Pacific231G

Indeed. The inefficiency wasn't such a problem when Newcomen engines were being used to pump out coal mines (except that some of the otherwise saleable coal was used) James Watt improved efficiency considerably by introducing a separater condenser but his engines still used steam only slightly above atmospheric pressure. It seems to have been Murdoch who first demonstrated the use of high pressure steam (several atmspheres) but Trevithick, then a mine engineer, who developed it. first for stationary beam engines to avoid paying royalties for Boulton and Watt's separate condenser but soon for smaller "puffing" (discharging exhaust steam to atmosphere) steam engines that could be used in vehicles but were mainly used as portable engines for running machinery such as stamps. These engines were smaller and had a far better power to weight ratio than an "architectural" beam engine but weren't more efficient as they didn't use the expansive properties of high pressure steam. Trevithick brough both principles together at Wheal Prosper in 1812 with what became the Cornish engine. Cornwall's metal mines had to import coal for their pumping engines at great expense from S. Wales so there was a great incentive to using it more efficiently. This engine used steam at higher pressures and, more importantly for efficiency, allowed it to expand in the cylinder. It was still though acting against a partial vacuum as the exhaust steam from the previous stroke was drawn into the separate condenser*. Steam locomotives discharge their exhaust steam into the atmosphere (and are consequently very inefficient) but most other steam plant has always remained partally atmospheric. After the live steam has passed through usually three compound cylinders or nowadays turbines it ends up in a separate condenser kept to as high a vacuum as possible. The legal and propaganda battle between Bouton and Watt, who championed essentially atmospheric engines, and Trevithick and others who believed in the new fangled "strong" steam seems to have parallels to that between Edison (DC) and Westinghouse (AC) over electrical systems. *There are a good number of preserved Cornish engines around but I believe the largest working example is the 90inch engine at the London Museum of Water & Steam near Kew Bridge in Brentford. They also have the world's largest surviving beam engine but the 100 inch isn't currently working.

Errr, yes. an engine using steam at atmospheric pressure wouldn't provide much power (possibly an atmospheric engine?) but I'm not sure if that is the lmit. I did read somewhere that Mamod live steam toy could go up to 3bar (2bar above atmosphere)

I know of one and it's certainly not new. Because there was nowhere on the loco to put it, Hornby's live steam Rocket has its gas tank in the tender connected to the burner by a flexible tube. Admittedly it is within the legal requirements for toy live steam not requiring a boiler certificate (which I believe is a boiler pressure of no more than one bar) The Rocket's original gas tank was a nightmare as it used the same cigarette lighter nozzle for filling as for delivery and the O ring had a nasty habit of being frozen by any escaping gas so ensuring that all the gas would escape. I've often thought that if certain American rocket engineers had ever owned one of these things the crew of the space shuttle Challenger might have been spared. (It was the great and always inquisitive physicist Richard Feynman who discovered that the true cause of the disaster was a frozen O ring. His comments are worthwhile reading for anyone engaged with safety critical systems https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt.

