Pacific231G

I've noticed that just about every single UK news report filmed in middle America includes a shot of a freight train going through the town. I think my favorite US railroad scenes are in Emperor of the North - which though unpleasantly violent does seem to depict steam era railroad operation quite well. It doesn't seem to get shown very often though. I also rather like the opening title sequence of Breakheart Pass though the film as a whole is not great. There is a very dramatic scene set to music of a military train being assembled in "The Mercenaries" aka "The Dark of the Sun" It's supposed to be set in the Congo during the violent period after the Belgians suddenly pulled leaving chaos in their wake but was actually filmed in Jamaica and the loco looks very Baldwin- probably one of the USATC S161s that were used by the American military in Jamaica during WW2 and bought by the British Government after the war. The Jamaica railway was apparently the first railway to be built outside Europe and North America in 1844 and though it closed as a public railway in 1992 reopened this year.

No, according to Lexx, that happens when we discover the Higg's Boson !!! I believe that Turkish and Persian carpet weavers deliberately weave at least one imperfection into their incredibly finely made carpets as trying to achieve complete perfection was seen as competing with the Almighty.

Soon after I started working in London I was at Bush House on the Aldwych so sometimes used the station there when it's opening times coincided with my shifts- which wasn't that often. I was really just being too lazy to walk down Kingsway from Holborn but it was a rather eerie place even then with only one platform in use. There were also enough odd side tunnels and locked passageways to make any conspiracy theorist faint with excitement. I did once after a night shift decide to go the wrong way on the Central Line and reached Ongar. That bit of line was really odd as it was very much country branch line with combine harvesters in the fields on either side of the single track and having not at that time ever been back to the Isle of Wight since the end of steam it seemed really odd to be seeing such scenes from the windows of a Central Line tube train. I think the UndergrounD expected that area to be developed like another Metroland but the green belt legislation thwarted that. David

We did think of operating one exhibition layout as a typical 1950s SNCF branch line in real time which meant running a pick up goods train in one direction in the morning, disappearing to the café for several hours for a decent lunch then operating the return working just before the show shut in the late afternoon. Passenger services would be a bus sitting in the station courtyard because the trains had been replaced by buses in 1939, temporarily restored during the occupation and then closed forever in 1948. Beeching had predecessors!! I came upon one French terminus about five years ago which would be even easier to operate authentically. It does still have a passenger service though no freight anymore and on the Saturday I saw it the Chef de Gare's duties consisted of closing a level crossing barrier and opening a signal- both operated by a two lever frame adjoining the station building- to let a sole DMU in at about 10AM, restoring things to normal once it had arrived then late in the afternoon closing the barrier, giving the driver- who also had nothing to do for about seven hours- a hand signal to depart and finally closing the barrier. She didn't even sell tickets though this was a Saturday and I think the number of movements climb to six on school days. The line used to go further south and that section has been taken over by a preservation group but their trains had to terminate a hundred yards or so short of the SNCF station- whose trains they do connect with- to avoid the dangers of entering such a busy hub of railway activity even though it does still have two platform lines and only ever sees a one or two car diesel unit.

Hectopascals- the CAA (following the meteorologists) have just decreed that the aviation world must now fall into line with SI units and use hectopascals instead of the familiar millibars and we're not allowed to abbreviate it. It's a far more awkward word to say though the actual numbers are exactly the same. I find these units far less obvious that the previous bar (roughly atmospheric pressure as a standard sea level atmosphere is 1.013 bar) I've got a sense that four bar is a modest boiler pressure but if I saw 400 kPa (kilopascals) on a pressure gauge would have to think twice whether it was four atmospheres or some enormous pressure that would blow apart anything in its path.

Very few Pete. I know this because I once travelled from Calais to Innsbruck on the weekly overnight "Tyrolean Express" which offered a special attraction in the shape of a "dance car". This was a very loud carriage as it not only had speakers inside that played loud music over its dance floor for most of the night but also external speakers to share the fun with people sleeping in lineside communities, platform staff, cows and sheep etc. At no time though did I see anyone actually using this carriage. I have a feeling that a lot of the music was of the Tyrolean Schmaltz variety so people along its route must have really looked forward to Saturday night.

No problem for the cat, the stupid apes will soon refill his bowl!!

