Pacific231G

I've now found a not very clear plan for St. Paul and some of my own photos which while of poor quality do show the goods shed before it was demolished to make room for (trolleybus?) parking. As well as the visible trackwork there was a scissors crossover just inside the 1400metre Loyasse tunnel. There were five platform tracks, what appears to have been a carriage siding and a single siding with a kickback serving the goods yard. A few years earlier there had been more sidings in the goods yard accessed by wagon turntables. In the plan, the building marked Gare just below the St. Paul station building was the lower terminus of the St. Paul - Fourviere funicular that at its upper terminus connected with a small metre gauge electric tramway serving one of the city's main cemeteries. These are the photos I took during a literally flying visit to Macon in the 1990s when I made the short train journey to Lyon. Unfortunately, I couldn't take any more photos even from the car park thanks to a particularly obnoxious station official. At that time it presented the odd image of a fully electrified commuter terminus served entirely by DMUs- the reason being that, when the region took responsibility for local train services as TERs, it extended a number of routes west of Lyon onto lines SNCF had closed to passengers decades before that had never been electrified. The station is and always has been very difficult to photograph and a good general view would require an aircraft or at least access to the apartments overlooking the tunnel end. It also looks like an extreme example of modeller's licence as the north east side facing the Rue St. Paul is raised on arches accomodating various garages and lockups while the other side is a sheer escarpment cut into Mont Fourviere and the tunnel mouth is jsut beyond the platform ends. The small goods yard attached to an urban, largely commuter, terminus could make operation more interesting and its cramped site makes it far less spread out than any other French main line terminus that I'm aware of. Even Bastille had more space to play with. With one of Lyon's five funiculars, trams, "electobuses", buses and a busy railway terminus, the St. Paul district must have once resembled one of those "Wonder Books of Modern Transport" There was one curious incident at the station on Friday 2nd March 1945, not very long after liberation, when a Mikado that had been damaged in an allied air raid and was being taken for repairs with others as a light engine broke free and headed down the line. With nowhere safe to divert it to it ended up gathering speed through the Loasse Tunnel and ploughing through the buffers into the station building which had been cleared. Nobody was injured and the locomotive, a 141C, was apparently back in service a few months later

Using Kadees on side buffered stock, as with any model coupler that pushes as well as the pulls, does involve a balance between having the buffers far enough apart to avoid any risk of buffer locking, with an unrealistic separation particularly for passenger corridor, and keeping them as close together as possible. Ideally they would be just touching as the couplers mate but that's not easy to arrange. There's no one answer to this as it depends on the minimum radius curves you're using (or to be strictly accurate the transition into them) and particularly any reverse "S" curves such as crossovers. I mostly use Kadee's NEM couplers, though they are a bit more clunky than the standard type, and simply keep a selection to use as appropriate for any item of rolling stock. With my own layout I generally find that if the buffing face of the Kadee is just proud of a line between the buffer surfaces then that usually works OK but I'm mostly using three foot or above radius curves and points. According to the NEM standard, the distance between the front face of the coupler box and the front face of the buffers should always be the same but when did manufacturers follow standards?

February and March 2011. I focussed on the terminus itself rather than going very far into the line it served. The first article is eight pages long and gives a general history and description of the station. It was originally planned as the Est's second main line Paris terminus. Instead, it became an almost exclusively suburban operation and in many ways the line was a little world of its own. The first article also runs through the locomotives and carriages that operated services in and out of Bastille over its 110 year life. The second article is seven pages and focusses on Bastille's operation, especially the 1920s rationalisation that squeezed far more trains into the same limited space by making great use of platform occupancy diagrams and the stopping patterns of trains, the resulting development of its track layout and signalling, its timetables and of course its modelling potential. Needless to say I've done quite a lot of research that was either too detailed to include in the articles or has been found since but I can probably answer most queries. The sad thing is that, until its closure was imminent, enthusiasts rather ignored this living museum, made so by the decades long protracted gestation of the RER that was bound to make it redundant. As a result, most photos and videos show it in its short period of push-pull working rather than earlier on when, during the rush hours, the loco traversers moving the 131TB Prairie tanks must been going like shuttlecocks and the whole operation would have been fascinating to watch.

