Symbolic Forest

Train nerds like trains, mostly. It’s pretty much definitive. They might have weird personal preferences, biases or hatreds that normal people can never really understand a reason for, but in general, they think that trains are a Good Thing.

A lot of British train nerds, though, don’t like HS2. They seem to think it’s a terrible idea.

I’ve never really understood this. If anything, I think it’s an inherent conservatism. Secretly, a lot of train nerds want to return to a past they feel safe with, whether it be the 1930s, the 1950s, or the 1980s. The time window shifts as the clock moves on: if you go back to railway books written in the 1950s and 60s, you find writers talking about how the modern railway, with its standardised steam locomotives and standardised carriages is an awful, terrible place compared to the Edwardian railways they remember from their youth. These are people who would rather not have a railway at all, than have a modern railway that doesn’t resemble the railways they grew up with.

“Why can’t we reopen railways instead,” these people say. “We had an HS2, the Great Central Railway!” And they’re entirely missing the point of how railways have changed over the past 200 years.

HS2 has, it’s true, being a long time being built. It was originally meant to be a fast new main line railway from London to Manchester and Leeds; then it became just London to Manchester; then it became just the current stretch under construction, London to Rugeley with a branch off into Birmingham and a station in Solihull. At Rugeley, the fast trains will be decanted onto the current West Coast Main Line, the line out of Euston, to reach Manchester and points north via the existing, aging, Victorian railway, via Stafford and Stoke or Crewe.

Nevertheless, it still effectively replaces the existing main line south of Staffordshire. It bypasses the London & Birmingham Railway, opened 1838, and part of the Trent Valley Railway, opened from Rugby to Stafford in 1847. And to be a modern, fast, high speed railway—high speed in the modern sense, not the historic sense, high speed the way that Eurostar is high speed—it has to be built in a different style to those railways too.

This is why those train nerds who say “but we should reopen the Great Central Railway for extra capacity” are missing the point: as train power has increased, as train speeds have increased, railways have to be designed in a different way.

When these particular train nerds say “reopen the Great Central Railway” they mean the line built from north Nottinghamshire to London Marylebone in the 1890s by the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. Their main line had been the route from Manchester to Grimsby, via Sheffield, but their management wanted more, bigger things, so they built a line down to London and gave themselves a new name. Their line went through the centres of Nottingham and Leicester, both places which already had firm links to London via the Midland Railway, and then down to Aylesbury to join onto the Metropolitan Railway and use their tracks to get to their grand new Marylebone station. As a through route it didn’t last: within seventy years of its opening, the line from Aylesbury to north of Nottingham had closed, and even their original main line from Manchester to Sheffield had closed. Parts of the Great Central still survive—Marylebone station is used for trains to Birmingham via the former Great Western Railway’s route, and their docks at Immingham are one of Britain’s biggest seaports. Their hotel at 222 Marylebone Road was converted into offices as early as the 1920s, and ended up becoming British Rail’s head office building before being converted back into a hotel again after British Rail was privatised. But when a lot of train nerds say “Great Central Railway” they don’t mean the hotel, the docks, or the surviving railway linking Sheffield, Lincoln and Grimsby. They mean the line from Aylesbury to Sheffield. It would be no use at all for modern high speed trains.

When the Great Central Railway was built, a typical one of their express engines was expected to keep point to point average times of around 60mph, and could generate a maximum hauling force (its “nominal tractive effort”) of somewhere around 75kN on a good day, and a power output of roughly 1MW. That meant the train had to be able to safely travel at around 80-90mph top speed, but also that it couldn’t accelerate particularly fast, and didn’t deal with hills very well. The Great Central extension’s design parameters were a typical curve radius of one mile, and a maximum gradient of 10 yards every mile, roughly 0.5%.

Compare that to a modern high speed train, on the other hand. The current Eurostar trains have a maximum speed of about 200mph (the exact number is 320kph), and a power output of 16MW, with an approximate hauling force of roughly 280kN. Sixteen times the power of a Great Central Railway loco, sixteen times the power of the trains the Great Central Railway extension is designed for.

