Trog

It was not unknown to have to create a needed stencil value in a hurry by cutting up two signs and bolting them together to get the desired result. I once spent an entire day doing this when it was realised on the Thursday that no one had ordered the stencils required for a linespeed increase project planned for that coming weekend.

Drilling a hole in a 2p coin is actually a very good investment, as it turns it into ten pence worth of washer. No wonder no one wants to pay people in washers.

I am sure I was once told the same thing regarding the WCML.

Having track like that would annoy the tits off me, even the picture is unsettling. But then I did spend the better part of forty years trying to lay the stuff in straight. Although I somewhat doubt that todays engineers would be looked too favourably on if they realigned bits of the WCML by eye because they did not like the look of it. The way we used to do it was to pick two points by eye that looked to be at each end of the bit we did not like. Then you have someone walk through holding the point of a crowbar just above the rail head, stopping every ten sleepers. You then put your head down next to the rail and look along it (remembering to also keep looking behind you for oncoming trains) and decide by what fraction of the rail head width (~70mm) the track needs sluing and in which direction. Shout that information forward to be marked on the track and repeat.

Classic S shaped curve for a buckle. One of the dodgy things about them is that you often don't get any warning as they happen or at least get worse under a passing train, which may be one reason why the loco can be OK and the trailing rolling stock derails. If the rails and ballast have got to their limit in resisting the heat induced compressive force. The last straw can be the up and down movement of the track under a passing train. As each wheel or bogie passes the track is pressed down by the weight on the wheels, conversely at the mid point between the wheels the track lifts sightly. While the pressing down does no harm as it increases the friction between the sleeper bottom and the ballast bed. The upward movement does the reverse and I have seen track lifting and moving sideways a step at a time, under the middles of the wagons of a passing ballast train, this is quite disconcerting to watch, and caused me to start jumping up and down in a quite animated fashion while, shouting and making the French army gesture. In British Railway practice it is normal to have a raised shoulder of ballast on the outsides of the track, the weight of the raised section of the shoulder helping to compress the ballast adjacent to the sleeper ends, and so increase resistance to lateral movement. This is / was not done so much in continental Europe being regarded as a British eccentricity, however I believe that BR had a lower incidence rate for buckles than most of said foreign Johnie's. Also such things were only a reportable buckle if they occurred while the track was open for traffic. If the P-Way looked at a bit of track and thought err that looks like it is starting to shift, rang the box up and blocked the line before the track really moved. The resulting S shape in the rails while looking much like a buckle to the untrained eye, was in fact just an unexciting track distortion that did not have to be officially reported.

Anyone who has ever worked on track in the summer will be able to tell you that the feeling you get when you bend down to look more closely at a rail is akin to opening an oven door. Rail expansion under heat is really impressive if you have a few hundred yards of rail unclipped and on rollers and the sun comes out you can actually see the end of the rail moving. This is why it is vitally important if you are working with CWR as the day warms up that the ends of the rail are left turned out so they can pass each other. Because if you leave the rails between the housings and they butt up as they expand for every degree C the temperature rises after that point a compressive stress of a tonne builds up in the rails. I once took over a relaying job on a Sunday morning went out to look at it and saw the rails had been left in the housings and touched as I looked at them. I thought oh s**t and dashed for the nearest crowbar, it probably took me 30 seconds to snatch up a bar, put it under the rail and push. When I did so about 60 yards of rail sprang into the 4' even when excited I am not usually strong enough to move over three tons of rail with one push. So if any of you reading this are P-Way remember that unclipped CWR is potentially deadly and to be careful with it. If you work for H&S don't worry as these are the ramblings of some old bloke who did more overtime than was good for him before H&S were invented to protect him from himself, as after all what could be dodgy about a bit of rail just lying on the ground.

Have seen that in real life when the North London No1 lines were electrified a short length of track under a low bridge was lowered to give the minimum allowed electrical clearances. Soon after that section of line was transferred from us to I think the Eastern Region. Their supervisor took one look at this horrible little dip in the track and lifted it out again.

That suggests that if you had a fully fitted train as described hauled by an 08 you do not have to have a brake van. Presumably a humane driver keeping the speed down to a level that the guard can successfully run behind the train.

I should think that it will add another layer of bureaucracy and paper shuffling. With large numbers of highly paid managers who would not recognise an F19 concrete sleeper if you inserted it where the sun does not shine. Holding meetings about holding meetings, to discuss the last meetings recommendation to curb spiralling costs by reducing the number of those scruffy orange clad trackmen and their conditions of service. As the way they are always standing about and not working as trains go by is not conducive to the image GBR wish to cultivate.

More just inside the curve normal to first install them at 15mm of cant, leave for a few days then check if the grease is being carried right round the curve. If not adjust the position of the lubricator a bit and see if it works better there.

There is no maximum length for welded CWR. For example I would not be surprised if the DF cess rail is one welded up piece of metal from the lead off the DC south of Watford Junction station to the tamper siding at Blisworth.

I thought that Royal Mails method of reducing the carbon footprint of mail delivery was to make the price of a stamp so high that every one sends e-mails instead.

