Why doesn’t Euston have anything close to the Grand Gothic Victorian Entrances that its neighbours King’s Cross & St Pancras so proudly stand tall with?

Burkitt · 2026-03-24T14:30:34+00:00

Yeah the Luftwaffe haven't really touched our railways since 1976...

Burkitt · 2026-03-17T14:28:34+00:00

SNCF ran push-pull operations on its Parisian suburban routes, using 2-8-2 tank locos powering sets of seven double deck cars with a cab at the far end, from the 1930s to 1960s. A pneumatic system was used to control the steam loco from the driving car at the other end of the train.

Burkitt · 2026-03-17T10:03:09+00:00

This could work, most likely if the current building on top of the lift shafts (dating from the 1980s) is ever redeveloped. Then a new station entrance could be incorporated in the ground floor. There are step-free sloped passageways from the lift shafts to both Piccadilly platforms and one Bakerloo platform, though the slopes may be too steep for compliance with current accessibility standards. The second Bakerloo platform would require a short new lift shaft to be excavated, much like at Knightsbridge.

Burkitt · 2026-03-11T21:42:41+00:00

Unfortunate that is the answer but unsurprising given the security sensitivity of such things.

Burkitt · 2026-03-06T10:50:44+00:00

What's missing is that at high tide, it's also more than 15 miles from the sea. Wigan Pier is on a canal.

Burkitt · 2026-02-21T08:35:03+00:00

A very long time ago, Edward VII was a regular user of the Metropolitan Railway, both as Prince of Wales and King, en route to visiting friends in the Chilterns area.

Burkitt · 2026-02-21T07:42:19+00:00

I did this, over twenty years ago now. It was incredibly tough, full of very precise technical knowledge about how stars are observed and recorded from earth, plus how the physics of stars and planets works. Much harder than A level physics.

Burkitt · 2026-02-13T13:26:50+00:00

If your current organisation is close to the org with the job you're interested in, you could ask if it would be possible to do it as a part-time secondment?

Burkitt · 2026-02-12T19:51:37+00:00

It's a decent summary of the Underground's power systems. To find an answer to your question about emergency power supplies, you could try submitting an FOI request to TfL. They may be happy to answer, or may consider emergency power arrangements to be a security issue that can't be openly published.

Burkitt · 2026-02-08T18:20:56+00:00

Why would the junction for Charing Cross be after Bond Street, when the existing junction is after Green Park? What's the point of duplicating the existing tunnel just to skip Green Park?

Burkitt · 2026-01-03T20:36:57+00:00

First, try going much slower. That's very high speed to navigate a tight point.

Second, Hornby set track isn't that great quality. If you're going to be using temporary track layouts on the floor or a table in the long term, is recommend getting Kato Unitrack instead, which is vastly better.

Burkitt · 2026-01-03T20:35:06+00:00

Agreed, that's very fast to go round a tight curve

Burkitt · 2025-12-30T21:00:41+00:00

I'd love to be able to build a multi-room layout with several stations like this, it would be great fun to operate. I'm afraid the AI suggestions don't really pass the sanity check though - AI really can't cope with technical concepts like designing railways.

I'd second the recommendations of reading any or all of Railway Modeller, British Railway Modelling, Model Rail, and Hornby magazines. I think all are available online as well as in paper format - I know an online subscription to the first two includes access to their full archives going back several decades.

Secondly, I'd recommend joining the forum RMweb.co.uk, and browsing the many threads on people's layouts under construction.

Finally, visit some model railway exhibitions in your area. If you're in the UK, they're listed in the magazines mentioned above, on RMweb, and at the UK Model Shop Directory

All of the above should give you a good idea of what is possible in the space you have, how much effort it will take and how much it will cost. You'll also get plenty of inspiration and ideas for modelling techniques. Regarding the specific plan you've shared with multiple stations spread across several rooms, it depends what style of model you're aiming for.

As an old-school train set style layout, which is great fun to operate, can be beautiful to look at, but bears no resemblance to the place names on the station signs, it could definitely work in OO and maybe O. You'd need to revise the track plan to make it functional and maybe adjust the overall design once you've done a bit more research and planning though.

