Jeremy Cumberland

Are they actually locked? @LNER4479, did you check?

So the Mk1s are there to provide retention tank toilets, it would seem.

There are no absolute requirements, but it isn't entirely irrelevent. GTR were fined £1 million under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 section 3(1) in 2019 when a passenger was killed by putting their head out of a window. This clause is a general duty of care by employers towards third parties. A statement by ORR in 2019 (https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/safety-first-droplight-windows-heritage-and-charter-trains) says: I don't think ORR has issued any specific guidance, and as you say, there is no specific legislative bar to opening windows, but if anyone is injured by sticking their head out of the window of a moving train, the operator can expect to be prosecuted.

That's a conventional relay. How would you use it with a solenoid point motor, CDU and pulse contact switch? The GM500 contains a dual coil latching relay and I imagine it has been designed specifically to work with Gaugemaster point motors. The instructions say 9V-24V, which ought to cover pretty much all CDU configurations.

An alternative would be Electrofrog "out of the box" style wiring, where you rely on stock rail to switch blade contact to provide the electrical supply to the crossing. This presumably is something you had intended doing anyway if you wanted to replicate Insulfrog, but I can't say it is anything I would choose to do myself, and I have no idea how reliable it can be made. I suppose you'd solder a pickup strip to the underside of the switch blade that has a wiping contact with the stock rail (or vice versa, soldering to the stock rail and wiping the switch) when the switch is closed. With Electrofrog out-of-the-box, the two switch blades are electricaly bonded via the frog, so you'll need to take care that the opposite side electrical wiper breaks before the near side electrical wiper makes. You will also need to make sure that the switch blade to closure rail electrical contacts are absolutely reliable on each side. You will probably need to add insulating joints and track feeds at the diverging end of the point, but these depend on the track plan. There is a potential problem with "out of the box" Electrofrog, which you don't get with Insulfrogs or live frogs with switched frog polarity, and that is that the open switch blade will be at the opposite polarity to the adjacent stock rail, which could cause a short if you have narrow open switch gaps, thick flanges or undersized wheel back to backs. This is unlikely to be a problem if you keep the same overly-wide open switch gaps as the Settrack points, but I expect you want to make them narrower.

I'd be inclined to build them with live frogs and switch the crossing polarity. The problem with any sort of insulfrog arrangement is that you end up with a very small, vulnerable crossing nose. Peco insulfrogs make the crossing nose part of the plastic base moulding. Peco Unifrogs use the moulded plastic base to support the crossing nose over its entire length. You will struggle to get this level of support with hand built track, not without having a very long insulated section.

Unfortunately the Scottish CalMac ferry saga has rather torpedoed the Buy British (at any cost) mantra for national infrastructure projects. A Labour government might well try and get trains built in Britain, but I doubt it will be very high up their list of priorities, and they will expect value for money. Don't expect to see BREL resurrected.

There has been no suggestion that I've seen that competition will be outlawed (unlike some post-war nationalisation schemes), and Labour have specifically said that they expect open access operators such as Grand Central, Hull Trains, Lumo and Heathrow Express to continue operating much as they do currently. The shame, to my mind, is that the roscos won't be touched, for reasons @Ron Ron Ron has described better than I could. I will be very interested to see what a Labour government envisages for new rolling stock procurement, whether they will continue to use roscos, or whether new stock will be purchased by the nationalised operator.

Someone wouldn't allow the Virgin class 57 Thunderbird models, though, as I recall. This may well have been down to Gerry Anderson / ITV side of things rather than Virgin.

48 was double-heading the down express with 140. 121 was on the up troop train. 907 was on the down local. There was a down goods train in the down loop, and an up special of empty wagons (presumably a "Jellicoe") which was admitted into the up loop after the passenger train was crossed over to the up main, but I don't know the loco of either. The driver of the down goods said their engine was six-coupled with steam brake on loco and tender, but the driver of the up empties didn't say anything about their engine.

Yes. Refusal or inability to come to terms is one of the main reasons for some liveries never appearing.

Have you not been paying attention to the conversation? There was some discussion about what it's like on the Mk2s at the moment, with no heating or ventilation. This led to looking at reviews of the Jacobite on various sites - all very much on topic. This led to To which @ruggedpeak responded Rather a good post, I thought (I did like "fall out to your heart's content"), and no further off topic than many other posts in this thread. There then followed some discussion on comparative conditions between Scotland and Switzerland, which @ruggedpeak responded to, again in a pleasant and informative manner with the pictures of a Swiss metre-gauge line. Then you jump in with bold text, underling and exclamation marks saying that U.K. railways are judged in U.K. courts and to U.K. laws, and then having a rant about...well, to be honest I am not quite sure what. It doesn't seem to have any connection with the conversation up to that point.

The up empty wagon train in the loop at the time of Quintinshill accident was almost certainly a "Jellicoe" (the nine wagons mentioned in the accident report are all from Cardiff, and the train was called a "special"), but I haven't found any mention of the locomotive type.

Ah, sorry, I've just looked again at theSwitchPilot Servo instructions and I see that the push buttons are used to short across pairs of terminals, not to give a short pulse (which is what a dual coil latching relay would require).

No, they were bogie wagons. These are four-wheelers. The wagons are TOPS KDV, converted from SPV 22.5 ton plate wagons. They are only periphary to my interest and I have only come across them in passing. I don't think I've seen the built-in cradles before. I see from Paul Bartlett that they (or some of them at any rate) were originally LNER Diag 196: https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/lnerplate Pictures of Coil D wagons after conversion seem to be rather elusive.