Pacific231G

Never mind. We'll still be able to sit in pubs telling anyone who can be bothered to listen how we won the Battle of Britain and the 1966 World Cup and once ruled half the world. Meanwhile the rest of the world, including the Swiss, will get on with living in this century.

Most good comedy is a slight exageration of observed situations. If you compare the scripts for "Airplane" with that for "Zero Hour" (a deadly serious film based on Arthur Hailey's short novel "Flight into Danger") they're remarkably similar and "Airplane" is technically a remake. . For some reason I've found Warley particularly rich in that sort of exchange. For example, sitting at our stand in front of a sign with SNCF Society in large friendly letters with a tricolour flag and the Swiss Railways Society three stands down equally clearly labelled with a nice big Swiss flag "Can you tell me about Swiss Railways?" "This is the SNCF Society, we're all about French railways, you need the Swiss Society they're just over there" "Well why can't you tell me about Swiss railways, they're continental aren't they?" I promise I remained polite to him I really did. I just reflected that the distribution of human intelligence and many other attributes follows a bell curve and that curve has an end.

Bulleid's attempt at a double deck coach seemed to fulfil that idea but people take up less room if they stand so apparently that's what the Elizabeth Line* will do with a bench seat on either side. *(That name really doesn't work. I think it's because it starts wih a vowel unlike the Victoria Line or the Jubilee line, I'm not being ant- monarchist as I think the Queen Elizabeth line would sound much better)

Train'in Box was launched as a purchasable product at Loco-Revue's Trainsmania exhibition in Lille over the the May weekend (28-30th April) This show, marking 80 years since the magazine was founded, was a tremendous success and a whole area was devoted to the new product with a number of modellers trying to complete the layout from opening the box within the show's three days. The price is set at €330 without stock or €360 if a fairly basic loco and a couple of wagons are included. The box does seem to include absolutely everything needed to build the complete layout and would I think provide anyone building it with all the basic skills, apart from carpentry, needed to pursue the hobby. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out. They seem to be aiming the product mainly at families or as a grandparent grandchildren thing but are also suggesting clubs, presumably as a project for their junior members. It was conceived as filling the missing link between the trainset and the "proper" model railway. The crowdfunding was successful enough to enable them to launch with all four regional versions though they've had subscribers to the project "Beta testing" it since about Devember. The buildings seem to be based on those made available as card inserts into their beginnners' magazine "Clés pour le train miniature" rather than the fairly expensive Regions et Compagnies range but they are proper models. the track is Peco Setrack. Though the stated aim of the show itself was to make railway modelling accessible to as many people as possible my impression was that the visitors were mainly people already engaged with the hobby so this particular show may not have generated as much interest in the product as hoped.

That doesn't seem to have been Peco's strategy in the past and they have other track products which probably have smaller unit sales like the bi-bloc track and the H0n3 range. From what they told me at Lille, the bullhead points do require a lot more hand assembly and that would push up the production costs considerably.

Very nice work Ben. From a normal viewing distance I'd have no problem accepting that as BH. That is so John but they assured me that this was very close to the production version. It will be at a premium price because of the amount of manual assembly required; the rail can't be simply pressed into the base

Peco had a stand at the Trainsmania show in Lille over the weekend and were showing their bullhead (or should that be double champignon asymétrique?) track including the prototype turnout. I assume this is the same one they've been showing so far but I'm not sure and they assured me that the production version will use proper rail for the switch blades which will not be hinged and metal check rails. the plain track is already being sold in France which, apart from people modelling British 00, is probably the one significant non British Isles market for it despite the sleepers being a bit wide for H0. The show, which was excellent, was to mark the 80th anniversary of Loco-Revue and the Peco stand (as always not a sales stand) was directly opposite Loco-Revue's large sales stand. I believe that the two family owned companies have had a long standing personal relationship. Loco-Revue are one of Peco's retailers in France (though I didn't notice any bullhead track on their stand) and their interesting new Train'in Box -complete layout kit in a box- product which was launched at the show uses Peco Setrack. Most of the layouts at this show did seem to be using Peco track, mostly code 75 for standard gauge, but I did notice at least one plain track module that had used C&L or SMP bullhead.

