Pacific231G's Content - Page 77 (2024)

14 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

It is my understanding the MRC 'Minories GN' layout was originally a verbatim copy of the plan envisaged by CJF, but has subsequently been altered that the two rear platforms are now through lines to provide an oval connection. It brought to mind - what is the Minories equivalent of a through station? Is it just one side of Minories with the remainder off-scene (like Minories GN) or are there equally suitable through station designs akin to Minories? Presumably the additional complication of bays for terminating services in one or both directions is offset by my assumption of no integrated goods platforms (those presumably being in an adjacent yard, rather than being dealt with on the platforms).

Yes. It was built by Tom Cunnington and other members of the MRC but as a personal rather than a club project. It was a fiftieth anniversary tribute to the plan's original publication and, apart from not being a folding layout, followed it as closely as possible though with some upscaling from OO to EM which made it about a foot longer and a bit wider, It was built while CJF- who was a member of the MRC all his adult life - was still alive. It wasn't the first time he got to see his best known plan made concrete.

A few years after it was fisrt exhibited they did add a loco length addition at the buffer end of platforms one and two to give greater flexibility and to add a street level station building.

(For some time I assumed this to be a traverser but it was just a short plain extension)

There's a fuller description of the layout here

https://www.themodelrailwayclub.org/layouts/minories/

Talking to Tom Cunnington the last time I saw it, when it was in its through station mode, they wanted to run goods trains so, in principle, it is still a passenger terminus but with goods only lines extending to the docks beyond. That also provides a larger fiddle yard able to store a wider range of trains than the six road traverser. Personally I preferred it in its "pure" Minories form but it's not my layout and can still be exhibited in that form.

An actual through station with some trains terminating and reversing wouldn't neeed direct access to both up and down platforms from both sides of the main line and, as that involves a facing as well as a trailing crossover, would traditionally have used a trailing crossover to allow terminating trains to be shunted to the other side for departure. With MU trains that requires the driver to change ends during the shunt so I think it's not uncommon nowadays to have a single facing crossover so that a terminating down train (say) runs directly into the up platform ready to depart. ISTR seeing that at Shepherd's Bush on the West London Extension Railway.

On 26/12/2020 at 16:19, WM183 said:

Hi John,

I dunno. I mean... I want to build coaches too, simply because I like them! But I must say the layouts that have made the biggest impacts on me - Arun Quay, Cwm Bach, Napier Street, the Sheep Fellow's 4mm layouts, and many others - tend to be busy goods-focused layouts with narrow clearances and lots of wagons to bother.

That and I really want to build a 56xx.

Amanda

It's a very personal decision. I really like Arun Quay too but somehow for me a railway with either no passengers (as in much of N. America) or no goods seems somehow incomplete. A BLT with a particularly grungy factory siding where unspeakable things are being done to large lumps of metal or a down at heel harbour line hiding the fiddle yard perhaps?

2 hours ago, WM183 said:

I have done the few final repairs and touchups to 5717, and decided today to begin weathering. I think it will not get much grungier than this; used but not neglected!

I'm remembering the Pannier tank that we used to see at Wolvercote crossing north of Oxford on the empty blanket express to Witney long after that line closed to passengers. It clanked horribly -some of the bearings had clearly seen better days- and steam issued from every pore but I don't think it ever got any grungier than your 5717. Maybe a few streaks from where water dribbled and some coal dust around the bunker but not generally any muckier. There was also a particular patina that steam locos acquired when they were being cleaned with oily rags and were well overdue for the new paint job they'd never get.

The sounds it made will probably never find its way onto a chip as you'd never find a loco now in such a worn mechanical state.

37 minutes ago, danstercivicman said:

It wasn’t a good Harbour. Ships couldn’t leave during bad weather (common) therefore Stranraer became the main Harbour and Cairnryan was developed as a the secondary/emergency docks for WW2... it wasn’t needed and after WW2 was used for dumping ammunition into the sea (via small boats) then scrapping navy ships!

I could happily divert trains to the Harbour but the Town station served as the run round for backing empty coaches into the coaching sidings

Interesting to know why they went down that road then changed their mind. The railway seems to have been persuaded to go to Portpatrick and maybe would have, if left to its own devices, focussed on Stranraer earlier. There must have been a balance between the relative qualities of the two harbours and the voyage time. I think the work the Admiralty was supposed to be doing on the harbour was partly to extend the piers and so make it more of a bad weather port. At some point they clearly changed their mind but left the railway holding the baby.

Sounds like some fun to be had with the WTT to see what can and can't be diverted to make Stranraer more interesting. Could the Town station be closed to passengers but still used operationally? I was at College in Plymouth for a couple of years from 1967 and though the Millbay terminus had closed for passengers in 1941 it was still intact and the line to it was was being quite heavily used to handle ECS from North Road and rather less heavily for goods traffic in and out of Millbay Docks.

1 hour ago, Wheatley said:

Portpatrick appears to have been chosen originally as it was the closest point to Ireland, something which appealled mightily to officialsin the Post Office who knew nothing about the place other than where it was on a map. No amount of 19th century development would have got away from the fact that it was still a hole in a cliff, and you had to go past a perfectly adequate deep water port to get to it.

