Trevellan

Given the payload, it was obviously an atmospheric railway...

Perhaps my photograph of 401 at Waterloo in March 1986 might help the debate?

Yesterday we had the RMweb Members' Day at Taunton and Andy Y very kindly let us loose with his APT-E on the modular layout. What became clear is that there were at least three of us who had yet to try assembling our own versions, even after reading the excellent instruction manual. (The latter, incidentally, deserves an award in its own right - every user manual for every product should be produced in this style from now on.) Andy demonstrated the technique required to join and separate the individual vehicles and I certainly came away more confident about the process. Thanks Andy! The image below captures the moment when APT-E made a loo stop at Chard, en route to a special meeting of the Time Lords

Thanks for the sound demo Andy. I particularly like the start sequence, where someone can be heard giving the gas turbine a good thump with a hammer

My personal preference for the visible edges of baseboards has long been to prime and then paint matt black. It's rather like a black surround to a colour photograph, seeming to add impact to the presentation. Varnish is okay if you want the layout to look like a piece of furniture.

Yes, 64 bit. As you say, it is worthwhile disabling all of the non-essential features to improve performance.

CPU is an AMD Athlon 2.80GHz with 4Gb of RAM. The performance has been much better today because I have shut down the Compatibility Telemetry feature. Part of the problem is that my current PC is an all-in-one type, which cannot be easily upgraded. It also tends to run hotter because of the slim design and the fan noise is intrusive, especially when trying to work on creative writing. Next time I'll go for one with a system box capable of various upgrades.

As mentioned above, my PC is on most days for work purposes, so a backlog is highly unlikely. Monitoring of Task Manager shows regular culprits causing high CPU and HDD usage,incuding: Windows Host Process (rundll32) Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry Microsoft Windows Search Filter Host Microsoft Windows Search Protocol Host plus others such as Runtime Broker. You may be fortunate with your experience of W10. Googling the various processes mentioned above shows that many people are experiencing similar problems, some of which clearly date back to W7 and possibly earlier.

No, my PC is on daily, so there can't be a backlog. Even as I type this the CPU is running at 40-50% because W10 is fannying around with various processes. I have Task Manager permanently in the background these days in an attempt to monitor what W10 is doing.

A W10 update today, which took no less than 1 hour 45 minutes to install on my desktop PC, preventing me from working. I've been a regular Windows user since v3.1 and IMHO W10 is the worst iteration yet. It's making the CPU on my PC work harder than ever with no tangible benefits that I'm interested in. I have even been effectively locked out on several occasions while it is using system resources. My PC is not yet five years old and was a good spec when I got it in mid-2011. This whole W10 business is making me re-think my PC replacement plans for the summer and a Windows machine is no longer an automatic front runner. I may be an old curmudgeon, but I still think that 98SE was the best iteration of Windows I ever used.

Thanks for posting these Peter. Very interesting. Mind you, when I initially looked at the first image I thought you had stored some brushes in the completed lift tower! Very ornate storage

My former home patch was on the West Anglia route, so I grew up with what became classes 302, 305, 307 and 308. We even had a few 304s for a while too. It must be a sign of advancing years, but what used to be everyday and incredibly mundane now makes me feel quite nostalgic.

I'm sorry, but that's an unfair accusation to make when you don't know the full circumstances. Still, such broad generalisations and assumptions are common these days. Sadly, many of the motorists who make these assumptions do not appear to be qualified to do so, by virtue of no large vehicle experience. I shall be driving buses today and much of my effort will be down to anticipating the actions of car drivers, rather like trying to predict lottery numbers. EDIT to correct typo.

Just a few friendly words of advice. You are relatively new to RMweb and to date your posts have come across as unnecessarily negative, even combative in some cases. This forum is a fantastic resource and you'll get a lot more out of it if you can make some positive contributions yourself. I can understand your frustration in the case of the O2s, but I feel - as Phil says above - that some prespective is needed. I have to say that my experiences of Kernow Model Rail Centre have been 100% positive and I don't believe this is down to pure luck.

