Pacific231G

It's a perfectly rational way of expressing the frequency . 0.5tph is six characters and fits in with frequency measures for other lines. 1 train/2hours is rather more to put on a legend and would be different from the way it's expressed for other lines.

At the risk of going OT from Johann's fascinating thread why not? Double deck railway coaches have been around at least since 1853 when the C.F. de l’Ouest came up with them for its Paris suburban services from St. Lazare! closely followed by the Nord and the Est. Enclosed and open double deck carriages at St Germain en Laye around 1900. The oriignal open upper deck type were absolute deathtraps but survived until the 1930s while the later enclosed type (but stilll with outside stairs) were used for another twenty or so years Train loading at Montmorency in about 1950 The last user of these four wheel double deck coaches was on the short but very steep independent line from Enghien to Montmorency ,in the northern outer suburbs of Paris, which used them until it closed in 1954. They had though been very widely used on several suburban commuter routes into Paris including into Bastille where they were only replaced by ex DRG single deck bogie coaches in the late 1940s. In the nineteenth century there had even been double deck steam railcars in France and Germany One of two steam railcars built by the Etat railway in France in 1880 to make operation of lightly used lines as economical as possible (no photos of them seem to exist I think because the Etat was rather ashamed of them) Similar but rather larger double deck steam railcar that could accommodate eighty passengers designed by Georg Thomas of the Hessische Ludwigsbahn in Germany in about 1880 and used by several German railway companies. Though double deck trains are often used now to increase capacity for the same platform lengths, the main reason for introducing them was because their tare weight per passenger was lower so more passengers could be handled withourt needing more powerful locomotives.

Sorry. I meant to add the OS map but got distracted. Here is a composite of the six inch maps covering the whole route of the Latime rRoad and Acton Railway with the line of the built but abandoned section marked in red alng with the rather obvious line where the shape of Frithville Gardens shows a route joining the H&C between its Shepherds Bush station (now Shepherds Bush Market) and the future location of the original H&C Wood Lane station . I assume the long thin parcel of land running west to east just to the north of Frithville Gardens (where the upper Hammersmith legend is) is a purchase for a line to the WLER though that's not certain.This map must have been surveyed before 1901 as Wormwood Scrubs is marked as Her Majesty's Prison. Despite the railway's name there's no sign of it ever having got close to Latimer Road station (also marked in red). There would have been little point as a junction there would simply have taken it back to to the GWML which it had left at Acton. If you want to trace its intended route in greater detail the details were in the London Gazette London Gazette Nov 26 1886 p 5883.pdf

A good memory Paul. I can't remember where I saw it- it may have been the MRC show- but Wyandotte Transfer directly inspired my own first "serious" layout which was an H0 N.American switching/shortline terminus. I thought though that it was earlier than the 1980s but it certainly led to many visits to Victors to buy boxcars etc. We've had the same reaction at Ally Pally a few times when the "continental" layouts and society stands tended to be grouped together and one often heard visitors saying "Oh it's all foreign here" before walking away.

I don't know about the Lincoln tipper but I just found this image of Corrall Queen loco passing over the tippler https://www.flickr.com/photos/52467480@N08/6454426137/sizes/l/ If you're interested in this location, George Woods took a very good sequence sequence of photos at Corrall's in Southampton in 1971. They're alll in his album of British Industrial locos on flickr and, though they focus on the loco, show the atmosphere of the place very well https://www.flickr.com/photos/52467480@N08/albums/72157628278328931/page1

There is another image of the tippler at Dibdens Wharf here. https://live.staticflickr.com/7035/6454428569_ef2b9e675c_b.jpg I assume it was taken by the same photographer at the same time as this one https://live.staticflickr.com/7032/6454429733_e213dc7cb9_b.jpg

I got as far as finding this line sketched into a gazeteer but there seems to have been doubt about whether it was going to join the H&C or the West London Extension. I also found some interesting land parcels and street lines between the abandoned section from Acton and the H&C on the 25 inch OS maps.

