Where Worlds Collide

Lawrence of Amish Tech Support suggests a solution to people making illegal turns in front of the shiny new Houston Metro.

The best way to solve the problem is to put big nasty spikes and plows on the front of each train, Road Warrior-style. Anything that got in the train’s path would end up mangled, eviscerated, and torn to bloody/rusty chunks in less than a second. Then accelerate the trains to about 100MPH, mount webcams or air live broadcasts of the tracks, and people would pay good money to see the Downtown Houston Deathtrain 3000’s run amok.

I’m sure the Dellner(?) automatic couplers on the front of the Manchester Metrolink trams would make a nasty mess of anything that got in the tram’s way. As far as I know, there has yet to be a fatal accident on this line, which has now operated for ten years. Admittedly the street running sections form a small part of the total network.

Oh No! Cold Spring Shops has discovered the dreaded Depot Layout. (In British usage, a ‘Depot’ is a locomotive servicing and maintenance facility, not a passenger station or freight terminal). This theme has been so popular with diesel era modellers in Britain it’s become a bit of a cliché on the Exhibition circuit.

On the subject of curves, it seems to me there’s a big difference in the way American and European modellers approach them. Americans tend to keep the curves in the open, and make extensive use of transition curves to soften them. In contrast, a common European approach is to exploit the way many manufacturers design their stock with clever extending couplings that can negotiate tight curves. So we see layouts with some very tight curves indeed (15″ in HO or 8″ in N), but those curves are hidden in tunnels.

My own layout follows this pattern; restricted to a 12′x2′ space I use tight curves (which will be hidden once I get round to constructing the scenery) to enable me to model a double track mainline that can cope with trains of nine 85′ coaches. They have no problem with the 8½’ curve on the inner main at each end, although they look ridiculous in the process, with the two coach ends at 45° to each other!

I’ve always though the Warblogger movement has more that it’s fair share of racist hatemongers and other deeply unpleasant people. Now one blogger in particular has started issuing death threats and publishing the home address of his target, which crosses the line from ugly talk to genuine evil. Read about it here and here.

The consensus is that the individual in question is probably all belligerent talk, and is probably, like most bullies, a coward. But I can’t help thinking that the next Timothy McVeigh will come from the darker corners of Warblogging or Freeperdom.

Steve Jones is giving up on 4mm British outline modelling, and returning to modelling those strangely shaped American things in HO.

So I’m returning to American modelling, where products are both cheaper and vastly superior to the current crop of UK releases. I’m convinced that quality UK products will come, if only because the terminally stupid defeatists bleating on about accepting whatever you’re given represent the static, existing market. A manufacturer looking for increased sales will obviously have to look beyond this to the lucrative and more discerning sector that currently throws money at American and European concerns. Unfortunately I’ve got a layout to build now, not in 5 years time, so American it is.

In some ways he’s got a point; if you want to build a large layout with a fleet of dozens of locomotives that are all perfectly superdetailed straight out of the box, then UK outline modelling is not the way to go. And it’s very frustrating that a number of high-profile recent releases from UK manufacturers have been released with quite fundamental errors. The Bachmann 37 with cantrail grilles in the wrong place is the worst example; if you’re familiar with the prototype it looks completely wrong, and it’s virtually impossible to correct.

I’ve been in the same boat; after 15 year modelling British N, a rash purchase of a Kato/Hobbytrain BLS Ae4/4 led to what was initially going to be a small Swiss layout as a side project. However, the vastly superior quality of Fleischmann, Arnold, Kato and Minitrix models compared with what I’d been used to from Graham Farish, combined with a house move, meant that Swiss modelling took over, and all my British N went into storage.

I haven’t abandoned British N completely, and I still plan to build another British layout when it looks like I’m going to be permenantly settled in one place and have space for a decent permenant layout. British outline is still in the blood, and not even the sight of an Re10/10 or a pair of BLS Re4/4s slogging through the Alps on a heavy international freight can quite beat the excitement of a pair of 37s hitting the 1:60 bank out of Par with the 14:55 St Blazey to Exeter Speedlink, or a 50 rushing through at dawn on the down Postal. So I’ve kept my extensive collection of UK rolling stock, and even add to it from time to time.

Until then I’m planning to build a smallish portable Swiss layout, to exhibition standards, which should keep me busy for a couple of years.

Update: today’s entry (Scroll down, no permalinks) clarifies things a bit; he’s not abandoning British modelling completely, just changing his big loft layout to US outline, and restricting his British modelling to smaller projects.

Cold Spring Shops notes my review of Iain Rice’s layout planning book, and appears to disagree with the author about the suitability of O gauge for such projects.

Sounds like it’s worth a look, despite the a priori ruling out of O Scale. Depends on what you define as main line, I suppose. Eight coach formations and 50 car coal trains do not a mainline make.

Yes, but….

