Pacific231G

It does, as Dave says, appear to have been fixed in position and though the sheaving could be that for a Toplis level luffing with three runs between the tower and the jib head and a single fall to the hook. there should also be a set of cables to luff the jib as this doesnt appear to have been counterweighted. That was a common feature of Stothert and Pitt dockside cranes so that, instead of a winding drum to raise and lower the jib, the mechanism was a crank acting directly on the jib (not for nothing is the dockside crane in Awdry's railway books called "Cranky"). but that doesn't appear to have been the case here. It's possible that the luffing cables have simply been removed

In the 1970s when I was a student living in Brighton, there was a public rifle range undeneath the now almost completely vanished West Pier. My recollection is that the entrance was in the first set of buildings after the entrance and it ran beneath the boardwalks with the targets at the seaward end. I think the rifles were the same .22 Lee Enfield training rifles that we'd had at school.

That's interesting David.I've been wondering about getting timber cut to size as I've never been good at making square cuts myself. Was it difficult to find a timber merchant who could cut that accruately and what sort of sheet are you using?

ISTR a system of lights and audible warnings on the approaches to a lowish bridge near Bicester but don't know how reliable or expensive to run such systems are. The not very low bridge on Horsenden Lane next to Perivale Central Line station was equipped a couple of years ago with a socking great steel girder to protect the Central Line from high vehicles travelling north. There is no such protecton south bound but the NR bridge which carries the line from Old Oak Common to Rusiip handles very few passenger trains and would protect the Central Line where a bad bridge strike could be a disaster. It took weeks to erect the girder and its supporting structire so it couldn't have been cheap.

That makes sense. What sort of person would even want to enter America if Trump was president?

,and an outstanding landing is when your passengers are prepared to fly with you again.

Well, it used to be said that there were two kinds of pilot; those who had landed without putting the wheels down first and those who one day would. I guess it's the same for drivers of overheight verhicles; they just forget for a moment what they're driving. Humans aren't naturally mentally equipped to maintain constant focus on any task nor to continually monitor things and driving is not something we're well suited to. We respond to changes and fail to notice things that havent changed. So, if we've driven under low bridges a thousand times in our car and never needed to consider it, we're quite likely to fail to notice them when it does matter especially if something else distracts us at the crucial moment. ISTR that bus drivers who've driven into low bridges have often been on a very familiar road where they normally drive single deckers.

Do you remember whether it was all coal or were there vans as well?

Excellent Since gettig hold of the original RM a few years ago it always struck me as being a layout with surprisingly good operating potential for its size. I did meet Awdry at one of the MRC Central Hall Easter shows when I was a lad. I was never sure whether the layout I saw then was this one or Ffarquahar mk 2 but from the Modelling Sodor timeline on http://www.pegnsean.net/~railwayseries/ffarquhar.htm I think it must have been this 6x4 version.

Despite or perhaps because of the vast amount of data we now produce, almost all of it in digital form, we could end up leaving remarkably little trace of ourselves apart from a ravaged planet. In a hundred years time even something as prosaic as railway timetables may still be available from the 19th and 20th Centuries thanks to Bradshaw, Chaix, and the railways' own published versions but not from our era. How would a railway writer be able to even know the times of a particular train or even what it looked like if it was only ever scheduled electonically and its stock photographed digitally. Will even physical drawings of rolling stock still exist? I was at the triennial Baie de Somme steam festival the weekend before last and came back with a couple of hundred images. Overall I'd guess that between half a million to a million images were taken during the three days. Will any of them still exist in a hundred years time? If I had to guess I'd reckon on a few dozen at most that had been published in magazines. In theory storage in the cloud should last indefinitely independent of the devices in use but what can easily be stored can just as easily be wiped or discarded. Twenty five years ago I was quite shocked, while making a programme about the impact of micro computers, to discover that all that remained of the seminal TV serial A for Andromeda were a few production stills and some exterior film shots (it's just possible that some overseas broadcaster still has a telerecording on 16mm film tucked away) I can remember very clearly the giant computer but all the videotapes of the programme had been re-used and thete was nothing I could use to illustrate my programme. Will future generations even be able to tell what the British Isles looked like in the 21st Century?

Post holes !It takes more than the timbers rotting away to defeat a good archaeologist and you'd be amazed at how much shows up from the air which is how Woodhenge was found. With only the post holes to go by and maybe a few glass "beakers" they'll have endless fun trying to figure out what was really there.

