Pacific231G

Not any more I haven't. (Editing posts does have a slightly 1984 Ministry of Truth feeling about it)

If it were, we'd have to abolish cars (and bicycles).

I wish sloppy use of apostrophes was the worst thing we had to worry about in that particular direction. The use of the apostrophe by greengrocers to denote a plural is so widespread that I suspect it may not be a mistake or ignorance but rather an archaic usage that has been handed down . Apostrophes were once quite widely used to denote plurals usually to replace the missing -e as the -es plural once used became simply -s. An example of that was lambes becoming lamb's and then lambs. Presumably tomatoes became tomato's and potatoes became potato's but for some reason they were amongst a few words that didn't evolve to become tomatos and potatos and, except for greengrocers, returned to a plural -es. It is curious though that we have tomatoes and potatoes but we don't have radioes or pianoes. But who is to decide what is "correct" written language? English is a language of commonly accepted usage with a lot of dialect variation and abbreviations are quite common, even foreign ones such as RSVP, etc. q.v., e.g. QED and so on. They also change over time. At one time most educated people would use 'phone to denote the abbreviation of telephone; now phone is generally accepted as a complete noun or verb as in "My phone's broken" "I'll phone you tonight" and I don't think "mobile telephone" was ever widely used to refer to what Americans call "cell phones" I definitely don't think we should abolish the apostrophe in written English, even though it's not apparent in spoken English. Its normally accepted usage should though be taught as it's useful. I've quite often had to restructure sentences for television voice over scripts that made perfect sense when written down but would be ambiguous when spoken.

I believe our Victorian forebears were equally exercised about the destructive effects on the language of "telegraphese". There's nothing wrong with txtspk so long as you know that the person receiving it understands it as well; there's a lot wrong with it if that is not the case. To take an even more extreme example, for most people this would be total gibberish EGKK 122252Z 1200/1306 26010KT 9999 SCT008 BKN015 PROB30 TEMPO 1300/1305 2000 RADZ BKN005 BECMG 1305/1308 SCT020 PROB40 TEMPO 1313/1317 24018G28KT 6000 SHRA BKN012 but for those who use it this is a perfectly good and clear communication in a usefully compact format originally designed for Telex machines. (before the Met Office starts grumbling about crown copyright, I made this example up)

Since an arrest has been made I suspect that publishing speculation about possible charges is on very shaky ground. Reporting restrictions apply to any publication not just to professional journalists and that includes online. Good summary here http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art20130702112133630

I've delved a bit further and the fourth power rule of thumb came originally from a major study carried out in about 1960 by the The American. Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and revised in the 1990s. The actual equations they derived for Vehicle Load Equivalency Factors are complex but the fourth power of axle weight provides a reasonable approximation. There is an American summary from the Umiversity of Wisconson of its implications here http://epdfiles.engr.wisc.edu/pdf_web_files/tic/bulletins/Bltn_002_Vehicle_Load.pdf Some very recently published research by Dawid Rys, Jozef Judycki and and Piotr Jaskula at the Gdansk University of Technology, suggest that this rule of thumb may be underestimating the impact of higher loads, especially on more lightly built local roads, and that the relatively small proportion of overloaded lorries (6-25%) have a disproportionate effect on the life expectancy of roads, . A summary of this research and the full text of an article on it is available here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352146516302782 The Gdansk research did include PSVs (buses and coaches) and they are significant though their Load Effect Factor was found to be about 65%-70% of that for HGVs on roads with the same maximum axle weights.

