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Meeting and local groups happen because local people are willing to organise them not because the society has made a decision on the best location. The GRS organised a recent show in Didcot (we took the SNCF Society sales stand there) and I think it was there largely because those prepared to organise it are around the Oxfordshire area not because it was central for their national membership. Nevertheless it was pretty well attended. The 009 Society, which I also belong to, has a fairly large number of local groups some of which organise members days open to all not just their own local members and even public exhibitions open to all. It's true that the 009 Society has a fairly large membership more evenly spread across Britain but for smaller societies like ours it's still possible to set up local groups snd they can operate in different ways. I've belonged to two in the 009 society, one of which meets monthly on a weekend afternoon in a village hall and the other monthly on Friday evenings in each other's homes. We set up a similar local group in the SNCF Society about twelve years ago and we take it in turns to host a Sunday afternoon meeting every six weeks or so. Apart from us there seems to be one other local group and a couple of more ad hoc groupings one based on an MRC with a number of members interested in French railways and the other around someone's large layout. I'm sure there are other areas with enough local members to start such a group even outside the South East. Someone or preferably several someones have to be prepared to organise or at least co-ordinate such a group but it's not that difficult. What doesn't work is to wait for someone else to do it as that's likely to be a very long wait.

"They" are the society members prepared to put in the work each year to organise it. Since they are in Kent they're not going to organise it in the Midlands .If others were prepared to run a second event in another part of the country at a different time of the year I'm sure people would come.

After Thursday I'm not sure if it's still legal to quote French but my Hachette dictionary defines halte as "Point d'Arret entre deux gares reserve aux seuls trains de voyageurs" (stopping place between two stations * for passenger trains only) .They weren't always completely unstaffed as many were associated with level crossings and sometimes had a ticket window in the crossinhg keeper's cottage for limited sales but they wouldn't handle goods or parcels. . (* Gare in French has a subtly different meaning from station in English relating to its operational role in handling traffic but it's as hard to pin down as the diference between a rapide and an express)

I found a plan based on the Deane principal in an early RM but it was very small so I think it must have been later than his first plan based on Portreath. I'll dig it out to find the date

Hi Ian A.R.Walkley is also something of a hero of mine and I'm familiar with his published work, both with his "portable shunting layout", that introduced almost everything such as automatic couplings, two rail track and reversible permanent magnet DC motors, that we now take for granted, and his pioneering 2mm scale layout. I didn't know that he had a brother who was also a modeller. I know A.R was a member of the Wimbledon club who pushed for what is now H0 but he seemed to vanish from sight after about 1930 and I think he may have emigrated to New Zealand but do you know more about both of them?

Which may be one reason for this forum's popularity. I assume that Hornby's European brands (Jouef, Rivarossi, Elettrotren etc) are wholly owned subsidiaries incorporated in the relevant countries as is Hornby America. I don't think any of them are on the same scale as Hornby is in the UK but don't know what contribution they make to the Group's income. If Britan does vote to leave the EU I would imagine they'd re-emphasise the well established national brands to avoid any resulting negative sentiment. I've not noticed Hornby Jouef products being discounted to any great extent but it's a far smaller range than Hornby's 00 offering.

Hi Andy I've not heard of this before so maybe not so common. A distinction has been made between complete guided transport systems such as railways and individual guidance elements to assist conventional vehicles in particular spots

When they found the wooden tramway in 2013 on the site of the Neptune shipyard in Walker, Newcastle, the archaeologists were looking for Roman remain but what they did find was far more interesting. I think the site was being dug prior to redevelopment so don't know how this find will be further explored or protected. I can't find anything more about it since 2013. I hadn't heard before that wooden wagon wheels needed to be soaked to prevent them from drying out and cracking but that apparenty was why the Hay Wain in Constable's painting was standing in the river (I assume modern wooden wagon wheels use varnish instead but does this depend on the type of timber being used?) Haytor is interesting because it seems to be effectively a granite version of an iron plateway built in 1820 long after iron plateways and railways had become familiar- a case of the iron age coming before the stone age- but very logical given the local materials available. Stone tramways do though seem to have been incredibly rare. Given that design precedence and the presumed use of iron wheeled wagons it probably would make sense for the moving tongue switches on the Haytor Tramway to have been made of iron rather than oak, perhaps rather like the one on this reconstructed plateway- (I don't recoginese the location, does anyone know it? (image Creative Commons by Brian Voon Yee Yap 2010)

