Pacific231G

I thought i knew the railways in my part of London but while exploring the maps.nls.uk site of the National Library of Scotland (a fantastic resource) I found somethihg completely new, at least to me. This is on the OS Six Inch map from sometime between 1883 and 1913. I think it's early in that period as Old Oak Common is still farmland, with Old Oak Farm on it, and the GWR loco shed for Paddington appears to be at Mitre Bridge Junction. About 300m East of Acton Station (now Acton Main Line) at Friars Place Green, just where the A40 crosses the GW Main Line (51 31 02 N 0 15 53 W), are the earthworks of a junction that would have faced the line towards Paddington for a single track branch that swings away from the main line roughly opposite where the Acton Wells branch rises to join the N&SW Junction Railway. It then curves fairly tightly (about 250M radius) to the right till it crosses over the N&SWJ Ry. on a roughly SE heading. The route then curves far more gently to the north side of East Acton Lane by whcih point it is heading almost due south. There it stops and there is nothing beyond that point . There's no sign of it beyond that point. The whole thing is about 900m long and running across what was then farmland. Though the earthworks and a bridge over the NASWJ Ry appear complete it's marked as Railway (Abandoned). There is absolutely no trace of this route on modern maps either in earthworks or street lines and I'm assuming it is a branch that began construction but was never completed. If its line is extended it would have crossed The Vale (A4020) and possibly joined the N&SWJ's short Hammersmith branch which had a terminus at Hammersmith & Chiswick Station. This was almost underneath the L&SWR Kensington and Richmond line (now the District and Picadilly lines) about 500m east of Turnham Green Station on the north side of Chiswick High Road just to the west of Prebend Gardens. That station was in an already well developed area and its site was still very evident from District Line trains when I first lived in West London in the mid 1970s. Though the station site has now been redeveloped the route of the rest of this long dismantled line is still very clear from modern boundaries and building lines. Does anyone know anything more about the uncompleted branch off the Paddington main line line which looks like it could be the basis of an interesting "might have been" urban branch.

I wondered if my memory was fooling me but have just been going through my copy of Ferry Boat de Nuit 1936-1980 which includes a number of accounts of journeys made on the service and a couple of articles about the Night Ferry service in Vie du Rail and its predecessor Notre Metier. It seems that passengers usually did stay in their compartments during the crossing where if awake the attendant could provide them with drinks and would obtain duty frees for them from the ship. However, one or two people do mention leaving the train and going out on the deck and others who travelled as I did as foot passengers mention exploring the vehicle deck. There was a low platform between each pair of tracks with stairways to the passenger decks so passengers wouldn't have been blundering around on the vehicle deck itself and such access would have been needed for emergency evacuation to the boat deck in any case. I'm sure it was from one of these platforms that I saw the loaded voitures lits and beyond them the HGVs.that occupied the rest of the deck. Various pictures also show foot passengers waiting to disembark at Dunkerque via the ramp but I can't remember whether I did that or not. I assume that only done at off peak times when there weren't too many foot passengers to clear. That practice of off-loading the foot passengers before starting on the vehicles was also quite common on some of the car ferries as it saved the extra operation of bringing up the gangways. It took a bit of thought to figure this out but, from the point of view of customs and immigration there shouldn't have been a problem with Night Ferry and foot/car passengers mixing as they would still have had to clear border controls at the rail terminus for Night Ferry passengers or at the port itself for others. The same would apply in reverse to those getting on the ferry. For the journey on the French side the sleeping cars and accompanying Wagon Restaurant were locked out from the day coaches that accompanied them as the sleeping car passengers were between border controls whereas the foot passengers were already/still on French soil.

