Black Marlin

Very pleased to have found this again after someone posted the link on NRM (*he hinted*) Will be really interested to see what's new! Gavin

I know I'm regressing by commenting on a post made more than a month ago but I couldn't resist this one. I've wanted to have a model railway that featured a particular scene since I was 7. I wanted a tunnel that swiftly gave way to a bridge, and overhead I wanted a low-flying Lancaster bomber. It was a very satisfying day when all that came together....

I remember - vividly - when I first started reading model railway magazines. The reason it remains vivid is because the very first magazine I bought featured a review by one Tony Wright. It was the review of the Pro-Scale V2. I was enthralled. I wasn't even a teenager at that point (it was the June '95 BRM, if memory serves, which would have made me 11) and I don't think I'd ever read a (please pardon the pun) model piece of criticism before. It didn't simply say that things weren't good enough - it said why they weren't good enough, and what would now need to be done in order to fix them. That review has had a curiously far-reaching effect. I live in Aberdeen, where I work for an e-learning company providing courses to the oil industry. I work in the QC department, and from time to time I have to tell people that what they've provided isn't good enough - but also precisely what needs to be fixed, and how to do it. Guess where I learned the importance of doing that? I know Tony took a fair bit of flak for that review (I also read the letters page in the months after it was published), but I thought he might like to know that his review had one wholly unexpected and positive result even this far down the line - it got me a decent job in an indecent economy. My thanks, sir. Gavin PS - for those wondering about the plural of Wolf of Badenoch: my preferred solution would be to avoid pluralising wolf (because that would suggest that there was more than one namesake of the locomotive) or double inverted commas (those should be reserved for representing direct speech) and include the name of the loco and the pluralising 's' (otherwise the possessive apostrophe becomes problematic) inside single inverted commas, thus "On Little Bytham we had the pleasure of watching a succession of 'Wolf of Badenochs' complete smooth circuits at the head of long trains".

Being off work with a chest infection, I have today had the opportunity to read all 48 pages of this wonderful thread. Fabulous trains, praiseworthy attention to detail, great research, fine modelling - but most importantly, a sense of fun and an awareness that somewhere along the line part of the intention has to be simply to play trains You've made what could otherwise have been a fairly dreary day far more interesting and entertaining than I had expected, and I am very grateful. (As a 1930s LNER modeller myself, I am also wildly biased, but let's not let that stand in the way of the sentiment!) Please, keep up the good work! Regards, Gavin