Pacific231G

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.

Probably not as stones that heavy would apparently have crushed the logs and you'd surely need a very flat road to run them on. Like most great inventions the wheel is very obvious AFTER it's been invented but there is nothnig like it in nature. The South Americans had very sophisticated civilisations but they never invented the wheel.* Current thinking seems to be that bith the stonehenge and pyramid builders used wooden sledges though there are other credible theories. I believe that in the Scottish Isles, experimental archaeologists did try using log rollers without success but someone had heard of locals laying seaweed in the path of a stone. They tried that and it was remarkably successful; the friction was so low that it required very little effort to drag a heavy stone over the seaweed. Presumably one could use other inland plants the same way. Neolitihc humans didn't have our technology but they certainly weren't dim-witted. Their brains were probably as good as ours at problem solving. To see what one person used to handling heavy blocks can do in turns of moving and raising stones (without wheels) it's worh watching this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs&ab_channel=giorkos3 However, to get the northern section of HS2 ever built we probably will have to rely on aliens. *Update. Apparently the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia as a potter's wheel about 5 500 years ago but someone then had to have the bright idea of putting two them on an axle. The wheel was developed in the Americas (presumably for potters too) but, without any draft animals, wheeled vehicles were not. I don't know about windmills - the other major historic development from the wheel.

The actual building of medieval cathedrals didn't take as long as most people think- a matter of decades, perhaps fifty years (Chartres Cathedral was built in thirty years). There would be between 50 and 100 skilled craftspeople and it looks like the total workforce on site at any one time was in the low humndreds rather than thousands The reason why so many were built over centuries was because of the need to fund them- a bit like HS2 really!

The army of workers/slaves idea seems to have been knocked on the head for both the pyramids and Stonehenge. It was Herodotus in about 500 BCE who claimed that a hundred thousand slaves built the pyramids (in the sort of scenes depicted by Cecil B deMille etc) but he was wriitng a couple of thousand years after the event and it's now estimated that only around 10 000 people took about 20-30 years to build each pyramid but they were honoured workers (they were buried with grave goods) and probably the grunt work was done by peasant farmers working for pay or rations during the off-season for agriculture with a smaller number of specialist craftspeople doing the skilled work. This is what English Heritage says about Stonehenge Stonehenge is a masterpiece of engineering, built using only simple tools and technologies, before the arrival of metals and the invention of the wheel. Building the stone circle would have needed hundreds of people to transport, shape and erect the stones. These builders would have required others to provide them with food, to look after their children and to supply equipment including hammerstones, ropes, antler picks and timber. The whole project would have needed careful planning and organisation. However, an experiment by UCL's Institute of Archaeology suggests that it would only have taken about twenty people to move each of the large stones from the nearby Marlborough Hills and it was only the smaller blue stones that were brought, possibly from an earlier stone circle, from Wales. So, if the building was carried out over a long period the actual number of people who carried it out may have been relatively small and drawn from local communites possibly as a devotional act (as may the pyramids) .

When it has once got into orbit without blowing up they'll try it with people: shades of "Those Magnificent Men..." (but in reality most early aviation pioneers died from flying accidents)

I don't know if this is relevant but, while discussing tree making with Jacqui of Ceynix at Ally Pally, I mentioned the well trodden idea of using the cheapest nastiest hairspray that pound shops can supply to fix foliage to trees (I'd used it succesfully in the past) but she warned me that even cheap hairsprays are now designed to be more easily brushed out so are far less sticky and no longer serve so well as scenic adhesives for modellers. She recomended spray mount. (with proper ventilation of course) Thanks to Mr Newton's theory about apples and planets tree foliage may of course require a stickier spray than ground treatments but I'd be interested to hear of anyone else's experiences. An excellent legend by the way but would it have spoiled my early teenage experience of watching (and hearing!) the Witney blanket going past Wolvercote crossing hauled by a very arthritic pannier tank that was sadly not long for this world.

You don't need to be a railway enthusiast to see that the train and the station are from totally different eras. We can see the reasons why that's obvious- high platforms, signalling, the porter's uniform, the track- but, even without knowing all that, the look and feel of the scene just screams anachronism.

The Royal Gunpowder Mills in Waltham Abbey had a whole network of ten miles of internal canals with connection to the River Lea navigation as well asa narrow gauge railway. If you think about it a canal boat has far fewer opportunities for shocks and fire than a railway wagon pulled at far greater speed by a steam loco with a coal furnace raging inside it. The only ignition sources would be canal workers' clay pipes and there wouldn't even be much ferrous metal contact to create sparks. The gunpowder boats used within the Mills site weren't even horse drawn (horses can bolt!) but were hauled manually though I assume the barges that took the finished product to Woolwich Arsenal etc. were horse drawn.

