DK123GWR

24 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Red Engines (but not the Double Red 'Kings-) were definitely permitted via Devizes at September 1938.  The wording of the authority. almost suggests that it wasn't new but might have been amernded from an older authority for 'Heavy Engines' over the route.  

 

Interestingly the 1927 Passenger Train Loads Book (the first the GWR issued) shows loads for both 'Stars/Castles ' and 'Saints' between Patney & Chirton and Holt Jcn.  This booklet does not contain any sort of note indicating that if a load was included that did not necessarily mean that the relevant class of engine might not be permitted over the route clearly implying that loads were only issued for authorised classes of engine

The September 1931 Service Time Table, on the other hand, says:

"HEAVY ENGINES BETWEEN PATNEY AND HOLT JUNCTION VIA DEVIZES.

The following types of engine are prohibited from running over the section named:-"

And then lists: Saints, Stars, Castles, Halls, Kings, 83xx, Cities, Counties, Badmintons (etc.), 47xx, County Tanks, 31xx, 2-8-0 tank engines, 56xx, 66xx, 1101 class, and absorbed Red engines of the 0-6-0T and 0-6-2T classes.

The sole exception is for Halls, Castles, and 47xx locos, which can run onto the line with freight trains at Patney to allow other trains to pass.

It lists loads for partly fitted and accelerated goods trains only for the category including the 43xx and 4001-4045 (all other routes have loads for engines up to 47xx and Castles).

A September 1938 upgrade seems reasonable though, even if the Manors didn't leave as soon as Red engines were permitted. Between February and April 1939, four new Granges were allocated to OOC and Westbury, at around the same time the four Manors seem to have left. Could it have been a case of keeping the Manors on until there was something suitable to replace them?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It has been suggested that I revisit Priddle and Hyde by a modeller who does recall Manors being mentioned, giving a very similar list to the ones I had inferred might have worked on the line based on shed allocations.

12 hours ago, Siberian Snooper said:

There was an article or two in the much missed GWJ on Devizes, with a good selection of photos and other information. I don't have ready access to my collection to give chapter and verse on what was in the article.

 

 

According to the index, three articles by Bill Crosbie-Hill on his wartime experiences. Probably worth looking at anyway, but I'm not sure they'll answer my question about the larger 1930s passenger trains unless something's mentioned in passing.

I have read the main book on this branch, Priddle and Hyde's 'GWR to Devizes', as well as a smaller volume by Nigel Bray. The line was upgraded to Red RA, as I understand it, in 1939 when a bridge was strengthened. There are many photos in the books on the line taken from this point onwards, showing Halls and Castles on the long-distance passenger services (London/Reading to Trowbridge/Bristol). What would these have been hauled by prior to the upgrade? There are no photos from this period.

I have observed in J.W.P. Rowledge (and this website, which duplicates much of the relevant information) that when built in January 1938 - January 1939 (before the upgrade), 7802 and 7808 were allocated to OOC, and 7809 and 7814 to Westbury. By nationalisation (the next data point for both sources) all had moved away, to Aberystwyth, Oswestry, and Bristol Bath Road (joining two Manors already in Bristol). The OOC locos both moved away in April-May 1939. This site suggests that it's not clear what OOC would need a Manor for, and I am inclined to agree - except that maybe, as the largest locos permitted, they would have been useful on the Devizes trains worked by Castles from just a few months later. I am not sure which month the bridge was upgraded, but by this point the threat of war (stated in Priddle and Hyde as the reason for the upgrade) would surely have been clear. On this basis, it would seem plausible that they had a brief stint on trains via Devizes, but that is the strongest claim I can make. Can anyone contribute evidence for or against this hypothesis?

Furthermore, what would have been used before the Manors? (Or before the Red engines, if the Manors at these sheds were used for something else?) Again, there are no photos, or even textual references, that I have been able to find. The obvious answer would seem to be a 43xx - also a group D engine with Blue RA, and it seems many were allocated at different times to sheds where they might have been used on these trains, including Reading, OOC, and Westbury (though scanning the 1931 timetable, it appears more likely that the locos came from Reading/OOC than Bristol/Westbury.