They may be paying more but it's a far smaller fraction of the costs they impose. HGVs make up 10% of the traffic on motorways yet are involved in 50% of fatal accidents and that percentage has been rising. Wear and tear on roads is roughly a fourth power function of axle weight so the difference between the wear caused by even the heaviest car- a two tonne Range Rover for example with about a tonne on each axle- and the 10 tonnes allowed for an HGVs is about 1: 10 000. The effect of two heavy axles close together probably increases that effect particularly deeper in the road's structure but I don't know by how much. As a scientist at the TRRL once told me, but couldn't say on camera, cars cause negligible damage to roads, the wear and tear is almost all caused by trucks. I'm probably a bit biased after being sideswiped by an HGV on the M25 last year that suddenly changed lanes without warning. Fortunately I was able to react quickly enough to avoid injury or serious damage to my car but if I hadn't I doubt if I'd be writing this now. I don't actuallly blame truck drivers for this situation- well not most of them- but more the system of subcontracting and cut throat competition that puts them under excessive pressure and puts safety some steps down the priority list.

Without speculating on this particlularly tragic accident, there is always a kneejerk reaction to want "something to be done about it" whenever a bad rail accident occurs. I don't know what the cost would be of developing and fitting to all tramways automatic overspeed sensors responding to local speed limits, as has been widely suggested this week, but suspect it would be prohibiitve and less cost effective in terms of increasing safety than many other measures. Clearly, if the investigation of this acccident reveals an underlying deficiency or that overspeed, whether due to driver error ot otherwise, was causing a significant number of non-fatal derailments then that would need to be dealt with. That is surely how railways generally moved from being a rather dangerous form of transport to the safest.

Aren't those civil offences that are judged on the balance of probabilities as opposed to criminal offences requiring to be proven "beyond reasonable doubt"? I'm not a lawyer but someone reading this must know the law.

Hi Martin While that's true up to a point, the "Greenly" compromise that became OO took it to a level of absurdity in order to accomodate tyres wide enough to enable OO "models"to take 12 inch radius curves rather as O gauge layouts were often built with 24 inch curves. I think the general preference for 4mm/ft scale during the 1920s and 30s had more to do with the perceived "fiddleyness" of working in an even smaller scale (at a time when gauge 0 was considered small) A number of people were already using 4mm'ft scale but with 18mm or even 19mm gauge track (the gauge adopted for 4mm/ft in America) .The BRMSB standard of 4mm/ft with 18mm gauge was also a compromise but an arguably sensible one that allows for overscale tyres but is not so visually obvious.Had it appeared much earlier I wonder whether anyone would now be using 4mm/ft scale models with 3.5mm/ft track I don't know what scale Trix or Rivarossi used for their British outline H0 rolling stock but at one time Rivarossi used a scale of 1:80 for their "H0" models of European prototypes (though not for N. American prototype models) and there was an unsuccessful attempt from Germany in the 1950s to define the scale for H0 as 1:80.

If you've seen the movie The Train you may have noticed how much easier it was for the La Biche character (Burt Lancaster) to remove a length of bullhead rail track than a length of Vignoles (flat bottom). In the latter case he has to unbolt the fishplates and then unscrew the fang bolts that fix the foot of the rail to the sleepers. For the double champignon (bullhead) rail, as Martin says, it's just the fishplates and keys. It just so happened that the disused line they used for filming those sequences south of Acquigny had both types of rail. That section has since been lifted and the surviving section north and south of it long since replaced with Vignoles but at Pacy, on the preserved section of the line south oif where the filming took place, some DC rail still survives in sidings. This is not my best ever photo but does show both types of rail and the fixings used. I'm pretty sure the rail in the sidings is asymmetric double champignon i.e. bullhead as the head does seem larger than the foot. Each of the pre SNCF companies had their own preferences for rail with both symmetric and asymmetric (bullhead) double champignon being used until the end. Some companies only used vignoles (They also had different ideas about sleeper spacing)

