The Johnster

Definitely an air of Triffid about it, the sort of thing I called 'man-eating cactaboogles' in my childhood!

My all-time favourite diesel was the Hymek, and I was lucky enough to be able to work on them at Canton in the early 70s. The perfect combination of ride, quiet cab, cosiness, visibility, and they looked superb in the original two-tone green 'Deltic' livery with white window surrounds. Pocket rockets, they were initially used at Canton to replace Kings on top-link passenger jobs, and managed albeit with savage thrashing, and it is a shame that most enthusiasts never got to see (and hear), as I did, them lifting 900 tons of loaded presflos and vanfits up the slope out of Aberthaw Cement works, Maybach screaming and sanders blasting; awesome! Just as Beyer-Peacock went under, an order for a further 100 of these locos was in progress, presumably to be the D7101-D7200 series. These were to be lower geared for a top speed of 70mph and were intended to replace steam in the South Wales Valleys, work eventually done by 37s drafted in when the order collapsed, effectivly the death-blow to Swindon's hydraulic aspirations. My observations at Aberthaw suggest that they'd have been as capable as the 37s on Valleys work despite the loss of two powered axles, and they were at least a loaded hopper better on paper. A further 100 would probably have been needed to satisfy the traffic demands in South Wales in 1963, but the coal traffic was diminishing by 1964 and those would almost certainly have been cancelled. They might even have been better in some situations than the 37s. which cut out readily when overloaded (as did all EE locos except the 08s) and didn't give the driver the option of caning it a bit when he was up against it! The same weight and about the same size as a 25, but the similarity ends there. There replacement at Canton with 25s on passenger jobs was ill-advised, but there was nothing else available; their freight work was taken on by 37s. I never understood the WR's reluctance to use 37s on passenger work; they did eventually but that was well into the 80s with eth stock. The ER, NER, and ScR used them very effectively in this way and found them satisfactory, but the WR mindset was that they were freight engines, perhaps because the initial allocations were specifcally for Valleys work to replace steam. I liked the 37s, and the experience of riding on them double-heading the 1,600ton trailing Waterston-Albion bogie tanks up Stormy or Llanvihangel was a privilege, to be savoured window open and head hanging out listening to the NOYZE!!! Then there were the triple-headed Port Talbot-Llanwern iron ore tipplers, 27 of them @ 100tons a go + 315tons of locos, 9mph blowing 3 holes in the sky at the summit of Stormy Down from a standing start at Margam Moors. You could sit in the beer garden of the Angel in Mawdlam village overlooking Water Street Jc. on a summer evening and savour it, the heaviest freight train in the country at the time and the heaviest diesel-hauled working in Europe, and against that steelworks & mountain backdrop they looked perfect. Steelworks pollution makes for excellent sunsets...

And yet there is an entire magazine industry, profitable at that, predicated on what these wastes of skin and other similar oxygen-hoggers do.

Problem is that lorry drivers buy satnavs in motorway services, not taking account of the fact that they are designed for general use, not HGV. Those big motorhomes are vulnerable to this as well. The satnav knows how to get there, but not necessarily that it’s in a 15’ high vehicle. Of course, satnavs for commercial vehicles are available, but expensive and only available to commercial customers. Cardiff buses had them a few years ago, set to sound a warning when the bus was within a set distance of a low bridge. Sounds like a good idea, but the warnings were going off virtually continuously in the city centre as they were almost continuously with range of such a bridge, even though the bridge was not on the bus’s route…

And probably the worst for reliability because of the electronic complications, a poor clapped out bargain for the WR as replacements for Westerns. 110mph btw, in order to deliver timetable improvements on the WCML when the Weaver Jc.-Motherwell electrification was put back in 1966, but they had to be double-headed and thrashed to deliver it. They could go a bit, though, I’ll give you that; I once timed one at a sustained 114mph between Cholsey & Moulsford and Tilehurst, fastest I ever went in a mk1…

The 31s were lovely things to work aboard; rode like a Pullman, roomy warm draughtproof cab despite the gangway doors (which were starting to be sealed up when I worked on the railway) with nice armchairs to sit on, good all round view, good soundproofing, and a good cooker. But they seemed a lot of engine for not much pull, same weight as a Western and as big as a 47, and they always seemed to be breaking down or running out of fuel when I worked on them, which was mostly bad luck. A little more powerful than a 25, but the size and weight ate into the difference; feeble. But they were adaptable, able to take on ETH and airco, better when they were re-engined, and lasted a long time in service. You’d have to say they were a success by the standards of the 1955 Modernisation Plan locos, not that the bar was particularly high!

