RLBH

Railway facilities turn out to be really difficult to destroy. Someone I know used to aim nuclear weapons for a living, and reckoned it took a ground burst from a high-yield nuclear weapon directly on a marshalling yard to be sure of taking it out of action. You'd certainly be running at reduced speeds in a weapon-affected area though. The EMP risk is massively overstated; it's a threat to unshielded equipment, but the shielding is fairly easy to provide (basically just a souped-up surge protector) if you're designing equipment to cope with it. Failing that, just turning things off and unplugging them does the same thing; anything not connected to transmission lines will probably be fine. Take those measures, and nuclear EMP isn't really something to worry about - you need to be so close to the weapon that the fact that the equipment has been melted, blasted into pieces, and is radioactive makes the circuits being blown a bit irrelevant. The reason it's getting a lot of attention is that civilian infrastructure usually isn't hardened against EMP, so would be vulnerable. Post-attack, the railway would probably spend a fair bit of time sending diesel locomotives out to drag in the electric locomotives that had either been directly killed by it, or stranded when the power grid went down. The effects on S&T could be quite significant as well, which would make controlling the network and safely operating trains a major challenge.

In other words it leaves Kings Cross an hour before The Highland Chieftain, but arrives at its destination about half an hour after it. So clearly Hogwarts is somewhere on the Far North lines about one and a half hours past Inverness.

We have one where I work to move ships to the right refit bay after being lifted out. It's not connected to the rail network though - not even our disused internal one. The inner rails (it has four) may be standard gauge, but I doubt it.

The usual way that this kind of TV programme does it is to have new teams in each season. If it's sufficiently popular, and the competitors are up for it, you may get a Christmas Special 'Champion of Champions' after a few years have passed and a decent number of series winners are available.

I can well imagine it - but you can buy a £80 bike to find out whether you enjoy it before committing to spending £500 to £1000 on a decent one.

And even then - how many people would like to participate in these hobbies/pastimes but feel that they are priced out of it? Cycling and football (to name two) are easy to get in to, because there are relatively inexpensive options. Which is, I suspect, one of the factors making cycling so popular for social climbers - you don't need to pay £1,000 for clubs and then pay course fees every time you play, you can cycle quite adequately on an £80 bike. That isn't so much the case, or isn't perceived to be the case, for model railways, along with golf, cars, sailing and much of the tech stuff.

He didn't get that far. He looked at the RRPs, almost had a heart attack, and decided that he'd pursue a cheaper hobby instead. I'd bet that a lot of people have had the same reaction. The highly-detailed models that are being produced are no doubt exactly what the established market wants, and they clearly have the means to pay the associated prices. For people like my colleague who are interested but not dedicated, they're quite offputting. A wagon or coach is, fundamentally, not all that different than any other injection-moulded plastic item of similar size, yet costs considerably more. A locomotive you expect to be more expensive, but passing through the £100 price point gives similar sticker shock to someone coming to the hobby fresh. Once they've been driven away by the idea that getting into model railways will cost them hundreds, they're unlikely to come back for some considerable time. The Hornby RailRoad range is actually at a good price point, and an acceptable level of detail for most potential modellers. £22.99 for a coach, £10.99 for a wagon, and £70-£110 for a locomotive (or £35 for an 0-4-0) makes it much more accessible. They just aren't as visible as they need to be, IMHO - the train set market is full of them, but additional rolling stock needs to be hunted out. It's no good that it's available in model shops, that's not where people who are casually interested will look. They'll be in Tesco, or Argos, or the likes - and they don't carry the rolling stock or locomotives that you need to turn a train set into a model railway.

Don't forget the perception of cost - a colleague of mine considered buying his son a train set, quickly found out that (new RTR) coaches ran to £40 each, and abandoned the idea without looking into cheaper ways of doing it. That's two people (father and son) lost to the hobby.

Ernemouth takes its name from the River Findhorn, often anglicised as 'erne' in local place names. It's not quite Lossiemouth, or Burghead, or Findhorn, but a combination of the three, so a name that evokes two of the three works quite well. In my head, the Gaelic name is 'An Broch', as it is for Burghead, and justifying a prominent headland overlooking the harbour.

My wife informs me that model railway exhibitions are positively genteel compared to craft shows. In the pursuit of the right type of bead or yarn, walking frames become offensive weapons.

Scaffolding need not be overly expensive - I have on hand at the moment a bill for some gutter repairs by my building's factors, which involved erecting and dismantling a three-storey scaffold tower. The contractor they use is notoriously expensive, but it still only runs to £350. Knowing how dangerous ladders are, I don't begrudge them a few extra quid to do the job safely. Granted it took six months for them to do it at all , and they may not have done it right, but those are other matters.

Indeed so - my wife and I are fairly enthusiastic board gamers, and there are some games out there that are brilliant in both sophistication and simplicity. The board gaming community gets as annoyed with people saying 'so do you like Monopoly' as railway modellers do with people who talk about train sets! Speaking as a youngish person - the main blockers to model railways are money and space. Not a lot can be done about space, though micro-layouts and smaller scales help when you don't have a convenient garage, shed or attic. Money is more of a seemingly-needless problem, and the cost issue seems to be one that doesn't go away. Paying well over £100 for some injection moulded plastic and an electric motor is a hard sell. Hornby's Railroad range is a brilliant idea on this front, but quite limited in its offerings.

