Pacific231G

The USATC locos weren't built for use in the UK but were stored here in preparation for the invasion of Europe. Building them to the smallest loading gauge they would encounter obviously made sense and they would in any case have had to be moved on Britain's railways. In practice 400 of the 800 S160s consolidations that came to Britain were lent to Britain's railways officially for "running in" but really to provide extra freight capacity during the run-up to the invasion. After D Day though they were collected back and followed the armies across the channel. AFAIK only one S160 remained in Britain and that was at the Army's Longmoor Military Railway, possibly for type training. The 382 0-6-0T S100s were also brought to Britain and stored for use after D-Day but the GWR and possibly other railways did operate them before the invasion (for "running in"?) and they strongly influence the GWR's design for the 1500 Class of Pannier Tanks. After the war these locomotives were surplus to military needs and became available to Europe's railways but, none were acquired by Britain's main line railways though several have since returned for preservation. The Southern Railway did acquire 15 S100s for use at Southampton Docks and others were bought by the NCB and various industrial railways. I don't know whether these had returned from Europe or simply never made it there. The S100s seem to have been better regarded than the S160s by a number of railways. SNCF, with a desparate shortage of motive power after wartime losses, acquired 121 S160s but, though they were given the class designation 140U, they don't seem to have stayed long enough to carry their SNCF numbers and were quickly passed on to other countries by 1949 when the North American built 141R Mikados became available. SNCF did though buy 77 S100s and, as class 030TU, some of these survived until 1970, mostly as works locos in MPDs, so almost until the end of French steam. Another USATC class the S200 Mikado was suppled to Britain under lend-lease in 1941-42 but for use in the Middle East where most of them ended up on the railways of Turkey and Iran and I don't know if these even touched British shores.

But H0 isn't three different scales. H0 as we now know it was developed in Britain in the mid 1920s by members of the Wimbledon MRC as 3.5mm/ft on 16mm (later 16.5mm gauge) and eventually adopted by almost the whole world but not by the country that invented it It was agreed back in 1952 at the Ruedesheim Conference of European Model Railways Associations that H0 scale would be 1:87 and its gauge 16.5mm..Before that some French modellers had used 1:86 scale (and often referred to it as 00) and the German delegation argued for a compromise scale of 1:80 (which would have lumbered everyone with similar problems to British 00) but 1:87 (3.5mm/ft to the nearest integer) was agreed and so it has remained.The NMRA had already defined HO some years earlier as had the BRMSB with the same gauge and scale* . That conference became an annual affair and a couple of years later it agreed to set up MOROP as an international standards body registered in Switzerland. It was, and AFAIK still is, owned by a number of Europe's national model railway associations so it's not true to decribed MOROP's NEMs as a "German system". Unlike OO, H0 can be a scale AND a gauge because 16.5mm multiplied by 87 is 1435.5mm which, within full size engineering tolerances is precisely correct*. The same is generally true of TT and N where 12mm gauge at 1:120 and 9mm gauge at 1:160 scale both give a gauge of 1440mm. There have been models described as H0 but built to a different scale most notably by Rivarossi whose European prototype models were for a time to 1:80 rather than 1:87 scale (though their US prototypes that I remember lusting after as a youngster were to proper H0 scale) Some "H0" building kits, such as those produced by Jouef, were also closer to 1:100 scale but those are departures from the accepted scale not different flavours of H0. Japan is a slightly odd case (as is Britain) where 1:80 and 1:187 scale are both used (as 1:150 and 1:160 are for N) but I suspect that was more to do with fitting mechanisms into the smaller bodies of 3ft 6in (1067mm) gauge trains even though in either scale the 16.5mm track gauge was far too wide. It's not clear why the Japanese didn't more widely adopt 1:87 scale with 12mm gauge track which is actually closer to 3ft 6in gauge than it is to the metre gauge it's normally used for as H0m. In any case with very little space in most Japanese homes H0 or its local equivalents is far less popular than N . *There is a tiny variation between the European H0 scale of 1:87 agreed by MOROP and the 1:87.1 adopted by the NMRA which is 3.5mm/ft to one decimal place rather than rounded down to an integer. In practice this difference is negligible and I suspect totally ignored by manufacturers.