An interesting viewpoint, and very much a trainspotters’ one IMHO. They were common, 509 in service in the 70s, and perhaps looked a bit dull; they were - are - a well proportioned and neat design and not unattractive in the original two-tone green livery, at least when it was clean (again, IMHO). But they didn’t have the brutal presence of a Deltic or the elan of a Western. But some the other classes you mention were also pretty ubiquitous; over 300 37s and nearly 500 Rats if you include the 24s and the 25s as all Rats. There were 200 40s and nearly 200 Peaks (44/5/6, three classes that looked more or less identical). Come to that there were well over 200 20s. Perhaps the outline of the 37s, 40s, and the Peaks, with noses, was more inspiring; by the 70s noses were out of fashion and ‘classic’ or perhaps ‘retro’. The 40s and 20s made interesting noises, and the 37s growled nicely. The Rats rattled, failed to pull the skin off the driver’s milk, were spectacularly uninspiring lookers, and utterly horrible to work on; we used to reckon the 56 miles between Cardiff and Gloucester with the 00.35 Peterborough parcels, 4E11, at an attempted 90 mph would shorten your spine by at least an inch. Which leaves the 50s, and the popularity of these amongst spotters has always baffled me. A class of 50 long-distance express engines used specifically on the WCML initially and later on specific routes further southwest becomes a very common sight on those routes, and one would have thought they were only really excitement-generators to spotters from outside their area. They were probably the dullest example of loco styling in their era, like a 47 (not the most inspired looker) but even boxier and plainer, boredom personified. I hated them for finally killing steam in 1968 and then my beloved Westerns, but in general the spotters went nuts over them. My opinion of 47s was that they deserved more respect than they ever got from the numbertakers; once they were made to run reliably by derating the engines by 100horses, they were the best all-round mixed traffic general purpose locomotive ever devised for use on Britain’s railways. The cabs were draughty and the ride was horrible, too soft and rolling, but they could pull anything that was coupled to them, and pull it to time; 95mph passenger, long-distance Motorail (with double fuel tanks), Freightliners, TEAs, block coal trains, MGRs. They could be dual-braked, fitted with ETH, and they were probably signed for traction knowledge at most depots throughout the country, so they were pretty much operable anywhere at a moment’s notice, a true workhorse, Control’s favourites. And the horns sounded nice.

The original M4 Severn Bridge was a disaster for South Wales. It enabled the development of industry and warehouse/distribution hubs in the North Bristol area, later developed into Cribb's Causeway, and the imported car distribution network based on Portbury Docks, which were easily able to serve supermarkets and industries in South Wales, to the detriment of jobs in South Waies. It was the death of car imports and exports from Cardiff and Newport. It also promoted the use of Bristol Airport at Lulsgate for South Walians at the expense of Cardiff (Rhoose). Both airports are very badly situated and poorly served by road and public transport, the 'wrong' side of the cities they are named for, and for some years there was talk of a 'Severnside International' airport to replace both of them and tap into traffic from the Midlands as well. An airport built out over the esturary close to the bridges and Severn Tunnel would be very stategically placed at the crossroads of both motorways (Almondsbury) and railways (Bristol Parkway), but it never happened.

Because no stock anywhere* had headlamps in the 70s until the arrival of the HST, which only had both headlamps lit when running at over 100mph. *Exceptions; the 'Heart of Wales' line and possibly Glasgow-Fort William and the Far North line, which had stretches of unfenced railway running across open country. The headlamps for the Central Wales line, fitted to some class 120 powertwin dmus and 37s, were Lucas car rallying spotlights, purchased by a Landore fitter from a local Lucas stockist with money from the shed's petty cash. I was once on one of the powertwins working the 23.05 Bristol TM-Cardiff, one of my link jobs, and the driver switched the light on in the Severn Tunnel, an illuminating experience on several levels when the normal lighting gave you a vague impression of half-a-dozen sleepers or so in front of the cab. The Lucas was a very powerful lamp, and showed the interior of the tunnel in detail not many people have ever seen I suspect. And the more nervous ones would not want to; the amount of water cascading in from the river was quite alarming!!! That's right, trains on the ECML and WCML were running at booked speeds of 110mph at night without their drivers being able to see more than a few yards ahead. I did it at 90mph myself on the Peterborough Parcels. One had complete faith that the line ahead was clear, because it was fenced and because the signals told you so, backed up by the AWS. Most of us would have argued against hi-intensity headlamps on trains on the grounds that nobody needed to see where they were going and that it was more than likely to dazzle oncoming drivers and others about the railway. Working at night depended to a considerable extent on 'getting your night vison in', and modern generations used to urban life would be surprised at how much can be discerned on even the darkest nights so long as there is no fog or mist.