In crowded locations the legend for buildings does seem to get a bit distant but the S.B. legend is consistent with those on the same line so I think the actual signalbox is on the platform to the left of the station building and what may be a lamp room where I've marked it in red In the goods yard, which is at a lower level than the station, you've got an end and side loading dock (where the S.B. legend is) , a fairly large two road goods shed and what may be a short mileage siding (where the hard standing is marked north of the goods shed. I assume that wagons to and from the engineering works would be left on the left hand end of that siding and brought to and from it by the works loco, or perhaps earlier judging by the wagon turntables, a horse. I can't really see the size of the Atlantic Works then justifying a loco but looking at the 1936 OS map https://maps.nls.uk/view/114581806 you can see that that the Atlantic Works have expanded massively and there's even what looks like a small loco shed in the north east corner of the new works to the north of the mainline. The signal box has now disappeared from the station (where it can only have been a small block post) with a new box larger replacing both it and a second box that originally controlled the entrance to the now presumably much busier goods branch. Looking beyond the station the Linotype works (vital to newpaper production) on the Bridgewater Canal a little to the south had also expanded (but without a rail connection) and, rather tragically, there was a "radium works (polish &c)" on the sounth bank of the canal a little to the south east of the station. One can only wonder what exposure to radium did to both its workers and customers. All that light industry probably explains why a minor station needed such a large goods shed.

It's clear that the tippler is not at the end of a siding and you can see the corner of the previous wagon at the left-hand edge of the photo. That makes the shunting quite interesting as each wagon that has been tippled has to be pushed off it, the next wagon has then to be placed, uncoupled and the rest of the cut pulled away. Looking at the trackplan from the planning documents the only rough positions for it that I can find where curves of the adjoining tracks fit are those I've marked in red. One of those requires an additional track to be laid so the one on the eastern side of the site seems the more likely especially as there seems to be a ship to the left of the tippler and I think the buildings in the far background may well be those on the other side of the Itchen

eaw020006 Unfortunately, the NLS collection only has 25 inch maps up to to 1933 and I think the track layout must have changed a lot between then and the 1960s-1980s This is the line into Belvidere shipyard In photos from the 1960s there is a second large gasholder where the 1933 map shows Allotment Gardens. This also appears in a 1948 Aerofilms aerial photo (eaw020006) that shows the site in great detail. Belvidere Shipyard became Dibden's Wharf and in 1948 it was already a coal yard though with more of the former shipyard buildings than seem to be there later. There is no sign of a coal tippler in 1948 but there are a couple of rail mounted dockside portal cranes with grabs for unloading coal from ships.

A very useful prototype. When I worked in South Western House in the 1980s I used occasionally to see Corrall's shunting loco, by then a diesel rather than the 0-4-0T Corrall Queen (aka Normandy), moving cuts of wagons across Belvedere or Brittania Road (I don't remember which) but had no idea they had a wagon tippler in there. https://www.bulleidsociety.org/96/96_Gallery.html

Welcome Simon Denis Allenden's articles were/are indeed inspiring and he'd clearly managed to visit a number of the last surviving d-Intêret Local metre gauge lines before they succumbed (though his Sainte-Colline-des-Champs always struck me as more of a large diorama than a working layout). He also inadvertedly convinced a generation of Anglophone modellers that the station at Le Mortier-Gumond was a typical example of those found on French secondaires up and down the country rather than being very distinctively unique to the Tramways de Correze (which is a bit like assuming that a GWR Pagoda was a generic type of British station building) Fortunately, the station buildings on SG d'Intêret Locals seem to have generally been built from similar plans as those used for most local stations on the national network though their trackplans were often simpler and occupying smaller total sites. My own H0 layout has always been a bit vague about whether it's SNCF or not though I think i've concluded that it's a d'Intêret local but operated by an SNCF subisidiary (as others were by CFTA or VFL) so able to borrow/hire SNCF locos. BTW, are you a member of the French Railways Society?