Just to tell the rest of the story. Since starting this topic I've been able to find out more about René Claude and his plans for a 600mm "main line" railway. The tale does end rather sadly. René Claude was the son of Georges Claude, a French chemist and inventor who came from a prosperous family and had made his own fortune by developing a commercial method for liquifying air (he was one of the founders of the Air Liquide company which still exists) As this made the inert gases available, he also managed to invent the neon tube and created the first neon lit adverts in France and then in America. Unfortunately George Claude had a darker side and was involved in right wing monarchist politics before the war. During the war he was, along with a number of other French industrialists, an active supporter of collaboration with the German occupiers and with the Vichy regime of Marshall Petain. In 1945 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and stripped of all his honours but was released in 1950. He died in 1960 at his Paris home at the age of 89. It was around that time that René Claude (one of three children) was forced to sell the Domaine des Etangs, a beautiful house in the middle of fifty hectares (about 120 acres) of forest. He died, apparently in relative poverty, in January 1982 and in accordance with his last wish, the new owners allowed him to be buried on the estate. Coming from a very wealthy family René Claude wouldn't as a young man have really needed to work so, perhaps a little like Arthur Heywood who developed the 15inch "minimum gauge railway" was free to pursue his own interests. He is described as being whimsical, generous and very kind and as having many railway projects. Pre-war he was a well known modeller and in the 1930s had been a president of AFAC the French railway enthusiasts association that used to exhibit regularly at the MRC Easter show. His plans for a 600mm gauge "main line" coach (post#1) dated from 1941 but I've just found a much earlier reference to him in the American Popular Science magazine from March 1931. About twelve years ago a French enthusiast living in the region got in touch with the estate's owners and was invited to explore it for any remains of the railway. All he could find were the ruins of the concrete platform for the station buried under brambles and a few earthworks in the forest. By the time the new owners first became acquainted with René Claude in 1960 only fifteen metres of the 60cm track still remained, the rest, presumably along with any rolling stock, having been sold off to meet living expenses. However, the railway had never been completed nor even been very advanced because the money had quickly ran out. The extensive 0 gauge garden railway, possibly the same one pictured in Popular Science, had gone by 1960 but there was a smaller indoor 0 gauge layout that he dismantled when he sold the estate. After his death this was passed on by his family to a museum in the Paris region which might possibly have been Rambolitrain. I've not been able to find out whether René squandered the family fortune or whether this was lost in litigation and appeals around his father's trial and conviction, but the final outcome is sad conclusion to what would have been, had it come to fruition, a very interesting narrow gauge railway "modelling" the main lines.

Hi Doric, have you been reading my Continental Modeller (Feb & March 2011) and RMF articles about Bastille? I've been fascinated by the station since discovering it a few months after it closed but with everything apparently still intact so it would be great to see someone in Britain actually building a layout based on it. I have been in touch with a French enthusiast who has built a layout based on Bastille and he was also the author of the most authoritative book on the line. Bastille was unusual in only serving one line (though originally it was going to be a mainline terminus) so it became a bit of a private world. Bastile was the smallest terminus in Paris but also remained more or less as originally built without the huge expansion of the other termini The "bidels" in your photo were the last to be used in France, on the short and very steep Enghien-Montmorency line just to the north of Paris. That closed in 1954 a few years after they had finally disappeared from the Ligne de Vincenne out of Bastille. The "bidels" had replaced earlier four-wheel coaches with an open upper deck -absolute death traps- and from the mid 1940s were gradually replaced in turn by ex DR bogie coaches seized from Germany (the coaches seen in your photo of Bastille in your original post, . The fifty powerful 131TB Prairies that had been built specially for the line in 1925 (Hornby-Acho produced a model) were gradually replaced during the early 1960s by push-pull fitted 141TBs (2-8-2Ts). cascaded, with their trains, from the Gare de l'Est suburban services when these were electrified. The 141TBs operated the line until it closed but push-pull operation was far less interesting than the sheer ballet of locos coming off the front of inbound trains and working their way to the head of trains they were to take out not much later. This operation was very much a "super Minories" but with a very cleverly designed track layout that enabled simultaneous "up" and "down" moves to and from any two of the five (not six) platform roads as well as light engone moves all packed into a very short space and with no reverse curves (enabling far sharper than normal points with a 1:7.5 crossing angle to be used). If they're of use to you I've got plans of the interior arrangements of the station as well as its always mechanical signallng . Unfortunately, enthusiasts largely ignored the station and the steam operated Ligne de Vincennes until closure became imminent so most photos and film of the station only show it in its short and final push-pull era. After a boom in commuter traffic during the 1920s the decline in traffic really started in the early 1930s with the effects of the Great Depression as well as competition from new Metro lines, trams and buses. The Chemin de Fer de l'Est even sought permission to close the line completely and, though this was refused, when SNCF took it over it promptly closed passenger services on the outer rural part of the line. Despite a wartime reprieve, the whole line beyond Boissy-St.Leger was closed to passengers in 1953. After the war plans for a "high speed metro" were revived and these would use part of the ligne de Vincennes out to Boissy-St Leger. It was the long delays in starting this project that enabled Bastille a swansong lasting for over twenty years and, without any modernisation, kept it as something of a living museum until it finally closed. Most of the line was electrified to become part of the first RER line but the first few kilometres including Bastille and a couple of other stations were closed.