I would think that the 'rail blue, late steam' concept is not impossible as an early to mid 70s scenario, based on the idea that the actual demise of service steam was driven by political and image considerations within BR to a certain extent, and there seems little doubt that it was. I would imagine it happening in two ways, firstly the retention of some express steam engines (Britannias being the obvious choice) as reserve motive power to cover failures or booked maintenance of OHLE on the WCML (ISTR the Norwegians did this on the Kiruna-Narvik line), and the retention of double-chimneyed 9Fs as general reserve motive power at main depots everywhere. The locos are redacted by the 70s and cost little to keep in service. Air braking would have to be provided, and 4-character headcode boxes fitted, contained between the smoke deflectors at the front, where they can provide a platform for accessing the smokebox, and split on the tenders. The withdrawal of water troughs might be a case for rebuilding the tenders on 6-wheel bogies and extending the lengths by cut'n'shutting. Livery, 1966 unlined rail blue, coach chassis brown for smokebox and below running plates, arrows of indecision on tender sides, cabside and smokebox numbers in standard 1966 font, and yellow hi-viz buffer beams. Running numbers to be retained post-TOPS as for preserved locos, ships, and hotels... Locos to be equipped with electric lighting and backlighing for headcode panels and all bearings to be replaced by roller-bearings. I would expect the Britannias to be limited to 90mph, and the 9Fs to 75mph, adequate for 1970s work. A number of ETHELs would need to be provided to work with the Britannias. There may also be a case for using retained steam on goods sevices that run only occasionally, say weekly. This means not having to find a loco from your diesel or electric fleet, which you should have a little difficulty with if you have the correctly efficient level of stock, and with the steam engine available at any time the customer requires on 8-hour firing-up-from-cold notice, you can provide a much more flexible service.

I'd say your options are limited if you want a domino 47 with a rake of unfitted minerals, but there are other options. 47s in the 70s were frequently used on class 7 and class 8 trains with fitted heads but with unfitted rear portions consisting mostly or completely of such wagons, and a brake van at the rear, and some of these were block coal trains. So, you can justifyably use your domino 47 with unfitted 16ton minerals, so long as you don't couple unfitted wagons to the loco; you need a fitted head. It is possibly to run a train as class 8 without a fitted head if it is light enough and the loco on its own can provide sufficient brake force (58tons for a 47) for the load, so long as the instanter couplings are all in the shortened position, but this would be unusual and modelling the unusual is never good practice. I do not recall any completely unfitted class 9 trains in South Wales in the 70s hauled by 47s; the standard horse for these was a 37, though the Newport Docks-Llanwern unfitted iron ore hoppers were worked by double-headed 25s and occasionally by 1200 Falcon. All the class 9 work was local in nature and did not venture beyond Cardiff Area, or very far within it. Class 8 block trains were mostly composed of 16ton minerals, but bogie bolster steel rod or bar traffic between South Wales and the Midlands via Gloucester was quite common, hauled by 47s or 45/6s, and some coal and coke hopper traffic was of this sort as well. The South Wales-Acton coal trains were class 8 and hauled by 47s or Westerns.

Yeah, but a series of photos that do not show the loco outside the box and from other angles shouts 'chiseller getting rid of faulty item' pretty loud to my ears! I'd be very wary of this item.

We used to do this on the 00.05 Cardiff-Liverpool, which was our usual train to the northwest for steam gricing expeditions in the late 60s. Blinds down as well.

Justifiable retaliation after the Severn Bridge tolls! You know what you say about us and sheep; well, it's all true, and then we sell them to you so you can eat them...

