Pacific231G

While looking for something else about modules I came across this. http://littorail76.chez.com/pdf/bossons.pdf It's in French but the photos and dimensions are pretty self evident and colle vinylique is just PVA glue, His use of magnetic buttons (presumably Niodymium) as baseboard joiners is interesting as is the use of gesso to protect the cardboard, I've built baseboards using foam core board (carton plume in French) and generally use the thinner version for the walls of buildings in H0 but have never thought of simply using mounting or other card for baseboards.

The traditional way round that was to make the leading character Canadian which would be fairly credible in most branches. Most Americans would probably not spot the difference from the version of English actually spoken by the American star. The American belief that they won WW2 all on their own is annoying but of course we suffer from the delusion that "Britain fought alone" between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor. That is pretty insulting to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many others and particularly to the two and a half million Indians who fought with us in the largest volunteer army in history.

Hi Jack You might be able to get S scale track which at 22.43mm (0.833inches) scales out at 976mm for 1:43.5..I think Shinohara do track for it but that would be to US standards. it's a fairly popular scale for scratchbuilders in Britain- there were two or three S scale layouts at an exhibition I was at at last weekend- and the S Scale Society http://www.s-scale.org.uk has track components and wheelsets but only for its members (£25 a year) I don't know how they'd react to someone joining in order to get components for Om but the 3mm Society were quite happy a few years ago when I did that to get 12mm gauge components for H0m. Are GEMME still active in France? I used to be a member when they organised Expometrique. They seemed to go a bit quiet when Travers des Secondaires broke away and took the exhibition with them and I lost touch with them.

Bonjour Jack Thanks for this very insightful posting. I stopped subscribing to Voie Libre when too many of the articles became H0e,0e or even about British 009 layouts and there seemed to be less and less about the metre gauge railways I was really interested in. I suppose H0e requires far less space than H0m and because N is so popular and TT is not there is far more available just as with 0e and 16.5mm gauge mechanisms. It's curious though given that there were about 21 000kms of public metre gauge railways in France but only about 450kms of public 60cm railways (and just one 12km line using the 760mm represented by H0e) Loco-revue did run an interesting article in March on using a wagon card system for operating goods trains on a layout with just one junction station so perhaps there is hope yet and even a simple layout can provide interesting operation. I've also noticed that a number of home layouts featured in L-R use Kadee couplers which does suggest an interest in shunting and operating trains rather than just running them through the scenery. It is true though that of the eighty layouts at Trainsmania, I only saw shunting on perhaps six of them (including on a couple of the "Croisées de l'Etroit") and two of those were the British built layouts "Pempoul" and "Mers les Bains" . Perhaps it's time to introduce French modellers to "Inglenook Sidings"

It's pretty clear that Loco-Revue Modelisme are exploiting their knowledge base from publishing and printing for the models they actually produce themselves so it would be natural for them to use paper/card products as far as possible in their new venture. Some of the same buildings do appear in their current catalogue where they are a lot cheaper than the more sophisticated buildings in the Regions & Compagnies range (To British eyes the price of these card kits is somewhat eye watering) I'm guessing that they were developed as card kits for Train'in Box and are also being made available as separate products though so far only the Provence and Bretagne buildings are available. Train'in Box also offers Alsace and Nord. They are indeed laser cut but according to the catalogue the same buildings have appeared as thin card centrefolds in Loco Revue's magazine Clés pour le Train Miniature but those are best glued to card to produce a sturdy model. The Regions et Compagnies range are laser pre-cut rather than being completely cut but that's very similar to the old die cut Bilteezi kits. The layout is quoted as being for age 12 years plus so they are likely to have avoided the need for any sharp tools or glues other than PVA though I didn't get to see exactly what was contained in the box. I'm not a great fan of part works as they seem to not follow the logic of a realisable beginner's project leading into the broader hobby. Train'in box would anyway be difficult to replicate in that form as the box needs to large enough to include the longer lengths of corrugated card used for the base and the card trackbed. In any case the base is probably tackled as a single job and the whole thing is supposed to be buildable relatively quickly so the idea of getting a few more pieces of card each week along with the odd bag of flock and a tree or two would run counter to the whole idea of the thing. This is to enable new modellers to build a complete working model railway fairly quickly and then move on. It could probably be tackled as a holiday project by a family and for that the price of €330-€360 (without or with a basic loco and couple of wagons) is probably about right. What I do like about this, along with L-R's publication over the past few years of a beginner's magazine, is that they're clearly thinking about the future of the hobby and the best way to interest more people to take it up.