In the late middle ages I believe that the urine from bishops was thought to make the very best quality gunpowder. Apparently this wasn't just superstition. Bishops, and to a lesser extent priests, ate and drank well and that improved the quality of the "product" The town of Saumur on the south bank of the Loire is famous for its mushrooms. They are grown in artificial caves that were fairly simple to carve out of the soft rock known as tuffe* but the main reason why mushroom production developed there was because it was the home of the French army's cavalry school!

They'll have worked out the basic flow of the series in terms of "landmarks" and planned the challenges to make sure that there are a couple in each episode. The archive sequences were probably to some extent pre-cut, at least on paper, and some of the background stuff may have been pre-scripted in advance. They'll also have pre-planned to some extent the deployment of crews and special faciliities such as drones but a series like this does require a great deal of flexibility. Trying to follow a rigidly laid out plan or an over detailed script would be exactly how not to do it. That's true of almost all television production; things simply never go according to plan and you're having to compromise all the time with your carefully laid plans. I did once work as a location director for a producer who insised on trying to follow a very detailed script in great detail. He even tried to push each interviewee into saying exactly what he or she had told him while he was researching the programme and had those answers in the script. It was a total nightmare and the results were horribly stilted but I learned a lot about my craft from that experience!

Thanks for this Pat. There may be some other things on there of use to us as well.

I think they were making a comparison with the navvies who built Britain's full size railways so an opportunity for a dollop of social history (though we won't go into the reasons why such a large number of the rural population had become an itinerant workforce at that period in our history) Anyway what's wrong with seeing people letting their hair down a bit. We wouldn't want people to get the impression that railway modellers are a bunch of po faced puritans who think "fun" is a sin.

In his own patent application Albert Gisclard clearly described his invention as a "rigid suspension bridge" http://www.google.com/patents/US671133 The US patent application was filed in 1900 and granted in 1901. There are some more photos of the Viaduc des Rochers Noirs here which clarify the design https://structurae.net/structures/viaduc-des-rochers-noirs and in particular the complex "rigging" of the cables. These provide far more detail of the cables than the two photos I posted originally. They confirms that the design IS primarily a suspension bridge as the stay cables coming down from each tower do not directly support the deck but instead support and give to the main suspension cables the greater rigidity required for a railway bridge (though there are Gisclard road bridges also) . The bridge deck appears to be entirely suspended from cables descending from the main suspension cables but only at the lower outer half of their catenary. Where each of the main suspension cables supports the deck through these cables it is in turn partly supported by a fan of cable stays descending from the opposite tower. You can see that the main support cable are each made up of four cable elements while the cable stays are made up of just two. There is also a pair of cable elements between the tops of the towers supporting lighter vertical cables running down to the main support cables. I assume these are to give greater rigidity rather than being load bearing but they may also be to help support the towers in the absence of the usual complete catenary. I'm grateful to you Arthur for querying the nature of this bridge as, although I've admired it for decades, this has caused me to study its design far more closely and that has been fascinating.(I must put the Milau viaduct on my bucket list!) Had Gisclard not been killed in a site accident in 1908 while his first large railway bridge was being commissioned, one wonders what he might not have gone on to achieve. (The Correze viaduct was actually designed by a M. Maret) The other remarkable thing about this viaduct is how a very humble steam tramway trundling along the side of quiet country roads managed to throw itself over a wide gorge in such a magnficent way. There were a few other comparably lavish bridges on local light railways but, for most of them, all that is now left are the abutments either side of some great river. These always seem a bit like finding that the Ffestiniog Railway had built something akin to the Britannia Bridge. P.S. The Tramways de Correze are at the top of my list of places and times to visit when I get my hands on a TARDIS, even above the IofW in its pomp.