TfW is in many ways a political construct, formed in order to obtain funding from the Welsh Assembly Government. There has never been an effective rail route between the north and the south of Wales, and there is only barely an effective road connection (A470). Our Trawscambria coach network does not provide a through vehicle, you have to change at Aberystwyth and it is a long way round; back in the 90s this provided one coach per day between Cardiff and Holyhead, which too nine hours via Swansea, Carmarthen, and Aberystwyth. The basic problems are the geography, which consists mostly of mountain ranges aligned SW-NE when the traffic flow is SE-NW, and the traffic levels; there are not sufficient people who want to travel between the south and the north of the country to make the provision of a through route entirely to the west of Offa's Dyke viable, in fact not even enough for such a route to even see the sky over viable. By and large, if you live in the south or southwest, your destination is Swansea or Cardiff and your airport is Cardiff or Bristol, if you live in Powys it is Birmingham and the trains run to Birmingham Internaional, and in the north it is Liverpool and John Lennon airport, or Manchester. You could argue that Wales only exists as a specific entity becuase of the difficulty of the terrain. The Diawl Saes hailed from the relatively level country of Northern Germany or Southern Denmark, and failed to overrun this difficult territory because they did not understand mountain warfare or that movement in such terrain depends on being able to access the tops of the mountains, and made the mistake of advancing up the valleys where our archers could pick them off at will. The Normans made the same error, repeatedly; you could invade the country and subdue the opposition, but the costs were huge and you couldn't maintain dominance except from the boltholes of your castles for very long. And of all the castles, only one, Pembroke, was effective and never fell to the Welsh at one time or another; the rest were ultimately a liability. Owain Glyndwr set up his Senedd at Machynlleth because he could ride his horse along the mountain ridgeway tracks anywere in the country within 24 hours; the valley routes would have taken days. This is the root of the English belief that he was a magician, able to be in two places at once, and he did nothing to disabuse them... The road and rail networks, A40/M4 & SWML, A44 & Cambrian, and A55 & North Wales coast line, reflect this and cater to long established and engrained traffic patterns. Nobody from Bangor would consider shopping in Cardff, they would go to Liverpool, obviously, it's closer, quicker, and costs less. Most of the few that have to drive between Cardiff and Bangor do so by M4/A449/A40/M50/M5/M6/A55, which is about 100 miles off course for a journey that a crow could fly in less than 200. The rail services inevitably mean a presence of bilingual branding and signage and information well east of Offa's Dyke, as far as Birmingham International or even Norwich, and occasionally Bristol or Manchester. As an indication of the difficulties even at the height of railway expansion, there was, in the Edwardian era, a daily through coach between Cardiff and Aberystwyth. Its route was a validation of the Trawscambria tradition that much of the journey takes place at a heading 90 degress away from a direct route; Cardiff Bute Road/Treherbert/Neath (via R&SB)/Carmarthen/Aberystwyth. quite an adventure, and it was just as quick via Shrewsbury!

And there’s the old Airfix, now Dapol Kitmaster, plastic construction kit, which IIRC is dimensionally pretty good. This needs a bit of working up; the door/ramp hinges are horribly crude and there’s a lot of moulded detail, but has the advantage that said doors can be posed open of you wanted to make it up as a siding lurker in a cattle dock.

I believe it is in fact basically the old Hornby Dublo model which Dapol inherited from Wrenn, though they have retooled the chassis and fitted better buffers in the meantime. Rails’ announcement is about a new production run; the use of the word ‘new’ by the marketing departments of some companies is not always as transparent as it could be… this is not in any sense a new model, and is really over 60 years old… Roof profile and wheelbase are visibly and obviously wrong, as they are on the Ale van that Dapol have developed from this model. Personally, I’d avoid it, but it will be fine for many customers less concerned with accuracy than me! TTBOMK the only accurate 4mm RTR cattle van is the Hornby Southern Railway model. The Oxford LNER cattle van is accurate except for the sides, which are mirror-image but should be handed, or the other way around, I forget which now but you only see one side at a time. Both of Bachmanns’ fall into the generic chassis trap.

I knew more than a few people who coukd not operate their tvs, never mind VCR. Yet for some unfathomable reason this demographic managed fine if the vcr was built in to the tv. They could manage knobs and switches, but not ‘modes’, wjhhere the same button performs different tasks in different modes. I used ‘NICAM Stereo’ VHS as a stereo audio recording medium, much better than cassettes, more robust and a choice between longer playing times and better audio quality from faster running speeds. I was never really happy until the age of mp3 and streaming though; I no longer possess any audio or video material in any physically existing format, it’s all algorithms and electronic mythology... sounds better, though!

