Pacific231G

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree. turnover loco operation was really about fast turn round suburban/commuter operation with loco hauled (rather than push-pull). The locos- probably tanks- would have made multiple relatively short runs, taking on water but probably not coal. Pilot locos didn't typically seem to have had a dedicated layover siding so with Minories one can extend the loco spur to make a fourth departures only or parcels platform. It may still be a favourite lurking place for a pilot. If you search for Bastille in this topic you'll see details of how they handled turnover operations there. I've recently watched "The Last Journey" on Talking Pictures TV a 1936 film made "with the cooperation of the Great Western Railway Company". It's not that good a film- a sort of lightweight La Bête Humaine (though made before Jean Renoir's 1938 film with Jean Gabin) but it includes a lot of contemporary operational stuff including a pannier tank bringing into Paddington the coaching stock for the express that the story is based around (I'm not sure if those locos dedicated to ECS movements were technically station pilots) One thing I did wonder about was the driver, who'd just brought an express in, signing off at the Ranelagh Bridge Stabling Yard. Would the main line crew have done that or would they have taken their loco back to Old Oak Common?

Interesting Stevey. From the height of the legs it actually looks more like a dockyard (ship repairer, naval dockyard etc) than a cargo handling crane but definitely seems to be rigged for Toplis level luffing and should be adaptable. I don't think it's a Stothert and Pitt design though it does seem to be using somethnig like their crank design for luffing the jib rather than a winch. It looks the part mre than the old Airfix/Dapol travelling portal crane. Dockyard cranes needed more height in order to lift machinery in and out of engine rooms etc. than those used in ports for general cargo handling which mostly just had to clear the holds and any deck cargo and probably didn't want the cabin to be too high above the work.

Au contraire. I'd say it suits the BR diesel era very well. I agree with Tony about Hallam Town and did you not see the EM version "Minories GN" that Tom Cunnington and others built at the MRC for the plan's 50th anniversary in 2007? Tom let me have a go at operating it at one of its LT museum showinngs and it is challenging to run it intensively without getting snarled up. Operating another version with mainly non loco-hauled EMU sets I found far less engaging. The odd thing is that, still mourning the decline of steam, the first time I actually found it fascinating to watch diesel operations was at the old Fort William terminus in the mid 1960s. Though that was single rathers than double track it had three not very long platforms and was a reversing terminus with trains often arriving hard on each others heels and requiring a lot of shunting to add or subtract sleepers, restaurant cars, observation cars and sometimes tail loads. Nostalgia for steam (which I share) and the losses of so much after Beeching tends to make the BR blue era rather unloved but it's interesting that, according to Loco-Revue, the equivalent era in France (Ep IV in NEM terms) when steam had disappeared but loco hauled trains that included sections, parcels and postal traffic and wagonload goods were still the norm is the most popular epoch among modellers there.

There is a programme coming up on 4th April on BBC World Service that looks interesting Deep Waters: Sanctions and the new 'dark' fleet "Will the new "dark" fleet of secretive tankers carrying sanctioned Russian oil cause a shipping disaster?" more here. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5f3d

No, but thanks for sharing it and I'll look forward to watching it (apart from the over use of the effects catalogue in the opening sequence!). It's a direct to video rather than a broadcast production so aimed at a more specialist audience than either the current Hornby series or the Great Model Railway Bake Off. The empty factory in Margate looks just as sad though. In exploring our hobby in a way that brings it to a general audience I don't think anything has done better than the BBC Timeshift "The Joy of Train Sets" (which was far more about model railways than train sets) but that strand is both entertaining and informative about almost every subject it tackles.

You may be even more astounded to hear that I did generally enjoy this series though it is what I term a "watch and wipe" and not a keeper. That doesn't though alter the fact that, in terms of objectivity and the integrity of factual programming, it also worried me. Lightweight is fine but facts are still facts. The "forgetting" of the 3.5 inch Rocket has made me think of seeing if mine still works (It's been a rather large ornament on a high shelf in my railway room for several years) I did get a more sturdy gas tank for it soon after acquiring it. I also wondered about the 00 scale live steamers. They were operating (as usual) at Ally Pally. The reasons why they weren't a suitable product for Hornby made sense but I couldn't help wondering if the idea would suit a more niche manufacturer. Would the currents available in DCC power be enough to turn sufficient water into steam?

