Fenman

Can two figures be a column? Not exactly the supermarket bill I referred to earlier, or Stationmaster's daily office takings... Paul

You seem to be ignoring the key difference: most of us hardly ever have to add up columns of times! Paul

I think you’re too young to have lived through it?! But if you don’t think it’s too much hassle, try an exercise the next time you find yourself with a supermarket shopping bill: first convert each item to LSD; and then add up the LSD column. In fairness, some people are a whizz at it (my mother could add up an LSD column just by glancing at it), but most of us mere mortals had to put a lot more effort into it. And mistakes were much more frequent. Or do you think it’s just fashion that pretty much every country in the whole world uses a decimal currency? Paul

Frankly it was a nightmare to add up items priced in the old currency, using base 12 (and fractions of it), base 20 and base 10 in the same calculation. And there weren’t many calculators around. But there is also a theory that having a non-decimal currency improved the mental dexterity of the entire population, by constantly forcing the brain to exercise. Personally I was glad to see the back of LSD. Paul

Goodness, you don’t like EVs, do you?! It’s just calculating the energy used in the ICE systems in kWh and, equally as easily, enabling EV consumption to be converted into a mpg equivalent. What it does is enable a like-for-like comparison, using mpg as a single measurement system — a system which has acquired familiarity over the decades. Which, of course, is exactly why ICE manufacturers and fan-boys alike dislike it. It does not enable a “whole life” comparison of energy required between ICE vehicles versus BEVs. But the complexity of those calculations, along with the massive differences caused by the truly vast range of uses that we individuals make of our cars, means those calculations are largely theoretical models. Mpg-equivalent is a handy (quick and dirty) comparison of economy in individual use. Experience tells me the mpg I achieve in any particular car is likely to be mid-way between the hopelessly optimistic figure claimed by a manufacturer using their standardised tests, and the actual figure achieved by petrolhead (sic) motoring journalists who are thrashing the living daylights out of the cars they drive. But it’s still a useful measure to me. Isn't the appropriate maxim “dim illumination is better than none at all”? Paul

I was idly flicking through YouTube video reviews of EVs (er... I mean doing research), when that nice robot bloke from Red Dwarf — who is now a presenter on Fully Charged — gave the mpg equivalent for the EV he was driving. It was, to me, startlingly high. He went on to add that one of the least energy-efficient EV cars available, the monstrous 2.2 tonne Audi e-tron, still manages the equivalent of 150 mpg. I knew EVs were more efficient than ICE cars, but I didn’t realise they were so hugely more efficient. Blimey. Was it just me that’s taken so long to catch up? Paul

I’d agree with much of that. But I’m also an old fart who remembers the terrific opposition from some people (including all my relatives) to the introduction of smokeless fuel zones in heavily-polluted towns and cities. They simply didn’t care about the horrific destruction of lives and lungs, and wanted nothing to do with these new-fangled heating systems. They were forced to change, and it turned out that, mostly, things were better for most people. Aren’t EVs going to be the same? Reduction in city centres of the amount of those particulates which destroy toddlers’ brains strikes me as a prize worth having. Will EVs be the panacea that gets us to paradise? Of course not. But, overall, don’t they look like at least part of the answer? Paul

The loco in your 2nd photo is a BR Standard class 4 (basically a restyled version of the LMS Ivatt 4MT). It’s available RTR. Paul

From playing with Hornby track on Minories variants, I seem to remember they produce a tiny length of straight track that neatly fills the gap you’ve created. Though it was about 20 years ago, so no promises! Paul

Disappointing news about Crossrail 2. Paul

Except you'll be doing it on a high-level walkway through a not very salubrious part of London, exposed to the elements -- driving rain, snow? Tough. It was decided the option where the platforms would all be in the same station was either too expensive or would lead to the loss of a bit of Wormwood Scrubs (which is anyway not a brilliant green open space though, admittedly, this part of London needs all the green it can get). Paul

I largely agree with your comments about the LHR spur (which made no sense when Mawhinney reported against it, and makes no sense today), but your assessment of the interchange with the WLL is too kind. It is not that it will not be the best interchange -- it is that it will be an utterly dreadful interchange, involving long walks (was it 300m?) between the WLL LO platforms and the other platforms that will serve LHR. Intended mainly for air passengers many of whom will presumably be travelling with luggage... The last scheme I saw involved a high-level footbridge snaking across the area. It was only an "interchange" in the same sense that, say, King's Cross and St Pancras are currently a single interchange. Ie, they are not. Paul

Interestingly, all of the 73s are being offered as individually numbered locos -- not, as has been more normal for Heljan O gauge, mostly unnumbered with one or two numbered locos. Is this a sign of O gauge evolving into something more like the mainstream OO RTR market? Paul

When? I was asking earlier this year and in two separate branches they both insisted that they no longer sold MR players. I do seem to have been led a merry dance. Annoying. Paul

Thanks for the tips (if not the abuse) -- that'll teach me to go to Richer Sounds and John Lewis, supporting my local bricks and mortar retailers, instead of giving all my money to Amazon... Paul

