MarkSG

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.

You've clearly never played Sim City either 😀

There's a church in Camden Square over the MML just out of St Pancras, and a cricket ground over a tunnel on the Chiltern Main Line just out of Marylebone. St Stephen's Canonbury is practically on top of the Moorgate branch from Finsbury Park. But such locations are somewhat atypical, and rarely modelled! Traditional, rural Anglican churches anywhere near a railway line are pretty rare, let alone on top of a tunnel. Most historic church buildings are at the centre of the original village, but when the railways came they typically built their tracks and station on the edge of the village because that was where the available land was. Over time, the centre of gravity of the settlement typically shifted to the railway station, and away from the church, so the buildings closer to the station tended to be newer. Where a church is close to a railway line, it's typically either where the church building itself is newer, or in major urban areas (such as London) where the railway simply demolished or tunnelled a route through an already built-up area.

As was said very early on in this topic... ...so we could well end up with multiple versions of the more popular liveries anyway, which I think is a Good Thing. And, for the same reason, I hope Rapido aren't too averse to repeating liveries that have already been done by other manufacturers. Particularly for the era that these models represent, a pair (or more) of similar, but not identical, wagons is more realistic than a couple that are either completely the same or completely different.

It's a step in the right direction!

The APT-P probably falls into that category. I've seen the preserved one, but I never saw it or travelled on it when it was in service, despite it being in operation at a time when I was a regular rail user. But I lived in East Anglia at the time, and the APT-P was strictly WCML, which was the other side of the country and didn't offer a route that would have been useful to me. So I never encountered it.

Any chance you could build an E4 next? 🙂

That's not entirely good for my credit card!

It's so bad that it's almost into "so bad that it's good" territory. But not quite.

Unpainted wagons are something that regularly crops up in product discussions. But the reality, as has already been pointed out, is that the marginal extra cost of applying the livery is too small to be able to offer a significant discount for an unpainted wagon. The upfront costs in the R&D and tooling will be the same whatever colour the model is (or isn't), and painting is a relatively small part of the manufacturing cost as well. When people mention unpainted wagons they're probably thinking of the ones that Dapol do, which are cheaper than painted versions. But you have to bear in mind that those are all older toolings which have long since repaid the development costs, and therefore can be sold at whatever price covers the manufacturing alone. On the other hand, I do understand why people don't like the idea of painting over an already applied livery - somehow, it feels a bit like vandalism, especially if what you're painting over is better quality than what you will be replacing it with! Maybe the solution is to offer a very simple, beige livery with minimal decoration, that's still good enough to use RTR if you're so inclined but is a lot more receptive to being overpainted for those who want to do that.

Yes; a lot of people are under the impression that rolling stock being owned by a leasing company rather than the operator is a modern, post-privatisation thing. But, as you say, at least for PO stock, it's as old as the railways themselves. Indeed it would, yes. Even just including the "era" on their website product listing would be useful. I know it's a crude measurement, but a lot of retailers use that (eg, at Hattons and Rails you can restrict a search to a specific era or selection of eras), so having it as available data does make it easier for consumers to find what they want.

Well, well, well. This is definitely going to be my first Accurascale purchase. I may need a little modeller's licence, since the early BR one, despite being a GER loco, was far away from GER metals in that era! But, given that my layout is based on a proposed line which never came to fruition in real life, I suppose I can always argue that in my alternate reality 68535 never went up north either.

Unfortunately, the 1907 design is a bit too late to be hauled by Rocket.

As I've said before, PO wagons can be a cash cow for manufacturers because there were so many different liveries that you can keep on releasing new ones until, er, the cows come home. Apologies for two unrelated cow analogies in one comment! However, one of the reasons that works for the likes of Hornby and Dapol is that theirs are, generally, firmly in the "cheap and cheerful" category and appeal to the cheap and cheerful target market. I can't imagine all that many train set owners buying lots of Rapido PO wagons at thirty quid a pop, because they simply won't appreciate the detail and therefore won't buy them when they can get them cheaper from elsewhere. It will be interesting to see how well these do, therefore. Because I certainly want some in appropriate early BR condition, but that won't happen if the first batch doesn't sell well.

There's one on there that really should have been left to1st April for the announcement. Or possibly held back until the 5th November.

Nice. I've been asking for these for ages. Now, what I really want is versions in early BR condition, with simple patching of the numbers rather than a full repaint.

Actually, having had a look, it's specifically a notification about mass local deletions - if that option is enabled in the settings, it will notify you if it detects a large number of local deletions and give you the option to override the automatic cloud deletion. That's aimed at the scenario referred to earlier, where someone loses a lot of data due to a local deletion without realising it will also delete from the cloud. If you just delete a single file (or a small number) you won't get a notification, but you will if you delete a lot of them.

If I delete stuff locally, OneDrive prompts me whether to also also delete it remotely or whether I want to keep it.

In a previous job, many years ago (more years ago than I care to remember!), I regularly travelled to The Netherlands on the overnight ferry from Harwich. The departure times stayed the same in GMT all year round, they simply advertised them as an hour later during BST. So, for example, the 07:00 GMT departure was the 08:00 BST departure in summer and the 15:00 GMT departure became 16:00 BST. But the 23:00 GMT departure, in summer, because the 23:59 BST departure, just to make sure the date remained the same as in GMT.

The original Bassett-Lowke never did OO. And the brand name isn't particularly associated with Hornby, having only been owned by Hornby since 2008. So it doesn't have the "Hornby heritage" aspects of either Dublo or Triang. The use of the Basset-Lowke brand for the steampunk range seems to me to have been part of a deliberate intent to distance it a little from Hornby. The primary target market for the revived B-L isn't railway modellers, it's steampunk fans, and I suspect that Hornby felt they would be put off, rather than attracted, by using Hornby branding. It also has the advantage that it can be applied to things that don't even vaguely resemble model railways (such as the "brickpunk" range) without diluting the core Hornby brand. They could, I suppose have just made up a brand name that hasn't previously been used. But using one that's in their brand portfolio, but hasn't been used for more than half a century, probably made more sense from an intellectual property standpoint. And the name "Bassett-Lowke" does have a kind of Victorian, steampunky ring to it.