Where Worlds Collide

Living in rented accomodation with fitted carpets tends to preclude the sort of messy scenic work I’ve used on layouts in the past. No plaster Mod-Roc scenery, no green emulsion as a base for scatter materials, and no loose ballast fixed with watered-down PVA glue.

On Wöminsee, I’ve been using Kato Unitrack to avoid ballasting, and I’ve been experimenting with Heki grass mats for ground cover. The results can be seen above. I still need to do some trimming of the edges.

The result looks passable, though it’s not what I’d call exhibition standard. But this layout isn’t planned as an exhibition layout. The join between the two pieces is unfortunately rather noticable. I’ll have to hide that with some lichen bushes.

Carl Cravens has a dilemma. He’s got an idea for a space opera setting, and wonders whether to submit it as an article to Fudge Factor, or whether to polish up a longer version to sell as a downloadable PDF product.

I’ve wondered whether there’s any commercial potential for a Kalyr RPG. In terms of quantity, I’ve certainly got more than enough material for a 128-page worldbook. Much of it’s pretty disorganised at present, and I will have to rewrite the bulk of the actual text. The game mechanics would be Fudge, which is released under the OGL. I don’t have any real idea as to whether I’d be able to sell the thing to anyone who wouldn’t qualify for a playtest copy (i.e. my current players) The other issue is that much of the material is already available online, and The Phoenyx have a non-exclusive licence to it.

The post by Mike Mearls about core stories also makes me think. Successful RPGs have a standard storyline for adventures; D&D has “Adventurers kill monsters, take their stuff, and go up in levels”, Call of Cthulhu has “Investigators explore strange places, discover Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and go horribly insane while saving the earth. What’s the core story of Kalyr? (As the GM and worldbuilder, I think I know this, but I wonder how clear it is to anyone else)

The Ministry of Information thinks BlogExplosion has fizzled out. I’m not so sure. I think it’s probably peaked, but it’s not dead yet. I think it’s possible to game their Blog Rocket promotion to get more hits than you surf random blogs.

What I’d like to see is a BlogExplosion-like link exchange system which, instead of serving up completely random blogs, does some sort of bayersian analysis comparing the text of your own blog with the ones it serves up; then you’d be more likely to see blogs covering subjects you’re actually interested in. It would filter out all the angry rightwing bigots and vapid teenage diaries, unless you’re actually interested in reading such things.

Actually, something that works in exactly the same way as a Bayersian spam filter would do the trick. All it would have to do would be to ask you to rate each blog as “good” or “bad”, and it can filter blogs in the same way as a spam filter filters your email.

Getting from Cheadle Hulme in Cheshire to Barrow-Upon-Soar in Leicestershire is not one of the easiest rail journeys to make. The ticket clerk at Cheadle Hulme hadn’t even heard of Barrow Upon Soar, although it didn’t help when I asked for a ticket to Barrow on Soar, which obviously wasn’t programmed in the ticket machine

The journey involves no fewer than four trains, a local for one stop to Stockport, a Central Trains ‘City Link’ to Nottingham, then a MML Meridian to Loughborough, and finally another local one stop to the unstaffed halt at Barrow upon Soar.

The short hop from Nottingham to Loughborough was the first time I’d had the chance to travel in one of Midland Main Line’s new class 222 “Meridians”. These are derived from the class 220 Voyager, but with rather better interiors, with seating and general ambience resembling the classic Mk3. Unfortunately this was spoiled by noticeable vibration from the underfloor engines, worse than a Voyager, and far more intrusive than the 170 Turbostar on the Stockport-Nottingham leg. Don’t know if this is typical, or there was a fault on car I rode in.

Amazingly, with eight trains and six changes in the outward and return journey, I didn’t suffer a single missed connection. I did have one late-running train, the MML HST between Loughborough and Chesterfield on the way back, which lost 10-15 minutes because of a track circuit failure near Trent. But fortunately there was a 25 minute connection at Chesterfield.

Interesting loading levels on the trains. The Central Trains citylink train was a two car class 170s DMU, and was pretty full out of Stockport, although everyone managed to find a seat. I’ve travelled this way a lot, and it’s often been busy on this route on a Saturday morning. Many people got off at Sheffield, but just as many boarded, and there were people standing when it reached Nottingham, where it terminated due to engineering work further east. It actually reached Nottingham in time for a slightly earlier train than the one I was making for. But the two car 170 bound for Birmingham was pretty crowded, so I decided to wait for the train I’d originally planned to catch, the MML London train. This one, the four car 222 was practically empty; as a semi-fast to London, it would probably pick up passengers en-route at places like Wellingborough and Kettering, and arrive at St Pancras with a decent loading.

The last leg of the journey, of just six minutes, was on the ‘Ivanhoe Line’, a new local service shuttling between Loughborough and Leicester, serving several intermediate communities who has lost their rail service in the Beeching cuts on the 1960s. Only about a dozen passengers boarded the two coach class 156 DMU at the start of it’s journey, but I counted another eleven waiting at it’s first stop, Barrow upon Soar.

My local Member of Parliament Patsy Calton, who I voted for earlier this month, has died. As reported by the BBC

Ms Calton won her seat with a majority of about 4,000 despite defeated Conservative MP Stephen Day trying to win it back.

She was unable to attend the count at Stockport Town Hall due to cancer treatment.

Liberal Democrats president Simon Hughes said: “This is a real tragedy, Patsy I’ve known for many years.

“I was born in the seat she came to represent, she had lived there for many years with her family.

“She became not just the MP for Cheadle… but she became a true community MP.

“In her last days, fighting against cancer, she refused to give in, she said ‘other people have to fight, I’m not going to give in just because I’m a politician’.”