Hi John The phrase they used was "For the Average Enthusiast" meaning mainstream rather than mediocre and I agree with you about it forming a running history. I think though that as well as being a record of the hobby RM strongly influenced its development. It always encouraged layout building over the building of individual models and I think that's been one reason for the hobby's great popularity here. It's other great strength has been the way that it's allowed the personality of layout builders and layouts to be expressed in their articles; we felt we knew people like Denny, Hancock, Pyrke, Charman and many many others. That is of course down to the skill and wisdom of the editors and Cyril Freezer in particular made a huge and often underacknowledged contribution to the development of the hobby. Apart from those by John Ahern, articles in contemporary editions of MRN and MRC just seem much drier than those in RM.

Hi Peter It was good to see you and of course Mers les Bains (which did look great) on Friday and Saturday. I don't know how much time you both had (was it just the two of you?) to see the rest of the show but it was about the best I've been to in France and Loco-Revue clearly pulled out all the stops for their 80th anniversary. Operation has always seemed less of a priority at French shows and I think their approach tends to be more a landscape (or village or townscape) with trains running through it than trains operating in a landscape. From what I saw on Friday, on most layouts trains did simply run through the various scenes and it was only on Mers les Bains, Pempoul, Olivier and Gaelle Taniou's latest industrial layout and one of the N gauge layouts in the AFAN are that I saw much actual shunting going on. I've operated various layouts at French shows over the years where visitors have been rather intrigued by this strange British habit though I think that may be starting to change.

There is an interesting contrast between British war films made during the war which tended to focus on the ordinary tommies, sailors and even civilians and those made in the 1950s and later in which the main protagonists were generally officers. It's a subtle difference and by no means universal but it's quite noticeable. San Demetrio London was a good example of the former - and an excellent film which doesn't get shown very often- whereas films like Sink the Bismark were definitely in the latter camp.

I didn't see you there Gordon, did you make it? It was so crowded on Saturday that even if you had been there I probably wouldn't have known. I made a very late decision to go on Tuesday but was still able to get a Eurotunnel out today back tomorrow "day" return for about £50 with a very early start so was there on Friday afternoon (it opened at 12.00) and Saturday morning and bought my two day pass online before I left.It was actually fairly quiet on Friday so I was able to talk to a number of layout builders but far busier on Saturday. It was an absolutely terrific show, certainly the best I've ever been to in France. LocoRevue had clearly pulled out all the stops for their 80th anniversary (I can think of only Model Railroader that's been going for longer-1934) and they did themselves proud.They'd also managed to gather a good number of layouts that they've featured in Loco Revue, Voie Libre or Clés pour le Train Miniature. I gather that organising a show on this scale has been a fairly large financlal gamble for them so I hope it came off and that they're able to do it again. I also thought their Train'in Box idea was interesting as a way of getting new people into the hobby. Peco certainly did join in. Their exhibition stand was directly opposite the Loco-Revue hub which was also selling Peco products so the relationship was evident. it's Peco Setrack that's being included in the Train'in Box. Peco also showed their new bullhead track including the turnout (not yet in production) . France is probably the one significant market for bullhead track outside the UK. There may well have been as many if not more route miles laid with "double champignon" there than in Britain. Peco's new track is to scale for 00 of course so the sleepers will be a bit wide for H0 but the spacing should be alright. Lille was a good location. It took me less than two hours to drive there from the tunnel but had I come by train the Grand Palais exhibition centre was two metro stops or a twenty minute walk (0.8miles) from Lille Europe station. As it was I dumped my car in a fairly secure multi-storey car park near my hotel in Tourcoing and used the rather dull but very efficient automatic VAL metro to make the 35min journey (€1.60) to and from the exhibition each day. A lot cheaper than staying in Lille centre.

I'm not sure why the height of the conductor rail would advantage bullhead but if its easier to bend that might well explain it as the Central Line is notoriously sinuous (to avoid wayleaves by going under the streets)

If you have an angled or curved approach you wouldn't necessarily need curved points. In that situation it's fairly straightforward to design a throat with basic left and right hand points that has no reverse curves at all. That allows the use of points with a larger than usual crossing angle with no buffer locking. I know I tend to bang on about it but my favourite throat design- the old Bastille terminus in Paris- was laid with standard left and right hand points using the sharpest of SNCF's standard crossings (tan 0.13) normally only used for goods sidings. The only exceptions were one single slip and a three way in the small loco depot using the same crossing angle.That enabled a very complex throat for intense rush working into five platforms to be crammed into an incredibly short space (though it probably wasn't a good idea to attempt to drink a hot cup of coffee!)

Does this mean you can now take us from the special to the general theory of Minories design

Thanks for this Chris. This is the clearest plan of BM I've seen, excellent work. BTW what is the "Flush Siding" in front of the goods shed siding? It's a term I've not heard before.