Can't help you with this, but when I was in the market for a new DVD player a few months ago, every specialist retailer I went to said it was no longer possible to sell me a multiregion DVD player: they're all now "smart" so, after they've been unlocked, the next over-the-air upgrade they get just re-locks them. As a consumer/ movie nerd who has (legitimately!) bought both R1 and R2 discs when I've lived in different places, it's insanely annoying to be told I can only play discs of the region I now happen to be living in. Especially when some content is only available in one region and not the other. It appears globalisation is only meant to work when it's to the producer's advantage, not the consumer's. Sorry for the rant... Good luck. Paul

But it’s tricky, isn’t it? The BBC had been “maintaining balance” on news programmes by giving a climate change-denier equal space with a climate scientist every time they had a relevant news item. They finally dealt with this nonsense after an internal review that pointed out that if they had an expert commenting on Man U’s 2-0 win over Liverpool, it would be ludicrous to “balance” that by giving equal time to someone who denied that that was the score and maintained that, in fact, Liverpool had won. Unsurprisingly, climate change deniers were unhappy with this decision. Decades ago I ran a big public lecture programme addressing contemporary political issues. At that time I subscribed to the “no platform for fascists” policy, and simply didn’t invite any. The view you have expressed — by not inviting them, their (mostly) ludicrous views could not be properly challenged — niggled me at the time and continues to do so. I don’t know if there’s a right answer, rather than a least-worst answer. Seeing people like Laurence Fox — responding to Twitter critics who described his views as “racist” by calling them “pedophiles”, apparently without a shred of evidence — does make me wonder who would benefit from giving him yet another platform? Equally, our electoral system locked Farage and his kin out of Parliament, even though they apparently represented the views of a significant minority of citizens. It was to nobody’s benefit except Farage’s, who could present himself as an underdog oppressed by the establishment, shut out of parliamentary debates. Much of the toxicity around Brexit seems to me to derive from that lack of parliamentary representation. It’s tricky. Paul

I agree with you. It's sobering to read some of the arguments used by those opposed to the abolition of slavery in nineteenth century England -- when that was an apparently respectable political position to hold. People who you might think of as radical champions of the English peasant, like William Cobbett, also had some (to my eyes) pretty vile racist views. What's "right" and "wrong" changes with time and context. Paul

I think the changes in laws are more varied than that: the Race Relations Act and Sex Discrimination Act seemed at the time to be very significantly ahead of majority public opinion, leading social change; while sexuality equality laws appear to have lagged very significantly behind majority public opinion. If you take a longer term view, most societies seem to oscillate between greater personal freedoms and greater social control. We've been generally moving towards greater personal freedoms (especially for most minorities) for a long time now. Paul

Thanks for starting an interesting thread. Your comment reminded me of the pithy phrase by Margaret Atwood: Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. The first of those, fear of being laughed at, seems to me to be a powerful motivator for many haters. A sense of self can be fragile. Something we perceive as threatening to undermine us (to make us look “small”) can quickly lead to what objectively is an over-reaction. Paul

I assumed Branston pickle was being panic-bought, but it turned out masses of the stuff was recalled when a jar or two had been found to be contaminated with plastic. Fortunately normal supplies now seem to have resumed. Paul

You’ve created a new name by mashing-up two lovely M&GN station names: North Drove Counter Drain The third station between Bourne and Spalding was the other you mentioned, Twenty. This gave rise to the schoolboy joke which relies on the now archaic way of expressing numbers: “How many stations are there between Bourne and Spalding? Two and Twenty”. Counter Drain, incidentally, serves the delightfully-named Fenland hamlet of Tongue End. Paul

Our friends at the M&GN often used “Road” suffixes. Their problem was a lot of their stations were built a long way from the settlements whose name they bore, so “Road” was code for “not very convenient and you might have a long walk when you get there”. But they also used this technique as a marketing device: for example, the station in the centre of the albeit tiny village of Roydon was actually called “Grimston Road” after the much bigger village a couple of miles away. Their terminus in Norwich was built after Victoria and Thorpe, so they named it City to emphasise its centrality and convenience (but then bizarrely treated Norwich as the terminus of a minor branch line from Melton Constable, instead making Yarmouth the main easterly focus of operations). Paul

Maybe you were all out when they made the map?

Another option in this part of England (Norfolk) is to use the names of lost medieval towns and villages. Not so far from me you can use names of abandoned villages like Babingley, Bawsey or Burgh Parva; or there are settlements lost to sea erosion including Shipden (a very significant port in its day), Ness, Foulness, Waxham Parva. Wikipedia has a handy list here. And there’s a nice map here. You can find similar resources for other counties. Place names can feel “rooted” in a particular time: again near me, I like Thieves Bridge and Saracen’s Head. The old M&GN had lots of tiny stations in the middle of the Fens, mainly for agricultural freight, with such lovely unglamorous names as Ferry, Twenty and (my favourite) Counter-Drain. I’ve posted on here before about an eighteenth century journal describing a sailing tour of the Fens: at one point they rest for the night at a place near a then-notorious brothel, called Whoresnest Ferry. Alas, that name seems to have disappeared. Names can be so evocative. Paul