Tripping the boat train down the 1 in 40to the harbour four coaches at a time would make intetesting operation on a model though.

You don't need to permanently close the Town station, just derail something large on the runround points for the day :-)

Hi Wheatley

You could equally describe Fokestone Harbour as being a hole in the cliff - the 1in 30 branch from the main line would be completely unbelievable if we didn't know it had really existed.

Before the railway age Portpatrick was an important ferry port with a daily packet service and it was already used for mails. It was the end of one of the old Military Roads in Scotland and formed part of a postal route to Ireland.

Dan, I hope this isn't imposing too far on your topic but I've just spent a fascinating couple of hours investigating the Portpatrick Railway including the correspondence between the railway company, the Admiraly and the Board of Trade etc.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uwkTAAAAYAAJ&q=portpatrick&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=portpatrick&f=false

I think the Admiralty's involvement was from Portpatrick being a harbour of refuge for Royal Naval ships and they had workshops there. According to the railway company the twenty odd mile crossing from Portpatrick to Donaghadee would take about one and a half hours even with the ships available in 1862, and for a mail route that time saving would have been an important factor.

What makes this interesting is that while most might-have-been railways didn't get beyond Parliamentary approval - if even that- or possibly a few initial earthworks, this one was actually built. Had the Admiralty, having insisted on the railway and harbour branch being built on schedule, completed the planned dredging and improvement to the harbour at Portpatrick, the boat trains with their mail vans would have run and the mail ships would have sailed to Donaghadee.

There clearly was a firm intention to complete the scheme, the Admiralty was even arguing with the railway about the width of the quay between the line of rails and the harbour wall. The railway wanted to reduce it from 50 ft to 40ft to give a better line from its approach but the Admiralty were demanding the full 50ft on the grounds that they expected the service to become very busy.

Unfortunately the harbour branch's actual existence fell between detailed Ordnance Survery surveys. An 1848 6 inch map shows a short but interesting looking "tram road" from a quarry south of the harbour running past the harbour with a branch but no other railways. By 1894's 25inch map the tram road has gone with some of its route a three hundred yard rifle range. Portpatrick is there with all its trackwork but of the harbour branch only its trackbed from the buffer end end of the station to the north quay with a bridge under Holm Street and a level crossing of Blair Steet remains. I've not been able to find out just what the railway did build on the quayside as a harbour station but the legal papers do make mention of a booking office being built.

If anyone know more I'd love to know just what was built and what was intended to be built at Portpatrick and also at Donaghadee.

On 20/12/2020 at 20:31, danstercivicman said:

I’ve now fitted most of my coaching stock with gangway connectors

That small addiiton does make an enormous difference. Do the coaches so fitted have to operatein semin fixed rakes or are you able to couple and uncouple them? (though I assume that in the case of Stranraer what comes down also goes up)

On 20/12/2020 at 20:43, danstercivicman said:

I may be very naughty and switch some of the Town services to the Harbour... naughty and unprototypical but... more interesting!!!

Why not if it makes operating the layout more interesting. Just assume that a cost benefit analysis by some whizkid in Glasgow found an earlier benefit in rationalising services to Stranraer Town after the Portpatrick line closed in 1950* and more services using the Harbour station could have been entirely prototypical.

*It's also Interesting to reflect on what might have happened had the Admiralty gone ahead with its plans to develop Portpatrick Harbour, the Donaghadee and Portpatrick Short Sea Steam Packet Company had actually then been successful and boat trains to Portpatrick Harbour Station had developed as planned rather than the harbour branch being closed in 1868. Portpatrick station would then have been a reversing terminus for boat trains which provides a very interesting prototype and presumably, with naval actvity and ferries , Portpatrick itself woud have developed into more than a village.

12 hours ago, phil_sutters said:

How does the texturing work? What sort of printer do you need to get 3D texturing?

The processes are known by printers as embossing and debossing but the basic technical aspects are pretty much the same (and probably use the same machine) Using heat and pressure, a metal plate containing a design, text or a pattern is pressed into a suitable stock to form a raised (embossed) or lowered (debossed) image. For embossing you need a front and back die and it raises details on the front of paper. For debossing you just need a front die and it leaves the back surface smooth. If you look at the posher of the Christmas cards you've received this year you'll probably find examples of both (if it has an embossed design on one side but is smooth on the other they may have laminated the embossed paper onto a backing piece)

Traditional letterpress (metal type) printing does deboss the page very slightly.That's usually just a side effect of pressing the type onto the paper to transfer the ink but for textures and particularly what we would need for building papers it would require more pressure and a suitable stock; for stonework or roof tiles I think one would need embossing.

Modern printing is though based on offset litho where the ink is finally transferred onto the paper via an offset or blanket cylinder that picks up the ink from an aluminium plate where an oil and water not mixing process puts the ink only where it's needed. I don't know whether textured building papers are embossed or debossed - I would guess embossed but it would depend on the depth of impression needed. In either case, though I don't know for certain, I assume that that the building paper would have to be colour printed and dried before being embossed/debossed to produce the texture. The processes would need to line up accurately of course but that's what printers do. Some of the buildign papes I have look as if they were embossed using fairly thin stock that was then laminated onto thicker stock to give it adequate strength.

