Where Worlds Collide

This is the third year I’ve attended “Festival of British Model Railways” at Harrogate. Last year my visit formed part of a rather busy weekend, of which the exhibition was probably the least significant event.

With just the show, and no gigs in the evening, I’m afraid this years event was a little underwhelming, and I’m not sure this show is really worth a two-and-a-half hour journey across the Pennines.

Not that there weren’t some good layouts. Basingstoke is one of the largest and most complex N gauge layouts on the exhibition circuit, and it runs as well as it looks. It’s set in the mid-sixties before electrification when the main line out of Waterloo was one of the last strongholds of steam, and the four-track main line serves up a constant procession of trains, mostly steam-hauled, but with some “Warship” class diesels on trains to Exeter.

These two views show the whole of the scenic part of the layout.

Not all layouts are immense monsters. Steve Grantham’s 4mm scale “Heavy Traffic” is typical of the small shunting layout built my many modellers.

Again, these two photos show the entire layout. Layouts like this are inspirational in that it goes to prove you don’t need a huge space, or need a lorry to transport it.

This view of the layout and it’s operators (Steve is on the right) shows just how small it is. The crowd barriers are a reminder that this building is often used for agricultural fairs.

Followup to my previous post about the new Fleischmann releases, here are a couple of photos of the full-sized versions, both from my Swiss trip in the late summer of last year.

First, we have one of the veteran Ae6/6s at Erstfeld on a trainload of aggregates, at the foot of the climb up the north ramp of the Gotthard line. The train has stopped to attach a pilot loco, and the train later attacked the ferocious climb to the summit with the assistance of one of the more modern Re6/6s, an odd-looking combination.

BLS Re485 no 485.019 hurries through Liestal, just south of Basel, on a ‘rolling road’ train bound for Domodossola in Italy. The Re485 will work the train as far as Spiez, where a pair of Re465s will take over.

I’ve uploaded a few more photos to my fotopic site. Some photos from Cologne dating back to September (pity it was such a dull day, I’ll have to go back there when the sun is shining!), and a few concert photos from Mostly Autumn at the Astoria just before Christmas.

The 2007 Manchester Model Railway exhibition was held, as usual, in New Century Hall in the centre of Manchester. This show traditionally features layouts of a very high standard, and this year was no exception

I’m not normally a fan of narrow gauge steam layouts.  I find too many of them to be random hodgepodges that lack any sense of verisimillitude. Bridport Town is an exception; it’s set in a specific location in Dorset, with most of the non-railway buildings based on real structures. Another touch hat lends authenticity is that the scratchbuilt locomotive fleet are neither models of motive power well-known and associated with other lines, nor the sort of dubuous freelance concoctions you often see on narrow gauge layouts. Instead they’re based on drawings of proposed locomotives that were never actually built, in this case a Hunslet 4-4-0T intended for the Lynton and Barnstable

The World War One Baldwin was a common loco on a great many English (and Welsh) narrow gauge lines. Large numbers were shipped to France during the war for service on military railways. These rough and ready beasts were available cheap after 1918 for any railway in need of motive power.

Lapford Road is based in the Exeter to Barnstable line in the late 1970s. The blue diesel era is now as much ancient history as any steam railway; class 25 locomotives are long since gone from the main line network. Indeed, the surviving preserved examples have now been museum pieces for longer than they were in main line service.

Woodhouse was a large O gauge terminal, very much a classic steam branch terminus layout featuring the odd early diesel, such as this class 17, a model of an attractive prototype. Unfortunately the full sized versions turned out to be almost totally useless, and were consigned to the scrapheap after less than a decade of use.

There were only a couple of N gauge layouts in the show; this was one of them, Bassenthwaite, set in the lake district. Although fairly small (it’s little more than a train-set oval with some additional storage roads for exhibition use), it still displays some excellent scenic modelling, especially the late itself.

I’ve uploaded another set of photos from my Swiss trip; these ones feature two metre-gauge railways, the Zentralbahn (above), formed from a merger of the Luzern Stans Engleberg line and the SBB Brunig line, and the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn, another merger, this time of the Brig Visp Zermatt and the Furka Oberlalp.

This is the first of a series of blog postings covering my European wanderings to fill in the time between Odin Dragonfly and The Reasoning.

Luxembourg was my first overnight stop. It’s the smallest nation in the EU; the entire country is about 40 miles long. This gives a rather unique flavour to Luxembourg’s main railway station in that almost all the trains begin and end their journeys in another country. That means Luxembourg’s own trains are outnumbered in their own country by French, Belgian and German ones. There are also three different voltages of electrification involved, and I’m not at all sure how they cope with that. I assume there’s switchable catenery involved.

The other big difference between Luxembourg and Britain is that almost everything is loco-hauled.