My friend Paul has answered my query about European stations handling two current systems with four example from Switzerland, At Geneva Cornavin, the tracks were switchable in DC days and may well still be between 15 and 25kV The current units are the Stadler standard design for 15/25kV. When last observed at Chiasso, as trains enter, their locos lower their pans while still under their 'home' system and coast to a standstill. A dual current Swiss shunter would then haul them away from the train and propel them back home, so to speak. At Pontresina, NE of St Moritz in Switzerland on the Rhaetian Railway the Bernina line (1kV dc) meets the main system (11kV ac) and its trains continue to St Moritz so Pontresina and St Moritz both had 2 systems. The platforms at St Moritz may have been permanently segregated by voltage but Pontresina is now switchable. In 1985 he travelled over the Bernina, through Pontresina to Bergun on the line to Chur on the 'Bernina Express'. The train was hauled in by two railcars which detached and went forward to St Moritz. The loco to take the train forward then propelled 4 coaches - including the restaurant car - under the 1kV OHLE while itself remaining under the 11kV. He also remembered in 1970 being shunted from Bale SNCF to Basel SBB by a Swiss dual voltage loco. It was done without stopping and there was rather a flash at the pantograph head went from one system over the neutral section to the other.

Apart from the SNCF 40100s (and the almost identical SNCB class 18s) with their four pans. I don't know how many other locos or sets used multiple pans in that way. The four pans were a single arm type mounted in pairs at each end of the loco and only one could be raised at a time. Looking at diagrams and models of them it does appear, rather to my surprise, that the Swiss RAe TEE II sets also had four pans, double arm types also in pairs at each end of the motor car. This was in the middle (3/6) of the six car set and was a real oddity as it was an A1A- A1A and the two driving cars appear to be unpowered. I think it included the kitchen but presumably a lot of it t was occupied by electrical cabinets. I'm hoping my fellow FRS member Paul may know the answer for Ventimiglia. Commutable was the word I was looking for from commutateur, change-over switch as opposed to interrupteur on-off switch (one place where French uses one word to express what English needs a qualifier for). Commutator seems a useful word and I wonder why we only use it for DC motors. It was/is also used for the usually three-way switch in block instruments so may be a word that has fallen out of use in that context. It seems far more elegant than changeover switch or rotary switch.

That's what I assumed but it still leaves open the question of stations on the border between systems with single current locos and trains. Ventimiglia comes immediately to mind as I don't think the fairly ancient sets that SNCF were using on the coastal line that effectively terminates in Italy were dual currrent. I know that switchable catenaries do exist but assume they'd only be used on fairly short sections of track such as within a station. While stopped at the staton, coasting between systems would obviously be impossible but I understand that even a dual (or multi-current) unit would lower its pan while the switch was made. Modern on board systems would detect the flavour of electicity on offer when it was raised again and act accordingly but in the past drivers had to make the appropriate switch, presumably with an embarrasingly loud bang from the circuit breakers if they got it wrong.

Well rather large pneumatic circuit breakers, presumably interlocked but a fellow member of the French Railways Society knows a great deal about electriification in both France and Switzerland so I'll ask him if and how it was done.

Lots of examples. For TEE services the Swiss SBB-CFF-FFS built five quad-voltage RAe TEE sets. Also originally for TEE services, SNCF then came up with the first quad-voltage locomotive the CC 40100 with no less than four pantographs. These covered 1500V DC (SNCF), 3000V DC (SNCB), 25kV 50 Hz (SNCF) and 15kV 16 2/3 Hz, SBB-CFF, DB, & ÖBB. Eleven of of these in total were built for SNCF by Alsthom from 1964 plus a further four for SNCB. They had a top speed of 200 km/h SNCF 40103 on TEE L'Oiseau Bleu at Brussels in 1979 (Steve Morgan, CC by SA3.0) It has its 3000 V DC pan raised. The Thalys high speed trains that run from Paris to Brussels and beyond are either tri- current to cover French 25Kv, Belgian and Dutch electrification or quad current for those going on into Germany- nowadays of course that doesn't require separate pans. Some border stations had/have switchable OLE so that locos from both sides (or dual-voltage locos) could run into them. I think Geneva must have been one such because, AFAIK SNCF trains did run into it before dual-voltage locos were available and apparently the SNCF 40100s never actually used their fourth panto in normal service even though there TEEs running into there from France. The nature of the TEE network as a pan European service of premium (1st class + supplement) expresses to compete with the airlines for business travel meant that they didn't want to waste time with loco changes. Changes of current also happen within France so at Bordeaux the LGV from Pasis-Montparnasse which is 25Kv 50Hz meets the former Midi's 1500v DC system. I assume though that the TGVs on that route are dual current and simply change systems on the move.