The net result of this is that, as well as reaching over double the speed, the modern high speed train can cope with much steeper gradients, and accelerate hard on gradients that would drop the 1890s train’s speed significantly. On the other hand, for passenger comfort, it can’t cope with curves. If you look at HS2’s interactive route map: aside from the slow speed Birmingham branch, the route’s curves are easily at ten times the radius of the Great Central’s. If you reopened the Great Central extension, you’d be hard pushed to get a train to 140mph safely and in comfort, even though it would easily have enough power; HS2 has been designed to go way, way faster.

Ultimately, though, what I don’t understand is these people’s lack of vision.

I regularly travel from Lincolnshire down to South Wales, and the only sensible route takes me through Birmingham, through the motorway junction where the M6 from south east to north west crosses the M42 from south west to north east, in a confusing tangle of flyovers. HS2’s giant triangular flying junction, where the Birmingham branch meets the main line of the railway, is being superimposed across this motorway junction.

The construction work has been ongoing for years, will take at least a year more, with ongoing motorway restrictions as drivers weave between under-construction bridge pillars. My overall impression of it though? It’s amazing.

Driving past the construction sites, the scale of this project is truly enormous and truly impressive. A whole triangle of high-speed flying junctions, curving over the motorways, concrete viaduct dancing around each other. They are massive but graceful, artful despite their scale. If you drive past at night, the bright lights of the round-the-clock construction sites form their own new constellation, marking out the line of the new railway across the landscape.

Most of Britain’s main line railway construction happened in the thirty years between 1830 and 1860; we had never seen such a fundamental transformation of the landscape before, and arguably never have since. Building HS2 is one of the first things I’ve seen personally, which could be considered comparable, which gives me some sense of the awe that late Georgians and early Victorians must have felt as the railway transformed their landscape. Moreover, I don’t understand how you could look at the HS2 works and not feel something, whether it be awe or fear.

Some of the train nerds who were always against HS2 are still against it, still think it’s a waste of money. I wonder if any of them have seen the building works, though, and still think it shouldn’t be done. The works are so impressive, I don’t see why they’d still have the same opinion. I don’t see how they can.

Keyword noise: trains, HS2, engineering, civil engineering.

Since the start of the year, I’ve been trying to publish about one post per week, and with ten posts so far (including this one) I’ve come pretty close to the target.

Given I missed last week’s post, I was keen to make sure I got one out today. However. I’ve found a problem.

As I’ve said before, this site is generated using Iceforge, a static site generator that, essentially, I wrote myself (with a lot of inspiration from elsewhere). Because of that, I’m responsible for fixing it myself. And I’ve discovered that at some point, I’ve brought in a bug that I wasn’t testing for.

The post I started drafting for today includes a map image, which I wanted to link back to an actual map itself. Straightforward, although the Markdown syntax can be a bit thorny. Testing the post out, though, I discovered that at some point Iceforge has gained a bug: the Markdown parser doesn’t render images inside links properly. Although Iceforge uses a dependency library for Markdown parsing, it includes custom code to rewrite image links in posts so that they always become site-absolute, which is important when an individual post gets embedded into other pages like the home page or an archive page. Somewhere in that, there must be a bug.

Potentially, I can find a workaround. Or, I can fix the bug. Or, to be honest, rewriting that whole area of Iceforge is on my Iceforge to-do list, because the dependency library is a couple of versions behind current. Because of breaking changes in the dependency, the image-link-rewrite code needs to be updated at the same time.

In other words, the post I’d written for this week is on hold, for now. Before long, hopefully, I’ll find the spare time to fix it. Until then, I’ll write about something else.

Keyword noise: blogging, Iceforge.

Over some recent posts, I’ve been talking about how easy it would be to build a model of the Brecon & Merthyr Railway towards the end of its life, in N gauge. And specifically, how easy is it if you start with a train set? For one thing, I’ll need to have more than just one train to play with! But is it easy to get models of the right types of train in N gauge?

