Pacific231G

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My school's railway society ran a number of shed bashing trips during the mid 1960s and most had a scrap line of withdrawn steam locos.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.

Why so? Or are you simply assuming a particular reaction from the "greens" and using your assumption as an accusation based on no evidence. The most powerful passenger steam loco currently operating in Europe is 241P17 an ex SNCF 4-8-2 designed to haul 700-800 tonne trains on gradients of up to 1:120 and with a service speed of 75 MPH and the last passenger steam locos built in France (1948-1952). These were fitted with a mechanical stoker but did not, so far as I'm aware, produce any more smoke than manually stoked locos. I believe that in Britain 3 9Fs (92165-92167) were originally built with mechanical stokers but it would surely require a fairly major redesign to retrofit an existing loco and tender with such a device. Mechanical stokers were most effective when locos ran for long distances at a fairly constant speed that they could be optimised for. Such conditions were fairly common in North America but far less so on European railways including those in Britain and generally far less efficient than a well trained fireman. Like compounding, mechanical stoking was less advantageous than expected so they weren't that common in Europe. However, a loco as powerful as the 4000HP 241P would be particularly hard (close to impossible?) for one man to fire manually on the fairly long continuous runs it was designed for.

Interesting point, perhaps the thread should be Preservation and Heritage. Tornado is not a preserved loco as it was brand new but it is preserving the class and it's surely a heritage project. I remember thinking when Tornado was completed that the news reports going on about it being the first new steam loco to be built in Britain since Evening Star were nonsense. There have been plenty of new steam locos built for NG railways since them. One or two of them got it more right by saying it was the first new main line steam loco but I'm not even sure of that as weren't steam locos still being built for export for some time longer? I do also wonder about the defintion of "preservation" more generally. The loco engineer of an N.G.railway that had been criticised for modifying an ex industrial loco to be able to haul passenger trains argued that the loco wasn't "preserved" as say a loco in the NRM's collection would be, but that its current occupation on a working steam railway was simply another interesting chapter in its long and varied life (that had involved a number of modificiations over the years). Surely, one of the virtues of buildng a new loco like Tornado is that it's not a historic monument as say Mallard is so it can be allowed to work as hard as its predecessors would have in service. That gives us the possibility of seeing an express steam loco doing what it was designed to do and what some us can still remember them doing up to the early 1960s .

I was watching the second part of Channel 5's surprisingly interesting programme Inside the Tube: Going Underground which focussed on the Central Line and noticed in the section about relaying track on a tightly curved section that the rail appeared to be bullhead though with a short foot. I use the Central Line quite often and know that there used to be some bullhead at White City now replaced but didn't know it was still being used in the tube section. Is there something about BH that makes it particularly suitable for tightly curved section or is this use just because this section hasn't yet changed to Vignoles (FB) rail?

Fiddle yard- through station- fiddle yard does mean that more may have to happen in the fiddle yard than in the scenic section which may be fine for an exhibtion layout but I'm not sure how much fun it would be for a home layout. The great advantage of an urban location like yours is that through tracks, particularly goods lines and possibly single track, running past a terminus but not part of it sometimes at a lower level, are perfectly credible. There were several in London but Birmingham Moor Street. Plymouth Millbay (line running on to docks mostly freight but in GW days Ocean Mails as well), Southampton Terminus (ditto and with Pullmans to the Ocean Terminal in recent times) Weymouth (harbour tramway and the Portland branch) also come to mind. Southampton was also an example of a different arrangement where a main line terminus branched off a through main line fairly close to the station. That was quite common in other countries particularly France and N. America where the railway wanted to get a main line terminal close to the heart of a city (e.g. Orleans, Tours, Lille & Biarritz) but couldn't or didn't want to build their main line across the city centre. I'm sure there were examples in Britain (Norwich Thorpe?) . Depending on traffic flows the junction for these was quite often a triangle but not always.

