Pacific231G

It's a nice idea but they weren't surveying Great Britain for gun laying purposes. It was simply that the job of preparing government maps, initially for the military, was given to the Board of Ordnance which was essentially engaged in what would now be called logistics including the supply of armaments and munitions to the military but picked up other jobs such as mainitaining coastal fortifications. The job of surveying the country (starting with what is now the site of Heathrow Airport) was therefore called the Ordnance Survey and later became a separate department. You're right to be cautious about maps though: I've found some real oddities. In the French "Etat Major" map from about 1857, the final kilometre of the new ligne de Vincennes from its Paris Bastille terminus is correctly shown as only planned. The rest of the line to its first outer terminus at La Varenne had by then been built and is shown as such but the final section to the Place de la Bastille was delayed by a planning dispute. The 1200 metre long line connecting the Vincennes line to the Paris-Mulhouse main line at Nogent, which had a strategic importance for the army, is also shown as complete. The problem is that this connecting line was never actually built or even started Someone studying the history of this line might conclude that the connecting line had been built and that could become accepted wisdom. It won't because this particular line is too well known but for a more obscure location it would be easy to be led astray.

I certainly remember it and it was in the list of inspirational layouts that I posted earlier. Augher Valley was Railway of the Month in the April 1964 RM and I'm looking at it now. It was 00n3 and based on an imaginary line in Ireland- for which Lloyd says he wrote a complete history- but using stock drawn from various real Irish 3foot lines including some very attractive County Donegal railcars. The layout filled a room ascending from Fivemiletown where the works were, past Moyasta Road and Manorhamilton Junction (an end on junction between the original line to Manorhamilton and the Castlemalin extension railway) to its upper terminus at Castlemalin. Lloyd describes the line very well in his article and it had a detailed working timetable and goods working using playing cards. He says the layout had taken three years to reach its current state and talks of a possible mixed gauge extension at the lower end. However, looking at the photos it appears that only Fivemiletown was ever fully completed scenically as in an article about building early 00 coaches for the "Rocket" in RM for December of that year Lloyd describes the AVR as "now alas no more" though it had appeared as the background to some traction engine conversions in an article "Iron Maidens" in RM that August. Of course there's no way of knowing when these three articles were written as opposed to being published and he doesn't say why he abandoned the Augher Valley. Update: I've now found a later article by David Lloyd about a later Irish 00n3 layout and he mentions that Augher Valley was sold soon after the 1964 RM article was published because he was getting married an moving into a smaller house.

There are often very good reasons for using consultants when they have particular knowledge or expertise that's doesn't exist within the organisation or are able to see the big picture in a way that those too close to a situation can't. The problems come when they don't actually know anything more but have learnt to hide that under a thick layer of jargon. Also, they're very often used to justify decisions that managements want to make anyway but don't want to be seen to make. I've worked as a consultant from time to time when I know I've added value based on real specialist knowledge but have also experienced the opposite. On one project we employed consultants from a certain large firm until we realised that what we were doing was genuinely groundbreaking and that they were charging us a great deal of money to pick our brains. With the most blatant of them I used to tell him something that I knew was nonsense- but you needed real knowledge to know that- and see how long it took him to tell us the same thing as valuable consultancy. The odd thing about the Tay Bridge disaster was that Bouch's reputation as an engineer was shot after the disaster whereas Robert Stephenson's didn't seem to be following the Dee Bridge disaster which also involved cast iron under the wrong stresses.

