November 05, 2006
How to choose liveries
Yet again, the subject of alleged poor sales of Dapol's class 73 has erupted on the Ngauge Mailing List. While the usual suspects are claiming that the 73 was a silly prototype to have done in the first place, the more likely culprit is Dapol's strange choice of liveries. They started off with two obscure and short-lived liveries (EWS and Southwest Trains), and appeared to have deliberately held back the most popular liveries until last. Then, after flooding the market with too many liveries in too short a time, they complain that the final livery (BR Blue) is selling poorly.
I think it's a myth that a model locomotive needs a huge number of possible liveries in order to sell, to the extend that some numerous and long-lived prototypes have been suggested as poor choices as RtR models because they carried 'too few liveries'.
The trouble is that if a prototype carried 20 liveries, it probably means that 15 of those 20 liveries will only appeal to a limited subset of modellers. Dapol's EWS and SWT class 73s gather dust on dealer's shelves, while kettles (which come in just green or black) sell like hot cakes.
I believe manufacturers should think long and hard at what liveries they should be producing models, and should go for those which are likely to sell well as their initial liveries, not hold them back for later. There are exceptions, of course; there have been one or two particularly attractive liveries that have sold regardless of the fact that only one loco ever carried them. The Pullman livery 73 is a case in point.
For a hypothetical example, look at the class 47. Over their 40 year careers, they've carried a bewildering variety of liveries. But a significant proportion of those liveries were short-lived, often applied to just a handful of locomotives. Many were one-off depot specials. I don't believe any sensible manufacturer should focus on these limited appeal liveries at the expense of bread-and-butter colour schemes.
If I was a manufacturer making an all-new Class 47, the first six liveries should be something like BR Blue, Two Tone Green, Virgin, RES, Railfreight Speedlink, InterCity Swallow.
All of them were applied to significant numbers of locos, and (with the exception of Virgin) lasted quite a long time, and covered a wide geographical area. I know there are some significant liveries missing from the list; large logo blue comes to mind. But between them those six liveries cover just about every base - anyone modelling any part of the country from 1962 to 2002 will find a use for at least one of those six. Lesser region-specific or shorter-lived liveries like GW150, NSE, Scotrail, Dutch or EWS can wait. And things like 47803's "Yellow Peril" or the Police Car livery should be left to the respray artists.
For the humble class 08 shunter, a prototype that's carried even more colour schemes, it's even simpler; Banger Blue, BR Green and EWS will probably satisfy the 08 needs for 95% of the market. After all, there are still BR blue 08s running today!
An excuse for a very bad joke
It's a 1950s jungle movie, probably as politically-incorrect as only a 1950s jungle movie can be.
As our heroic explorers head through the virgin jungle, the sound of tribal drumming can be heard in the distance.
"When the drumming stops, we are doomed", says one of the native guides.
"What do you mean", asks the heroic explorer.
"When the drumming stops, we are doomed", relies the guide.
Then the drumming stops.
"We are doomed", cries the native guide in panic.
"Why", cries the explorer.
The guide stares at him and replies, "Bass Solo".
Swiss Train Formations
Very useful site for anyone modelling Swiss railways. Reisenzüge der Schweiz lists Swiss train formations from the current timetable. It's all in German, but you don't really need the German text to be able make use of the site. For instance, this page lists every conceivable type of rolling stock (and you get a pretty graphic of each one, so you don't need to understand the alphabet soup of coaching stock codes); click on one and you'll get a listing of every train that includes one in the formation.
October 31, 2006
God's Unfinished Business
Richard Hall's Economics and Theology blog reviews John Wilding's God's Unfinished Business: Evolution of Humanity
Nobody will put up a statue of an Amazon reviewer
I've never paid much attention to the customer reviews on Amazon.com. When something's filled with typos and bad spellings, it's difficult to take the reviewer seriously. Charlie Stross has trawled though some of worst, and come up with some hilarious takes of classic works of literature.
