LBRJ

Its far from the best ever picture, even by me, but I thought it captured the feel of a cold night at the station. Someone mentioned posh units on Sheffield to Leeds trains. This one was more the usual standard of transport provided and I assume it had just come the other way. Platform 8 is (or at least was) the usual termination point for units arriving at Sheffield for an overnight stay and fuelling, cleaning etc. This unit must have been one of the first ones to get there, as it is right down at the south end of the platform. Sometimes Leeds based drivers would stop short, nearer to the footbridge for a quicker walk over to their next train, and cause all sorts of chaos due to "platforming issues" for subsequent arrivals.

I noticed that too, and I assumed that it was one and the same....

The former NCDC were on record as saying that they regarded the Camel Trail as being an asset with a greater overall benefit than a reinstated railway line to Padstow would be. That is obviously quite a long time ago now, but fifteen /twenty years ago there was the most idle of gossip on the matter, and the very vaguest of remote rumours of a possible "swap" between the Bodmin & Wenford and Network Rail involving the Looe branch being the base of the preserved line and Wessex Trains running a regular Bodmin Parkway > Bodmin service (I kid you not!)

The closest real life modern example, at least for operating purposes, would be the Plymouth to Gunnislake branch. So nowadays it would be a steady diet of Class 150 units running from the mainline at Bodmin Parkway to Padstow via Bodmin General, and back. Through running from further afield wouldn't be an option unless you totally rebuilt and re-laid Parkway's track layout; let alone the constraints of platform capacity at General. I suppose that if it was still there, the line may be suitable for Class 158 operation, so you may also see the odd one of those on the branch.

There is also the point that everyone pretty much sees colours differently anyway, at least to some degree.

The backscene certainly helps set the scene with the mid Cornwall vibe.

It is just that the headcode is obviously a class 1 train and from London...

Was 1C07 not some sort of postal or parcels working at the time? Could be wrong there of course.....

On the NLS map the longer one appears to be about 330 feet.

https://gelligaerhistoricalsociety.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/NEwsletter67-January2023.pdf on page 7 of the PDF linked above is a Francis Frith picture of the whole area.

Most interesting. My paternal grandparents were married at Aberbargoed, though they did not live there (her family did at the time). They may even have got off the train at that station at some point !

Having had a look at it in zoomed in on big screen I am going to suggest that it is pretty immediately post war, say up to about 1946/47. That is nothing to do with trains or cars or rationing or whatever, it is just that the overall look of the people says late 40s to me - It is certainly not the early 30s, if that is the other likely option.

Think of it as my vote in a Lifetime Achievement Award.... All the way back to Rotherbrook in N :)

I like the planning and detail you have shown, it all helps to capture the feeling of the area. Kyle is not a place I know a lot about but ever since seeing Pete Matcham's rather iconic version of the place in 2FS I have thought it an ideal prototype to use as the starting point to base a very small layout on.

I like that picture, and the story of the dartboards. My mate had a HA van that was pretty much the same colour as the Renault 4 in the picture, at least on the outside - and the same colour as the nearby road sign on the inside. I assume it had been a BT van at some point.

One suspects that the two points here may be connected 😉

That work is actually just a badly drawn Spaniel. Check it out and you will never unsee it now ;)

They do. I wrote steel when I meant iron. We had been talking about steel making, thats what Sheffield Forgemasters do.

My acquaintances, as mentioned in my previous post, were of the opinion that the only potential issue could be a short term short fall in overall production capacity. The point that we currently export a lot of our scrap metals is relevant. As I thought, but wanted to confirm, most of the steel produced here is made by using the electric arc process anyway; all special steels are also made that way. Blast furnaces only make the most basic of steel iron. apparently that typo really matters, edited now.

A couple of my long time acquaintances were formally pretty high up the metallurgical ladder at Forgemasters. I shall ask their opinion on this matter at the earliest convenience and report back on any of their thoughts they wish to share - I imagine they are a fairly good source on the matter of electric arc melting of special steels.

I wasn't in the slightest surprised, I was just reporting something as good news, rather than the more frequent negativity mentioned in this thread.

on a brighter note, I called in at Rails today and they are reporting record levels of orders this week,.....

The point that the closing of a model railway retailer, and a regular exhibition coming to an end should make the pages of any national paper would suggest that all is not quite as quietly rotting away as some people would have you believe.

I have been that pedestrian! Fortunately the barriers went up while the train was still in the station. If it had been an Up train I may have had a fair old wait....

It sounds a bit more like the sort of station that you might have found in some small, soon to be post industrial, northern town a decade earlier, than anywhere in Devon in the period mentioned.