Don't be mesmerised by the TGVs. They are a remarkable achievement and Britain does need a few high speed lines on key overloaded routes but the investment in them seems to have been at the expense of France's "classic" network which compared with ours is anything but impressive. Several lines have even closed just because the track was too poor. Often, where an LGV has been built, rather than the increased capacity allowing more local and regional services to run intermediate towns have actually seen their rail services decline. According to UIC statististics and excluding metros, France with a roughly comparable population had 1.077 billion passenger journeys in 2010 whereas the UK had 1.480 billion. Passenger kilometre figures are higher in France- it is a far larger country- but surprisingly freight carried in billion tonne kilometres in 2010 was almost as high in Britain with 21.2 as in France with 22.8 and far more freight is loaded on trains than in France. SNCF's performance on freight is generally regarded as dismal . The TGV network does make travel between Paris and France's largest cities very fast indeed but the same cannot be said for travel between those cities unless they're on the same direct route from Paris. Even quite short cross country journeys such as Chartres to Orleans that were once straightforward now involve a long journey via Paris (that particular line is being upgraded to take passengers but it'll take years) Beyond the largest cities the picture is far less rosy and overall it's far easier to get around Britain by rail than in France. The German approach with a few new high speed lines but far greater reliance on upgrading of existing lines seems a more sensible option for Britain. In France the LGVs seem to have been planned as a completely separate network rather as in Japan but of course in Japan the "classic" network is 3'6" gauge so high speed trains can only run on the high speed network whereas TGVs can and do use other lines. The approach of building LGVs completely separate from existing lines to every major city is being looked at again as it is fabulously expensive.

They would. Massive nostalgia. I used to be taken to Aristotle lane by my grandfather- a retired signalman- in the late 1950s and as a teenager often went to Port Meadow over the footbridge on my bike at about the time you took these photos. I may have even seen you there, though I and my friends also tended to hang round the old Wolvercote Crossing.

Sorted- I'd meant to strip the name attibution but failed to. I'll stick to editing in BBCode. Fair enough if he has mentioned it in one of his books.

I hope I'm not being too po-faced but unless the person concerned has themselves made it public, should we really be discussing what we may have heard about someone's medical condition on an openly available forum? The fact that someone on other forum has chosen to post what they think they know doesn't mean we should spread the rumour.

Some of the older layouts that inspired me at the time still do but I was barely aware of Borchester Market in its prime and now go to shows mainly to see it. When I was a youngster I didn't get to many exhibitions except the MRC Easter show, so I mostly knew layouts from articles about them. Very often I think it was the ability of modellers like P.D. Hancock, John Charman and Peter Denny to write inspiringly that was at least as important as the actual quality of their layouts. For me the inspiring older layouts include well know ones like the Madder Valley, the first Craig and Mertonford, Charford, Berrow, and the original Leighton Buzzard (more than the rest of the Buckingham branch for some reason) but also some less famous layouts including the Rev. P.H.Heath's 00n3 Llanfair, his equally simple 00 "Piano Line", David Lloyd's Augher Valley and, not quite so old, Andy Hart's Achaux. One layout that fascinated me was Cliff Young's original Denver and Rio Grande. The real thing wasn't half as interesting when I rode on it in 1970 though the scenery was better. The oldest layout that I still find inspiring, though I only really found out about it a few years ago, is Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate's 0 gauge Maybank. It was described in MRN in 1934, though first exhibited two years earlier, and was the first fully fledged (main line) terminus to fiddle yard layout. I would define all these layouts as inspiring because I still go to back to the articles about them, and in the case of the Madder Valley, to Pendon to see it in the flesh. P.S. I'd forgotten the simplest but one of the most inspiring: Alan Wright's Inglenook Sidings.

I can't remember when the link between the Bletchley-Oxford and the OWW near Yarnton was closed. "Railway Cottage" is still there at the site of the LC on the Woodstock Road.