Most of the spam phone calls I'm getting these days seem to be from the "computer services" fraudsters so TPS seems to be working fairly well for the UK as these are all from abroad. I usually give these very short shift and warn them that they're employed by a criminal conspiracy before putting the phone down and I never confirm that I'm the name they've got. I've tried the pretending to go along with them to waste their time but they usually put the phone down very quickly if they don't get whatever response they're after. I think in future I'll just say when they ask if it's my name - they invariably mispronounce it- that we have a Mr. so and so in the fraud department and would they like me to put them through. What I could do with is something that plays the sound of a fax line or a computer connection or better still something that makes them think they've dialled somewhere they'd wished they hadn't.

I'm slightly curious about this thread as surely isn't half or more of the satisfaction of building your own the fact that you have done so not that you have a model that's not available RTR.

Thanks. It makes interesting reading. I wouldn't say that the pilot flying (the 1st officer) was at fault as he clearly thought the aircraft had handling problems at around V1 and you really don't want to take off with those. There is of course no rule in aviation that can't be set aside if the pilot deems it necessary for the safety of the aircraft. There is an odd one here that the decision to reject the TO seems to rest with the captain even when the FO is the pilot flying. If something is wrong with the handling then the pilot actually controlling the aircraft may have to make an instant judgement with no time to discuss it with the captain. I did note that the 737 stopped with 500M of runway to spare which while not generous is quite a long way from an overrun. I also don't know what sort of overrun area that runway has but the FO wold have done. Do you have a reference for the AAIB's report on Stansted ? David

Do you have a link to this report? I'd like to read it: which carrier was it?

Apart from the pre -Beeching steam railway that would take you to and from any reasonable sized community, one thing I really do miss are the small ports that used to be all around the coast and often surprisingly far inland. Unlike the large docks they were usually open to wander around, were full of scruffy atmosphere, had proper quaysides often with rails inset into them and even goods trains till quite late, and a fascinaing range of shipping from dirty British coasters (and clean Dutch ones) to Russian timber ships all worked by good honest Stothert and Pitt cargo cranes (the type Airfix should have modelled but didn't) and, unlike the current dehumanised wildernesses of concrete and containers , would have seemed quite familiar to Drake and even the ancient mariner who would both have found the local tavern in no time.

And employers could kill and injure them with impunity. It's always amused me when they announce on the cross channel ferry that "this vessel meets all the latest safety standards". Well yes, it would be illegal for it to leave the berth if it didn't.

But but, how many people would be strong enough to stand up - especially to their boss - and say "this practice is dangerous, we shouldn't be doing this." I thought the lady from the HSE's "Our job is to stop people being killed and injured at work" was entirely sensible and she clearly sees the dangers of a tick box compliance rather than sensible hazard assessment culture. In my own industry all producers and directors had to have H&S training after a member of the public Michael Lush died on the Late Late Breakfast Show during a stunt in 1986. It was actually quite shocking to realise just how cavalier we'd all tended to be before then about safety and anyone who did query it was generally dismissed as a wimp. Nowadays I fill in a hazard assessment form everytime I go filming and they do make me think about potential hazards- not all of them obvious- though I'll guarantee that's not universally done. Other industries were even worse. Before going to Uni in 1970 I worked for a while in ships' engine rooms. We had no hard hats nor safety shoes despite a lot of overhead work, no hearing protection despite noise levels of about 110dB in some areas and the electrical distribution panel had open bus bars with just a single wooden railing as a barrier (think ship, pitching around in heavy seas, water, exposed terminals ..shudder) and just as a bonus we had machine tools in the workshop powered by open belts. David

I think Shepherd's Bush Market is simply a recent renaming of Shepherds Bush (Met) to avoid having two stations with the same name at opposite ends of the green but it's the same station. The original Shepherd's Bush station on the Hammersmith line was between that and the present Goldhawk Road stations and was replaced by those two stations. Its site was swallowed up by the development of BBC Television Centre - which employed enough people to rather make nonsense of closing it in 1959. Though you can still see traces of it behind the multi story car park there wasn't a lot left and Wood Lane is a very welcome addition as is the overground station at Shepherd's Bush especially as I can now get to Brighton without having to go into central London.

