KingEdwardII

My experience with the MP1 motors is that it makes very little difference whether the spring is removed or is left in. The motor and the pin connecting the motor to the tie bar hold the tie bar to whatever position the motor is in and the spring appears to have no effect. This also means that you must adjust the motor position carefully to ensure that the switch blades reach their end of travel - poorly adjusted position will mean that the blades can fail to meet up with the stock rail and the result is derailments. Yours, Mike.

Hmm, my memory of switching from the mainline trains to Elizabeth Line at Liverpool Street is that it is quite a long trek and takes some time. Presumably the suggested Liverpool Street train is one of those express services that does not stop at Stratford? Otherwise, I'd expect that changing at Stratford to Liz line would be more convenient. Yours, Mike.

Define "quick and easy". I judge the journey for difficulty based on me + some luggage, as is generally the case when I do these journeys. Changing trains is "easy" if it is done on the same platform, or an adjacent one - i.e. no stairs/escalators/lifts involved. Not many tube connections are like this. And using the tube in the first place involves journeys to/from the mainline trains which mostly involve a descent on entry followed by an ascent on exit, sometimes with quite long and involved routes to follow. This is what contributes to London being an "obstacle course" if you have to connect from a train on one side of the city to another on the opposite side. Yours, Mike.

Hmm, not sure I follow this. Waterloo connects to Paddington with Bakerloo and with Euston via the Northern. That's it, I think. Anything else involves changes. My personal bugbear is getting from Waterloo to St Pancras or Kings Cross. Yes, it is possible to connect from Waterloo to Stratford to catch some of the trains from Liverpool Street, but not all of them. Yours, Mike.

The Elizabeth line route is way south of Euston/St Pancras/Kings Cross - Tottenham Court Road station is about a mile due south of Euston station. It would have taken a major diversion of the route to get the Liz line near to the northern terminal stations. But I sympathise with your thinking. Connections between the major stations in London are poor and this makes London an obstacle course for folk trying to travel through (rather than to) the city. Liz line sorted out some of the east/west connections, and Thameslink provides for some of the north/south links, but in general, it is still pretty poor. Connections to/from Waterloo (the busiest station) and almost anywhere else are dire. Yours, Mike.

The name "Bow Street" has applied to the village for over 200 years - and there does not appear to be a Welsh alternative. Yours, Mike.

That is probably about 50% of the local population ;-)

I've had no problems whatever with my DR4018s driving my MP1 motors. Yours, Mike.

One of my nephews works at one of the modern container ports. They work 12 hour shifts, alternating between nights and days. The shift pattern is one week of 4 days followed by a week with 3 days. So 7 days off every fortnight. He likes it due to all the time off he gets, although 12 hour night shifts are hard work (I did a job involving those when I was still a teenager, so I know what they are like). Not much sitting around in his job - the place really does involve 24x7 activity. Yours, Mike.

Well, there is perhaps an element of fiction to that, although (collapsing bridges notwithstanding) the rail commute from Didcot to central Oxford is also a doddle. The enormous car park at Didcot station tells the real story, I think - very handy for visiting the Didcot Railway Centre on the weekend, of course ;-) Yours, Mike.

Those shelving systems will carry a lot of weight with no problem. As DLT says above, just make sure that the uprights are well fixed to the wall. I've used them both for bookshelves and also in the garage for holding tools and materials. The weights involved there are very likely much higher than you will ever get from a model railway layout. Yours, Mike.

I don't think that the major expansion of Didcot is really about "Oxford overspill" - I think it is much more about London commuting, with the fast rail service to Paddington being a major driver. Didcot has a much quicker service than, say, Winchester - made even more attractive by the Elizabeth line providing swift access to both the old city and to Canary Wharf. Yours, Mike.

That's not wildly different from the method of construction used for the Novotel in the centre of Southampton. Basically each room in the main block was a prefabricated container and they just slotted them in one next to the other. Perhaps in future all new homes will be constructed in this way too - so much faster than conventional methods. Yours, Mike.

I think mine are Pan Head Pozidriv No 4 (imperial) x 12.7mm (i.e. 1/2inch if I'm not mistaken). I use 12mm ply for my baseboards so these might be too long for your purposes - I think that there are shorter ones available, like 9.5mm or 0.375". I source mine from electrical retailers like Farnell or RS-Components, typically in 100 packs. The Pan Head is important for gripping the fastenings on the MP1s - regular countersunk screws will do damage. You'll need a suitable small pozi screwdriver to handle these screws. Yours, Mike.

