Where Worlds Collide

I really ought to put Steve Jones’ Electric Nose: On My Workbench on my blogroll. It’s really a blog, although it lacks permalinks. Steve is not only a good railway modeller, but he’s a good writer too. And he’s as opinionated as any blogger. Read what he says about the Dapol Pendolino:

A great shame, then, that the Dapol Pendolino is of little use as anything other than a toy - I think the real Pendolinos are fine machines and would kill for a decent model.

The Pendolino isn’t converted to DCC (I’d judged it to be a waste of a decoder) but was having a quick wobble round the layout as loco zero. If you are tempted to convert one then be very careful of which decoder you choose. My model has a stall current of well over 2 amps - a figure that will blow most normally-rated chips. A heavy duty decoder would be required, which given the poor quality of the model would probably be throwing good money after bad. A better bet might be to replace the motor with a superior model and take it from there, but personally I’m unlikely to bother. If it looks like a turkey, sounds like a turkey and moves like a turkey, then the odds are it’s a job for Bernard Matthews rather than Bernd Lenz.

Having seen this Dapol creation, I have to agree with him.

Take a worn out carnival from 11 weeks ago, a refurbished alternator from last week’s, and a reconditioned power plant from across the Atlantic, and you’ve got THE CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES No 57.

Another suspected comment spammer banned: Add 213.213.89.130 to your blacklists.

I’m deleting any comment nowadays that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the post it’s a comment on, and has a suspicious looking URL.

After the mass spamming of weblogs a couple of weeks ago, it looks like there’s yet another DDOS attack on Hosting Matters, taking out Instapundit, Samizdata, and (I think) Matthew Yglesias. Details of what’s going on here. Not a good month for the Blogosphere.

My PBMB on Dreamlyrics is underway again after a slightly longer hiatus that I’d planned, following my holiday and the recruitment of some additional players. Follow the adventures of Karogeth and Luanu, Hollis and Jorlak, and of Marlith.

There’s still one more opening, for anyone considering joining Dreamlyrics.

Just what do today’s 12 year olds make of the computer games our generation used to play?

On Tetris

Tim: Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?

EGM: Sorry, they don’t explode.

Becky: This is boring. Maybe if it had characters and stuff and different levels, it would be OK. If things blew up or something

Space Invaders comes off even worse….

Tim: This is nothing compared to Grand Theft Auto III, because you can’t steal a taxi cab, pick up somebody, then drive into the ocean with him.

Kids today, I don’t know….

First batch of photos from my recent holiday in the West of England up on Fotopic.Net. These are all from Par in Cornwall on 30th september, featuring EWS classes 66 and 67 on china clay, oil and mail trains.

I missed their show last year because I wasn’t ‘up north’ at the time. Blackburn always put on a good show with high-quality layouts, and this years was no exception.

The stars were three very big layouts; The Farnham MRC’s Basingstoke, a accurate copy of the prototype station in N gauge. The layout is set in the late sixties just before the end of steam, on what was then the last fully steam worked main line in the country. It’s the sort of thing you can only do in N, with a 30 foot scenic section taken up by the four track mainline, six platform station, locomotive depot and extensive freight and carriage sidings. It also shows just how good Peco code 55 pointwork can look when well laid and ballasted.

Then there was Europ 3, another big multiple track layout, this time in HO, set in Italy with overhead electrification, with a procession of passenger and freight trains representing just about every country in Europe, hauled by a large fleet of Italian electric locomotives. I like the clever way they use mirrors to produce optical illusions at each end of the layout, to disguise the hidden sharp curves of the track as they double back to the extensive fiddle yard.

Third biggie was Oxenholme, an OO gauge representation of the real life junction of the Windermere branch with the West Coast Mainline, set in about 1960 before dieselisation, although there were few brand-new diesels in evidence, including a brand-new Metrovick Co-Bo.

I also liked the two large scale narrow gauge layouts; Bridport Town and Three Chop Mill. The former, despite being a totally fictitious railway, had a lot of atmosphere and believability, while the latter featured a very high standard of modelling and detail. American logging layouts don’t usually appeal to me at all; the high standard of this one was the exception.

My bank balance got of lightly this time, perhaps because I left my credit card at home. I did pick up a new Bachmann RES BG for my next British layout, plus a couple of N Scale Intermodal containers (OOCL and Uniglory) for my current Swiss layout.

If the threat of IT jobs being outsourced to India wasn’t a worry, now we have these guys to fear.

Software testing must be built into successful software projects. All testing is handled by our multiple Baboon colonies. At Primate Programming Inc. we offer the lowest prices worldwide for quality software testing. All testing must be performed here at our campus due to the howling and air quality issues with Baboons.

(Link from The Daily Illuminator)

Patrick Crozier has written a long piece on his impressions of German railways. Some notable quotes:

German trains can be late. Bit of a shocker, I know, but on plenty of occasions I saw trains running 5, 10 and even 20 minutes late. Again, it was difficult to tell whether this was normal or just my bad luck.

On my trip to Switzerland earlier this year, the only late-running services I were those that started their journeys deep within Germany. I have a (possibly false) impression that German punctuality has deteriorated in recent years. I noted in the Swiss regular interval timetable that trains originating in Germany often slot into the regular pattern replacing an internal Swiss train that hour, but trains from Italy don’t do this, running as extra workings outside the interval timetable. I always assumed this was because of poor Italian punctuality

Although the trains seemed very modern, I was very surprised by the number of suburban services operated by push-pull trains. I had thought that push-pull was a thing of the past but according to our hosts it had the advantage of being extremely flexible - it being possible to roster them on regional services at short notice. Push-pull trains are also (ahem) rather more reliable than some of their more modern competitors.

Actually we have a lot of push-pull trains in Britain, but on inter-city routes rather than local commuter services. The almost universal use of multiple units in Britain is the exception rather than the rule. I believe what survives of American commuter rail is largely operated with push-pull formations, at least on non-electrified lines.

One of the big things on German railways is connections. On Inter City trains you will, usually, find a list of connections on your seat. Very useful if you are travelling off the beaten track.

That’s currently the big bugbear of the British network. There just doesn’t seem to be any attempt to plan sensible connections, even between two services by the same operator. A ludicrous example; on Sundays the hourly branch line service from Falmouth to Truro arrives just after the train to Plymouth, leaving passengers with a 59-minute wait for the next train. Who on earth came up with that one?