I too am eyeing up a version of Minories for a French terminus and perhaps apart from a releasing crossover between platforms 1 & 2 I can't see anything in it that would be less prototypical in a French than a British context. I'd probably extend the loco spur to form a longer bay for parcels, postals and possibly autorails. The French were rather fond of double slips but seemed rather more inclined to use standard turnouts etc. than bespoke complexes so you'll actually be closer to ptototype using something like Peco track (which is H0 in any case) than you would be for a British station. When they used three way points these tended to be symmetrical rather than staggered. The Est and then SNCF did use exclusively Vignoles (flat bottom) rail unlike many of the other pre-nationalisation companies that used chaired bullhead (double champignon) . I absolutely agree with Fat Controller about Bastille. This terminus was an incredible exercise in cramming a quart into a pint pot- which makes it particularly interesting for us..At its busiest period in the mid 1920s it was dispatching trains from its five platforms during the peak of the evening rush hour as close as two minutes apart. Because the station was immediately followed by a narrow almost mile long viaduct with room only for the two running lines and there was no room in the cramped terminus site for any stock storage, every outbound train had to be balanced by an inbound working. Before push-pull operation was introduced in its final six years, locos also had to get from the Paris end of an arriving working to the country end of a later train. Bastille really was Minories writ large and the process that the Est's traffic Department went through in the early 1920s to rationalise its operation to get about 25% more rush hour trains through it without spending any real money on it (commuters were never very profitable) became a model for suburban terminus operation. Fortunately you have no need to to search for a plan. I've written a couple of articles about Paris Bastille for Continental Modeller and the French magazine RMF so have researched it fairly thoroughly. This is a plan from the 1950s after SNCF had relaid most of the Est's 46Kg/m track and pointwork with their own standard 50Kg/m types. and this is my rendering of its final layout using Peco large radius pointwork which gives a total throat length very close to reality and is a bit clearer about which points were left and right handed.. Apart from one single slip at the very start of the throat (only needed to get the exact entry angle to the viaduct so easily substituted by simple turnouts) and a symmetrical three way in the small loco shed the trackwork was made up almost entirely from SNCF's sharpest standard left and right hand points (with 1: 7.5 crossings) usually used only for sidings. This enabled the designers to cram a very complex throat into a very short length by not having a single reverse curve; and it was a very clever design that enabled simultaneous up and down working with any two platforms. There were five platform roads and a loco release line for no. 1 and three loco traversers (very similar to those at Birmingham Moor St.) to enable the longest possible trains to be run. Before it closed to be replaced by the first of the long planned RER lines, Bastille had become something of a living museum with mechanical signals and pointwork controlled from a single small and very Britsh looking Saxby box and was all steam until the very last train departed.on the night of December 14th 1969 Most of the photos that illustrate my articles required permission to use and I don't want to abuse that trust but here's one from my own collection that shows one of the 131TB Prairie tanks that were specially designed for the line in the 1920s hauling a train of the ex Reichsbahn bogie coaches that came to France as reparations after the Second World War and replaced the rather ancient four wheel double deck coaches that had previously operated the line . Soon after it closed SNCF's film department released a very evocative film about Bastille and the Ligne de Vincennes and I challenge anyone to watch this and not fall under the station's spell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwn8DzI0rpU&t=521s What this doesn't show is the choreography of movement required to operate an intense rush hour service before push-pull working was introduced in about 1963. . I agree about Lyon St Paul also being interesting. It too had five platforms (It's four now) but also had a small goods yard and was crammed into an even more cramped site with a tunnel mouth immediately at the end of its throat with a scissors crossover inside the tunnel. It was never as intensively worked as Bastille but goods workings would add to the variety. It's difficult to photograph but I have a plan of it somewhere that I'll dig out.

Yes, as a worked example for new users, Martin Wynne included in Templot the data file for a layout based on Minories. It's called Engine Lane and it's in Gauge O Fine. I think Tom Cunnington and the other MRC members who built the EM gauge Minoriesfor the 50th anniversary used Templot rather than off the shelf templates for their pointwork. They followed CJF's original plan as closely as possible but slightly lengthened the points to give more generous curves which lengthened the scenic boards to a total of 7ft 10ins.

