JeremyC

While their locos are smaller, we should remember the Ffestiniog Railway successfully operated their engines as oil burners for many years.

A problem with the original subject for this thread is that we are only getting one side of the story and that is from people who are unhappy with a situation (and possibly have an axe to grind). On the issue of the attitude of some managers when handling volunteers, yes there are bad or arrogant managers no doubt of it, but nowadays some things have to happen because the regularity authorities require it. Unfortunately there are those who, no matter how nicely they are managed, simply take the attitude that "nobody's telling me what to do" (an attitude that is sadly becoming more and more common) or it's "health and safety gone mad", so in the end management has to crack down and take the attitude of 'do it or else'.

One of the D34 Glens was originally named Glen Gau, except there is no such glen. it was later 'corrected' to Glen Gour, (though some writers have questioned whether this was the Glen intended as Glen Gour is in Highland Railway territory!)

The Belgium incident was 8 years ago and the ship has, according to some of the Youtube commentators, passed numerous inspections without major defects since and also the crew onboard are unlikely to include any of the same personnel so I don't think we can really draw any conclusions from that incident. I was at sea as an engineer for over 40 years and I can't think of any ship I was on that didn't, at some point, have a blackout.

Two engines wouldn't have helped if, as some are reporting, the ship had an electrical blackout, because all the engine auxiliary services (e.g. lub oil pumps, cooling water pumps, fuel booster pumps etc.) are electrically driven so the engines would shutdown on the safety systems when they failed. This is why in confined waters you always run multiple alternators so a single failure doesn't cause a power loss.

My first large show was what is now Model Rail Scotland at the McLellan Galleries in (I think) 1970. The only exhibitor I can recall is the Edinburgh & Lothians MRC and that's because I subsequently joined them and am still a member.

This video of the Plettenberger kleinbahn shows (at 7m 25s) the narrow gauge locos shunting standard gauge wagons off the transporter wagons. The offset buffers can be seen in various shots earlier in the video. The shots of trains traversing some of the curves on the street sections and sidings of this line are interesting.

I think that was intended to be the Barclay Fireless, but that leaked out at Doncaster!

If you look at 'Gerrit's Tagebuch' on Miniature Wonderland's YouTube channel there have been quite few videos on the huge amount of development and problem solving involved in the creation of the Formula 1 system.

Thing is if some people are to be believed in a few years ship's will be remote controlled or autonomous so will not have a crew, so who is going to do the damage control then? (Reminds me of an old third engineer I sailed with who said he'd believe in computer control when it could go out and repair the fault it had flagged up)

Yes, those are the ones that worked the Lauder Light Railway.

Then there was the Lauder Light Railway in the Scottish Borders which was operated by J67 tank engines coupled to ex NBR tenders so they could run with empty tanks to reduce their axle loading.

I model UK (Scottish) railways, German narrow gauge (and a bit of Welsh narrow gauge as well) in various scales. At shows I enjoy any well built and operated layout of any prototype, except, for some reason I can't really explain, North American models which leave me 'cold'.

We drove down from Edinburgh for a weekend away to visit the show. Had a very enjoyable day at the show on Saturday. A good selection of quality layouts both large and small. My personal favorites were 'Hills of the North' , Copper Wort, Ashgate and Calstock's Halton Quay, the last two were also my wife's picks. If I was to make one minor criticism it was that while we were handed a free sample BRM containing a show map there seemed to be no dedicated show guide. The magazine contained an about Alexandra Sidings, but there was no information about the other layouts.