The area I worked on was busy so all the beams were used most week-ends so the beam would probably stay with its carrying wagon for quite a while. With the pair just travelling from job to job. The carrying wagons we used were just standard bolstered salmons. I suspect that the specially adapted grey wagon with the little end frames was just one of the H&S departments solutions looking for a problem. I don't remember us ever using two cranes in tandem, better things to do with them and if you do that you have to derate them by 50%, so twice the cost twice the staff to get a second rate TRM. There were however loose sleeper beams designed for use with cranes these were of the thinner type and about 30'-0" long. They carried the sleepers double spaced so on arrival at the installation point you unhooked every other sleeper, then moved up 30'-0" and unhooked the rest.

Those 'bales' are loose sleeper lifting beams which would usually be used with a TRM hence why they have two locations on them to which the TRM's lifting bales which were designed to lift panels of track by clamping themselves to the rail heads can be attached. The sleeper lifting beams are fitted with removable short chains with various fittings on them so sleepers with different rail clip housings can be lifted. There are multiple fixing points for the chains so the spacing and number of the chains and hence the sleepers hanging from them can be changed to suit the job being done. From 24 sleepers in 60'-0" for some rustic branch line (although 26 would be more likely} to 30 sleepers in 60'-0" for the WCML fasts. The sleepers would be delivered to site on salmon wagons in double spaced layers ie 48, 52, 56 or 60 sleepers to a layer depending on the spacing required on site, with every other sleeper being lifted at each pick.

Interesting as there was what looked like a raised loading platform in it where the PW Supervisors office was in the 1980's and just a single line of rails set in the floor to one side of it.

Surely if he had there would be references in the Bible to Jesus turning wine into pints of warm beer, and how it reminded the local Centurion Biggus Dickus of the time he spent as a young recruit stationed on the wall in that far northern province.

I thought that was an old goods shed? the LNWR engine shed being in the triangle to the west of there.

You are making me feel old as I remember an S&T colleague telling me how they used to erect replacement poles. Digging a narrow trench/hole with a sloped end from which the pole base would be inserted into the ground, then once the pole was vertical rotating it through 90 degrees so the arms were across under the wires, and how their supervisor insisted that the spoil from the hole was piled up in such a way that it could be returned to the ground sub soil first, 'top soil' last.

Although of course if you were installing a drain you might want a few Seacows next to the loco, for maximum control while unloading with Grampus wagons behind for the gravel and spoil. The vacuum brakes on the Grampii being worked using the vacuum blow through pipes on the Seacows. Sealions being dual braked would be simpler, but the BR Civil Engineering department was often forced to be creative in its unending mission to get a quart of ballast out of its pint sized wagon fleet.

Are you perhaps thinking of using one of those ultra sonic water vapour smoke generators in the rear coach to simulate the cloud of mist generated at the back of the train when someone flushes the rear most toilet while the train is travelling at speed? If so I don't think it will be all that realistic as you won't get the associated cool feeling as the mist blows into your face.

The L&B had a capitalisation of £5.5 million for 112 miles of double track route, so pro rata £1.6 million buys you 32.48 miles, so welcome to Tring. However as a lot of the more difficult and expensive bits like Roade cutting, Kilsby tunnel etc are north of that perhaps you might get to Leighton Buzzard.

It was Euston fields before the L&B station was built, and the station throat was I believe built with space for the GWR lines to parallel the L&B down Camden bank. Also the dual company station needing more space might have already started to spread eastwards across the current gap between Euston and St Pancras. Put the equivalent of Paddington in the gap between Euston and the site of St Pancras Goods and you have the railways owning a continuous plot suitable for a Mega Euston. I suppose some sort of leakage from a parallel universe where Marc Brunel gave the young Isambard a clip round the ear for being too clever by half, and the Euston joint station thus later existed. Could explain the bit in the Harry Potter books that makes the necessary suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy the series so difficult. ie the absurdly unlikely Midland Lake liveried GWR Hall class working out of Kings Cross.

My niece was talking about using the Elizabeth line, and my brother said about how it would make getting to Heathrow easier as you could avoid the awkward tube trip to Paddington. Which got me thinking as I believe that before that Brunel chappie decided to put his rails the wrong distance apart it was intended that the GWR would share Euston with the L&B. If the GWR and L&B had shared Euston would that have set a standard in the minds of railway directors with the later GNR and Midland etc thinking that the done thing is for all lines to a city or town to share a single station. With London perhaps ending up with two main stations a mega Euston and a super Waterloo for all the south of the river lines, if so would Harry Potter have travelled from Platform 39 3/4 in the ex GN part of Euston?

I believe that there is still an LMS railway built Salmon in Watford Yard, 748029 although it has been an internal user for many years, and its personal siding may have been isolated from the wider railway. Certainly when I was a youngster in the 1980's the Civil Engineers Wagon fleet contained many big four open wooden plank spoil wagons. The Tube/Pipe wagons in particular were quite worrying as the sides bulged when they were loaded with spoil to the extent that they sometimes had to be moved under out of gauge conditions.

Back when I worked in Birmingham it always struck me that the council seemed to keep the central area quite clean, almost as if they were proud of it!?! Although myself I always thought that the best thing to be seen in central Birmingham was the Up Stour at the south end of New Street Station.