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Pacific231G

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  1. I'm glad to see that's still on the late Carl Arendt's site. It was I who sent it to him having discovered it while exploring the remains of the line that ran between Fecamp and Dieppe. These are the photos I took of it at the time (a couple of which are on the carendt site) The former level crossing keeper's cottage the line ran across the road here but had been tarmacced pver. This was the view from the other end the yard was shunted using a powered capstan - quite common around small rail connected silos- with a couple of unpowered ones - including this one - for directing or reversing the hauilage cable. This was my plan of the site (scaled in feet for 1:87 scale) This is the same but with dimensions added from the rough sketch and pacing out of the yard I did when I visited it and measurements taken from Google Earth and IGN . The line marked as dismantled was the start of the station's passing loop. Finally, this was my suggested Microlayout based on it The yard was shunted using an electric capstan but I've seen similar silos - perhaps a little larger- with an old locotracteur, often a Moyse, apparently rotting away but actully used in the brief periods when the silos got busy. There used to be a lot of these small local silos in France and they kept a lot of secondary lines in business until the 1990s, decades after they lost their passenger services. They did though have a nasty habit of blowing up (grain dust, like many other small particles in aerosol, can be explosive) so were replaced with fewer much larger silos. The way this was worked would have been that the two points connecting the yard to the SNCF line were opened by the crew of the SNCF pick-up goods who picked up and dropped wagons as apprpriate. The points were then padlocked shut and the silo staff could shunt their private sidings to their hearts content as wagons were loaded or unloaded one by one. The station's LM (Limite de Manouevres - shunt limit) sign was just before the level crossing but that must have been passed when shunting to or from the private sidings.
  2. My tongue was firmly in my cheek but don't worry. the GWR (or possibly the South Devon Railway) used the plan a couple of generations before John Allen. If you look at Ashburton's track plan it was, apart from the locos shed road, a timesaver! In its American form, with just a coupler of freight cars in each siding, timesaver always seemed to me very contrived -which of course it was- it was a pure shunting puzzle and not intended to be in any way realsitic. Ingelnook Sidings, on the other hand could be a small rural goods yard. I have found though that if you add a run round loop and another siding facing the other way you get an awful lot of far less contrived shunting. This was what I came up with in five feet but I did some experiments and found that, with small radius points and a small tank loco, it could be crammed into 4ft 6ins which is only about three or four inches longer than a 5-3-3 Inglenook using the same European H0 wagons.
  3. Stevey, I think you may have just re-invented John Allen's "Timesaver". https://gdlines.org/GDLines/Timesaver.html Which is not altogether surpring as there are only so many ways to arrange five points (though as Timesaver was designed for 40ft American cars, you'd probablyy need to semi permanently couple wagons in pairs to make the puzzle work. I agree about making the front edge of the layout a quayside, possibly with an inch of "water" and just a couple of small boats. You can fit a layout with a run round loop into four feett. as Paul Gittins did it with his Enigma Engineering layout (BRM Nowember 2006) and in P4 to boot using two foot radius points. The fiddle yard to the right is optional with a level crossing gate closed during shunting . The sidings and headshunts will each take two wagons (limited in the case of the sidings by the wagon turntable and some rusting wagon wheels on the other siding . The run round is limited to three wagons (it will take four but that makes the puzzle too easy) I've drawn it using Peco short Streamline points and it clearly fits. The layout has six wagons on its visible section (the fiddle yard allows them to be changed) . "Enigma Engineering" followed his H0 "Peforia Narrows" (Continental Modeller Oct 2003) which had the same double crossover layout and was 5ft 6ins by 9ins with the same siding and loop capacities but for 40ft freight cars and no fiddle yard. With six cars on the layout the puzzle was set in much the same way as Inglenook Sidings by randomly dealing six "destination" cards (including the departure track and then the six freight car cards to be shunted into them. Enigma Engineering was opeated in much the same way but with the additional complicatiion of a brake van to be on the rear of trains arriving from the fiddle yard and departing to it. I think this arrangement, with two of the sidings facing in opposite directions, gives more interesting operation than Inglenook and it was used by Peter Denny for the first version of Leighton Buzzar (Linslade). With a little extra length it can also accomodate a passenger station.