That rather explains why the largest European locos really did need mechanical stokers; SNCF's 241P Mountain class, their most powerful loco, had an output of 4000 hp, its smaller sister the 141P Mikado was 3300 hp.and the very numerous 141R Mikados built in N.America immediately after the war were rated at 2900 hp These three classes all had mechanical stokers but others such as the final Etat Pacifics (SNCF 231G) with an output of 2200 hp and the ex PLM Pacifics (231K) that used to haul the Golden Arrow with around 2300hp did not. From this it does seem that the LMS and LNER Pacifics were approaching the limit of what a single human fireman could be expected to deliver on long non stop runs. I believe that the Princess Coronation delivered 3300HP continously on one of its tests but needed two firemen working flat out to achieve that. It does seem that the maximum continuous horsepower of a steam loco is a far more variable feast than that of a diesel or electric loco or even than larger steam plants such as those in ships and power stations.. . Did they simply run out of coal or were the tenders overfilled? I always wondered about the reality of the second man look out but presumably the places where it mattered most were less likely to be those where maximum power output was required- maybe! . Like those incredible steam engines used in plate mills that reversed immense amounts of power almost immediately to shuttle heavy steel plates back and forth between the rollers. The limitation for a steam loco exerting full torque would be adhesion. As teenage enthusiasts we used to love watching Bulleid Pacifics attempting to pull heavy passenger trains out of Oxford Station in the last years of steam without slipping. Needless to say the far superior Castles never seemed to slip (but given our strongly pro GWR prejudice, we probably didn't admit it when they did) .

The Swiss Federal Railways did that during the war when there was as acute shortage of coal imported from Germany while their own abundant supplies of hydro-electricity were fully available . They added electric heaters to two 0-6-0 tank locos so that they could run under the wires without using any coal and also operate rather like a fireless steam loco away from the wires. For longer runs on unelectrified tracks these locos could still be fired with coal. Power was taken at 15 kV, 16.6 Hz via the panto. and used via two transformers (total 480KW) to heat resistive heating elements in the boiler- so yes it was an electric kettle. Also in Switzerland, the Brienz-Rothorn railway uses electric pre-heaters to raise steam and maintain it overnight in the very well insulated boilers of their SLM built steam locos. These though are plugged into a shore supply rather than using pantographs.

Thanks for this Stephen. No we probably don't want to get into integral calculus with imaginary numbers. Electrical engineering was only one part of my OND and being rude mechanicals we called it magic. I did a bit more for my degree but not a lot. The coupler I'm looking at was invented by a French modeller in the 1970s and apparently used successfully by a number of others. It was single ended and relied on a permanent magnet to hold a link in engagement with a hook and a track mounted DC electromagnet to create a repulsive field for uncoupling. It looked like something that would never work but according to the people who used it (not the inventor!) apparently did and with virtually no uncommanded uncouplings. Its main feature was that it looked like a real screw link coupler. The magnetic field only held things in places so didn't carry any drawbar forces. This is different from neodymium based couplers currently used by some O gauge modellers (and the ordinary magnets used by Brio for the same purpose in their wooden track toy trains)

Hi Mark I've heard this before but never understood it. Why doesn't reversing the current at 50Hz constantly reverse the polarity of the electromagnet to give an average of nought? I'm guessing that's maybe what does happen and the relevant part of the coupler, being unmagnetised, gets attracted to the magnet independently of whether it's seeing a north or a south pole. This must though mean that the coupler itself has very low hysteresis. It would be different if it was acting on another magnet and I'm interest because I'm looking at a coupler design from the 1970s that used a permanent magnet on each vehicle to keep it coupled to the next one. Uncoupling was carried out by an electromagnet acting on part of the coupler to give it the same polarity as that from the permanent magnet so causing a repulsion. The electromagnet in this case presumably would have to be DC powered. This would also explain why Tri-angs block instrument set could be powered by AC or DC as it used a couple of electromagnets in each instrument to drive the pointer from line blocked/normal either way to line clear or train on line depending on the position of the control in the other instrument. I agree about having an inline fuse with any lead acid battery. They can deliver a lot of power (why turning the key to start your car works a solenoid rather than directly switching the battery to the starter motor. Very interesting

I'm rather inclined to agree. I've used Peco track for years and since I model French H0 it's always suited me very well. Ironically, for the parts of the republic I'm interested in, so would their new BH range, at least for plain track, with a bit of cosmetic attention. I was planning to use Code 75 Streamline for my next layout which will have a main line theme but will either have to buy all the points I need fairly soon before they change to this or look for an alternative. What is depressing is that Peco may be responding to a market of "modellers" increasingly unprepared to learn even the basics of the craft (If I can wire up a layout with Electrofrog points then anyone can). Unfortunately all the other "finecale" ready made H0 track such as Tillig is not only less sturdy than Peco but it also tends to follow German PW design which is a bit different.