As it happens, there weren’t actually that many different types of steam engine used on the Brecon & Merthyr in the 1950s. Many trains were operated by pannier tank locos: now, there were multiple different classes of pannier tank engine, but given my train set came with one, I think I can put that to one side for now. What other types of steam engine were used between Brecon and Newport?

Firstly, there’s the Dean Goods, or 2301 Class. These were small 0-6-0 tender locos, with a pretty long life: they were originally designed in the 1880s, and lasted through until the late 1950s, specifically because they were small enough to run on a number of meandering Welsh railway routes with strict weight limits. Quite a few were requisitioned by the Army in both the First World War and Second World War, and ended up operating across Europe and in Turkey as a result.

Secondly, comes the GWR 2251 Class, a small 0-6-0 tender loco from the 1930s which was intended as the Dean Goods’ replacement. It was more powerful, but slightly heavier as a result, so didn’t quite have the same range that a Dean Goods did. Nevertheless, they survived until after the Brecon & Merthyr lines had largely closed.

Thirdly, the Ivatt 2MT Class, a lightweight 2-6-0 tender loco design from the late 1940s sometimes known as the “Mickey Mouse” classs. These were brought in to the Brecon & Merthyr from the early 1950s until the line closed; indeed, they operated on all of the lines radiating from Brecon.

You could, frankly, operate a realistic model of the Brecon & Merthyr in the late 50s using only the 2251 Class, the 2MT Class, and a pannier tank or two. If you want to go back a little bit earlier, you’d need a Dean Goods as well. There were still a handful of the Brecon & Merthyr’s own engines surviving at that date, but they were relatively rarely used on the Brecon line itself; you’d be more likely to see them heading up through Risca on the Western Valleys lines.

Moreover, N gauge models of all of these locos have been produced! The Ivatt 2MT class is, indeed, still available in the shops at the time of writing. The others aren’t, but it should in theory be not too hard for me to find them on the second-hand market.

In other words, with the right time period, this aspect of the model railway shouldn’t actually be a problem. Other problems will be much harder! I’m glad, though, that the project hasn’t immediately become too hard for me to consider. On, I suppose, to the next steps.

Keyword noise: trains, model trains, model railways, N gauge, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

One issue with writing this blog for so long—especially given it’s not long since I had a hiatus for a year—there’s a lot of draft posts and ideas-for-posts that I’ve logged, and never done anything with. Write about The Mother being taken to hospital in May 2022, for example, which was overtaken by events when she died a few months later. Some of them I have no context on at all, such as writing about The History of Grimsby by Edward Gillett. Yes, it is a classic work of local history from the 1960s. No, I don’t know what significant or interesting things I had to say about it.

A more recent note, though, should be easier for me to turn into a post! About eighteen months ago, I noted “Post about Lego radio”. Which is nice and straightforward, because I took plenty of pictures whilst I built it.

Like a real radio, it does have a couple of controls: a “tuning knob” to move a needle against a frequency scale, and a switch which turns a sound brick on and off. The switch’s mechanism was both fun to build and tactile to fiddle with afterwards.

Alternatively, the back of the radio comes off, and there’s a Lego-build phone holder inside, so you can use your phone as a speaker. I dare say, if you have a Bluetooth speaker that resembles a phone in physical size and shape, it would sound even better. It can be rather louder than the built in sound brick too.

I have to admit, this was the sort of project where I buy it purely because I’m in the shop and feel like I’d be too disappointed to leave with nothing. It’s a fun little build, true, but not really one that, for me, is worth keeping on display. It comes back to the start of this post: given I found it a fairly routine build, why did I want to write a blog post about it? I honestly don’t know at this point, other than the ever-present sense that I should document everything I build. I did have a nice time building it, but I haven’t really thought about it at all since it was finished; very different to other Lego sets like the lighthouse or the Swiss Crocodile locomotive. Writing this does, at least, cross the idea off the list!

