Pacific231G

Very nice Fred A friend of mine has acquired a Trix 241 complete with DCC sound so, though his layout is analogue.intends to make one circuit switchable so he can run it all singing and dancing. I also have a number of FT carriages, mainly OCEM's in Ep III livery but including some of their TYs. This was an Est coach but they chose it because it was the most generic of the different regions' slam door bogie coaches.

The Minories in question was Brian Thomas' excellent 0 gauge Newford (later sold and incorporated into the larger Littleton layout). I can appreciate, without sharing, Brian's enthusiasm for Southern Railway Electric stock so what were to me almost identical trains (apart from the Brighton Belle) were a good cross section of the fleet with its HALs, NOLs, SUBs*etc. I was quite fascinated to watch it at a couple of shows so Brian very generously allowed me to operate if for half a day at Watford Finescale- remembering always to fire the photo flash that imitated sparking from the pick up shoes. Brian did have a loco hauled parcels train and used the loco spur as a small goods road so there was some shunting involved but I did operate parcels services far more frequently than was strictly prototypical. Operating it was really useful as it told me what I would need to add to a basic Minories for a layout of my own. I must also say that the "heft" and presence of his stock in 0 was also quite alluring though that is one rabbit hole I have no intention of going down! *I'm quite sure that the subtle differences between OCEMs (FL and RA) including Sanitaires , DEVs (Inox & AO), Bacalans, Est and "Bastilles" etc. would be as meaningless to most of you as the distinctions of Southern Railway EMUs are to me.

Indeed not. Anyone who's followed this thread knows of my fascination with Paris Bastille, a very compact and, during the rush hours, hectically busy five platform terminus serving a single commuter line that stayed faithful to steam and mechanical signalling till it closed at the end of 1969. Until push-pull operation came in its final years it also had an elaborate turnover operation and an incredibly well thought out operating pattern. I would love to have seen it in action and deeply regret not discovering it until about a year after it closed. In many ways Bastille was a larger version of CJF's conception of Minories as an inner city terminus handling a steady flow of tank-loco hauled suburban trains (an ideal project to use Tri-ang's first TT-3 offering of 3Fs and suburban stock and to break the GWR branch line cliché) Nevertheless, despite writing several articles about Bastille and its operation, including for the French RMF magazine, I have absolutely no desire to model it. More or less identical trains hauled by identical locos coming and going in a five-train cycle that simply repeated itself several times during every rush hour with a few paths left empty as things got quieter would simply not appeal to me as a layout to operate. However, a French enthusiast Daniel Combrexelle who knew the line as a child and who wrote two excellent books about it did build a layout based on a very good model of Bastille. He even fitted DCC to a small fleet of Hornby-Acho 131TBs (the Prairie tanks designed for the line that operated it from 1925 until replaced by auto-fitted Mikado tanks in about 1963)