You should have ripped their heads off. I've just looked at my copy of the 1950 BR rule book and rule 16 clearly states. Except where otherwise provided the term train includes Light engine; i.e. engine without a train; also rail car; rail bus. and in the 1904 GWR rule book- also Clearing House- the short form of Rule 27 (a) is "Train" includes "Light Engine" or in full "Except where otherwise otherwise provided, when the word "Train" is used it must be understood to include "Light Engine"

I'm sure they explained that in prog 2 (or was it 3 I'm not taking notes) In a way the Victorians couldn't do it is true; they couldn't do it because the costs were too high for any possible financial return and because of railway politics but I agree that it was a bit misleading to imply that the technical challenges were beyond them. I'd have thought the Great Glen a relatively straightforward route compared with many others as it's following a water course rather than crossing several of them. The trestle was great but I was rather amused by Claire's dismissal of a suspension bridge asserting that "they are not suitable for railways". When a very humble roadside tramway in deepest France encountered a not so humble gorge the result looks like a suspension bridge to me. . Par MOSSOT — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0, This is the Viaduc des Rochers Noirs in the Correze. It's an interesting design developed by the former military engineer (like Dick Strawbridge) Albert Gisclard where the suspensions from each tower overlap to give enough rigidity for a railway. The tramway closed in 1959 but I drove over it several times in the 1980s as it saved a long series of zigzags to get across the valley by road (and was a whole lot more fun. Apart from the viaduct itself, the approach road used the roadbed of the tramway included a couple of narrow gauge tunnels) . It was later relegated to a footbridge and is now completely closed though classed as a historic monument. I have travelled by train over another of Gisclard's suspension bridges on the Cerdagne line in the Pyrenees but it's a bit less dramatic than the Rochers Noirs. Sadly Gisclard was kiiled in 1909 during the commisioning of the Cerdagne bridge when a load testing train ran away down the line following a misunderstanding.

What used to be in the field of "special interest videos" are unlikely of themselves to attract a wider audience though they might reach enough devotees to make an online channel feasible. I know of one devoted to the equestrian world Horse&Rider TV brings you the best equestrian riding, training and management videos for you and your horse! but the rather specialist audience for that tends to be above average in prosperity so is particularly attractive to advertisers and sponsors. It's worth noting that there are no regular series on TV about gardening, fishing, sailing, photography, computing, amateur perfomance arts, nor of course model making. A few programmes apparently targetting special interests do exist- but I doubt if the Sky at Night's audience are all amateur astronomers- but they can bring in things with a wider audience interest such as space science, gravitational wave research and the wonders of the universe in general and I suppose Time Team taps into a general interest in our past. For "mainstream television" (BBC, ITV, Four and Five with their sub channels) the trick would be to think of a fairly popular leisure time pursuiit that leaves you completely cold and come up with a TV series based on it that would engage you and that you would be likely to watch and keep watching over umpteen episodes.

I don't have time to go through the whole story now but will when I get a chance as some French enthusiasts looked at this about a decade ago and one of them who lives in the Sologne was invited to visit the estate by its current owners and found virutally nothing left. An aerial mapping photo from 1949 does show what could be the concrete platform described by M. Claude in one of his articles in the area marked "station" on the plan as well as some track or at least trackbed extending from it. A later survey photo from 1963 shows some sign of this but by then it was very overgrown A much later NASA image on Google Earth does suggest a path through the trees in the shape of the curve at the north end of the plan but there's no sign of this in the 1949 survey when the area was still clear of trees so I suspect that tree planting was simply carried out to leave a path for the future railway. There are also signs in the 1949 photo of a possible path in the area of the "Ferme Common" . I now suspect that the only track ever laid was no more than 300metres around the area marked "station" and that was apparently second hand and rather rusty contractors' material that was eventually supposed to be for sidings. According to its new owners, when Claude had to sell the property in the early 1960s there were only about thirty metres of 600mm gauge track left along with an 0 gauge garden railway and all the rolling stock went to a museum- though that may have been referring to the 0 gauge . I agree with Forest Pine's comments about missing crossovers on Claude's plan but this was only "stage 1". We can speculate on what form a completed railway might have taken given that it's aim was to be a training railway for potential cheminots both for SNCF (though they were quite able to train their own staff thanks very much) and for "The Colonies" rather than a public attraction.

