Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench

[Jake The Rat]

3 hours ago, Mikkel said:

No mouse? 🙂 It would be a nice trademark to leave in there. Do people do such things in VR modelling?

I do. On my layouts there are always more cats than people, & I really like this dark & gloomy thing named 'RTS Old Railway Tower', though I don't know what purpose it might serve. A water tower, maybe?

 

 

18 hours ago, Annie said:

I know that mice can jump surprisingly high when they have a need to.

As you might suspect from my nickname, I'm quite familiar with their larger relatives; & yes, they can. They're also skilful climbers.

Edited July 19 by Jake The Rat

[Annie]

2 hours ago, Jake The Rat said:

On my layouts there are always more cats than people

I did mention your cats Jake.

 

I think that old railway tower is a water tower like you say.  They don't make them like that anymore.

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, Annie said:

I did mention your cats Jake.

 

I think that old railway tower is a water tower like you say.  They don't make them like that anymore.

 

I'm afraid I misread this and thought his cat was using the water tower as a latrine.

 

I'll go an rinse my brain out with soap and water.

[Annie]

GWR Star Cheer Up Picture:  100 years ago today, on 19 July 1924, this photograph was taken of Star class 4-6-0 No 4006 ‘Red Star’ at Plymouth North Road station.

 

'Stars' and 'Saints' are nearly almost as good as Broad Gauge engines for cheering me up.

 

(The photograph is by the Stephenson Locomotive Society and the print is in the Jeffery collection, Great Western Trust, Didcot Railway Centre.)

[Compound2632]

19 minutes ago, Annie said:

'Stars' and 'Saints' are nearly almost as good as Broad Gauge engines for cheering me up.

 

True, they sit up straight and have a certain perkiness to them, at least in early condition. I think the small tender helps give this impression. Compared with them Castles and Kings seem to slouch along with their hands in their pockets.

[Annie]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Compared with them Castles and Kings seem to slouch along with their hands in their pockets.

I couldn't have asked for a better comparison.  The 'Castles' and 'Kings' have never much appealed to me, - great uncouth thugs that they are.

[Edwardian]

8 hours ago, Annie said:

I couldn't have asked for a better comparison.  The 'Castles' and 'Kings' have never much appealed to me, - great uncouth thugs that they are.

 

And as a Star should look, with the cab porthole windows!

[Annie]

Morning Beyer-Peacock Cheer Up Picture:  Dutch State Railways No. 13 (2-4-0, Beyer Peacock & Co. Manchester, No.533 of 1864; renumbered Dutch Railways NS 705 in 1921). This the oldest preserved locomotive in the Netherlands. Seen at the Dutch National Railway Museum, Utrecht, 9 July 2024.

The tender isn't the original as it belonged to an older sister engine built a year earlier, but I think that can be forgiven as it's absolutely wonderful to see such an elegant survivor that's being looked after so well.

 

[Jake The Rat]

On 19/07/2024 at 23:27, Compound2632 said:

Compared with them Castles and Kings seem to slouch along with their hands in their pockets.

 

On 20/07/2024 at 00:57, Annie said:

I couldn't have asked for a better comparison.  The 'Castles' and 'Kings' have never much appealed to me, - great uncouth thugs that they are.

 

Call them what you want - I like them. They were the closest things to the magnificent Pacifics of the other 3 big railways the GWR ever had. 😎

 

'Cadbury Castle' meets 'King George V.' somewhere between Tristyn & Rathtyen.

 

 

& yes, I do know that the Kings never ran in Wales, but I was just too lazy to change all the Welsh names.  😉

[Annie]

2 hours ago, Jake The Rat said:

Call them what you want - I like them. They were the closest things to the magnificent Pacifics of the other 3 big railways the GWR ever had. 😎

It's a question of the pre-grouping 4-6-0 design aesthetic versus the later post-grouping version of the same.

 

Each to their own though.

[Annie]

I stumbled onto this while looking for something else.  I thought it might be of interest.

 

 

[Annie]

I may have posted this here before, but if I have it's worth posting again.

 

Paul Meyerheim (German, 1835-1915) - Assembly of a Locomotive, 1873.  This painting is one of a seven-part series Albert Borsig commissioned for his villa in Berlin-Moabit.

 

[Jake The Rat]

I can't make up my mind, what I like better: the loco or the cat. 🤔🌞 

[Compound2632]

On 23/07/2024 at 19:51, Annie said:

I stumbled onto this while looking for something else.  I thought it might be of interest.

 

Three converted ex-LNWR diagram 17A goods brake vans.

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Three converted ex-LNWR diagram 17A goods brake vans.

 

Is it too grim to contemplate what they might have been used for?

[Annie]

They seem to have been used as a basic form of passenger carriage. 19 seconds into the video there is a photo of the carriages in use to transport school children.