. I realised just how underscale the Jouef and MKD buildings are when I built an Artitec low relief corner Café de la Gare for the back of my H0 layout. Artitec models are to scale so it towered over the modified Jouef Gare de Neuvy station building on the near side of the Rue de la Gare and had to be replaced by a couple of far smaller MKD industrial buildings It's also fairly easy to add an attached goods shed and quai marchandise to Villeneuve though you'd probably want to lose the single story wing to produce a typical Secondaire two door station. Though it's now very battered with most of the detailing missing, I built this one for an H0e roadside tramway layout almost forty years ago though for 1:100 scale the goods platform is probably a bit high. For H0 I find the Jouef and MKD kits quite acceptable so long as they're behind the tracks. Being underscale seems to produce a forced perspective effect that makes the layout appear wider than it really is.

Also worth noting that a lot of the architectural models from Jouef and MKD were closer to 1:100 scale than to 1:87 they were advertised as. For example, the doorway on the familiar Jouef Villeneuve station building is 27mm to the apex of the arched top whereas, from an architect's drawing scaled for 1:87 for an equivalent standard CFD station, the equivalent dimension is 32mm so I think they may actually have been scaled at 1:100. Their downside for the civil buildings is over familiarity- rather like Bilteezi and Superquick buildings once were in Britain- but they're reasonably easy to kitbash and the railway buildings are entirely typical of thousands up and down France. There are quite a few model details available in 1:100 scale from modelshop.co.uk though unfortunately their cars are all modern. Interestingly the scales they offer also include 1:87 and 1:76 as well as 1:160 and 1:43 but not 1:120. They're worth looking at as, though some of their lines such as Preiser figures and Gaugemaster are familiar to us, they seem to mainly supply the professional modelmaking trade, particularly architectural and stage design, so for example their own range of ground textures and flocks have pantone colour references. Some of their other scenic items like etched tree armatures also look interesting and not too expensive.

Thanks Ian This is a fabulous resource. I'm not sure how they're getting away with claiming copyright on old postcards but their own stuff is very valuable.Because Vie du Rail (and its predecessor Notre Metier) has been a weekly periodical for cheminots and their families, the pictures taken for it include far more behind the scenes images of the whole railway operation. Whereas enthusiasts would get endless front three quarter views of locomotives, Vie du Rail's range from passengers queuing for tickets or boarding trains to baggage handlers and traders in goods yard. It's full of the sort of details we need for modelling; for example; despite all my researches I hadn't know till now that part of the original tracks for steam cranes at Dieppe Maritime continued to run inside the very wide tracks laid for the new electric cranes around the passenger terminal.

Hi Ian I didn't realise that you'd started a second Trainsmansia topic for your report and I generally follow topics rather than forums. Anyway no matter and I'm glad you also enjoyed it. Hi Bécasse I saw your module and particularly liked the building and water tower but I was rushing a bit by then and, because I've been there, another module based on the Isle de Re really grabbed my attention. Might we perhaps see it at ExpoNG but will "les croisées de l'étroit" be at RailExpo towards the end of this year. As Expometrique, that once had a real focus on H0m and Om but I get the impression that there's now less enthusiasm in France for modelling true metre gauge with H0e and Oe becoming far more common. Though I may have missed some, the only H0m layouts I saw at Lille seemed to be based on the Belgian SNCV. Do you think that's down to the greater (and cheaper!) availability of N gauge material such as mechs, wheels and track or are there other factors?