At the moment it has to be Pempoul. Even if Gordon and Maggie closed and dismantled the railway and made the station into a private house it would still be a brilliant model of a corner of Britanny. Apart from that my favourite is still the Madder Valley. Even though the individual models are of their time- brickpaper on card buildings and dyed sawdust for grass- the overall impression of a small seaport at the mouth of a river with a railway wending up its valley still hangs together incredibly well. Whenever I visit Pendon (as a "friend" usually several times a year) I seem to end up spending longer with the MVR than with the Pendon Parva village scene superbly and inspiringly modelled as that is. I tend to like really convincing townscapes as scenery so there are two other layouts that come to mind. Giles Barnabe's St. Emilie, even though mostly based on well adapted proprietary French building kits, seemed to really capture the atmosphere of a small town in northern France with its deux gares (Standard and Metre gauge) It was also, for a very small layout, great fun to operate. The other townscape that I really liked, though never saw in the flesh, was P.D. Hancock's original Craig. Again this was a port with a light railway terminus next to the harbour but it really seemed to work as a scenic whole and I think that's the secret, to paint a picture in three dimensions of a place that if it existed you'd really love to visit. Strangely enough, I can't think of a single model based closely on a real place that does it for me so perhaps for a really attractive scene the artistic imagination needs free reign.

Do you remember when that was? The trip I was on did much of the PC in both directions and started and finished at Paris Bercy. It was organised by IFC and was on the Sunday of the Paris Salon where we had a stand. Sadly 230G353 seems to be in a fairly poor state now following problems with a repair I think to a superheater collector and has been the subject of some kind of legal dispute between SNCF, Ateliers de Gray and CFTA. Though she was built by Batignolles some of the class were built for the PO by North British in Glasgow.

I should get to the St. Albans show so I'm looking forward to seeing it. It's also high time I put the photos from the 1988 trip on Flickr. I wasn't actually riding in the train for about a quarter way round the PC which is why I've also got a very soft spot for 230G353!! Apart from the PC we did weird things like running on RER A and what is now T2 under the Grande Arche at La Defense. You do have to go back to Paris!!

I've had a soft spot for the Petite Ceinture for years- ever since going round it on a steam special in 1989- and I really think you're capturing the atmosphere. BTW I'm not sure the yoyo would be unauthorised on the RATP siding. There are two photos in Images de Train tome IV of a Nogent 141TB delivering a line of pneumatique stock for Metro ligne 4 via the connection from the ligne de Vincennes to the RATP depot at Fontenay-sous-Bois. It would make an interesting train as the metro stock is on its flanged steel wheels and the rubber tyres are stacked in a wagon between it and the loco.

I was quite amused, while watching The Bruce-Partington Plans episode of Sherlock Holmes a couple of days ago, that in the scene in the ticket office of Woolwich station a single line token machine is very evident. Conan Doyle's story was written in 1895 and he clearly had a reasonably good knowledge of the system. The text of the story is available on http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2346/2346-h/2346-h.htm

*( Despite its quarter million population Milton Keynes still isn't a city but as a town it's a bit odd as it incorporates the established towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford) I've now learned that it's entirely up to a civil parish whether to be a village or a town though a town can include several parishes some of which may in turn have decided to be towns. To be a city though you need a royal charter and Milton Keynes didn't get one last time it applied in 2011. I don't think it makes much difference administratively. On the other hand the citizens of Kidlington, which is due to be served by the Water Eaton Parkway station on this line, have despite a 17 000 population which is larger than several English cities, decided to remain Britain's largest village. There is a Milton Keynes village in the town of Milton Keynes which proudly maintains its separate identity as a village with its own cricket team etc.

I travelled on the line before it closed and I'm pretty sure it was all double track from Oxford to Cambridge. Wikipaedia confirms this for Oxford to Bletchley "During 1982 the entire length of the Bletchley-Oxford section, which was still double-tracked throughout, was used for diversionary passenger services while a bridge at Hill Wooton, between Coventry and Leamington Spa was replaced" Although the line closed to regular passenger services in 1967 (with Oxford to Bicester reopening twenty years later) It was used for freight until it was "mothballed" in 1989. In the 1960s it was a fairly slow line operated with rather unpleasant two car DMUs and a lot of passengers between Oxford and Cambridge preferred to travel via London. It seems slightly odd that the 1967 closure coincided with the start of Milton Keynes' planned development as a new city* which should have made a line connecting the three cities far more viable. I think though that the general Whitehall view back then was railways were an outmoded form of transport that didn't really have much of a future once the motorway network had been built. *( Despite its quarter million population Milton Keynes still isn't a city but as a town it's a bit odd as it incorporates the established towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford) .