Indeed and there were Bulleid Pacifics to watch slipping at Oxford for some time after the hated (by us) Hymeks had displaced the Halls and Castles. I think it was about 50/50 for interegional trains using the west curve and changing locos at Oxford against those that reversed and changed locos at Reading. ISTR that the Pines Express (which was often absurdly late) and the Summer Saturday Only "holiday" workings generally avoided Reading. One of my own regular 'steam experience' jaunts was to travel from Oxford to Reading West on one or other of such trains , then get the trolleybus to Reading General before returning to Oxford on the next steam hauled express (or semi-fast) from Paddington. I think by then the stoppers were DMUs. This is getting very OT for Minories so I'd better just mention Reading Southern which, though not steam operated in my time, was a wonderfully compact terminus with many of the attributes of a Minories (though with four rather than three platforms) Being Southern it had a very different and perhaps more intimate atmosphere than ex GWR stations of similar size. Technically I suppose it was something of an outer commuter terminus (though a lot of its trains went to Surrey rather than Waterloo).

With the Costa Concordia you might well have seen two orders of magnitude more fatalities and double those for the Titanic. It was much the same with the Herald of Free Enterprise diaster at Zeebrugge. Had it not been for the good fortune that the ship part capsized onto its side on a sand bank there could well have been a complete capsize in open water with a near total fatality rate. I've always been a bit haunted by that disaster as I travelled Dover-Calais on one its sister ships the weekend before. On board they were showing a video "explaining" how dangerous the Channel Tunnel was going to be. I had though been made aware of doubts about TT's safety standards some time before Zeebrugge- though not enough to stop me from travelling on their ferries.

I think your final sentences are very telling. Your wife and her colleagues were spending time and effort preparing for an inspection they knew would be coming sometime soon. It therefore follows that either that time was spent finding evidence of what they were doing rather than actually doing it, or they were having to do extra work on top of teaching their students just to make the inspectors happy. All the teachers I've known in the fairly recent past say that stress levels have worsened. Some of them who loved teaching and were very good at it took early retirement because the stress created by the non-teaching things they had to do was becoming unacceptable. One thing several of them mentioned is that their freedom to be imaginative in their lessons had also been eroded as they were judged in part on how faithfully they'd followed the set curriculum. Think back to your own schooldays and tell me if the teachers who really inspired you weren't the ones who often went off piste if that was engaging their students' enthusiasm. The teachers I know have also had colleagues who became OFSTED inspectors and say that those weren't exactly the most talented teachers. Teachers who love teaching tend not to become inspectors.

In the early 1960s (from 1962 till the end of steam) I used to watch, and sometimes travel on as far as Reading or Banbury , the summer Saturday trains after school at Oxford (my school had lessons on Saturday mornings) and there were always a number of them. That one would have come through too early for us but would have carried passengers back from the Isle of Wight as the guest houses normally changed visitors on Saturdays. Newport Castle is plated for 81A (OOC) so I'd guess the train changed locos at Reading. I can't see from the photo whether the coaching stock is WR or SR but the train is quite short at 6 carriages. I'm guessing, from the photos in Warwickshire railways, that Moor Street was local and commuter only during the week but, with fewer commuters, had capacity for long distance holiday trains on Saturdays when these tended to run and these would not then take up capacity at SH and its tunnel.