That's odd unless your earlier CFLs were poor quality. I changed almost all of mine some years ago and, apart from what I'm saving in electricity, not having to drag the steps around the house all the time to change blown tungstens has been a real bonus. I don't have any LEDs for home lighting yet but do use them for photography and they run for hours on rechargable AAs from which you'd be lucky to get half an hour with an equivalent low voltage tungsten. I don't know what the spectral quality of the light from domestic LED lighting is like. They used to have a very notchy spectrum but the latest one I have can be smoothly adjusted from a colour temperature of 3150K (a bit lower than tungsten) to 6300K (daylight is 5600K) Power consumption is 9watts for the same light as a 700watt tungsten. I suspect that the first domestic LED I get will be for modelling.

A number of the sheds we visited had a complete loco acting as a stationary boiler and ISTR that some of these continued after the shed had stopped operating steam locos. Did that save any of them or was the Dai Woodhams Steam Heritage Emporium effectively supplying all needs? I ask because it was only the chance of its final humble service in 1969-70 as a ship's bunker oil heating boiler at Dieppe Maritime that saved my Avatar (231G558) from Gertie the Gas Cutter. This loco is the only survivor of over 300 Etat Pacifics (40 of them built by North British) which would be rather like having only a solitary King to represent all the GWR's Kings,Castles, Manors and Halls.

I could be wrong but, since the official and practical responsibilities of the fireman on a steam loco go way beyond shovelling coal into the firebox, there can presumably only be one official fireman on duty at any time. That doesn't mean they can't be assisted by a stoker but, whatever you called them, that person wouldn't be responsible as fireman. When steam locos were In normal revenue service it would have been expensive to require a third employee on the footplate so, for the largest locos on long runs (so probably not in Britain), having a mechanical stoker would have made economic sense. That surely wouldnt apply in the same way to a heritage operation where simply having an extra pair of trained hands to shovel coal would be the sensible option.

I think they're NIMBYs rather than greens though some NIMBYs do disguise their real motives. I did have a look at mechanical stokers in France and could find only eight pre-war locos fitted with them, two of them in clases of one so prototypes. Of locos buit for SNCF during and after the war all of the roughly 700-800 coal fired 141-Rs (built in N. America to a design partly based on the USRA light Mikado) had mechanical stokers as did all 34 241P "Mountains", 318 141P "Mikados" and most of the 115 150Ps."Decapods". These three classes, express passenger, mixed traffic and heavy freight respectively, shared a common tender design. Apart from the 141Rs the stoker equipped locos represented a tiny fraction of even the large locomotive fleet. I'm not sure that stoker design has advanced at all since the late 1940s- certainly not for locomotives. Apparently the type fitted to three 9Fs was a single archimedes screw type. It did have steam jets controlled by the fireman to control where the coal went on the grate so they weren't just shoving coal onto the back of the fire but I don't know whether that was a feature of most locomotive stokers.. I did find references to coal pushers on some French tenders (not those fitted for mechanical stoking) but have no idea whether they were ever used in Britain.

My school's railway society ran a number of shed bashing trips during the mid 1960s and most had a scrap line of withdrawn steam locos. The spotters loved them because they could cross out loads of numbers in their ABCs. I just found them very sad though the sheds we visited were always also still home to active steam locos. Most of the sheds were Western and Southern ones that we could reach on a Wednesday or Saturday afternoon (the school's half days) but we did make some longer day trips. The most ambitious of these was to Darlington which I think had the largest concentration of locos including some very odd (to my eyes) types such as Sentinel Y1/Y3s. I must admit though that my main memory of that trip was travelling at 100MPH for the first time in my life behind a Deltic from King's Cross. For me at least, the journeys to get to them, especially if behind steam, were more important than the actual shed visits. I'm not sure which (if any) sheds scrapped steam locos on site and which sent them away. A good proportion had their gear disconnected and sometimes the coupling rods removed and I assume that was to make towing to a distant scrapyard easier after they'd been disused for a few years.