Any thoughts (including reasoned guesswork) would be much appreciated.

The tooling has, according to Dapol, already deteriorated considerably, causing a reduction in the quality of the kits. Surely the most likely cause of the range being discontinued in that context is that they reach the point where the tooling is barely useable. What would then be the point in anyone else buying it?

2 hours ago, ISW said:

Has this reduced the 'pulling' power of the loco?

 

I've found that with BEMF 'on', if you put your finger infront of the loco you can feel it increase the power. With BEMF 'off', a finger just stops the loco.

 

Ian

I haven't performed that specific test, but yes, I think so. Previously the loco was moving off at speed step 1 (albeit eratically) whereas afterwards (and before I altered the start voltage) it was only doing so at about step 5. I think that's what you'd expect to happen. As I understand it, the BEMF is a proxy for the motor's speed, and the chip is meant to use the reading to determine whether the motor is running faster or slower than expected at a given speed step, then change the voltage to compensate. In this case, the motor was running slower than expected, so the voltage was increased to speed it up. However, for reasons that I don't understand (and, since it's working OK without BEMF, don't need to) it must have been severely overcompensating at times, leading to the sudden acceleration.

I have purchased a Hornby Star class on ebay, which was DCC fitted. CV8 reads 151 and CV7 reads 89, I believe indicating that this is some sort of LokPilot. At very low speed steps it is a jerky runner. At around speed step 8 it can suddenly jump up to a very high speed. Often it is just brief wheelslip, but sometimes it races off and has to be brought to a stop. CV29 is set to 34, so analogue running should be disabled. I haven't yet had the chance to test on DC, but will report back when I can. Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this sort of behaviour?

EDIT: The jerkiness at low speeds appears to be the same issue, but with more frequent and shorter duration periods of 'running away' - several per rotation - on a loco which is (apart from that major issue) running correctly.

EDIT: I turned off BEMF by setting CV49 = 0. This has solved the running away issue, although the loco probably needs a few further tweaks it is now usable.

10 hours ago, The Johnster said:

El(on) Weirdo reckons AI will replace all human labour, and I can't off-hand think of any job that couldn't be done by autonomous intelligent bots, some of them better.  Whether all of them should be done by bots is another question.

 

It would need a ground-up overhaul of how we reward ourselves for production of food, neccessities, or luxuries, and what would be our means of exchange; actually, if a means of exchange would be needed at all!  Worst case scenario, we are surplus to requirements and the bots destroy us, then shut themselves down as they hit the resulting existential crisis (with us surplus, they are pointless, see Bomb 7).  Best case scenario, we all live lives of safety, comfort, and freedom from poverty, and have to indulge in hobbies to keep our minds occupied, a dream world of lotus eaters with no purpose, point, or discipline.  The Squeeze says I'm doing this already. 

 

The reality, if go get' im Muskie is right, will probably be neither of those scenarios, but there may well be elements of both in the final result.  Our economic, political, cultural, and religious systems will be surplus to requirements, the answer to the  question 'who will pay for it all' will be 'nobody/the bots'.  The bots will obey Asimov's laws of robotics, and serve us, but will develop their own systems of economics, politics, culture, and even religion if they want to; none of our business!  They'll probably develop bots to do the work for them...

 

None of our ways of life, making a life, making a living, producing comestibles and wealth, will make sense any more and they won't work; we'll have to rethink the lot, and it'll probably be too much for us.  Don't worry, the bots'll sort it out for us...

 

It'll effectively be the replicator economy from Star Trek, everything and everything you want without payment or effort.  Human activity in Trek is devoted to exploration, warfare, and power struggle, the traditional preserve of the nobility but open to all.  Perhaps that's it, the future of humanity boldly going where no hooman eye has set foot, or perhaps it's something we haven't thought of yet.