What did you think of it Ian? Saturday did seem very busy. Someone I know who had a table in the secondhand bourse, which was open on the Saturday and Sunday but not the Friday, says he had a very successful weekend. Saturday wasn't so good for studying layouts or talking to their builders so I was glad to have made the Friday afternoon my main visit. Tim, the pictures don't exagerate; the quality of modelling was often superb. Of them all I think Gordon and Maggie Gravett's Pempoul still had the edge in that respect but I'd say the overall level of scenic and architectural modelling was rather higher than at most large British shows. What wasn't so good, and never is at French shows, was the standard of operation or rather the lack of it. The two British built layouts there, Pempoul and Mers les Bains, were being fully operated but apart from them I only saw significant shunting on Gaëlle and Olivier Taniou's H0 ATMAFER and one of the N gauge layouts that also represented an industrial zone. Though I didn't see it, I think Francois Joyau was doing a bit more than running trains through his 57bis Rue d'Eiffefe Some of the microlayouts also had a sequence and I might have missed one or two other layouts that were operated rather than just run, In general though the French approach, at least for exhibtions, seems to be more oriented towards creating beautifully modelled and often wonderfully detailed slices of la Belle France and then running trains through them than depicting the full operation of a railway. I have seen some signs of that starting to change but fairly slowly. In some ways the exhibition was a bit like visiting an art gallery and most layouts were using a proscenium type display. Although narrow gauge trains and autorails (railcars) only passed or overtook one another at Jean Ville's small station I can't think of a more perfect spot for watching them than the cafe next to the church on Jan van Remmerden's beautifully atmospheric Oe layout. Lille is very close to the Belgian border and several layouts came from there including at least two based on the country's once dense network of secondary "Vicinal" tramways. For me,one of the show's real highlights was to actually see Gerard Voisin's model of Dieppe Maritime that I'd only seen in photographs. This wasn't just author's bias -though I have to admit that it did make my day when he told me at the show that it was my articles that inspired him to build it- but this now completely vanished marine station has fascinated me ever since travelling through it enroute to Paris in the early 1970s Gerard Voisin's model faithfully represents the buildings along the Quai Henri IV using a PC based photographic technique known as CLAP 2000 and was one of a series of modules displayed by the Dieppe based club Littorail76. Their Modules 3000 standard uses a light box approach with different modules separated by short blank linking sections thus avoiding the problem of abrupt changes between modules while allowing multiple modules that can be a complete layout. Dieppe Mme. is two modules long.

And how many times did you or anyone else actually sit through the resutling footage. My advice to the OP would be to think in terms of filming a series of shots that tell a story. Especially on a relatively short heritage line there should be plenty of scope to film the same stock through the course of a day from a number of locations. There is an absolutely delightful short film of the Hayling Island line, made in I think the early 1950s by a local cinema owner. Any of us could learn a great deal from watching it and analysing it shot by shot. I think it was all filmed using a clockwork 16mm camera. I couldn't find it on line so this isn't it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-sXyupjHNo, but, despite a few bad cuts, even this it's still better than most.

Back in the sixties when steam was still to be found on BR I used to take plenty of photos of and from trains but quite frankly, trying to photograph the loco of the train I was on invariably produced rubbish photos that were never worth the effort. I quickly discovered that the worst place to see or photograph a train and especially its locomotive is from the train itself. Even when small digital cameras made filming from the cabs of steam locos a practical proposition, shots of the crew at work etc. were well worthwhile but very few of the shots I took looking forward onto the track ahead ended up in the final cut and most of those were from tank locos running bunker first. When doing it for myself rather than for a produced work I also tend to think that you can either photograph/film something or experience it, it's very difficult to do both.

There's no reason why a card baseboard can't be a strong structure if its well designed. A few weeks ago I was at Loco-Revue's 80th anniversary Trainsmania exhibition in Lille where they were launching their Train'in Box complete layout kit. This uses pre cut corrugated card (die cut I assume), to build the layout's 1m x1.1m baseboard (39 x 43 inch) which also forms the basic structure for scenery as well as the trackbase. . The aim is to bridge the gap between the train set and the "proper" layout so absolutely everything needed to build a first layout using quality products, from track (Peco) and power unit to groundcover, trees and buildings (card kits some of which are already in LR Modelisme's catalogue ) and even PVA glue comes in the box. OK, the results won't exactly be Pempoul - which was a also at Trainsmania- but the idea is that a beginner or perhaps a family following the instructions will learn the whole range of basic model railway skills. At the show they had two or three modellers attempting to build layouts -it comes in four regional options- from opening the box to completed layout using only what was in the box over the two and a half days of the show. I was only there on the Friday afternoon and Satuday morning so I don't know if they succeeded by the Sunday close. I'll be folllowing this innovative idea with interest (and looking again at the wine boxes I brought back from France once they're empty (hic!!)