I'd always assumed it referred originally to Eggerbahn rather as LGB gave us G gauge but delving a bit deeper I'm not so sure. Looking at MOROP's NEM010 in French and German it seems if anything to stand for "étroite" i.e. narrow in French where voie etroite - narrow gauge- usually refers to gauges below metre gauge. In the German version of NEM0101 there is no reference to a word beginning with e. Egger-Bahn introduced models with a very nominal scale of 1:87 and 9mm gauge track in 1963 just a year after Arnold introduced N gauge as a commercial range. Egger-Bahn was broken up in 1967 and the tooling was bought by Jouef who produced a rather cruder version of it. I did have some of it - though I'm not sure whether it was original Eggerbahn or Jouef's "VE" (voie étroite) version- and it was rather toylike. Fortunately Lilliput came in with much better H0e scale models based originally on Austrian 760mm gauge prototypes and these were followed by others. I'm not sure when or by whom the actual designation H0e was first used. It may have derived from Eggerbahn but I don't think it ever appeared in Egger-Bahn's own advertising nor in Jouef's till their brief re-introduction of it in the mid 1980s. It did appear on Roco and Lilliput's advertising but I'm not sure from when. .

Does that mean that any models in 00, H0 or 0 scaleygaugeything don't really exist and any you might think you came across at an exhibition were merely a product of your imagination.

I've always crossed my sevens. My writing is so awful that it's the only way of distinguishing them from ones. In the first half of the 1940s that would probably have got me arrested in Britain but it's always made sense to me to distinguish them that way. At one time in my life I also went through the whole business of writing zeros as 0 with a diagonal stroke to distinguish it from a letter O as anyone else who has ever dealt with Fortran coding forms and their ilk will probably remember I think the OO or 00 thing may well be a case of trying to find the one "correct" answer where there isn't one. Like most things in language, it comes down to usage and that does vary. I have though noticed a subtle difference between H0 and HO. The NMRA define the scale as 1:87.1 (based on 3.5mm/ft) and always seemd to print it as HO but the European standard is 1:87 and that generally appears in the NEMs etc as H0. Clearly 00 did follow the sequence 3,2,1,0, 00, 000 but looking at model railway magazines from 1925 to the digital age 00 and OO were often interchangeable even when the typeface did make a distinction. And, as others have pointed out, many if not most pre-digital type designs made no distinction between 0 and O. Meccano did call their product Dublo but that didn't really make it a letter as in those days, outside the military, it was very unusual to verbalise the number 0 as "zero" and "Oh" was even more its normal pronuncation than it is now. Meccano France called its H0 product Hornby Acho and H0 is normally verbalised there as "Hache Oh" even though it tends to be written as H0. In the film version of You Only live Twice, the Japanese SIS people who were collaborating with him to prevent WWIII did refer to him as Zero Zero.

There's no need to swear Titan and anyway you haven't. It's still available on BBC iPlayer Radio https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03v379k/episodes/player

I loved the original radio series - though I've never managed to hear every episode- and even more the TV version but I also enjoyed the film and I've seen it a couple of times. I guess that means that for me that you can have several adaptations of something that are quite different but all valid. Funnily enough for me the least succesful adaptations of the radio series (the original version of HHGG) were Douglas Adams' own novelisations. I quite enjoyed the first in the new radio series so will certainly listen to all of them. It's a shame that we can't hear Peter Jones as the book any more but I thought John Lloyd made a good fist of it. Whether it'll appeal to those who were not already fans may be another matter.

Imagine though trying to explain to Turing or Babbage that we now all have access to supercomputers that can make more calculations by orders of magnitude than all the mathematicians in the world in their time. So are the majority of us doing incredible things in science, mapping the heavens and gaining unprecented insights into life the universe and everything? No, most of us are using all that computing power to send each other pictures of cute cats!