Not quite true as the route between platform 1 and the Up (inbound) line over the two back to back points does involve an immediate reverse curve over pointwork and so is prone to buffer locking. However, it's the only one of the six possible routes that doesn't have a separation between the reversal of curves, so with that one exception, Minories is a much smoother arrangement than an equivalent straight throat in the same length. My modification of using a Y in the main throat avoids the problem of that one immediate reversal, without increasing the overall length, by almost doubling the radius of one of the curves and halving its angle but I accept that is at the expense of adding a similar but equally shallow reversal to two of the other routes. I wouldn't claim that my plan in 455 is a pure Minories as it isn't but I'd argue that it is close enough and uses the same basic principles to be a modified Minories. That's very different from claiming any three platform terrminus at the end of a double track mainline as a version of Minories, though there was a lot of that around the time of the plan's 50th anniversary.. Modellers were building those before Cyril Freezer was born - there are a good number in Edward Beal's pre-war books- but what I think he achieved was to squeeze a main line terminus quart into a branch line terminus sized pint pot and to come up with a specific arrangement of pointwork that not only achieved that but also gave it an impression of main line busyness. Designing termini pointwork with no reverse curves at all is a fascinating exercise* and I'd love to see the plan you came up with for your friends's layout. Though I've never been there Penzance has always seemed like a good basis for compact main line terminus and having the MPD some distance away up the main line must give scope for some interesting light engine and pilot working. * See post #72 for my favourite real world example. It took me ages to convince myself that there really weren't any reverse curves and that it was all done with off the shelf #7 left and right hand points and could still handle long main line stock

Agreed and you can do that in H0 (European rather than American) as well. The Peco long points have a curved frog (I think)and contine to curve beyond the frog so has anyone tried straightening the diverging track (and probably trimming them too) for more prototypical crossovers?.

Not on the same board unless you make it a small radius point (which rather defeats the purpose of not using small radius points) and even then your points would be within half an inch of the ends of the board. I'm not really though very convinced by that single kickback parcels siding which looks to be just trying to fill in the dead space in the front right of the layout. I prefer somethnig like this: (6 inch grid) The centre folding seven foot board is fine for the basic pure passenger Minories but I actually find that 3ft 6in half board length slightly awkward if you want any goods/parcels facilties as that requires at least one other turnout beyond the main throat. There isn't quite enough room for it on the right hand board so you either accept a longish gap between the main throat and the pointwork on the other board, which makes the layout a bit wider because of the angles involved, or you shift the entire throat to the left and lose some platform length. My intinct would be to use slightly shorter boards for the main folding section, make sure the tracks at the left hand end are parallel then add an extension piece. That's probably not a bad idea anyway as, depending on the space available, you could then have the short version for home use but a longer version for exhibtions. The good thing about metre (39") length boards is that I know they'll fit in my car and are fairly comfortable to handle. I'll have a play with my version that includes Ys as that may avoid some of the width problem, Update Yes I think it has. (6 inch grid 2x 42x12 inch boards total 7ft x 1ft) The Y gives a shallower angle to the lefthand end of the main throat so the gap between the throat and the goods yard entry points doesn't throw it so far forward. II've allowed two inches minimum between the ends of points and the board ends. This effectively gives you the same goods facilities as in the version of the original Minories with a goods shed alongside the passenger station but without having to use platform three as a goods reception road. A goods shed (or milk depot or whatever) at the right hand end in longitudinal low relief could act as a view blocker for the main line exit to the fiddle yard and you can just assume that this is one end of a larger goods yard. This is close to the plan I'm working up for a French version of the terminus. but I need to come up with a couple more ideas to give it more of a Gallic main line and less of a City of London ambience. as well as lenthening I'll probably need to widen the layout a bit and turn the loco layover road into a longer bay for autorails and postal/baggage vans

Hi Phil I probably wouldn't set any pointwork closer than an inch or more from the board end but without using ANY small radius points you won't need to. With medium radius points, all the pointwork (apart from the points for the kickback siding) fits very comfortably onto a metre long board. I've got it laid out on one right now and the total length of the actual pointwork occupies 34 1/2 inches which gives a tad more than two inches clear at each end. With 38 inches to play with, even with the hinge post,you should be fine. After a lot of playing around with it I have made one change to the original plan which is to substitute a medium radius Y (nominally 5ft radius) for the first of the two back to back points. I'm pleased with the result of this. it does significantly reduces the end displacement between coaches in trains moving between the Up line and platform 1. That is at the expense of an S curve between platforms two and three and the down line but it's at a much more gentle curve and with half the angular displacement so all movements over it are smoother. This is from an earlier mockup so I need to lay it more accurately and test it again. The medium Y is the same length as the medium left and right points so it adds nothing to the overall length but does also make the overall S curve through the station gentler and you don't need a reverse curve within the platforms. There is still more end displacement than I'd like but I simply don't have room to use all large radius points on my planned layout. I did try substituting a large radius turnout for the first set of points in the throat but that didn't seem to make much difference, possibly because Peco's large radius points curve beyond the frog to get to the same final divergence angle and a normal crossover would have straight track between the crossings. . .

