Pacific231G

I'm curious because though radar is an acronym of Radio Detection and Ranging , the second letter is not an initial so the initials would surely be R.D.R. not R.A.D.A.R. I was just trying to compare the etymology of Radar with Asdic only to discover that what I'd always been told (and my OED still maintains) that it was the initials of the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee, was a myth generated by the RN in 1939. There never was such a committee. The Asdic name seems to have come in reality from adding -ic to anti submarine detection to make it into a pronouncable noun. Mongrels are generally healthier than pure breeds and whoever coined the word in about 1900 was very well aware of combining a Greek and a Latin root. Latin masters (and English teachers overinfluenced by them) have a lot to answer for, like trying to tell us we shouldn't use split infinitives in English because they don't exist in Latin. That does beg a rather obvious question. He probably also thought that we should refer to football stadia rather than stadiums.

Even though frites are of Belgian origin. Never was there a country with such curtailed freedoms as the US that bangs on so much about freedom. It always reminds me how countries with Democratic in their names are usually anything but.

If they can put a Kingfisher Beak on the front of their high speed trains then why not a different bow on their ships. From the side it looks rather quaintly old fashioned like a steamship from the the turn of the 19/20th century. I assume the size of these vessels means that they don't take waves in quite the same way as a smaller ship or have the laws of hydrodyamics changed to make bulbous bows less advantageous?

It's not one of the standard Ishihara plates but in several of those (I think 19 and 29 come closest) people with red-green colourblindness see a number or line but those with normal colour vision see nothing. https://www.challengetb.org/publications/tools/country/Ishihara_Tests.pdf

Isn't that a pattern where people with a certain type of colour blindness do see text but those without it don't?

Thanks for posting that Keith. It really takes me back. We had several family holidays in the Western Highlands ( I think my father liked rain and midges!) and I can remember going to Skye on the Glenelg ferry as well as another crossing and the turntable car decks on the Glenelg ferry seemed very Heath Robinsonish. This would have been in the late 1950s early 1960s so none of the ferries we used would have been the Glenachulish but I didn't even know that these small ferry boats even had names. I 'm sure we also used the Ballaculish ferry but can't remember what sort of ferry was in use on the other short crossing to Skye. It all brings back memories of single track A Roads with passing places and staying in Highland B&Bs. We used the Motorail service at least once to get up there but also the "Starlight Special" (a cut price overnight train with day carriages only) with a hire car from I think Edinburgh.

Strangely enough, the design looks very similar to the former Starvin Marvin diner (now a block of flats). It's different from the classic 1950s American diner but, though I've eaten in plenty of diners while travelling in N. America., I don't recall any of them being absolutely the classic design though the same Budd like corrugated stainless steel fascia, itself based on railroad "streamliners", was not uncommon. I wonder if the Starvin Marvin and the OKs were from the same designer or based on a common American prototype.

I don't know if they're still there but there used to be a couple of these on the Great North road that I went to several times while driving on business. I remember them as being pretty good (unlike Starvin Marvin's)

Setting scenes in dramas is all about suspension of disbelief. There should be nothing that immediately makes the audience feel they're not when and where the scene is set so one has to ask what is necessary for achieving that end and what isn't. We happen to know far more about railways than the overwhelming majority of viewers so see things they don't* I'm quite there are always things that people with other areas of specialist knowledge will spot that we won't. Are the hens clucking in the 1950s farm yard different from the breeds around at that time; are the horse harnesses too modern; is it obvious to any highway engineer that ,in the Edwardian street scene that I accept as authentic , the straw strewn road with the yellow lines carefully covered has the wrong camber and the wrong surface treatment? What makes a scene feel authentic may be quite subtle and what makes it just feel inauthentic may not be due to any particulalr details beign wrong but rathet to a general sense of things not being quite right. All this does of course apply equally to our layouts! * For example, in the Burt Lancaster film "The Train" I accept the story and its locations and have a sense of the train crossing war torn north east France in the summer of 1944. Even the locos, with one exception, are from the right region. I do though notice that some of the track is bullhead even though none of it in the Est region was and I do also noice that outside Vaires loco depot, when it is being bombed, there are a number of 141R locos on shed which weren't delivered to France till after the liberation. They are though in the background so they don't shout "Wrong!" to me while I'm watching the scene. Burt Lancaster operating a hand point lever that throws a point a hundred yards away I do notice!