Hello Roger Groupe d'Etude du Modelisme Ferroviaire a Voie Metrique et a Voie Etroite Group for the study of railway modelling of metre and narrow gauge. I was a member for quite a long time from when it was GEMM and focussed purely on metre gauge modelling (Om, H0m and Nm). They used to organise the annual Expometrique exhibition in the Paris area which started out as a small and rather initimate get together but grew into a very large operation. In 2007 a number of members split off from GEMME to form a new private association Traverses des Secondaires and took the exhibition with them. The ostensible reason for the split was that they wanted to include standard as well as narrow gauge light railways in their remit but I suspect that ownership of Expometrique had a lot to do with it; organising that and a smaller exhibition for artisanal suppliers seems to be the main activity of TDS but the two groups seem to be on amicable terms. Eventually TDS renamed Expometrique as RalExpo with the narrow gauge becoming a minor theme. GEMME did subsequently organise their own exhibition at the now sadly defunct TVT preserved line at Richelieu and used the Expometrique name but I don't think there have been any others.

Hi Garry (and Rod) I for one am enjoying this thread very much. I had TT-3 as a youngster so am finding it very nostalgic but also interesting. I had Mike Bryant's book First Steps in TT-3 at the time (I have it again now) so I'm especially enjoying your efforts to build the proprietary version of his Pint-Pot layout that was in the MRC series but AFAIK never actually built till now.

By coincidence I was talking today to a friend in SE London who has just had the same problem and solved it the same way - a large icicle emerged from the pipe and the boiler then worked OK. Hot air will do the same job so either use a hair drier or paint stripper (but very carefully at a safe distance from the pipe) or get a government spokesperson to talk near to it. I've used that technique (with a useful applicance rather than a politician) to unfreeze pipes that could only be reached from below so not suitable for the hot water (which does't have to be dangerously hot if you use plenty of it) treatment.

The thaw started in London yesterday afternoon revealing that the ball valve feeding the CH expansion tank in my loft had frozen and cracked. Copious quantities of water went where it wasn't wanted but fortunately I was in at the time so shut of the CW supply, hopefully before any damage was done beyond some damp plaster board in the ceiling and a couple of ceiling light fittings that'll need checking. The emergency plumber who's just been round says he's seen one ceiling down already this morning and has twelve more burst pipes to fix today.

. Publc disquiet following a number of serious accidents led to Acts of Parliament in 1840 and 1842 that empowered the Board of Trade to appoint Railway Inspecting Officers and these were invariably recruited from the Corps of Royal Engineers. (This was long before the RE had a Railway Operating Division) They weren't always that senior, at least not at first, and the head of the department during the great debate about interlocking and block working following a spate of particularly bad accidents was Captain (later Sir) H.W.Tyler. His colleagues did though include at least one Colonel and most of the reports I've seen were from Lt. Colonels or Colonels. I don't know whether the inspectors were seconded from the RE or retired officers but the same names do come up again and again in accident reports. The inspectors' iniitial duty was to report on new public railways which required the inspector's approval before they were allowed to open. There was pressure for the government to have direct control over railway safety but Tyler believed that actual responsibility should remain with the railways themselves and initiated the publication of accident reports which would by persuasion and public opinion have the desired effect. Employing Royal Engineers in this role would have provided inspectors with a solid background in public service and the necessary practical experience of engineering and organisation. This was probably better than having accident enquiries led by judges or coroners and, particularly in the earlier days of railways, there would have been distinct advantages in having the inspection and approval of their safety in the same hands as the investigation of breakdowns in that safety. I would definitely agree with L.T.C.Rolt (Red for Danger) that the system of inspection in Britain created a situation in which, instead of a blame culture, the lessons from accidents really were learnt and applied in a process that railway workers co-operated with.

Fortunately I still have City Radio in Ealing to get those bits and pieces that I always seem to need at the last minute. but If it does close down I'll miss Maplin. You can't go on the internet waving around say an obscure plug and asking if they've four more of them. Amazon etc. is all well and good when you know exactly what you need but I've often found that browsing the shelves of Maplin or even B&Q reveals the very thing that I need but wouldn't have spotted without actually seeing it. The other thing you don't get in a physical store is having to register and come up with a new password just to get one or two items from a shop you'll probably never need to buy anything else from.

Interesting.Is the idea to have fiddle yards at both ends of the upper level? A couple of my favourite MLT layouts, Geoff Ashdown's EM gauge Tower Pier and Roy Emery's 00 Fenchurch Cuttings, do have separate passenger and goods operation but for some reason I prefer to keep freight and passenger working together even though separating them would give greater flexibility in design. I have operated a number of layouts that are effectively two layouts in one. One that I operated regularly had separate H0 and Hom stations with an exchange siding, but always seemed to end up focussing on one or the other. Perhaps I'm just bad at multi-tasking.