It WAS a good friendly little show with some interesting layouts- including Schwungischerplatz- and a chance to catch up with friends from other "continental" societies. Apart from the SNCF Society stand I had some fun operating Alan Marlow's excellent transition era* Czech layout. Next year we hope to have something French there. I second the thanks to Alan Monk and the GRS for organising it. *The transition from Soviet style "democracy" to the real thing rather than steam to diesel

This is slghtly off-topic for a discussion of street running in Britain but perhaps interesting as a comparison. When I first discovered the sheer number of light railways and particularly roadside lines that once ran through particularly rural France I too tended to see any wide verge along a D road as a former railway. Close study of early Michelin and Taride maps showed that they weren't quite that ubiquitous but there were an awful lot ot them. I did though want to get a more definitive figure for public railways using roads in France as the numbers are fairly staggering. The listings in Baddeley's book The Continental Steam Tram are a bit uncertain for lengths as he includes a number of lines that I know had just a little roadside running and ran mainly on their own rights of way. He does though very usefully denote the types of locos used, fully enclosed, motions enclosed or just ordinary tank locos. In general you can assume that a railway using fully or partly enclosed locos was, at least in part, a roadside tramway but not vice versa. A lot of the tramways, especially the later ones, such as the much missed metre gauge Tramways de Correze and the 600mm Pithiviers-Toury never used enclosed motions let alone fully enclosed tram locos. It's a very difficult figure to establish but I have scans of Jean Arrivetz's* monumental post-war work on the subject which lists tramways, and light railways for every French Département, along with their gauge, for 1913 and 1921. Unfortunately he doesn't differentiate between roadside tramways and town trams though it's usually possible to make a fair guess based on the form of propulsion. Horse then electric or shortish electric is usually a pretty good clue to a town tram as is the name of the operating company. Another really useful source are two editions of the Magazine des Tramways a Vapeur et des Secondaires from 1989 giving lists by départements of every local light railway at their peak in the 1920s, and also the mostly metre gauge railways that were part of the national network. It doesn't distinguish tramways from other light railways- the legal distinction between them for local railways was abandoned in 1913- but it does separate out d'Interet Local lines that carried both passenger and freight - a proper railway IMHO- and those that only carried passengers. Most of those were town and city trams though the category does also include systems like the Paris Metro, various funiculars and a few small passenger only steam tramways to hotels and resorts. it's take me a couple of days to put all these numbers into a spreadsheet but cranking the handle gave me a total, excluding town trams etc. of between 20174 and 21668 kms of local light railways of which 9375kms were roadside tramways (defined by more than two thirds of their route using public roads-usually the verge). On top of that were some 2400 kms of not so light d'Interet General metre gauge including the Reseau Breton, Vivarais, Corsica, PO Correze etc. Without comparing each individual railway across every source, which would be a monumental task, I think the totals for tramways derived from Arrivetz may be slightly inflated by a bit of double counting as some tramways were incorporated into wider Départemental systems or city tram networks but the overall total for French light railways are fairly close to those I've calculated, rather sadly, by totting up all the figures for closures. From all this it would be safe to say that France once had over 20 000kms of public light railways of which around 9 000kms or 45% involved significant roadside running. * Jean Arrivetz, who was still with us until the end of 2015, was a senior manager in the Lyon transport authority but better known as one of the founders of the group that preserved the Vivarais and perhaps the father of the railway preservation movement in France.