Actually that wasn't an example of murderous bent. Barnes Wallis wanted to produce bombs that would cause maximum damage to infrastructure with far fewer civilian deaths than plastering a target with bombs. The bouncing bomb was one example of that and the "Earthquake bombs" Tallboy and Grand Slam were another. A single Grand Slam destroyed the Bielefeld viaducts which 3 500 tons of bombs had failed previously failed to do. How many of the slave workers kiiled by the dam raids and by the raid on Penemunde do you really think would have survived several more years in the hands of the Nazis?

Hello Ron I haven't yet downloaded my own photos from the SD Card but your images look a lot better than mine did in the camera. I tried using a high ISO but got very grainy images. It was a splendid evening (I was there as an NGRS member) and it was good to chat with you in the Willow Lawn buffet/ticlet office while waiting for that train. The railway was running its most intensive service ever and it was fascinating to watch and experience, especially once dusk had turned to night.

A year later but I've been wondering about this myself. I do have a possible explanation but am not sure of it. Looking at the images of the terminus I've been able to find it appears that the station was worked with a separate up departure and down arrival side each with a bay (there was no passenger access between them) and there are no images of a train on the up platforms with a locomotive at the London end. There are though plenty of examples of both up platforms and the middle siding occupied by trains with locos at the London end. This implies that on the down side no train would be backed towards the turntable whereas on the up platform that would be the norm with the trap siding ensuring that trains would never be backed into the turntable pit. On the Signalbox Diagram (i only have the SRS thumbnail) , there was also an elecric fouling bar (EFB) marked at the turntable end of the down platform presumably to prevent the TT being unlocked from that road when the down approach to it was occupied. The turntable is marked as electrically controlled by sbx and I assume this refers to its locking not how its driven. The other oddity is that the three carriage sidings are only directly accessible from the down (arrivals) platforms. This implies that an arriving train would be propelled into the sidings by its own loco and a train being drawn from the sidings would have to be pulled into the down platform (by a station pilot?) and then propelled into the tunnel in order to reach the up platforms where the train loco could then be attached (the station pilot then being able to make good its escape via the turntable. This 1905 map is congruent with the 1914 signal box diagram and, being a resort, it looks on busy days that trains would arrive in the morning and their coaches would be stored in the sidings clear of the platfoms while their locos went up the tunel to be serviced. As evening approached (with other non tripper trains arriving and departing) the trains would be pulled out of the sidings and theit locos would arrive to take them out. images do show trains ready for departure on the two up platforms and a third, without its loco, on the centre road ready to move over to the main departure platform as soon as the train there had departed. Another image does show a train being drawn forward from the centre siding by a main line loco. All this suggests an eminently modellable set of operations that may look a little unlikely but are completely true. Does anyone by any chance have a summer timetable for Ramsgate Harbour (aka Sands) Station?

I don't remember him but there was no particular reason I would have. I just went in, had my lunch - often a sandwich- and left. I had interesting conversations with fellow diners who there tended to be professional/media but don't remember meeting the cook. The silver diner near the railroad depot can be a bit of a cliché on American themed layouts but the saddest aspect of that trip was driving down I 40 (to the south west (I wanted to fly myself over the Grand Canyon and also travelled the full length of the Cumbres and Toltec RR) after I'd finished my stint with the campaign. The downtowns of the sort of small towns I'd remembered, mostly as rest stops, from touring the country by Greyhound in the early 1970s, were fill of boarded up businesses and shops. The big stores like Walmart had set up shop just outside the town (where they didn't have to pay town taxes) and sucked the business life from them. It was in those downtown areas where the RR depot was invariably sited and it made what woudl once have been the town's focus look very sad. There were a few exceptions where the town had some kind of historic or tourist aspect but I saw the same pattern in town after town.