Looks good and I think it'll be a cracking layout. The goods arrangements are a far more practical plan than Cyril Freezer's original goods depot equipped version of Minories. If you're being a purist you might need a trap point to protect the platform three passenger line from the goods yard though if that's not actually a passenger road then the passenger lines are protected by the pointwork. If it is then simply moving the first set of points after the goods yard entry back a bit would give room for that. I don't know whether the goods arrival line would also need a trap but somebody here will. Is the second kick back road on the right had side serving an industry such as a dairy? Good idea to add to the shunting. When serving smaller towns the typical British goods yard would have sidings for mileage, goods shed/dock and coal. I'm not though sure whether a small goods yard like this in a large city would include just a single coal siding as there would probably be a dedicated coal yard elsewhere. British cities consumed so much coal that I think a local yard would either handle a great deal of it or none at all. Birmingham Moor Street would be a good example of a yard handling a wide variety of traffic but AFAIK no coal while the LMS Rewley Road terminus in Oxford was a fairly modest passenger station but it had quite extensive coal sidings. Because Birmingham Majories is on a viaduct (an excellent idea IMHO) and they cost money the goods yard would be as narrow as possible but still wide enough for the carts and later lorries to get in between the mileage sidings (wagon lift to a low level goods shed as well?) . I think the arrangement of the release crossover is more flexible in the sketch than in the plan as this would both allow for slightly longer goods trains to be run round and for a couple of parcels vans to be parked between the crossover and the buffers on platform three.

Fine to work within design constraints but most of the development of the concept took place in Japan and in France (mostly by members of GEMME through an annual competition) where the four square foot measurement would mean very little. I'm not sure that you'd really see a conventional terminus to fiddle yard layout (the original TT-3 Minories for example) as a microlayout just because it was within that size. Carl never did decide what constituted a microlayout and the more he thought about it the vaguer the definition became. It's probably just one of those things that's almost impossible to define but you know one when you see it. It's only when you're setting the rules for competitions (or for yourself) that absolute size become important.

Thanks Kevin and congratulations; I'm looking at your 009 News article now and I think you might actually be the father of Microlayout as a word in English - though not the レイアウト マイクロ * nor possibly the Micro-reseau. The only similar reference I could find anywhere before that was the title of Giles Barnabe's Micr-O-Layouts article for small O gauge layouts in Scale Model Trains . Some of the illustrations for my article have gone a bit awry in its current format and the photo shown for J.A.Patmore's work is not of his earlier layouts but of his final TTn3 layout (though being completely self-contained in a lidded box that does fulfil my first out of the exhibition door criterion) .His two halves of a box TT-3 Larpool and Easington was particularly neat and I've seen the same idea used very effectively in Geoff Latham's current N gauge Tuxedo Junction-Mahwah layout. Do you have a copy of the Joe-works book? I've been trying to get sight or a scan of it since before I wrote the article for Carl. * (I butted the words for micro and layout together to make this supposedly cod Japanese word but to my surprise got it right and as a search term in Google etc.it does yield some interesting images)

Why do President Trump's advisors go round in threes? One can read, one can write and the third one is there to keep an eye on the two dangerous intellectuals. (I believe this joke was originally applied to policemen- secret or otherwise- in Soviet era Czechoslovakia but it may well be much older)

Hi Kevin It was me wot wrote that page for Carl's website. Tne term microlayout never has been defined (and a good thing too- who needs more rules in their life?) but in the subsequent ten years I've not found any earlier use of the word than in 009 News in 1988 in reference to a specific layout and then in 1990 by Yuji Niwa referring to the tiny but complete H0e layouts being produced in Japan based on Joe works locos. If you do know of any earlier references I'd be very interested. Carl 's ideas certainly changed during the years I and others here were corresponding with him but four square feet was only ever a guideline and the "microlayout" is far more an attttude of mind than an actual set of dimensions. Ten years ago we both had a go at tracing their history from both sides of the Atlantic but it was a fairly convoluted story. http://www.carendt.com/small-layout-scrapbook/page-61-may-2007/ http://www.carendt.com/small-layout-scrapbook/page-61a-may-2007/ I was slightly teasing Carl when, after we'd been discussing the four foot "rule", I came up with a design that would handle five coach passenger trains but still be less than four square feet. I didn't and don't really consider a layout over eight feet long as a microlayout but Carl loved it and persuaded me to mock it up for his site. http://archive.carendt.com/scrapbook/page44/index.html My favourite definition is a working layout that you could close up at the end of an exhibition and be out of the door carrying it before the last visitor has left !!

With good reason. Birmingham Hope St. is a very nice layout. There are no fewer than three layouts using the original Minories plan at Alexandra Palace this weekend in 2mm fine scale, 3mm and EM.

That is amazing, a brilliant job, I even found myself wondering why no steam was coming from the whistle! I also kind of wondered whether there should be a few whisps when it was at rest but steam (OK water vapour I know steam is an invisible gas) has always seemed like the missing visual ingreedient. The vapour, whatever it is, even looked the part and that's really difficult to scale. It sounded fine to my ears.