Thanks very much Arthur that's incredibly comprehensive. From what I saw from the road I'd had no idea the rail operations were quite so extensive but I do remember the electric locos looking very odd - far more so than those I saw at South Shields a few months later- and from these pictures I finally know over forty years later what I did see. Apart from the slag dumping would there have been a process in DL's works that shot large gouts of flame into the night sky in a particularly dramatic way?. I vaguely remember seeing that from the ship. It's hard now to remember just what an enormous scale some of these rail served heavy industrial sites were on. It reminds me of the line in Night Mail about "the fields of apparatus set on the dark plain like giant chessmen" though that was the Clyde of course. David

This may start to answer a question I've been wondering about for years. In 1969 not long after the moon landing I was working on a cargo ship that had docked at Teesport- roughly where the white rectangle- is to load bagged fertiliser from ICI. It was an utterly bleak place even for an industrial quayside- nearest bus stop about a mile away, nearest pub about three miles away, nearest railway station (Grangetown now closed) about two and every so often on the tips behind the port a train would appear with two or three wagons and dump a load of white hot slag. This was quite impressive particularly at night but it was an inhuman landscape and I pitied the inhabitants of the few houses in the area. Anyway. One day I walked from the ship down the road along the edge of the river (right to left on the photo) and after about a mile or so passed a wharf that was connected to the works behind by a SG railway with OHE and I saw at least one fairly massive electric loco. I'd not seen industrial electrics before (though I went to college in South Shields a month or so later where the Westoe Colliery railway was still in full swing) so I've always wondered what it was that I saw on Teeside. Can anyone shed more light? I think the location where I saw this chunk of heavy industrial railway was roughly where I've marked the circle Our next port of call was Hamburg and that was a far better place to be. David

Apropos of Liverpool Street Station, a friend invited me to go on the Globe Theatre's "Sonnet Walk" on Saturday- a walk through the City interrupted by actors posing as as passers by who break into Shakespeare's sonnets- and the route took us through Exchange House Square which is built over Liverpool Street's approach tracks . On the south side of the square there is a glass screen that provides an excellent view looking down on and into the train shed from the opposite end to the concourse. I'm sure everyone who knows the station well knows all about this vantage point but I've been there often and had no idea that this existed. From the concouse it's most easily accessible by walking up the western side of the station. Andrew, will your layout be exhibited when it's completed? It's looking great. David

It looks to be standard embedded track of the type generally used on quaysides with a continuous check rail. I'm pretty sure that at the time the Weymouth Harbour Tramway was in use this was almost always laid on conventional sleepers with a double shoe (for bullhead rail) to enable the continuous check rail to be laid often with a lighter rail. The road surface would have been built up around the track originally with stone setts or cobbles which could be removed for maintenance or from about the 1920s with concrete which definitely did make track maintenance harder. I assume that there would be enough of a gap between the running and check rails to get at the fishplate bolts but any heavier maintenance did involve breaking up the concrete. This is one reason why embedded track on quaysides tended to get left in place long after it fell into disuse and is often still there covered in tarmac: the cost of lifting it and remaking the road surface simply wasn't justified by the scrap value of the rail. Being confined to very low speeds, quayside track probably didn't need a lot of maintenance and point levers and mechanisms were generally protected by concrete slabs or metal covers that could be removed fairly easily. There is a good description of this type of track on http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gansg/2-track/02track1.htm. If you want to really research this it might be worth getting in touch with the Bristol Industrial Museum who operate the Bristol Harbour Railway as a lot of this is inset into the quayside and they must have met any track maintenance issues.

Looking at the photos in the two articles on the Weymouth Harbour Tramway (Hornby and Railway Modeller) did raise one question I've often wondered about. Why on earth did nobody produce a commercial model of the ubiquitous type of British dockside crane (typically bult by Stothert and Pitt of Bath) that were familiar feature of almost every port in the country? The Airfix/Dapol "dockside crane" is based on a far less common type that, unlike most cargo handling cranes, is not level luffing *. The more typical dockside cranes could be rather tall but some were relatively small and though dock cranes have been offered by other European model company's Artitec's has a fixed jib and Kibri's is based on a "horse-head" jib which looks very different from typical British cranes. Scalelink do have an etched brass fret for a dockside crane in N and their smaller architectural scales that looks like it is of this "Topliss" level luffing type (named after Stothert and Pitt's designer who patented an elegant system based on how the cables and pulleys were rigged) but I've never found anything in OO or HO that corresponds to this once most common type of crane. David * With level luffing, when the jib is extended the hook stays at the same height which makes handling cargo quickly far simpler and requires very little power to luff the usually counterweighted jib but the different ways of achieving this make cranes look very different.

