Where Worlds Collide

Mermaid Kiss explain their concept behind their current work-in-progress album American Images. Yes, they’re a prog band - an album’s got to have a concept.

Although I have never been to America, I have a good idea of what it’s like. In my head are cities, deserts, buttes, mountains, canyons, houses, cars, people, lakes, rivers, lots of empty space. And roads. Especially roads.

Evelyn’s never to been to America either. I harbor a desire to sling a couple of guitars in the back of a beat up Buick (it wouldn’t have to be a Buick, anything distinctly American would do) and play our way across the USA, taking our time, stopping off whenever and wherever we feel - staying as much as possible on the back roads where we believe the real heartland of America lies.

This fantasy, is, of course, fueled by watching far too many US road movies with evocative soundtracks… As we planned our imaginary journey from picturesque Boston to the bright lights of New York, down via the Appalachian Mountains where time stands still, and on to the steamy South (ours is to be no straight ‘coast to coast’ trip), it dawned on us that the America we were driving through is the America of films and of music - an America uncorrupted by reality.

They’ll be telling me they’ve never actually been to Etalis next.

I’ve only been to America on business trips to Atlanta, GA, back in the days before George Bush and the War on Terror. I have no desire to go there now. To me, America resembles a gigantic version of Milton Keynes. Not quite sure if that’s quite what Mermaid Kiss are after.

On the other hand, what about the HO-scale Americas built by various Americanophile railway modellers in Britain?  I’m thinking of things like the small crumbling small prairie town of Godinez, Iowa, featured in the July issue of Continental Modeller.  Or all those grain elevators (every layout seems to have one).

Taking a holiday in the Euro zone, that is.

I’ve confirmed my booking for a holiday split between St.Goar-am-Rhein in Germany and Namur in the Belgian Ardennes. Both places I passed through on my way to Switzerland last year.

With the pound doing so badly that British model railway manufacturers can actually think about exporting stuff, going to a Euro country isn’t exactly the cheap option. But nothing in Britain really appeals to me this year (you can have scenery or trains, but not both), and going somewhere outside the Euro zone means going somewhere further away than can easily be reached by train. With the current levels of security theatre at airports I’m not willing to fly and have the airline lose my baggage.

Still, Germany and especially Belgium are renowned for good beer. Provided I can actually afford any…

On RMWeb, there’s a thread on 1923 Grouping. While the initial post was about the reasons behind the grouping (it was an alternative to nationalisation, which was seen as too radical a step in 1923), it’s spawned a side-discussion on alternatives.

For example, what if, rather than the government imposing the big four, they’d instead changed the law to make it much easier for railway companies to merge, and let the market decide which groups would form? We probably wouldn’t have seen the uncomfortable forced marriage between the LNWR and the Midland, for starters.

One scenario that sounds interesting would be a merger between the Midland and the LSWR, forming a network stretching from the Scottish border (and probably beyond, as a Midland-GSWR merger would be likely) to Cornwall. To counter that, the Great Western might merge with the Great Central to form a rival network with a very similar national footprint. This gives a couple of big company networks that will be very different from any of the historical ‘big four’. I wonder what they might have looked like? Would either of them have gone for large-scale electrification?

Four years ago, I posted about Signature Trains for a West of England layout. I tried to come up with six trains which ‘defined’ the Cornish main line in various eras. A lot has happened in the world of model railways since those days, and now I find myself in the early stages of building a layout based very loosely on Lostwithiel in Cornwall.

The layout will still be multi-era. With some careful juggling I think I can fit in eight roads in the fiddle yard, which means I’m can expand to eight trains rather than six.

Let’s start with the post-privatisation era. I had originally selected 2002 (the final hurrah of daytime loco-hauled workings), although since then the introduction of Dapol’s Virgin Voyager has allowed 2004-ish to be modelled.

1999 : This was the indian summer for classic traction. I visited Cornwall in the final weeks before the new EMD class 66s took over from the venerable 37s on freight workings

• Paddington-Penzance express formed of a GWT ‘Merlin’ livery HST. Because Farish never did the TGS or Buffet in this livery, this will have to be a mixed-livery set including two vehicles in the old InterCity colours.
• GWT loco-hauled set made up of InterCity liveried stock behind a Merlin-liveried 47/8. This was a semi-regular substitution for an HST, because GWT were a set short at the time.
• Virgin Cross-Country HST. I don’t have a full set of Virgin liveried coaches, just a TGS and a Buffet, so this will be a second mixed-livery set, with most of the coaches in InterCity
• Loco-hauled Virgin Cross Country set made up of a 7-car Mk1 set behind a 47/8
• Class 158 on local working. Post-privatisation liveries hadn’t come to the 158 fleet this early, so this needs to be a Regional Railways one; which means I have to coax my dead RR back in to life
• Cornish TPO behind a RES livery 47/7
• ‘Enterprise’ freight working, behind a pair of 37s. The stock will be a mix of Bachmann VGAs, Dapol Cargowaggons and Minitrix bogie tanks, the latter a continental product that makes a suitable placeholder for the ’silver bullet’ clay slurry tanks while I’m waiting for the ATM version.
• Local clay working behind a single 37. I’m building a rake of EWS liveried CDAs, although I’m not sure if very many carried EWS livery this early.

