Pacific231G

But if you don't believe anything you read in the news then you're no better off than someone who believes everything that's in the news. It's surely better to determine which sources are more or less likely to be accurate. Newsnight and some bloke in the pub who claims to know something somebody once told him may both get it wrong but I know which I'd trust more. The other test is to consider who owns the news source and what they are likely to want you to believe. That takes a bit of work and most people are more inclined to simply believe whatever agrees with what they already think. Healthy scepticism is one thing but cynicism can be very unhealthy.

I believe it wasn't a terribly efficient way of getting shipments from A to B and not compatible with modern just-in-time logistics. (Though when people say that it was also not compatible with today's desire to order things and get next-day delivery I'm not so sure - first class mail generally managed to get where it was going the next day so far as I know). Rail could even manage same-day delivery. The BBC newsroom I once worked in often used BR's Red Star Parcels service to get film shot in the morning to the studios for that evening's broadcast. It was a very reliable service- packages had to be personally signed for by the BR staff responsible at each stage- and meant that, as neither the reporter nor the crew needed to return to base with the film, they could be sent to film another feature for the following day's programme. Timing was generally tight but the newsroom co-ordinators knew what time the film had to be at a particular Red Star office to catch a specific train that would get it to our local station in time for someone to go to the railway station to pick it up in time for processing and editing. Don't believe the ideological propaganda that the private sector is wonderfully efficient and the public sector the opposite. In my experience both BR and the BBC were very lean and efficient organisations.

Don't hold your breath. I wonder how well 500 year old steam locomotives will perform

So in a single loco it's preserving a significantly larger proportion of our ralway heritage than we'd always supposed. I have to agree with t-b-g on this. If FS was almost entirely made up of completely new components then one might question its identity as a piece of heritage but even then it would be no different from an awful lot of preserved aircraft and probably a few ships as well. My personal view is that if something has had a continuous ongoing history then it's the same something it was in the beginning even if a lot of it has over the years been replaced, just like you or I in fact. If it's just been rebuilt completely around a few components from an effectively deceased something then it's really more a reproduction.

I could be wrong but my impression has always been that,apart from roofs with their different materials- zinc, slates, tiles or roman tiles- and pitch, there's not a lot of difference in the basic architecture of many urban buildings across most of France. I'm sure I've seen similar nineteenth century buildings in Dax as in Chartres. Older and particulatly rural buildings are far more vernacular but the areas around stations, which is what we tend to be interested in, were usually developed after the railway arrived so don't cover such a range of architectural epoques as say ancient city centres. You do see more bricks and distinctly Flemish styles in the far north, a certain amount of half timbering in Normandy and some stone buildings in Brittany that look rather British but a lot more seem to have the same basic features. French buildings are distinct from British, German or Dutch buildings but apart from some regional specialities within France there seems to be a lot of commonality. I've got some files on French urban buildings that I've used to find appropriate buildings for my own layouts so I'll look again to see what regonal differences are apparent.

What's the opposite of future-proofing- heritage proofing? I'm unlikely to move away from DC but if I was starting from scratch I'd be very inclined to go down the DCC route. I recently started work again on an H0m layout that's been in storage for some time and it took me quite a while to figure out the wiring. It's not so much the underboard wiring but the hideous number of conductors in the control panel umbilical and that's for a layout with just five motorised points and no sectioning ! We all know that DCC involves more than just attaching two wires to the layout but how much simplification of wiring are you getting from using frog juicers? Personally, if I didn't have so much "heritage" DC motive power I'd be looking not just at DCC but toward some kind of radio control of autonomous locos with little or no power transmission through the rails.