You mean you had to have a sleeper berth if you were travelling on the sleeper train-err well yes? OK I take your point that a lot if not most sleeper trains used to also convey passengers in day carriages. In the 1970s I often travelled in Europe on trains that had a couple of Voitures Lits (that I certainly couldn't afford) plus couchettes (that I could sometimes afford) and ordinary day carriages (that I usually used ) In its latter decades the Orient Express was very much like that and the film that depicted that most accurately was "From Russia with Love". Others tended to over glamourise it. Interesting Mike. I vaguely remember seeing the Night Ferry departing before the boat train and by the time I got to the ferry the sleepers were already loaded. When I travelled on the ferry early in 1975 there certainly were Night Ferry passengers using the bar and just stretching their legs so they certainly weren't confined to the train but the attendants would presumably have prevented anybody else from entering the train. It was early in February (I had a week of outstanding 1974 leave to use or lose, a seven day France Vacances ticket and southern France was a lot warmer than Britain) so there were only a handful of foot passengers and I don't think the Night Ferry was heavily booked.

Err. yes you could. I used that service one very cold February in the mid 1970s. I travelled down on the EMU that left Victoria after the Voitures Lits. At Dover Marine there was a long and rather cold walk over various footbridges to reach the train ferry dock where I got on the ship (boat?!!) . At Dunkerque, I got off the ship and, after the border controls, was drected by signs to a row of SNCF coaches waiting a couple of hundred yards from the berth. Eventually the Voutures Lits were coupled on to them and the combined train headed for Paris. Aboard the ferry, passenger accomodation was limited to a saloon with a bar that was available to the sleeping car passengers as well as foot passengers. There was no restriction on visitng the vehicle deck so I did and apart from the Night Ferry sleepers, and I assume a Fourgon, most of the deck was occupied by HGVs.

I don't know why they're excluding, they should be way out of copyright, I can see them when signed in but here they are again A view of a corner of Mr. Walkley's etc. is not from that article but from the Dec 1926 MRN accompanying a letter saying he was henceforth going to call 00 gauge with the correct scale (3.5mm/ft) half 0. I think that letter was the origin of H0 as J.R. Maskelyne shortened it to that fairly soon afterwards. . I might try rescanning the final page. If you can't get these let me know and I'll PM them Rob, did you ever get these scans from me?

Hi Stephen, by split I didn't mean that the wood had spits in it but that it was rather crudely split from a log with the minimum of saw cuts. Your point about the effect of WW1 on the production of sleepers is interesting though and the trenches certainly had a voracious appetite for timber. I'm wondering if these sleepers had been cut in fairly crude sawmills in the forests rather than by the usual specialist sleeper making facilities. During WW1 a lot extra forestry activity did take place, particularly in the vast artificial pine forests of Gascogny. The French, Canadian and American armies all had forestry units with thousands of men working in the region and NG railways, some of them quite extensive, were built to bring the felled timber to their sawmills. .

Funny thing is that I've been looking at some old images of mainline track on the old Ouest/Etat out of the Gare St. Lazare and the sleeper spacing and width looks more lke American practice so maybe 83 line would be a contender. They also seem to have made their sleepers on the "wild west" principle of splitting a suitable log, knocking the bark off and planing a couple of flats to screw the rail to before chucking it onto the ballast. Some of the sleepers they were using with bullhead rail and chairs weren't much better. I know the Ouest was going bust before the Etat took it over before WW1 but really !! I am eyeing up the new Peco bullhead track for service in H0 sidings in La France Profonde and I suspect the St. Malo corsairs will soon be pillaging model shops along the S. coast and spiriting this track across the channel. I wonder if the millenium beacons are still in working order.