2002 : Three years later, a surprising number of things have changed.

• The Paddington HST now carries FGW “Barbie” livery
• The loco-hauled London train is now a timetabled fixture, but the Mk2 coaches now carry FGW’s “Fag Packet’ livery, as does the loco. I’ve also got a “Purple Ronnie” 57/6, which I’ve seen in FGW loco-hauled workings before, although I don’t know if it ever made it into Cornwall.
• We can now model the ‘Night Riviera’, since Bachmann have done the Mk3 sleeping cars in ‘Fag Packet’ livery (they’ve never done them in InterCity). This replaces the second HST in this sequence.
• The Virgin Cross-Country loco-hauled set remains unchanged
• The local 158 must also carry a different livery; I’ve actually got two suitable ones, one in Wessex Trains Alphaline, and one in Central Trains, representing a unit on hire.
• The three freight and parcels workings have the same stock, but all change motive power. The TPO now has class 67 haulage, the ‘Enterprise’ is behind a 60, and the local clay working has a 66.

2004 : We’ve lost the daytime loco-hauled workings, and the TPO has stopped running, but there’s still enough to make for a worthwhile sequence.

• The Barbie HST as before
• Dapol class 221 Voyager replaces the loco-hauled set.
• 158 as before
• Night Riviera sleeper as before, although the motive power is now an FGW liveried 57/6 (my most recent purchase!)
• The Enterprise and the local freight as before, except that both are now behind EWS 66s.
• The Hope-Moorswater cement behind a Freightliner 66; in 2004 it consisted of a mix of Cargowaggons in Blue Circle livery and PCA tankers.
• Engineers train behind a third EWS 66. In the summer of 2004 there were a lot of engineers trains working in conjunction with doubling of the track between Burngullow and Probus. Some were MHAs (Bachmann). Others were things like autoballasters (the forthcoming N gauge society kit).

A future post will cover the sectorisation and blue diesel eras.

First, Psycho Chicken, posting from Glasgow:

The wind’s so strong the building is moving - and when you consider that my building is a 100 year old sandstone tennement block, that’s quite something - and I can’t see the other side of the street for the horizontal rain.

There are actual waves in the school playground.

Then this morning the West Coast Main Line gets seriously disrupted, not by fallen trees or damaged overhead wires, but by an intermodal train shedding containers at Shap at 3 in the morning..

At least one of them was a forty-footer as well. I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before. TV reports show one of them took out a signal and reduced it to a mangled wreck. Yet it didn’t derail the train, which continued into Scotland before the driver realised anything was amiss.

And it wasn’t a single incident either; a second train lost containers south of Milton Keynes.

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.

It’s that time of year again, when model railway companies announce their products for the coming year.. Modelling Swiss outline in N gauge, two new models announced by Fleischmann are naturally of great interest to me.

First, the classic SBB Ae6/6. The full-sized locomotives are now in the twilight of their careers, but last time I visited Switzerland there were still plenty of them about. The first livery will be the Epoch III dark green dating from their introduction in 1952, but many of the survivors still carry this colour scheme in 2008. While there has been a Minitrix model of this loco available for many years, that model now very crude and dated by today’s standards. This iconic locomotive now looks like having the state of the art model it deserves.

And for something much more modern; they’re doing the BLS Re485, a relivery of the DB 185, which they’ve also done as an SBB Re482.  This model is a limited edition for 2008; I can see I’m going to have to reserve one from my local model shop. It appears to be a repeat of a special edition they did a year or so ago for a Swiss dealer. If you model the BLS mainline, it’s an essential model.

It’s going to be an expensive year, I can tell.

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.

Profoundly depressing news about travel terror security

Mr Brown said improved security would be installed at the country’s 250 busiest railway stations, as well as airports, ports and more than 100 other sensitive locations.

“Additional screening” of baggage and passenger searches were planned at some large railway stations and other “sensitive locations”, he said.

This is a fundamentally pointless idea. All that the introduction of airline-style security will achieve is increase the time and hassle involved in travelling anywhere. It’s just so-called ’security theater’; smoke and mirrors designed to create a false sense of security without actually making things any safer.

All a potential terrorist will need to do is board a train at a smaller local station, and they’ll bypass the whole bloody lot. So millions of travellers waste millions of hours of their lives, all for nothing. And thousands of misanthropes will be given the opportunity to ruin people’s day just because they can.

I’ve already given up flying because the every increasing security and ever more draconian baggage restrictions make it too unpleasant an experience. Please don’t let rail travel go the same way.

I have nothing but contempt for any sheep-like Daily Mail readers that bleat “it’s better to be safe than sorry”. I think it’s tragic that people that stupid and gullible are allowed to vote.

I hope the train companies persuade the government how stupid this is.

Update: Christian Wolmar completely agrees with me.