As orthers have said you don't need to model an LGV to have plenty of TGVs mixing it with oher trains. The Cote d'Azure does offer some particularly dramatic coastal senery and is unlikely to get an LGV anytime soon. You might also find the area around Dax quite interesting. The line between Bordeaux and Dax through the Grandes Landes de Gascogne (once a vast moorland now mostly pine forest) carries a very wide range of trafiic and is very busy as is the line from Dax down to Bayonnes and the Spanish border. There is even quite a lot of the very distinctive (and IMHO attractive) ex Midi 1500V DC "ogive" catenary still in use. I've not been down there for a couple of years and last time SNCF was strike bound (though some trains were running) but four years ago during a half hour or so break for a coffee at Morcenx (the junction for the single track unelectrified line to Mont-de-Marsan). I saw TGVs, Intercités, TERs (including some still operated with Corails and locomotives though I think that's now finished), heavy freight trains and even some local freight operated by VFLI with their own distinctively liveried locos - (VFLI's small loco depot for the region is in Morcenx) . Another reasonably compact station where I've seen TGVs cheek by jowel with other types is Agen on the line from Bordeaux to Toulouse. When you say twenty first century do you mean contemporary or earlier this century when far more trains were loco hauled and there was still rather more wagonload and freight generated by smaller private sidings than now? There have been significant changes over the past eighteen years but apart from a few new LGVs and one or two lines reopening to passengers they've tended to be a retrenchement that's made France's railways less rather than more visually varied. An obvious question but are you a member of the French Railways Society (formerly the SNCF Society)? If not you would find it useful and if you're devoting a lot of time and effort to a single layout very useful indeed for the collective knowledge of its members if nothing else..

My Hachette dictionary, which is quite good on railway terminology, doesn't give that specific meaning but its second definition of champignon is anything whose shape is reminiscent of a mushroom. Apparently this includes the accelerator pedal of a car ! To be really pedantic double champignon doesn't exactly translate as bullhead. Bullhead rail has a head bigger than its foot- hence the name- and in French that would be double champigion dissymétrique. As rail got heavier that became the most common type but some railways, notably the Chemin de Fer du Midi had continued to use double champignon symétrique quite late, certainly into the mid 1920s. This was the sort of rail you were supposed to be able to turn over once the railhead had become worn (except that nobody did because the foot was corrugated by the chairs). I don't know when symmetrical rail stopped being used in Great Britain but was it generically referred to as bullhead or did it have another name? In France, and I think elsewhere, flat bottom rail is universally known as Vignoles, after its British inventor. For this type of rail the foot is known as le patin, the head is le champignon (mushroom) and the web joiining them is l’âme. The Midi remained faithful to DC until it was absorbed into SNCF in 1938. The Ouest/Etat and Paris Orleans, who were using it almost exclusively before the First World War had started moving over to vignoles rail before they too were absorbed but I think there was still more DC than Vignoles at that time and there is still quite a lot of it in use today. This is Les Herbiers, the terminus of the CFV in Vendee. Note the steel sleepers.

Since he was the fantasy creation of an American writer Mary Mapes Dodge who clearly knew nothing about collapsing dykes that's not altogether surprising. I knew about the great flood of February 1953 that killed 335 people in Great Britain and 1836 in the Netherlands but not the true story of the grain barge Twee Gebroeders her skipper/owner Arie Evergroen and volunteers Cornelis Heuvelman and Johannes Aart van Vlie. It's a story that deserves to be better known as their prompt and courageous action must have saved many thousands of lives that night but they weren't really recognised until 2009. http://www.godutch.com/newspaper/index.php?id=1525

Hi Mike Methinks Peco generally know what they're doing, shame about much of the rest of the industry- on both sides of the channel. Although the track was designed to scale for 00, Peco lost no time in advertising it as Voie Double Champignon in France. The sleepers are wide to scale in H0 for most French railways, (though not apparently those used on parts of the Midi, something to do with maritime pine sleepers) but French modellers of DC track have long used SMP and similar British 00 bullhead track and just accepted the slightly overwide sleepers and possibly that the chairs are a bit heavy. . I saw these two examples on modules exhibited at Trainsmania in Lille last year; I'm not sure whether they are SMP or C&L. Peco were there with a stand displaying the new track and the, at that time yet to be released, points but I don't think anyone had used it yet.

Hi Pat I'm not surprised you thought it unlikely. E.F.Carter's block plan (fig 8 in my edition) is as clear as mud with absurdly small turntables for the purpose. and no explanation of the track running along the back of the layout. He also suggested this but it seems that the turntables and traversers respectively were seen as ways of moving or reversing trains not to hold them as hidden sidings. It's interesting that in 1950 Carter, who in 1934 was the founder and until 1938 the editor of Model Railway Constructor, seemed to have never heard of hidden sidings or fiddle yards. Although The Model Railway Encyclopedia was published in 1950, has the odd reference to British Railways and acknoledges the existence of EM gauge, its contents do seem decidedly dated.