Well, my two island examples have arrived safely within the last hour and what little beauties they are. The slightly muted finish looks right to my eyes, although my various IoW albums show the cab surround and Westinghouse pump bands to be mostly dull and dirty. An easily solvable issue. I won't be able to run them until later, but for now I am one very happy bunny! I wonder how many O2s we can get on the modular layout at Taunton next April?

As someone with PCV and LGV entitlement, I would never condone tailgating. However, I have been in situations where I have set a truck's cruise control to 50mph and have had to keep lowering the figure because of over-cautious motorists (42mph in one notable case). Whenever I'm in my car in similar circumstances I often use lorries to check my speed, because I know their cruise control will be more accurate than mine.

This is certainly an interesting shot, not least for the 2BIL in the SR platform. What a great find.

Yes, I appreciate it's the lens rather than the camera in terms of picture quality (and film too), but in the case I was referring to (not the shot above), it was the composition that beat my efforts. The Rokkor on my Minolta wasn't that good, but my mate's Pentax had the Super Takumar IIRC. I don't recall what lens PDH was using.

Yet another shot from June 1974, scanned from a transparency and featuring an unidentified Western. My notes, albeit sketchy, suggest the location is somewhere near Grampound Road. Certainly, the next slide in the sequence was taken at St Austell. Perhaps one of our Cornish brethren could comment? This location was interesting, in that another photographer arrived after my mate and I had set up. The new arrival was using an elderly Pentax SLR, while I was shooting on a (then) new Minolta SRT303 and my mate had a nearly new Pentax Spotmatic ES2. Later, we saw the other photographer's images published and it turned out to be Philip D. Hawkins. His pictures were much better than ours too, proving that it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it .

Back in the mid-1970s, I attended a talk given by a former WR fireman to the North London Group and I recall one of his anecdotes concerned auto-train working. He claimed that the fireman would, in certain circumstances, remove the pin from the regulator and drive the loco himself by watching the linkage move and opening up or closing accordingly. The excuse for this was given as the relative crudity of the mechanical system, which sometimes meant locos working harder than they needed to and therefore making the fireman's job more difficult. It would be easy to dismiss this as fanciful, but I have read a number of locomen's reminiscences which suggest that rules were often bent if it made life easier. These days we seem to make a habit of being critical of things that happened many years ago, all from a comfortable vantage point. As has been said above, the physical demands of footplate work could be onerous, so it's hardly surprising that crews tried to mitigate this where it was safe to do so.

This contribution is, I regret to say, technically poor. However, I thought these two images might be of interest to fans of the hydraulics. The first image dates from November 1973 and was shot through the window of a Mk2 coach passing Swindon at speed. It is, of course, Glory awaiting its fate and I'm afraid the original slide is rather grubby. The second image shows Western Duke passing Dawlish. It was a rather less than successful attempt at panning, yet I think it still conveys the power and grace of the Westerns.

I'm not sure on dimensions Tim, but they certainly look very similar. I well recall the Wills kit, many years ago, which was designed to fit the Hornby Dublo/Wrenn R1 chassis.

Here's another of my shots which I managed to scrape off an old hard drive today. Western Dragoon acts as a super-shunter at Lostwithiel in June 1974. Offhand, I can't recall whether it was picking up or dropping off vehicles, but the driver was certainly giving it some stick - presumably because the train was blocking the down Cornish main line!

My lined maroon version arrived yesterday and I am quite pleased with it, although I agree with others that the floor looks odd. However, there is also a feeling of something which is not particularly good value for money. I already have the Airfix and Hornby autocoaches and, when comparing the three of them, there doesn't seem to be the major step-change in quality and detail that has occurred with other models to current standards. I'm aware of development and tooling costs, but the price tag on this coach seems odd. The Bachmann 64xx is a superb model and well worth the £72.99 I paid for it. However, the Hawksworth autocoach set me back £62.61 with postage, which seems wrong for a model which is not particularly complex, especially in comparison with the ex-LMS inspection saloon. I rarely feel dissatisfied when it comes to the high quality models we now enjoy and the bottom line, I suppose, is that I should just be grateful Bachmann have produced something I couldn't. But despite all the foregoing, the ambivalent feeling persists....

I've heard these called "switched diamonds". As others have said, it allows higher running speeds because the gap in an ordinary diamond is closed.