Nothing wrong with collectors or models that end up in showcases (or in their boxes in cupboards) and I'd agree that if the only rolling stock sold was for immediate use on layouts then the market probably would collapse. It does seem a shame though if the basic core of locos and other rolling stock needed for working layouts lsn't available. I don't think that's true for Britain's main railways unless you're very picky about liveries and details but it can be the case when modelling other European railways. ISTR an estimate that the proportion of Airfix kits sold that were ever assembled was quite low.

I can't help feeling that the manufacturers are increasingly serving a market for collectors rather than layout builders, or at least not the sort of layouts that do more than just run whatever locos or trains may have taken their owner's fancy. I wonder if that's the direction the hobby is taking - or perhaps it was ever thus. The idea of gradually acquring the locos and rolling stock you need as you develop a layout seems rather lost unless you're a kit or scratchbuilder. I'm guessing that to probably be rather less true for Britain than the rest of Europe and even less true for North American prototypes but a bit concerning for those of us modelling European prototypes.

Though the better availability of Hornby International products to UK modellers is most welcome it may also reflect Hornby's retrenchement. I understand that the Electrotren, Jouef and Rivarossi brands are now being run from Kent and the offices in France, Spain and Italy are being closed with only the German office remaining open. How good a team in Kent will be at understanding the market in say France is something I'd question so the H0 products may become more easily available here but I wonder how large the range will be. At the moment for example, the Jouef range includes just five steam loco types though with a lot of variations. These are the 241P, 141R, 141TA, 150C and 030TU/USATC S100. The latter is also available in Austrian, Italian and its original USATC livery so was reasonably widespread; the 150C was the Prussian G12 so though a bit limited in its SNCF version to heavy coal trains in the east of France would have scope for reversioning for Germany, Austria, Poland and Jugoslavia. . By contrast Jouef as an independent company produced nine main steam loco classes as scale models. Of those, updated versions of the 140C, 040TA, 231K and 141P would be really useful items in the range as they're native French types rather than ex German reparation locos Bachmann did produce a 140C fairly recently for the Liliput brand but it's been dropped- a great shame as these locos (most of them built in Glasgow and Manchester during the First World War) were a large class and very widespread. MKD ooesn't appear in the main Hornby International pages but does if you got to Hornby France though I don't know how up to date those pages are.

There used to be a set of crossing gates at the south end of Oxford statiion adjoining the road underbridge and used occasionally for overheight vehicles or when the road under the bridge flooded. I never saw them used and wondered whether these were operated by the signalbox or subject to special arrangements as they were opened so rarely. I'm not even sure that they went across the four tracks or opened outwards. So far as I know they were entirely on railway land and not part of the public highway.

Hi Col This is perhaps a slightly different situation from the one you describe but there's an example of a level crossing on railway land that crosses the eastern chord of the ex GWR Greenford branch to reach the PW site (now Plasser I think) that sits within the trangle formed by the GW main line and the two chords at the southern end of the Greenford Branch. This was/is not a public crossing and at one time it was controlled by just a white light (light off means don't cross) but now has a full set of flashing red lights and sounds but is still not gated or barriered. I presume the change was because in BR days only railway PW staff would have use the crossing but now, though it's within a gated enclosure, various contractors also have to use it (I don't know whether everyone using it would have to be certified to work railside or whether users would include delivery drivers). Passenger trains cross it at very low speed and that may have some bearing on it not needong to be barrier controlled.

I've been wondering how much bullhead was still around in the UK and happened to notice yesterday, while using the Greenford Branch to get to Paddington during a tube strike, that the junction that forms the apex of its southern triangle just south of Drayton Green is still entirely bullhead. It also looks as if the western arm of the triangle is still bullhead most of the way to its junction with the GW main line slow lines. The junction is still the traditional two sets of points and a diamond crossing with the two points being fairly symmetrical. I think there's some image distortion on Google Earth as it makes the diamond crossing look like a switched one which it definitely isn't. It's a relatively busy junction with four passenger trains an hour toing and froing between West Ealing and Greenford using the eastern arm and a fair amount of freight and ECS workings using both arms.

It is on Daily Motion as Le Train (1973) but only in French..The English language version didn't look dubbed so I think they may have double shot the lip sync dialogue shots.