Summary of posts in the Channel 4 topic I was familiar with both narrow gauge and miniature railways but was intrigued by the the idea of a conventional narrow gauge being used for a main line in miniature rather like the RHDR but on a larger scale, enabling main line type corridor coaches with separate compartments, a toilet and even steam heating. Half a dozen articles from 1947 to 1949 in the French Loco-Revue magazine described the project it was intended for. M. René Claude- a fairly well know modeller since before the war was planning a railway oriented technical school in the grounds of the large family estate the "Domaine des Etangs Sec" where he lived. The plan was for a double track main line loop roughly two and a half kilometres long with loops into stations and a future extension to the nearest main line station about ten kilometres away. There was some idea that it would be used practically to transport timber- it was in a forested area- to the big railway. The whole thing does look like the miniature railway of a particularly ambitious model engineering society but not disimilar from some of the layouts (usually 0 gauge) featured in Loco-Revue around that time. . A 600mm gauge version of a main line Pacific built for a pre-war international exhibition in Belgium, was bought and the train of "express" coaches was designed. Other rolling stock, would have been more conventionally narrow gauge, quite a lot of second hand 600mm gauge stock was available at that time but these were to be fitted with side buffers and central screw link couplers. Operation would, like the RHDR, have followed main line practice based on that of SNCF. As well as the Pacific, Claude seems to have acquired an 0-6-0 T from Popineau of a type widely used on contractors' railways. By October 1947 a total of 200-300 metres or track had been laid either side of one of the projected stations by a contractor employed by M. Claude and at least part of the route cleared of trees and levelled. I can't tell from the articles whether this was around the area marked "Station" or that shown as "Ferme Common" on the plan. However, an article a year later said that work had been temporarily stopped while "waiting for better times" and it was apparently a period of high inflation which among other things had made the cost of bringing in ballast from quarries prohibitive. The last article about it was in May 1949 but that was theorising about possilbe rollling stock with nothing about any actual progress on the building and that seems to have been the end of the story. The railway was undoutedly something of a pipe-dream and certainly very ambitious but Loco Revue's owner and editor, Jean Fournereau, was clearly quite enthusiastic about it. In December of 1949 the first advert appeared by René Claude advertising his services as a modelmaker from the same address (Domaine des Etangs Sec) and these appeared every month in Loco-Revue until August or September 1951 before disappearing. He specialised in scenic materials including model trees and superdetailed models of locos and rolling stock based on commercial products. I can't find anything later about the railway but from 1950, Loco-Revue got equally excited about another large scale project by an amateur enthusiast. This was a plan by Jacques Milet, a "greffier" (clerk of the court) and narrow gauge enthusiast with no practical railway experience to build a completely new 60 cm gauge roadside tramway across the Cap Feret peninsula. The idea was to take day trippers arriving by boat from Arcachon on the sheltered side of the Cap across a mile or so of sandy forests to the very fine Atlantic beaches on the other side. Reading Milet's articles, the plan sounds as improbably ambitious as M. Claude's main line training railway. However, Milet did build his railway, it became his life's work and is still in operation today (well not literally today- it doesn't run in the winter) It does meet a fairly genuine transport need for at least a proportion of its passengers who still use it to get from the landing stage to the beaches. As to what parts of M. Claude's railway were actually built, Google Earth came up with some interesting images in its "historical" sequence. .Most are too tree covered to really make out paths but the first in the dated sequence from 2006 is a more detailed NASA image and you can make out some estate roads and tracks half hidden by trees. There are also some other possible lines that look "interesting" particularly an apparent curve that could correspond to the northern end of the planned double track loop. I've now found out rather more about M. Claude and the fate of his railway, not an entirely happy story, and will post that later.

Unfortunately Mike I think I may have reached the end of what is now knowable about the Chemins de Fer du Domaine de Sologne. I suspect that it was a project that tripped over its own ambition and even if it ever did get to run at all it was probably as a far more limited private railway using ordinary NG equipment.If anything interesting does turn up. I'll start a new thread to accomodate it. Well I have now found our more about this railway and what became of this "main line in miniature" and its builder so have started a new thread.in the narrow gauge prototype section http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/130226-cf-domaine-de-sologne-main-line-miniature-railway-in-france/ I'll condense what I've aleready posted here and add to it as and when new information becomes available.

