Artless Bodger

J195, there's a lot of interesting and useful detail in the backdrop to this photo; the mixed building materials in the same building, street lamp (electric or gas, that box on the post - anyone know?) behind the boundary wall, shrubbery along the cutting side and the signal with subsidiary arm tucked into the bank above the retaining wall, super. And J1609, took me a while to detect the culvert, hiding among the trees, it's great your Dad thought to catch such scenes, the minor details that contribute to the whole.

J3119, the bridge at Walberswick - this was originially a swing bridge iirc, and was blown up in the war as it was in an area vulnerable to invasion.

Maybe because the patron saint of miners is St Barbara? (Also patron saint of engineers in the original sense of military engineers).

Would a diesel hybrid be allowed through the long tunnels of HS2? I understood that a proposal to use hybrids on HS1 to provide St Pancras to Hastings via Ashford services was a no-go as diesel fuel was prohibited through the Thames and London tunnels?

That looks good, what paint did you use please? I'd like to try something similar on my new OO layout (currently thinking of using double sided tape and dyed sawdust / fine ballast as I did with N gauge nearly 40 years ago). Your crane - Dinky? I have had a 6 wheel lorry mounted Coles crane by Dinky since I was about 5 (was always mad on cranes), bought for me at the end of a week's holiday in Broadstairs from a shop near the beach. M&D thought I had been pointing to a much smaller and cheaper model as we passed each day and promised I could have it at the end of the holiday. They did buy the expensive one after all, it must have been a great strain on their finances I later realised. You never think about the sacrifices your parents make when you are young.

41611 seems to have a very shapely, Maunsell inspired, chimney - off a D1 perhaps? I like your approach to ballast.

One for the 'when the real thing looks like a model' thread - the scenery on the left looks contrived, to hide the fiddle yard behind the industrial sidings on the viewing side. A wonderful prototype for anything photo! Did the expanding quarry remove an exisiting hill continuing to the right of the main line, or were the lines built by competing companies. I'm afraid this is an area of England I don't know much about, nor its railway history.

There's been a few million years of erosion since the Cretaceous to thank for that.

Nice photo C5034, the train is crossing the Luton Arches. 2EPB in the lead as you say, the second unit looks like a 2HAP - you can see the water pipes along the roof to the toilet tanks.

Two sets of plates, lower ones are under the road deck forming the main load bearing structure, the upper ones form the road parapets but also contribute to the strength of the girders?

Interesting that the use of the cantrail stripes was a UIC invention. I had always - erroneously - thought that in the UK it was a development from the GER 'jazz' stock colours. I had read somewhere years ago that at the beginning of the blackout in ww2 the Southern painted some 1st class doors on suburban EMUs yellow, it was not perpetuated when all suburban EMUs were made 2nd class only. I'm aware that from early times many European railway administrations painted carriages different colours according to class, leading to some odd half and half schemes for e.g. KPEV composites. Post war DB painted 1sts blue, 2nds green and restaurant cars red (as in the old Mitropa colour), leading to vehicles with catering and 2nd class seating being 1/2 red, 1/2 green. When was the UIC scheme introduced? Presumably those with red / green colourblindness would not have benefitted from some combinations?

Agreed, I confess to looking at pictures more readily than reading text!

OT as it is earlier than the period in question, but intrigued by this question I found that for a few years in the 1880s the PS Carrier "floating railway", originally built for the Tay crossing was used to convey wagons from Langstone Harbour to St Helens wharf. Some fish traffic was still carried in the Southern Railway period as A. B. MacLeod had several LBSCR 10T vans lettered for fish traffic, previously fish had been carried in the luggage compartments of passenger carriages, leading to complaints from passengers of their luggage smelling of fish. (Rails in the Isle of Wight, P.C. Allen and A. B. MacLeod).

J2804, I was puzzled by the odd looking car on the right, strange back end, then realised it is pulling a trailer! The snow scenes made me want to turn my collar up! They've caught the atmosphere well.

I have looked again at Paul's web page, he does state the slope sided wagons were for coal not ore. I missed that at first viewing so between you and him I've learned something new, thanks. Also found that Bachmann did a model of this wagon type (as well as the more common side door ones). This thread of Dave's, and the comments thereon, are proving to be a mine of information.

They look like the Charles Roberts slope sided ones made for the MoS in the war, Paul Bartlett has photos on his website: https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/bscotippler

C1902 - I wondered about the apparently different placing of the pantographs on the first and second units, but find on further investigation that the first unit was a 2 car, expanded to 4, so the pan would have to be on a driving car, not an intermediate one. Thanks for the photos, I've learned something new from this.