Keyword noise: Lego, toys, radios.

A week or so ago, I wrote about the train set I’d recently bought, as the nucleus of a model railway inspired by the Brecon & Merthyr line in South Wales. The train set is N Gauge, or N Scale. Is this, though, the best scale for me to build it in?

The term “gauge” means the distance between the inside edges of the rails, just as it does on a normal train. Model trains come in a huge variety of scales and gauges, ranging from those large enough to sit on, to those barely large enough to see. N Gauge was created by the Bavarian toy company K. Arnold in the early 1960s, and is named for the fact its gauge is nine millimetres—or neun Millimeter, I suppose. If I put a piece of the track that came with the train set next to a ruler, you can get a rough idea of its size.

Because it’s so small, you can fit more train into a tight space; that’s always been one of the reasons I’ve struggled to build myself a model railway.

Lots of trains are made in N Gauge, off the shelf; and train sets, like the one I bought, to give you an easy start. However, it’s not the only gauge or scale that’s roughly this sort of size. The other one, in fact, is even older.

N Gauge’s scale, for British models, is 1 to 148; or a fraction over 2mm of model to every real-world foot. However, since the 1930s, modellers had already been handbuilding models to exactly 2mm to the foot. It’s an extremely similar scale, roughly 1 to 152. Given the trains are so small to begin with, the difference is barely even visible. One pioneering 2mm Scale model railway built in the 1940s, the Inversnecky & Drambuie Railway, has survived and is partially on display in the National Railway Museum in York.

Unlike N Gauge, you can’t buy any trains or train sets in 2mm Scale. There is, however, a 2mm Scale Association who produce various different products to help modellers build their own 2mm Scale trains. A while ago now, I bought one of their “starter packs”, which includes a short length of track, which you assemble yourself from rails and a plastic base. It’s much more fragile than train set track, so I glued it down to a piece of foamboard and tried to make it look ballasted.

The track gauge isn’t 9mm, though; it’s 9.42mm instead. Very very close, but not close enough to run the same trains reliably. You can see it has much thinner rails; that’s because it tries to be an exact scale model of real track. For most of the twentieth century, most British railway line was made of individual 60-foot panels; so this piece of track is 12cm long as a result. 9.42mm is the exact width of real track, scaled down to 2mm scale; N Gauge, on the other hand, if you scaled it up to real life, would be about 10cm too narrow.

The question, then, is: which way should I go with this model? Go with N Gauge and trains I can just buy; or 2mm Scale and have to build an awful lot of stuff on my own. With the trains, at least, it’s possible to get N Gauge trains and just give them 2mm wheels; because as I said, they’re so close in size that few people can tell the difference. It might be an awkward, fiddly job though.

At the moment, I’m just not sure. Before things go much further, I’ll have to make a decision, and choose to go one way or the other. At least for now.

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, N gauge, 2mm scale.

Ever since I was a wee girl, I loved Forteana. Tales of the unexplained. Creepy stories, earth mysteries, that sort of thing.

Most of them were remote, in relatively exotic places like Bermuda, the Harz mountains, or New Jersey. There were a few, though, that were a lot more local. Crop circles, even if they didn’t tend to pop up much in The North. The Loch Ness Monster, even further away. And alien big cats.

The classic alien big cat from that time period was the Beast of Bodmin, but they popped up all over the country. The Beast of Exmoor wasn’t too far from Bodmin, but they’ve popped up further and further north over the years. There was a spate of sighting in Lincolnshire in the nineties, for example. I always kept a lookout, but I never saw one.

Until, towards the back end of 2024.

They weren’t on my mind at all, that day. I was zooming south down the A1, just past Peterborough, just coming up to the Huntingdon exit, when I saw it. About here.

On the right, was a landscape of rolling hills leading up away from the road, arable fields, with woodland to either side. In the nearer field was a large, black animal. Too dark to be a stag. I thought at first, it must be a cow, but then realised that it was the wrong shape. It was moving, away from me, and it was stalking. Keeping itself low, its shoulders moving stealthily.