  4. With that much space to work with and assuming a mainline set up, I wouldn't limit yourself to four coach trains which IMHO aren't really convincing as expresses. Visually, in 00 or H0, five coaches seems to just do it but I'd plan on a platform long enough to take at least a six coach train plus loco. It doesn't matter if trains are shorter than the platforms- that's pretty normal- but you might kick yuorself for not allowing for anything longer. The steam era expresses I remember as a teenager at Oxford were very typically eight coaches long - apart from the longer summer Saturday intergionals- so I think six would be a reasonable contraction. Obviously, the longer the platforms the less open main line running you'll get. It does also seem to be the case that the smaller the scale the less compression you can get away with. At normal layout viewing distances I find four coach expresses fairly convincing in O scale but not in 00/H0 and in N even a six coach train can look a bit short.
  5. When I was very young, probably in the late 50s very early 60s, I went to the MRC show in Central Hall two or three times with my father. In those days he could just drive into Westminster and park on a nearby side-street! The only layout I can actually remember was Wilbert Awdrey's Ffarquhar (Mk1) which he was operating. Though I'd had a couple of his books I'd never been a great fan of the Railway Series and, even as a child, thought locomotives with faces silly. However, there was none of that on Ffarquhar and I remember it being an interesting layout. I don't recall going to any other exhibtions in those years but they were far fewer then. If there was one in Oxford we didn't go to it (though we did have Howes in Broad Street then)
  6. It's very hard to tell the colour of SE Centre 3549. The side tank appears to be black but the front of the right hand tank appears to be green. That may be a reflection of local greenery but I'd guess that dark green was the actual colour.
  7. Ealing Broadway was the (or a) terminus for trains on the GWML for a couple of weeks after the Ladbroke Grove disaster. With two Underground termini there it provides good connections for central London though it was rammed. During that period I believe that a number of services also terminated at Reading.
  8. These are screen grabs from the colour (not colourised) version of Jour de Fête note how the shades of green vary between different shots of the same box. I'd probably go for the shade of green in the third and fourth frames but perhaps let down a bit. Tati's first feature film also includes a rather nice sequence of shunting on the metre gauge SE Centre at Marçais (a once important junction on the metre gauge network- it had all closed by 1951 - just a few years later- and the station building is now a farmhouse. More screen shots of that sequence here https://fdelaitre.org/lpf2/Jdf.htm SainteSainte-Sévère-sur-Indre never actually had a railway but the level crossing scene was shot where the now long dismantled line from La Châtre to Montluçon crossed the D917 road about eight kilometres north of the village while Marçais is about thirty three kilometres to the north-east in Allier.
  9. You can definitely see how far Da Vinci got it wrong. How much better his paintings would have been if only he'd had the support of Adobe. 🤣 A few years ago I wanted to know what shade of green a typically weathered French post box would have been in the 1950s. So, when I got hold of the colour (not colourised)* version of Jacques Tati's 1949 Jour de Fête I thought a scene where the local kids are taking the mick out of François the local postman around a post box would provide some kind of answer. How wrong I was. The scene involves about half a dozen different camera angles and in every one of them the colour looks significantly different thanks to different angle of the sun, lighting, background etc. I actually think that contemporary paintings might be a better guide to colours pre reliable colour film stock as though a professional painter may not have got the details right they probably would have been able to get the colours right as they saw them. *Tati shot the film using the new and unproved "Thomson colour" 3-colour process but had the good sense to also film it in parallel in black and white. Wisely as it turned out as Thomson could never get the colour to print properly so Tati edited and printed the filmfrom the B&W negative. Forty years late Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff, who was herself a film editor and director, and the cinematographer François Ede, were able to use digital techniques to recreate the film in authentic colour from the original colour negatives. The edit was somewhat different as colour films require a different cutting rate than B&W.