I think I may know that diner! I worked as a volunteer on the Clinton-Gore campaign in Little Rock in the summer of 1992 (a very interesting experience). The presidential campaign was based in an old newspaper building in downtown Little Rock and I used to go to a diner about a block away. By then though Governor Clinton wasn't nipping out to the local diner for lunch. The diner was on the ground floor of an office block so not a prefab diner but the food was pretty good with fried okra a regional speciality . At that time there were still quite a lot of "Mom n Pop" restaurants in the south- the big chains hadn't yet taken over.

I've seen grounded wagon bodies used as agricultural sheds in both North America and France- rather as old ISO containers are often used now. There have been a few restaurants based on Wagon Lits restaurant car bodies- there are or were a couple on top of one of the retaining walls of the Batignolles cutting maybe half a mile outside the Gare St, Lazare. I did once stay in a motel in Pennsylvania whose restaurant was a former Pennsy dining car but, though static, that was still on its wheels on a length of track. So too were the motel's cabins that were all ex Pennsy Cabooses. Its name "The Red Caboose Motel" (look it up) should have been a clue! A few American diners probably were grounded bodies but the vast majority were built for the purpose by a number of specialist companies, particularly in te 1920s and 30s. Some of these came over here but I don't think there are many left. The long narrow shape enabled them to be prefabricated and shipped by rail or truck to their site. The archetypical stainless steel design was inspired by "streamliner" trains like the Burlington Zephyr and thousands were built. I've eaten in the diner car of the polar Bear Express in northern Ontario and it had more or less the same layout as a typical roadside diner. I suspect though that its layout was inspired more by roadside diners than the railway version. I think traditonal American dining cars followed the same basic design as European ones with a separate kitchen at one end and seating on both sides of an open saloon. The typical; prefabricated diner layout of a long counter with stools on one side with cooking facilities behind it and table seating on the other side is often too wide for even American RR loading gauge so would have had to be shipped as a wide load by road. Their decline in America seems to have come with the expansion of branded fast food joints like McD, Burger King, Taco Bell etc. There used to be a typical American Diner on the A40. Fortunately, it's closed down now and a block of flats built on the site. I say fortunately having been there a couple of times but this link explains why http://www.cheeseburgerboy.com/2014/02/starvin-marvins-greenford.html

I watched the whole Coronation on TV amd am glad that I did. I am British and it is an important milestone in our national life. It was all terribly well done of course and it struck me, not for the first time, that a constitutonal monarchy with plenty of pomp and ceremony but no actual power provides a focus for our patriotism that isn't a flag or, worse still, a politician. A system that ensures that even the most senior politician is never actually at the top of the pecking order, so always a servant of the nation and never its master or mistress seems like a bargain to me and I think you need a good deal of what we witnessed today to make that happen. On a related matter, the commentary during the parade on the Buck House lawn, made mention that most of the military personnel taking part had arrived on trains and would be going back the same way. That implies a fleet of special trains as I'm sure the regular ones won't be full of squaddies. Does anyone know more?

Moreton in Marsh (March 2022)

I have thought of running my French layout in real time. The morning train left at 06.30 to connect with the express to Paris so long before the exhibition opened and the afternoon train returns at 5.30 just after the public left.I might just bring in the mid morning mixed, shunt it for a bit then send the crew to the Café de la Gare for lunch for two hours, finish shuntng it and send it on its way. Sundays though tended to have the same schedule but without the mixed. (railway workers were often ostracised because they worked on Sundays) I don't think train spotting was ever much of a hobby in France as, on so much of the netrork, there just were't many trains to spot. Much of America was even worse.

Which only shows that those white supremacists banging on about the "purity of the white race" have totally got the wrong end of the stick. Mind you, these are the idiots who think a few minor genetic adaptations to less sunny climes created some kind of overall superiority.