I like my clocks to show the right time if possible, and flashing LED displays drive me nuts (back in the 80s I seemed to be the only person in the known universe who bothered to set the clock on his vcr). There are two battery analogue clocks that don’t though, the layout ‘Cwmdimbath Time’ clock, and one laid on it’s back with the 12 pointing due north, set to 13 minutes after GMT, astronomical time for this longitude; the real time, just to show that I know what the real time is and of absolutely no practical use whatsoever, just because I like that sort of stuff.

Yeah, sod off buses, with your lcd destination panels and poor timekeeping, and your uncomfortable seats with no leg room, and your spine-jarring (lack of) suspension, and your screaming children, and your bad-tempered drivers, and your passengers that stand by the door in my way when there’s seats for them to sit in further back, and your no room for prams. Nobody likes you, you’re just a reminder that my life is a failure and I can’t afford to run a car or get a taxi, sod off!!! Actually, don’t, I need to go to town later…

Even then the fact that the lights were on was barely detectable in all but the gloomiest daylight conditions, a situation that also applies to post-mk2d coaches with tinted windows. Lighting on RTR models in general is far too bright and gimmicky, and if the layout is ambient-lit for daylight conditions (and most are lit for summer sunshine) the only lighting that should be immediately apparent to an observer is the loco high-intensity headlights, and these were unknown in the UK until the introduction of the HST in the 70s, and not until the next decade on other stock (‘Heart of Wales’ line excepted). Not saying lighting is a bad thing, it isn’t, but the RTR approach needs a bit more subtlety and toning down, especially on steam-age locos and stock IMHO. Of course, if this were done, there would be howls of protest from ill-informed modellers complaining that they couldn’t see the lighting that they’d paid for, so the manufacturers understandably respond to the demand, but perhaps we could have a ‘dimmed/realistic-level’ setting as well as the standard ‘retina-burner/visible in normal ambient’. Pre-flourescent coach lighting was by 25watt filament incandescent bulbs powered by the 20vdc dynamo/battery supply. As well as the main compartment lights, which could be dimmed by passengers who wanted to sleep, there were reading lights on the divider walls which could be switched off. None of these were very bright, and even at night were not readily obvious in well lit areas like big stations.

The 1960s saw major changes in the way that general mechandise goods traffic was dealt with, brought about by a sort of perfect storm of co-inciding events. One of these was the 1955 Modernisation Plan, which allowed for more point-to-point block trains, another was the sharp fall in traffic which occurred after the 1955 rail strike, which prompted a major shift to road transport which would probably have happened in the next few years anyway, connected with which was the development of the motorway system and the 40' articulated lorry, then Beeching, which resulted in the closure of large numbers of hundreds of smaller main line stations with their goods yards, and entire branch lines, and the closure of the goods yards of many of those that survived for passenger traffic in order for them to be converted to commuter car parks to take advantage of the quantum increase in private car ownership which also occurred during this period. In the decade between 1955 and 1965 station goods yards more or less disappeared while the remaining traffic was concentrated on the large goods depots found in major towns and cites; these were shortly afterwards handed to NCL. Few lasted more than another decade. Freightliner container traffic began in the late 60s, and revolutionised freight handling in general. In railway terms, again, it was concentrated on strategically placed yards where the containers could be transferred from rail to road and vice versa. Household coal was similarly centralised at 'House Coal Concentration' depots, and, like the freight depot traffic, mostly closed altogether in the later 70s. The demand for domestic coal had more or less vanished, replaced by central heating or gas/electric fires. Some traditional yards survived as transhipment points for industries, especially cement, aggregates, and timber, but in general the traditional local goods yard was a thing of the past before the end of steam!