Less busy now but still rail connected and with an extensive track layout. Which area was the ordnance depot? I'd understood that it had become a general stores rather than Ordnance depot. Most of its freight seems to be containerised these days but it still seems fairly active as a rail depot.

It's pretty crucial I think to recognise how wide the range of activities covered by the loose term "railway modelling" really is: probably a wider range than almost any other hobby. The membership of RMWeb probably represents a relatively small subset of this totality as for every person trying to build a reasonably realistic representation of an actual railway (one possible definition of "railway modelling") there are probably several others simply running model trains straight out of the Hornby box around a couple of loops of track. What makes it confusing is that the same RTR loco may be a model train that one person plays with but for another a component in a carefully researched and realistically operated model of a complete section of railway. The vast range of activities it covers is probably one of the hobby's strengths but it also leads to misconceptions. There are other activities that cover a wide range of expertise- a local drama group and the Royal Shakespeare Company are doing essentially the same thing though at very different levels- but do Bradfield Gloucester Road and the tracks running around a large baseboard in James May's Top Toys programme really represent different levels of the same thing or fundamentally different activities related only by their association with railways? One aspect that Robert mentions is the relationship between the practice of the hobby and the publications that support it and I think this has been crucial with different approaches by publishers making a huge difference in how the hobby has developed at least so far as can be seen. In the USA, Model Railroader has always put great emphasis on prototypical operation with the large lifelong layout seen perhaps as the aspiration. In Britain there has since the 1950s been far greater emphasis on the complete well finished layout that one modeller could plan, build (and possibly exhibit) before moving on to the next project so in some ways the layout is the model. In France the magazines have generally given far more space to the detailed modelling of individual items, especially rolling stock, than to complete layouts and articles on layout operation are virtually unknown. What is less clear is what is actually going on in the homes of the majority whose efforts never appear in magazines or at shows. I rather suspect that in the US it's the 8x4 board with an oval of track and a few sidings and its 6x4 equivalent in Britain.

I've been interested in French railways probably since spending a week exploring the country on a France Vacances ticket in the mid 1970s. For a long time my main interest was in Secondaires - especially the roadside metre gauge variety though I never knew them- but thank the gods of railway preservation that the one real survivor of France's "interet local" metre gauge railways the CFBS is so close to us. That did mean that I ignored a lot of what was still around on the main lines but isn't any more such as local goods trains and boat trains on the quayside at Dieppe. I now model EpIII in H0 and H0m and have a small SG terminus- fiddle yard layout Le Goudron-Calandre designed to provide as much shunting as possible with five points in less than five square feet. I'm also building an even smaller (4'x11") H0m layout which might at last provide an outlet for my small collection of metre gauge stock. I've been an SNCF Society member for decades and have written a number of articles about aspects of French railways for the SNCFS Journal and various magazines. Though I've no intention to model them I've long been intrigued by the railway byways of Paris - including the Petite Ceinture that I explored in the late 1980s by train (partly on the footplate of steam loco 230G353) and the sadly lost Gare de la Bastille that I saw fairly recently closed but still intact on my first trip to Paris.

The gentle S curve through the whole station could look very good. I see you've dropped the two back sidings and added a fourth platform face( for railcars and parcels?) BTW What points are your designs based on and what software did you use ? I had a go at your original plan in Xtrkcad based on Peco medium Y and medium radius points and came up with these, the first is your original plan and the other two are modifications to that but I think you've already improved on it. I did find with unmodified Peco Ys that the geometry tended to increase the main line track separation a bit too much even more than the usual excess with Peco points (OK for an ex GW station maybe) but they could probably be shortened to give a better six foot (2 metre?) way. I don't think the reverse curves are a problem with your new plan as there is only really one and that's through a pair of Ys with a much larger radius than it would be with left or right hand points the same length. Laying out the CJF Minories throat with Peco medium radius points and running stock through it I did find that the one reverse curve (through the two back to back points) still gave a lot of excess lateral movement with full length carriages so most of my experiments with it have involved either using long radius points for those two - which does lengthen the throat - or replacing one or both of them with a Y but that does tend to curve the throat.