My experience of operating a pure Minories entirely with EMUs is that it got very old very quickly and it would have been the same with DMUs. The loco hauled turnover operation is rather more challenging but again, in its pure form, is a repetitive cycle. I came to the conclusion that I needed more than that for my own layout so concluded that probably the best solution is a reversing terminus (e.g. Fort William, Plymouth Millbay or Littlehampton ) especially those where changes are made to train formations (adding or subtracting vehicles) before they depart along with some goods and parcels operation (Littlehampton even had a docks branch off it to give added variety.) Though on a smaller scale than the sort of main line terminus we're considering I always rather liked Max Pyrke's Berrow branch where the subsidiary terminus East Brent was in front of the fiddle yard and the operating pattern was, for a fairly simple layout, particularly interesting (you don't of course need to actually model the subsidiary terminus). For a long time though I assumed that Berrow's formula of a branch terminus with a twig to a second terminus was rather contrived but have since discovered several real world examples such as Deauville-Trouville for a main line or some of the lines in northern Scotland. This could work particularly well if the terminus is a busy main line one with a branch kicking back from it and possibly taking through coaches from the main trains along with local services (Deauville with the branch to Cabourg was like this) . For a Minories equivalent terminus you could either assume that the junction was a little way up the line (as with Deauville) or treat the double track as two parallel single lines (as at Tulle). If you can arrange things such that the "fiddle yard" works as storage sidings with all the trains you need for an operating session set up in it so that you don't have to handle them during the session, then hiding them behind a scenic feature is more feasible and this would anyway be far more suitable for one operator operation . Maybank- the great grandfather of all main line terminus to sidings layouts- had a four road motorised traverser hidden beneath a high level MPD so was simply charged with trains before each operating session. Unfortunately, I've never seen exactly what a typical operating sequence consisted of but I'd guess that it started with a couple of sets of coaches parked in the platforms and four trains loaded onto the traverser. Then the first train would be a down arrival coming from the first siding followed by a departure to the now empty siding moved over one place over to line up with up line (the traverser required a single button push to advance it one place with an automatic alignment) followed by another down train and so on. With locos coming on and off shed and shunting of goods wagons this could give a great deal of operation with the operators (Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate) doing all their work on stage. NB On your point 3, classifying parcels trains with passenger rather than goods trains seems to have been common internationally. SNCF also classed trains messageries) alongside passenger trains. Trains marchandises formed a second main category and machines HLP (light engines or trains of them) a third. The classification of mixed trains (marchandises voyageurs) was though different from Britain as these were classified as goods trains. Passenger trains could though include a number of suitable goods wagons fitted with passenger as well as goods Westinghouse braking systems) It all makes for some interesting potential operations.

Looking again at Matloughe's plan. It strikes me that, while a scenic feature or rail served industry, such as a quayside, makes sense to hide the fiddle yard for a rear operated exhibition layout, it's likely to be a real PITA for home operation from the front and, unless the layout is in a living room (rather than the garage) where it needs to look attractive (though even here the fiddle yard could be finished neatly as a display cabinet for the stored trains or scenicced to look like storage sidings) not serving any real purpose but just having to be reached over to reach the stored trains. At home, I do have a low barrier in front of the fiddle yard of my own small front operated layout so that trains do have their entries and exits but can be easily reached for crane shunting (I use Kadees so vehicles can be lifted in and out) . One of the first scenic layouts to appear in the early Railway Modeller was Maurice Dean's Culm Valley which occupied one end of a large room. For that he built a fully detailed "junction yard" (complete with run-rounds etc.) which was visually part of the layout but acted operationally as a fiddle yard. It's interesting that his earlier layout Portreath, built on the same boards, had a fiddle yard behind the terminus with a link line to form a continuous run- a neat idea that Wilbert Awdry, among others, used for his first Ffarquhar layout- However , so far as I know, Deane never again used what Cyril Freezer dubbed a "Deane Pattern Fiddle Yard" presumably because leaning over the terminus to reach it wasn't great.

It can be done in 3 m with Peco medium radius pointwork (apart from the single slip which is effectively 2 ft radius) and a double slip replacing the interlaced points in the goods sidings. The important thing was the use he made of scenic breaks; the overbridge (a valauble part of CJF's plan that most versions of Minories seem to ignore) and a short overall roof at the buffer end of the station which meant you never realised just how short the layout was. The only thing I didn't like so much was the complete separation of goods and passenger operations which is why I like the the kickback goods sidings version of Minories that CJF later adopted (and those can be extended back into the fiddle yard. I used to operate Giles Barnabe's 0n30 Puerto Paseo layout at exhibitions (it's now part of his permanent home layout) which had a version of this which I really liked in the form of a kickback track to the docks (actually two roads in the fiddle yard) as well as a small two road goods yard alongside the terminus. The turntable was for turning single ended railcars. tender locos were turned at the depot up the line (i.e. in the fiddle yard) Puerto Paseo (2x 4ft 6ins x 18 ins) plan based on photos so not exactly to scale As usual, Giles had developed a detailed and very effective operating sequence for the layout which took about 45-60 minutes to work through and left everything at starting positions.

I agree with Compound about using Bradfield Gloucester Road as inspiration, at least for passenger and parcels movements but also take a look at Geoff Ashdown's sheets for Tower Pier that I posted her on Sept 10th along with the track diagram. he did separate goods and passenger operations completely but had obviously worked it out well as it was fascinating to watch at exhibtions.