He said there was “no greater recent model of political courage” than Ms Calton.

I knew she was seriously ill, even before the election. But her death still comes as a shock. I’ve only lived in Cheadle for a couple of years, but I gather she’d established a reputation as a very good constituency MP, who will be hard to replace.

There’s an awful lot of whining on the ngauge and ngauge-modern mailing lists from people who ought to know better, complaining that Dapol are doing a class 66 locomotive instead of [insert class here]. One person is even claiming that it will be a ‘financial disaster’ for Dapol to go head-to-head with Bachmann’s own long-promised model.

For those whining “Why couldn’t it have been a 59 or a 58 or a 56″, all I can say is “When was the last time you travelled anywhere by train, or went anywhere near a railway line?”. 66s are everywhere. The odds are, if you see a freight train, it will have one of these locomotives on the front. They are now the second most numerous main line British diesel of all time, after the class 47. They’re going to be the backbone of freight haulage for the forseeable future.

The class is really the meat and potatoes locomotive of the present-day scheme. Other classes like 60s or 67s are just gravy. Unless you want a purely passenger line with a fleet of nothing but units, you cannot build a convincing contemporary layout set anywhere in the country without at least one 66. They run everywhere from Penzance in Cornwall, to Georgemas Junction in the far north of Scotland.

In my opinion, Dapol made a serious marketing blunder with their first non-steam model. The 73 is a ‘niche’ prototype with limited geographical appeal, and they compounded the error by choosing what must have been the least popular liveries for the initial release. Hardly surprising the initial sales have been disappointing. With the 66, it seems that Dapol have learned from their earlier mistakes, and it deserves to sell well.

Dapol dropped a bombshell at the N Gauge Society AGM with the news of their next models for this year:

• Class 66 locomotive
• Dogfish ballast hopper
• Six wheel milk tanker

Future plans include a class 150 DMU, which will be a very useful model provided it has nothing to do with their horrible OO model from a few years back.

There has been a lot of criticism on the Ngauge mailing list for their decision for do a class 66, on the grounds that Bachmann had announced one. But the critics ignore one obvious fact! Bachmann have been promising a 66 for years now, with no release in sight. Bachmann have announced all sorts of things, with release dates put back so many times that nobody takes them seriously any more. Some have even suggested the announce things as ‘spoilers’, to discourage rivals. Following on from Peco with the HAA coal hopper, Dapol have decided to call their bluff. Good on Dapol! Perhaps this will prompt Bachmann to get their finger out. The prototype 66 is in service with several operators with a combined fleet approaching 400. It’s the essential model for anyone wanting to model the contemporary British scene.

If someone had asked me for the ideal wagons for Dapol to produce, I would have suggested the Dogfish and the milk tanker! Both are very long-lived prototypes with a wide geographical spread, sellable to both diesel fans and boiler bunnies. Both tended to run in block rakes. Any British layout set from 1948 through to about 2000 could make use of a rake of a dozen or so Dogfish. Although there is an etched brass kit available, they’re a pig to build, and way beyond my ability to produce an acceptable model from. Any many layouts set from the 1930s to the 1980s can find a home for a milk tank or six, especially those much loved west country branches.

As reported by the BBC, South West trains have run the last Mk1 train out of Waterloo. The venerable 4-VEP and 4-CIG units have been a feature of south London commuter lines for something like 40 years. North of the Thames, and in the regions, slam door commuter stock has been history for a while, although the even more venerable class 101 DMUs lasted a good while on Manchester commuter services.

You haven’t missed your last chance to ride one; not only do Southern still have a few trains left in service out of Victoria, but SWT still retain a couple of units for the Brockenhurst to Lymington shuttle in Dorset.

These trains were a daily feature of my life for several years when I commuted to Virginia Water in Surrey, with the English Electric motors howling up the grade from Egham.

At least one unit really needs to be preserved, preferably in main line working order. These trains are every bit as iconic as any much-preserved class of locomotive.

Graham Eccles, SWT chairman and managing director wins the Donald Rumsfeld gobbledegook award with this quote:
“Although they have passed their sell-by date, they don’t owe anybody a living.”

Quite what that’s supposed to mean is an unknown unknown.

Unlike those people who start new RPG campaigns every six months or so, I’ve been using the same setting for almost all the games I’ve run for the past fifteen years or so, including the eight years old PBeM, the face-to-face game I ran for about five years before that, and the convention one-shots I’ve run in the last couple of years. Even after all this time, the setting is still evolving; you get a lot of depth after all that time.

The Kalyr Wiki has been around for quite a while. Originally it merely duplicated all my existing static web pages, but more recently I’ve added some new stuff. The latest entries cover Political Systems and Crime and Punishment. Food and Drink and Family Life and Customs, howerver consist only of a few sketchy ideas.

The great think about a Wiki is that other people can contribute and add ideas. I’d appreciate comments or further ideas, especially for the entries above.

Steve Jones‘s commented on my previous posting, comparing Ken Hite‘s subjective film review with the factually inaccurate ‘OK at normal viewing distances’ nonsense you get in product reviews in model railway magazines.

He got me thinking, and my mind started making connections between apparently unconnected things, especially the comparisons between my two hobbies, RPGs and model railways. Is the misshapen Farish class 56 equivalent to the broken dice mechanic of Deadlands. Do E Gary Gygax and Cyril Freezer occupy equivalent positions in the two respective hobbies, very influential in the founding years, but now rather stuck in the past? How much does the clunky class-and-level mechanics of D&D parallel the steamroller wheels and tension lock couplings of ready-to-run OO gauge?

Or am I talking complete rubbish?