The landlord built it after taking the dogs for a walk? (Sorry I've been watching Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad and Airplane again!) I wonder what archaeologists wil make of it in a couple of thousand years.

Yes please Phil, here would be just fine.

Thanks for posting these Phil; they are not only excellent photos but also very informative. I said that I wan't aware of any goods trafffic during visits to the Island in the last years of steam, probably in 1965 and 1966, but as the photo was from 1963 may well have seen coal wagons at Cowes but simply not noticed them. Coal merchants at stations were still a commonplace sight and perhaps the same would have been true for Ventnor that I also visited a couple of times.

It's usually when contracts are involved that clauses start to appear that are not in the author's interest. Without discussing specific publishers (but I've had a couple of articles published by Peco and and am perfectly happy to offer them more) I've found that formal contracts are fairly uncommon in this and other specialist publishing areas and most writing for Model Railway magazines in Britain actually takes place on the basis of mutual goodwiil. It seems generally accepted that if you submit material to a magazine the implied contract is for First British Serial Rights in return for their normal fee. First serial rights is effectively a licence to publish a work that hasn't been published before; the author still owns the work and is perfectly free to license it elsewhere but not until after the magazine has been published. If a magazine has a digital edition as well as or instead of a print edition I'd probably simply assume that's how they'd publish it but it would be something to take into account. I wouldn't expect them to include my article in a future annual or compilation without my agreement unless I'd originally agreed to that. Some publishers do try to claim additional or even all rights and I found this from one of them "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx pays for first time global print and/or electronic publication rights to freelance manuscripts, images, video recordings, and audio recordings .....You may not use the work in a commercial publication that costs money without our permission." The words bargepole and ten foot immediately come to mind but they and others trying the same thing presumably figure that innocent modellers and enthusiasts will be so happy to see their favourite photos or layout etc. in print for a modest fee that they will be happy to give up all their rights to their own work forever.

Nowadays of course a whole queue of people trying to figure out the TOCs' labyrinthine fare structures without getting ripped off. Dax also had the small child shouting insults and making rude gestures at passing loco crews until enough lumps of coal had been thrown at him to fill a coal bucket to take back to the cottage for his mum ( the modelled coal is magnetic so finds the metal bucket) . That one was supposed to come with a recording of insults in various unintelligible dialects and is a very old railway joke. That was the in the series of 23 cartoons that ran from June 1958 until July 1960. I've just been going through them and some are hilarious. The old dear isn't indecisive by the way, she is calmly discussing at great length the price of a ticket for her cat. The queue get increasingly agitated and when the train arrives they rush past her only to have the platform gate slam shut in their faces whereupon once the train has departed the queue reforms behind her. I think my favorites are two buffet jokes. In one a passenger gets off a train and runs over to the buffet which is firmly closed; as the train departs he jumps back on whereupon the buffet opens. In the other a customer emerges from the buffet with a roll which he attempts to eat, in disgust he throws it on to the track where it derails a passing express. I think the great thing about them is that, like W. Heath Robinson's contraptions, they are almost credible as automata. There's usually a slot in the platform for the person to be moved along by a mechanism beneath just as you see in elaborate medieval clocks and some of them certainly could be built. Very easy to build would be the two face savers where, when the layout's power fails it releases a presumably spring loaded mechanism that in one case causes a picket to appear with a strike placard and in the other a cow to charge through a broken railway fence and block the line.

I think Cyril Freezer was trying to persuade people not to give up on the raiways despite Beeching and the loss of steam and it was around that time he came up with the "Moderrn Image" phrase but I agree that was a horrible period for anyone who loved railways. I too have a soft spot for "The Living Lineside". The first film I ever made was shot (with the Stationmaster's permission) on Oxford Station and based loosely on one of Dax's visual jokes. It was the passenger who keeps emerging from the waiting room to ask if the train just arrived is his but when his train does arrive manages to miss it. I think it was after seeing Mon Oncle though our school film society's version wasn't exactly up to Tati's standards. The French seem quite fond of setting up little animated scenes on their layouts (or more often their modules) and some of those are rather Dax like.