There may not be a legal definiton of factual v light entertainment but they are distinct genres. I spent most of my career as a producer and director in various factual genres in the BBC and I definitely wasn't making light entertainment (a very different skillset) though I hope my programmes were entertaining (or at least engaging) as well as informative. The convolutions that have led to the present incarnation of Hornby Hobbies are indeed a can of worms as indeed is true of most of the toy and hobby industry (As a freelance, I did some productions for the BTHA in the late 1990s so heard quite a lot of it from the horses' mouths including those around Lines Bros and Airfix) I too wouldn't dream of trying to explain it to an audience for a programme like A Model World but I would want to know it well enough myself to ensure the factual accuracy of my scripts . It was the voiceover scripts I was referring to. The interviews and actuality were of course unscripted (at least I certainly hope they were!) My mistake about he channel but the fact that Yesterday is owned by BBC Studios, a commercial subsidiary of the BBC, makes it, if anything, worse. The move of programme making to BBC Studios was not exactly uncontroversial. The series was actually made for Yesterday by Rare TV who, on their website, describe their work as "Intelligent, Entertaining, Factual"

Not even Peco?

Actually Phil this IS a factual series and not light entertainment: that is a real genre distinction. It's not the inevitable simplification that concerns me but but the way that the programme makers appear to be simply parroting whatever Hornby is saying about itself. What any of the contributors say in their interviews is up to them but ensuring that what is said in the voice-over narration is accurate, even if simplified, is the sole responsibility of the programme maker. Even for a fairly sympathetic portrait, I can't imagine making a single programme, let alone two series, about a company without doing my own research into both it and its history. I don't know whether Hornby did actually vet the scripts or were given editorial approval - the shennanigans around transmission of the first programme in the series did rather suggest that- but that's certainly not how factual television in this country, even at the lightest end of that spectrum, is supposed to be made. Section nine of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code is very clear "9.1: Broadcasters must maintain independent editorial control over programming." It's not actually Hornby I'm concerned about, they've managed to get a load of free publicity and good luck to them (but they'd have got that from a more objective series too), but I am concerned about Channel 5 and its commissioning/editorial process. Did we ever really get to the bottom of what happened around programme 1?

I agree. They don't seem to have heard of backward compatibility. It's why 405 line TV was maintained for years after 625 became the norm and why all colour TV systems produced perfectly good B&W images on older sets. I just hope MR manufacturers don't start making DCC only motive power.

There used to be a lower quadrant semaphore signal on the Greenford Branch just north of where it crosses the A40. I did once video it to analyse its movement and could detect no bounce. It also took 15 frames so 15/25 seconds to move. This particular signal was a good distance from Greenford E box but was wire operated. The GE box is still a mechanical frame (the last in Greater London?) and there are maybe half a dozen semaphore arms close to it but unfortunately not used often enough for me to have ever seen them moving.

It'll need to be fast then lest its passengers die of tedium. With all those cuttings and tunnels to make sure nobody actually has to look at it, It does promise to be one of the world's most boring train journeys. It's railway not a blooming sewer!

A bit less than three years but that would be using medieval methods. Cathedrals take a lot less time to build nowadays (otherwise there wouldn't be any in the USA) and have done for quite some time. St. Pauls Cathedral took 40 year to build but Westmiinster Cathedral, opened in 1903, took 8. By that reckoning you should be able to build a 1:87 scale cathedral in about six weeks. Though some cathedrals may have taken 250 years to build (and Milan took 500) that was usually due to the need to raise funds to pay for the work. If funding was avaialable even a medieval cathedral could take as littlle as 50 years. However, what I don't understand is why, built largely by hand by navvies, main line railways used to take a lot less time to build than they do now. The first railway from London to Birmingham took five years to build so how come HS2 phase one is taking at least twelve (actual buiild time on top of ten years of planning). Stephenson and Locke employed 20 000 people to build the L&B, largely by hand, while construction of HS2 is apparently providing work for 29 000 people.

