colin smith

1 hour ago, AY Mod said:

Biggest load of guff I've heard all day.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av-embeds/64758467/vpid/p0f554lc

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?

21 hours ago, Butler Henderson said:

Earlier in the program - Oh dear, elderly visitor nabs NRM boss and whittles on about seeing 9Fs on Immingham fish trains. NRM man smiles gently and decides not to point the difference between a Britannia and a 9F.

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.

2 hours ago, Phil Bullock said:

but it’s worth remembering that the Zulus were attacking Roukes Drift and had they prevailed the outcome would have been the same as Isandwalha…. 

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.

1 hour ago, Oldddudders said:

But war is not something taken out of the cupboard, plugged in and switched on. Every conflict has a history of someone's dissatisfaction with the actions of someone else, until that boils over into military intervention. You will need to reprogram humanity to overcome that tendancy. 

Indeed. And the reprogramming starts with culture and education.

23 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

So the progress of Hitler and his ghastly ideas wasn't justification for taking him on?

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.    

9 minutes ago, ChrisN said:

 

Colin,

What a brilliant idea.  Narrow gauge is easier, but is also all kits, (for the Talyllyn anyway, but, yay, there are R-T-R chassis for the locos.  (Are you a member of the 009 Society?)  I once had a good look at redoing a Dean Goods into a Jones Goods, the Cambrian one not the Scottish one, and it is fairly doable.  I did not do it once I twigged that they are about 8 years after my time period.

 

I have been trying to build coaches through various techniques and still have lots to do.  I have lots of wagon kits to do as well.  All this has stopped as I have been told rather pointedly that I have enough coaches and my grandchildren would appreciate my layout more if there was some scenery.  Locos were/ are going to happen when everything else is done as they seem the most difficult.

 

If you start a layout, put it in 'The Railways of Wales', as you will attract the few of us that model Welsh Pre-Grouping.  Mention GWR, or build a GWR coach and GWR fans will turn up as well.  Failing that put it in Pre-Grouping.

 

My motive power, is all the wrong sort but it will do until I eventually make my own. 

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. 

25 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Then I think you're probably stumped. One approach might be to make do with running stock from a later period - isn't the Bachmann Dukedog spot on for the Cambrian Coast line? Plus the various Dean Goods?

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.  

24 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

A significant part of the appeal of pre-grouping modelling is that it is modelling. 

 

That said, I'm not averse to making use of an appropriate piece of RTR if it appears - but it's a luxury rather than a necessity.

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.

 

43 minutes ago, Gilbert said:

This is from another topic on RMweb...compression at its best IMHO..

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.

Just now, AY Mod said:

 

Of course it goes on, I'm not ignorant of that, but it's not something I would be proud of doing or telling people. I watched it, legitimately, when it was on bona fide streaming services but it didn't cost me a penny, just a few minutes over the previous few months.

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. 

1 hour ago, Ruffnut Thorston said:

Its not as if the same content isn’t available from unofficial sources, but on the internet.

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

17 minutes ago, HonestTom said:

don't we all strive for a form of perfection in what we do? 

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.

Quote

Perhaps we aim to produce something that pleases us or perhaps we produce something for public consumption.

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.

On 15/12/2021 at 13:04, rapidoandy said:

The LMS created the shape of Lion as we know it today during its overhaul at Crewe works.

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

6 minutes ago, 33C said:

I like a laugh as much as the next man, (apart from Capt. Peters, his wife, ...and some of her friends.) but in reality, life's no laughing matter until you have James May's kind of money....

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. 

1 hour ago, HonestTom said:

I don't know what Minecraft has to do with model railways.

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.

2 hours ago, westernviscount said:

 

I might suggest the desire for universal adoration is apparent on the other side of the argument.

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.

5 hours ago, rockershovel said:

Agreed, but not quite my point, which was that the "gamers" were good with the levers but tended to display a distinct lack or real-world skills (like mechanical ability, time management and the simple robustness to get out on a freezing  wet ROV hangar at 3am to diagnose and fix a leaky cable gland). 

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.

3 hours ago, Jol Wilkinson said:

 

Just like designing an etched kit or creating a period model of railway, then.

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

53 minutes ago, westernviscount said:

 

No, and I am sorry to read that. 

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.