Oops.I was of course referring to the International Civil Aviation Organisation Phonetic Alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie...Zulu) but everyone seems to call it the International Phonetic Alphabet. Its original version was the NATO Phonetic or Spelling Alphabet but it was developed into a more universal system by the ICAO inthe 1950s. The French have a habit of pronouncing Alfa (AL fah) as OL fah and Yankee (YANG kee) as Yonkee though we tend to pronounce Quebec (KEH BECK) as KWEH BECK. (I'd still like to get my hands on whoever decided that Millibars were to be changed to Hectopascals)

Which apparently is also how the Pecos River in N. America is pronounced. Anyway Peco is the registered trademark of the Pritchard Patent Product Co. Ltd. founded in 1946 and comes from the three Ps in the company name so I'll stick with Pee-koh. I'm sure I've generally heard it pronounced that way in France (and they even mangle letters in the International Civil Aviation Organisation phonetic alphabet) Why on earth would Peco want to rebrand itself? It's a very succesful international brand whose products enjoy a good reputation and it was founded three years before Piko was set up (originally as Pico) by request of the Russian army in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany just as that was being rebranded as the DDR. . It is true that between 1949 and 1961 Peco used a 3P's monogram before adopting their current logo of ther nane in whilte letters on a dark background but their products were always referred to as Peco. Pritchard used Peco as a product brand from the start (though using the company's full name to identify itself) with the first advert for Peco-Way inviting "trade enquiries only" in September 1946 and Peco-Insulaxles "2 rail electric conversion made easy" for both 16.5mm & 18mm gauge in February 1947.. Insulaxles were credited by Michael Longridge in MRC 18months later as having "probably done more to foster OO two rail operation than any other product". There were clearly early problems with Peco-Way track as in April 1947 ERG were advertising "Peco dead scale OO third rail chairs... .though Peco-Way is still unavoidably delayed."but whether that was down to manufacturing or the supply problems rife in the early post war period isn't reported. It wasn't until November 1947 that Peco started advertising Individulay. By April 1948 they were advertising both Peco-Way and Peco-Individulay for both standard (16.5mm gaugr) and scale (18mm gauge) OO though both products had been covered four months earlier in MRC's January 1948 "survey of Gauge OO tracks" also by Michael Longridge. Both products used the same bullhead rail and chairs into which the rail could be pressed along with prefabricated frogs and wing rails ec. but in June 1949 Peco introduced "Flat Bottom Rail Section in anticipation of its standardisation on British Railways". . BTW, I was wrong about Piko's manufacturing. Although they do manufacture G-scale and H0 "classic" at their headquarters in Sonneberg (Thüringen) they also have their own factory in China that produces their other H0, N & TT ranges .

while our very own Peco also shows that it's possible to make things in its native country. It's a curious coincidence of similar named companies remaining loyal to manufacturing in their own countries. I seem to have quite a lot of Piko stock from both DDR and BRD eras and of course it runs on Peco track. DDR era stuff includes two ex Prussian G8s in French (040D) and Dutch livery while post communist era I have a far better built SNCF 040B (ex Prussian G7) and a fair number of "boring" wagons (the vans, opens and low sided flats that made up the bulk of most goods trains) courtesy of very good offers at a show in Paris from a French magazine publisher who'd used them as subscription sweeteners and had leftover stocks; there was no scrum !! I've always pronounced Peco with a Pea as in Pritchard and Piko as pie but now wonder about the latter.

I've got one of those somewhere but lord knows where (I really must search for it) The split screwdriver looks very desirable and I could have done with one on several jobs recently.