 

It may be that the bots have arrived  at the right time.  Go get 'im is a messiah of techno-capitalist idealism, and if anything is certainly doomed irrevocably in the near future, the lifetime of our children, it is competitive entrerprenuerial capitalism; the planet cannot sustain it.  We need something we haven't thought of yet to re-organise social and power structures, not to mention the fair and equable distribution of wealth and property, that'll ensure our future comfort and physical & spiritual/psychological well-being, and it will be no good looking to our past for ideas, none of them have ever worked and more than one of them made things much worse.  Not sure I'd want to trust Sunak and very sure I don't want to trust go get 'im Muskie with any of that, sounds like a job for AI to me...

 

But not just yet.  AI is developing fast, but it isn't yet developmentally self-propagating and improving.  It's coming, though, and there's nothing we can do about it but rely on Asimov's laws.  And if it all sounds a bit utopian, just consider that the bot's will arrange things on the basis of the greatest good for the greatest number (back to Trek, 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one') which leaves minorities up the creek without a canoe, never mind a paddle.  It's gonna be hard!!!

A generous Unconditional Basic Income. There can be no other sane method of allocating resources in a society where there is so little demand for wage labour. Of course, the capitalists who control the AI firms (and, most crucially, computer servers) will try to keep hold of their products and use them for profit. I don't think that will be sustainable. In a passage that you echo above, Karl Marx once wrote:

Quote

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

It is hard to see how this vision could practically have been acheived in Marx's day, and even in the present I think it would be unacheivable. But supposing we did reach the stage where food and communications technology could be produced and managed by machines, and we had a way of supplying enough energy to run them (I have no idea how far away that is - but I would say at least 50-100 years when you appreciate all of the capital investment needed) it is hard to see how politicians and the public could resist the freedom on offer.

One might hope that when people no longer have to worry about survival, they become nicer and more coopertative, and culture will become more developed. If people no longer have to have full time jobs, they will do what they enjoy. This will almost certainly mean more people will get involved in all forms of art - literature, theatre, model railways*, etc. More people will also be able to appreciate what others have produced. It is likely that many will return to education, studying what interests them, and that many others will be happy to pass on what they know. People could take part in projects to improve their local community - maintaining flowerbeds, building children's play areas, volunteering at heritage railways, etc. I don't see any reason that people would be left without purpose more so than in present day society, where many are trapped in jobs they hate.

*See, we are on topic!

4 hours ago, The White Rabbit said:

Which sites/AI versions would people recommend for artwork? AI images are something I've dabbled in this month but with disappointing results so far, whether we're talking trains, landscapes, ships or 'sillies'. Mainly as the systems have been rather selective as to which of my written instructions it's taken any notice of. I appreciate I'm potentially at the bottom of a learning curve and it's still a developing technology anyway but I have seen other images posted which I've thought have been good. 

Bing image creator.

I also tried to find out what it would look like if giant cats terrorised real railways, just as the do models. I give you: 'Paddington Station being attacked by a giant evil kitten named Terrence.'

Here he is causing carnage at King's Cross:

And here he is just after you've finished weathering your layout's centrepiece.

Bing doesn't seem to know what Dawlish looks like, but I felt this image was worthy of inclusion because of the 47-style HST, which might make an interesting model for someone.

GWR Castle:

I'm actually quite impressed by some of these. Obviously none are perfect, but you could take a good guess at what they're supposed to be.

37 minutes ago, CameronL said:

Wot? Not one watch per time zone?

If you have analogue watches you can use the same one (flipped) for India and UK winter/European summer.

30 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

I have a clock that is a pain to turn back because it can only be adjusted forwards that I leave it on GMT all year.

My old watch could only be adjusted forwards and didn't have a 12/24 hr button, so you had to press a button 49 times to set it back an hour (once each to enter and exit the time setting mode, and 47 times to cycle around the clocks). And if you accidentally went an hour too far, that's another 47 button presses.