I have no idea of costs for this and it isn't something I'd expect you local InstaPrint shop to do but I don't think it's beyond the capabilities of a 'proper' printer. The printers who handle the Journal I edit sent me a Christmas card this year in the form of a jigsaw puzzle and they'd obviously printed it first onto thick mutlilayered card glued only at the edges then used a press to die cut it. Solving it was made easier by the impression of the die-cut going through to the base of the card but it took me about fifteen minutes on a locked down Christmas morning so kept my attention far longer than the micely printed but ordinary card from the accountant so was a good piece of marketing.

I was always rather sorry when Metcalfe stopped embossing their buidling sheets. It added cost but though I've used their embossed (using the term loosely) papers I have no use for the current range.

22 minutes ago, F-UnitMad said:

Yes, as Northroader posted a couple of links just after my comment faux pas....

I have been suitably re-educated, and privately kicked myself anyway for missing the distinction between sector plate and traverser in the first place!!! D'oh!!

Well the links did. The sector plate at Snow Hill was an odd beast to say the least though.

Moor Street does seem to have been the GWR's exhibtion of "the many things that can be done with the modern marvel of electricity". Apart from the passenger platform traversers they had another in the goods yard that sat on top of the rails (a bit like a Peco loco lift) allowing wagons to be shuffled fromsside to side, electric capstans, wagon hoists to the lower goods shed and electric conveyor belts and cranes in said lower goods shed.

I assume that, apart from the loco release traverses, most of that kit could be found elsewhere as well but there just seem to have been an awful lot of it at Moor Street.

I actually came on all this while searching for sector plates and traversers for fiddle yards for reasons that anyone following the General Theory of Minories topic will have probably heard me agonising about far too much already- gallon jars and pint pots!

On 09/12/2020 at 10:30, F-UnitMad said:

You mean Moor Street? Same city, same line, next station.

Updated after fact checking

No. Snow Hill did have a sector plates at the end of a couple of bays. Moor Street had traversers. The Moor Street traversers had three sets of rails and slid under the platforms so, when it was locked, there was a always a complete track to the buffers. The sector plate at Snow Hill had a similar arrangement but the odd think was that the the BoT were normally very strict about passenger lines in termini not converging at the terminus end but in this case that's exacly what happened. Normally, where turntables were used between roads used by passenger trains, there were points that could either be set either to a buffer end or onto the turntable. Apart from Sheerness there was a very good example at Ramsgate Harbour (or Beach ) station .At termini like Bembridge with only one platform road that wasn't necessary, the turntable would simply have been set and locked for the platform road before a passenger train could arrive or depart

Turntables used for loco release weren't that uncommon especially in earlier times when locos were relatively short.

The problem with traversers is that they were so rare. On SG in Europe I think there wereonly Moor Street and Paris Bastille and there were one or two in Australia.

There used to be a huge sector table plate at Boulogne Maritime with about six roads coming off it and no arrangement for avoiding voids but, as it was right at the end of the quay, there would have been no room for pointwork. I think it was probably built in the 1950s so by no means a heritage structure.

On 02/12/2020 at 12:07, jetmorgan said:

I'm pretty sure it is a studio recreation, as you say there is something about the lighting and also the cramped look of the set. But it is very well detailed and if it weren't for that look it would be a real one.

It's definitely a studio interior but that would be well within the capabilities of Ealing Studios. Filming a real pit head would probably have been a gret deal harder and at least one of the sound stages at Ealing had a pit they could have used for the cages to descend into.

4 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

I think you're missing the mistake being highlighted.

“managed to avoid getting torched”

So did they get torched or did they avoid it?

Well there are locos that were"saved" from Gertie but were never really preserved , they either just rotted away or were canibalised.

Wnat I'd have liked to have seen preserved were a darn sight more examples of French mainline steam. They included some magnificent machines but very few remain. Apart from locos preserved "cold" in various museums, where we are fortunate to have hundreds of main line steam locos, from our closest neghbour there probably aren't more than a dozen or so main line steam locos in working order at any one time and most heritage lines have to make do with one or two ex industrial locos. North American built 141Rs and British built 140Cs are fairly well represented- they were the country's last working main line steam locos, but there is just one 241P and a handful of Pacifics. I'd love to be able to see other examples of the hundreds of Etat Pacifics but there is only 231G558 (my avatar) and that was only preserved through a lucky chance of fate.

17 hours ago, WM183 said:

Thank you!

I admit, as I look at these clerestories and at brightly coloured pre grouping goods stock I am debating rolling back to 1915 or so...

I don't think stations changed all that much between the Edwardian era and nationalisation (Tavistock LSWR was stilll gas lit in 1967 ) so you could always run more than one era but the period of the 1930s that Pendon is set in seems a pretty good bet for running a wide range of stock and the panniers built as such are all AFAIK post grouping . We know of course that at least two brake end clerestories were still running until 1950.