Hi Kevin That's certainly true and the one long description of Maybank in MRN in 1934 was by someone else and based on a visit to it at Bill Banwell's home. Banwell and Applegate did though exhibit Maybank regularly so that was probably where it had its main influence. Equally Roye England may not have written much but it was his creation of Pendon that gave his and other's work such influence. What I do find missing in magazines like Loco-Revue is that almost every layout featured is written up by a staff writer rather than by the builder. That may save authoring fees but i know from reading several modellers own accounts of their work on the equivalent forums to this one how much that policy misses out. I understand that one of the British magazines may be tending towards that approach and if so it is most regrettable. It was what people like Peter Denny, John Ahern and John Charman wrote about their work as much as their layouts themselves that inspired and influenced a generaton of modellers.

Just for completeness here are a couple of photos of the second version of the East Coast layout which was exhibited in its U configuraton at the Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art and Industry in Glasgow in 1911. Whether the straight version ever surfaced I've no idea. From the plan I think the upper photo is "York" and the lower one "King's Cross". What I can't figure out is the trackplan as the 6ft 9inch length of both terminus boards simply wouldn't allow enough length for even a fairly sharp croosover with room behind it for a loco plus even three coaches.. 2" gauge is roughly three times larger in scale than 00 whiich would make the terminus boards equivalent to about two foot three inches in 4mm/ft scale. This simply isn't long enough for even the shorter main line bogie coaches of the pre Great War era so, unless either the model was operated with a lot of wrong line working which seems very unlikely or there was another crossover, the mystery continues. . By the way, the LNWR model with a train turntable each end from the same period was also 2" gauge and was also built by Bassett-Lowke in 1908. . I'm very intrigued by these early working model railways but there may simply be no more information to be had.

Gauge/scale isn't the only criterion for finescale. I think RMJ has a bit of a finescale bent too but that's where I found my favourite articles by Frank Dyer and about Bradfield Gloucester Square.

We'll probably never know for sure of course but I think you're right about the top photo being York in which case we're effectively seeing the whole of that station in the first two photos and the block plan does include all the pointwork though not to scale. The first photo captioned "The G.N.R. model leaving King's Cross" is therefore in reality its arrriving at York from KX. The description from 1909 is clear about their being three Atlantics and one five vehicle ECJS train. Operation was described as follows. The locomotives working the model train from "London" to "Edinburgh" will be G.N.R. N.E.R. and N.B.R. The train will leave "King's Cross" headed by a replica of the G.N.R. no 1442 and travel as fars as "York". The G.N. will be detached, and the train taken on over the border by the North-Eastern "Atlantic". The N.B.R. will be stationed at "Edinburgh" and can be arranged to take the train back to "York" or perform any other evolutions at the will of the operator. The turntable at "York" is used to turn the engines for return journeys and is is operated mechanically from near the signalbox. Automatic reversing is fitted to all the locomotives in the manner before described in these pages (an article about an automatic reverser had appeared in the March 1909 edition of Model Railways). All signals are correct models, those on the G.N.R. portion being of the "tumbler" pattern. From this I'd surmise that the running of the train was a periodic demonstration rather than a continuous operation* and at the end of the sequence the locos needing to be turned for the next demonstration were run up or down to York. The implication is that only the G.N.R. loco ran between KX and York but both the N.E.R. and N.B.R.locos were used between York and Edinburgh. Whether they took this in turn on alternate runs or simply repeated the same sequence probably depended on the enthusiasm of the operator. There is no mention of any goods vehicles in the 1909 description but they'd clearly been added by the following year's exhibition in Brussels when the photos were taken before the fire. Although the first layout only had three locomotives representing the three companies it clearly had the capacity for more. The description in 1911 of the Mk 2 layout describes an identical set of three engines and the same operation of the ECJS train but also mentions the shunting of seventeen goods wagons as adding to the fascination of the operation though it doesn't say if there was a fourth loco for this. Both layouts were controlled from a single "signal box" at "York" so I doubt if there was actual block working which as yuo say would require three operators. The replacement layout is described as "improved" but the only real change I can see is that "Edinburgh" now had a trailing rather than a facing crossover. t might be quite fun to figure out just how much operation you could get out of this layout. *Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate used to operate Maybank this way with a complete and fairly intensive sequence of about 15-20 minutes being operated every hour with the layout and its hidden traverser then being reset for "the next demonstration" .