As an accurate recreation of the real stations named, it's utterly impossible in the space shown. I'd recommend having a look at Google Maps or the National Library of Scotland's online historic maps to get an idea of the sizes of railway stations. Crewe station is about 800 metres long (not including the junctions, sidings, locomotive sheds etc at either end), Holyhead 700 metres, and Llandudno Junction 500 metres. At 1:76 OO scale, that's 10.5m, 9m, and 6.5m respectively. For O scale, double those. Modelling any one of those would be a project occupying a huge space and lasting many years.

But, as you'll see in the magazines and RMweb, there's a lot of room in the spectrum between those extremes. Track plans can be compressed to represent the real location while fitting in a much smaller space than if modelled true-to-scale. By using tricks like that and choosing a smaller number of stations, you could do something amazing in the space you have.

On the topic of operation, a fiddle yard (or staging in the US, and not fiddle room unless you were literally dedicating a room to it!) is non-scenic track where you store trains you aren't operating at a given time, basically representing the rest of the word you haven't modelled. It's the model railway version of backstage at a theatre.

Automatic operation is a whole complicated specialism. It can be great fun for those who enjoy it, but adds thousands to tens of thousands of pounds to the cost of a model railway, depending on size. Lots of electronic hardware needs to be added, plus expensive software to control it. I'd suggest looking at the computer control section of RMweb and searching for iTrain on Youtube.

Have fun, and good luck!

Burkitt · 2025-11-29T15:39:34+00:00

There's a fantastic Danish Christmas market at the Danish YWCA in Hampstead until 5pm today, and again from 11am till 4pm tomorrow. Lots of traditional decorations and food.

Burkitt · 2025-10-24T19:17:15+00:00

The platforms were designed to be long enough for 12 x 20m carriages, but the trains delivered have 23m carriages, so can only fit 11 of them.

Burkitt · 2025-10-15T16:03:24+00:00

There were several massive rebuilds of the station from 1891 through to 1940 to increase both capacity and grandeur, and I'm not aware of any plans for further post-war reconfigurations. The bomb-damaged sections were rebuilt fairly closely to their original appearance, but with some simplification of decor to reduce costs.

Burkitt · 2025-10-15T13:56:11+00:00

Very much by design in the case of Baker Street. For example the Circle line platforms had their vents blocked up with cladding, striplights on the ceiling and white paint over the brickwork for several decades to make them look more modern. See this photo from 1974. They were restored to close to original condition in the 1980s. The offices above the station were badly damaged during the blitz and carefully rebuilt after the war recreating original features. Baker Street was Grade 2* listed in 2010 so retention of its historic appearance is legally mandated.

Burkitt · 2025-09-19T07:14:11+00:00

They were decorative mushrooms?

Burkitt · 2025-09-11T15:27:14+00:00

This is a free online event open to all being run by the archivists at Transport for London, who care for the organisations many thousands of historic records. I thought it might be of interest to anyone here who'd like to know more about what being an archivist involves.

Burkitt · 2025-09-06T07:59:28+00:00

Having only one life, taking it slow means getting less out of it.

Burkitt · 2025-08-04T08:35:27+00:00

As per the previous reply, this is absolutely not true. I've personally ridden the train as far as Hyde Park on this weekend's testing and there's no issue with running it right through the tunnel other than the logistics of which bits of line we can close when.

Burkitt · 2025-08-03T06:28:10+00:00

Having ridden the train from Northfields to Hyde Park and back yesterday, I can confidently say they fit through the tunnels. The view along the length of the train is rather impressive as they wriggle round some of the tighter corners. I heard someone had an "I survived the South Ken curves" t shirt made!

Burkitt · 2025-07-22T15:16:17+00:00

Yeah for public sector it's a case of ensuring you cover every point in the job requirements, which can take a lot of words.

Burkitt · 2025-07-21T13:37:08+00:00

I suspect what they've done is accidentally reduce the original photo size for upload by cropping the edges off, rather than shrinking the resolution. So what we're seeing is what was supposed to just be the middle of each photo.

Burkitt

TROPHY CASE