Regularity

You haven’t said what era, but the nearest we got to an inter urban was the Grimsby and Immingham which may provide some alternative ideas - the trams/trains were bigger than on most tramways: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimsby_and_Immingham_Electric_Railway

Yes, a point made in this thread all of 4 days ago.

I was at school with a guy called David Freak. If you don’t believe he exists, he gets a mention in Andrew Collins’ book, “Where did it all go right?”

Not up to the photoshopping, but here’s a what if... Take a Highland River, replace the boiler/firebox with a taper/Belpaire job, and increase the boiler pressure to create a class 5. I am hoping that the weight would not increase substantially. Who then would need a Stanier Black 5, or indeed the Crab or Stanier mogul? A slightly more open-minded approach to reviewing what they had inherited might have served the LMS very well.

Ah.Why would an opinion not be honest?

You might not, but I am about to! The LNWR ceased building 0-6-0s about 1903/4, moving not to moguls but to 4-6-0s.It is a shame that due to a number of their senior officers approaching retirement age, that the LNWR thinking did not have more influence on LMS thinking. That said, the retention of inside cylinders showed that maybe they switched to ten wheelers slightly too soon? More damning was the retrograde influence of Riddles on the BR standards. Yes, outside cylinders and motion and high foot plates were a significant step forward, but not compared to other parts of the world: the Britannia pacifics - much as I admire them - were little more in concept and overall design than a Pennsylvania Railroad K4s from 40 years before... But anyone who has sat in on a board room meeting will be aware that sometimes the common sense approach is outweighed by personalities, and ultimately the key driver for decisions should be stakeholder value. Not just the share price, nor the return on capital, but also the long term value and cost. We also should be careful of casting too much blame on engineers not being able to anticipate better understanding in the future when it comes to things like hammer-blow, bridge deflection, etc. But it wasn’t just attitude. The railways made a big capital investment in the late Victorian/Edwardian era, and even without the Great War would have been constrained from further expenditure until they had shown a reasonable return. Lots of branchlines had small turntables which could only just cope with a large 0-6-0, and an outside cylinder 0-6-0 will “box” a lot on the track: a leading truck or bogie is really a sine qua non for adding outside cylinders, and the turntables would then need to be enlarged, so more capital expenditure on lines which rarely broke even. Add to this the fact that after about 1870, investing in most of the bigger railway companies offered a steady, safe, long term return on capital, so governing bodies had to be very careful with new projects. By the way, the Black 5 with Stephenson’s motion was highly regarded by those who drove it, with many feeling it was perfectly capable of class 6 duties. What a lovely, refreshing attitude! One abbreviation (it’s not an acronym unless it is pronounceable and regularly said as such) which annoys me is “IMHO”. IMO is fine, but I always think, “If your opinion was truly humble, it wouldn’t be expressed”! Let’s hear it for people being proud of their opinions, no matter how senseless they may be.

It would have been even more amazing if he had accomplished it without them!

Neil, Thanks for the kind words. Have you considered the ScaleLink 1:32 range? There is a nice looking Hunslet 4-6-0, plus some WD wagon kits. Close enough to 1:35 to get away with it, I think. Simon Edit: Amusing autocorrection had turned “Hunslet” into “Huntley”. Presumably Reading’s finest biscuit makers also had a sideline in making locomotive engines as part of the war effort. Well, I thought it mildly amusing.

I’d like to see that happen. The only way I could see that working would be if the woman reckoned that he might shut up if she gave him a . All girls like a winner. To many French women, that would be someone who addressed them as, “Fraulein”. (To be fair to the Germans, in most places that the Western Allies liberated in WWII, women felt they could no longer walk down a street without being molested, whereas under German occupation they were treated with respect. This was particularly noticeable in Rome.)

Yeah, we get that a lot. I know of people in their 70s who are almost in tears after spending a day operating an S Scale layout, over the regret that they had missed out on the experience 20 or 30 years before they had amassed a large P4/EM collection. But I also know full well that had they experienced S Scale at that stage of their life, they wouldn’t have made the switch, as they were too used to having broad(er) trade support, and would not have been prepared to “abandon the safety net” of kits and rtr. S Scale is not about adapting available models. It’s about creating something from a limited range of components. In many ways this is easier: any mistakes are your own, and - a bit like crossword compilers - there isn’t someone else’s thinking to unravel. It’s a different mindset, and not for everyone. Possibly, only for a very few.

