Railways Blog

So the train companies are to get a thousand new carriages to be delivered by 2014, 994 of them presumably for Greater London, with half-a-dozen for the rest of the country. What’s left unsaid is whether that’s a thousand additional carriages, or whether a significant proportion will simply be replacements for older rolling stock which will be worn-out by 2014. The sooner the dismal four-wheeled ‘Pacers’ are dispatched to the scrapheap the better.

Naturally, free market ideologue Patrick Crozier is not impressed. All the railway companies need to do is treble the fares, and all the problems of overcrowding with vanish! He does make one valid point, though:

Groan, because, if the last train splurge is anything to go by the new trains will be either unreliable, inappropriate, expensive or late – or all four.

He’s talking about the 1955 modernisation plan, when the nationalised British Railways wasted vast sums of taxpayers money on locomotives some of which turned out to be pretty much useless, and failed to outlive the steam engines they were supposed to replace. Many of them were ordered from manufacturers whose works happened to be in areas of high unemployment, despite the lack of experience in building diesel locomotives.

I don’t think that’s going to happen this time round; in the last few years we’ve already seen a lot of new trains delivered, as will be apparent to anyone that travels by train. If (and it’s a big if) they resist the temptation for the sort of political meddling we saw in 1955, all of those new trains will be repeat orders of tried and trusted designs already in service. So hopefully we won’t get the equivalent of Metrovick Co-Bos or NBL Class 21s this time around.

And so you get back to the image problem that the coach presents. Cars mean individuality and freedom, trains mean romance, and coaches mean school kids singing obscene songs and being sick in the aisle on their way to Llandudno.

From a BBC News article on coach travel.

Friday night’s derailment at Grayrigg seems to have brought out the worst in some sections of the media. We have banner headlines in the tabloids about ‘Train Crash Carnage’, a lot of ill-informed rubbish spouted by self-appointed ‘experts’, and that appalling ambulance-chaser Louise Christian baying for blood. Not that the 70s dinosaur Bob Crow is any better.

What’s noticeable is the remarkable way the Pendolino coaches stood up to a high speed derailment. Compare this with the last serious crash, the derailment at Ufton Nervet in Berkshire, where an HST set derailed at the same speed, and came to a halt in roughly the same distance. In that crash one coach ended up folded in half, and six people died. At Grayrigg all nine coaches remained substantially intact with not as much as a broken window. The relatively low number of serious casualties resulted from people being thrown around inside.

Saying that, the fact that it’s caused by a catastrophic failure of a set of facing points is worrying, especially as it appears very similar to the Potter’s Bar accident in 2002. But passenger deaths on the railways are declining year-on-year, so all the talk about ‘profits before safety’ is just bollocks.

While any death is tragic, we need to keep a sense of proportion. Potter’s Bar was five years ago. In that time, Fifteen Thousand people have died on Britain’s roads. And a good proportion of those were the result of criminal recklessness an order of magnitude worse than the maintenance failures that cause Friday’s derailment.

A few weeks ago, a National Express coach overturned on the slip road connecting the M4 to the M25. The casualties were worse than Grayrigg. Many people suffered horrific injuries; there was an entire family all of whom lost limbs. The story lasted one news cycle in the media. The coach was towed away and the road reopened within 24 hours; no suggestion that the whole area be sealed off as a crime scene for days before any work started clearing the wreckage.

It’s impossible for anything to be 100% safe. It’s quite likely that we’ve reached the point where any attempt to eliminate the last 0.0001% risk might actually endanger lives, either by raising costs or reducing network capacity and forcing people onto the far more dangerous road network. I bet there are dozens of badly designed road junctions more deadly than any set of facing points on the national rail network.

The Times’ Roger Boyes trots out some tired clichés about model railways.

Part of the attraction of model trains has always been the order of the landscape. The trains may sometimes fall off the rails but on the whole they run on time. Everything is prim and proper: the plastic fir trees are untouched by climate change; the towns are tidy clusters of gabled homes rather than slum tenements and the little people never talk back.

Clearly he’s never some of the superbly-modelled scenes of urban decay on the exhibition circuit. Yes, there are the rather dull chocolate box models of a fantasy steam era past that never really existed. But there are plenty of layouts out there with things like abandoned shopping trolleys in rivers modelled in loving detail. And who can forget the topical “No Poll Tax” graffiti on the motorway viaduct on the Model Railway Club’s “New Annington”.

But Roger Boyes visited the trade fair at Nuremberg, and his head exploded.

