying a family day out tipping themselves out of the train at speed are only increasing as time passes. My opinion now is that West Coast are not fit and proper people to be running trains on main lines, to the extent that I will not travel on their trains for safety reasons, and that the best solution is for the management to be replaced by a more professional regime, starting with a root and branch restructuring. The shibboleth of 'these trains ran perfectly safely for years without any trouble' won't cut it nowadays, when nobody expects doors to be potentially opened by passengers while the train is moving any more; those background accepted skills have been lost, and it is no use heritage operators, people with an interest in preserving the past and of that mindset, trying to pretend that the current situation doesn't or shouldn't exist and that modern passengers are the problem; they pay their fares and quite rightly expect a duty of care from the operator of the train. This means things anathematic to old-school enthusiasts, like fixed or barred droplights and CDL. The railway has changed since 1968 and so must the operators, in line with current regulation and ORR instruction/advice.

Obvious photoshop, everyone knows the ‘mids were made of LEGO…

And to Quaker's Yard presumably.

And, true to form, RM left a soggy box containing the BT outside my front door this morning! Luckily the coach in it's Triang Hornby box was bubblewrapped and dry... Progress, of sorts, though, yay!

Holding in his right had the Chisel of Mendacity...

From 2001 to 2011, I lived in a flat in Dyfrig Street, Pontcanna in Cardiff. This is a short cul-de-sac off Cathedral Road, the main access to the city from the Llantrisant direction and the satnav route to the City council's Sophia Gardens touring caravan site, used by trailers and quite big motorhomes. The actual site is separated from Dyfrig St. by a wall, the boundary wall of the city's Sophia Gardens parklands, though there is a doorway through the wall for pedestrian access. Road access to the caravan site is from a junction with Cathedral Rd about a quarter-mile southeast, then through the Wales National Sports Centre, with roads engineered for the traffic. Satnavs, particularly German ones for some reason, routed incoming for the site off the westbound M4, A48(M), and Western Avenue, left on to Cardiff Road/Penhill Road/Cathedral Road. Then Dyfrig Street... So, part of the fun of living in Dyfrig St was helping hapless Teutons in super-luxury motorhomes the size of artics that were in fact sometimes artics (one had a slide-out garage uner the floor with a sports car in it, seriously), sometimes trailing SUVs, smaller motorhomes or caravans for local tourning, or boats, or in big BMW or Mercedes SUVs hauling massive caravans with things trailed behind them (and frequently no idea how to back a trailer, never mind mutiple trailers), to back out of the cul-de-sac on to Cathedral Road, which experiences very heavy traffic at peak times. This tended to divide itself naturally into three parts. Firstly, one had to attempt to calm down the confused and frustrated Germans, tired having driven from Dover or Harwich, and explain that, whatever the satnav said and whatever the size of vehicle you'd told it to find a route for, it was wrong; this generally involved you showing them through the doorway in the boundary wall and over an embankment in to the caravan site, thus proving that despite their disbelief, they couldn't drive that way. Then you had to explain to them what the correct route was, and that they had no hope whatsoever of accessing it through the back lanes with that behemoth. Then the real fun started; backing these road trains out into Catherdral Road. A community effort with several neighbours involved, and a merry way to spend an hour or so, and I rather miss it since I moved to the sensible side of the city in 2011...