I received this picture from my eldest daughter, currently on holiday in San Francisco. Nice to see the family name at ‘Bartlett and 23rd’. Perhaps this could be a feature of my future interurban layout? Whatever the location.
Apart from the personal touch, the street scene is interesting, as the buildings are not so different from a standard DPM kit – you could get away with those buildings anywhere. Which reminds me of a recent post on the Model Railroad Hobbyist forum with a picture of Lancing, Iowa by Bob Bochenek. This is pure DPM!
Scanning some more old photographs, I came across these pictures of King’s Cross on a raw January day in 1970. My camera was awful, so apologies for the fuzzy focus. But I’d forgotten what a great place the end of the platform at King’s Cross was. Most trains were locomotive hauled and Deltic’s were very much in evidence.
The station throat and diesel stabling point set the modelling mojo working. All very compact, despite the size of the terminus. Oh to go back to 1970 with a modern digital camera! I’d settle for that, though perhaps a few years earlier with a station full of steam and A4’s would be even better. Enjoy….
Did you see or hear about this yesterday? A Southern 455 EMU comes apart between second & third coach. Luckily was an ECS movement into Victoria.
For ECS read ’empty coaching stock’? When the same thing happens on our layout (or indeed yours if you like) we can say that we’re modelling a typical and prototypical Southern Railway movement. Or course, if you’ve fitted Dapol Scharfenberg couplers to your stock, you will already be familiar with accidental uncoupling!
From the Daily Telegraph, and probably a very good advert for Chinese railways (although they will be jam packed, too, for the mid-autumn festival.)
If you thought the traffic was bad in the UK, then spare a thought for the poor motorists who were left stranded in this monster jam dubbed the ‘carpocalypse’. Forget the bank holiday road ‘chaos’ we usually see in Britain, things can get a lot worse in China during their ‘Golden Week’ celebrations.
Thousands of motorists near a toll station in Beijing were left going nowhere fast as people returned home at the end of the week-long National Day holiday. The nightmare bottleneck was reportedly caused by the combination of a new checkpoint, which sharply reduced the amount of lanes on the motorway from an estimated 50 to 20, and foggy weather. Drone footage captured the unbelievable traffic gridlock on one of the country’s busiest roads, the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway.
An estimated 750 million people, half the country’s population, were expected to travel on China’s rail and road networks across the seven-day holiday. Long tailbacks are a recurring theme when the Mid-Autumn festival begins, with major roads being transformed into enormous parking lots for frustrated motorists. In 2012, there was huge disruption reported when Chinese politicians granted free road travel by suspending motorway tolls. It was even worse in 2010, when traffic slowed to a snail’s pace along a major Beijing road for nine days.
More than three million tourists visited 125 different locations in China during the first six days of this year’s Golden Week, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Migrants are very much in the news at the moment. Despite the seemingly unsolvable pressures of the current mass migration across Europe, I do think that most big cities are made more interesting by a cosmopolitan population. And where would ESNG be without our local curry house?
Along many stretches of the Victoria Line more than 11 different languages are listed as a main language by at least 1% of residents.
Many people originating from Bangladesh moved into the area around Euston, a major railway station connecting the capital to the north of the country, to meet hungry travellers’ fondness of food from the Indian sub-continent, says Mohammed Salique, a local community leader. “Before people get on the train they get takeaways.”
A lot of interesting statistics and some good photographs of the stations along the way. Also a high speed trip at ground level along the route of the line (or as close as one can get along the local roads.)
You might also like this geographically correct tube map. The stylish diagrammatic map is a design classic, but sometimes hides how close stations really are. (I have a friend who moved to the 1970’s who changed tube twice rather than walk half a mile – until she realised where the stations really were.)
Just occasionally I come across a model railroad site that just inspires. John Ott’s site fits all too well into this category. He models late 19th / early 20th century American railroads and his layouts are sometimes weird (the HP Lovecraft references) but invariably wonderful. The scenery and especially the buildings are beautifully detailed. John Ott writes….
THE CITY OF ARKHAM
… Won’t win any civic beauty awards. The model is supposed to represent one of those smoky, dirty, busy American east coast cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Arkham is a combination of scratchbuilt, kitbashed, and straight kit buildings. Several have been salvaged from my previous layouts. All of Arkham’s streets are kinky—they all have twists and bends, which means the blocks are irregular and the building lots are largely trapezoids— just as in real-life Massachusetts.
The rolling stock is equally interesting, much as early UK stock is, but pride of place must go to the carriages. John Ott again says….
Until the dreaded Eastlake style simplified everything in the late 1880s-1890s, passenger cars were ostentatiously decorated with gilt, paint, carving, and marquetry in order to show off the host railroad’s financial well-being, attract patrons with superficial luxury and finally, to distract them from the very real discomforts of late 19th century train travel.
I’m not sure I’m interested in this era, but can certainly learn from an expert modeller at work! I’ve pinched a couple of pictures of the site as a taster below. But please do go and see for yourself.
The trouble with being an exhibition manager is that as soon as one show is over, you have to start planning for the next. And as such it is almost impossible to resign from the job, as you are starting the next show even as the dust is settling from the last one!
However, I did have a couple of months off after the 2015 bash, then realised I had better start getting 2016 organised. A string of emails and phone calls later, we might just have a fully booked show again, and I think it might be one of our better ones.
We’ve fixed the date – April 9th 2016 – and booked St Joseph’s school again, as it has worked so well for the past two years. And what’s on display? (Assuming we don’t get the same number of drop-outs as last year – all totally reasonable, but I’m due a little luck.)