This strikes me as being a good plan. Operationally it is the same throat as Minories but straightened out and making judicious use of Ys to avoid most double crossovers. There is an S curve on the first crossover, so the longer those points can be the better, but a direct approach may be more credible as the double dog leg of Minories can seem a bit artificial- as if the the engineers aimed the main line at the station site and missed. The Ys in the second crossover should largely avoid that so long as they're reasonably long (The Peco medium Y is about 5ft radius on each arm in the length of a 3ft radius medium point ) Too many Ys can look a bit odd but I think these should be OK. Even Minories has one S curve for an arriving "up" train going to the "down" platform. This may be a silly question but does the exit have to be straight? A main line at an angle to the station would allow you to avoid the reverse curve on the first crossover The extra road between the two platforms is useful- Brian Thomas did it with Newford and it both added operational potential and gave more of a main line feel to the station but watch out for the clearance on the curved platform. I'll try it in Xtrkcad but I think that replacing the last Y in the second crossover with a left hand point and then using another left hand to access the centre road may give a smoother entry to the lower platform (platform 1?) What will the siding beyond the island platform and the kick back siding be used for?

The 1914 Sunday timetable is in the French Wiki article "Ligne de Paris-Bastille à Marles-en-Brie" and not the English "La Gare de la Bastille" which if you follow the references is more or less an unauthorised précis of my articles in CM (even down to some of my sentences). I suppose I should be flattered and my work is at least identified in the bibliography but articles taken from a single source will always tend to magnify and add to any errors and as a Wiki editor I did need to make several corrections where the "author" had misunderstood what I'd originally written. The 1914 timetable is interesting and I don't have it myself but with seventy four trains it was pretty busy all day. It is of course rather poignant as a lot of the men going off for a carefree day in the country would all too soon be on very different trains going to the front. The basic idea of "flighting" groups of trains wasn't new of course but rather than simply running the fastest limited stop trains first and the all-stoppers last the Est's traffic department perfected it for 1925 so that some trains ran all-stopping (omnibus) to a nearer point before turning round whilst others ran non stop to an intermediate station then stopped at all stations. By doing this they managed to get five trains into each batch rather than the previous four. Also, almost every evening rush hour train spent just ten minutes on the platform between arrival and departure whereas in 1923 that had varied between ten and thirty minutes. Looking at the improved platform allocation bar chart I suspect that not having coach sets hanging around on the platforms required far less use of the traversers to release locos as they could take on water at the concourse end and then follow their previous train out and the train on the opposite road would only clear two minutes earlier. That does follow Cyril Freezer's concept for Minories where there are no loco releases at all. Towards the end of its life Bastille 's small Saxby box seems to have been operated by a lone signaller but by then the service was far less intense. I've got the 1960 timetable, two or three years before push-pull working was introduced, and on weekdays there were only thirty two trains in total. A shorter evening peak from 17.48-19.29 included just fifteen trains- with only three or four trains going out in quick succession in each batch. For the rest of the day the line was served by a less than hourly "omnibus" service. You could almost run that service on Minories with a couple of operators and maybe the extra line to enable parallel working between all three platforms. I think Cyril Freezer's original idea, that he used in several other plans, was that with services run by almost identical suburban trains and locos, Minories could be connected to a simple reverse curve so that every departure quickly turned into an arrival without the need for a fiddle yard operator. Even one man (or a driver and a signaller) could then have all the fun of running an intensive commuter service. Maybe not such a bad idea even now as the loop could be folding and plugged in for operating sessions. I don't know how many operators Bastille itself would have needed in earlier times nor how many operational staff on the ground apart from train crews. I suspect though that the long gap after the last peak hour train was to take up any slack and give the operational staff time to get their breath back.