The difficulty i find with this is trying to be in any sense objective. If I list those who have inspired or had the most influence on me they'd include John Ahern, Peter Denny, Cyril Freezer and Philip Hancock who most of us would probably agree on. After that though it becomes very subjective and closely related to my own particular interests. My own ten would also include Roye England for Pendon, John Charman for Charford, Mac Pyrke for Berrow and East Brent, Giles Barnabe, latterly from operating his layouts, and Dennis Allenden for his wonderfully evocative writing even though I've never scratchbuilt a loco in my life and certainly not in 0 scale, For the final place it's probably a toss up betweeen Frank Dyer, Mike Bryant and Carl Arendt but there are several other contenders hovering around. There are other modellers whose work I greatly admire and in many cases have gone out of my way to see including the Gravetts, David Jenkinson, Richard Chown and Ian Rice but I'm not sure that they've been such a direct nfluence on my own modest efforts.

Remember that the purpose of this layout was to showcase all three of the the East Coast railways' locos along with the latest East Coast Joint Stock so having locos running light engine to and from "York" would have been no bad thing and operationally equivalent to regarding it as each terminus's loco depot. It was also designed to carry out a specific sequence of movements rather than as a generally operational model railway. The layout seems to have been operated from "York" by a single "attendant" making use of automatic couplers to manage the evolutions at each station. Its 60 foot length in 2" gauge would be equivalent to about 18 to 20 feet in 4mm scale. After White City, the layout went to the 1910 Brussels Exhibition where, unfortunately, a bad fire in the exhibition hall totally destroyed it. These photos, taken in Brussels a couple of months earlier, are the only ones that appear in Model Railways. One of them does suggest a bit more pointwork at KX than appears on the block plan buit the description in 1909 does say that Edinburgh only had the single crossover between the up and down lines. Basset-Lowke were commissioned by the GNR to build a new version of the East Coast layout and this is the plan Note that this plan shows two possible ways of exhibiting the layout, it was originally exhibited as a U but the straight sections could replace the curves to make a 60 foot long straight layout very similar to the mk 1 layout. The write up for it describes the same sequence for the passenger train but also describes the "fascinating" shunting of some 17 goods wagons. From the photos of the Mk 1 layout it's clear that the crossover at KX is far enough up for the whole train to be behind it so forming the throat of the station rather than being a releasing crossover. I would guess that the new loco, which might well be already in the side road at KX would pull the train forward over the crossover and back it into the up side departure platform so releasing the loco that had brought it in to run LE tender first to York on the down line with the ECJS train following a bit later. The write up of the Mk 2 version does say that all signalling is to scale, correct and properly interlocked with the points. This is all a bit off-topic but it does show the sort of professional model railway building that Basset-Lowke was engaged in and that would clearly have crossed back and forth with the development of model railways as an amateur activity.

Peter Denny also had a good number of articles in other magazines (mostly MRC I think) but CJF gave his work its greatest exposure. The great legacy of Cyril Freezer's editorship, and the reason I'd also put him near the top of my own hall of fame, was the sheer range of modellers that he somehow turned into effective authors so that we can still meet them and their work throuigh their writing long after many of them have passed on. You get some of that in the other magazines but not to anything like the same extent.To take one of many examples, so far as I know the Rev. P.H.Heath only ever had four or five articles in RM (Cyril Freezer told me that he never actually met him) but I still love his description of the original 00n3 Llanfair Valley and, though it was purely proprietary, still enjoy his Piano Line and have used that basic plan more than once. I treasure my bound volumes of all the earlier Railway Modellers that CJF edited and to have had the chance to discuss Minories with him at some length a few years before he died. I'm really glad that Peter Denny's Buckingham Branch has been conserved as a working layout by TBG of this parish and it was woderful to see Leighton Buzzard again at Ally Pally this year. Above all I'm delighted that Pendon have managed to put John Ahern's Madder Valley back into working order. I have his books and many of his articles but to be able to actually see his work whenever I choose is wonderful and I have to admit as a friend of Pendon that I tend to spend more time looking at the MVR than either of the other scenes magnificent as they are. I suspect that some of the other layouts that I found most influential through the pages of RM and elsewhere were probably best experienced in print and would suffer a bit now if they could still be seen in the flesh.

