Andy Kirkham

A particularly brutal bit of rationalisation, given that Falmouth was originally a main line terminus (the Cornwall Railway ran from Plymouth to Falmouth rather than to Penzance)

What's the vehicle, I wonder. A dormitory?

At about the 20 minute mark the narrator seems to refer to a Standard 2-6-4T as a "Dot And Carry One Tank". Has anyone ever heard that terminology before? <Edit> It does sem to be a genuine idiomatic expression http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dot1.htm but how it applies to a loco I don't know

Burnham-on-Sea can't be in the West Country because, if it was, there would have been a Bullied pacific named after it.

I'm a sucker for narrow gauge cuteness so I can't resist this. One of a pair delivered by Pecketts in 1941 to Hadfield's East Hecla works in Sheffield. I can't find a reference to what gauge the lines were. The pair were named FINLAND and CZECHO presumably to honour those early victims of WW2 aggression, and this picture was taken in 1949 so evidently FINLAND kept its name throughout the remainder of the conflict even though we were officially at war with Finland. Not that the Finns were baddies - they were just trying to recapture territory that had been siezed by the Soviets.

Well that's something I didn't know about. Introduced in 1943 and the Allies didn't realise what it was until the end of the war.

<inadvertant duplication>One marine occupation that must have been pretty hazardous in wartime is fishing, but there doesn't seem to be much online about the dangers that fishermen faced.

One marine occupation that must have been pretty hazardous in wartime is fishing, but there doesn't seem to be much online about the dangers that fishermen faced.

A particularly audacious ploy was to create a secret base for the mini-sub operations inside a derelict vessel - the Olterra - which lay half-sunk in Algiceras harbour. Under the eyes of the Spanish authorities and British observers, the Italians worked to create a secret workshop inside the ship's cargo space and cut a sliding hatch below the waterline for the mini-subs to to come and go.

I thought this picture would go go down well on this thread

I should say that Gloucestershire is definitely in South-West England (if it weren't it would have to be in the Midlands) but I have my doubts about it being in The West Country. Perhaps I think of The West Country as being the area where people go for their holidays, hence beginning at Bristol or even Taunton. The most ambiguous term though is, West of England. It's sometimes used (as by the Association that runs the Bristol show) as co-extensive with the South-West Peninsula, but more recently it seem to be taken to designate Greater Bristol (as in The University of the West of England, the West of England Combined Authority), seemingly as an attempt to resurrect the concept of the County of Avon without mentioning the name.

The exhibit that made the most impression on me in the early 70s was Yatton Junction. It was portrayed in the 1930s (as indeed were all West Country layouts in those days) and what particularly struck me was the authentically heterogenous composition of the passenger trains with clerestories and Collet stock mixed together. And Wilbert Awdry was there with Ffarquhar, and I was to shy to speak to him.

That picture made me sit up when I saw it, my immediate reaction being that the U-Boat appears too big in comparison with the Sunderland. But I looked up their respective dimensions and discovered that the average U-Boat was indeed over twice the length of a Sunderland. I think I had the impression of the Sunderland as being the behemoth of the skies on account of it being, at 10s 6d, in the most expensive category of Airfix kits.

My favourite film as a boy was Zulu (probably joint first with Daleks' Invasion of Earth 2150AD) but I don't honestly feel I want to see it again; I'm not sure I'd be able to relish the sight of hundreds of Zulus being mown down by British gunfire.

Thanks. I didn't know about the Laconia incident and I've just looked it up on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident . A truly ghastly business, added to all the other horrors of the Battle of the Atlantic that I already knew about. Maybe I'm feeling a bit fragile at the moment, but I started to read The Cruel Sea recently but some of the horror was a bit much for me and I couldn't read it to the end. I guess the film toned down this aspect to a certain extent but there were still some distressing incidents as I recall, such as having to drop depth charges amidst survivors swimming in the sea. I do still enjoy watching those postwar films and I can't really find it in me to accuse them of any serious dishonesty. <Edit> I saw Midway (2019) the other day and it didn't seem all that different in essence from those British films.

I was once at an awards ceremony for educational software at which Barry was the after-dinner speaker. He had evidently taken the trouble to inform himself a little about the business so he was able to give impression that he'd prepared his routine just for us. A true professional whose warmth and good humour shone through. (On the other hand on a subsequent occasion we had Sandi Toksvig....)

An intriguing machine seen at Shrewsbury Abbey station. Evidently some kind of Super-Sentinel - Peter Shoesmith/Geoff Dowling

Thanks. That page includes the full timetable for winter 63-64. A fairly sparrse service of six trains in each direction, but two of those were from Paddington. Who knew there was once a service from Paddington to Trowbridge! Interesting that the Devizes line was always single track, even when it was the main line.

In the 19th century Devizes was on the main line between Paddington and Westbury and thence to Weymouth. But in 1900 it was bypassed by the new line between Patney & Chirton and Westbury, which left it on something of a backwater. Devizes still looked like a main line station but I can imagine that it would have been quite difficult to provide it with a useful train service as, to judge from maps, no obvious traffic flow passed through it. I'm aware that there was at least one Paddington-Bristol service that passed this way on its circuitous route, but were there any other long-distance services? What were the local services and where did they terminate? Patney? Trowbridge? Westbury?

Not sure whether I've posted this before https://www.flickr.com/photos/52554553@N06/9200458659

I came across this brochure for a boat train named the Empress Voyager. https://open.library.ubc.ca/viewer/chungtext/1.0372007#p0z-5r0F: It is entitled "Your journey to Euston on the Canadian Pacific boat train Empress Voyager owned and operated by Bristish Railways" This seems to suggest that the train was chartered by Canadian Pacific, so that presumably the shipping line would have sold the tickets rather than BR. Is this how boat trains were usually organized?

An archive film recently posted. What initially cuaght my eye was the narow gauge loco at the start (Hudswell Clarke?) but the whole thing is a fascinating insight into the heavy engineering practices of the past.

Another intriguing Derek Chaplin shot presented by Peter Brabham. A municipally owned steeple cab loco.

I honestly thought it was a train sim when I saw it

All the pictures I have seen have shown 0-4-2Ts - in earlier days the 517 class, and later their Collett successors, usually of the 58XX class, which were identical to the familiar 48XX auto-tanks (later renumbered 14XX) except that they were not auto fitted. So it looks as if the coaches would indeed have been a B-Set or something similar. One interesting thing in both these photos is that the loop next to the platform road is used for stabling wagons, so presumably the loco had to run round passenger trains using the further loop that passed though the engine shed And judging by this picture, milk was a significant traffic.