In 1930 It looked like this:- This was past the line's absolute peak in the mid 1920s, after which it faced competition within Paris from new Metro and bus routes, but you can see that of the seventy daily departures from Bastille between 06.00 and 00.40 no less than thirty five of them were between 17.00 and 20.00 after which there was a forty minute gap. The morning peak was a bit less intense with thirty one trains arriving between 06.00 and 09.35 followed by a gap of an hour. Though it looks complicated it does follow a rhythmic pattern, especially of departures during the evening peak, with five trains departing in the space of about ten minutes followed by a ten minute gap and then another five trains. That cycle repeated seven times getting slightly less intense towards the end of the rush. This public timetable obviously doesn't show the empty stock movements but there were a lot of them as only twelve service trains arrived in Bastille during the three hour evening peak. The difficulty of operating the station was that beyond the five platform roads there was no room at all for storing stock and the nearest carriage sidings were at Reuilly the next station at the other end of the long viaduct. Most trains only went part way down the line so during the peak would certainly have worked back to Bastille as empty stock probably more than once. What does strike me about this pattern is that there is absolutely no room for error so what happened if there was a breakdown I've no idea. Outside the rush hours, apart from an outbound flurry of five trains at midday there were only two or three trains an hour so balancing inbound and outbound service trains wouldn't have been a problem. One peculiarity of the line from Bastille was that it carried almost as many passengers on Sundays- mostly Parisians heading out of town for the day- as on working days with over sixty departures and about seventy arrivals but these were far more evenly spaced.

The French certainly love their theory and their modelling magazines used to be full of articles about things like designing curves, gradients and even electro magnets accompanied by pages of detailed equations. They did though and AFAIK still do make far greater use of train graphs operationally than I think was the case in Britain where I thought they were mainly used for timetable planning. I've even seen train crews on preserved lines like the Baie de Somme, especially on busy gala days, carrying them as working timetables. They don't normally use staffs or tokens for single lines so the timetable is key. The French certainly did also use platforming bar charts. This one beneath the train graph for Bastille in the evening rush hour after it had been rationalised was included in two papers by the Est's traffic manager. This shows what train number a set of coaches in each platform came in as and went out as and also shows from which incoming train locos on outgoing trains had come from (HP was light engine) Though this looks hideously complicated the principle is fairly simple and I know of several modellers who've used this technique to plan layout operation particularly for fiddle yards. It looks like they didn't use a pilot at Bastille but presumably had at least one spare loco in steam during the rush hour.

I think that's why I find Bastille and Minories so attractive as station layouts. I do see similarities between them and they're both elegant designs. There was nothing higgledy-piggledy about Bastille. Despite using double deck carriages and maximising train lengths by installing traversers. the Est's traffic department faced severe undercapacity during the rush hours in the "roaring twenties" Expansion or electrification were ruled out on cost grounds and the company hadn't adopted push-pull working so its traffic department did some fundamental thinking about both the track layout and the operating pattern to be able to turn trains round as fast as possible. They published learned papers about it and these are full of complex equations, diagrams, platform occupancy charts and so on. The rationalisation did involve a certain amount of track relaying and I suspect that one reason why it was made up almost entirely from standard turnouts was to allow this to happen over a short occupancy. It is an interesting design. Were these two platforms used particularly for suburban services rather like the almost separate suburban station on the western side of Kings Cross ? That also had the parcels depot alongside. I think it's as much the intensity of services as the size and that does vary. After all Penzance, Marylebone and Fenchurch Street all had four platforms in the steam era. Penzance could probably be operated to timetable by one person but I doubt if Fenchurch Street could. I know that Cyril Freezer published Minories largely to show that a busy city terminus could be just as feasible a layout for a lone modellet to buil and in much the same space as the BLTs that most people seemed to be building at that time. The MRC group who built and operate their EM gauge Minories for the fiftieth anniversary operate it pretty intensively with loco hauled trains with just two operators.