Interesting Kevin. I'd not come across any references to these but looking in volume one of Henry Greenly's Model Railways & Locomotives magazine (the world's first dedicated model railway magazine AFAIK) I did find a description of two model exhibition railways at the British Empire Exhibition at White City in 1909. The GNR model was 60 feet long 2 inch gauge and built by Bassett-Lowke This had three Atlantic locos, one for each of the GNR, NER and NBR, and a train made up of ECJS stock, namely two brake vans, a sleeping car a first class dining saloon and a composite coach all lit with electric lights. Typical operation consisted of a GNR loco taking the train from King's Cross to York where it would be replaced by an NER loco to take it to Edinburgh. There a NBR loco would be waiting for the return run to York where the GNR loco having been turned would take it on to KX. A certain amount of light engine working would also have been needed to turn the various locos at York to run back to the respective termini. This was the model of KX with three roads Meanwhile on the other side of the Machinery Hall (where the railway companies also exhibited full size locos) was the rival LNWR model and this had recently been set up to operate in the pattern you describe. The report didn't say what gauge this was built to (update) but other information is that it was also 2inch gauge and built by Bassett-Lowke but the the two turntables were in tunnels and operated automatically when a train was run on to them- apparently to the amazemen of visitors. I could be pedantic and say that this wasn't actually a terminus to fiddle yard but more a diorama fed by the two turntables but if I did I'd probably immediately find another exhibtion piece with one terminus and a turntable FY. I must say that I too have mixed feelings about Henry Greenly. On the one hand he did do a great deal to promote the hobby of railway modelling to occupy an unclaimed space between toy trains at one end and model engineering at the other. Model Engineers tend to just want a track that their models can run on and it doesn't need to be in anyway realstic as a visit to any Model Engineering Society's running track will demonstrate. Model Railways seem right from the start to have been about incorporating aspects of real railway operation into layouts that were more than just somewhere to set model trains running. That first volume does include locomotive drawings but also various plans to allow for something tending towards realistic operation and quite a lot on signalling including the building of interlocking frames. He also established standards that while very crude now did at least offer the possibility of trains staying on the tracks. Unfortunately he seems to also have been rather arrogant and couldn't see why anyone would want to improve on his standards "now that they've been established for once and for all" He clearly saw model railways as very small miniature railways where scale compromises would be of little or no consequence so long as the layout could be run something like a real railway. .