Though its tempting to exagerate its equivalence to early railways and wagonways from the seventeenth century onwards, it does seem that the Diolkos was far more of an organised guided system than most early archaeologists, not being engineers, realised. They tended to see grooves worn in the surface of a road but images do show something purpose built for guiding vehicles. The guidance possibly wouldn't have been as positive as on something like the Haytor tramway and unlike the Haytor, the guideways were built into the surface of a paved road that would have been able to take other vehicles as well. I'm not sure how strong the evidence is for more advanced railwaylike features such as passing loops but I doubt if you'd be looking at things like points with moving switches. The technology of the Diolkos may have derived from that used for launching vessels from slipways (I've seen similar grooved guides in more modern slipways) and both the Greeks and Romans were clearly familiar with simple guideways as they used them for apparently mundane purposes like moving stage sets and scenery in their theatres (there's a good example of this in the Roman theatre in Lyon) Update I've just found online the very interesting 2001 paper by Dr. M J T Lewis (University of Hull).Railways in the Greek and Roman World http://www.yieldopedia.com/paneladmin/reports/fb8f151d1ee5d60af0482d429fd27c10.pdf I have a printed copy of this but wasn't sure from where I'd got In this paper Dr. Lewis raises the interesting possibility (but is very clear that it is only a possibility) of a continuity between the primitive railways used in mines by the Romans and the medieval mine railways that formed the pre-history of the sort of railway I just travelled on from Paddington. He does mention the Gozo rutways in that but unlike the Diolkos doesn't see them qualifying as railways as theyre really "accidental" mofiifications to an ordinary roadway. As a "callow youth" in 1974 (his words) Lewis wrote the book Early Wooden Railways.that Kevin has referred to. For the four hundredth anniversary in 2004 of the first recorded British wagonway, he wrote a follow up paper on its origins Reflections on 1604 http://www.rchs.org.uk/trial/ER5%20website%20-%20exemplar%20paper.pdf Dr.Lewis is though certain that while influences from mining elsewhere in Europe may have helped the development of that first waggonway, the progress from that to the modern railway in the first quarter of the nineteenth century happened entirely in Britain and mostly in the North East. Dr. Lewis is also a historian of the Ffestiniog Railway and was one of its pioneering "deviationists"

Very interesting Brian. I've been fascinated by the Haytor Granite Tramway since exploring much of the upper, almost completely intact, moorland section thirty five or so years ago. The sets are so complete in large parts of it that a suitable wagon could surely still traverse it and it's a little surprising that this hasn't been done in the interests of experimental archaeology to measure forces and how much a horse could haul etc. There is a very good account of the Tramway and the quarries it served here http://www.9fairfield.eclipse.co.uk/haytor/haytorone.html There have since ancient times been "grooveways" where the horse simple pulled a single wagon onto the appropriate route at junctions but evidence suggests that on the Haytor tramway wagons carrying blocks of granite descended by gravity in trains of twelve. Facing points would therefore have required something to direct them onto the appropriate route and these were simple feathers mounted in the holes in the sets. Presumably these were held either by friction or some kind of groove in the set after being kicked over and similar devices appear on many other early waggonways/tramways/plateways/dramways (and all the other names these things had in different parts of the country) . I can't help thinking that if these feathers or point blades had been made of iron some would have surely survived as much larger (and therefore of greater scrap value) iron objects remain in the quarries. Wooden feathers would surely have rotted away completely after the best part of two centuries, especially out on the open moors. I would though have thought that modern archaeological methods would be able to identify by the traces left behind whether the holes in the sets wherever tracks diverged had once been the pivot for iron or wooden objects. Apparently for the descent the horses accompanied the wagons that they would later pull back up the tramway. On the granite track speeds would have been far lower than on an iron railway like the ffestiniog so there would have been no need for wagons for the horses to ride on and I suspect the horses had a role in the descent. UPDATE After reading a bit more about it, it seems that the horses were hitched to the rear of the trains of wagons to help brake them for the descent. What I find intriguing about the Haytor tramway is how late it was built and operated, from 1820 into at least the 1840s so well into the era of steam railways. Something I read recently shed light - at least for me- on the relative advantages of plateways with unflanged wheels and edge rails (railways) with flanged wheels. The received wisdom always seems to have been that the great advantage of plateways was that the wagons that ran on them could also be used on roads (rather like a guided busway) and this was included in several prospectuses included that for the Surrey Iron Railway (which was of course a plateway) There is a major catch in this argument though as that the leading axle on road wagons needs to be steerable in order to follow the horse around bends whilst those on any kind of guided track need to definitely not be free to swivel in order to be guided by the track. An "amphibious" vehicle would therefore have to have had some way of locking its steering which would have made them far more complicated to both build and operate. In practice the wagons used on plateways seem to have been confined to them. You may also find this interesting from three years ago. http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-east-news/river-tyne-200-year-old-5325105

I've PM'd you the original Maurice Deane article. Maurice Deane's original Portreath layout pioneered this approach and it was described in his article The Possibilities of a Miniature Layout in the August-September 1950 Railway Modeller (published by Ian Allan) . Cyril Freezer used Deane's idea of a fiddle yard behind the terminus for a plan in the Oct-Nov 1950 Modeller based on Buckfastleigh and Ashburton but without the link for a concealed continuous run. Porteath didn't last that long as Deane visited the Culm Valley branch (probably in October 1950) and immediately started dismantling his layout to build a model of it on basically the same baseboards. That appeared in the February 1952 RM (by then a Peco publication) the month after an article by Deane describing the branch. That layout didn't have a link for continuous running either but instead used the interesting idea of a fully modelled " fiddle" yard in full view in front of one of the stations so the layout was essentially an elongated spiral.

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.