I'll have a delver through my MRNs to see if there are any drawings of clerestory brake ends.

There are. PM on its way

I think a lot of it this week has been people suddenly finding that their Christmas plans to go and visit family etc. are kyboshed so having to buy extra food. I had to do that for Chritmas lunch yesterday morning so drove down to the local Waitrose hoping to find something a bit more special than my usual weekly shop only to see a queue that stretched for over a hundred yards. Fortunately, the queue at Tesco was nothing like as bad and they were well stocked so Christmas lunch won't consist of baked beans on toast

The only thing I've not been able to get for months is Vegemite (Marmite just isn't the same!)

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/eat/american-kids-react-to-vegemite/news-story/e42ab021c3612edf1dab5c0ca386578c

American kids can't stand it so it must be good!

6 hours ago, keefer said:

Was that the one where the train was in the loop, got the tip to pass the signal and promptly derailed on the trap point?

There was a video of it (might still be) on YouTube

Yes 29th April 2013. There are several. This one shows the actual incident very clearly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr5EztEPJS8

Because it was on a siding and didn't involve a passenger train, the RAIB decided not to investigate the incident. There was some controversy about that at the time but I'm sure the GCR paid it a great deal of attention.

What did strike me about the Bognor derailment was that a passenger train was derailed by a trap point. I thought that lines used by trains carrying passengers weren't allowed to have devices to derail trains whereas passenger carrying lines are required to be protected from non-running lines.

6 hours ago, The Johnster said:

My first train set was a Triang (I'm not quite old enough for pure Rovex) Black Princess and even at the age of 4 I was aware of it's literal shortcomings and the unrealistic curves. Next xmas brought a 748 Saddle tank and some goods vehicles (cattle van, dropside steel medium, and toad), some extra track and two turnouts, and this was probably the single most influential moment in my modelling history. 748 looked much more at home than Princess Elizabeth on the curves, and I discovered shunting. Future layouts build by dad during my childhood all featured an outer circuit that a passenger train could be left to it's own devices on, an inner circuit with sidings off it, and a trailing crossover.

I still favour smaller locos and went for end to end layouts with lots of shunting as soon as I realised they were a thing, when I was about 12 or 13 and started taking MRC (CJL, you have a lot to answer for, but thanks!). I suppose that, for a first train set, the big fast glamour stuff is what people who are not necessarily enthusiasts recognize but, really, who wants FS and 2 coaches/a 3 car Eurostar, or whatevs, going back to HD 3-rail duch*esses and A4s, when all they do is go round and round. Then you can take them off the track and make them go round and round the other way. Then you can do it slowly, with one coach, pushing one coach and pulling another, or light engine, and you have now exhuasted your play value; the thing gets put in it's box, stowed in the attic, and 60 years later you approach me in the pub because you know I'm into this stuff and ask me how much it'll go for on the 'Bay, to be a bit irritated when I tell you that you can't give away duch*ess of Montose tinplate 3 rail; 'but there was one on 'Going For A Song' that went for thousands the other day, and I'd never even heard of it, Bassett Loco or something...'.

Play value turns into serious prototypical operating and is best achieved with a small loco, few wagons but at least one open, and at least one preferably two sidings. A bit of imagination (and kids are good at that) about loads and your train can be carrying anything from anywhere to anywhere for any reason. This will probably be steam based and there may well be some of those awful Hornby 4-wheel coaches, but current image can wait until the kid is a bit older, has developed a prototypical interest, and can make informed decisions; even then, Eurostars will not be the best use of space in most cases.

But nothing I have said or written on this point in the last 60 years will prevent parents with the best intentions buying Hornby train sets for their anklebiters at xmas and going for FS, Eurostar, etc, when Smokey Joe is a better bet. To be fair to Hornby, they are trying to use the Covid situation to market 'family fun project' stuff which addresses this and is far more likely to lead to serious modelling, and will be proper family fun even if it doesn't, but they would be idiots not to pander to the xmas market for train sets with big fast glamour stock.

I have never felt the need to overcompensate by buying a sports car.

Hi Johnster

Had you or your Dad by any chance just read Alan Wright's "Wright Lines" article when you went down that much more fruitful road? It's just that a loop with two sidings, a small loco and some wagons sounds like a very similar layout.

My own first layout in the mid 1950s was Hornby Dublo with a Dutchess of Atholl two coaches and a couple of wagons. It was bought second hand so was properly mounted on a 5x3ft baseboard complete with wire in tube to control the three points from a "proper" lever frame. As my grandfather was a signalman this was a feature that I really liked but the trackplan was an oval with a reversing loop (HD 3 rail so no electrical issues) and a single siding. This was fairly useless as all you could do was ti run the train round the oval anticlockwise, take it over the reverse curve once and then run it clockwise. I suppose I could have backed it over the reverse but my three or four year old mind didn't quite grasp that.