Hi Gary You are struggling to fit a quart into a pint pot but so are most of us. I can't help thinking that if you're prepared to accept the degree of throwover (the ends of coaches wildly out of line with one another) inherent in using small radius points with main line coaches, then you might as well use the straight throat equivalent to Minories and avoid the extra reverse curve into the platforms (I'd probably introduce a gentle curve through the platforms to avoid it all being too straight. Cyril Freezer's whole point with the Minories throat was to enable trains to snake rather than lurch through the approach by avoiding all but one of the the immediate reverse curves inerent in the straight version. However, they lurch through even a single small radius point so the benefit is lost and you also then have Minories' rather unnatural double S through the station exagerated by the small radii. I did some tests with both Minories and straight crossovers. This is what I found with a Minories throat using small radius points And this is with a straight crossover There doesn't seem to be a lot in it. This test was with H0 French coaches but these are about the same length as a 00 mk 1. The smaller scale does make the throwover relatively greater but the amount of lurching is the same. With the straight throat you do at least have a straight run for trains departing from platform 1 and arriving at platform 2 (and the curves into platform 3 are not too bad) It's interesting that the space you have is only nine inches longer than the late Geoff Ashdown had for his EM Tower Pier, (see images and plans etc earlier in this topic) which was more or less equivalent to Minories but in a straight throat and of course using bespoke hand made pointwork. That layout could handle three suburban coaches or a quad art with a tank loco or a diesel. Assuming you're using Peco track I'd suggest getting hold of some cheap manky old code 100 points etc. from an exhibtion bring and buy and using those to try out potential designs with real stock before committing to buying the new track you will use.

I was thinking more of something like Dieppe Maritime which had a double track approach and was served by Pacifics (which did their own shunting) but yes, Weymouth Quay is the obvious British example though perhaps with rather more upmarket services. For sleepers in Britain it would need to be far enough from London so serving either services to Ireland or possibly the Scottish Islands. That's the great virtue of a tightly constrained harbour railway like say Dieppe with two platform faces, Folkestone which only AFAIK had a couple of platforms as did Stranraer (plus a bay at one time). Fishguard Harbour had two passenger platform roads plus a third that could be brought into use for extra demand such as for the Cunard services (there was also a fourth siding that could have been used for passengers but AFAIK never was. At its peak, Dieppe, which was built on an existing narrow quayside with cafés, chandlers, and shops along its shorward side, could handle three trains at once and, apart from the main services to Paris and Rouen, these could include trains of couchettes taking British holidaymakers down to the Spanish frontier.

Airplane was technically a remake of the 1957 lowish budget "Zero Hour" (which the writers bought the remake rights for) with the same plot and many of the same lines. According to Wiki, the writers, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, who were used to writing comedy, used Zero Hour's plot structure because they had never written a feature film before, so weren't sure how to structure one. The scripts for Both Zero Hour and Airport were written by Arthur Hailey who had originally written the teleplay for the live 1956 Canadian TV drama Flight into Danger that Zero Hour was based on. A fun fact I hadn't known about Airplane was that, after auditioning and rejecting several voice actors for the red zone, white zone skit at the beginning, they found and used the married couple who had recorded the actual kerbside announcements for LAX. If Airplane was a serious film turned into comedy is Night Sleeper something of the reverse from Silver Streak?

Try this site Paul- they have photos of tugs from all the major (and minor) Thames tug companies covering 1833-2020 http://thamestugs.co.uk/MULBERRY-TUGS-[3].php Your scenario seems eminently possible. There were tugs towing lighters all over the Thames. Keeping this on topic- Minories has long struck me as a very suitable plan for a ferry port, probably with an extra inset quayside siding either alongside platform three or as a long extension to the loco road parallel to platform one, In either case the front baseboard edge would be the quayside so saving having to build any actual ships but you could probably tuck in a bit of harbour for a tug. This would be a good excuse for things like Pullmans, sleeping cars etc. that you wouldn't normally expect to find at a smallish terminus.