I agree. It was always what I didn't like about John Allen's Timesaver and, though I have seen good layouts based on it, the shunting always seemed rather conrtrived. On the other hand Enigma looks convincing as a layout serving various loading or unloading points for a factory or as the track on a quayside while Inglenook is a fairly typical local goods yard that you might often find in France, Britain, N. America and likely elsewhere where one siding served a goods shed and loading bank while the other- mileage siding (UK) team track (US) voie de transbordement (Fr)- serviced wagonload goods that traders loaded and unloaded themselves. A wagon tippler would certainly make a feature but a simpler way of maximising shunting would be a weighbridge that every outgoing wagonload would have to pass over. In some ways a goods yard without a weighbridge is a bit like a shop without a cash register (though in Britain they often weighed carts and road vehicles rather than wagons.

It is a four foot long (plus a fiddle siding from which and to where trains go but not allowed for shunting) layout built in P4. It was the second of the plans I suggested on Sunday at 01.29 and is simply two crossovers facing one another. All three sidings and the head-shunt will take two wagons but, since 5050 built it, he can give you chaper and verse on it and the card based shunting puzzle used for it.

Paul, you'd obviously know better than anyone but, compared with Inglenook, I reckoned that Enigma probably offered more interesting shunting in the same four foot length simply because one of the sidings faces in the opposite direction so you have to make judicious use of the run round loop. For a factory with multiple loading points it also looked particularly convincing- as did your American H0 equivalent (in five feet?) . Having built it in P4 do you think it would work with Peco short Streamline points or equivalent? A friend of mine did build an H0 shunting layout using Setrack but had a lot of derailments. It's interesting (maybe) that Peter Denny used the same basic plan in EM - though with a longer total length- for his original Leighton Buzzard (Linslade) station and said that, for its size, it was interesting to shunt.

I just watched the opening of Bulldog Drumond's Secret Police (1939) on TPTV and it was hilarious. It opens with Drummond and companions in his car chasing a very American train through very Southern Californian scenery. Cut to a wide shot of a station with a real GWR train arriving (1st vehicle choc and cream the rest chocolate) obviously a stock shot. It then cuts to a very American looking carved station sign saying Rockingham followed by a sequence in which a passenger from said train is having a conversation with a porter (in what looks like GWR uniform but with a cat draped over his shoulders!) asks the way to Temple Tower to which Drummond and co are also heading . We then see the exterior of Temple Tower, where the rest of the action takes place, which looks like a fairly typical American millionaire's "European" castle. I can't believe that even the dimmest audience member could fail to spot the disparity. There's a similar disparity, but the other way round and an odd one, in the "Wild West Chronicles", a series currently running, which depicts Bat Masterson, as a newspaper reporter returning to the west to interview eye witnesses to a range of actual stories. Masterson was a real character who went west as a young man and for a time was the Sheriff of Dodge City before moving on to be a gambler and ultimately a Journalist in New York. Though Masterson did write eight articles about characters of the Wild West (though not about his own life there) his story finding trip back west for a mythical newsapaper called "The Journal" (Masterson was actually a sports columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph) seems purely fictional. The format does work well though and makes a change from endless historians being interviewed. The stories are all true, mostly not well known, and clearly well reseached. The filming locations were in California and included a couple of authentically American railway scenes involving actors, notably the real "Great Train Robbery" (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid's hole in the wall gang) , which makes it very strange that the opening sequence showing Masterson ,now a journalist, on a train heading west, is vey obviously a train of four wheel open platform carriages hauled by a very German or Central European looking tank loco. This does seem odd, unless the opening sequence was an afterthought, as there is plenty of preserved steam from that era in the real American West.