It is the only one I know that would be supplied via London, but am ready to be corrected. Here's the empties passing New Hythe sometime around 1984/5. The loco number appears to be 56057. And an earlier one with two x 33s. Sorry, poor quality, taken with an instamatic.

Would that be the train from Allington? I've checked the Flickr page but no details. The Allington trains were usually 56 hauled in 1985, the last time I saw them, previously double headed 33s.

APM - Aylesford Paper Mills at New Hythe, part then of Reeds. We used chlorine for water treatment, the building you see the end of the roof is the Medway pump house, water was drawn off the river, pumped up, screened then flowed by gravity to the powerhouse turbine condensers, some of the return flow was directed into the 'ballast pit' reservoir which you could see from the passing train. Liquid chlorine was drawn off the siphon pipe in the tank wagon, mixed with water and dosed into the condenser feed, and process water feeds to kill off any microorganisms that might cause fouling of the pipes etc. We used about 1 ton a day in summer, 1/2 ton a day in winter when the microorganism level was lower.

The real thing in use. The drawing of the tank wagon in our technical dept at APM (supplied when our siding was relaid to accomodate the bogie tanks replacing the 4 wheel ones) was lettered for Murgatroyds. This is the last one on site about to be returned, BR stopped wagon load services on the North Kent line soon after, c. 1983/4. Hope this is of interest.

At one of the Wembley exhibitions there was a continuously moving train / tram driven by an Archimedean screw between the rails, https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/the-never-stop-railway/

The wagon looks interesting - highfit? There were some fitted with a roller shutter roof - is this one? There seems to be a frame on top of the side. I see it is shock wagon too.

Make that move permanent, really level the country up. Save the HoP refurb money, sell it off to developers like Battersea Power Station was, or demolish it as a symbol of a discredited colonial / imperial past? With rising sea levels the HoP will be inundated within a few decades if not sooner.

A bit about the background, real and imaginary, to the layout. Our family walks on sunday afternoons encompassed much of the district surrounding Maidstone, favourites were to catch a trolley bus to Loose, walk down the valley to Tovil and then home. To me the Loose valley would have been perfect if it had a railway line, not knowing then that one had been projected in the past. Mote Park was near our house and a great playground as kids, Whatman's Turkey Mill was alongside the river Len as it exited the park and had a short siding off the up line approaching Maidstone East. Venturing beyond the park further up the Len valley to Spot Lane where there were quarries, and I later discovered once a small paper mill. There were sandpits and fullers earth pits nearer to Leeds, and Grant's cherry brandy distillery in Maidstone had orchards out near Lenham where the river Len rises. Walks along the Medway to Allington Lock and back through Little Switzerland in those days revealed more ragstone quarries, some with remnants of narrow gauge tramways leading to the river (all under housing now), and there were large sandpits around Aylesford, also with NG lines to riverside wharves. From all this I have plenty of inspiration for an independant railway, built to transport stone and sand to a river wharf, inward coal, rags and woodpulp traffic to industries and some local fruit, hops and timber traffic. The layout represents (loosely) the riverside wharf on the Medway in Maidstone, at the mouth of the Len. It occupies a space which in real life was Palace Gardens, sandwiched between the Archbishop's Palace and Maidstone bridge. There was a wharf and warehouse here - Bridge Wharf. I'm imagining that the track extends off scene under the approach to the bridge to access Town Wharf, the electricity works and breweries (and maybe a mainline connection via Springfield Mill and the LCDR). Going the other way to the fiffle yard the line would cross Mill Street, run along the mill pond beside the tanyard, later Rootes motor works, crosses Lower Stone street and passes the Lower Brewery (Isherwoods) and Len Cabinet works, Padsole Mill (paper), B.L. Wood meat cannery, Primrose and Len dairy, Whatman's Turkey paper mill, Spot Lane mill and quarries then out to sand pits near Leeds etc. There are some obvious problems with this imagined route, not least how to cross Mote Park, developed around 1800 by 3rd Baron Romney, Charles Marsham, sold in 1895 to 1st Viscount Bearsted, Marcus Samuel (founder of Royal Dutch Shell), and in 1929 to Maidstone Corporation. But in imagination anything is possible...... The flights of fantasy go much further but are not relevant here, but could be indulged with more space, time and money. The planned NG element is really inspired by systems around the Medway valley, at Tovil, Allington and Aylesford. It is a stand alone system bringing sand to the river quay. There - enough blether.