The three modular layouts went down very well last year so we’re doing it again. Our own display will include a mix of N-mod (4 track) and N-club (2 track) modules:
ESNG N-mod and N-club modular layout.
Berkshire NGS group N-mod modular layout.
West Sussex NGS group N-mod modular layout.
Stand alone layouts from the club include:
Leonard (modern SR)
St Chant (BR/SR)
St. Elizabeth Street (modern BR)
Kato Racetrack (Japan – bigger and better with more bullet trains)
Visitors include;
Azuza Street (USA switching layout)
Brighthampton (BR/SR)
Southbridge (GWR)
We have the same selection of traders as last year:
BH Enterprises (for the bits and pieces you never knew you needed)
Invicta Model Rail (for all the latest releases)
JB’s Model World (for your blue storage boxes)
NScaleCH (for second-hand Swiss and others)
Winco (European ‘N’)
Ian Grace
And last but not least, we have:
The N Gauge Society Stand
The ESNG second-hand shop
I think it will be a good show! I now need to find time to finish my N-club modules (I seem to say this every year!)
No rest for the wicked! Another busy weekend, exhibiting at Dorking MRC’s show over in Dorking. Appropriately, it’s in the Oddfellows Hall, perfect for model railway enthusiasts. This is a small but friendly venue and show, but sufferers from being on the first floor, so there is no wheelchair access.
As I’ve reported, a lot of the ESNG members were away this weekend, so instead of a modular layout, I just took along all 4′ of Earl’s Wood, and shuffled and shunted a goods train and an RDC all day – or at least when punters were around. The layout behaved reasonably well, and the foamboard fiddle yard worked fine. However, it will need some repairs where I leant on it. Or perhaps I will finally get around to building a train turntable – I got tired of swapping locomotive and caboose in the fiddle yard. A third train would also give a little more variety. Still, it was a fun weekend, and I got plenty of complements for the layout.
Dorking MRC’s layout, Ranmore Junction, is an excellent model of BR/SR days, with mainly green, blue and blue and grey EMUs running. The layout also features realistic third rail, and this lovely Southern era signal box. I wish Hornby would shrink their 2-BIL down to N.
Our friends from the West Sussex Group were there with a room full of N-gauge, centred around their excellent model of the Lyme Regis branch. Not quite modelled realistically, as I don’t think they’d have got a West Country 4-6-2 around the tight curves the branch was famous for, let alone across Cannington Viaduct. But once again, rule 1 applies – it’s my railway and I’ll do what I want with it!
Other layouts included OO, O, and OO9. Some nice modelling on view. I was wondering whether I was more tempted by a Dapol O gauge Terrier, a Heljan O gauge 4-wheeled railcar, or an OO Metropolitan Bo-Bo electric. I bought some N American wagons instead.
Finally, the Dorking club layout took the opportunity to rival ESNG Paul’s long train award. A 59 car Southern Region EMU will take some beating. If running on our local line, it would be stopping simultaneously in Redhill and Earlswood!
Well, the meeting was buzzing tonight. 13 members present, and it all got a bit much for the treasurer with so much money to collect, so he took a break to lock up the school. the chairman didn’t make it due to dodgy knees and an early round. Is it coincidental that whenever he can’t make it, numbers go up? Surely not!
Here we see a number of the amusing little ESNG members in their natural habitat…. Whoops, touch of the David Attenboroughs. Honest John was testing a number of delightful Grey Goose Mouse (or should it be geese mice) units. I understand these were pioneer overhead electric units, capable of working off four supply voltages, with multiple pantographs to suit. Paul was running a mix of bullet trains and other Japanese multiple units. Some of the ‘normal’ commuter units are again good looking trains.
Derek had an old Graham Farish 4-4-0 and four wheel coaches in Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway livery. It ran very well for much of the evening without overheating or any other old Farish tricks. This blue livery always looks very smart, but the real interest in the line was it’s joint ownership between the Midland and LSWR, later LMS and Southern. This provided an eclectic mix of stock that makes a very good model. The line was closed, probably unwisely, during the 1960’s.
Finally, Simon had a large American steamer on show with a long train of oil tankers.
My latest copy of the British NMRA region magazine, Roundhouse, has an interesting article by David McLaughlin…..
Honey, I shrunk the Railroader!
Have you ever dreamed of being trackside or being in the cab of your favourite diesel or steam engine with your hand on the throttle? And on the layout that you’ve created?
Well, actually no. I’m not that sad and my dreams are generally far more interesting (but I’m not going there.) Read on….
Well, now you can – or at least a scanned and 3D printed version of you can…..
Here’s how it works: you dress up how you’d like your scale figure to appear with whatever you’d like your scale figure to be holding, and then Alan does a 360 scan of you using a handheld scanner. Alan then edits the 3D image to remove the background and any other extraneous bits and the figure is then 3D printed.
I’ve been trying to get rid of my extraneous bits for years. But it does seem a fun idea and the Modelu website is worth a browse. This is what they have to say about scanning…..
Perhaps we could get some 3D prints of the ESNG crown done and put them on the layout? Allan would be making the tea. Derek Apps would be in the ticket office counting the money. You get the idea…. So I’ll stop there before I lose a number of good friends!
If you’re interested, it will be happening at a number of shows later this year.
This is the blog of the East Surrey N Gauge model railway club. Find out about our club activities here, as well as news and views on N-gauge railway modelling.
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