I've found two articles about sign writing and typography. The typography article was in MRN 11-1965 and Signwriters' alphabets of the nineteenth century by Andrew Emmerson was in Model Railways October 1976. They'll still be in copyrght but I can PM them. The Emmerson article is probably the most relevant to you Nick so I'll PM that one first

Hi Nick I have a few such articles from various model railway mags in my cuttings collection. I'm busy at the moment but rattle my cage if I haven't responded in about a week's time. Typography can be a bit of a rabbit hole - you get into it and modelling time all goes on it. I spent ages analysing the type face (probably a stencil) used for the French station name boards that appeared usually enamelled white on a blue background on the ends of station buildings just to get it right for my own. As I know you know but others may not, for printed typestyles the problem is that digital versions are vectors that simply reproduce the same typeface in any size you want where traditional type designers made subtle changes of weighting etc. for each different size font. ( I'm no expert on all this but in 1989 I produced some BBC programmes on printing and publishing so learnt stuff from a lot of people in the business. The thing all the tradtional printers regretted was how much of the sublety of their craft was being lost as digital typesetting took over. There was though no subtlety in a linotype machine!)

Hi Neil I don't think so. I've certainly never come across one or its remains. Rivers are/were a different matter and I can remember the Thames Conservancy gates along its towpath (always well kept and painted a pleasing shade of light blue) There is a section of the Oxford canal where it uses the Cherwell and there are no signs of gates on the towpath though on the opposite bank there are places for cattle to drink and fences that come right down to the water. Canals were private enterprises like railways and the towpath was on canal company land but I'm not aware of towpath gates at junctions between canals. The other thing I've only just twigged is that the reason why the towpath side of rural canals is so well hedged off was that local farmers didnt want the bargeees grazing the horses on their fields. The need to carry fodder for the horse must have cut down the carrying capacity of canal boats but I've not seen that documented- how and where were the horses supplied with feed?

Thanks Keith. That's an excellent find and really well transferred to 4K. I worked for the BBC in Southampton through most of the 1980s and a little of that atmosphere was still there with fairly regular boat trains for the QE2 etc. passing by our studios. The odd thing about Southampton though was that, unless you had business there (which I sometimes did), the city was almost completely walled off from the port and there were very few places, apart from Mayflower park and the Hythe and IofW ferries where you could actually watch shipping activity. Nowadays the port handles far more passengers than it ever did in the days of the great liners. Unfortunately most of them now come by car not boat train so the main roads tend to seize up every time there are several cruise ships in at once. I was curious about the Calshot as it was clearly far more than a harbour tug and looked to have had passenger accomodation. I've now discovered that she was a historic ship built in 1929 for Red Funnel (who operate the IofW ferries) and a rare survivor of a Tug/Tender. There are even photos of her working the RMS Olympic I think as a tug. Tenders transferred passengers to and from liners at intermediate ports so they didn't need to dock. I wasn't aware though that much of that ever went on at Southampton but perhaps lines like Holland-America did. Sadly, having deteriorated badly, efforts to restore the Calshot failed and it was broken up last year.

There's not really enough clearance between the nearest and middle track and the hinge block for a building so I think a bridge would be the obvious disguise. You could of course be imaginative and just model the piers of a now dismantled railway bridge- that way you could have bushes beyond the far parapet and maybe model the derelict track or its remains on an embankment leading up to the near parapet.

We shouldn't conflate environmentalists with objectors even though many objectors will claim environmental justification. This is the big difference between railways and motorway type roads. The latter have such a wide footprint and the costs of tunnels and viaducts are so high that they remain a scar on the countryside forever as in the M3 cutting through Twyford Down. On Monday I happened to drive on the A40 towards Witney past the A34 Oxford bypass and both the Oxford Birmingham and Oxford Worcester main lines. It so happens that living fairly locally I can remember the A34 by pass being built in the mid 1960s with vast amounts of plant, earthmoving and concrete pouring. Now, though all the grass and vegetation around it has grown, it still dominates its surroundings. In complete contrast, you have to know you're crossing the two railway lines to even be aware that they're there (the double track line to Bicester is even more discrete). After a good number of years you can now make a similar comparison between HS1 and the M20.