I took these photos in the hour I had waiting for my train to Switzerland in the morning.

One of the few non-loco hauled long-distance trains is the Paris TGV. Here we see an iconic piece of French industrial design disfigured by advertisements for a British bank. I can imagine some Frenchmen not taking kindly to that.

A Basel to Brussels train arrives headed by a French “Sybic” multi-voltage locomotive

Only three coaches of the train carried on to Brussels behind a Belgian loco. Judging by the number of railwaymen photographing this, I’m guessing it’s a rare instance of a freight loco not often seen on passenger work. It’s SNCB no 2006.

Deutche Bahn 181.218 heads the train Norddeich Mole.

Finally, my own train arrives, SNCB’s no 2018 heading the southbound EC “Vauban” Brussels to Interlaken, made up of Swiss EC coaches. The French “Sybic” from the earlier photo took the train forward after reversal.

There are larger versions of these pictures on my Fotopic site

Acording to He Who Must Not Be Named, the weather in Edinburgh was wet throughout the weekend. Not quite true.

When the Virgin Voyager deposited me in Edinburgh Waverley station on Friday afternoon, the weather was like this:

By Saturday morning, it was overcast, although the sun did attempt to break through at one or two points in late morning.

Then at lunchtime, it turned into this:

(Photo by Chris Walkden)

And then by Sunday morning it was dry again!

And there was another glorious evening

And it was another beautiful morning on Monday

I have to wonder if Fish put a curse on the gig

I realised it’s been a month since I went to Switzerland, and I’ve never posted any of the photos I took on the trip

Here’s the very first one I took on the trip, at the station buffet in Kandersteg. I can’t imagine anywhere quite like this in Britain. What railway station has a beer garden with a view of a very busy main line surrounded by magnificent scenery?

Just one without any trains in it. This is in the mountains above Kandersteg at the top of the Sunnbuel cable car. If you think the scene is somewhere in the Misty Mountains of Middle Earth, remember that Tolkein used to go on hiking holidays in this part of the world. Did JRRT once stand here?

Back to trains again, this is the famous Baltschieder viaduct, on the south ramp of the Lötchberg main line. The train is the Brig to Goppenstein local, hauled by one of the twelve ex-SBB Re4/4 sold to the BLS. While many of them now wear BLS new silver and green colours, this one’s still in the old SBB dark green.

On the north ramp this time, here’s one of the hourly Basel-Brig expresses, taken from the footpath that parallels the railway.

After travelling to North Wales to see Mostly Autumn on the Friday, I decided to make a weekend of it. Not that I didn’t head out of Rhyl on the first train out of town on Saturday morning…

I travelled west to Caernarfon, capital of Gwynedd, starting point of the 60cm gauge Welsh Highland Railway. The original WHR ran from Dinas Junction, a few miles south of Caernarfon, through twenty miles of spectacular mountain scenery to Porthmadoc. The northern section dated from 1875, but the extension to Porthmadoc wasn’t completed until 1923, by which time it couldn’t really compete with buses for local traffic. The entire system closed in 1937, too early to benefit from the postwar tourist boom.

The new WHR begins in Caernarfon itself, and runs on the trackbed of a former standard gauge line to Dinas Junction, before running on the original WHR formation.

The engine is by far the largest narrow gauge locomotive running in Britain. It’s an ex-South African 2-6-2 + 2-6-2 Beyer-Garratt, built, I think, in Manchester. It’s more than double the size of the sole surviving locomotive from the original WHR.

The current terminus is Rhyd Ddu, about half-way to Porthmadoc, and half a mile short of the summit of the original line. The remaining section through Beddgelert to Porthmadoc is still under construction, and is due to open in 2009. When complete it will be the longest narrow-gauge line in Britain by a long way.

Long before the coming of the WHR, Caernarfon has been famous for it’s magnificent castle. There are several well-preserved castles in north Wales, but Caernarfon is not only the most impressive, but the most complete. While it was build by Edward I to oppress the conquered Welsh, I notice it’s now flying the Welsh national flag, not the British one.

I’m not sure what to make of this building. It’s the offices of Gwynedd Council, the unitary authority for the top left-hand corner of Wales. The design is so cod-medieval it looks like something out of a Katherine Kurtz novel.

After too long a delay, I’ve put some more pictures from last summer on my Fotopic Site, of SBB and FS motive power in Lugano and Chiasso, in the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland.

Lugano is the lakeside resort where I stayed from the first few days; it’s a remarkably compact and very modellogenic station, on a very busy line.

Chiasso, a few miles further south, is the frontier station with the Italian network where all trains must change locomotives due to the different electrification systems of the two countries; Swiss 15kv AC locomotives give way to Italian 3kv DC ones.