A discussion of the difference between a miniature and a model railway on the Channel 4 Model Railway Challenge topic led me to revisit a diagram that had fascinated me as a youngster in the 1950s edition of Henry Greenly's Model Railways. This was a 600mm gauge "model" of a French main line express corridor coach with its body aproximately 5/8 scale and five four seat compartments(plus a toilet) instead of the eight six seat compartments of the prototype. For many years this drawing was all I knew about but I've discovered that the planned railway it was intended for was featured in some detail in a series of articles in the French Loco-Revue magazine between 1947 and 1949 Along with these articles I've been able to find out, from other French sources, more about the Chemin de Fer Domainial de Sologne and René Claude who started to build it. As this is rather off-topic for the Channel 4 topic I'm starting a new one about this railway, that was south of Orleans and never completed and any other examples of a "miniature" rather than conventional "narrow gauge" railway using one of the commonly used narrow gauges such as 600mm to "model" a main line railway rather as the RHDR did in 15" gauge. The planned main line coach was intended to accompany a 600mm gauge "model" of a main line Pacific that Claude acquired in 1947 but the plans had been drawn up in February 1940, before the occupation. I'll add to this anything more I discover and encourage others to add information about this or any other such railways.

I did once do the run up to the first night of an amateur opera group's production as a live outside broadcast with pre-filmed inserts and that worked pretty well, but the experienced drama group I used to belong to putting on one of our regular productions in our own church hall,though very satsfying for us would probably not have been that watchable because we all knew what we were doing and the goal lay in the quality of production and performance not in getting it to happen at all. The deliberately contrived tensions of the programme that was made for the BBC was probably good telly but didn't do the group, which I had just left for work reasons, any favours. All very true. The actual filming, the logistics of the volunteers and crews, choice of motive power, design of the portable track (definite shades of Paul Decauville here) , risk assessments which would have been particularly thorough, even the handling and backing up of the cameras' data cards, and of course the route itself would have been very well planned from the start, but how the groups actually tackled the various challenges far less so- otherwise they'd have been just following a script. Also Molke's, well known military maxim that “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” applies particularly strongly to any live action television production, especially when it involves amateur performers. So far as I know, nobody has ever done this before and probably never will again - James May's Tarka trail programmes were very different- so, even with all the planning in the world, nobody would have known quite what to expect. For me it fell on the right side of that line, rather to my pleasant surprise, but we'll all see it differently. Something I have been wondering about is this. There are references in this and other programmes to "the navvies building the railways" but I've seen very little about how those early projects were organised and managed. I know that they drew on the experience of canal building but the railways were on such a larger scale that new approaches must have been required. Just a thought.

So. If you were a commissioning editor which of the following would you fund? 1. The Production- we follow an experienced and award winning drama group as they stage one of the three regular productions they put on each year. 2. Faking It. A National Theatre director who has only ever worked with professional actors directs an amateur drama group in an ambitious production with only a few weeks till their first performance. It was a BBC programme, one of a series of similar "challenges", and I'd been a member of the drama group who took part in it. So how about this. Four well trained and experienced teams of professional engineers execute a fully developed project to lay seventy miles of model railway track across Scotland and run a train along it, easily solving all the problems they meet along the way. That really sounds like "appointment to view" television...NOT.

Unfortunately Mike I think I may have reached the end of what is now knowable about the Chemins de Fer du Domaine de Sologne. I suspect that it was a project that tripped over its own ambition and even if it ever did get to run at all it was probably as a far more limited private railway using ordinary NG equipment. If anything interesting does turn up. I'll start a new thread to accomodate it.