It's interesting that Loco-Revue's crowdfunded Train in'Box ends up as a circuit with a passing loop and a blind siding running through the scenery from a choice of French regions but that's more a beginner's model railway, somewhat marketed as a family project, than a traditional train set. The box contains literally everything needed to build the layout which uses die cut card for the baseboard and trackbed, Peco flexible track, card building kits and everything from flock to PVA to put it together. I think the idea of this was to encourage the hobby by taking would be railway modellers through every step to building a first - and probably somewhat disposable- layout. I've often wondered whether the tradiional train set with its loop of track and the train going round and round and doing nothing else actually put more youngsters off the hobby than it encouraged. Perhaps a different story from the Hornby 0 gauge tinplate that preceded the electric train set. In the following years I certainly got a lot more satisfaction from my Meccano set.

9 minutes ago, WM183 said:

Well.

Baseboards have been hung! Three sections, each one 122 x 50 cm (4 feet x 20 inches)have been installed on our brackets. That gives us 12 feet, 3.66 m.Evidently, I cannot measure, because the wall I can use for this is 13 feet long, not 14 feet. That loss of a foot *hurts*. My kingdom for another 4' board. I need to make up the remaining 30 cm of board somehow, though mechanically this is pretty simple.

Any dreams of trains of more than two coaches - and realistically, one with tail traffic - are probably gone here. Two coaches plus a tank engine is 4 of my 12 feet.I was using 60' scale length (LMS coaches are 57' long, plus 3' buffers etc) as a size measurement. It is still not impossible, but probably a quart in a pint jar at this point.A shunting type layout a la Arun Quay, or perhaps something grotty and urban, seems to be the ticket now.

Off to measure stuff some more!

Amanda

Hi Amanda

The lost foot is frustrating (it actually makes a huge difference to my own current plans in H0) but not a show stopper.

If you want a shunting layout or a grotty urban yard then fine but if what you really want is a complete terminus with both passenger trains and enough goods shunting to keep you busy then I don't actually think you have a problem.

Maybe look again at the Piano but you've anyway got room for a conventional BLT to fiddle yard and I reckon you could handle a two coach train with a tail load quite comfortably.

I'm looking at the GOG's Small Layouts vol 2 now - I also have vol 1 but it's hiding. Apart from the two 'pianos'- Tony Collins' Goonhilly, which is nine feet long, and Maurice Daniels' Clock Abbot which is 11ft 3ins- I can see John Berry's Bassetts Castle which is eight feet long plus a 3ft 10 inch sector plust fiddle yard and . Dave Cox's Wantage (probable too specific) which has a total length of eleven foot three (to fit in an elevent foot six room) Remember that the run round loop only has to be long enough to accomodate the train less the locomotive.

(Let me know if you want PMs of any or all of those plans)

43 minutes ago, PaulRhB said:

So someone who does 10-20 turns a year is more experienced than someone who does it every working day?
Everyone has to go solo in a boxat some stage and learn more from there, no one can teach you everything in an industry with so many different scenarios.

We have a document created by the experienced staff to refer to if something unusual happens but it doesn’t override the rule book and sectional appendix but it does tell you what else to check. It creates thinking time too.
I’ve been in a large panelbox for 19 years, and two manual lever boxes before that,and I still come up against stuff I’ve never seen before. I’m not going to patronise the poor guy as I don’t know all the facts even from the report andI’ve seen very good Signal(wo)men make mistakes even they struggle to comprehend they did. Fatigue is a huge issue and managing the sudden pressure in a failure with multiple calls from drivers etc is not easy. I’ve had people be arrogant to us about Signallers sitting around be stunned by the sudden explosion of workload when it goes wrong. Do a shift in a busy box when it goes wrong at the end of a long shift and then I bet people would be less judgemental.
Ultimately he obviously did some of the other essentials which prevented worse outcomes.
There are other issues I can’t talk about here but I assure you they are talked about between the guys in work.

Not more experienced obviously after doing the job for a while. I was thinking more about the amount of training before going solo. It was one of the issues raised in the Ladbroke Road enquiry though that related to driver training. I'm also aware of issues around certain heritage railway operations though those I know personally are extremely thorough. I simply don't know so wouldn't speculate on whether length of training and the amount of time spent working with a more experienced person before "going solo" is an issue with regard to signalling but it comes up again and again in failures of safety critical systems in many fields so is one of the things the investigation needs to look at.

I agree with you absolutely about not being judgemental about a person who has made what appear to be "unbelievable" (as one post put it) mistakes. Mistakes are not unbelievable at all, we all make them far more often than we like to admit and we make far more of them when we're stressed, tired or during high workloads.

Someone said that this incident sounded like something out of "Red for Danger". Of course it did; Rolt's book is all about the history of enquiries that looked at the whole system rather than trying to pin blame on individuals; the very process that has made rail travel the safest form of transport there has ever been.

1 hour ago, Nick C said:

Definitely one of those situations where the factors all added up - the point motorizing being 'done on the cheap' with the levers not repainted and the locking not adjusted, then the signalman being unfamiliar with the system and being fatigued, and then the actual failure itself of the batteries.

There's particular parallells with Knaresborough, where a set of power points hadn't gone fully over, and the MOM covering the relief turn in the box authorised the train to pass the inner home at danger, leading to it splitting the points and derailing - again, the lever could be reversed as the locking was satisfied, but the signal wouldn't clear because there was no detection.