Inglenook is always a good start though a bit limiting but there is a version, which will fit in four feet by a foot, where the five road siding is hidden and acts as a fiddle yard. Raymond Butler used this arrangement for a very attactive and self contained layout in 4ft by 13 ins. in H0 and followed the usual Inglenook sidings rules that the headshunt could take a loco and three wagons clear of the first point, the long, mainly hidden siding could take five wagons and the two goods yard sidings could take three wagons each. This is in H0 with French four wheel wagons about 4 inches long over couplings so should work in 00 with traditional British 10ft wb wagons. Raymond's layout folds over to form a two foot long box. (The medieval tower lifts off to reveal the front hinge) I do though rather prefer the two crossover plan, which also fits into four feet by one (or a bit less than 12") and I've seen it used in that length even in P4. (Paul Gittins' Enigma Engineering BRM 11/2006) For Enigma engineering the rules were that the run round could hold three wagons clear of the points and the four other tracks could take two wagons each. There was a fiddle yard to the right but the gate was closed during shunting operations (which were based on a card system similar to those used for Inglenooks. I also rather like this plan This was basically the plan that Chris Krupa used for his 009 Minbury Abbas layout which was 26 ins. long by 10 ins wide. Having seem it in action several times I admired this scheme so tried laying it out in four feet in H0 and it does all fit (again using longer European wagons) . The basic rules are that the front left headshunt (that ends with a loco shed on Chris' layout) will take a loco and two wagons while the right hand "main line" will take a loco and three wagons clear of the point and that length of train can also be hidden off stage, As you can see in the photo, Chris laid it out rather more attractively than my basic plan with the line laid at an angle across the board and slightly curved. The way I laid it out as a standard gauge line was on the basis that the line at the back is the main line so is straight while the sidings are a small, possibly private yard off it with its own headshunt. This layout can actually be worked with two locos and watching Chris operating it, it allowed for rather more shunting than an Inglenook with a passenger station to boot. To my surprise I did actually come across this plan in reality on a disused line in France where it had been the private sidings for a grain silo. Wagons were delivered and picked up by the SNCF pick up goods train but the actual shunting of the yard itself was done with capstans. However such installations frequently had their own small four wheel shunter. My plan allows for extensions at both ends to make it a main line halt with other trains running through between two fiddle yards for exhibitions. All three plans have been used succesfully in 00 or H0 in four feet of length so I hope they give you some ideas or at least food for thought.

Can we learn anything from the exhibition scene in other countries (even though post Brexit customs requirements now make it much harder to actually take layouts to them from Britain and vice-versa as we used to )? I've noticed that in France most club exhibtions- which almost all the regular exhibitions are- seem to be biennial. Perhaps that puts less strain on a club's human resources while model railway clubs, though fewer in number than in Britain, also seem to have a higher proportion of younger members). The emphasis also seems to be on showing off the hobby, not on raising funds for the club. Possibly for that reason, local clubs seem to benefit from sports halls etc. being regarded as a public good for a range of leisure activities by local authorities rather than as a revenue generator. The large annual two-day exhibition held every January in St. Mandé (a suburban town at the end of the Paris Métro) is even held in the town hall. However, one of the best and largest biennial exhibitions - the one in Orleans- wasn't held in 2022 and won't be returning in that form because the city passed its large exhibtion halls to a private operator who naturally bumped up its rates (and cannot yet provide WiFi which is a no-no for traders) Loco-Revue (the largest circulation model railway magazine in France) did organise two large three-day exhibitions "Trainsmania" in Lille, the first and larger of them inn 2017 to mark its own 80th anniversary. They were planning to make this show biennial and held a show in 2019 and a virtual show during the pandemic in 2021, but decided not to hold one in 2023 given uncertainties about likely attendances. Trainsmania is the only sponsored Model Railway exhibtion that I'm aware of but there are multi-format model shows like the biennial RAMMA in Sedan (next one in June 2024) where the local mulidisciplinary model club (based in a large social centre) partners with the town, département and region and with Edtions Loco-Revue. I know very little about them but it might be interesting to also find out what MRCs in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany do in terms of exhibitions.