This comes about because when you scale things down, the ratio between gravitational and inertial forces goes adrift. To compensate, you also have to scale time - which isn't impossible. The approach taken is - imagine that you model a grandfather clock with perfect fidelity in 1:76 scale, using the same materials as the prototype. Since this is a thought experiment, we can assume that your modelling skills are arbitrarily good. If the prototype clock's pendulum takes one second to make a full swing, the scaled pendulum will have a period of 1/sqrt(76) seconds - i.e. 114.7 milliseconds. This is then your scale second. You also have to scale down speed in a similar fashion, so that a 35mph prototype train travels at 4mph on the model, and so forth. If you speed up video taken of your model in this ratio, the behaviour of the model will be more realistic. The only problem is, for this to work you also have to scale down mass and inertia, which is not exactly straightforward. And with scaled down axle loads, you'd better scale down power too, otherwise you'll get wheel slip all over the place. Oh, and friction doesn't scale this way, make sure to compensate for that. There are ways to do all of this, and it can be done for scientific/engineering testing purposes. But for a model railway it's all a bit complicated and not very satisfactory.

That was, I think, the GCR's Robinson, on the strength of his seniority. This was also why he declined the post, feeling that he was too old to take it on as he intended to retire. He recommended Gresley for the job, and the rest is history. Raven was the next most senior CME of the LNER's components after Robinson. Had Gresley not benefited from that recommendation, Raven would probably have got the job. This could have been interesting as he was a big fan of electrification, with the S3 class apparently designed for secondary, non-electrified routes.

This is indeed spot on. However... Watch a number of such programmes and you realise that the 1.2 Scottish teams on average becomes precisely one, with no statistical variation. You would expect there to be occasions when there are none, and occasions when there are two. Come to that, look at the Walking Lost Railways programme - one Scottish, one Welsh and four English lines. I have no particular agenda in wishing to see the number change in one direction or the other, but it does seem interesting.

You're not wrong. I'd half expected the token team from north of Hadrian's Wall to be called the Flying Scotsmen.

Big - I'm envisaging a 7 foot diameter boiler as per the LNER U1. Anything larger and I wouldn't be confident that the boiler would stay in gauge. The tubes would need to be 21 to 22 feet long, and I'd prefer a 7 foot 6 inch boiler to shorten them if that can be kept in gauge. The smokebox would have to be proportionate in size too. The 60" drivers are there primarily to give the thing a decent turn of speed so it doesn't get in the way of other traffic more than necessary. There'd be no harm in something in the 54"-57" typical of heavy mineral locomotives if this wasn't a consideration, and would allow the cylinders and boiler to be reduced. The ability to build it out of 9F parts had also occurred to me. As far as the Ya-01 goes, I had thought that locomotive was a bit smaller! Definitely in the same class anyway. It occurs to me that the LNER U1 might not have been too shabby on this kind of work. A bit undersized, but it was basically two O4s with a common boiler, and I'm sure I've heard it had features that didn't really make sense as a dedicated banker....

Playing around with the mechanics of it all, I wind up with a 4-8-2+2-8-4 Garratt. Cylinders would have a 21" bore and 28" stroke, 60" driving wheels, and a 250psi boiler for a tractive effort of 87,465 lbf. An axle load of 21 tons, matched to that of a 56-ton bogie hopper, would give a factor of adhesion of 4.3, total weight of 265 tons and an overall length of about 118 feet; the grate would be something between 84 and 90 square feet, so mechanical firing would certainly be required. It comes out to a big beast, rather larger than the EAR 59 class and therefore the most powerful Garratt ever built. But, it would be able to handle a train of twenty-four 56-ton hoppers between Newport and Ebbw Vale for a 2,000 ton train, or eighteen between Tyne Dock and Consett.

Hi, I'm a 30-year-old engineer based in Glasgow. I've been lurking on RMWeb for a while, and finally created an account. I've been interested in railways as long as I can remember. My wife bought me a Hornby Flying Scotsman trainset for Christmas last year, little knowing what she'd unleash; it didn't take long for me to decide I wanted to have a properly scenic model railway - but a model railway all the same. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't operate trains it isn't a model railway but a really fancy diorama. My interests lie in diesel and electric haulage - steam doesn't do a lot for me aesthetically, though I find the engineering aspects fascinating - freight operations, and the railways of the Scottish Highlands in the 1960s-1980s before Sprinters came along and made it all a bit boring. Counterfactual history is also a bit of an interest of mine, and I'm liable to put in my two penn'orth on the Imaginary Locomotives thread. It's taken me most of the year of playing around with ideas to conclude that I can't really get a layout that would satisfy me in 00 in the space available to me. So, N gauge it shall have to be, and I may as well commit to DCC now rather than be faced with more expense to do it later. Space constraints also mean that I need a layout which can be stored away when not in use - so it will be based on four 1050mm x 450mm boards. My proposed layout, 'Ernemouth', will be a Moray Coast branch line terminus serving a small harbour based on Lossiemouth and Burghead (which, as it turns out, have very nearly the same size harbour basin) and a distillery. Once I get around to building the boards, that is. The whole lot will be a learning experience, that much is for sure! Robert