Gosh. Where did you have the luxury of cut editing quad tape -with the microscope? We were using it when I first started and sports were still cut editing for highlights but it was all tape to tape with ten second run ups and umpteen chinagraph marks on the tape till the cut happened on the right frame. Apart from archive, I think the last time I met quad two inch tape in anger was in about 1979 I doubt if they had time for multiple takes on something like this (though I'm sure a few of the cutaways were "can you just join those two bits of track together again so we can get a close up") and they don't have a camera on everything that happens

Well done for identifying the exact location. Some of the estate roads seem much clearer on Google maps I'd been fooled by an apparent commune boundary so was looking the other side of the aerodrome (which must be a private "farm strip" as it isn't in the pilot's guides and there are no runway numbers. Google Earth came up with some interesting images in its "historical" sequence. .Most are too tree covered to really make out paths but the first in the dated sequence from 2006 is a more detailed NASA image and you can make out some estate roads and trackshalf hidden by trees. There are also some other possible lines that look "interesting" particularly an apparent curve that could correspond to the northern end of the double track loop. I'd be intrigued to find out how much of the railway actually got built or at least graded.

You just describe it a test track then it's respectable Loco-Revue came up with a nice name for a reseau (layout) that's just circuits of track with sidings to hold a range of locos and no scenery. They called such a layout a Locodrome.

Chemins de Fer du Domaine de Sologne. (Sologne Estate Railway roughly translated) Sologne being the region of ponds,marshes and forests that covers parts of the Depatments of Loiret, Loir-et-Cher and Loiret. Back on topic (finally! ) I'm delighted to have been proved completely wrong about this series. I was very, very sceptical about it when it was first mooted but having just seen part two I'm really impressed. It's entertaining, informative and educative and if this doesn't help create a greater interest in engineering then nothing will. I'm finding the combination of railway modellers and professional engineers working really well and there's certainly a lesson in the chap pooh pooing Elf and Safety followed by someone else coming close to going in the canal with one of the quad bikes. The challenge is a real one and they have came clean about why the originally planned railway was never completed. I do have one query. Does the track actually include metal rails or is it all plastic? If the latter then why are expansion joints an issue? I don't BTW see plastic track as being "not model railway". I've got a box of the plastic track that came with Hornby's live steam "Rocket" including a coupel of points and I've never thought of that as being anything else. The BLR is also very clearly not a "train set". You don't scratchbuild long fuly practical viaducts for train sets. In answer to Dibber. I hope you're not accusing me of being a professional liar as I spent most of my career as a "television person", mainly as a producer and director and quite a lot of it in BBC newsrooms, and we certainly did let the facts get in the way of a planned story if that was the reality. That could be frustrating and it's not easy to abandon a programme item that simply isn't working, fortunately though the truth sometimes ade for a better story. I'm not saying that no producers ever lapse from telling the truth but I'm proud of most of the television that I produced. If you accused all local councilliors or cops of being corrupt, all teachers of bullying kids, all medical staff of not caring about their patients or even all politicians of "only being in it for themselves" i think others would quite rightly rap your knuckles for that. Claiming that all mainstream media is "false news" endangers our democaracy as I think we're now beginning to find out. BTW. One of the reasons why both Tomorrows World and Microlive (both of which I worked on, especially the latter) were live was precisely so that we couldn't be accused of "fixing" things in the editing suite.

Going into a pub may be misleading. Pub interiors, even the "authentic" real ale variety, do look very different now from how a pub on the corner of a terraced street would have looked in the 1950s. Here Google is your friend, just do an image search on Pub interiors 1950s (or whatever era you're in) and choose the most typical looking examples to give you more than enough information to model them. Don't forget the kids sitting outside with a bag of crisps because "family friendly" was still in the future. I had the same problem with my Café de la Gare. I started to put in banquettes, just like in most French cafés, brasseries and bistros I'd ever been in, only to discover that in the 1950s-1960s they were far more likely to have smallish tables with individual chairs which are a lot more work to model. They also of course look totally different around meal times than at times when everyone is drinking, chatting or playing cards It's always difficult to know how much detail to include in interiors, An empty space just somehow looks empty but it's easy to include far more detail than anyone is ever going to see. it depends a bit on whether you intend to light them and of course if you actually enjoy modelling interiors. you could argue that all you're really interested in is what you can see with your eyes (not a camera) from outside at the equivalent of a normal viewing distance- which I'd suggest is the other side of the street- or better still from the top deck of a bus passing on the other side of the road. That won't tell you what's authentic for your period but it might give you an idea of how much you can (and can't) see.