Unfortunately that breaks down when you decide you need to distinguish H0 and 00. 1,2 & 3 were defined as gauges but OO became more complicated- much more complicated. At one time 00 (or OO) could mean a scale of 3.5 or 4mm to the foot and a nominal gauge of 5/8 inch, 16mm, 16.5mm, 18mm or 19mm (I think the BRMSB renamed "Scale OO" as EM before it became 18.2mm) It's no accident that instead of 000, 0000, and possibly 00000 we got N, Z & T. In any case with only two gauges below 1 in the sequence, O and OO don't really need to be placed in a numerical sequence but can be treated as discrete symbols. One catch with using numerical values with a computer is that, unless you actually tell it that 0, 00 and 000 are text strings NOT numbers it tends to treat them all as zero. O, OO and OOO are of course treated as strings and OO9 doesn't turn into 9 either. I discovered this while indexing magazine articles in a spreadsheet with nominal scale as one of the fields. H0 was no problem but there were an awful lot of 0 gauge layouts and a surprising lack of any 00 layouts. Fortunately I spotted this before I'd indexed more than about twenty magazines but even when I formatted the field as text it had forgotten what I'd originally keyed in so I had to go through a number of them again. I think the typewriter thing is a bit of a red herring as the pre-war magazines were typeset and O and 0 were always different.

And the Hornby collectors had all been so deliriously happy till someone noticed that. I did like the comment about the preserved B12 being "incorrect" as if it's a 1:1 scale model of itself. It reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2P2mFT_ac It makes me laugh everytime I watch it.

Hi John Beware of being pedantic about this. This has always been very vague and on their website even the Gauge O Guild (or Gauge 0 Guild) use both even for their own name They are though registered at Companies House as THE GAUGE "O" GUILD LIMITED with an Oh not a zero). Though 0 gauge and then 00 gauge appear to have been a logical downward progression of the larger gauges 3,2,1 (sometimes III, II, 1) most early references to both scales, including Model Railway News from 1925 and the early books by Edward Beal and Ernest Carter, clearly used a capital O rather than a 0 (the typeset characters are distinctly different). Using the letter rather than the zero seems in the main to have stuck, at least in the English speaking world. As is well known Britain has no generally agreed standards but In their standards the American NMRA definitely refer to O, HO and OO (though H0 sometimes appears in articles) while in Europe MOROP in their NEMs equally clearly use 0 and H0 (with passing references to "Anglo-Saxon" 00) The main French association for 0 gauge is also "Le Cercle de Zéro". but though H0 is pronounced "hah-null" in German it is more like Hachaux or Acho in French where O is pronounced Ohh but 0 is pronounced Zéro. Both H0 and HO appear in adverts and articles there just as 00 and OO both appear in Britain so nobody can really say that one or other is "correct" .

Other way round apparently. Before the foot (actually the yard) was internationally defined in terms of metres in 1959 the US foot (stilli in use as the "survey foot" in some states) was 0.304800609601 m but the British foot was 0.304798966667 m. The international foot is 0.3048 m This is a little worrying as the scales we use are based on so many mm to the foot so there could be a difference of almost two parts per million betweeen a scale model built before 1959 and one built now. They'd surely look completely wrong if run in the same train.

Quite I discovered Kadees many years ago when I had an American switching layout for which they were a total no brainer and have used them whenever possible ever since- including microtrains couplers for H0e. They do look a bit chunky with side buffered stock and don't on their own solve the excess space between vehicles issue. With NEM boxes it often takes a bit of choosing between the different shank lengths to get the buffers almost but not quite touching. I do have some Roco couplings within a rake of Rivarossi Inox (stainless steel) DEV coaches Though they're pretty close together you can still see a small gap between coaches though that probably calls for a very flexible corridor connection rather than trying to get the coaches any closer. Kadee's standard coupler head is overscale but though they do have a scale version the market for offering them for NEM boxes is probably a but too niche. Going back to track. My small terminus layout uses code 100 Streamline. In photos (as in the goods yard above) the rail section looks fairly gross and my next layout will probably use code 75. However, when I'm actually looking at the layout this seems far less obvious or objectionable.