The great virtue of Cyril Freezer's Minories plan is that out of the six possible routes through the throat only one of them (up line to platform one) involves an immediate reverse curve. All the other routes do involve a reverse curve but there is at least the length of one turnout between them which significantly reduces lateral displacement between longer coaches. . If you compare that with the normal straight line version of the same arrangement, which also requires the length of four points, you'll see that, while platform one to down and up to platform two, are completely straight. the four other possible routes all involve an immediate reverse curve mostly over a crossover (up to platfrom three can be a bit more gente) and one of them, platform three to down, involves two sets of reverse curves. Although Freezer's very first version of Minories, which was 6ft 8ins x 9 ins. in OO, seems to be based on nominally two foot radius points these are rather sharp though I have seen them used on the wonderful Horn Lane layout in its main terminus inspired by the Distric and Central Line section of Ealing Broadway, That seemed OK with short Underground cars but tight for mainline stock- even suburban. All his later versions, including the 7ft x 1ft version with the single kickback siding, were based on nominally three foot radius points (Peco Medium) which is a lot more comfortable. I notice that in your drawing you've used small radius points (nominal 2ft) which gives a few more inches on train lengths but does seem to lose the idea of a train flowing through the pointwork. It's very difficult to improve on Freezer's basic throat arrangement plan but, using Peco track, I have found that replacing one of the medium (three foot nominal) radius back to back points with a medium Y (nominal five foot radius) avoids buffer locking on that critical one critical route and also makes the overall S curve through the station a bit less marked. The throat still fits comfortably on a metre long baseboard. I don't know how much cant (if any?) would be used on a crossover in a slow speed terminus approach but it's supposed to be zero at the point where the curve reverses with a cant transition either side.

I've seen a layout that included a section of AFAIR about half a metre of flooded track and it did just use tapwater. Though there probably were some electrical losses through the water (which would effectively create a parallel circuit to that through the motor) it didn't seem to be causing a signficant loss of power, probably less than the mechanical drag created by the water. Clearly a longer water section would have greater losses but it would be easy enough to experiment with a length of track and a bowl of water.

Thanks David. I've not seen that edition but always wondered if he'd taken the layout further; it's good to know that he did and I'll look for that article . Peter Heath also came up with the "Piano Line" (Holiday project RM July 1965) idea which is a very neat way of getting a complete working terminus to fiddle yard layout into a small space by having the main line joining within the run round loop rather than at its end. . The original was quite basic with a single goods siding and was worked by a Tri-ang OO "Nellie" 0-4-0, two four wheel coaches (made from a Tri-ang suburban bogie coach) and one goods wagon. With an extra siding it has suprisingly good operational potential. I assumed the basic concept to be total modeller's licence until I discovered at least three termini on French metre gauge lines laid out in exactly this way to get into awkward locations. It would also lend itself rather well to a harbour branch

Even with my less than perfect track laying I've experienced far better running with H0m than I ever did with 009/H0e and I think that may have something to do with the locos being less top heavy. I think my favourite OOn3 layout was probably David Lloyd's Augher Valley and I loved the idea of the complete railway winding its way up a valley with movements such as "railcar half working" but the one that most inspired me was the Rev. P.H.Heath's original Llanfair wihch must have been one of the first to use Tri-ang mechs for NG. It was a very simple layout- just a loop and a siding in the terminus with a single track fiddle yard but seemed to capture the atmosphere of a Welsh NG railway perfectly. He later extended it to a second terminus but with too many proprietary buildings that seemed less convincing than the Llanfair end. I did notice at the Trainsmania exhibtion in Lille at the end of April that, apart from the Belgian SNCV modellers, very few NG models were in H0m. 0e and H0e dominated the NG sections even when they were supposed to be representing metre gauge prototypes though I think there were a couple of Nm layouts. Metre gauge was brillianty represented by the Gravett's Pempoul in 1:50 scale of course but it did seem odd, given metre gauge's dominance of European narrow gauge railways that relatively few NG modellers are now using it apart I guess from those modelling Switzerland. .