It was a big cat. Like nearly all British big cat sightings, it was a black one.

I would have left it at that—I had other things on my mind that day. But the next day I thought to search for other sightings; and a few of weeks earlier, another had been spotted only about twenty miles to the north, around the area where Lincolnshire starts to fade into Cambridgeshire.

I only had it in sight for a couple of seconds, to be fair. I could have misjudged the distance or the scale. No big cats have ever been reported as roadkill in Britain. But if there really aren’t any here, then many, many other people in Britain have made the same mistake as me over the past fifty years; and in one case now, genetic evidence of a big cat has been found. I’ve never seen a feral wallaby either, but nobody doubts that they exist in Britain.

More than that, though, I want to have seen it. They’ve been in the back of my mind since I was small, after all. Now—for over a year, even—I can genuinely tell people I’ve seen one.

Keyword noise: cryptids, big cats, alien big cats, cats, Forteana.

A few weeks ago, I posted about how I’d finally made the decision to start building a model railway, because perfection is the enemy of the possible or something along those lines.

A few days later, a box arrived.

No, I don’t know why they sent such a big box, because the contents were much, much smaller.

If you want to model the Brecon & Merthyr Railway in the 1950s, Great Western pannier tank locos were extremely common. Conveniently, at the moment, you can easily buy an N Gauge train set containing a Great Western pannier tank, a couple of wagons, and a brake van to go on the back. Buying a set, with an oval of track and a power unit, means you bootstrap yourself: you can get everything you need to run one train in one box, even if all you can do is send one single train round and round in a circle. I’ll do a post explaining what “N Gauge” means at some point.

Some people might point out that the loco is in 1945-47 condition, but the wagons are in pre-1937 condition; lots of wagons never got repainted though, so really they just need to look a bit dirtier and worn-looking than they are. You might notice I’ve also bought myself a few more wagons, the well known “BR 16 ton” type. Over 200,000 of them were built in the 1950s, and they were ubiquitous on the railways from the mid-50s through to the early 1980s. The ones I bought come in pre-rusted condition from the factory, so they’re really more like a wagon of the 1970s, after the B&M had closed; but, regardless, they’re still appropriate for the train.

Ever since I was small, also, I’ve read model railway advice that says “never run your train set on the carpet! There’s too much fluff!” So, this is on our dining table, which is also nice and friendly on my knees. I deserve comfort, you know.

Naturally, I wasn’t satisfied with just a single circle of track. It wasn’t long before another box arrived.

The track is a different brand to the train set, but it’s all the same track gauge, and also, all the track is the same shape: the curves are the same radius, the straight bits are all the same length. You’d think it would all just slot together, wouldn’t you?

Well, it didn’t.

Although the track was all compatible on paper, the “rail joiners” on the train set track were bigger and chunkier than the ones on the extra track. The extra track didn’t have enough clearance, between the rails and the plastic base, for the joiner on the train set track to slide on.

If this was a proper model railway and all of the track was fastened down, I wouldn’t care about this. I’d just pull all the joiners off and replace them with thinner ones. Because this is still just a train set, which has to be taken apart again whenever we want to stop playing trains and play a board game instead, that wasn’t really an option. Option two was to replace all the joiners anyway, and just hope that the new joiners stay in place. It would have done the job, but it also sounded like a lot of effort. Option three: buy more track. The original oval of train set track went in the spares box, and I just bought myself an oval from the other brand instead.

With that done, though, we had something you could imagine was a little station. It’s not much station and you need a lot of imagination, but nonetheless, you can shunt your train about!

(This is a still from a video, so it’s a slightly blurry photo. Never mind that)

Where do we go from here? Well, there’s a few more things a full railway will need. More than one train, for one thing. I’ll post about that soon. For now though: there’s something extremely fun and simple about just being able to run your train round in a circle on the dining table, without really worrying about accuracy, authenticity, and anything else. Until we do need the dining table for something else.