I'm afraid my first reaction to a terminus for hoiday specials was to wonder why anyone would go to Leicester for their holidays but of course people heading to the seaside had to be coming from somewhere. Wiki has a 1910 timetable for Belgrave Road showing just 12 or 13 (depending on day) departures - none of them long distance- but it's for April so doesn't include the summer holiday specials mainly to Skegness and Mablethorpe. It closed to regular traffic in 1953 but by then there was only one local train, to Grantham, each day and I did wonder if that was effectively a "ghost" train to avoid having to go through the formal closure process. Holiday traffic continued until 1962 so although five platforms seem a bit overcapacity for a dozen trains, presumably most of them were only used for the summer specials. It sounds a bit like the "Excursion" platforms at Weston s Mare or Tattenham Corner station that was pretty quiet most of the time but very intensively worked on Derby Day so needing all of its seven platforms (even nowadays I doubt if it needs all of its remaining three platforms on other days). Tattenham Corner Station on a race day (but probably not Derby Day) I know of a number of otherr termini at holiday and other destinations that had significant extra capacity to cater for such "leisure" peaks but it had never occurred to me that that urban termini might also have had extra platforms for the other end of such services. For a mainly commuter terminus outside London (Birmingham Moor St. perhaps?) that would make for an interesting extra variety of trains especially as holiday specials often used quite old carriages that otherwise spent most of their time in the sidings.

Milk Chocolat Lawrence of Arcadia Avenue 3.10 to Ewell Last Year at Marylebone Dr. Zhivago's Casebook From Ruislip with Love The Day the Circle Line Stood Stil North by Northwest Trains Closely Observed Trainsets A Streetcar Named Desiro The Cruel Seat

It looks to provide a good mix of operation and though I don't know about GNR practice to my untrained eyes this does look like it's following a specific company's practice rather than being a more generic trackplan like Minories. Just a thought, but if the scenic break at the right hand end is an overbridge rather than a tunnel then would it make sense to extend the goods sidings a few inches into the fiddle area? With a cassette based system that probably wouldn't interfere with other off-stage activities. This would give the impression of a larger (or at least longer) goods yard off-stage. Didn't you in any case do that with Birmingham Hope St?

I thought I'd saved the relevant page but I think it's on an old drive. As a news item it doesn't appear in the main article listings for Meccano Magazine but I think you're right about it being Harwell and a 4MT. Sometime when I've really got more time than sense I'll plough through the online page scans of the magazine.

Hi Dava I've got that reference somewhere and it was in Meccano Magazine. I also remember it from the time, probably eary 1960s. I'm pretty sure it was a Hornby 2 rail tank loco bought from a local model shop (I suspect Howes of Oxford) pulling and propelling a modified wagon that carried the test sample to be irradiated. I can't remember whether it was at Harwell or Appleford. I've just been doing some work on a Hornby Acho Prairie made for the French market and the very sturdy mechanism- which I think is the same as the one used in their UK products- looks like it could stand any amount of radiation. A couple of junior researchers came up with the idea of running the loco up and down a length of track as that was far simpler than almost any other way of remotely placing the test samples. I always reckoned this to have been the smallest working freight railway ever. I have found an earlier example of a third rail loco doing something similar in a radiaton lab in Cleveland Ohio but that appears to be O gauge. It's in a 1949 edition of popular mechanics https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9NgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA149&lpg=PA149&dq=model+train+used+in+radiation+lab&source=bl&ots=YQu6kpwE-I&sig=D_19s2eZKFrZYxx9wjTFPbzq71E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjfuaDw_7bZAhVoLMAKHbR0DuQQ6AEISDAD#v=onepage&q=model%20train%20used%20in%20radiation%20lab&f=false

