papagolfjuliet

Is it still owned by the Dean Forest Diesel Association, and on loan to the NYMR, or has it been purchased outright?

I misspoke. The ownership of the grave remains with the church, but any memorial on that grave belongs to whoever put it there and to their heirs or, if the owner dies intestate, to that person's descendants. Only they can authorise the replacement or repair or amendment of a gravestone and only they can authorise further interments in that plot. As to the exhumation of a certain well known author, the unlikelihood or obtaining such an order has not prevented the Bronte Museum from trying to get Anne out of St. Mary's Scarborough over and over again for years.

Many middle aged blokes don't have much spare time, for the simple reason that people are having kids much later. In the early days of the railway preservation movement by the time a man was 45 or so his kids had got married and left home. Now like as not a middle aged couple's kids are still at primary school.

This is also the reason why vandalised gravestones are seldom repaired or righted - they are the property of the family of the deceased, and not of the church or local authority, meaning that they can't be touched without the permission of the family, so once a gravestone is knocked over it will probably stay knocked over because if as is usually the case you can't readily track down the descendants of the person whose grave has been vandalised then you can't readily repair it. There is one particular case of a Yorkshire church where the graveyard is the resting place of a famous author whose equally famous family are all buried in the grounds of a museum elsewhere, and whose grave is made of sandstone and faces out to sea with the result that it is badly eroded. There was a lengthy tussle between the church and the museum over ownership not only of the grave but also of the body, which the museum would very much like to exhume and place with the rest of the family as (not to put too fine a point on it) a monetisable tourist attraction, the current upshot of which is that the body is still in situ but the grave has two gravestones: the original eroded one standing upright, and a new one laid flat on the ground beneath it. Another case in point is the Royal Albert Hall. If you've ever watched concerts broadcast from there you'll have noticed that most of the boxes are always empty. This is because the Hall was funded by public subscription and the biggest subscribers got a box of their own in perpetuity, meaning that nobody except the descendants of that donor can use the things.

Back in the 90s - before the days of DBS checks - the Ffestiniog took somebody on who subsequently turned out to be a convicted child molester. They sacked him, naturally enough, and he sued them for unfair dismissal and won a sizeable sum of money. There's an element of self-protection in DBS checks even if the person being checked is unlikely to interact with children as part of the job.

Now, to be fair the Tri-ang Wagons Lits sleeping car is a rare item and a good one will probably set you back around forty quid, but there is such a thing as taking the Mickey. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185118937555?hash=item2b19f2d1d3:g:e4oAAOSwreRhcJzv&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAAwP9pQ%2FNBwzym2wIACP1mA%2BcCCSNYn68Mmt2NM5byo%2FCFGPpiu9W81tA4qqWCs8u2Zw2LPgtybDz5MZhNbEWP0RPSMPBF3GsbqJENnOrfUAbhRhV5LDIvpiZIIDmhfCcCGcaYDiAcmWni3LUV0cziR5jyQ1kZgbAvDmQGKj%2BCJ%2FYDbHYsXv7MEPp%2FTVVSxgb4tvXDEk%2FBF0uqtJcu2GzpgE%2BzOS%2BltIFfP1KvHzR25%2FlDLInf1N0q9TfO4%2FXENR8KEQ%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR-SqnKSJYw

I knew some fun guy would do that joke.

The British Mushroom Company's narrow gauge railway at Chislehurst Caves. Motive power: a Baby Austin. What a microlayout this would make. I'm thinking Oxford Diecast Austin, plus Faller Road System buried under track?

I belive so. Juice is definitely going across it and it is intact, so my suspicion is that in forty-odd years of storage all the electricity elves have escaped from the magnet.

That one's Darius43's in the next post. Mine's an unbuilt kit.

He's done the same value-reducing job on a Kitmaster Garrett and Swiss Crocodile.

No idea, but I'll be popping down there later in the week for a look.

News of the other former Thorpe Park line's stock: the four coaches which went to the Lynton and Barnstaple and thence to Statfold Barn have now been donated by the SBR to the Bala Lake Railway and were delivered to Llanuwychllyn last week: https://bala-lake-railway.co.uk/2023/11/24/blr-news-november-2023-edition/

Here's another photo of the operational one (LMS No. 7106) taken in 1996. Last I heard - which was two years ago - TFT was still using it as Bibbiena pilot and on occasional trains to the Baraclit concrete factory. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:15.11.96_Vercelli_Cariboni_700.001.jpg

A repatriation bid was mooted in 2016, but I haven't heard anything since. https://www.railwaymagazine.co.uk/1105/lms-built-shunters-in-italy-could-uk-preservationists-bid-to-bring-them-home/

Of course under a former regime the 2024 announcements would have consisted of artist's impressions of a WD 2-10-0, a Bulleid-Raworth Booster, and a Port of Par Bagnall.

This should fit the bill: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/kitson/kitsonst.htm

It's a vile slander to claim that the GWR only owned three types of engine, and who doesn't go misty eyed at the thought of Saint King Castle Hall arriving at a country junction station where a thing shaped like a matchbox pushes identical grey wagons around while a branch line train with the loco at the wrong end simmers in the bay platform?

Have the two LMS jackshaft shunters which survive in Italy been mentioned yet? Some photos of one of them here: https://www.drehscheibe-online.de/foren/read.php?17,6698323

A few more, which fell out of a second hand book. No idea who took them or when or where. The second Class 20 image is partly double exposed but is included anyhow as it might be of some interest and because I'm a sucker for a Thornaby kingfisher.

Interesting to see them side by side. The Jouef Whistler was state of the art at the time and I note that it stands up pretty well next to the Bachmann and Limby models.

Lucky ebay find this week, lucky in that it was bought in a thirty quid job lot of Dublo coaches in which its photograph did not even appear: an unbuilt MTK Cravens parcels railcar complete with motor bogie! Everything is present and correct and I plan to have a go at it, but the motor bogie is stone dead. Is it worth trying to get it repaired, and if so by whom, and if not can anybody suggest a suitable alternative? Photos to follow.

The leading vehicle in the breakdown train pictured there has survived and is preserved in departmental condition by the LMSCA at Peak Rail. http://www.cs.rhrp.org.uk/se/CarriageInfo.asp?Ref=686

Two of the three RODs preserved in Australia were loaned to British companies prior to export: 1984 (pictured as such in Dave John's link) to the LYR and then the LNWR and 2003 to the GCR. The third Aussie survivor is either 1615 or 2004; if the latter then it was a Caledonian engine for a brief period.

I think it's fair to say that the Ffestiniog is a 'heritage' wasteland once you get above Tan y Bwlch, and indeed Harbour Station itself is essentially a modern station housed in some heavily modified Victorian buildings. Where the FfR does score is in its commitment to the restoration and replication of historic rolling stock.