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, N gauge, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

When I last wrote an article about how this blog is built, how it is turned from Markdown text into an array of thousands of static HTML pages, over eighteen months ago now, I said that “another big change to how the site is published” was coming soon. It did, indeed, come soon; I just didn’t write about it. Since summer 2024, this site has been published by an entirely new static site generator. Moreover, it’s my static site generator.

When, in 2020, I decided to switch the site from hosted Wordpress to being static, there were a few options to choose from. Jekyll is (and was) one of the leaders, but it’s written in Ruby, which would have been a whole new ecosystem for me. Eleventy seemed like a good option, and I can’t really remember why I didn’t choose it at the time. The tool I eventually went with was Wintersmith, because it seemed simple and straightforward, and a quick proof-of-concept showed that it had all the features I needed. The only red flag, though, was that it didn’t seem to have been updated very recently. Nevertheless, I thought, I could always move again later.

I reimplemented the site with Wintersmith, got everything working, and built new Wintersmith plugins to provide all the features that Wordpress had, like tagging and categories. And all was good. Except, Wintersmith still wasn’t getting updates.

Wintersmith was part of the JavaScript ecosystem, distributed via NPM. Every time I ran a build, NPM would warn me that a big stack of Wintersmith’s dependencies were outdated and had security risks. None that genuinely affected me; but still, it was more and more of a concern. I thought: well, I could patch it; but then, I saw, someone else had already submitted a patch to do just that, and the patch was sitting there in the project repository, unmerged. I had to switch.

Rather than learn a new system, though, why not take Wintersmith and fork it? It’s open-source software, after all. A fork is simply when someone takes an existing project which doesn’t quite do what they want, or which is going in a direction they don’t like; and they make it their own. Like two different branches of the evolutionary tree; things split off in different ways, and we end up with mammals and lizards and birds all happily coexisting.

So, I picked a name—Iceforge, to give it a nod to its heritage—and got started. And along the way, I changed a lot. Iceforge is a classic Ship of Theseus. Every single line of code is changed, but it will still build a basic Wintersmith site, and plugins only need slight changes to port them from Wintersmith to Iceforge.

The reason I can guarantee every single line of code in the application has changed—aside from possibly some of the blank ones—is that Wintersmith was written in CoffeeScript. You might not have heard of CoffeeScript; I had used it, in the early 2010s. It is essentially an alternative syntax for JavaScript. It’s a much terser syntax; it’s heavily whitespace-dependent, and at the time it was created it included a few features JavaScript didn’t have, like classes.

I didn’t like using CoffeeScript, although I understood it well enough to write my own Wintersmith plugins; so I immediately knew that Iceforge would use something else. The obvious choice was TypeScript: a more verbose version of JavaScript, more verbose because it includes compile-time type checking.

Naturally, I had to switch over from using CoffeeScript classes to JavaScript classes; that wasn’t an issue at all. The asynchronous coding style also, I thought, could do with an update to it. “Asynchronous coding” means that, when the application goes and asks the computer to do something that might take a while, like reading a file, it will get on with something else whilst it’s waiting until the file is ready. When I’m cooking food I’ll pop it in the oven, and then I’ll go take the rubbish out whilst it’s roasting. Asynchronous coding is just like that, but not as tasty.

Originally, Node.JS handled asynchronous coding through something called continuation-passing. It relies on the fact that functions, individual pieces of code, can be passed to other functions which can then call them. With continuation-passing style, if you want to read a file, you call a system function and give it first the filename, and then the piece of code to call when the file has been read. It worked well given the limits of JavaScript at the time, but it means that code can end up a little bit broken up and fragmentary. The code that gets run after a “slow operation” has to be separate from the code that gets run before a slow operation. Moreover, Wintersmith was largely plugin-based, and continuation-passing clutters up the plugin API. Every Wintersmith plugin has to be written in a continuation-passing style and the plugin authors have to remember to call their continuation functions even if the plugin itself isn’t calling any slow operations.