To give a flavour, here's some wingnut on Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.
At best, Marquez reveals an egalitarian attitude that seems to pervade the Americas south of the Rio Grande (no wonder those countries are in constant economic trouble). Marquez should study supply side economics as described by Milton Friedman, another Nobel Prize winner, in order to give his book better balance."
Others cover such classics as 1984, Brave New World and A Tale of Two Cities
October 30, 2006
Music Quote of the Day
In a post about music and radio stations, David T of comes up with this gem, deep in the comments thread:
There's Radio 2, for those who have resigned themselves to their middle aged fate.Then, there's 6Music. Which is basically Radio 2. But it plays more Clash.
For a few years, I thought: 'Oh, this is cool - I'm still into new trendy music, and so I'm never going to get old and die'. Then I realised that things like 6Music, the (excellent) Word magazine, and all those revivals of punk bands etc. were actually just an enormous marketing ploy to make me feel as if I was still in touch with coolness; and were, in fact, the cultural equivalent of wearing lo-slung jeans with a middle aged gut hanging over them.
Indeed. Reminds me very much of that work colleague who I've mentioned before.
In fact the only cultural different between the current crop of formulaic new-wave of new-wave of new-wave post-punk retreads and the third-generation prog-rock I listen to is that the prog-rockers never try to pretend that they're cool and trendy. Oh, and they know more than three chords and therefore play far better actual music. But if you're reading this blog you knew that already.
October 29, 2006
An Amazon Astore
As a bit of an experiment, I've included an Amazon aStore on this site. It's still a bit rough and ready, and not yet fully intergrated with the rest of the site, but give it a try.
You're probably going to call me a total commercial sellout for this.
October 28, 2006
Live music for November and December
Like last year, there's a lot of live music coming up over the next couple of months. This represents as many shows as I saw in the whole of 2004.
- Opeth, Manchester Academy 1, Friday 10th November
- Hayseed Dixie, Manchester Academy 3, Friday 17th October
- Mostly Autumn, Bilston Robin 2, Friday 1st December
- IQ, The Mean Fiddler, London, Saturday 9th December
- Mostly Autumn, Crewe Limelight, 20 December
So far I've got tickets for the first four of those. The Crewe Christmas gig isn't quite a definite for me yet, but Mostly Autumn's Xmas shows are usually well worth attending.
Classical Snobs
Rather silly article by Philip Hensher which is supposed to be about why rock musicians shouldn't attempt anything more ambitious than three-minute pop songs, but really says a lot more about the snobbery of large sections of the classical world.
One of the reasons such enterprises often fail so dramatically - and it's very difficult to think of any that have lasted more than a couple of performances - is that their composers rarely have the technical ability to record and convey their intentions with any accuracy.Many rock musicians can't read music and have what strikes most classical musicians as rather a loose conception of authorship, relying on amanuenses to transform vague ideas into detailed life. In the world of popular music, such transcribers, arrangers or "producers" have always done a great deal more than the public suspects.
Note the scare quotes around the word 'producer'. I know that it's not exactly a secret that a lot of best-selling chart acts have extremely limited musical abilities, and their records owe more to whoever's producing them than anything else. But there are plenty of other rock artists with plenty of compositional and arrangement ability, especially those working in genres outside the fashionable 'indie' mainstream. Some can ever read music!
When he starts talking about 'amanuenses' (yes, I did have to look that word up), Hensher reveals how little he understands rock music and how it's created. He can't get his head round the idea that you can have highly complex and sophisticated music that doesn't completely revolve around 'the dots'. If a lot of rock musicians can't read music, then a lot of classically-trained musicians are incapable of playing by ear. I remember a bassist telling me how frustrating he found it to work with musicians who couldn't play a note unless they had those dots in front of them. The reason rock works the way it does because of the ubiquity of recording technology, something else he fails to grasp.