If I were modelling in OO I might well prefer BRMSB over Peco's H0 track (even in H0 I often widen the 60cm sleeper spacing to somethng more appropriate for sidings and branch lines) but I don't think I could then use two foot radius curves or points as the sleeper spacing does, to my eyes if nobody else's, make them look even more unrealistically tight. It does though as you say come down to what looks right or in other ways is best for each modeller and that's not something that anyone else can lay down. There's no wrong or right so I'm not sure why it is such an emotive subject though it clearly seems to be. Looking at many 00 layouts I find the narrow gauge of the track far less disconcerting than enormous tension lock couplings and coaches with two foot gaps between their vestibule connections passing over reverse curves that would decant any unfortunate passengers on their way to the dining car straight into the four foot instead.

Errr whose gauge/scale? H0 (16.5mm gauge and 3.5mm/ft scale) is as British as roast beef. It was developed by British modellers, many of them members of the Wimbledon MRC, including Stewart Reidpath and A.R.Walkley back in the 1920s. 00 then referred to the gauge and the scale was simply the correct one for that gauge. It was only when 00 came to more generally mean a scale of 4mm/ft (for which 18 and 19mm gauges were also suggested and used) that 3.5mm/ft started to be called Half-O (A.R.Walkley) and then simply HO (J.N.Maskylene) to differentiate it from 4mm/ft. Defining a scale as mm/ft reveals its British origins as Europeans don't use feet and Americans don't generally use the metric system (American O scale is a quarter of an inch to the foot as opposed to 7mm/ft 1/43.5)

No, it's an opinion not a fact except insofar as OO is itself "wrong" (but not if you want to use 18" radius curves) . There are two ways of dealing with the inherent "wrongness" of 00 (apart of course from adopting EM, P4 or H0). One compromise is to make track that is to scale for the gauge and accept that things like sleeper spacing are underscale for the models running on it. That's what Peco did (within the limits of affordable mass production) with Streamline and opened up a significant H0 export market as well. The other compromise, which was the BRMSB approach, is to make everything lengthways, such as sleeper spacing and width, to scale for 4mm/ft and squeeze everything widthways, especially sleeper length, to look as OK as possible given that the gauge is to a different scale (or if you prefer is a model of 1254mm 4ft 11/2 inch gauge track) I can't see that one is logically "more wrong" than the other. It's also worth remembering that the BRMSB, after long deliberation, adopted 18mm gauge as the "scale" standard for OO and clearly expected that, for 4mm/ft scale, 16.5mm gauge would soon be largely confined to proprietary and "train set" models. Peco is a successful British company with a worldwide export market manufacturing entirely in Britain while Formoway, Gem, Wrenn and many other less well remembered brands have disappeared. That wasn't because Peco killed them off with ruthless cut throat tactics but simply because more modellers found its products to better meet their needs. There have always been plenty of examples of OO exhibition layouts with track built to BRMSB specs but if that was such a vastly better compromise then one would expect more OO modellers to have adopted it.

From what I've seen in Loco-Revue most French modellers who use SMP track for double-champignon don't seem to reshape the sleepers but they do look fat (the sleepers not the modellers) .

Hi Martin I'll only complain if their marketing claims that BH track was peculiar to Britain- there were probably more route miles of it in France than here- and I can see me ending up using it for H0 This is the former Etat railway to the port of Blaye on the right bank of the Gironde. It closed a few years ago but remains "closed" rather than "abandoned". The rail section is quite heavy and I think it must have been relaid by SNCF in the 1960s or later.