I was looking at some revlews in an old MRC a few days ago and they were slating HD for still using tinplate when Tri-ang and others had moved to injecttion moulded plastic but I agree that they somehow looked better not least because the windows were almost flush. I did build a K's body kit of an 060PT (a condensing tank AFAIR) for my TT-3 Jinty but it was a bit wonky (glued rather than low temperature soldered). I think the extra weight did improve its running slightly. . Some years ago I looked at some of the odd items of Tri-ang TT-3 stuff I still had with a view to using it for H0m but one look at the steam roller wheel profiles compared with Tillig and even Zeuke/Berlinerbahn soon put paid to that idea. Instead I bought some wagon chassis from the 3mm Society which were spot on for a local French metre gauge railway

I had Tri-ang TT-3 in the sixties and I'm afraid that it did seem to me closer to toy than model, not least because of poor running (compared with my previous HD) and those gross couplers. My dissatisfaction with it led my youthful creativity to focus more on my Meccano set instead. It's a shame because TT, whether 3mm/ft or 2.5mm/ft, always seemed an attractive scale, just large enough to not feel distanced from the models which is how N scale has always felt to me (I did build a small N gauge layout once but didn't take to it) but sufficiently smaller to do a lot more than H0 or 00 in the same space. I think it was probably the arrival of N scale that really killed off TT as a commercial scale as for years what was available was generally not very well made (compared with its Western European counterparts) E. German models One perhaps unexpected bonus from the commercialisation of TT was the huge boost it gave to narrow gauge modelling particularly of 3 ft and metre gauge prototypes. That seems to have waned in recent years with 009/H0e, using more readily available N gauge mechs. becoming far more popular despite the fact that it represents a gauge far less used outside Austro-Hungary than 2ft/60cm or 3ft/metre gauge.

George Osborne was comparing apples and onions. The number of people who live in West Ruislip and need to go to Epping or vice-versa is tiny but the number of people needing to travel between the Leeds/Bradford connurbation and greater Manchester is probably quite high though both will need good local transport to make high speed travel between their centres worthwhile. Central Line trains don't normally terminate in either the West End or the City but most of its passengers do though they originate from a large number of stations along its route. That makes the effective length of the Central Line as a commuter route far less than half that of Manchester-Leeds and I doubt if journey times have improved all that much since the Central London Railway was first built, comfort even less so. The Central Line used to offer scenery as well. Once, after a night shift in London, I travelled to the then end of the Central Line at Ongar instead of making my usual journey to Ealing. It was quite bizarre to get on a London Underground train at Holborn and end up on a single line trundling through miles of completely open countryside even with combine harvesters hard at work in the fields on either side. As I recall, Epping-Ongar was even more rural than the Island Line is and, in any case, those are ex-Underground trains not current ones.

They weren't - quite deliberately of course and the mayhem was undoubtedly as accidental as in a Tri-ang exploding boxcar- but automobile based inspection vehicles and pw vehicles have been used perfectly succesfully by railways more or less for as long as they've been on the roads, either converted to railcars or amphibious. .Just search for Wilys Jeep Railroad and you'll find them hauling quite long trains. I don't think it was an accident that the original Jeeps had a track width so close to 1435mm (they had one fo them fitted with rail wheels running up and down a siding at the Baie de Somme gala last year). Some of the French secondary railways also had two wheel baggage trailers so there's probably no reason in principal why a caravan couldn't be used. Some railways in France (mostly forestry logging but one 800mm public NG railway) went one better and used converted Fordson farm tractors (mostly ex WW1 US Army) as locomotives. I think the original Aveling and Porter locos on the Brill tramways were also converted from or at least based on traction engines.

I think most of us fall into both camps to some extent. I've got far more stock than I'll ever use and some of it, though relevant to what I model, was bought either because it was way under priced so too much of a bargain to turn down, usually at local MRE second hand stalls, or just because I really liked it. I think the latter is probably fine but I've got rather too many examples of rolling stock I jsut need some of. Sooner or later I'm going to have to ruthlessly classify it into the usual four categories. Sort, Sell, Charity, Dump (mostly half finished projects that I really know never will be) . I sometimes wish I had the skills to be a scratchbuilder (I am for many of my buildings) as then the sheer work involved in building something would be a definite barrier; impulse buying is one thing but impulse scratchbuilding quite another- or is it??!! I guess that's one of the advantages of working in a specialist field such as 3mm/ft or S Scale.

