Where Worlds Collide

Cold Spring Shops tells us it’s the 50th anniversery of the container. He remarks that deep-sea container traffic is one of the biggest growth areas for the US railroads

It’s true in Britain as well; this one of Freightliner’s GM-built class 66s at Colchester, bound for the port of Felixtowe. Knowing the state of British manufacturing industry, it’s likely that most of the containers will be empty.

Freightliner has an interesting history. It started out as a domestic intermodal service in the 1960s, intended as the long-term replacement for internal wagonload freight. That never happened; the distances involved meant that it couldn’t compete with direct road haulage as the motorway network expanded, and the domestic traffic slowly faded away. But Freighliner repositioned itself in a new market hauling boxes from ports, and traffic is now booming.

You think your own country has a terrible music scene, dominated by cheesy pap? It could be worse. You could live in North Korea

A graduate of the North’s prestigious Pyongyang University of Music and Dance, Kim was allowed to further his studies at the Tchaikovsky Music Academy in Moscow in 1995 at government expense.

A year later, he came into contact with jazz for the first time.

“One day, one music class was cancelled, so I went to a cafe near my school to drink a cup of coffee, and music (coming) from the speakers there _ a type that I had never heard before _ thrilled me”, Kim said.

So, which jazz great did he hear? Bird? Coltrane? Monk? Rollins?

“I asked the cafe owner what kind of music that was, and he replied it was `A Comme Amour’ by pop, classical and jazz pianist Richard Clayderman. It was too good, and that began to change my life”.

Richard Clayderman? “Too good, and that began to change my life”?? A chilling insight into the cultural desert that is North Korea.

First, there’s a new Fudge Web Forum. The mere existence of such a thing is controversial to some people, who fear it will cannibalise traffic from the existing Fudge Mailing List. This is probably a justified fear, but I’m hoping that it will instead attract a new audience of the ranks of people that love webforums but loathe mailing lists. If this happens it might raise the overall profile of Fudge in the wider gamer community, which would be a Good Thing.

I do have to say that the big plus for web fora is their visibility to the wider world; mailing lists archives are often hard to find, and hard to follow to to lack of threading. I’ve posted to the new forum a few times, but I’ll probably pay more attention to the mailing list, because I find that form is more convenient to follow discussions.

Of course, the Phoenyx will soon have a webforum interface to the mailing lists; it’s ironic that the Fudge webforum appeared just before it was ready to go into beta test.

Perhaps more significantly, there’s this announcement on Carl Cravens’ blog

Now I’ve taken on the leadership task of coordinating a bottom-up rewrite of the Fudge core rules.

Why, oh, why would I add such a task to my already-full plate? It seems kind of insane. But in my recent four-part essay (which I should post here) about Fudge, Fudge Factor, the Fudge community, Fudge in the marketplace, and the future of all that, I call for just that thing… a bottom-up rewrite and embellishment of a document that has not changed in ten years, despite what Expanded and 10th Anniversary editions might imply. In short, to rewrite Fudge into what it should already be, taking into account ten years of accumulated wisdom from the Fudge community.

And I don’t believe in saying something should be done unless I’m willing to contribute to the effort. In this case, that turned out to be leading the project and (so far) 27 team members. Cat herders have it easy. But it needs done, and I’m fairly optimistic. It’s going to take some time… maybe a couple years, but I think it will work and will be worth it.

I’m one of those 27. I hope this project bears fruit and doesn’t fizzle out in a heap of disagreements.

After too long a silence, Electric Nose is back. His most recent post commemorates the 50th anniversary of Cyril Freezer’s Minories.

I wouldn’t presume to second-guess Cyril’s original intentions, but, whether by accident or design, for my money one of the most significant factors that has made Minories consistently attractive over five decades is it’s do-ability. It’s buildable by anyone, regardless of scale or gauge. It’ll work with everything from set-track upwards, and uses standard pointwork cleverly, arranged in such a way that dog-legs and reverse-curves are minimised. All too frequently, published track plans show flowing pointwork on sweeping curves, artistic license painting an idyllic picture that, whilst prototypical, just isn’t attainable when you start nailing the savage corners of commercial trackwork to your baseboard. In a hobby where 99.99% of plans seem to be aimed at the 0.01% who think hand-building track is a worthwhile use of their leisure time, Minories stays with the mainstream. The sharper than scale bends inherent in commercial pointwork are masked as much as possible by using them where a train needs to turn a fairly sharp corner anway. The design works with these limitations, using them as features rather than obstacles.

Cyril Freezer’s plans get a lot of stick, and many of them look cramped and rather toy-like compared with the more recent designs from the likes of Iain Rice. But I was greatly inspired in my teenage years by the likes of “60 plans for small layouts” and “Plans for Larger Layouts” published by Peco Publications in the 1960s. I think a lot of his smaller ones would actually work very well in N if you built them to the same physical area as his 00 plans, with adjustments for track centres. Then his 3-4 coach trains become 6-8 coaches, and visible 18″ curves don’t look quite so horrible.

Saying that, I’ve never tried to build anything based on a CJF trackplan. All my British outline N gauge layouts have been attempts to reproduce prototypes.

BTW, I’ve always thought that Cyril Freezer is to model railways what E Gary Gygax is to roleplaying. And I have (briefly) met both of them.