The seaside landladies must have just loved 31027 !! I'd always udnerstood that it was mostly coal the Dover line carried but it was clearly far more mixed than that so presumably as well as the RN. there were commercial docks at the Eastern end that weren't just shipping out coal from the Tilmanstone bucket conveyor. Interesting that there appears not to be a man with a red flag though that was usually required. Even the Dieppe Maritime branch had that even though most of it ran along a quayside rather than the adjoining street (unlike the Weymouth Harbour Tramway that was on the street) I've just remembered the Campbeltown and Macrihanish, a 27inch gauge railway that crossed the Mull of Kintyre. The line itself was on its own right of way but, though the passenger station was technically on the quay, only a surveyor would know that as it wasn't separated from the street and was built with inset track. https://www.railscot.co.uk/imageenlarge/imagecomplete.php?id=33469 http://www.singscript.plus.com/daviddrewmusic/Images/cmlr.jpg Nigel Macmillan - a great friend of P.D. Hancock- built a very nice model of this line in O 16.5 and I got to see it at a Gauge O Guild show in Telford some years ago. It's a line I'd have loved to have seen in the flesh as the combination of quayside, narrow gauge railway and street mist have been marvellous.

That's fascinating Phil. I sort of wondered whether the horse would be in danger of nudging the car off the rail if it strayed from side to side but maybe they came up with a harness to avoid that. Most passenger monorails seem to have confirmed the old adage of being " the transport system of the future, always have been, always will be". They always seem to be trying to do things that railways do better and get very confused by junctions and level crossings but they've clearly been far more successful in various forms of material handling. The one at Amberley is well worth seeing.

It finally closed in 1945 so far too early to be dieselised but I don't think anyone has yet mentioned the Wantage tramway in Oxfordshire. It opened in 1875 so very early for a roadside steam tramway in Britain. There was also of course the 3ft 6in gauge Wolverton and Stony Stratford tramway and the Swansea and Mumbles Railway - opened in 1804 as the world's first passenger railway. I think in that case it was more a question of a railside road than a roadside railway as the adjoining turnpike road didn't open until 1826. The Mumbles wasn't steam hauled until 1877 and eventually in 1929 became an electric tramway in all but name though I think almost all of it was on its own formation rather than being on the road.

Most monorails appear to be trying to to get round some non-existent patent for a conventional railway but the Ewing system used on the Patiala State Monorail one was quite interesting, particularly for a railway specifically designed to run along a public road. Most of the weight, about 95%, is on the double flanged rail wheels with just enough on the road borne outrigger to keep locomotive and trailing vehicles upright . As can be seen here, the surface the road wheel runs on needs to be firm and flat but it doesn't have to carry much of a loading while the single rail can run on the the side of the road out of the way of other traffic so doesn't need to be expensively inset. So far as I know the only use of the Ewing system with locomotives was on the 50 mile long Patiala system from 1907 to 1927 but it was also used on the bullock hauled Kundala Valley Railway carrying tea from 1902-1908 before that was replaced by a conventional 2ft gauge steam railway. I don't know if it was used on any other industrial railways but it could have assumed far greater importance in a different situation. I'm not sure if canal towpaths count as roadside but In 1898 Siemens came up with this design for an electric canal haulage tractor that was tried out experiemntally on the Finow canal In 1900 they exhibited this developed version intended for the St. Dennis canal at the Paris exhibition . In this case about 85% of the weight was carried by the flanged rail wheels and about 15% by the "road" wheel. which either ran on a light rail with no flange gap or simply on the flat towpath. This left the towpath clear for towing horses and other traffic. In the end the St. Dennis Canal scheme wasn't pursued and in Germany only the Teltow canal near Berlin used electric rail haulage over its 37km length. That lasted from 1905-1945 but the local authorities rejected the monorail so electric tractors ran on a conventional metre gauge railway. In France, canal haulage by electric rail locos was developed from the 1900s on a far greater scale and by the 1920s equipped well over a thousand kilometres of canals across North and East France from Dunkirk in the north to Mulhouse in the east. The towing service was maintained until the end of the 1960s, by when most barges were self propelled, but a few section associated with the longer canal tunnels were still operating into the 1980s. This network also used conventional railway track laid on sleepers mostly metre gauge but 600mm where towpaths were narrower in the formerly German regions of Alsace. However, unless the trak was inlaid (as it was around wharves and in some towns and villages) the railway track effectively replaced the towpath and other forms of canalside haulage, mostly horses, were banned. If the Ewing system had been developed for this purpose it might have been both cheaper in track costs and more flexible. In terms of energy use hauling a barge along a canal using an electric rail tractor is the most efficient form of inland freight transport ever invented but rather less so in terms of the number of people needed to operate it. .