Indeed. I got that screengrab from a cabride video from Bordeaux to Pointe de Grave and another was the line from Bordeaux to Arcachon and on both there were quite a few grey painted masts both vertical and ogive. They looked like aluminium but I think that may well have just been the surface coating.

Though I did a two day Fortran course at University my first professional encounter with a computer was soon after graduating in 1973, working at one of the University of London colleges for six months before starting with World Service. Our research group had a load of data on punch cards which muggins- the research assistant- landed the job of re-sorting. It was a choice between about three very tedious days sorting the data cards manually or writing a program to do the job for me. The college had a "terminal room" for the IBM main frame at UCL where, along with card punching machines, there was a Texas Industries scientific calculator chained to the desk like a medieval bible. My program was only about 15 lines and I would hand it in on top of the data deck and a few hours later get a printout with the latest crop of syntax errors. I eventually got the program to run and, though it took four days, I eventually got a nice new deck of sorted data- far more interesting than hand sorting the cards. I bought a secondhand Sinclair Spectrum in about 1984, but it wasn't until 1986 that I started using computers for scriptwriting, when I worked on the BBC's MicroLive programme. I started, not surprisingly, with a BBC Micro but then got hold of the Toshiba 1000 laptop PC I'd used in a film demonstrating international e-mail (Telecomm gold and its Dutch equivalent if anyone remembers that far back). I actually still have the Tosh though I've not tried running it recently. They were very popular with journalists and I used it as a word processor for several years. It had no hard drive and just one 3.5 inch disk drive so you loaded a copy of WordPerfect from a working floppy with enough space on it to also save the work onto (though I generally backed up onto a second disk) .

Hi Jon Re the colour of apparently rusty catenary masts. This is the end of the line at Pointe de Grave at the mouth of the Gironde , where the ferries to Royan go from. I've seen a lot of 150v DC catenary masts (both vertical and Ogives) that colour in S.W. France. The line is operated by EMUs but also serves the port of Le Verdon which part of the Bordeaux port handling container, timber and cruise ship traffic. OT, There used to be a fascinating private SG light railway at Pointe de Grave operated by the Bordeaux port authority mainly for stabilisation works (dumping sand and rocks to prevent coastal erosion) but also used for taking buoys etc from their works to the quayside. Its "main line" to Soulac-sur-mer" is used for a tourist operation using ex SNCF draisines but the first time I went there in about 2000 a transfer yard alongside the SNCF line (a few hundred metres behind the image above) was still partially intact (there's now no trace of it) as were sections of the port authority railway that crossed the SNCF and then spread out to the various works and quays to the east (to the right of this view) Looking at Google Earth most of this along with the various sub branches that came off the line to Soulac seem to have been tidied away.

No idea I'm afraid but I assume that, like everywhere else, there are Japanese modellers who prefer to pursue their own niche choices of scale/gauge. For some people, modelling in a scale where where everything has to be scratchbuilt is a positive attraction. 1/43 is interesting (though OT for a discussion of TT120) as it's generally the flavour of 0 scale used in Britain and France as opposed to the more common 1/45 in the rest of Europe and 1/48 in N. America. Speaking of restricted space requirements and scale, I was rather amused to find this by Henry Greenly in an edition of Model Railways (the world's first dedicated railway modelling magazine) from 1909 describing the "gauge No. 2" (2inch gauge ) model railway of Mr. H.F.R. Franklin."The first thing the model railway engineer must settle upon is the site for his line and how he can to the best advantage utilise the space available. Except where cost and space is limited, gauge No. 0 need not be considered...Gauge No. 1 is quite suitable and can be well recommended for all rooms of medium size" Mr. Franklin's indoor live-steam two-inch gauge layout was about 14 x 10 ft with a double track main line and a minimum radius of about 4ft 3in, more or less equivalent to the 12 in. standard radius used by Tri-ang for TT-3, though Greenly did go on to say that in 2 in. gauge "scale models of large modern engines - of the six-coupled type, to wit- cannot be made to traverse curves of 6 or 7 feet radius. Franklin's largest loco was a 4-4-0 GER "Claud Hamilton".