I think that would be the film released in an English language dub in 1974 as "The Last Train" and in 1973 in France as "Le Train" starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Romy Schneider.and a certain steam loco *. It's actually one of my all time favourite films and IMHO works better than the Georges Simenon short story it's based on. It's a moving story of two people on an evacuation train crossing France in 1940 from near Sedan to La Rochelle to escape the rapidly advancing German invasion. The final scene is incredibly poignant and gets me every time but overall the film paints a very good picture of ordinary people caught up in France's greatest national tragedy. The music is terrific and includes what I think is the best musical evocation of a steam loco since Honegger's Pacific 231. The train effectively made much of the journey portrayed in the story, much of it on secondary goods only lines, and the railway locations, even the large stations at Moulins and La Rochelle, were as yet relatively unmodernised so still looked as they would have done in 1940 It hasn't been shown on British television for quite some time but is available as a DVD and well worth getting. *The loco that hauled The Last Train was 230G353, an ex PO 4-6-0 I have great affection for. This is mainly because, during a steam tour of Parisian railways in the late 1980s, I got to ride ion its footplate round much of the eastern part of the Petite Ceinture. It was the loco that featured in Muder on the Orient Express and many other movies because, after the end of steam, it was maintained in service by SNCF for just such duties. Sadly a boiler problem in 2000 (serious corrosion I think) took it out of service and it's not steamed since. For a long time it was in bits at the SNCFs workshops in Epernay but since 2013 has been in the hands of a preservation group APPMF (Association pour la Préservation du Patrimoine et des Métiers Ferroviaires) They restored it cosmetically for a 2014 Orient Express exhibition in Paris and are working to return it to service. I really hope they succeed.

I was at college in S. Shields in 1969-70 and remember seeing that, or a colliery waste transporter very much like it, working. It was quite an eerie experience top stand on the beach and watch the endless sequence of buckets going out to sea and tipping over without a soul in sight. I've often wondered what the environmental impact of that process was. Coal has been naturally washed into the sea along that coast from exposed seams for aeons so it would be the scale of the disposal rather than the content of the waste buckets that might be damaging. Update, apparently the Blackhall site and other beaches on that coast used as coal waste dumps made it an environmental disaster area with damage to the marine ecosystem up to four miles out to sea. It has now been cleaned up at considerable cost and in the Council of Europe Landscape Awards in 2011, the Durham Heritage Coast was a runner-up in the contest for the most transformed landscape in Europe,

Hi locomad I'm curious about the film made in Normandy that you saw and would love to find it. La Bataille du Rail was made immediately after the war when the railway network was still being repaired so I suspect the fim makers simply used whatever military equipment they could get hold of and doubt if historic accuracy was at the top of their agenda. What I couldn't figure out was how they got permission to wreck a steam loco for the Kilometer 212 scene given the desperate shortage of motive power in France at that time. Possibly the loco, "Pershing" consolidation 5-140G436, built by Baldwin, had wartime damage that had written it off. Most of the film was shot in Brittany and the derailment was staged near the village of Trégrom near Lannion. "The Train" also has its share of anachronisms. You may notice in the aerial view of "Vaires" a number of 141Rs, a large class ordered by SNCF from North American builders after the war lined up at the side of the depot. The drama was supposed to be set on the Eastern Region between Paris and the German border and the 4-6-0 locos of class 1-231B were from that region. The railway scenes though were mostly shot on the Western Region south of Rouen with "Rive-Reine" being the small town of Acquigny. The ancient 060 that started the wrecking process at "Rive-Reine was a venerable C.F. de l'Ouest type first built in 1867 that as SNCF class 3-030C was still in service until 1966. If you're a real stickler though you'll notice that though the Est used Vignoles (Flat bottom) rail a lot of the track seen in the film, including the length of rail that Burt Lancaster sabotages to finally stop the art train is Double-Champignon (bullhead) as favoured by the C.F. de l'Ouest. There's an article on the locations used for "The Train" here http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/peclegg/sncf/articles/article_2008_07.html though sadly the line through Acquigny is once again closed and derelict.

If you get a chance it's also worth seeing La Bataille du Rail, a French film about the "Resistance Fer" made immediately after the war from which a lot of the delaying tactics shown in The Train (one of my favourite films) were taken. I'm not sure if that's the film locomad is thinking of. La Bete Humaine is also well worth seeing but one of the most atmospheric films about a steam loco I've ever seen is conveyed in a short "Pacific 231D 735" made by SNCF's film unit in 1968 when mainline steam was coming to an end. It's definitely up there with Snowdrift at Bleath Gill. This film has now been made publicly available by SNCF's archive centre here http://sncfopenarchives.minit-l.com/archive/trsardo1270 .Most of the dialogue is from Emile Zola's text for La Bete Humaine but though it's in French the meaning is pretty clear and it siimply follows a locomotive from shed to destination in day and night .