  10. Or just bulld a model of the actual sea wall the Pendon scene is also a model of!
  11. There was, it was in 2007 (the plan's anniversary) and was organised by DEMU but that's not what I'm remembering. That competition, defined "Minories" layouts as a terminus with three platforms in seven feet and, as far as I recall, entries included Birmingham Moor St. in scale four (which I think won), Ripper Street and a couple of others. The year I remembered was 2017 (so the 60th anniversary) and there were three or four layouts at Alexandra Palace much more closely based on CJF's actual Minories plan with the characteristic 'diamond' arrangement of crossovers. Hallam Town was the 2mm scale example but I'm not sure what the others were except that one was 3mm scale and another was 4mm scale- possibly Tom Cunnington's EM Minories (GN)
  12. There have been other Borchesters including an RM railway of the month based on plan 24L in "Plans for Larger Layouts" . I think Frank Dyer (Borchester Town and Market) always wrote for MRC and one has to remember that, in those days before the internet, if you subscribed to one magazine you could be in complete ignorance of very well known layouts offered in the others so modellers coming up with the same name might be doing so entirely independently. I knew nothing about Frank Dyer's work until comparatively recently. I can remember being very frustrated that Mike Bryant included a lot of photos of his 4ft x 2ft layout in his "Modelling in TT-3" book but no plan to tell me how he's done it. My father and I took Railway Modeller and I had absolutely no idea that a complete step by step series of articles by him on building the "pint pot" layout had been published in MRC in January-June 1958. Had I seen those I might well have made far more progress in TT-3 than I ever did.
  13. John Charman housed it (the two boards - each 5ft 5ins- stored upright behind a curtain) and brought it out to operate, in a large (27 ft long) residential caravan, probably not the sort you'd be stuck behind on the A303 but still cramped. Whether he actually built it in the caravan is less certain though in his first article he did mention his wife putting up with a lot of sawing and drilling over a year. That was in 1955 and, by 1959 the caravan had been sold and he'd moved into more spacious accomodation(RAF Married quarters?) with Charford extended as an L.
  14. It's not a problem. At Ally Pally a few years ago there were three Minories, in 4mm/3mm and 2mm scale respectively. They all used CJF's track plan and they were all different. Ashburton is an odd one as it was a lovely station (I visited it when the DVR was still planning to have it as their terminus before the Vogons decided to demolish the track to make way for a bypass) but it's a very limited one and very difficult to work - in reality and in model form. I thought Peter Denny had the right idea with Buckinham mk 2 which was based on Ashburton - Great Centralised of course- but with the mill move to the other side and the kickback mill siding turned into a goods loop. Though he never seems to have acknowledged it, Derek Naylor's 00n3 Aire Valley was effectively a close copy of the 00 Madder Valley. The original version of Saltaire was Madderport less one siding and, in the final version (RM July 1972), most of the scenic features are drectly lifted from the final version of the MVR - though without John Ahern's artistic flair. Even the sawmill in the corner with the watermill on the other side of the railway and the branch on the near side of the river. I seen nothing wrong with that but I do think that if you base your layout on someone else's you should acknowledge it. I can't imagine building a Minories and describing it with no reference to CJF or using the Inglenook name without acknowledging Alan Wright.
  15. The new train was being tested again today. I watched, and heard, it passing on the embankment just south of South Greenford and, though not "eerily quiet" it was quieter than normal Distric Line stock. I then walked down to Castle Bar Park to get the train to W. Ealing (I was enroute to Ealing Broadway) . I'd hoped to see and photograph it coming back towards Greenford before my train arrived but found it still at W. Ealing on the charging rails. The Lizzie line train arrived as the Greenford train was pulling in, so I only had time to get a couple of snaps.
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