But visitors to the trade fair in Nuremberg have been gaping at the antics around the railway lines. Merten, which makes train-set figures, is offering a nudist beach, a waitress wearing only an apron and stockings and a couple of lascivious pole-dancers. One scene shows a man urinating against a wall, watched by a woman. Another shows a couple performing oral sex. Look carefully at the scene depicting a brothel raid and, behind the naked prostitutes, you will see the figure of a priest trying to make a quick getaway.

Hate to break it to you, Roger, but they’ve been making HO scale nudists for years. And it’s not just those wacky Germans; there’s a big O gauge British layout on the exhibition circuit with about a dozen nekkid wimmin on it.

Link from Spinneyhead

“Layout Design for Operation” is the third volume in Atlantic Publishing’s layout planning series.

Unlike it’s two predecessors “Designs for Urban Layouts” and “Mainlines in Modest Spaces”, this one’s not the work of Iain Rice, but’s co-authored instead by Steve Rabone and Trevor Ridley.

Rice’s two books, for all their strengths, concentrated very heavily on 4mm scale British-outline steam-era modelling. Designs for the diesel and electric era, or for N gauge were something of an afterthought. This book, while it might lack Rice’s evocative prose and meticulously-drawn plans, does a lot to redress the balance.

For a start, it doesn’t confine itself to British modelling; more than half the layout designs are of Continental European or North American themes. Then there’s a more or less even balance between OO (or HO) and N. Finally, although there are a few steam age designs, the emphasis is very much on modern diesel and electric operation.

Apart from a couple of big 00 steam-age loft-busters, most are room-sized plans, suitable for fitting in to the sort of space modellers are likely to have available. All are either based on real-life locations, or plausible ‘might have beens’. Just about all of the N gauge ones focus on intensive main line operation rather than shunting; this is the sort of thing N really excels at.

To give a couple of examples, there’s one plan based on the evocative west end of Edinburgh Waverley, not the first I’ve seen published for this location. It’s intended to operated entirely with large numbers of multiple units. It simplifies fiddle yard arrangements by taking advantage of the fact that multiple units don’t have to be remarshalled offstage. A perfect antidote for those that say contemporary DMUs are boring.

Similarly, there’s a spare room (9′ x 6′) plan for Göschenen in Switzerland, focussing on the endless procession of international passenger and freight trains over the steeply graded alpine main line; the operating interest centres on bidirectional running enabling fast trains to overtake slower ones, and the banking of freight trains. This turns what could have been a simple tailchaser into a potentially interesting layout.

Many of the OO and HO plans in contrast are typically L-shaped end-to-end affairs, although the themes vary from Arctic Norwegian termini to through stations on Irish secondary routes. Just about all list the typical rolling stock that’s likely to be needed; did you know northern Norway sees both GM Nohabs and class 66s?

Overall, an excellent book, and very inspirational especially if you’re into either modern traction or N gauge.

For weeks Dapol have been teasing us with their secret new N gauge product to be released at Warley next weekend. Rumours of ’58, 59 and 60 reasons’ made some people wrongly suspect it would be one of those three classes of loco. Then came two more rumours, one that the RRP would be £140, which suggested a multiple unit rather than a loco, and that it would be suitable for both modern and steam era modellers. In a conversation with Grahame Hedges at the Crewe show a few days ago, we considered the possibilities of a Southern Region 4-CEP, or a Blue Pullman.

Today, they decided to let the cat out of the bag, and only one of those two rumours turned out to have any truth in it. The new model will be a Class 220 Virgin Voyager.

I’ve posted many, many times about the shortcomings of the full sized Voyager from the perspective of a traveller on this blog, but when viewed from the outside it’s both an iconic and ubiquitous train. They literally travel the length and breadth of the country; from Scotland to Cornwall, from Wales to Brighton. Very few present day main line locations would be complete without one.

Also coming up are a couple of interesting wagons, most notable of which is an intermodal ‘Spine’ wagon with containers, to go with the 66. The combination of the Voyager and the 66 with two or three decent modern wagons to go with it means that the modeller of the contemporary scene has the start of the ‘model railway in a box’ that GWR BLT modellers had from the start.

That wet splattering noise you hear is the exploding heads of certain members of the kettle brigade. One or two of their number were still pontificating up to a few hours earlier that there was no way that Dapol would be doing any modern multiple units because there was clearly no demand for anything wasn’t a locomotive, preferably something that ran before 1968. And anyway the Voyager only runs in one livery, and Dapol will only do things in 57 livery variations. The mystery Dapol product was ‘obviously’ going to be a large tender loco. Let’s hope they accept the Q1, Dapol’s next model, as an acceptable consolation prize.

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!