From 2015, JavaScript gained an awful lot of new features; one of them was “promises”, a new way of calling slow operations without passing continuation functions. A couple of years later, it gained the await keyword to go with them. A slow function, nowadays, can return a Promise object, and the developer can choose whether to treat that in a continuation-passing style, or to use await to pause that particular line of execution until the result from the slow operation is ready. Because, in my opinion, that produces much more readable code, I restructured all of Iceforge to use awaited Promises everywhere that the code had been using continuation-passing. When a developer is writing an Iceforge plugin, their plugin registration function has to return a Promise, but they don’t have to worry about adding a continuation boilerplate call any more.

I made various other useful changes, such as building into Iceforge’s “blog” site template a lot of the features I’d developed for this site. The Markdown parser had to be tweaked a bit, just because the API of the underlying Markdown rendering library has changed a bit. I developed a unit test suite, not something Wintersmith has ever has as far as I’m aware. The one thing I haven’t done yet is documentation. At present, all I’ve done is to add documentation to the code itself; learning how to use Iceforge is left as an exercise for the developer. At some point, when I find the time to write all that, I’ll get a documentation site online. After that there are a few other things I’d like to do, such as port over the rest of the existing Wintersmith plugins, and implement footnote support in the basic Markdown plugin. After that… Iceforge 2.x could do with a much bigger rewrite, to tidy up aspects of the API that I’ve just found a bit weird. There’s no rush, though.

If you want to use Iceforge you can install it from NPM, either as a global tool, or if you’re willing to consider your website source code to be an NPM module, locally within that module. I like the latter, because it works cleanly with CI/CD toolchains, but you could do it the other way too. This blog post isn’t meant to be Iceforge documentation, so I’ll let you play with it yourself, but feel free to try it out and give it a go. I will get the documentation site finished some day, I promise.

Keyword noise: blogging, Caitlin lectures you, coding, Coffeescript, computing, JavaScript, Iceforge, programming, static hosting, static websites, TypeScript, Wintersmith.

Occasionally, over the past few years, I’ve mentioned how I’d like a model railway, but there are just too many interesting railways to choose from. In fact, I’ve always wanted a model railway. My father also always wanted a model railway, but never quite managed to do anything about it either.

This has led me to an interesting place in life. I’ve always had many, many plans for different model railways. I’ve tried to start building them, and I’ve never got very far, but the research I’ve done has been immense. On the actual railway history side, I know my stuff. I know my Bristol & Exeter from my Bristol & Gloucester. I know my Midland from my Great Northern from my Midland & Great Northern. I know why the Great Western Railway had LNER-style signals, and I know where the LNER ran in North Wales and why. On the modelling side, I know my theory too. I know why cassettes are better than traversers, and the difference between EM and P4. I know who Edward Beal was, and how his West Midland Railway wasn’t the real one. I know John Ahern created the Madder Valley, that Barry Norman doesn’t mean the film critic, and that Cyril Freezer has had his day. I know that dyed sawdust is a thing of a past, and I’ve admired Copenhagen Fields. I know the theory. I’m just no good at putting it into practice.

Like any skill, though, this is a classic chicken and egg situation. I’m just no good at putting it into practice, because I don’t try.

The answer to that, of course, is to just pick something and start. And nowadays, model railways have come on a long way from where they were when I was a small girl. There’s so much more that is either available to buy off the shelf, or has been at some point and can be found on the second-hand market. You just have to be judicious what you choose to build. If you want to model something from after 1950 or so, it’s much easier than something before around 1925, just because the amount of diversity in the railway network dropped dramatically following the creation of British Railways and the National Coal Board.