Hornby magazine did it as a layout idea in June 2008. This is well illustrated with photos and though their layout ideas seemed rather optimistic in terms how much they crammed into a small space the article did include a useful series of plans showing the development of the layout on the pier at various times (This inspired me to do the same in my own C-M article on Dieppe Maritime) There was also an article "Quayside quintessence" in the May 1980 Ralway Modeller Are you thinking in terms of the harbour tramway going along the quayside or the actual maritime station? You can make out the track on Google Earth but there used to be several sidings for wagons serving the other wharves and the harbour . There are some particularly good photos from the mid 1980s on http://freepages.nos...eritage/wey.htm and one of these shows one of the side loops though the once busy largely perishables (flowers, early vegetables etc) goods traffic ceased in the 1970s I did get to travel on the tramway once in about 1966 before the ferries became car ferries while en route from Oxford to a scout camp on Guernsey (Though for some reason we had to walk to the town station on the way back) I think the train was hauled by a diesel shunter but it had been a pannier tank. Although the harbour station would have stll been handling goods traffic at that time I think the sidings serving the other quays along the tramway were already out of use. David

It's funny that everyone seems to have had this impression for as long as I can remember because it simply is not true. I've got bound volumes of all the Peco Railway Modellers from the end of 1951 when they took the title over to the early 1960s and though the GWR/WR was probably better represented than any other single railway this was mainly in the form of main line layouts like the North Devonshire and Little Western. The only layout based on St.Ives I could find was a description of Cyril Freezer's own Tregunna "railway in a cupboard". It is true that the branch line layouts included Torpoint and the Culm Valley which were GW but they were outnumbered by the most famous BLTs which were probably Charford (Southern) Berrow (S&D) and Buckingham (GCR). Of the "Railways of the Month" more were generic or freelance than based on a particular railway and there were notable layouts representing the Highland, County Donegal and of course the mythical Craig and Mertonford. addendum I've just made a quick count of layout articles in early Railway Modellers - mostly Railways of the Month- through the 1950s up to the end of 1962. Out of 140 articles just 24 were about BLTs and only 10 of those were GW/WR There was though a total of 25 articles about layouts mainly featuring the GWR. Articles about GW/WR BLTs were actually fewer than the twelve articles on narrow gauge layouts though half of those were about P.D. Hancock's Craig and Mertonford. I think the myth about the preponderance of GW/WR branch line layouts in Railway Modeller got repeated so often that it became accepted wisdom and I think even Cyril Freezer came to believe it but the facts simply don't bear it out.

Now there's an idea, a layout based on Midsomer county- a place that makes Juarez seem a nice spot for a quiet vacation.

I've also got those two articles on the Potwell Mineral and amazingly for a largely shunting layout it was clockwork. It was an excellent little layout based on the East Kent Railway junction at Shepherdswell and one of the coal mines it served and well worth another look. There are a number of layouts such as Pempoul, Calcott Burtle, Buckingham and the Madder Valley that I find inspirational but in terms of those that have actually inspired my own modelling I think the three in no particular order might be. Charford- I agree with everything Western Sunset has said about this layout. I've got a file with all of John Charman's articles about it and probably dig it out more than any other. St. Emilie - Giles Barnabe really captured the atmosphere of a Secondaire (well two secondaires- one SG and one metre gauge to be precise) serving its local community somewhere in France Profond. I think the standard gauge terminus got as much operation out of five points and five and a half feet as any layout I've seen and the experience of operating it at a number of shows definitely influenced many of the ideas for my current small layout (as well as providing a couple of its buildings!!) The third is probably Llanfair, a very simple 00n3 layout built on a plank by the Rev. P.H. Heath in the 1960s. Craig and Mertonford was inspirational but Llanfair looked doable so more than any other one layout probably inspired me to try NG modelling. P.H. Heath also built the original Piano line that would be well up this list and I wonder what he ever went on to model. Those are today's choice of three but, in terms of articles that I refer to most often, on another day my three might include Maybank the original pre-war terminus to fiddle based on a GCR main line terminus, Achaux and Borchester. (Can I take twelve discs to my dersrt island please ??)

Yet in the days when controls were strict on most European borders there were still plenty of through trains. All that happened was that passports and luggage were checked at the border crossing itself by police and customs who came through the train often between the two stations either side of the frontier so passengers not crossing the border simply weren't affected. Even trains that crossed the iron curtain were able to mix domestic and international passengers and those were far stricter borders even than the UK.