These look like the compressed air locos used during the buiilding of the Simplon Tunnel from 1906 and other Alpine tunnels but they were also used in mines and compressed air was also used to power trams particularly in France. I can't find another image of your particular loco and I notice that it unusually had side buffers. These locomotives came in a variety of forms some with a single large air cylider and others with between several to a whole battery of cylinders to enable higher pressures to be used. . This one was built by the Swiss Winterthur works for the Simplon and ran on 800mm gauge track and this one was built by Renault in France for use in mines in 1921 Compressed air was of course in constant use for drills and other tools in both mining and tunnelling so a supply of it was readily available (though not perhaps at the very high pressures used by some locos) If you look up locomotive air comprimé in your favourite search engime you should find plenty of them. There is an article here from 1877 describing their first use in the building of the St. Gothard tunnel https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_10/February_1877/Compressed-Air_Locomotive_in_St_Gothard_Tunnel There is also a fairly long article on them here but with a somewhat American perspective. http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/airloco/airloco.htm However, this does say that the user of compressed air to power trams was short lived and unsuccesful. In reality they ran for a good few years in Paris and other French cities that didn't want steam trams in the more upmarket parts of their city centres until electric traction really took off. They proved particularly useful during the Paris floods of 1910 and in a couple of cities such as La Rochelle they survived into the 1920s (possibly because of objections to overhead wires) They weren't particularly efficient, given the heat energy losses associated with compressing and then releasing air, but in the situations they were used for that probably wasn't the major consideration. Apart from your photo, I've not seen any other examples of compressed air locos with a canopy. The early ones tended to have just one large air tank but multiple cylinders, as in your example, enabled far higher pressures to be used (up to about 2000psi in some cases) The working pressure was generally much lower than the storage pressure and air was supplied to the engine via a reducing valve. The problem with compressed air as a power source is that, like any gas, it cools when it expands so acting as a refrigerant when released. That leads to the freezing up of pipes etc. and was always a problem though obviated by hot water or even small coal heaters.

Quite by chance I was looking through the September 1959 MRN for something else when I happened upon a piece by J.N.Maskelyne, by then the magazine's consulting editor, describing a 100MPH+ run on a special train from Kings Cross to Doncaster for the Stephenson Locomotive Society's Golden Jubilee tour of Doncaster works on May 23rd 1959. The train was 8 coaches long and carrying 345 members. The locomotive was A4 Pacific Sir Nigel Grelsey (60007) driven by Bill Hoole. According to Maskelyne the train reached exactly 100MPH "for some distance" north of Hitchin with an average speed of 98.3 MPH over a three mile stretch. On the return run the last five miles of the descent from Stoke Summit to Tallington were covered at an average speed of 108.8MPH with a maximum of between 110-112 MPH. I'm assuming that these timings were based on stop watches and quarter mile posts but were clearly recorded by a number of people who took such timings seriously and, even if the maximum speed was a bit high, it was clearly well beyond 100MPH . I hadn't known that such high speeds were ever attained by steam locomotives during BR days and my own first 100 MPH run was behind a Deltic on the ECML (during a school railway society trip to Darlington) in the mid 1960s when I was told that this was faster than BR steam locos ever ran in service. I assume he'd never flown because Maskelyne said that this was the first time he had ever travelled at well over 100MPH "....and behind a steam loco too!" so it clearly wasn't common but does anyone know how often steam locos exceeded the ton under BR ? I got to see the Tornado programme a few days ago some weeks after it was broadcast nationally (on BBC4 ?) and it was excellent. Well pitched without a lot of hype but seemed to really capture the quiet excitement of those involved.