It's something that was repeatedly drummed into me as part of my training at the MHR - always check your repeaters!

The possibillty occurs to me that volunteers on heritage railways may actually be more thoroughly trained- or at least spend more time learning specific installations from more experienced colleagues - than their professional counterparts. What we don't know of course is what other boxes this particular signaller was regularly operating and whether the Bognor Regis box had characteristics that were different from the boxes he was more regualrly operating; were they perhaps all mechanical?

3 hours ago, Karhedron said:

I am not an expert but I think it would depend on whether the brake van was fitted or not. If it was not fitted, it would definitely have to go at the back as the milk tanks could not have an unfitted vehicle between them and the loco. If the brake van was fitted then I suppose in theory it could have gone anywhere in the rake. What actually happened in practice I am not sure.

I had a look around and it seems that brake vans had to be at the end of the train until they were generally replaced towards the end of the 1960s by guards riding in the rear cabs of diesel locos. There were exceptions to that such as dangerous loads and locos that only had one cab. There was apparently a big dispute between ASLEF, the NUR and BR about the respective roles of second men and guards around that time. However, there are photos of the Culm Valley train with milk tankers following the coach so presumably the rules on passenger train tail loads then applied.

Going back to the Culm Valley coaches themselves, the ex Barry brake seconds that replaced the Clerestories in 1950 came with electric lighting but the train was too slow for the dynamos to charge their batteries. They were instead retro-fitted with gas lighting becoming the last gas lit coaches on BR. I'm curious about the heating of those coaches though because if they were steam heated (as I assume they were) then, when one of them was being used as a brake behind loose coupled wagons, the guard's compartment would have been unheated. I wonder if they had a separate stove for that. The same thing would have applied to the earlier clerestories too.

On 21/12/2020 at 21:22, thegreenhowards said:

We are still considering a name for the layout. Street names in the City of London seem the most promising at the moment. Something like Tower Hill, Botolph Lane, Bank, Telegraph St orTooley Bridge.

Andy

It's looking very good Andy. As for names, any idea which railway it would be most associated with?

Cyril Freezer always said that he chose a name that sounded City of London without intending to define its location with the real Minories.

The Cities of London and Westminster were originally very opposed to letting any of those nasty new fangled railway things into their respective territories. The termini that eventually were built witihn their city precints were only allowed to penetrate them a short way so your terminus would likely be on the side of the city from which your railway came and that may suggest names. Think of the lines to Victoria, Charing Cross, Blackfriars and Cannon Street coming in from the south but to stations not far from the original banks of the river (a bit further for Victoria but it followed the route of the Grosvenor Canal from the river and was built on the site of the canal's basin) Fenchurch Street coming in a little way from the East and ditto Liverpool Street from the North East and the Metropitan more or less running along the City of London's northern border. That may tend to give some ideas for a name but Bank is probably too central. Think also of where a railway would or would not be allowed to knock existing buidlngs down. Basically you can knock down common dwellings and factories but forget about anything like the Inns of Court or any of the guilds. Charing Cross for example was built where Warren's Blacking Factory, that Charles Dickens worked in as a young man, used to stand and, before the Embankment was built to cover Bazalgette's new sewer in 1865, the banks of the Thames were marshy and insalubrious.

The City of London itself seemed to make an exception on its western side with Ludgate Hill and High Holborn stations and the viaduct over Fleet Steet (all now gone) obscuring St. Pauls Cathedral but that more or less followed the line of the River Fleet (known in its lower reaches as the Holbourne)

For anything coming from the north London Wall comes to mind- I think that was the imaginary London terminus in a BBC radio drama series a good few years ago. Think also what name a railway company might or might not want to diginify its City of London terminus with. Bishopsgate Station sounds alright (except that Liverpool Street Stn. occupies most of the ward) but Cheapside. Cripplegate or Houndsditch Station doesn't. Lime Street - just to the east of Liverpool St. is available but maybe too associated with that other Lime Street Station.

15 hours ago, 34006 said:

Just a quick thought,the speed limit on the Culm Valley line was 15 mph,so I guess there was little difference in the travel time of either goods or passenger trains.

atb

Phil

The actual running time probably was much the same, though setting off with loose coupled wagons may have involved a slower accelaration, but it's the shunting at intermediate stations that really adds to the journey time of mixed trains.

That wouldn't have applied if the goods were all milk tankers as they'd only be shunted before departure and after arrival at Hemyock or Tiverton.

The 1950 Bradshaw is quite interesting especially as it would have been the one in force when Maurice Deane visited the line* .

Apart from the daily return passenger train from Tiverton to Culmstock or Uffculme, down trains (to Hemyock) were scheduled for 57', 49', 64' and 49' and up trains at 32', 37',41', 40' and 34' It doesnt say whether those were all mixed or whether one or two were all passenger but it's not hard to spot the pick-up mixed goods. Also, apart from the private siding at Coldharbour, all the intermediate goods sidings were trailling towards Hemyock so was a down mixed goods train shunted with the passenger coach attached (There was an account of this in a recent French Railways Society Journal) or did the crew have to uncouple from the coach, run round the train using the loop and then shunt the sidings in which case they would surely have done this in the up direction. Given that one down train is timed for 63 minutes, fifteen minutes longer than the two faster workings, and there's no such extra allowance for any up train I'd guess that the coach did stay with the engine and most goods wagons were taken down to Hemyock and then back up to Tiverton with no intermediate shunting. Handling livestock may have required different treatment.

