colin smith

I like Armitage but I admit this isn't the literary equivalent of JMW Turner's 'Rain, Steam and Speed'. But how often do steam engines get poems written about them?

So far as I could tell, the Britannia and Evening Star are displayed next to each other so while the former is in shot when SK is talking about the Immingham fish trains he's actually standing between them and referring to the loco behind his back.

From a modelling perspective 1922. After that there was just too much standardisation.

Presumably the Vale of Rheidol Railway was running steam-hauled ballast trains, etcetera, up until it was privatised in 1989.

Had Rorke's Drift been in Cambridgeshire you might have a point. As it was, native resistance to colonialism was not an act of aggression.

Indeed. And the reprogramming starts with culture and education.

That's not what I said. I said war is collective insanity. Not the British declaring war on the Nazis in 1939. I mean all war everywhere.

1960 was quite late for a British WW2 film seeking to document an actual event from the war, albeit with some factual liberties. After that there was often greater Hollywood involvement and events were increasingly elaborated on or wholly invented (The Great Escape, Heroes of Telemark, 633 Squadron, etc) and from the late 60s ostensibly WW2 Hollywood films were influenced by events in Vietnam and became more about the waste and futility of war as seen from the combatants’ perspective rather than banging the nation’s drum. Looking back, post-war British films like Battle of the River Plate, The Dambusters, Sink the Bismark, The Wooden Horse, and the rest, seem quaint. Perhaps even more archaic than the events they depict. They were as much about post-war national myth-making as war-time reality and if as a child I accepted that myth without questioning I would grow to question it and then despise it. Today I could only tolerate a war film with the premise that war is collective insanity rather than as something glorious with clear moral distinctions between good and bad.

Unfortunately, I'm some way from starting as my bedsit doesn't have room. This is an idea for the future. But having been a OO9 modeller many years ago I have to dispute that it's easier, not least because all the tricky mechanical bits are that much smaller! Tbh, if I had any children/grandchildren, I would have kept them outside the railway door. I do have a plan for what I want to build when the time is right. Standard gauge in black, narrow-gauge in grey. Cambrian coast line overbridge bottom right. Road along the bottom. Coal store served by narrow and standard gauge on the right. Talyllyn platform bottom left with passenger shelter. Talyllyn Railway office far left. Cambrian sidings and the foreshore beyond with the sea on the backscene. Cassette fiddlesticks to left and right.

A Dukedog could work for a late 1930s layout but by then the slate quarries at Abergynolwyn were long past their best. I have noted that Camkits do OO kits for the Cambrian small and large goods 0-6-0s, which is pretty much all the idea would need, along with open wagons and cattle wagons. That said, O gauge would be better as the Talyllyn is much better provided for in O.16.5.

For you, no doubt. I was a professional architectural modeller for twelve years and a picture framer for several more years so I'm not averse to making things, but the engineering aspect of model railways doesn't interest me and I'd rather put the energy into the creative and imaginative aspects. Also, life is too short to acquire the skills needed to produce the relatively few items I would want to a standard I would accept. The particular bit of Cambrian that interests me is the Aberdovey harbour branch which, in my reimagining, would also have been the terminus of the 2'3" gauge Talyllyn Railway* but it really can't be done without one or two Cambrian locos. *The initial proposal for the Talyllyn was for a line from the slate quarries at Abergynolwyn to Aberdovey but once the standard gauge reached Towyn they decided to build an interchange with the Cambrian. Much of the slate went via the Cambrian to the harbour at Aberdovey.

A question. Given its route mileage and character is the Cambrian Railway unusually ill-provided for by model manufacturers compared to companies like the SE&CR, the Midland, and the LSWR, among others. I can't think of a single rtr loco, carriage, or wagon in OO or O.

If you're querying the accuracy of the map then it should be possible to find this detail on the National Library of Scotland's database. https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/#zoom=5&lat=56.00000&lon=-4.00000&layers=298&b=10&z=0&point=0,0 Then, if anything on the map survives today, such as the row of terraced houses on the right, you can find it on Google streetview and double check the dimensions, e.g., by counting the bricks across a house frontage or by using the Measure Distance feature which measures a straight line between two points. All you need is one known dimension and you can work out everything else.

That's caricature for me. It's just too crowded and far too twee.

I know when it looks right on a model and I know when it looks wrong, but the main thing is the level of compression varies wildly depending on what is being compressed. As a rough rule of thumb, maybe: 0% for individual locos and items of rolling stock. 30-40% for train length. 10-30% for building footprints, with larger buildings being compressed more. 30-50% for the distances between buildings, albeit with attention paid to sightlines. 30-50% for the track arrangement. Obviously, you can compress a lot more than that but to my eyes the results often end up looking like caricatures rather than the 'real thing'. One other detail. The level of acceptable compression partly depends on how much head waggling you need to take in the layout. The more head waggling the larger the layout will feel.

I wouldn't say I was proud of doing it, though I take some pride that at nearly 61 I am sufficiently savvy to do it.

Indeed. I think I downloaded the latest Bond within hours of it being released to streaming services.

Ideally, yes, with the proviso that what we are doing is of importance to us. I take a lot of care to write as well as I can. I take rather less care changing the duvet. I think it's rarely either/or and even if something is only done to please the person doing it they still have to appease their inner critic.

Is there potential for a model of Lion before the LMS overhauled it?

Oh, I completely disagree. I haven't got much money at all but regard life as one long (or not so long) amusement. I can take some things seriously but over all it's impossible to take my brief fart of existence on an insignificant rock in an unimportant galaxy at all seriously. Once you accept that life is utterly meaningless you can relax and enjoy it.

I think I mentioned Minecraft as an example of a virtual world-building game requiring many of the skills, and giving the player many of the pleasures, as a real-world world-building game like model railways.

In 1978, at age seventeen I decided to write a novel. Several of those I mentioned this to replied with variations of "So you want to be the next Frederick Forsyth?" Forsyth was, at the time, in many people's eyes, the epitome of the very successful novelist and there have been many iterations of this line in the years since, with JK Rowling and Dan Brown, among others, replacing Forsyth, but the assumption that what every writer wants is fame and mega-sales is a constant. I dare say the same kind of comment has been heard by every neophyte entrepreneur, singer, actor, artist, or whatever, with the same assumption that what the person really want is vast money and adoration and the thing they are doing is simply a vehicle to that end. Perhaps for some of them that was their real desire (mine is to be shortlisted for the Booker) but any suggestion that the desire for universal adoration is either a new thing or necessarily a bad thing is wide of the mark.

I was distinguishing between games that are played within a virtual environment made by the designer of the game, and games where the creation of a functioning and successful society/civilisation/economy/whatever is the point of the game. The latter requires a lot more than being good with levers.

Indeed. There are a lot of similarities. There are also a lot of similarities with the skills need to create virtual worlds.

There are a few reasons to question your good faith. First, you start a thread with the leading question, Do youtubers contribute positively to railway modelling? Then it becomes apparent that your experience of YouTube (and other social media channels) is limited. Then you state Yes, I would rather youtube ceased to exist. Then you start describing YouTubers as 'choobers' which does suggest some degree of contempt. It feels as though you posed the question on the assumption that most people would confirm your prejudice against YouTube rather than as a genuine inquiry into its value for the model railway hobby.