I regard curved points as my friends ;-) Curved points allow crossovers to be placed on the curves around the corners, for example, keeping the straight sections free for other structures. They can also be used to produce larger radius corner curves when platforms are involved. If you're building platforms on the corner curves, the shallower those curves can be - the better. Yours, Mike.

Hmm - through + terminating platforms is evident in a place like Richmond in the London suburbs even today. And in the past it had a full set of goods facilities as well. Yours, Mike.

I would consider putting the station along the top wall - it will benefit from the greater length available there than along the side, where it is rather cramped in the present plan. I also think that the section of quad track is rather long and consumes space that could be devoted to the goods yard, engine shed, etc. Yours, Mike.

It all comes down to time and convenience - there are lots of folk using Heathrow from the South and West who would welcome a rail link to the airport, if it is as fast and as straightforward as the road journey. This requires a direct rail link from the West into Heathrow - and would also need some rethinking of the trains from Basingstoke, Winchester, Southampton, Portsmouth, etc. Current arrangements are simply too slow. Multiple changes are also v bad for those with luggage. "Schiphol thinking" would involve more than just linking the GWML to Heathrow in both directions. There should be routes that get passengers to south west and north west London as well. Ironically, the south east and north east of London are fairly well served by Liz line now. The very high proportion of passengers using road to/from Heathrow clearly points to the problem. Going into the centre of London and back out again by train does not cut it - it is too slow compared with the alternatives. Yours, Mike.

The pronunciation of "a pint of Dark" is for me the touchstone of the true Cardiff accent. Not that I ever possessed those wonderful tones, being of valley origins and living in the suburban delights of Coryton during my teenage years. But visits to The Vulcan (now forever preserved in rescued form in St Fagan's folk museum) got me the flavour of the true Cardiff voice, highly distinctive and so very different to the "taffy" of the valleys to the north (still spoken by numerous of my relatives who live there to this day). Yours, Mike.

It is said in the book "British Steam: GWR Collett Castle Class" by Keith Langston, on p12, that the LMS first made a request for a batch of Castles and when that failed, asked for the Castle drawings - which were also refused. Yours, Mike.

Well, the LMS had a loan of "Launceston Castle" in 1926 and it was so good on LMS duties including the Cumbrian banks that the LMS asked if the GWR could make some Castles for them... ...which the GWR refused. I suppose they got an alternative when they headhunted Stanier from Swindon to become their CME in 1932... Yours, Mike.

The question is whether it has to be like this? Services from the South Coast to Victoria via the Arundel route (ie. places like Littlehampton, Chichester, Bognor) are seriously slow, simply because they stop everywhere - there are no expresses that stop only at the principal settlements. The contrast with the line via Basingstoke to Southampton is very clear - there are some expresses that don't stop between Waterloo and Winchester - and a whole host of trains that make two or three stops only. Result: Winchester is an ideal spot for commuting, in a way that Chichester is not. Yours, Mike.

Yes, indeed. I've travelled from Schiphol to many parts of the Netherlands and never had to change trains more than once - and even that, rarely. A properly thought-out system that works well. Yours, Mike.

There is a huge potential for train journeys to/from Heathrow - at present, a very large majority of passengers arrive and depart by road. One of the reasons for this is the simple one: it takes too d*mn long to get to & from Heathrow by train. As a result, people travel by car or taxi. I did this for 36 years in my job that involved fairly frequent air travel, travelling from South Hampshire. Today, even from Reading the quickest train journey to Heathrow T5 I could find was 54 minutes. It's almost quicker to catch the bus from Reading, which is pathetic... As for places like Southampton or Winchester, just forget it - 1h 45m is the best time you can achieve (Winchester) and that involves going via Paddington. It is far quicker to drive. The contrast with places like Amsterdam Schiphol is stark. Yours, Mike.

I can just see a stream of folk trotting along Old Oak Common Lane to get from their HS2 from Birmingham to a train from Willesden Junction, their luggage rolling along behind them... (It's over a mile for folk unfamiliar with the area) It's this kind of lack of joined-up thinking that condemns OOC HS2 station for me. There are lines running close to OOC that could provide great connectivity across London, but there are no plans to provide any kind of usable access to trains on those lines. Yours, Mike.