If he calls my daughter a H0, he’s for it...

I thought it was “other people”?At least, that’s what Pope Jean-Paul the Sartre said.

You might also ask this in the Pre-grouping Special Interest Forum: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/121383-transfers-and-paints/ I have cross-posted a link from there to here.

Worth mentioning this thread, which has just appeared: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/129038-matching-pre-grouping-paint-colours/&do=findComment&comment=2958799

Yes, but at most, two of those in a day. “It’s right to fight for what we want, for all that we believe. It’s right to fight for want we want, to live the life we please. As long as we have done our best, then no one can do more. For life and love and happiness, are well worth fighting for.” Can’t for the life of me remember anything of the plot, but I loved the theme tune!

There’s black, and then there’s blackberry black.

As a child, there was rarely more than 30 minutes a day that I wanted to watch.

You should try S Scale, then... What I love are the modellers who claim to have never heard of it, yet have been to the same local show every year for the past couple of decades, during which many S Scale layouts have been at the show - sometimes even the same layout. If something falls outside their interest, then it doesn’t exist, or at least, not for long.

Like the computer programmer who got stuck in the shower washing his hair.On the shampoo bottle, it said the following:

If you look at the crossings, then the difference is obvious to anyone who has made a proper study of prototype track. However, it is in the consistent application of balanced standards that good running is born. Craftsmanship is craftsmanship, and that is really what we should encourage.

Wow. Do we have a date for the photo?

Fair point, but sometimes people just don’t like what’s outside their own experience.

It’s called an “illusory correlation”. Like all animals, we have to process enormous quantities of information, and the only way to prevent overload and meltdown is to learn the patterns of the typical, and to then pay attention to the atypical. Even on poorly constructed model railways, derailments are rarer than trains staying on the rails (I hope!) and on most, they are relatively infrequent, and therefore atypical. P4 layouts are by their nature atypical, so more attention will be paid to them and even if the rate of derailments is the same as for 00, the derailments on the P4 layout will atypical for two different reasons, and the combination of double-atypical gets logged in the mind as a distinctive event. Bummer, but there you go. This is also, by the way, how poor racial stereotypes develop, but that’s a separate issue. You can deal with this by a certain amount of re-thinking matters: “Gosh, I saw a derailment on the P4 layout. That was a very rare event,” but you need to make a bit of a conscious effort, and if someone adds a preconception (or a prejudice!) to the mix, well, you have no hope as they are merely looking for instances to refute generalities, which is a no-no. But also, some elements in finescale and particularly P4 are wont to proselytise that their solution is the only way to reliable rule, and as Greek tragedies were showing us more than 2,000 years ago, hubris usually leads to nemesis. (”Finescale English” for pride comes before a fall.) I realise that such people are a minority of P4 modellers, who generally are the same as everyone else and simply have their own personal preferences for how they wish to enjoy themselves, but again we are back to a minority group performing atypical behaviour, not helped by the self-styled MRSG’s rather simplified and strident preaching in early articles on P4. In short: do something different and imply that you are better, and everyone else will be forming a queue to spot the first mistake and turn it into a storm in a teacup. And that’s what the originators did - with the sad result that some have been gunning for them ever since. And a small number still insist on this. The simple truth is that care in construction provides for better performance, as does a properly balanced set of standards. Anyone exercising this care will reap the benefits, but the finer the tolerances, the less-well a system will cope with events falling outside its parameters. René Gourley has put it rather nicely on his blog, even if he was talking about details, the same point applies: https://pembroke87.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/details-theyre-personal/

A true Mallet is a compound.Some of the later American Mallets weren’t, technically, Malletsbut they had the same arrangement of the rear set of drivers in a rigid frame, and the leading set of wheels articulated, with the hinge point between the two. Basically, the boiler got so long, it could no longer be supported by a rigid frame: 4-16-4 anyone? Even the Russians didn’t go quite that far...

Julian and Sandy working as baristas in “Bona Beans”?