Actually, one of the worst things about many rock/classical crossovers is the appallingly lacklustre playing by some of the orchestral musicians. Frank Zappa has railed against this sort of thing on some of his many orchestral collaborations, especially the complete lack of rhythm of some orchestras. Listen to the original recording of Uriah Heep's "Salisbury", where what's actually quite a good composition is spoiled by some very sloppy and out-of-time playing.
The article ends with a rogues gallery of unsuccessful rock/classical collaborations, while conveniently neglecting to list any of the successful ones.
Railroad Earth, Spawn of Satan?
Have Railroad Earth done a Robert Johnson and sold their souls to The Devil in order to play that shredding mandolin and fiddle? Is there an Ümläüt in the making? If you think I'm worrying unnecessarily, look what's happened to one of their fans.
October 27, 2006
News from 2026
Captain Electra has some predictions for model railway products from the year 2026.
Hornby were showing off their Lyddle End "Nano-Folk", 1:148 scale robotic folk who can be programmed to perform simple tasks such as getting in and off trains, waiting impatiently on the platforms and going shopping. We are assured that the problems encountered with earlier Chinese-built "Nano-Folk" will not be repeated and they will not form a Democratic Republic on your layout.
Will the range include nano-chavs?
October 23, 2006
Life Imitates Test Data
At work I've spent most of the past year's work as an IT tester working on an extremely complex work allocation function as part of a housing management system. Some of my test data is somewhat humourous; I've got aging rock stars as operatives, "Disinfestation of rats and mice" as one of the jobs, and "Sharp pointy stick" as one of the required material items. Little did I know that reality would catch up!
Update: Now it seems that "Disinfestation of Pigeons" needs a Pelican.
October 22, 2006
Podcasting: for Marillion fans only?
Some completely stupid drivel from a tiresomely hipper-than-now New Statesman scribbler called Rachel Cooke.
Podcasting is for geeks -- created by geeks, listened to by geeks. Think about it. Don't you ever wonder why you no longer see anyone wearing a Marillion T-shirt? I'd bet good money that the reason for this is that the owners of said T-shirts are all too busy at home, messing around with their podcast software.
Doesn't she know that Marillion T shirts are for wearing when going to model railway exhibitions?
I find something vaguely fascist about the Bruschetta-eating literati's hatred of 'geeks'. They seem to feel threatened by the very existance of people that don't conform to their narrow definition of 'cool'. How dare we listen to music which has some depth and complexity rather than the latest three-chord style-over-substance flavour of the month? How dare we read science fiction rather than pretending to like dull novels in which nothing happens but are deeply symbolic of man's struggle against his socio-polical environment?
Mailing lists vs. Web Fora
The Ministry of Information's take on HippyDave's post on mailing lists vs. web forums.
On the initial topic (e-mail groups vs. online fora), I definitely favour the latter, for one main reason: threads. For me, that's the 'killer app' of fora, with which e-mail lists can't compete. I drastically prefer to read the topics I choose, rather than an undifferentiated stream of all traffic.
I can see the point on signal-to-noise ratios, but I find that the extra time spent checking and navigating web forums is longer that the time skimming and deleting off-topic postings on most mailing lists. This may be because I'm still on dialup, and I find web forums with all those graphic avatars and other 'cute' cruft take forever to load. But few if any web forums have an easy way of telling you which posts you have and haven't read, or even which threads have new posts.
Most mailing lists support threading if you use a decent mail program (i.e. anything other than Microsoft Outlook, which was intended for corporate email, not Internet discussion groups, and it shows), although that gets weakened by poor thread discipline, mostly from top-posting Outlook users who don't realise that other mail programs exist.
One of these days someone will come up with a 'killer app' that combines the best elements of both. Although I think the usability of web fora would be dramatically improved by the simple addition of RSS feeds which can tell you when there are new posts on a particular subject - I can't imagine the Blogosphere without RSS.