John-Miles

Steel works coke is a very different product to coke for domestic use. Steel works coke has to be strong enough to maintain its integrity in a furnace when it has other things tipped on top of it. Domestic coke is much softer. The coal used is different to that for domestic coke. When I was a student, I had a summer job on the Avenue Coking plant just south of Chesterfield, The coke they produced was fist sized and before it was weighed for loading it was always soaked in water, presumably to increase its weight - this was a different process to quenching when they tip the coke out of the oven. Working eight hours a day on a coking plant gives you a certain aroma which no amount of bathing gets rid of. At the same time I had friend who had a job in a chip shop. The aromatic combination when we went out for a drink had to be experienced to be appreciated.

I use real ash from a railway. If you walk old railways you generally find if you dig through the surface, which tends to be grass, the old ash ballast is there. It needs sieving of course. There is sometimes a problem with the result containing too much white material but I tend to live with that in the knowledge that it's a bit of real railway. So my model of Penwllt / Craig y Nos is ballasted with ballast from Penwyllt - which pleases me.

The attached is a WTT for Madam Patti's third wedding to Baron Cederstrom, How posh is that. I doubt many other people had a special for their wedding. Mine was a registry office job in Solihull. As you can see she departed from Penwyllt after the wedding in an 8 coach train - for 2 people and their servants.

Stephen I am impressed. Ian Howard (yet another person who can identify a Midland Carriage at 300 paces on a foggy, dark night) said there was no way he could reliably say what kind of carriage it was.

There has been a lot of speculation over the years about this train. As suggested above, the most likely explanation is that this is the through GWR Brecon - Paddington service. As to Sandy's (aka Penlan) suggestion about Madam Patti. Her travels are very interesting, in fact she is very interesting. She earned up to £3000 per night in Victorian times - for those who are starting to speculate, she was a soprano. She insisted in being paid in gold before she would perform and she had a pet parrot which she had trained to say "give us the money". Well worth looking up on Wiki. Madam Patti only travelled in style and a 6 wheel carriage would not meet her needs. The GWR saloon at Bodmin was frequently used for her travels, it was originally built for the Prince of Wales but she also used it. When she travelled on the Midland, she was provided with one of their carriages. See attached photo of her at Swansea. Images of her and trains are rare so if anybody has any I would be very interested. The one exception to the above statement about the Midland is when she married Baron Cederstrom in Brecon and then it was a GWR carriage so far as I can ascertain. Sorry if the above is a bit incoherent but I have been watching Dagenham and Redbridge v Chesterfield on the Internet and I needed something to calm my nerves - it was a 2-2 draw despite the best efforts of the referee.

Horses were very important to the railways. Almost all railways owned substantially more horses than locomotives and they were looked after. Have a trawl through the MRSoc Study Centre catalogue and you will find quite a few items from the company's vet department. If a man was killed you could get another one for free. Horses cost money.

I think this gives a wrong impression. I have looked at the Midland's minutes for negotiations between them and the B&M and the latter were no push over. They managed to obtain decents amounts of cash from the Midland without the histrionics of Watkin when he was in charge of the N&B. My impression was that the B&M was canny and realised that they made good money out of their links with the Midland. Back to the main topic of this thread - the loco looks lovely. I can't wait to see it painted.

Just to be really pendantic (I used to be an academic so I did this for a living), before 1923, Brecon shed was Brecon and Merthyr and Cambrian although the Midland rented space in the Cambrian shed. Brecon is interesting, although the Midland didn't own a yard of track at Brecon, for a long time it was the centre of their South Wales operation. I once saw an allocation of shunting time at Brecon. It was split between the 4 companies who used the station and the Midland had the largest share which suggests they were moving more traffic through there than the other companies.

You don't say what gauge you are going to use. I built one of these to EM. It runs beautifully on straight track but the wheels foul the outside frames on curves. You can use insulation tape to stop them shorting out but there is still a severe lack of space to allow for a bit of sideplay. I guess it will be ok in 00. Also personally I would use Markits rather than Gibson wheels. Their outside cranks are more substantial.

Trecwn. It's a former naval store for armaments. It is mostly underground and the tracks you saw are narrow gauge to take things in and out fo the store. IIRC the store is connected to the main line by a stub of the former North Pembrokeshire railway which ran through Maenclochog and was an alternative route to the present line from Clarbeston Road to Fishguard.

The simple answer is yes. You can optimise for anything; it gets more complicated when you try to optimise for several things at the same time and there have to be compromises. Rather than thinking of optimal solutions, it's better to think and talk about good solutions.