Geoffrey Baddeley's book IS called "The Continental Steam Tram" (ISBN 0 900433 78 7) and was published by the LRTA in 1980. He lists 169 steam tramways in France. Most of these were fairly short but some Départements- notably Correze, Ille & Vilaine, Vendee and Sarthe had fairly extensive networks. I've been interested in French "Secondaires" for decades so have a fairly comprehensive library of books and other material on them and can probably dig up something about any particular line. The best known metre gauge lines - mostly because they survived longer- notably the PO Correze, Vivarais and the Reseau Breton as well as the half dozen or so "traditional" (i.e not modern city trams) metre gauge railways still in public service weren't actually "Departmental" railways "d'Interet Local" (I.L.). Instead these were "d'Interet General" (I.G.)which means they were considered to be part of the national rail network. Legally that meant they were the responsibility of the state rather than the local departments. The I.L.s were effectively the equivalent of our public light railways and usually more lightly constructed with simpler signalling regimes and fewer barriered/staffed level crossings - (crossing keepers cottages are a useful sign of old railways in France but for departmental railways you need to look for the station buildings) The I.G. metre gauge lines totalled just over 2 000kms but this total was dwarfed by over 16 000 kms of metre gauge I.L. railways. There were also about 3 000kms of standard gauge I.L. but only 442kms of sub-metric public light railway, all but one 600mm gauge mostly sponsored by Paul Decauville* . The sub-metric lines, all but one 600mm, were all roadside tramways, the most extensive being in Calvados. The final line of that was abruptly closed on June 6th 1944 after too many allied tanks ran over its tracks but you can see it in several of the film clips of British troops advancing inland on D-Day. That day the regular early morning train already had steam up but for obvious reasons it never ran. For the metre gauge lines it's quite hard to separate the roadside lines from the rest and even the I.G. lines indulged in some roadside running- The CF de Provence line from Nice to Digne still does in a few places! I'd estimate though that something less than half the total was roadside. It tended to be the poorer departements like the Vendee or Correze that went for roadside lines, mainly because they were cheap, but they were also very slow and succumbed very quickly to road competition from the early 1930s. The last example, the truncated metre gauge Twys. de Correze line from Tulle to Neuvic d'Ussel closed at the end of 1959. The 600mm Pithiviers tramway had already closed to passengers in 1952 but lasted as a seasonal sugar beet line until 1964- late enough for its first 3kms to be preserved. Most of what is now preserved of the metre gauge is from the I.G. lines but the one notable survivor of the I.L. lines is the CF du Baie de Somme. That's easily within day trip range of southern England and is a wonderful system but, despite a few hundred metres of quayside running, isn't a roadside tramway The preserved 3kms of the Pithiviers tramway does offer roadside running along amost its entire length and there is also some of that on the upper section of the preserved Haute Somme near Albert though that 600mm ex WW1 military then sugar beet line was never a public railway. There is one rather remarkable roadside tramway in France and that's the 600mm Tramway Forestier du Cap Ferret. That was built in the early 1950s by a light railway enthusiast who made it his life's work and runs across the Cap Ferret peninsula connecting boats arriving from Arcachon with the Atlantic beaches. It's only about a mile long and the most remarkable thing about it is that it was mainly built along the side of roads that had been planned but not yet built. By getting in before the roads and houses the line was safe from the NIMBYs who had prevented him from building it on the more direct route of an earlier 800mm horse tramway . *There were several fairly extensive but short lived networks of 600mm gauge public railways operated by the "Ministry for the Liberated Regions" immediately after the First World War. These were the ex military trench supply railways pressed into civilian service to help rebuild the shattered areas along the Western Front. The lines often ran along the middle of roads as well as the side. They closed in the early 1920s but a number were then taken over by the sugar mills to handle the intense seasonal traffic in beets.

Hi Kevin I think street running railways were always far less common in Britain, where railways were always regarded as nasty dangerous things that needed to be fenced off like a field of bulls, than almost anywhere else. The distinction between a tramway and a railway has always been a rather vague one and at one time rural France and particularly Belgium were littered with railway lines running along the side of roads and sometimes down the middle of them. In France, the local railways were the responsibility of local authorities (Départements - counties more or less) and since they also owned the local "D" roads very little land had to be bought if they decided to save costs that way. The downside of that was very slow trains (typically not more than 15km/h or between nine and ten MPH) These lines certainly did carry goods and in general were probably more important for that than for passengers. I can't remember what proporton of France's fifteen thousand miles of mostly metre gauge "départemental" railways were tramways (defined as a railway with more than 2/3 its length running along public roads) It wasn't a majority but it was a fairly high proportion.