It does look better but I've never seen one with a cast common rail like that. Is it a type of double slip used in Germany? I abandoned ideas of using Peco's slip (to be fair I have an SMP copper clad slip that is just as sharp) or indeed any of their small radius points simply because I couldn't square having corridor coaches with one buffer halfway between the buffers of the next coach and the corridor connections displaced laterally by three quarters of their width (or worse). It's one of my pet bugbears that modellers worry about every detail of a carriage being spot on yet accept a yawning chasm between them that would send any passenger trying to move around the train to their death!

That's probably true and full signalling is maybe part of the heritage experience but I'm looking through a few GW branch line stations in the OPC books and haven't found one yet that didn't have both a starter and an advanced starter in each direction. Wheatley (on the relatively quiet Princes Risborough-Oxford branch) faced a driver in the up direction with a fixed distant, up main home, up main inner home, up main starter and up advanced starter. I count a total of thirteen signal arms for a station with a passing loop and small goods yard. St.Ives- a terminus of course with a total of just seven points (and three traps) offered departing drivers an up main starter, an up main intermediate starter (with an up main to shed road starter), and an advanced starter with a shunting arm. Buckfastleigh (in GWR days) had a starter (main and loop) and advanced starter for both up and down departures. All three stations also had a full suite of shunting disks. I don't know if the GWR was particularly keen on creating work for its signal workshop in Swindon and I'm not getting into a discussion about which country's signalling system was best, their situations and signalling philosophies were rather different (though the French system also developed from early British signalling), but the fact is that the regimes used in France required far fewer signals and, at quieter stations, rarely required dedicated signalling staff.

Tillig's double slip does seem to be a very tight radius. 310mm (12.2 inches) equates to 426mm for 16.5 mm so equivalent to a radius a bit less that 17 inch for 00/H0. I found in H0, when trying to "improve" on Minories using Peco slips to shorten the throat, that they were equivalent to their small radius turnouts which made coaching stock lurch rather than flow. I also can't help thinking that the smaller the scale the less extreme compression you can get away with visually. Looking back at plans for TT-3 from the 1950s/1960s the general advice seemed to be to not simply reduce every dimension to 3/4 of its 4mm scale equivalent. Peco seem to have embraced this with their TT "medium" turnout having a nominal 3ft radius so equivalent to a 5ft radius in 00/H0 and closer in equivalent length to their large radius 00/H0 turnouts.

French signalling is simple enough at the sharp end (i.e. for the driver and station staff to understand) and one of the aims of the 1923 Code Verlant (on which, with a few additional aspects for CLS, French signalling is still based) was to reduce the number of signals to the minimum required in any situation. So, the actual design of signalling installations seems to involve a lot more variation than in the UK. There are also different "regimes" for different levels of traffic rather than the traditional British one-fits-all-approach where a quiet country branch line required permanently manned signalboxes and the whole suite of starters and advanced starters etc. at every station that was more than a halt. I have now found the Loco-Revue Hors-Serie that Gordon referred to and it does cover rather more ground, especially about single track lines, than their book on signalling. If you want to go into it in greater depth I'd suggest joining the French Railways Society whose members have collectively a wealth of knowledge and also get hold of the Signalling Record Society's 1995 paper no. 13 "An Introduction to French Signalling" by Richard Lemon (a long standing FRS member)

Except of course that as a factual series, albeit closer to the entertain than the inform end of the spectrum , it's not supposed to be about marketing Hornby's brands. For the company that may be a useful by-product and undoubtedly why they've done it but if the production company are agreeing to things like not mentioning China or distorting the history of Hornby to suit the present company's needs, and I'm not saying that they are, then that would be very questionable. On the choice of prototypes I found this phrase in the voice-over very telling. "Modellers like to populate their layouts with superstar trains from the past". Clearly by trying to buy models that are at leas appropriate to my own layout I've been getting it wrong all these years or should "modellers" in that sentence perhaps be "collectors"