It all depends on your definition of a ‘modest space’, and the level of versimillitude you want in your model. An American modeller used to building layouts in a basement the size of the total footprint of the house might consider a 20′x20′ area ’small’. To most British modellers such a space would be considered ‘huge’; an area 16′x9′, the size of a single garage or the usable amount of space in a typical attic, is the largest space most of us can ever dream of.

As for realism, some people are satisfied with 3 to 4 coach trains representing 10 to 12 car expresses, and accept unrealistically tight curves as an acceptable compromise. Cyril Freezer has written a load of planbooks in the 60s, 70s and 80s with those sorts of restrictions. But this isn’t really what Rice’s book is about; the emphasis is very much on finescale modelling, where those tight curves aren’t an option, and where major reductions in train length aren’t really acceptable.

Michael Jennings, as well as giving us his thoughts on a trip to Antwerp, tells us of the villainy of King Leopold II

The Belgian Congo (initially the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had ironically managed to get control of it in the first place by presenting himself as a great humanitarian) was perhaps the most brutal colonial enterprise of them all. Essentially, at the end of the 19th century the colony was turned into a slave labour rubber plantation by King Leopold and his men. Over a thirty year period the population of the colony was reduced from 20 million to 10 million. The level of brutality is hard to imagine. ….. The practice in the Congo was truly mindblowingly barbaric. One of its more notable practices was to demand that the men enforcing the collection of rubber from Africans bring back a severed human hand for every bullet they were issued with, to demonstrate that the bullet had not been “wasted”

Not for nothing is this man in the same league as Hitler and Stalin, yet he doesn’t loom anything like as large in the public imagination. As Michael notes, his crimes make those of Saddam Hussein pale into insignificance.

I’m sure my luck is going to run out sooner or later. I realise that over the past three weekends I have travelled over a thousand miles by train, much of it by Virgin Trains, and not suffered any serious delay. And twice I’ve made the connection between the local train from Manchester into the Preston-London at Crewe despite it being too tight to be advertised as a connection. And coming back from Warley I managed to get a seat on a Voyager on a Sunday night!

Just about the worst problem has been outside Notwork Rail’s territory; the tube between Euston and Paddington. That bit seems to go pear-shaped every time I use it. What’s gone wrong with London Underground?

A bit of silliness at Stockport today, though. A minute before the train to Alderley Edge was due on Platform 1, the tannoy announced a platform alteration and that the train to Alderley Edge was delayed due to ‘the late arrival of the inbound service’. As the announcer spoke, a class 323 with the words ‘Alderley Edge’ on the front rolled into platform one, dead on time. After a few moments of confusion, the conductor confirmed that this was indeed the Alderley Edge train, and the station announcement was total bollocks.

I’ve spend part of the weekend at the last gaming convention of 2003, Dragonmeet. Since I’m not currently in any regular roleplaying group, I rely on cons for my gaming fix.

Dragonmeet is a one day convention held at Kensington Town Call in London, now in it’s fourth year in it’s current incarnation. I missed last years event, due to the date clashing with the Warley model railway exhibition; this year the two fell on consecutive weekends, so I could attend both. I did miss out on the office party, though. You can’t have everything, and Dragonmeet gives you less of a hangover.

It’s rather larger in terms of attendance than the two residential cons I’ve attended this year (Stabcon and Conjuration); the action was spread across four halls, though I didn’t venture into the CCG one. The trade hall showcased several British gaming companies, notably Mongoose Publishing with mountains of d20 stuff, Pelgrane Press, publishers of the Dying Earth, and Ragged Angel, publishers of Principia Malifex.

On a one day event you don’t get as much gaming as a full weekend con, so the game sessions tend to be shorter; two to three hours rather than the six hours plus at a longer con. I played two games that are both new to me, Diana: Warrior Princess, GMed by the game’s author, Marcus Rowland, and the modern day horror game Principia Malifex.

Diana is a very silly game indeed, designed for people that think White Wolf’s Adventure is far too po-faced and serious. Imagine a TV show in a future as far away from us as ancient Greece is in the past, with the same level of research and loving attention to historical authenticity as that TV series filmed in New Zealand. Get the idea? As well as Diana and her sidekick Fergie, PCs include Red Ken the barbarian hero, who has the ability to speak to amphibians and reptiles. Villains include the evil Queen Elizabeth, who is also secretly a gangster called The Queenmother, and her evil chancellor, the undead sorcerer Thatcher. The whole thing is played with cinematic game system played with buckets of d6. The adventure we played involved recovering the stolen Stone of Scone, a haggis farm, a gigantic flying dreadnaught chased by the PCs in a steam powered biplane, and a bunch of bagpipe playing druids led by a fellow called Rabbi Burns.

The Principia Malifex game was rather different. This game ran three times during the con, with a prize of a bottle of champagne to any party that managed to defeat the scenario. The premise was that the PCs had banded together to rid the world of an evil sorcerer, who lived in a walled house surrounded by woodland. Our plans went pear-shaped pretty rapidly, losing one PC (death by ladder) before we even got inside the house. I was the third casualty, wibbled out in the kitchen from seeing one Thing Man Was Not Meant To Know too many. The three survivors made it to the top of the stairs before being wiped out, which was further that the earlier group had done. I don’t know how the third group did, but the champagne survived to feature in the charity auction at the end of the convention!