8 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That depends. Are the philosophers debating the objective reality of external sensations?

I think so, but that might just be my subjective perception.

The Shopping Trolley Problem:

A runaway trolley is careering down a hill. You have an ethical dilemma. If you do nothing it will continue down the path and hit a group of five philosophers. Alternatively, you can place an object in the path of the trolley to deflect it into the canal.

On 13/10/2023 at 15:49, KeithMacdonald said:

visiting the Oasis Sports Centre - mistaking it for something to do with the Oasis band.

The band was named after it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasis_(band)#:~:text=Liam suggested that the band,in Swindon as a venue.

8 minutes ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

I haven't looked at what is actually planned, but surely they'll either put a station on the Willesden - Clapham Junction line or else provide a link to Willesden Junction. From what I understand, the Elizabeth Line is ill-equiped to cope with more passengers, so it's important that as many people as possible are siphoned off onto something else.

Payed for by whom? TfL are broke and spending more money on HS2 (or rail in general) doesn't seem to be in line with current government policy.

1 hour ago, Hacksworth_Sidings said:

Welp, first City arrived, and guess what dumb me did? That’s right, I broke the crank!

Going to try and glue it back on, unsure of how well this will work though, things were going so nicely too…

 

At least I figured out how NOT to assemble one of these.

 

Edit: Only just noticed there’s no quartering whatsoever! Cranks are offset by 180 degrees instead of 90, and the cranks on the right side are 90 degrees off from the counterweights! Is this a problem on my particular model, is it my building, or is this a problem on all the CoT kits?

I have found that when trying to build one in the past. The only running example I have seen had static connecting rods - perhaps for this reason?

7 hours ago, newbryford said:

 

Does anyone know a joke about a computer trying to pay in a car park?

 

That would kill three birds with one stone!

No, but I asked a computer for some:

Why did the computer go to therapy after trying to pay at the car park?

It had too many unresolved issues!

Why did the computer get a ticket at the car park?

It couldn't find its cache and ended up in a data traffic jam!

Why did the computer break up with the car park?

It felt the relationship was getting too "transactional"!

1 hour ago, JimC said:

Is that a general opinion? If the occasional what if of standard parts I post is unwanted then I'll go away.

Absolutely not! This work-in-progress wouldn't exist without your contributions to this thread:

Hornby Grange chassis, Bachmann Manor Boiler and running plate, 3D printed tanks, the rest Airfix 61xx. Some of the joins need smoothing out a bit more and the left cab steps need replacing before it gets painted.

37 minutes ago, BachelorBoy said:

But rail is only ever a natural monopoly in a trivial sense. In reality, railways have lots of competition.

 

If I want to go from London to Edinburgh I could walk, cycle, take a coach, drive my car, sail my yach, hire a taxi, or fly. Etc.

 

 

Water can be moved in tankers, but tankers aren't an appropriate subsitute for water mains. Walking is clearly not an appropriate substitute for inter-city rail travel in any case, and in many cases none of the options you have listed are. There is no way that another mode of transport could move large quantities of stone from the Mendips to London as efficiently as the railway does. There are markets that only railways can serve. In many cases, these markets are not large enough to justify the enourmous cost of building a new, competing, rail line to serve them. Even in those markets where a second line is viable, a third and a fourth will not be. Many of these rail routes are natural monopolies. Others are at best natural oligopolies. Even allowing for the fact that air travel is a close substitute in certain markets (e.g. London-Edinburgh passenger transport) this does not take us out of natural oligopoly territory. Planes and landing slots are very expensive, so the cost of entry into the market remains high even when you have the option of setting up an airline instead of building a railway. These markets require, at the least, heavy regulation of fares and service levels, if not government ownership.