Just to add to my previous post something about passenger stock from the July 1963 MRC. After it took over the Island's Railways at the grouping the S.R. first of all brought in "new" four wheel passenger coaches mainly from the LBSCR and London, Chatham and Dover (some of these converted from LC&D six wheel stock) "cascaded" from suburban lines that had been electrified along with a few LSWR bogie coaches but from 1934-1939 the four wheelers were gradually replaced by ex. LBSCR bogie stock apart from on the Newport-Freshwater line. There ex. LBSC four wheelers continued in service until after the war when a considerable number of ex SECR bogie coaches arrived. I hadn't realised that push-pull sets were used on the Island but there were two from the SECR (one single one two coach set) brought over in 1938 that worked the Merstone-Ventnor West line until it closed in September 1952 and then the Brading-Bembridge branch until it too closed the following September. The article does say that "Few if any of the coaches on the Island remain in the condition in which they first ran...many have been virtually rebuilt often with steel sheeting over the panelling and no two coaches..are identical" The one piece of rolling stock I never saw and hadn't even heard of before reading the MRC articles was the "Midget". This was probably still around when a school railway society trip to the Island in I think 1965 included a visit to the sheds in Ryde St. John. The Midget was a hand operated 0-4-0 shunting loco with which two men cranking a large wheel could move about 20 tons in low gear- someone must have modelled it. The thing I do remember from my teenage trips to visit the Island's Railways was how, right up to the end of steam and the simultaneous closure of most of the Island's remaining railways, the locos in particular were cleaner and kept in far better condition than their mainland couterparts. If any group of British ralwaymen deserved to keep their railway, despite Beeching it was those on the Isle of Wight. They also seemed to avoid the loss of morale so apparent elsewhere on BR* and even just a few months before the end, when my father and I travelled on the whole system in a day, there was no hint of anything amiss. There were plenty of jokey IofW postcards about people getting off the train to pick flowers but, though the stock was old, my abiding memory is of a smartly worked railway run by a friendly and dedicated group of railwaymen. I didn't by the way see any sign of goods traffic during those visits in the 1960s and, though coal for locos obviously got to St. John somehow, simply assumed that the IofW had been basically a passenger only railway for quite some time. Does anyone know how frequent the coal trains from Medina Wharf to various yards around the Island were in the last few years?

Just to add a bit to Pete's very interesting notes, as luck would have it I very recently got hold of a bound volume of the 1963 MRC that includes a major five part series of articles "Modelling the Railways of the Isle of Wight" by G.M Kichenside and Alan Williams (though Alan Williams is the only named author after the first part) . It ran in March, April, May, July and September. The first article includes a complete track plan of the Island's railways complete with signals as it was in the early 1960s with just the Ventnor and Cowes lines in service. The final article focusses on Freight Vehicles. This confirms what Pete has written about the SR replacing the rolling stock from the original railways with vehicles from its main constituent companies. For goods stock* these seem to have all been ex LBSCR apart from the goods brake vans that were all ex LSWR. The article mentions that only three cattle wagons remained by the mid 1950s (but there never seem to have been very many on the island) and that they were finally broken up in 1956. By the mid 1930s most open wagons were around 450 ex LBSCR standard 10ton five plank types but in 1948 88 13 ton eight plank SR standard opens were also transferred to the Island and 79 of these more modern wagons were still in service in 1962. Since freight was already declining these presumably replaced some of the LBSCR wagons and only a third of these, 150 wagons were still in service in 1962. At the birth of BR there seem to have been three types of van on the Island, all ex LBSCR, one with wooden underframes, one with steel underframes and the third type rebuilt from standard LBSCR cattle wagons with an 11ft2in wheelbase, wooden underframes and 18ft 4ins long . The article also mentions some odds and ends mostly in departmental use including two tank wagons for weedkiller that had been rebuilt from Isle of Wight Central water tanks use to take fresh water from Newport to Medina Wharf for the steam cranes there, an unusual traffic. I've always had an affection for the IofW's railways having visited them I think three times towards the end of steam and also as a small chld on a family holiday in Ryde. I did like this comment in the first article "Last months editorial commented on models of rural branch lines given train services that would put Clapham Junction to shame.Anyone modelling the Isle of Wight need have no fear of providing an overlavish service; the difficulty wil be to keep pace with the timetable" That does accord with my first childhood memory arriving at Ryde on the paddle ferry from Portsmouth and being very impressed by the busyness of the station with trains in every platorm, a scene that was more reminicscent of somewhere like Fenchurch Street than a bucolic British branch line. I also remembered feeling vaguely disappointed that we used the tramway to get to Esplanade rather than one of the steam trains- I wouldn't feel that way now!! *more to follow on passenger stock

How close is your house to the line. The "bin liner" trains run regularly on the Greenford branch and I've not noticed them to be particularly noisy at the low speeds of the branch. The noisiest part is the shed as it pulls away from signal stops but I doubt they'll disturb your sleep.

I understand that it was among the last devices to do electromechanically what solid state circuits were soon doing electronically. I believe that PWM (puse width modulation) which is what the Rolla-controla provided is used in most if not all feedback controller and also by DCC chips to deliver power to the motor. Someone said that it had been featured on Tomorrows World which almost guaranteed that it wouldn't be a commercial success.