Sorry but most of the maths on optimsation dates from WW2 onwards when Operations Research was started for managing things like convoys. It really took off from the 60s onwards when we had computers and more recently there have been advances such as Stochastic Search Algorithms (not to be confused with algorithms used for School grades which didn't deserve the bad press they got - blame the user not the algorithm).

I remember travelling from Penrith to Keswick in the front of a DMU when it was possible to have a driver's eye view. It twisted and turned so much it almost followed field boundaries but what a brilliant railway. The word optimal is hugely misused like many other words such as unique (e.g. almost unique). For something to be "optimal" would require a definition. Optimal with regard to what - cost, environmental impact, length etc, etc. There is no way that Victorian engineers could ever have achieved anything like an optimal route to any criterion. The maths didn't exist and you need a computer to do the number crunching.

There are some quite cheap chassis assembly jigs which consist of dummy axles onto which you put the coupling rods so you get the hornblocks in the right place. You will need and Engineer's square to check you have things at right angle. It's also useful to have two or three lengths of eighth rod which you can put into the chassis axle bearings and it gives a good indication if things are square and parallel. You can check by measuring between the rods with callipers. This is the cheap way. The expensive way is to but a chassis assembly kit from someone like Eileen's Emporium or Hobby Holidays. I have never used on of these but people say they give good results. The cost is roughly £200.

I grew up in Chesterfield. If anybody said they came from Grassmoor, you ran away from them as fast as you could.

GWR Kruger?

Midland 2P and 3F. Also I would like to suggest fewer Manors should have been preserved. I get fed up of going to preserved railways and their main offering is a Manor. It's almost as if nothing else ever existed and the lack of variety is boring. (I know I am well out of sync with mainstream opinion but that's the price of being cranky).

The reason for sending the wagon to Gurnos is of course anthracite which, unlike other UK coal is almost completely free of arsenic and therefore much used by the food and drink industry. Nearholmer suggests above that this would have gone to Gurnos colliery. It might have, but Gurnos was a yard on the Swansea Vale serving a large number of anthracite collieries and the wagon could have picked up coal from any of them. I presume the wagon would have been routed to Norwich via Hereford, Birmingham, Leicester, Saxby and the M&GN so there is an excuse to run Colman's wagons for quite a lot of model railways.

IIRC Southwell engines were supplied by Nottingham. I think there is an article in Midland Record about them.

I have just read the article in Railway Modeller on the 0-4-4T. It looks absolutely beautiful but I don't think the chimney is correct. I am talking about the Johnson chimney and to my eye it tapers in the wrong direction. Johnson chimneys gently taper outwards from a place just below the rim. According to the images in RM, the chimney on the model has a slight reverse taper. It's a shame because Bachman have done a wonderful job otherwise.

The reports say Cross Country not using the "Old Road" via Barrow Hill and Eckington. Is this because of lack of route knowledge or train paths? Sorry I typed the above based on the original post on the BBC news site which said Cross Country were terminating at Derby and Leeds or York. Other operators were bussing people from Chesterfield to Sheffield.

So I have now dug out my original source of information which is Gough J., 1989, The Midland Railway: A Chronology, Railway & Canal Historical Society. He states that the agreement with the Worcester and Hereford Railway was "Between Worcester and Shelwick Junction and between Barr's Court Junction and Barton station the Midland Railway possessed running powers for all classes of traffic - also as a user of the W&H it possessed running powers over the S&H from Shelwick. Gough is well regarded by Midland historians and in my experience is accurate although as a secondary source not infallible but this also applies to McDemott. What he is quoting here is so far as I am aware the original agreement which was later amended so that the running powers were for goods only.

If this is correct why would the GWR do the Midland a favour in allowing them to run passenger trains from Worcester to Hereford when they blocked the Midland's trains from the HH&B (despite rulings from the Court of Chancery that their actions were unlawful).

My understanding of this is that originally the Midland had full running powers between Worcester and Hereford but there was then a long running dispute with the GWR over access to Barton station for Midland trains from the HH&B. This was resolved by the Court of Chancery and then the Midland and GWR with LNWR entered into further negotiations about the Midland having access to Barrs Court because all other passenger services used this station. As a part of this agreement the Midland gave up their passenger running powers from Worcester. It was no great loss for them because their passenger trains between Worcester and Hereford were replaced by a single carriage which the GWR worked so presumably the number of passengers were low. Interestingly the Midland advertised connections from Swansea to places as far away as Edinburgh using this service.

There was a short tunnel (Broomhill) between Chesterfield and Sheffield (near Whittington) which was opened out probably in the 1970s. It's a busy main line and I don't recall any major problems - by the way, that's another Derbyshire tunnel.