That's fine if the NEM pockets have some sideways movement but not if they're rigid. This was a problem Kadee would have had when designing their coupler for NEM pockets. The standard NMRA pocket/gear box is wide enough to accomodate a centring mechanism and the post the coupler rotates on so Kadee's standard couplers have the shank and the fixed part of the coupler head as a single casting (or moulding) . The NEM pocket is narrower and designed to hold the swallow tail rigidly. This scan of an unassembled Kadee no 5 with its "draft box" (NMRA pocket) alongside a Bachman Ezimate and an NEM pocket shows the difference; the NEM pocket is narrower. The scan is a bit low contrast but I had to leave the scanner lid open because of the coupler pins. I think most Kadee couplers for NMRA pockets now use nylon "whiskers" to centre them rather that the phosphor bronze spring device seen here. The "Magnematic" principle invented by Kadee, and used by clones like Bachman after the patents expired, requires some sideways movement of the coupler head for normal coupling and uncoupling and a larger sideways movement for delayed uncoupling. To achieve this for fixed NEM pockets Kadee added an articulation just behind the coupler head and the wings accomodate the centring spring for this. The Bachman Ezimate is designed for NEM pockets with some freedom to move sideways (for example in a close coupling unit) so doesn't need the extra articulation. I discovered this after acquiring a bunch of surplus Ezimates for a song at an exhibition. When I tried using them with some wagons fitted with rigid NEM pockets I found that they a) didn't uncouple properly and (b) tended to cause the wagons to derail. I could have used them with wagons fitted with close coupling units but found that the length of the Ezimates gave an excessively large gap between the buffers (though not as wide as the original hinged loop couplers the wagons came fitted with) I also found that they didn't work quite so well as Kadees but I might used them with stock fitted with close coupler units that mostly run in fixed rakes.

Hi David Do you (or anyone else) know what the couplers are on those sets. They look like AAR (known in Britain as Buckeyes) but might be Willisons- It's relevant to an article I'm writing.

Many thanks for this Martin It's the crossing angles relative to the actual prototype minimum radii mentioned by Coachman I was after and you've answered my question. I wasn't directly comparing with Peco's offering but with a known main line prototype that had crossing angles of 1/7 with turnouts simply specified as "short" and "long". 1/9 would have been more usual but this was a particularly tight location with speeds correspondlingly restricted.

So I'm afraid were the pre-production versions of the first Streamline points; at least that was what appeared in a photo in the March 1961 RM .That was a two foot radius point with a dead frog.

I did wonder about that. I agree that two foot radius is too tight. I have two small radius points in my current layout and though they're only in goods sidings I wish I'd kept to medium radius throughout. For a small BLT I find they look alright and the Peco medium points are nominally three foot radius. Theyr'e actually almost identicial in overall geometry to SMP three foot radius points and when trackbuilding was more the norm that does seem to have been the most common size for 16.5mm gauge. Peco's large (nominally five foot radus) points are curved beyond the frog to give the same 12o exit angle as the small and medium radius points which are straight beyond the frog. That does seem to lose some of the benefit of using longer points particularly on formations like crossovers.because of the abrupt reversal. By the way, what would be the crossing angles/frog nos of full size turnouts that would give radii of 6 and 10 chains?

Hi Dave They do sell servo motors (PSS125) but I'd be surprised if Peco deviate from the current arrangement of loose heeled switch rails and a sprung snapover mechanism. They'e used that for their 83 line and it's worked well for them since they first introduced Streamline in the 1960s. The entire switch assembly may well be identical to the current code 75 one in which the switch rails are not actually tapered rail but folded. That would make the switch rail- tie bar assemby the same so it should be fine with the current solenoid point motors. In my experience it's at the tiebar where turnouts tend to fail; Peco track and pointwork is notoriously reliable and I can't see them risking that reputation with their new bullhead range.

For most locos with an unrealistically high top speed that would surely be an improvement but would the motor tend to overheat with a higher current at lower speeds? That is important in other types of machinery though I assume that stalled DC motors overheat because of the lack of back EMF.

