MarkSG

It's flimsy enough that it will snap off if you handle it roughly. After one such accident I decided to leave it off rather than fix it, on the basis that many wouldn't have a canopy in real life anyway.

If you want a bit of nostalgia you can play Lemmings online at https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html

If you're going to paint the walls and ceiling, then white, definitely. Otherwise, a natural neutral colour (eg, leave wood unpainted). You don't want anything which will create a colour cast over the layout. Bear in mind that the sky looks blue when you look at it (well, some days, anyway), but it's not actually reflecting blue light on you! The sky is blue because of refraction, not reflection. A blue painted surface, though, will reflect blue light. Which isn't really what you want. if you really want something that's designed for a model railway, then a Pendon style lightbox ceiling is ideal. But that might be a bit beyond the resources of the average modeller in a shed 😀

One might agree with your suspicions. Consider also the following facts: That paragraph was added by an editor with the username "D8592", and the only other edits that username has made are to the main Viz article on Wikipedia. As well as being a Wikipedia username, D8592 was the running number of a Class 17 (Clayton Type 1). Chris Donald is a member of a Clayton Type 1 appreciation group on Facebook. Chris Donald mentions Clayton Type 1, number D8592, in the first paragraph of "Rude Boys" his semi-autobiographical account of the founding of Viz. It might, of course, all be coincidence. But, equally, it might not be. (And just in case anyone queries point 3, yes, it is that Chris Donald, even though it's not an uncommon name. His Facebook profile and public posts make that clear enough. Oddly enough, he's also a member of two groups that I'm a member of, although I don't recall ever seeing any posts by him there.)

They weren't exclusively big cities, but they were more common in major urban areas. They weren't all the same design, though, and the typical Metropolitan Police box designed by Gilbert Mackenzie Trench (which is what the Tardis is based on) was mainly found in London., with a slightly modified version being used in Glasgow. Otherwise, individual forces all had their own preferred designs, and in many cases they were often more like a small, blue-painted shed than anything with any particularly consistent design. All those which remain are now listed buildings. And the vast majority of those which have survived are not Mackenzie Trench boxes. If the Mackenzie Trench boxes had lasted a decade or so longer in use, then they probably would, like K6 Telephone Boxes, have been recognised as worth preserving before they were mostly scrapped and hence we'd have more of them. But, as it is, the majority of those which do remain are those which either carried on being used longer than was normal, or which simply escaped being scrapped because nobody could be bothered to remove them and, instead, simply fell into disrepair. Edinburgh, oddly enough, now has the largest number of remaining police boxes, which may partly be more to do with the fact that they got listed there earlier than elsewhere in the country. But, also they're typically larger than elsewhere (mostly built to a design by Ebenezer James MacRae), so a fair number of them were repurposed into street vending kiosks, which obviously helped them to survive beyond their police functionality. Here's a Mackenzie Trench box in Glasgow: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/200399858-police-box-cathedral-sqaure-glasgow And an original Met Police Mackenzie Trench box, now far from home: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101109166-metropolitan-police-box-at-national-tramway-museum-crich Here's a MacRae box in Edinburgh: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/200395663-police-call-box-west-princes-street-gardens-edinburgh-edinburgh And a completely different design in Sheffield: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101405185-police-box-adjacent-to-town-hall-surrey-street-sheffield-city-ward And, for completeness, a modified Mackenzie Trench design in Wales: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/300021458-former-police-telephone-box-alway Someone at Cadw (the Welsh heritage body) appears to have had a bit of fun writing that listing.

According to Wikipedia: During the latter years of his tenure as the editor of Viz, Donald opened a hugely unsuccessful restaurant at a former railway station at Ilderton in Northumberland. It opened in 1994 and closed three years later than it should have done, in 1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Donald

It appears to be Bachmann's Garden Scale coupling. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Garden-Scale-Thomas-Engine-moving/dp/B001RG9QHO https://www.Bachmann.co.uk/category/model-railway/thomas_and_friends/large-scale

Bo and Luke appear to have had a rather unexpected change of allegiance, too. Although you could, of course, justify all this by means of a fictional backstory that the Hazzard County Railroad is now a preserved tourist line, and you're modelling one of the "Days out with Thomas" events which are regular occurances on such attractions.

All of the emails (order confirmation and dispatch) related to my previous Hornby orders came from Hornby. No mention of CCL anywhere in the emails, even in the headers. So maybe this is an area where Hornby have learned their lesson and realised this isn't something they can reliably handle in house.

Any chance you could identify which wagons you think are wrong, and cite your sources?

I refer the honourable gentleman to a comment I made last year...

Happens in real life...

Yes, a lot of our model railways are essentially fiction, even if they're based on a real location. But there's plausible fiction and implausible fiction.