I think this has to be more than just modellers whose work we happen to admire however greatly but rather those whose contribution has had a profound and lasting effect on the work of other modellers. These tend to be people who have not only been great modellers but have also been able to communicate their ideas, usually by writing about them. From the period before 1945 I'd certainly include in my own list both Edward Beal and, a little later, John Ahern but also and rather reluctantly Henry Greenly . On the positive side Greenly, working with Basset Lowke, almost invented railway modelling as a coherent hobby separate from model engineering on one side and toy trains on the other. The Model Railway Club also seems to have been his idea originally as was the very idea of a model;railway magazine well before the First World War. Unfortunately he also seems to have felt that inventing the hobby bestowed ownership of it and so foisted his minature railway preference, for locomotives noticeably over scale for the track gauge, onto scale railway modelling. I'd love to also include A.R. Walkley but I can find almost no evidence that his pioneering work on small scale modelling from the mid 1920s was actually taken up by others. His 3.5mm/ft scale 00 gauge portable shunting yard from 1926 seems to have been seen by him more as a proof of concept than a fully developed layout. Though it included such novelties as scenery, reversible permanent magnet motors, two rail track and automatic couplers, most of these seem to have been re-invented later on rather than evolving directly from Walkley's own work. Certainly Alan Wright had never heard of Walkley nor his layout when he virtually re-invented it with his own Inglenook Sidings. From that same era, though his name seems amost forgotten now, I would definitely include Bill Banwell who, with Frank Applegate built Maybank while they were still teenagers. This O gauge main-line Great Central terminus, built in 1932, shortly before the GCR itself was swallowed up in the grouping, seems to have been the first terminus to fiddle yard layout, the result of the young Banwell not having room for a continuous run but a long narrow shed to play with. It was also possibly the first fully fledged portable layout to be exhibited (though its four six foot and one seven foot long, two foot wide baseboards must have been a handful) . It was first exhibited locally in Harrow towards the end of 1932 but after its first appearance at the MRC Easter show at Central Hall in 1933 became almost an annual fixture there until the war. Judging by contemporary accounts of the exhibtion Maybank seems to have often been almost the only fully working layout there and it was even operated prototypically to a sequence timetable. It certainly had a profound influence on the next generation of modellers especially a young Cyril Freezer but after the war, with a garden to play with Bill Banwell seems to have turned to more conventional indoor/outdoor O gauge themes. From the post-war period I'd certainly include Cyril Freezer who, as editor of RM far more than from his own modelling, did more than almost anyone to encourage the idea that, even with only a modest space, the "average" modeller could build their own complete layout to a satisfyingly good standard. Perhaps more important was his ability to encourage inspirational modellers to write eloquently about their work. These included Pete Denny and Philip Hancock who would also find a place in my own Hall of fame, as well as others like John Charman whose articles I find myself returning to quite often. That engagement with the personality of the modeller was a distinctive feature of RM right from the start of Freezer's editorship when the title still belonged to Ian Allan. I believe that really brought the hobby alive in a way that's lacking in many other periodicals.

Meanwhile in Scotland an evening meal of fish and chips is better known as a fish supper. Tea is something else but, despite many family holidays there in the late fifties and sixties, I never heard a guest house proprietress in Edinburgh or anywhere else in Scotland greet arriving guests with the phrase "Ye'll have had yer tea!!" I believe that in health terms it's reckoned better for the main meal of the day (dinner?) to be taken around the middle of the day with a much lighter supper in the evening.

It certainly is. As Reorte says, all our energy sources, apart from nuclear and geothermal, are ultimately derived from solar energy. Fossil fuels are simply the fraction of solar energy used to convert CO2 into plant tissues that ended up getting captured and so stored over a very long timescale The catch is that we're preferring fossil fuels to the energy freely available from the sun now (as solar, wind, waves, biomass etc) and burning all of it we can get our hands on over a couple of hundred not millions of years. That means we're releasing that stored carbon as CO2 very rapidly with the inevitable result that, unless we stop, global warming will exceed the environmental conditions in which we and most other current species evolved. I strongly suspect though that a main line steam locomotive like Tornado hauling several hundred people is releasing less CO2 per person than if they were in their cars. In any case it's negligible.

Amusing or nightmarish depending on your POV but the overall thermal efficiency of an electrically fired steam engine must be down there wih Thomas Newcomen. You get the inherent losses from converting heat into power twice. The Swiss locos took advantage of the copious amounts of hydro electricity available (which is ultimately solar heat turned into a power source via a natural process) but even so were only used to cover an emergency.

Excellent information John and just goes to reinforce the truism that in the 19th Century civil engineers probably saved more people from disease than doctors and continue to be vital to public health. I have one question, this probably wouldn't apply to rural installations but to what extent were light railways used in Victorian sewage and water treatment works? I know of one near Watford that connected a waterworks with the Rickmansworth branch but were they much used internally?

One of my favourite short stories is A Subway Named Mobius written by A.J. Deutsch in 1950. When the MBTA adds just one more interchange, the Boston transit system becomes so complex that a train can disappears into it, still drawing power and ocasionally being heard but not re-appearing. You can find it here and it's only twelve pages long so well worth reading. http://www.rioranchomathcamp.com/lessons/Topology/SubwayNamedMobius.pdf