By coincidence, after watching James May's programme I came upon this from A.C. Gilbert's 1938 American Flyer catalogue I don't know whether the amount of assembly was more or less than for Tri-ang's CKD range from the early 1960s. Offering a complete train set in that form was interesting but it certainly didn't include assembly of the motor. I don't think the idea reappeared after the Second World War and I don't think that Tri-ang's CKD range lasted very long so perhaps there was too much disappointment from locos that didn't work after they'd been assembled. ISTR that Hornby also offered his pre-war O gauge tinplate railway items in a self assembly form compatible with Meccano. A.C. Gilbert seems to have been the American equivalent of Frank Hornby with his "erector set" being very similar to Meccano and a strong commitment towards toys with a technical and scientitically educational flavour. I don't though think that Frank Hornby ever conceived of anything like this "perfectly safe" set from 1950-51. This was the era when we (or anyway Americans) were being told to anticipate railway locomotives powered by small nuclear reactors. For once the description "most extraordinary set ever developed" seems quite true though not perhaps in the way that A.C. Gilbert intended. I wonder if any of the kids who were given this set actually found any Uranium with their geiger counters. Did one or two of them even end up with a Nobel prize for physics? both images licensed by the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Far more examples of Gilbert and American Flyer catalogues at http://www.eliwhitney.org/

I enjoyed the content of this programme but it was rather spoiled for me by poor camerawork/directiion. I know it wasn't really a how-to programme but I still wanted to see what he was doing and most of the time I couldn't. If you show someone demonstrating something then you've got to have close ups that are in frame and in focus and held for long enough to see what they're doing. That's not easy when they're working on objects as small as the components of a 00 loco but it is entirely possible (even in a live broadcast whcih this wasn't) and James May is an experienced enough presenter to take direction for this. Remagnetising rather than using a new magnet made sense as the object was to reassemble the original loco. The insights into the history of the manufacturers was informative. I know plenty of people who still think that their current purchases from Hornby are directly descended from the Hornby Dublo they or their fathers/grandfathers had as children rather than from Tri-ang.

Very interesting idea Tom and it's a fascinating prototype. Having once travelled on it, I tend to tihnk of the Weymouth Harbour Tramway in terms of boat trains; there must though have once been a lot of shunting of the various quayside sidings before the actual Wymouth Quay station.

Hi Martin I noticed while travelling on it today that the northern arm of the Greenford Branch triangular junction at West Ealing still has BH pointwork (two turnouts and a diamond) with some BH on the two arms towards the GW main line. The rest of the branch is FB with a lot of it between Drayton Green and the northern triangle fairly recently relaid on steel sleepers. I'll take a closer look next time I travel on the branch (if I ever do see below) . Slightly OT but, while waiting for my train this morning, I was struck by the strange logic of TOCs. I'm sure you can spot the obvious inconsistency

Hi Martin You're probably well aware of this resource but I found a useful table of rail dimensions compiled by the S scale society here http://www.s-scale.org.uk/rails.htm It includes over sixty types of bullhead and almost three hundred and fifty types of flat bottom as well as bridge rail and crane track. It's particularly useful for some of us as it includes non British rail (India, Australian, NZ and French for bullhead) both bullhead The scale dimensions are naturally for S scale but the table can easily be inserted into a spreadsheet and recalculated for other scales (which I've just done for OO and H0)

I'm not at all sure about this. Some modellers may have had skills drawn from industry but John Charman was an RAF officer, I think a pilot. He used CCW bullhead track for Charford. I've not been able to find out much about this track but it seems to have been a chaired component product rather than RTL. Others who definitely built their own track included Philip (P.D.) Hancock an academic librarian, Rev. Peter Denny an Anglican vicar, Rev. Edward Beal a Church of Scotland minister, and John Ahern an insurance broker. None of those professions would be likely to foster engineering skills and they all seem to have acquired their skills in building track and other areas from railway modelling rather than bringing them to it. The great thing about our hobby is the very wide range of skills involved, technical, cerebral and artistic. That's far wider than any trade or profession I can think of.

I would Brian. It's not just the infamous disappearing knuckle spring; the coupler as a whole is a precision piece of engineering and even a fleck of paint or glue in the knuckle or the draft gear box can stop it working properly.