[Edwardian]

4 minutes ago, Annie said:

They seem to have been used as a basic form of passenger carriage. 19 seconds into the video there is a photo of the carriages in use to transport school children.

 

Yes, but they might have been intended for patients (windowless padded cells on wheels comes, perhaps unfairly, to mind). There were proper carriages on the line, judging from that filum, which I assume were for the relatives.

 

I am sure that Whittingham Hospital was built with the best of intentions and probably, for the first decades of its use, it did provide better lives for its inmates than they would otherwise have endured as "pauper lunatics", as the founders put it. It certainly seems intended to have accommodated inmates well in pleasant surroundings. The emulation of a country house set in recreational park land seems clear. Later, in the 1960s, it seems to have been criticised as one of those grim Victorian mental institutions, and probably no longer represented the best conditions or the most enlighted care 90 years on from its well-meaning inception. Of course, the subsequent days of "care in the community" were to see the closure of many such places to be replaced with the new horror on the mentally ill living on the streets.  

 

Few societies have a good record in dealing with mental illness, and places like Whittingham at its inception, and for many years after, may have represented the high point, such as it was.  

 

There is a model railway, called Hospital Gates, that is "inspired by" the Whittingham system. O gauge, IIRC. I recall an article in which the builders seemed all kind of queasy about the fact that the railway served a mental asylum and made sure no part of  the hospital featured.  I cannot help thinking that if we were less queasy about mental illness and acknowledged and confronted it more, our society would provide better outcomes, and I do not see the need to shy away from depicting such a subject any more than I would a necropolis railway or a military railway in wartime (killing each other does seem to be an integral part of human life, albeit one that ought to be more avoidable than it has often proved to be), and there was even a prison railway, though that is not pleasant to contemplate either. These are all slices of life, and there are certain things I would certainly not depict, yet if I see a loaded WW1 hospital train or a closed train of Victorian "lunatics" on a model railway, it will give me pause for thought, it will make me a little sad or uncomfortable, but, then that might just be better than ignoring it.

 

That said, this hobby should be a source of joy, and no one should be criticism for treating it as escapism. I certinly do!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Annie]

7 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Of course, the subsequent days of "care in the community" were to see the closure of many such places to be replaced with the new horror on the mentally ill living on the streets.  

 

As a former social worker for the adult mental health service there is so much I could say about this, but I won't since this is not an appropriate venue for it.  However I will comment that in this sentence James you have very much summed up what neglect 'care in the community' was all about.  At its heart it was more about saving money and selling off valuable real estate than providing care.

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, Annie said:

At its heart it was more about saving money and selling off valuable real estate than providing care.

 

And as usual providing insufficient resource to make something good in principle actually work in practice. 

[Edwardian]

It is problem for the Proceedings thread to ponder further, but personally I would be shocked, shocked, by the suggestion that those who set themselves above us do not always act in the best interests of the general populations of their countries. I mean, surely the last 14 years in the UK speaks to the care of the political classes for the the people of this great land.

[Caley Jim]

Apropos the above post - aye,right!

 

Jim

[Caley Jim]

Deleted - duplicate post. C- nile virus again! 🫣

 

Jim

Edited July 26 by Caley Jim

[Annie]

Digging about in my hard drive where I keep my railway snaps I found these ones of one of my 'Sharpies' on motor train duty.

My Norfolk layout has been out of action for some time, - though I have been able to retrieve it from TRS22 and it's now part way through being installed in TRS19 where I think it will be a lot happier.  Even though I've got other layouts that I like running trains around on I've been missing my Norfolk layout more than just a bit and it will be nice to have it properly working again.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 26 by Annie
added a picture

[Edwardian]

We've missed it too. What beutiful summer evening light.

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

We've missed it too. What beautiful summer evening light.

Thanks very much james.  TRS22 was certainly good for creating lovely soft Summer evening and morning effects, but with every 'update' resulting in things that were working perfectly fine before now being suddenly broken I decided to give up on it for my older legacy layouts.  The last straw was when N3V did something daft to the collision detection scripts which mean that it was nearly impossible to run a locomotive around a train without it trying to crash straight through a train of carriages.

I've been told that layouts and routes built in TRS22 don't have the issues that layouts built in TS12  and TANE have when transfered over to TRS22, but I still see plenty of cries of anguish being recorded on the TRS22 Trainz forum after each new 'update' has been released.

 

I simply want to be able to build up my digital layouts and have fun with them without having to spend hours of my time fixing things that got broken by an 'update' that was touted as being an improvement.  I'm going to take a JOMO* attitude to all of N3V's 'update' patches from now on as I'm tired of my hard work being the subject of N3V's mad digital experiments.

 

*JOMO, - Joy Of Missing Out.

 

Edited July 26 by Annie
More words needed.