I worked in South Western House next to the old Southampton Terminus station from about 1979 and I can remember in the first few months I was there seeing short goods workings behind 0-4-0 diesel shunters using the link. I wish now I'd paid more attention to it at the time but my recollection is that most of the inset track was where it crossed the various entrances to Town Quay and Royal Pier. For some of its length the line was on its own ballasted formation separated from the road by a low single rail fence. II don't know if it was technically a tramway or on private land owned by the docks board. I think the track onto Royal Pier was still in place but disused. There are some photos of it about five or six years earlier here http://railthing.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/southampton-docks-1973.html There used to be a railway that was completely street running along the promenade at Dover between the Western railway docks and what was then the Admiralty Harbour but now the site of the main Eastern RoRo docks. It mostly carried coal and it must have really offended the terribly respectable guest house owners to have steam locos chuffing along the prom and spoiling their gentility. It's very clear in this photo from the 1920s https://doverhistorian.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/th-western-docks-1920s-before-promanade-pier-was-dismantled-courtesy-of-dover-library.jpg The line finally closed in 1964 by which time it was at least partly operated by diesels but by then traffic had declined. There's a lengthy note about it and the nearby military railways here https://www.flickr.com/photos/jelltecks/15224231033

It's not a recently introduced Americanism. I've traced it back in PW engineering to well before WW2 but haven't found it any earlier than that. I have also foind the word frog in British usage equally earlier. I assume the adoption of switch rail rather than point blade was precisely to avoid any confusion between the normal common usage of points to mean the whole turnout and the more specific use of it as a component of them. The GWR was referring to points and crossings before the First World War but by the 1920s was rather confusingly referring to "cutting in switches" implying the whole switch and crossing and seemed to be using "points" rather more generically. . I'm very happy to use the word turnout when discussing the specifics of permanent way as it has a precise meaning but not to tell people they're wrong when they call them points. I've certainly seen the term set of points used in RAIB (or BofT) reports to include the crossing or frog when the failure of that has been the cause of a derailment.

Hi Jack According to Portsmouth Model Shop, the only UK retailer listed on the Redutex website http://co.uk.redutex.com/ there's been a holdup on orders since last Christmas apparently because of an illness in the small Spanish firm that makes it. They do have some in stock so it might be worth giving them a call (Portsmouth Model Shop tel 023 926 53100 www.modelshop-portsmouth.co.uk) I'd normally suggest Loco-Revue, who have a large range in their current catalogue, as their online ordering is usually pretty efficient but looking at their website they're currently only showing six surfaces and none of them brickwork http://trains.lrpresse.com/search.aspx?q=redutex Sorry not to be able to help more.

points or set of points is the normally accepted British English word for a junction between two railway lines (OED definition). Turnout can be seen as the technical term, originally an Americanism, used by PW engineers to describe the same thing. They are synonyms so neither is "correct" nor "incorrect". It's a bit like kneecap and patella, a doctor might use the latter in her medical notes but would certainly use kneecap when talking to a patient. The idea that a thing can only have one word to describe it is very strange and rather smacks of Orwellian Newspeak What I can't understand is why PW engineers have come to insist on the incredibly clumsy "switch and crossing work " or "switches and crossings" when pointwork has been perfectly well understood for generations as a generic terrm. If you watch Network Rail's otherwise very informative introduction here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuR5QTlfOzk it just sounds awkward. It's also interesting in the same film to see a certain ambiguity about crossings, whether they mean just the fabricated or cast combination of nose and wing rails commonly known as the "frog" or the whole thing including the check rails. So far as I can tell the term "common crossing" seems to no longer be in current use outside modelling circles. While going through my collection of MRJs over the weekend I was also rather amused to see the term "turnout control" or "turnout motor " appearing more than once presumably by modellers who thought that was somehow more "correct" than the vulgar "point motor"