This little line really does get more interesting the more one delves into it.

* Though Maurice Deane's first article (RM Jan 1952) seemed to imply that he'd visited the line on a single day he doesn't actually say that. He also says that he walked the seven miles up the line. With photographing the stations that would have taken several hours so I suspect that did that on a Sunday when it was closed- there is no stock in any of the sidings at the intermediate stations in his photos. I presume he stayed in Hemyock overnight before observing operations at Hemyock the following day before returning to Tiverton and home by train.That might have given him enough information for modelling the line but he may equally have spent several days there (a long weekend perhaps?) getting permission to walk it on the Sunday and simply compressed that into a simpler narrative. I can't post his article as it's copyright but can PM it for "private study" if anyone else wants to read it.

37 minutes ago, Karhedron said:

You are right about that. A toad brake van was often used after the withdrawal of passenger services on the branch.

From the various photos it does seem that the rules about a brake after loose coupled stock were strictly followed even with quite short trains but with fitted milk tankers would the van have had to be at the rear?

3 hours ago, Zomboid said:

Personally I found a 4 vehicle train to be very pleasing, but that was a BSK, CK, BSK, CCT formation, so only the 3 passenger carriages, and the CCT having 4 wheels and being a lot shorter than the carriages broke up any symmetry.

A single track approach is clearly not Minories in any form, but you could still have a fairly significant "urban" station with that. It just needs to be in a part of the world where long single line routes are found. I don't know about France, but it's certainly something you'd expect in Ireland, parts of Scotland, Scandinavia and the far reaches of the LSWR and GWR. It doesn't really scream suburban, but a medium sized town that has a portion from the main express.

Limerick for example is a fairly grand station at the end of 3 single track approaches. And Galway and Sligo are along similar lines.

There were and are plenty of single track termini in France including many handling expresses and even TGVs. The catch for me is that they were normally quite spread out and the usual scenic breaks of overbridges etc. just woudn't look convincing. They were also generally quite self contained with loco sheds and carriage sidings very much on site. Urban termini seem to have almost invariably been double track and a lot of the single track termini came from what were branch lines gaining a fairly heavy "resort" traffic as more people started to take holidays.

59 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

Weren't milk tanks fitted with vacuum brakes? I cannot see them being dragged from west Wales to London at 25 mph.

Yes they were and AFAIK they travelled on the main line at express speeds both as tail loads and in dedicated milk trains. There are plenty of photos of the Culm Valley train with one or both brake end coachs and a bunch of milk tankers either in front or behind. They only put the second coach at the other end when there were loose coupled wagons involved and passengers then rode in the front coach (I wonder how strictly that was enforced) . The milk tankers weren't allowed to enter the goods sidings at Culmstock or Uffculme - presumably because their wheelbase was too long. It therefore seems, and photos bear this out, that mixed trains either conveyed milk tankers and XP vans carrying churns etc - so would have made the run between Hemyock and Tiverton at the same speed as a passenger train- or loose coupled general goods wagons, which would have been slower, but not both. I dont know what the situation would have been with other fitted wagons such as cattle or horse boxes.

1 hour ago, Keith Addenbrooke said:

Really interesting - it probably explains why I prefer to run a three coach train to a four coach train: appears totally counterintuitive, but maybe this is the explanation (I’m talking about secondary routes, not mainlines). I did once have a five-coach set, and I agree it looked much more like an express than afour coach set I also had.

This is proving to be something of a revelation. Unfortunately it also makes me think that if I do build my planned Minories based layout which, in the room avaialable would only be long enough to take a four coach train , I may never be happy with it. This apparently aesthetic question may explain why I've found it so difficult to accept that and its been bugging me for years while I got on with other layouts.

Certainly, on my existing branch line layout I always seem to put together goods trains five wagons long, passenger trains always seem better with three four wheel carriages though two would be prefectly prototypical and mixed trains generally have a single carriage plus three or five wagons. Five wagons plus a carriage involves some tricky shunting as it's longer than the run round but I never seem to put four on -which would fit.

Maybe it is time to look again at a single track throat perhaps something not a million miles from E.A.Beet's O gauge layout from 1948 .

Note the five coach express and the three coaches plus a couple of vans in the bay.

I've thought that a layout in which a departing train passes over two or three sets of points then promptly disappears into the fiddle yard would be a bit silly and not "urban" enough whereas Minories' four point throat does seem a credible run out over main line looking pointwork. Does being able to run a five coach "express" trump that? I'm not sure but having laid out my modified Minories it might now, while we're all locked down here in London, be worth using the battered ol code 100 points to try it out.