There's a slightly bizarre and apparently gratuitous main title sequence to the 1964 film "d'Ou Tu Viens Johnny?" (where do you come from Johnny?) that was recently on TV5 as part of a tribute season to the late Johnny Hallyday. The film starts with a ten minute or so monochrome sequence where Hallyday's character, who plays his guitar in a group, gets into trouble with the local baddies when he discovers that a case he's been asked to carry contains drugs which he throws into the Seine in disgust. He decides to disappear for a while and says goodbye to his band including his girlfriend in a scene shot on a street overlooking the Batignolles railway cutting . This is followed by the title sequence which is a 3-4 minute locked-off wide shot looking down onto the tracks as various trains pass back and forth accompanied by urgent music. The shot is cut so that the movement of trains is more or less continuous. Unfortunately, and rather surprisingly, I've not found a clip of this sequence online but these stills might give a hint. The effect is quite mesmerising and the shot gives a fascinating glimpse of some of the types of train operating in and out of Gare St. Lazare during that end of steam period, presumably in the rush hour. These mainly include push-pull sets with West region 3-141TCs (possibly 141TDs) at the country end and 3rd rail "standard" EMUs, but also a long distance RGP DMU, a train made up of two Picasso autorails with a trailer between them (not exactly a DMU as the X3800 "Picassos" were not equipped for MU working) and one steam loco operating light engine. Immediately after the titles the film moves to the Camargue, which answers the question posed in the title, and goes into colour. The rest of the film is set there and there is no other railway involvement at all. I can only assume the director's idea was to use the rush-hour trains and the accompanying music to symbolise the urgent busyness of Paris in contrast to the peace and solitude of the Camargue but, coming from nowhere with no obvious relationship to the plot , it did seem very odd. The film itself is a vehicle for Johnny Hallyday who rides horses, wrangles cattle, gets back together with his girlfriend Sylvie Vartan (Hallyday's first wife a year or two later) and defeats the bad guys while performing a number of songs. Unless you happen to be a Johnny Hallyday fan I wouldn't bother though there is rather more plot than in the average Cliff Richard movie.

My pleasure. I'd hazard a guess that these were dealer or distributor's spare parts as, particularly when used in train sets, the masts were probably far more susceptible to getting broken than the base units.

They appear to be signal masts (posts) from an early Jouef mechanical signal listed in their 1978-79 Catalogue as 9315 Functional Semaphore. To avoid cross posting I've responded a bit more fully as a reply to your original query and I'll add anything more that emerges to that thread http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/131009-can-anyone-identify-these-signals/&do=findComment&comment=3050890 I'm quite curious about a bunch of these masts appearing without their bases

I can answer this fairly definitively. They are signal masts (posts) from Jouef's "sémaphore fonctionnel" (working semaphore signal) that appeared in its catalogues from 1977 (ref 9315 from 1977-1994 and 931500 from 1995-2001) The signal mast clipped into a box attached to a piece of track that incorporated a section break with a rocker switch that also operarted the signal arm. Roughly translated, the description in the catalogue says "this semaphore inspired by real signals enables the train to be stopped and started by simple finger pressure". Inspired by does imply, as if there was ever any doubt, that this is not a scale model The coarseness of this model with its thick plastic signal arm is in marked contrast to the fine lattice work of a real Lartigue sémpahore. They do look rather like hangovers from Jouef's "Jouet" (i.e. "toy") era though by 1977 when they first appeared most of the company's range was made up of reasonably scaled models. The catalogues also offered a set of the more familiar rotating board type signals but presented as very crude mouldings that could only be operated by twisting the whole mast on the base it plugged into. This does seem rather odd as the same catalogues include far more realistic models of standard SNCF colour light signals. It looks like the idea may have been to have a range of signal heads that clipped into the same base but, so far as I can tell, this was the only version they produced. This rather garish version appeared in a number of Jouef's battery operated train sets but does show the mechanism very clearly. At first sight the choice of this particular signal, which was purely a block signal, rather than a more familiar French signal like the absolute stop carré seems a little odd. I suspect though that, in the train set market, Jouef were looking at wider sales as it does bear a passing resemblance to signals commonly used in other countries. The complete signal appears very frequently on ebay.fr but I've not seen the masts as separates items so am wondering from where they came.

Hmm. The most pedantic people I ever knew were in the world of Latin (as opposed to the Latin world) Compared with them the most obsessive rivet counters were at around "if it's got the right number of wheels it's near enough" on the International Pedantry Scale (By the way, does anyone happen to know the current unit for pedantry, I've just had to change from millibars to hectopascals so wondered if the pedantry unit had also changed)