Don't you believe it Dave. I'm quite amazed at how many people building model railways - including my own brother-in-law till I explained it to him- have absolutely no idea that OO uses a narrow gauge and probably don't care. Peco Streamline is fine for them, it looks better and trains run more smoothly than Setrack and being H0 scale may look better in itself (until you put a 4mm/ft scale train on it) than the wider sleeper spacing of track built to BRMSB specs. That may be accurate in terms of the sleeper spacing but does tend to show up the narrowness of the gauge and also, though this isn't often mentioned, the "correct" sleeper spacing does emphasise the excessively sharp points and curves that we habitually use. I agree with you about it not really being a marketing dilemma and I'm sure Peco will market BH using a phrase such as "traditional British steam era track" (or something very much like that) I'll be very interest to see how (or if) Peco market it in France where bullhead rail was also very widely used. The wider sleeper spacing won't be a problem as that varied enormously and on the secondary lines where it survived longest (and still does) were quite wide in any case. The sleepers may be a bit long and fat but quite a lot of French modellers use SMP or C&L for "double champignon" (Bullhead) often just for plain track with Streamline for points I've seen no evidence of Peco exploiting their ownership of Railway and Continental Modeller and I doubt very much whether the manufacturing department get free advertising space at the expense of paying advertisers as that would distort the publishing company's finances. Peco Publications and Publicity Ltd. is a separate company incorporated in 1951 (presumably when Sidney Pritchard bought Railway Modeller from Ian Allan) from the original 1946 Pritchard Patent Product Company listed by Companies House as "Non-specialised wholesale trade". There is a third Pritchard Patent Product Company (2001) Ltd. listed as "Head Office Services" though they all have the same address and some of the same directors. I've also never seen much sign of reviews and editorials pushing Peco products at the expense of rivals. Again, those such as Gem and particularly GF advertised in the magazine and would hardly have continued to do so if editorial was pooh pooing their products. The only exception to this was Sidney Pritchard's regular Peco Topics in the early 1950s but that was I think a serialisation of the Peco Platelayer's Manual that for some reason, paper rationing possibly, Pritchard had been unable to publish as a book in its revised form. Where I think Peco did subtly promote sales of its track was by encouraging an emphasis on layout rather than on say loco building. Clearly layouts require track and if more people have them then the commercial "pie" for track manufacturers will get larger and so will Peco's sales.

Don't laugh too hard. Just such a layout (well a diorama anyway) did appear at Expometrique near Paris a few years ago. It was a very well observed model of an abandoned level crossing with the remaining track buried in weeds and enough missing roof tiles to ensure that the crossing keeper's cottage would not be long for this world. You do though have to be wary of abandoned railways in France. In about 2000-2001 I visited the remains of a metre gauge line where I had seen a goods train running along decidedly dodgy track just before it closed completely in 1988. What I found was very sad. The track hadn't yet been lifted but the sleepers were rotting,small trees were growing between the rails and even with a machette you'd have found it very difficult to penetrate the actual track bed. Three years later I saw the same section of track again but this time from the end platform of a train run by the Société pour l’Animation du Blanc Argent (SABA) who have succesfully reopened as a tourist line the whole 27km abandoned section of this classic metre gauge line between Lucay-le-Male and Argy. SABA have been a particularly energetic preservation group and are actively seeking to take over the recently closed section of the Blanc-Argent between Lucay-le-Male and Valencay. The rest of the remaining Blanc-Argent from Valencay to Salbris (67kms) is still in commercial operation with modern railcars.

C&L and Peco are serving very different market segments and I can't see RTL bullhead, with the inevitable compromises that large scale mass production requires, changing that. I'm quite sure C&L, who are a Peco retailer, will have no difficulty about stocking Peco BH. Unlike certain other manufacturers Peco have a reputation for looking after the retailers who sell their products. There was by the way quite a long gap, almost a year I think, between Peco's original introduction of Streamline flex track and the appearance of Streamline points (starting with a nominal two foot radius point) Whether this was to sort out manufacturing issues or to gauge public reaction to their decision to produce scale H0 track rather than narrow gauge 4mm/ft track I have no idea. I suspect that the real reason for the introduction of BH now is nothing more sinister than that the development of manufacturing techniques has now made it cost effecrtive to produce a product for a far smaller potential market than "tradtional" Streamline's worldwide market.