I introduced natural monopoly as an example of a class of cases where government-run industries were more economically efficient than markets. Another point worth considering here is the complexity of the allocative problem. Economic efficiency is a bit of a vauge term and can be broken down into two distinct parts. One kind of economic efficiency is productive efficiency, how much stuff you can make from a certain amount of input. This probably has more to do with capital investment, worker training and motivation, and logistical optimisations than anything else. The other is allocative efficiency.

Allocative efficiency concerns allocating resources to particular people or industries in the 'best' way (it's impossible to say what this is without knowing more about individual preferences and societal values, but an uncontroversial example is that if I like apples and you like pears, giving me an apple and you a pear is more allocatively efficient than giving me a pear and you an apple). If a lot more people like pears than apples, then it is allocatively efficient to use resources in a way that allows us to grow more pears than apples. In some markets, the allocative problem is quite simple. It should be possible to estimate the demand for water based on good high-level data about population size, the economy, and the climate. This is a task government should be able to acomplish fairly easily. Now consider the food market, where people have diverse, constantly changing preferences. It would be nearly impossible for a government to work out what food to produce, and when, and where to send it, in order to satisfy people's preferences. Competetive markets are very good at solving complex allocative problems like this through the price mechanism. Predicting demand for rail is probably closer to predicting demand for water than planning food production, which means that one of the biggest (in my opinion the biggest) benefit of competetive markets wouldn't really apply to the rail industry, and certainly not to the same degree that it does in the food market.

I had already stated that there are other reasons that government involvement in economic activity might be appropriate. One of these is to encourage transactions with positive externalities, which are positive effects on third parties not involved in the transaction. It is well established that businesses benefit from 'clustering' - locating themselves among other similar firms. This often takes place in cities (and is part of the rationale for them). Clearly, not everybody who works in a city can live in the city centre (at least not in pleasant conditions). Therefore, to enable the clustering of firms in cities, you need people to be able to commute. If the government subsidises rail fares, then more people will be able to commute. If our assumption that businesses being able to cluster in cities leads to wider economic benefits is true, then enabling commuting will not just benefit the commuters, but all those who receive benefits from clustering. A similar argument can be made for cutting fares for any journey which enables benefits to people other than the passenger (essentially any journey other than a sightseeing trip fuelled by packed lunches).

Deciding how a particular industry should be run involves balancing multiple considerations. I discussed one in my previous post and have set out some more here. The point that I was trying to make before is that there are some industries where it is fairly clear that they ought to be run as government-owned monopolies (e.g. water). There are others where it is clear that some kind of market mechanism would be beneficial (such as the UK's food supply). It is true that rail is not a clear cut natural monopoly, as water is. But even the most competetive routes are natural oligopolies, which is scarcely better for passengers. And there are other reasons to think that the government should seek to reduce rail fares, since transport often facilitates economic activity and as a result has significant positive externalities. Furthermore, the allocative problem faced by the rail industry is less complex than in many other markets (it is clear, for example, that there will be more demand for travel between commuter towns an nearby cities at around the times people start and finish work, for seaside holiday towns in the summer, etc.). This weakens the case against government control. Overall, I believe it is clear from the above arguments that government should own at least the rail infrastructure, and if it does not operate the trains then it should ensure that those who do are acting in the public interest. It should also be willing to subsidise rail fares quite significantly. And I've only looked at arguments to appeal to the coldhearted economist. There are additional moral reasons that I think low fares are desireable, but as they will not find traction with those whose moral intuitions differ from mine I doubt it is worth adding them to this already long post.

2 hours ago, locoholic said:

Excellent article on the Spectator website today by Sean Thomas, detailing the "comprehensive" Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policies of HS2 - nice to know that they've got EDI all sewn up, although perhaps if they concentrated on building the railway, the costs might not have spiralled out of control so spectacularly.