You're surely not suggesting that this very serious drama series has anything at all in common with a run of the mill disaster movie 😁. Question. If a long train like this did go at full speed into the buffers at Euston or King's Cross, how survivable would it be for the passengers if they'd been in the last coach? I seem to remember that in the 1988 Gare de Lyon disaster most if not all the fatalities were in the front coaches of the stationary train as, in the short time leading up to the crash, passengers in the runaway train had moved back down the train. Clearly a train crash is far more survivable than a plane crash but how much more?

Have no fear Damo. The risk assessments for TV productions are very thorough these days (they weren't always!) and no way would an actor be anywhere near live OHLE under any circumstances or on the roof of a moving train unless some very elaborate precautions had been taken. It all got very serious after the 1986 death of Michael Lush in a stunt for the Late Late Breakfast Show. Following that we had compulsory Hazard Assesment training and had to carry out a formal assessment for every film or studio programme we were directing, however apparently innocuous. It's amazing how many real risks you identify when you really start thinking seriously about it. The training did actually involve analysing a sequence in which someone did run along the roof of a moving train. It was done perfectly safely but certainly didn't look like it on screen.

I rather enjoyed the first two episodes of Night Sleeper which required rather less suspension of belief than I'd anticipated. I was expecting a really good laugh at the producers' expense with something as absurd as The Cassandra Crossing but, in the event, found it far better than that, both as a drama and in terms of rail probability. Credibility was stretched of course but not to breaking point and they'd anticipated the obvious, why not just turn the power off, with a hybrid loco. There were absurdities of course, including that the locomotive was totally separate from the rest of the train but could be controlled from it, including disabling the dead man's system; that all the emergency door releases could be centrally overriden; that one hackable system controlled every aspect of the train's operation; and that in an out of control train, liable to collide with something at any time, the passengers hadn't already been directed to the rear carriage.

Hi Tim I must find out what the ruling radius is at Pendon (on the EM displays not the MVR) Stewart Hine's rule of thumb (for SG) probably does make sense in avoiding compromise if you have the room for it. Full scale is 304 mm/ft so that would make for a minimum radius of roughly 100 m or about 2/3 of the current (exceptional) minimum radius of 150 m for passenger lines or about 3/4 of the 125 m (exceptional) radius for non-passenger lines. For the London Undeground, I believe the minimum radius is 60 m so the Underground line on Copenhagen Fields could prototypically use curves sharper than 1ft for every mm of scale. for most of us with less room I think three foot should be the absolute minimum for SG points in H0 or 00. Tony Gee will know how well such pointwork, as built by Peter Denny, suits EM. For me, the important question is what radius enables proper corridor connections between main line coaches (obviously greater for crossovers). It always seems daft to have coaches to exact scale with every last detail present but yawning gaps between them.

The original BRMSB recommendations for 00 (both "standard" and "fine scale" i.e. EM) were a minimum radius of 30 inches for plain track and 3ft for points. The latter seemed to be a de-facto standard for pointwork used by most "serious" modellers in 00 (and I believe that quite a lot of Peter Denny's EM pointwork is three foot radius) and point kits offered by the likes of SMP tended to be three foot radius as well. That involved some compromises but nothing like those required to get proprietary steam locos round 15 or 18 inch radius curves. It's interesting that Peco claim their current TT medium turnout (nominal radius 922mm or 3 foot) to be a close match to the geometry of a BR B6 turnout (though, unless my maths is out, the 11.5 deg. crossing angle looks more like 1 in 5 than 1 in 6)

I actually found the same when I turned to N. American railways (it was Canadian so rlys. not RRs) in the 1970s and even then found that most manufacturers stuck to NMRA standards and it worked - both with Shinohara and turnouts I built myself. The standards were certainly not fine scale but even the least expensive "shake-the-box" car kits used the same RP25/110 wheel profiles (as we'd call them now- just RP25 then) as the best "craftsman" kits so all my rolling stock rolled smoothly through the turnouts without any lurches or wheel drop and derailments (other than those caused by finger trouble) were rare. My interests then turned to European prototypes- still in H0- and I was back in the world of inconsistent, often very coarse, wheel standards and the "universal" (i.e. compromised) pointwork that they forced Peco etc. to use.