If airliners needed to travel quickly to stay ahead of the fire in their engines then taxying would be a bit of an adventure! 😬 You are of course wise to familiarise yourself with the exits as soon as boarding a ship or airliner (or even more so a hotel) but do you check your tyres and brakes every single time you get in your car? Perceived risk is generally very different from actual risk. After the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster a lot of passengers switched to travelling by car. They were of course placing themselves at around twenty times greater risk for each journey. Tranport safety is very different if you compare deaths per million kilometres than if you compare deaths per hundred million hours. By distance, for travel within the EU, commercial flights (0.035 d/Mkm) are about eight times safer than ferries (0.25 d/Mkm) but if you look at it per hour then the time exposure risk for commercial flights at 16 deaths per hundred million hours is about double the 8 deaths for ferries. Rail carries about a quarter of the risk per hour of flying but about the same per million kilometres. Driving carries about twenty times the risk per kilometre compared with train or air travel but, across the EU, less than double the risk per hour. In the UK the hourly risk is about the same for driving and flying (because Britain has fewer road deaths than most of Europe) but obviously an airliner travels a lot further in an hour than a car. Those are obviously averages and, because most air accidents happen on take off and landing, a short flight is far more dangerous per hour or mile than a long one though the risk per flight is probably similar. An hour drving in a car is about three times more likely to kill you than an hour on a ferry and the ratio is about the same for a journey of the same distance. Apart from cruises most passengers don't travel very long distances by sea so the figure for ferries is nowadays the only one for whicn transport statistics are available. However, the 'transport' operations that worry me the most are the mega cruise ships. A slow sinking on a calm day then maybe they'd get most of their passengers off. A fast sinking, capsize or a fire that overwhelmed the vessel and I think we'd be looking at a maritime disaster that could well eclipse the Titanic.

Interesting. I'd understood that all the long distance stuff went to Snow Hill and Moor Street was purely suburban. That actually makes it a far more interesting prototype. Would that just have been because SH was too busy or were there particular long distance routes that used Moor Street. Bastille was effectively tank locos only and almost all of them, from the 1920s until push-pull sets with Mikado tanks were introduced in the early 1960s, from a single class of Prairie (SNCF 131TB) ,

Cyril Freezer suggest using a sector plate as a goods loco release on one of his later versions of Minories (the one with a kickback goods yard) The trouble though for a busy passenger terminus with that is that Moor Street was the only example in Britain, just as Bastille was in France, and both were AFAIK only used by tank locos for intensive suburban services*. So, if you use one, you're effectively modelling that terminus. You could perhaps have a concealed one . For a long time, I assumed that the loco length extension hidden beneath the high-level station building that Tom Cunnington and co. added to Minories (GN) was a traverser until Tom put me right. Termini with no loco releases were far more common, possibly the norm for busy city termini, as it was usually far more efficient to simply use a pilot or turnover loco. Even Fort William - hardly a city terminus though intensely busy at times- lost its releasing crossover in the early 1950s and, from all accounts, it had hardly ever been used once the Mallaig extension was opened. for years. Sector plate or turntable releases were rather less rare where length was a real issue; Sheerness Dockyard and Ramsgate Harbour come to mind as well as Snow Hill. However, to meet BofT rules in Britain, they had to be rather complex things and I think the increasing length of locos made them less useful as a loco can't simply run straight onto one but has to stop short, uncouple, and then pull forward. There was an example of a large sector plate that presented the tracks it wasn't aligned with a void at Boulogne's Gare Maritime but I suspect that was only allowable because trains approached the station along quayside track very slowly and once again, if you used one you'd effectively be modelling Boulogne Mme. *Having looked in detail at the rationalised operating pattern adopted to increase peak hour throughput at Bastille in the mid 1920s, I'm fairly convinced that , following that rationalisaton, the traversers actually got very little use. Incoming trains didn't hang around on the platform, before departing with a fresh loco, for long enough to make them worthwhile even if the opposite platform road was unoccupied.

Thanks Tim and I did enjoy your meeting with the architect responsible for Coventry which I might have dismissed as a not very interesting modern building but would look at very differently now. Ashford International's mothballing seems a great shame. The thing I could never understand with the Channel Tunnel was why they tried to hide its entrance. Keeping the nimby's off their back I suppose but It looks more like the entrance to a storm drain than a civil engineering masterpiece- One wonders what Brunel would have built there. The Goole bridge was wonderful and I did enjoy your excitement at operating it.

I used Folkestone Harbour a couple of times at least en route to Paris in the 1970s early 1980s . The boat train was an EMU but it was still interesting to go beyond Central and then back down the incline. I far preferred it to Dover and was delighted that it has been restored. At one time there seemed to be a preference for London-Paris services to go via Folkestone-Boulogne rather than Dover-Calais so I assume the total journey time was a bit faster. One of those trips was the last time I crossed the channel on a proper railway ferry- i.e a not a powered car barge. I don't know what the ship was but it was steam turbine and did the trip a lot faster than any car ferry (speed cats and hovercraft excepted). On one occasion we also used the hovercraft that ran to Boulogne Aeroglisseurs with a notably fast RTG set (Rame Turbine à Gaz) for the run to Gare du Nord. The last time I was there the station (a simple platform laid alongside a loop line used for the now demolished steel works) and the hovercraft terminal were still intact though the station platform had lost its canopy.