I'm sure that would be the case, until they developed a reputation as a toxic work environment and found that people who aren't straight white men were often reluctant to work for them, pushing up the wage bill (and probably lowering the physical productivity of the workforce). And that's before any costs associated with fighting or settling cases brought by employees who've been discriminated against. Once you've factored in those sorts of costs, I would imagine that implementing strong EDI policies (which is a common business practice) works out quite a lot cheaper. And that's before addressing the questions around the desireability of a society that tosses aside anyone it doesn't need in order to turn a profit, which are beyond the scope of this thread.

1 minute ago, BachelorBoy said:

1) Sales of UK government bonds (borrowing from investors)

2) The Treasury

Assisted by the Bank of England who effectively printed money to purchase financial assets (mostly government bonds) second hand, which drives up the market price and (because economics*) pushes down the interest rate that the government has to pay on newly issued debt). This policy is now being unwound.

*Bond holders are payed a fixed amount, the coupon value, at pre-determined intervals. The coupon value does not change as the price does, so when second hand bond prices increase (e.g. because the central bank has artificially increased demand for them) the bond yield will fall. If the yield of second hand bonds falls, investors will be willing to accept a lower yield on newly-issued bonds. This reduces the interest rate that the government has to pay on new borrowing.

21 minutes ago, BachelorBoy said:

There is. But where does it lie? Water is essential for life, I get that. But so is food.

 

One approach (and certainly not the least sensible) is to look at various factors, including what the effects of competition are in a particular market. Water and electricity transmission are usually regarded as natural monopolies, since it would be hoplessly inefficient to duplicate all of the infrastructure in the way that a competetive market would (the duplication of railway routes by the LCDR and SER is widely ridiculed on here and likely played a part in the financial difficulties of those companies - imagine how silly it would be to do the same thing with water pipes). If a monopoly is the most efficient way to run an industry, it makes sense for the state to run it in the national interest. Rail may also be a natural monopoly, and it is certainly not possible to establish a perfectly competetive market for rail travel (see the LCDR/SER case). If this is true, passengers and the wider economy will suffer from a privately owned network (at least in terms of extortionate fares, and Railtrack showed us that they may pay an even greater price if infrastructure maintenance is profit-driven) so it makes sense to run it as a public service.

By contrast, there is an argument that in the food market, or road-based freight transport, people are better off in a competetive market. Here a strongly competetive market between could plausibly lead to greater choice and lower prices, and force firms to operate more efficiently than a government monopoly would. There will still be market failures, for various reasons, some of which the government will be able to correct.

A full analysis would obviously be much larger, and would depend upon the values of the society in question. Nevertheless I believe that the above is sufficient to show why water and rail might be differentiated from industries such as food and are (at least at first glance) good candidates for being run as a public service.

14 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

the politicians are firmly in election mode

It's also worth noting that the Tory party conference begins a week today. I can't find much recent data but Conservative members (170,000 or so people who are very unrepresentative of the UK population) have historically been opposed to HS2. It's possible that current leaks and rhetoric are playing to this audience, both because a row at the conference can make the PM look weak, and with one eye on leadership challenges that will likely come in the next couple of years if the Conservatives don't significantly improve their position in the polls by the next election.

Cancelling HS2 would be a way for Sunak (and probably Jeremy Hunt) to throw some red meat to the party membership without having to compete with the likes of Suella Braverman to have the most extreme views on 'culture wars' issues, and it's less likely to alienate other voters. It makes a lot of sense, in terms of furthering their personal ambitions, for the PM and Chancellor to suggest that they might cancel the project.

4 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

A quote from Rishi Sunak on the BBC site re the changes to net zero:

 

If that's what he believes why is he making all these short term decisions such as stripping back even the first stage of HS1 by delaying Euston, talking about dropping phase 2 plus kicking the can down the road for the Net Zero changes that businesses were planning towards and now see the goal posts moved which will favour those who have delayed investment rather than reward those who are shifting.

An excuse rather than a criticism?

3 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

You forgot the requests for the groan button.

I assume that's filed under unfunny replies.

Are meetings with Peco sales reps buy a-point-ment?