I'm also looking again at Giles Barnabe's Puerto Paseo, an On30 layout that I've enjoyed operating several times. That has a single track throat with a kickback line to the "docks" three plattform faces and a two track goods yard. As with Minories there are no run rounds. Could a plan loosely based on this become a convincing terminus at some imaginary French resort and port.

8 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

I've read in many places that for uneven numbers are very effective at making something seem both natural and more numerous (vis-a-vis scenic components in a diorama) - I can definitely see that just comparing four and five-coach sets.

That is a very good point William and perhaps quite significant in making a layout satisfying. It is borne out by research and, though most commonly applied to the rule of three, does seem to hold for five and seven. Certainly, when putting together title or film sequences I always found that three or five shots worked far better than four and that applied to script writing as well. The psychological explanation seems to be that the asymmetry of odd numbers forces us to look for a pattern and the extra attention that requires makes things more interesting. Even numbers create symmetry but odd numbers create interest.

It's perhaps not insignificant that Alan Wright's classic Inglenook sidings uses siding lengths of five, three and three wagons and I've found that shunting a five wagon goods train is far more interesting than four but six wagons doesn't add anything like as much extra interest over five. Three cars also always seemed far more "right" for a DMU than two or four. The two car unit that operates on my local branch does just seem a bit too short to be a proper train.

At the moment I'm frustrated at not quite, by a matters of a foot, or so having room for five coach trains in my current Minories based plan. A five coach train isn't in theory much more of a grand express than one with four coaches but the extra coach does seem to make a far more significant difference than that between five and six coaches. I think this may be because we see at a glance that a train has four coaches but it takes a moment longer to see five. In principle the locomotive should bring the number to five but somehow that doesn't seem to work so I think we separate that into a different category. Using view blockers so that only three carriages can be seen at a time may provide an answer.

I wonder if having three platform faces rather than four also makes Minories more pleasing? Layout plans for main line termini by the likes of Edward Beal always seemed to have four platforms and they somehow always seemed a bit dull. I thought that was because they were based on two island platforms but I think the symmetry may have had something to do with it.

14 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

I know we spoke about this before, but I've completely lost track of what page in the thread it was - for the minimum stock requirements for a steam-hauled minories? If I remember correctly the conversation broadly went that:

1) Suburban trains would most likely dominate in real life, but being similar in look and organiation could be represented by a couple of loco + coach sets

2) A posh 'chairman's' train

3) A couple of regional trains (cheap and fast, and a prestigious one)

4) (part of?) a named express with top link stock

5) A goods loco and some NPCS: newspaper vans, horseboxes, carriage trucks, etc.

Is that about right?

That looks like a good and achievable range of trains and seems not disimilar to the services at Danstercivicman's Birmingham Hope Street (Dan's a topic that started in December 2016 is well worth looking through again) based on an imagined but well thought through GCR spur into Brum. It was Dan's layout complete with fully worked out timetable and shorter than Bradfield Gloucester Square that really inspired me to look again at actually building a Minories inspired layout. (I was about to buy the timber for baseboards but am now in Tier 4)

What you actually run obviously depends on length, taste and era. and what if any goods facilities you decide to add to the basic scheme.

If you're happy to focus on suburban trains serving a great city (e.g. London, Birmingham, as in Moor Street or Glasgow) then even the original short version of Minories is absolutely fine as proved in EM by Tom Cunnington and colleagues' Minories (GN) or Geoff Ashhdown's Tower Pier (not exactly Minories but operationally equivalent and only two metres long plus fiddle)

Unfortunately, pure suburban services don't really float my boat nor yours by the sound of it. Most of the passenger stockl I want to run is main line and includes posh stock like CIWL sleepers, dining cars and even a Pullman that would look daft on my rural BLT.

For those, the range of trains you suggest is pretty close and I think my equivalent of your 'Chairman's' train would be an occasional special train, including my DZH sleeping car, bringing delegates to an international conference .

The four main line coaches plus a four wheel brake van I can just about squeeze in is a bit short for a Grand Express so I'm looking at a situation that I don't think was all that common in Britain where a "city" station- possibly the original terminus of a main line that went on to become longer- is a spur off a longer principal main line (possibly said main line's original terminus) whose route took it a bit too far into the outskirts. That gives me an excuse for it being rather short with only sections- the most interesting sections naturally- of principal expresses using it along with local trains and complete but short cross country trains.

There were termini a bit like that in Biarritz (until 1980) and Boulogne (next to the fish quay ! until 1963) and still are in Tours and Orleans. None of them were/are actually that short but a tight urban environment has good scope for view blocking with overbridges and foreground buildings to hide just how short the trains really are .

Plymouth Millbay was a bit like the situation I'm describing, though I think more a reversing terminus for trains going on to Cornwall, and for a short time Oxford's original and long forgotten terminus close to Folly Bridge had a junction, that I think may have been a triangle, near Hinksey with the lines built later to Worcester and Banbury. Had the University forced those lines to be built a bit further west you might have had a very interesting albeit inconvenient) situation. Oxford also came within shouting distance of having a Metropolitan Railway/GC terminus near Magdalen Bridge. Services from there in competition with the GWR would have been interesting.