Hi Martin I do find the BRMSB standard rather strange. I'm looking at the 1950 version and it gives a sleeper length of 32mm for OO so 8ft but it also gives the same length for H0 which is equivalent to 9ft and 36mm for EM which is also 9ft. That does suggest that Maskelyne and co. were a bit steeped in pre-grouping practice but also that they believed that for best appearance the length of sleepers should correspond to the gauge. For some reason they also gave the same sleeper width of 3.5mm for OO, EM and H0 even though in H0 scale (which a good number of modellers of British prototypes were still using then) that's obviously too fat for a standard 10" wide sleeper. They also had a finer check rail clearance of 1mm for H0 and fine scale EM (EMF) than the 1.25mm they specified for OO and EM - In any case the BRMSB gauge for EM (and EMF) was still 18.0 mm rather than 18.2mm. Fortunately Peco aren't following the sixty year old BRMSB standards for their new track as those specify a rail height of 2.5mm for Bullhead which is code 100. Just for fun I had a go at working out the appropriate sleeper length for the 4ft 11/2 inch (1257mm) gauge that OO track is equivalent to as if it were a real gauge. . Taking the ratio of sleeper length to gauge and Interpolating between the standard sleeper lengths of 2600 mm (8ft 6ins) used for 1435mm (SG) in Britain and Europe and the 2100mm used by ZAR for their 1067mm (3ft 6in) gauge railways, I reckon that sleepers for a real 4ft 11/2 inch gauge railway would be between 2277 and 2476 mm. In 1:76.2 scale that would give sleeper lengths of between 30-32mm. That puts the BRMSB length at the upper end of that range and the nominal 30mm of Peco's FB track at the lower end. If the new Peco bullhead track has sleepers much longer than 32mm then it may look a bit narrow gauge. Since OO can never be accurate to scale what surely matters is whether it looks right with and without rolling stock - at least from the side at a reasonable range of viewing angles. BTW Does anyone know the tolerances that sleeper dimensions were ordered to from the suppliers a) by the pre war railway companies and b) by B.R. ? Obviously they weren't sawn to a few thou but was the allowed variation a few tenths of an inch or a couple of inches?

According to the June Loco-Revue they did succeed, just. It was a team from the Lille MRC working on one layout not the several I'd thought (I think it was an open challenge but they were presumably the only group that rose to it) Apart from water they were only supposed to use what came in the box (though I did spot a palette knife) According to the magazine's write-up, the only disappointment they encountered was ballasting with PVA without a wetting agent. Obviously every home has washing up liquid but clearly not the middle of a large model railway exhibtion when you're working against the clock.

Many years ago my father had a fairly large stamp collection that he was convinced was quite valuable though there were no rarities in it. After he died my mother gave it to me and I eventually sold it through someone I know to be utterly trustworthy and scrupulously honest (not a dealer!) To this day my sister won't believe that I wasn't cheated. I tend to think that one difference between a collector and a modeller is that the collector wants one of everything while the modeller wants batches of some things and none of others- particularly wagons but also coaches "You've already got a Great Western cattle wagon, why do you need six more of them!!"

I had a go with a pump trolley a few years ago. It was the most enormous fun and once you had it up to a reasonable speed it was surprising how little effort was needed to keep it going. Given the well known efficiency of the bicycle I'd imagine that a track cycle would be even easier for a longish inspection trip but probably carried less in the way of tools.

As always with aerodynamics it's a lot more complicated than any simple explanation. While a jet engine does have a ceiling above which the air is too thin, that's a very long way above the altitude of around 30-35 000 ft that most commercial jets operate where the pressure is typically about 200hPa compared with the "standard" pressure of 1013hPa at sea level. Jets can and do fly much higher than that and have gone to edge of space. The U2 spy plane, now used for meteorological research can apparently cruise at 90 000ft . I'm not an aerodynamicist but my understanding is this: Jet aircraft are more efficient at high altitudes partly because the air is cooler. The theoretical efficiency of any heat engine is (Tsource -Tsink )/ Tsource where the temperature T is in absolute. Cool air expands more when heated to the exhaust temperature than warm air and it is the expansion of the air that drives combustion engines. The other factor is the lower density of the air at higher altitudes. That produces lower drag so the aircraft flies faster than at low altitude when it is given the same thrust. Effectively, the air speed (the number of air molecules the aircraft is passing per second) is higher than the actual speed through the air at higher altitudes. At this high speed, the mass flow through the engine is comparable to the mass flow at lower speed in higher density air at lower altitude. The amount of energy needed to heat the air to exhaust temperature is comparable between high and low altitudes. But since the aircraft at high altitude flies much faster the fuel it uses per average ground mile covered is far less. These factors are noticeable even in a light piston aircraft flying at comparatively low altitudes where performance is far better on a cold winter day than a hot summer day but taking off from an airfield 5000ft above sea level requires a far longer runway than is needed at more normal altitudes. There is though a limit to how high a propellor driven aircraft can fly due to the limits of speed at the propellor tips. Turboprops are more efficient than pure jet engines (even high by-pass turbofans) at lower speeds and altitudes but one reason why they were used less was apparently the preception of passengers who thought aircraft fitted with them "old-fashioned" not knowing the difference between a turboprop and a prop in front of a piston engine. .