I agree. Though I was always aware of those four I can remember references to the North Devon Railway that I didn't then know anything about and I wonder if everyone knows what Charford and Berrow were. Also, so far as I was concerned Castle Rackrent was the simple terminus-fiddle yard built in a bedsit that had been the June 1975 Railway of the Month not the multi-station affair that it grew into. That was despite knowing Richard Chown through Courcelles-Part which he brought south several times . Courcelles-Part at Watford Fine Scale 2012 One of the buildings was tall enough to hold a bottle of wine so, even at the most "dry" venues, Richard would offer un verre de rouge to SNCF Society members, those he knew or anyone else who took enough intelligent interest in the layout. I did also get to see Allendac a couple of times, at the Gauge O Guild anniversary and at Ally Pally but I still knew nothing of the enlarged Castle Rackrent and may indeed not have associated it with Richard. Fortunately, the Madder Valley is not fabled but very real and can be seen in operation at Pendon on Saturday 28th September and Saturday 16th November.

It's good to hear from you and don't worry. I use Google translate (with some care as it still gets some things wrong*) for my posts on Forums LR Presse (the nearest French equivalent to RMWeb) I look forward to learning more about your Sainte-Apolline layout. *my favourite was its literal translation of Voie Ferrée as "Shoed Road" though it's much better nowadays. Réseau means network (as in the Réseau Breton) but in our field of interest it means layout.

Update I've just watched the "Golden Fleece" episode of Maigret again and examined a couple of Frecnh waterways guides from around that time. I'm now certain it was filmed at the Ecluse Longueil-Annel (Oise) now known as Ecluse 4 (Janville) the last lock on the Canal latéral à l’Oise before it joins the River Oise (which is canalised and navigable down stream from there) at Janville. This double chamber lock had the overhead aerial electric tractor "Chéneau" system to help non motorised boats to enter and exit the lock more efficiently as well as the CGTVN line (which predated it) running through to the barge port at the end of the canal at Janville. it's about 100km from Janville to the Oise's confluence with the Seine just to the west of Paris. Janville was as close as the towing railway network came to Paris with "touage" by tugs available for unpowered barges going on down the Oise. Images of this lock from when the railway was in use show several tractors there. and there was a siding near the lock for spare tractors to be kept. so they presumably dropped their tow for it to be taken through the lock to be picked up at the other end. The Chéneau system, which can be seen working in the episode was remotely operated by the lock keeper along with the gates and sluices from an overhead control cabin. Although we see quite a lot of the towing railway in the episode the tractors are simply shuffling up and down rater aimlessly without tows, (doubtless as requested by the director) The buildings in old postcard views also look to be the same as the BBC location though looking at it on Street View it all looks rather different today.

A very interesting set of images there Schooner. I don't disagree about the prevalence of sailing vessels among the deep-sea ships present in the docks and river, really until the development of efficient triple expansion engines, and Thames sailing barges were still working into the 1950s and at their most numerous around 1900. However, deep sea cargo ships spent an awful lot of time in port so in terms of traffic, with all those steam tugs dragging them around, the passenger steamers chugging up and down the river before the railways really got going (and later as pleasure trips) I'm sure that the steam vessels made up a significant portion of the traffic on the river and added their share to London's general miasma. One aside is that , after the 1878 SS Princess Alice disaster (that killed around 640 people), the river police were finally equipped with steam launches as there had only been rowing boats to try to rescue the survivors. Looking at this contemporary engraving it's interesting to note that the SS Bywell Castle, the large screw collier that she was in collision with, looks more like a sailing ship than a steamer. There also seem to be a fair number of similar ships, fully rigged but steam powered, in your 1850 Illustrated London News colour image, and only a handful of sailing vessels actually under sail- only three that I can see above Greenwich but eight steamers making smoke. That's only an artist's impression of course

Surely far more than a whiff and more like a fog of steam by 1879 . There are numerous references in popular songs etc. from well before 1829 - some as early as 1818- to trips on steam boats on the Thames, often from the Pool of London to the towns further down river as far as Margate. By 1825 the General Steam Navigation Co. was already operating a fleet of fifteen steamers between London, Margate and points in between and when the London Bridge -Greenwich railway was proposed in 1831, the main objections came from the stagecoach and steam boat operators - so the latter were by then clearly well established. These were all passenger boats of course and deep sea steam cargo services probably had to wait until compounding had been established. I've no idea how much short haul cargo was carried by steam ships or towed in lighters by steam tugs. The first steam tug on the Thames was the Majestic in 1816 and by 1830 the London and St Katharine dock companies were using them to tow sailing ships up-river past the competing West India Docks.