Like most cons, I met up with some of the regulars on the con circuit, Harvey Thomas, Ian McDonald and Jennifer Waddington (with Nigel the mongoose), plus a few others who’s names escape me.

Mainlines in Modest Spaces
Iain Rice
Atlantic Publishers
96pp

This is the sequel to the same author’s “Designs for Urban Layouts”.

This volume defines a ‘modest space’ as anything from a spare room to a single garage, and a ‘main line’ as a extreme provincial end of a route or secondary cross country line, giving as examples the Cornish main line, the Somerset and Dorset, or the Newcastle to Carlisle line, rather than four track sections of the West Coast Main Line.

The first four chapters are taken up with the philosophy of main line modelling, and the practicalities of building them in a limited space, with discussion of curvatures, train lengths and choice of gauge and scale. Sadly he concludes than 7mm is a non-starter; you can’t get “O Gauge”, “Main Line” and “Modest Space” in the same sentence.

Then we get fourteen complete layout plans for different scales and eras. Unlike the previous book in the series, this time the diesel era manages to gets a look in, with two of the fourteen plans set specifically in the post-steam era. Significantly both of these are in N gauge, while all but one of the steam era layouts are 4mm.

There’s a lot of emphasis on fiddle yard design in order to accommodate decent length trains in a limited space. Only a couple of designs use the traditional ‘oval with storage loops’ format. Instead, the author comes up with a variety of different ideas including vertical traversers and cassettes. Several plans feature steep gradients on the scenic parts leading to stacked fiddle yards, sometimes with an equally steep linking road to allow continuous running. Of course, we also see one of his famous “teardrop” style plans, with a steeply graded mainline in a teardrop shape fed by two fiddle yards, one above the other.

One things that strikes me is the relatively limited capacity of many of the plans. With a six road traverser or a pair of three or four road dead end fiddle yards, they only have space for half a dozen trains in a typical operating session.

Every one of these plans, just as in the earlier planbook, is set in a specific time and place. Some are based on actual locations, such as Luxulyan, Bodmin Road and Yeoford, while others are fictitious locations on prototype routes such as the Midland line through the Derbyshire peaks or the L&Y in Lancashire. The whole book is peppered with autobiographical asides. He tells us about trainspotting at Bodmin Road during family summer holidays in Cornwall with his packed lunch (”The up ‘Cornish Riviera’ used to appear at about sandwich-opening time”), and of his last sad sighting of an A4 pacific, filthy and battered hauling a humble pick up goods on the now closed Waverley route in Scotland.

Overall, while not specifically aimed at the diesel era modeller, there’s a lot of food for thought and inspiration in these pages. And the prototypicality of the plans is a far cry from the train set curves and cover-the-entire-board-with-track approach I remember from those Peco planbooks written by Cyril Freezer in the sixties and seventies.

Game WISH 74 is Supplements You’d Like to See

Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?

First, I’d like to see another volume added to the GURPS Alternate Earths setting from GURPS Time Travel. The two existing supplements, snappily titled ‘GURPS Alternate Earths’ and ‘GURPS Alternate Earths 2′ each describe six worlds where history took a different turn, ranging from a brutal totalitarian world where the Nazis won World War Two, a world where Rome never fell, to one where the Vikings dominate the earth. While I’d like to see a third volume with six more worlds for crosstime adventurers to visit, I’d also like to see one detailing specific locales within some of the twelve worlds already published. What dark secrets lie in SS Burgundy, home of the occult Aryan mystics from Reich-5? What of the Benedictine monastic kingdoms in the Pyrenees from Midgard, surviving bastions of Christianity in a world dominated by Norse paganism?

Another GURPS books I’d love to see would be The Madness Dossier. This is one of the sample settings in Ken Hite’s GURPS Horror, in which there was a reality quake in 535AD. Everything in what we believe to be history before that date didn’t actually happen. The true history is that before 535, humanity was enslaved by the alien Anunnaku, who were not only overthrown, but completely edited out of history by means that we don’t really understand. But the Anunnaku aren’t totally vanquished, and occasionally irrupt back into our own reality. They possess the power to mess with people’s perceptions, and if enough people start to believe in them there’s the risk of a second reality quake, wiping out the last millennium and a half of our own history, overwriting it with theirs. Only the secret and ruthless men and women of Project Sandman stand in their way. All this is described in just seven pages; it deserves a full 128 page book of it’s own.

Finally, I’d like to see the In Nomine line completed. In Nomine isn’t quite dead, but its definitely on life support, and it’s by no means certain that any more will be published for it. Earlier supplements detailed many of the superiors (Archangels and Demon Princes), but many more are still to be defined in detail. Since many of my IN PCs have served Jean, Archangel of Lightning, I’d especially like to see detailed writeups of him, and of his arch enemy Vapula, Demon Prince of Technology.