Hi Martin Well Rivarossi did at some point when they moved from what I believe was 1:80 to 1:87 scale for their European prototype stock. I don't think they advertised the change and the catalogue refers to "H0 Gauge 16.5mm" so perhaps deliberately vague about the scale. I used to have a Rivarossi 231E (an SNCF Pacific) and in many ways it was a lovely model but it just looked daft when coupled to 1:87 stock. For 00 and HO whether the scale is 1:76 or 1:87 is surely only relevant to the sleepering not the actual steelwork. For American modellers Streamline uses sleepers that are to the same scale as the gauge 60cm (2ft) spacing but their ties are normally narrower (9 inches) and more tightly spaced (~21 inches) than in Europe or Britain (~24-30 inches); the change from regular Streamline to 83 Line would therefore have been about the same in terms of tie width and spacing, though in the opposite direction, as from regular Streamline to OO Bullhead. I wouldn't hold you breath on classic Streamline ever being anything but 00/H0

I'm not sure where that 5% figure comes from. According to the Director's Report in the latest published accounts of the Pritchard Patent Product Company Ltd. for 2015, 28.75% of its turnover related to exports (up from 25.06% in 2012). Peco Publications & Publcity Ltd. who also run Pecorama are a separate subsidiary of the Pritchard Patent Product Company (2001) Ltd. which is the holding company. Ratio is listed as dormant so its business has presumably been absorbed into PPPCo Ltd. I believe that Peco do make track for other companies so the exports won't just be their own consumer range but it does seem that the home market is their main market though I'd guess it's the exports that make it profitable as their largest fixed assets are dies and moulds, about 40% of the total and double the value of plant and machinery and of freehold buildings and land. The number of people they employ has also risen slowly but steadily. (This information is all avaialable from Companies House)

It must be awful when someone forces you to read a thread Following this and previous threads and then trying to separate truth from opinion from other sources has actually taught me a great deal about both trackwork (real and model) and the history of our hobby. Shame I don't have room for anything longer than medium radius points so I'll be waiting even longer for bullhead in that size and will just have to pretend they are no. 8s and avoid parallel crossovers.

Sorry. I wasn't being entirely clear. Yes that is the case and it is 12o (according to Peco, Templot and my own protractor) but the long points have a shallower but curved frog and are then curved beyond the frog to get to that same angle. That's not necessarily unprototypical but would never be found on a crossover. While using the same final exit angle makes it easier to put together quite complex track formations it makes it hard to get the flowing bespoke pointwork that was very characteristic of steam era railways in Britain. Elsewhere, there seems to have been more use of standard pre -assembled switches and crossings *. I have a copy of the 1940 British Military Railway Engineering manual. Apart from using derailers rather than catch points, it follows standard British railway practice of the time for everything from track construction to interlocking and signalling but the military had standardised on just three turnouts, No. 6, No. 8, and No. 12, using a standard switch and lead for each. Given that most of us consider a No 6 to be rather generous its notes are interesting "The No. 6 will only be used in very congested areas such as docks and where small shunting engines usually operate; the No. 8 is the standard for general yard and station work; the No. 12 will be used only in places where high speeds are expected" I also liked "The laying of diamond crossings, slip roads, scissors crossings or similar complicated track layouts should be avoided wherever possible. These layouts require special fittings, are difficult to lay accurately and to maintain" It does seem that the Royal Engineers also had a favourite size of turnout, clearly not because it was a "very pretty size" though in engineering what is good often looks good. As well as minimising the need for onsite cutting of rail, standardisation made it far easier to maintain adequate stocks for use where they were needed, often in a hurry. It strikes me that the needs of a military quartermaster may have had quite a lot in common with those of a model shop owner. *Though they obviously inherited far more including a great deal of bullhead from the old companied, SNCF standardised on just five crossings (nos. 7,9,12,20 & 30 plus a no. 6 used only for symmetrical split lead points in marshalling yards) and three standard switches (with deviation angles of 0o18' , 0025' and 10 )