You are quite right of course but almost everyone (including me, despite having been there several times) seems to get it wrong, including Geoff Ashdown who was completely consistent in referring to St Katherine Docks (at least he got the K and the non possesive - not St Katharine's - right) I suppose it's because Katharine is such an unusual version of the name, at least in English. The print is interesting as there is not a whiff of steam to be seen neither in any of the vessels in the docks nor on the river. I'd have thought that by 1829 (the date of this print the year after the docks opened) that was surely no longer true.

I'm not sure if there was any more of it as I saw the WTT sheet for 09:00 -noon at three different shows. The 2014 one did say "over" in the bottom right hand corner but I never did see what was on the back. Below are my images of the sheets from ExpoEM 2011, Watford Fines Scale 2012 and ExpoEM 2014 so you can compare them and Geoff Ashdown's development of the timetable for yourself. Looking at them together the first two appear to be identical and the same piece of paper but the third is rather different albeit covering the same period. Geoff did have regular operating sessions with friends at his home in Southend (sadly, an eye problem then Covid meant I never did take up his invitation to make the journey there to join one of them). It's possible that he had a more complete timetable for those sessions and simply took the 9-12 sheet to exhibitions. in my experience as an operator at exhibitions, you need a sequence that can be worked through in a reasonable time (maybe 45 mins) followed by a breather for the operators and ideally ending up with everything back in the starting positions for the next run. You can make that "a day in the life" but you don't have to and for a busy urban terminus like Tower Pier a whole day would probably be too long for an operating sequence. These sheets cover a three hour period and, while it may just be chance that I happened to see the same period at three different shows, what are the chances? (1in 4 if there were just two sheets, exponentially longer odds if there were more) ExpoEM 2011 Watford Fine Scale 2012 ExpoEM 2014 Just to save you having to look it up, here is the Signal Box Diagram

Giles Barnabe had a 00n3 layout Midhaven that he acknowledged as being heavily influenced by the Madder Valley but I'd have to dig out the June 1971 MRC that featured it to compare the track plans. Apart from being a point to point line set in a valley with a good amount of scenery.The Augher Valley wasn't, so far as one can tell, based on the Madder Valley but was very firmly based on the Irish 3ft lines. It looked very attractive but I don' t think David Lloyd ever completed the scenery for the upper end, or if he did he didn't AFAIK write about it. The 00n3 layout you're thinking of is probably Derek Naylor's Aire Valley. Though he never AFAIK acknowledged the Madder Valley's influence, the track plan and general arrangement of Saltaire was, apart from the loco depot accessed as a kickback from the dock siding, very similar to Madderport and Moorhead had quite a lot of commonality with Much Madder though there was generally far less room for scenery or townscapes. Nethertarn though was very different from any of John Ahern's upper termini and the general arrangement was, like the Augher Valley, a single line going up the valley. That was the arrangement of early versions of the MVR but the final versions included the branch to Gammon End. The complete set of RM articles about the Aire Valley are here https://issuu.com/tombell17/docs/aire_valley_complete. The one thing that both David Lloyd and Derek Naylor had which, so far as we can tell, John Ahern never produced were timetables for their railways. The Madder Valley is quite definitely a light railway. I don't think there's be much point in a total copy of the MVR- the original does after all still exist- but a good approach might be to consider the valley of the River Madder as a real place with its two towns and villages that John Ahern had modelled, obviously with a great deal of compression, and set out to model that to finer scale standards. The basic features would be much the same but one could adjust the trackplans on the assumption that JHA had done the same. As an operable track plan, Much Madder is the least convincing of the four stations so could do with adjusting.