I believe that some Japanese modellers do indeed use 1:120 scale with 9mm gauge track to represent 3ft 6in gauge (as do some New Zealand modellers) but I've not heard of anything being commercially avaialable. In principle that would also enable the use of TT scale with 12mm gauge for the standard gauge Sinkansens. However, Japan with its very small homes is unusual with N being far more popular than H0 (almost a niche scale there) mostly with a scale of 1:150 for Japanese trains but 1:160 for Shinkansen. Although the hobby is very popular in Japan, a lot of modellers don't even have room for an N gauge model railways so TT wouldn't help. Microlayouts were (and I assume still are) popular in Japan often using 9mm gauge for H0e narrow gauge though the 30" gauge (762mm) used in Japan is not that common. When the county's standard gauge is 3ft 6ins (1067mm) the advantages of using a narrower gauge become less.

Nice thought Colin but I think the satellites used for uplinks are all geostationary. There used to be a whole farm of satellite dishes on the roof of a low building to one side of TV Centre and I never saw them tracking. BTW I'm quite amused watching Fireball XL5 on TPTV. There the whole "Space City" HQ building goes round and round rather than just the radar dish! The horizontal ski jump launcher is also quite good fun (I suppose that is a sort of railway!)

Hi Nick and Paul OnTopic In 2001, the setup modelled by you Paul would be pretty typical for a live report- You could add a stand light or two or even just the director pointing a "hand basher" at the reporter (been there done that many times) but I don't think they'd add much and the scene is fine without it. OFFTOPIC - so read no further if you don't want to. Nick, it IS possible to get broadcast quality pictures and even sound from a Smartphone. In fact, in May I produced a practical session for the Royal Television Society on this very topic (with ex BBC News camerawoman and mobile journalism trainer Deirdre Mulcahy). However, though they are useful for when the reporter gets to a story before their crew, is on holiday when all hell breaks loose , or wants to film very discretely, a Smartphone (which does have limitations) is no substitute for a properly equipped news crew which, for a mainstream news channel, would normally include a reporter, cameraman (or woman), sound recordist and possibly a producer. If you try to use a crew that's too small (e.g. just a camera operator and reporter) then things actually take longer and screw-ups (like recording an interview and finding a buzz or nothing at all on the audio) are far more likely. Jack of all trades applies to TV production as much as to anything else (though the crews of 15-20 or more that ITV sent to Downing Street for simple interviews with Thatcher did the TV industry no good at all) ENG/mobile trucks are by no means obsolete even today. If you're in the field (espcially if it's a very large field) you can't alway rely on getting a 4G or 5G connection so modern ENG trucks can often switch automatically between those and a satellite connection. Also, a lot of news reporting is not running round chasing breaking stories. For things like news conferences, launches, live interviews and many other events you need an established contact whether via VOIP, fixed lines or satellite. If the ENG truck is something like an SUV then it can of course be what the reporter and crew use to get themselves to the location. If you still think ENG vehicles are obsolete, take a look at this which was first seen at IBC (The International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam) in 2018 https://www.mastervolt.com/references/the-bbc-megahertz-ev-van-the-first-ever-fully-electric-newsgathering-vehicle-powered-by-a-mastervolt-installation/ It is all a far cry from this veteran Portugese OB vehicle from 1957 that I saw restored and displayed at IBC in 2014 I think it was a four camera unit but have no idea how this vision mixer worked. Possibly X is cross fades and H and V are horizontal and vertical wipes/split screens .