That's not really a tunnel, it's just a long bridge 🙂

So this is basically an announcement to announce a forthcoming announcement. To make things easier in future, maybe they should do an announcement to announce their future announcement schedule, so that we never have an unexpected announcement.

Point of order, but North Worcestershire is generally considered to be the three districts of Wyre Forest, Bromsgrove and Redditch (as opposed to South Worcestershire which is Wychavon, Malvern Hills and Worcester City). Bromsgrove is, by a tad, the largest of the three in terms of area covered, but it certainly isn't most of North Worcestershire. And Wyre Forest is the most populous of the three.

That looks... interesting. A bit of an unusual challenge for planning an exhibition. I hope you manage to get it all sorted out satisfactorily, though. I'm sure it will be just as enjoyable as a visitor.

Well, not in public, anyway....

I've exprimented with Kadees, but I've come to the conclusion that they just look too wrong for a steam-era layout. And yes, I know that tension locks are equally wrong. But it's a different kind of wrong. The problem with Kadees, for me, is that they're designed to look like a prototype knuckle coupler with steam pipes. Which, on a diesel or electric loco, is fine. But on a rake of steam-hauled wagons, that, in real life, would have been loose or screw coupled, they look anachronistic. Tension locks, on the other hand, don't try to mimic a prototypical coupling at all, and modern versions do their best to be discreet. So it's actually easier to get away with the "willing suspension of disbelief" (which is essential in any model) with tension locks than it is with Kadees.

Which, interestingly, has been modelled, and the model is now in the hands of the East Anglian Railway Museum: https://earmnewsletter.blogspot.com/2020/05/wickham-bishops-its-magical-model-layout.html

If you think it looks bleak in that photo, see the current condition on Google Streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/uDkGGGHawHveKHte9 The main platform has been lengthened, but the shelter has been removed. It can't be a particularly pleasant place to change trains on a wet day in winter.

No (public) vehicle access, but there's a footpath to the road at Glandyfi. Smallbrook Junction on the Isle of Wight has no external acess at all, not even via a footpath. But that exists solely to provide an interchange between the Island Line (National Rail) and the preserved Isle of Wight Steam Railway, and is a relatively new construction (opened in 1991). Unlike Dovey Junction and Trent Junction, there wasn't a station there at all in pre-Beeching days as there was no real need for an interchange at that point and no nearby settlement.

This is what's generally known in the festival and site management industry as a Turdis, for fairly obvious reasons: Available in OO as well: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/401792973659

It seems to me that this is a classic example of the four square grid. I'm not sure how well this is going to work using code formatting, but let's have a go... A B +--------+--------+ | | | 1 | A1 | B1 | easy to know | | | +--------+--------+ | | | 2 | A2 | B2 | hard to know | | | +--------+--------+ easy hard to to fix fix The point is that column A refers to things that are easy to get right, while column B refers to things that are hard to get right. And row 1 is things that are reasily observable (or discoverable without specialist knowledge), while row 2 is things that require specialist (or, at least, not immediately obvious) knowledge to know. What we're talking about here are things in cell A1 - easy to know, and easy to fix. Unless it' a pure "train set" layout (and that has its place, I'm not knocking it), there really shouldn't be anything in that category, at least on an exhibition layout (at home, of course, Rule 1 is the only rule there is). By contrast, B1 (easy to know, hard to fix) contains most of the things that we accept as a necessary compromise on a model. Static passengers that never get on or off a train. Big plastic couplings. Frozen water. Static vehicles. Trees that don't respond to the weather. Weather. Etc. Some modellers make a greater effort to address these than others, and some are more amenable to being fixed than others (we can manage three link couplings if we want to, and moving vehicles are doable. I've even seen a couple of examples of realistically modelled flowing water). But there will always be visible compromises in any model railway. The very nature of the thing makes it unavoidable. To be honest, though, I think it's cell B1 that has the greatest potential for debate. That is, things which require at least a certain amount of specialist or non-obvious knowledge to be aware of, but that are easy to get right if you do know. A classic example of that, which I see a lot of at exhibitions, is farms, fields and farm animals - there is, often, quite a lot of that which is anachronistic on layouts, usually for the simple reason that most people aren't particularly familiar with farms to begin with and even less so with how they have changed over the years. But if you do know, it's easy to get it right. As for cell B2 - hard to know, and hard to get right - I think that things like headcodes fall into that. Knowing that you should have them is probably an A2 issue, but knowing you should have them and getting them right is definitely in B2.

Being serious for a moment (sorry!), that's one of the reasons why I'm still not really convinced by DCC sound. It works OK in an physically restricted environment, such as a shunting plank, where you could reasonably expect most sounds to carry equally well. But on a big roundy roundy, it doesn't scale to trains at the far end of the line from my vantage point. And the complete absence of a doppler effect is a huge barrier to realism.