Tbh your problem is going to be that very few British shunting engines looked much like this loco. Typically, those used by BR did not have the large platforms ahead of the bonnet, though some had the structure behind the cab, and all had coupling rod drive, often from jackshafts. The Lima, even as a basically H0 model running on 00 layouts, is physically enormous, close to the loading gauge limits, whereas the BR prototypes were much smaller (except the 350hp family). You could probably fit a 6-coupled mech in there... Industrials could be more like this model in general appearance, but, again, the majority had inside frames and coupling rod drive. Your photos illustrate another issue; the buffers are far too high when you compare the height above the rail with those of the 7-plankers. Buffer heads need to be a larger diameter as well, as engines with wheelbases as short as this were usually required to work around sharp curvature, and large buffers were needed to prevent override or buffer locking. There are/were some outside framed industrial shunting locos in the UK, notably some chunky Brush/Bagnalls used in South Wales steelworks; these are too big for the main line loading gauge.

OCD, or at least an element of it, is to my mind an essential component of good modelling. Scale modelling demands some obsessiveness on the part of it's practitioners, and we all try our best to go the extra mile to tbe best of our varying ability, probably to an extent that most 'normal' (whatever that means) folk would consider unhealthy, and perhaps it is... I would probably be happy with a 120 with generic 64' dmu coach underframes, were I interested in one in the first place, but that is because, while I am I think fairly familiar with them in service in the 70s, I am not by any means an expert in the subject. Once I am aware of details, of course, I expect to see manufacturers include them in RTR models. All of which means that I want my RTR models to be as accurate and detailed as they can be, and it sits uncomfortably with me when they are not, but of course at the same time all models are compromises and are compromised, and the market demands a certain price level. Double standards of course; I want to see revolving drive shafts on dmus, and working internal motion on steam locos, and working windscreen wipers on diesels, but I don't want to see price increases... That puts me in both your 20% (when I'm aware of detail) and your 80% (when I'm not) simultaneously. Moreover, as my own modelling is not (and never will be) of a standard that enables me to even roughly approach that of current RTR in general, I have a bit of a nerve in demanding more and better detail. I try my best to hold to the attitude that a model that is to scale (we'll ignore the 00 discrepancy for now, life's too short) and runs well can be worked up if the level of detail it has out of the box is insufficient, and I have been doing exactly that with varying degrees of success to RTR models for six decades now. I'm happy with this state of affairs. I applaud your committment to realism, Ben. Better scaled, better detailed, and better running models improve our lives, and are a joy to own and use; moreover they promote more and better models in future, and eventually drag up the standards of even ancient bodgerigars like me! There are plenty of us, even on this site, who consider that models should be more robust and less detailed and delicate, but properly designed models are intricately detailed and can be handled without disintegrating (though there is one particular RTR company that seems not to understand this in a way I'd like). Nothing wrong with the more basic standards of previous times, and many people get immense pleasure from models of that sort, it's just not for me, thanks. My main objection to older models, especially those from the pancake motor/spur gear/traction tyre period of the 80s, is the poor running, especially at low speeds, but there was much else amiss with them as well; horrible oversized tension-lock couplers, silly little mushroom-head buffers, moulded brake detail. Hurray for current standards!!!

What is the state of the 2007 tooling for the Bachmann 2251? ISTR (happy to be corrected if I’m wrong) that the chassis was a development of the original Mainline split-block retooled to take an improved can motor with worm/idler gearing, a significant improvement but hardly up to current standards*. The bodyshell tooling was based on the original ML model as well, and this is seriously compromised as the original had no backhead detail or glazing. I think the 2007 retool had glazing but I am less certain about the backhead detail, given that the chassis blocks were developed from ML originals they protruded into the cab. More seriously than that, the ML bodyshell had an enlarged firebox to accommodate the original ML pancake motor housing and the carbon brush springs; not even up to the better of 1980s standards! If this is the case, the 2007 tooling is out of scale around the firebox and poorly detailed, which would confirm that a completely new tooling with no connection whatever to the original ML loco is, indeed, needed. The chassis block and mech from the 94xx could be modified to take the 2.5mm larger diameter driving wheels, to go with a new-from-the-ground-up body tooling, with the detail missing from the old one such as a proper smokebox dart, and lamp irons. *I have a Hornby large prairie (the previous to the current model, last of the line that originated with Airfix, moulded shovel on tank top fireman’s side) running with a Bachmann 43xx chassis from this period; split block with can motor and worm/idler cog drive. It is an excellent, smooth, and quiet runner, and I’m happy with it but the well-known ML split pickup axle problems may yet plague it. Work at Cwmdimbath is pretty undemanding, though, and with gentle driving I should get a few years out of it! I wouldn’t pretend it is able to cut the modern mustard, though!