What do you get when you cross Rammstein, The Darkness, and the props departments of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings? Something like Finlands’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. Those Vikings are crazy, I tell you….

I’d love to see Britain enter a proper rock song rather than the processed eurocheese we usually come up with. Mötorhead would be the ideal entry, especially if they do something completely uncompromising, along the lines of “Killed By Death”.

On the other hand, perhaps The Darkness would be the ideal entry; they’d actually be crazy enough to do it.

First Dagworth, next the world! That’s what The Guardian’s Dave Simpson seems to think.

“Most youth subcultures encourage people to drop out of school and do illegal things,” she says. “Most goths are well educated, however. They hardly ever drop out and are often the best pupils. The subculture encourages interest in classical education, especially the arts. I’d say goths are more likely to make careers in web design, computer programming … even journalism.”

Still doesn’t explain why I know more goths through the world of model railways than through RPGs.

We’re used to hearing of ridiculous lawsuits from the land of a far too many lawyers. Now, a Californian tries to sue himself

Curtis Gokey was understandably furious when a lorry belonging to the city of Lodi, California, backed into his pickup truck last month, causing damage estimated at $3,600 (�2,000) - although he was the one driving the lorry. Mr Gokey, a 51-year-old employee of the local public works department, filed a lawsuit demanding that the city pay for the repairs.

I think it’s time for Dick Cheney to shoot a few more lawyers…

Just over two years ago, four rail workers died in an accident at Tebay, when they were run down by a runaway wagon. The head of a maintenance firm has just been convicted of manslaughter.

Opening the case for the crown, Robert Smith QC told the panel of six men and six women that Connolly was “grossly negligent” in his actions.

He said Connolly, who ran MAC Machinery Services, had “scant regard” for railway safety and had deliberately disconnected the hydraulic brakes on two wagons.

He had dismantled the brakes for “financial gain” because it was cheaper than repairing the wagons properly.

Connolly’s firm was subcontracted to work for the rail maintenance company Carillion, which was working with Network Rail.

He had driven a low-loader truck with a railway crane and two wagons to Scout Green in Cumbria to lift ageing track from the west coast mainline on to railway wagons.

Shortly before 6am on February 15 2004, Kennett began using the large crane - known as a road rail vehicle - to lift lengths of steel on to the wagons. While he worked, Connolly slept in the back of his lorry.

Connolly had deliberately disconnected the brakes on the two wagons because both the hydraulic systems were in such a bad way they would not work properly in conjunction with the crane.

He then filled the cables connecting the wagons to the crane - usually full of hydraulic brake fluid - with ball bearings, giving the impression to an onlooker that everything was above board.

This is simply appalling. I hope the judge throws the book at him when it comes to sentencing.

But it goes further than that. It’s a terrible indictment of the way the railway industry has been fragmented that cowboys like Connolly are allowed to get anywhere near the tracks or anything else. This is like something out of the 1840s, when life was cheap.

I hope the buck goes further up the food chain than Connolly. Not that he deserves to be let off the hook, buy how did his awful little cowboy outfit get to perform work for the railway in the first place? While I would guess there’s little prospect of further criminal prosecutions, heads need to roll at Carillion, at least.

There is no British band remotely equivalent to Railroad Earth. They play what I think is called ‘progressive bluegrass’. It sounds like one part American folk, one part prog-rock, and one part jam band. RRE are in their element on stage, as this double live set shows. Some of their songs extend to 10 or even 15 minutes long, but never descent into directionless noodling, even though some contain two, three or even four solos. Some of the most amazing solos come from violin player Tim Carbone.

Although there’s no hint of this on the liner notes, Scott tells me it’s recorded entirely on acoustic instruments, although a lot of it’s fed through guitar affects. If you didn’t know, you’d swear most of the guitars were electric, and John Skehan’s mandolin was an electric piano. Todd Sheaffer’s distorted guitar even has some Rotheryesque moments. High spot for me is the lengthy “Hunting Song”, with Schaeffer and Carbone swapping solos. The whole album is pretty amazing stuff, some incredible virtuosity, and I wish I could get the chance to see them live.

Gilmour’s third solo album sees the Pink Floyd guitarist in mellow chill-out mode. It took me a while to really get into this one; at first, a lot of it sounded like the sort of material that I’d class as filler if it appeared on a Mostly Autumn disk. But Gilmour hasn’t quite descended into Eric Clapton pipe-and-slippers mode yet, and repeated plays reveal a lot more depth. Nothing really catches fire, but the album does turn into something of a slow-burner.

In places there’s a strong feel of “Meddle” thirty five years ago, and ultimately the only real clunker is the lumpen blues jam “This Heaven”. Naturally there’s plenty of Gilmour’s signature guitar playing throughout, although anyone expecting a new ‘Comfortably Numb’ might have to look elsewhere. On the instrumental “Red Sky at Night”, Gilmour demonstrates that he can play the saxophone as well as the guitar. He’s managed to recruit an impressive list of guest appearances, including David Crosby and Graham Nash, Phil Manzenera, Richard Wright, Jools Holland, Georgie Fame, Robert Wyatt and Guy Pratt. Overall, while this isn’t an ‘instant’ album, listen to it half a dozen times and it will start to get under your skin.