That means that building a model of, say, the Brecon & Merthyr Railway in 1905, would be difficult for a practical beginner, even though it would be incredibly interesting and different to most of the model railways out there. A model of the Brecon & Merthyr fifty years later, though, would be relatively straightforward. A few obscure local locomotives were still around, but most were fairly common Great Western and British Railways types. All the obscure little 4-wheel coaches the line had in 1905 had been scrapped and replaced with ordinary GWR ones; all the colliery-owned coal wagons with hand-painted lettering had been replaced with plain grey British Railways 16 ton ones.

With that in mind… I’ve bought myself a treat. I’ve bought myself a regular train set with a few extra bits and pieces, so I have enough there and then to at least get something moving and give me the inspiration to build more. Let’s see where it goes from here!

Update: To see where it did go from here, read the next episode in this saga!

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

Folklore is… something we had, right? The things people used to do, especially all those people who lived out in the country and whose lives were devoted to threshing and winnowing and all those sort of rural verbs we just don’t use in the modern world. Folklore is all that stuff, from the ancient Static Past that never changed.

This view is nonsense, nowadays, among historians and folklorists, but it used to be their genuine assumption, say a hundred years ago, and as a result I have a feeling it still lurks in the back of a lot of people’s minds as a kind of default opinion if they ever think about the topic. In reality, folklore was always fluid and adaptable; we’re just missing a lot of it, because it was only about 150 or so years ago that people started writing it down, and saying “I guess this is what the peasants have always done since Time Immemorial”. Folklore is still around us today, and it’s still changing and growing too.

The reason I’m writing this, though, is that last weekend we went out and committed an act of folklore. We—me, R, and the Two Children—went into Newport, to see the Newport Mari Lwyd.

The Mari Lwyd is Welsh, as you might guess from the name. Specifically, it’s a South Wales tradition, from the time around the New Year. The Mari itself is a horse skull on a stick, carried around by someone hiding under a white sheet, like all the best ghosts. It’s led around by a Leader, smartly dressed in a top hat. And it’s great fun. We still sometimes call it by the name The Child Who Likes Fairies used when she couldn’t pronounce Welsh very well: the Ghost Pony.

The Newport Mari Lwyd is done by the Widders Border Morris, from Chepstow. For about an hour or so, the Mari is lead around the centre of the city, with stops for morris dances. Between the stops, the Leader is the MC of proceedings, interprets for the Mari, and generally “holds her back” when she wanders into shops to terrorise people. If you don’t mind being terrorised by a very large skull on a stick, it’s great fun.

We followed all the way from start to finish: into Greggs in search of a sausage roll, into the pet shop for more food, or the slightly mouldy greengrocer, or the Arcadia coffee shop. We stopped outside a pub, with a guy stood outside it holding a toddler in his arms. The Mari bent down so the wee boy could stroke her nose like a real horse, and the boy did, looking confused and baffled but treating her entirely like he would a living horse. The followers all had their phones out recording, or their SLRs, some with selfie sticks to get their phones up above the crowd. And of course all the time we were passing people who weren’t part of it, who hadn’t come along specially, some of them jumping in fright and getting away, some of them intrigued and coming to stroke the Mari too.

This isn’t, of course, what the Mari used to do. The organisers specifically describe it as an Urban Mari Lwyd, in this form because it works well in a city centre, popping her head into all the shops along the way then finishing in the record shop in the arcade to ask the owner to play “Crazy Horses” by The Osmonds.

When the “original” Mari Lwyd tradition was recorded, the Mari would go around knocking on the doors of houses. At each there would be a battle of riddles with the person who opened the door; and when the householder lost, the Mari’s party would go inside and cause havoc: eat the food, drink the beer, grope the women, rake out the fire. And then, on to the next house. The party would often include people in blackface, and a Mr Punch. By the time it was written down, it was almost gone, and by the 1930s the tradition was effectively extinct. A few decades later it came back, as a deliberate revival, much as many “folkloric” aspects of British life were. In the early 1970s, a form of the Mari appears as an evil antagonist in Susan Cooper’s young adult fantasy novel Silver On The Tree, which I quoted here previously. Cooper’s Mari is almost untirely unlike the real one, and pops up in a part of Wales in which she wasn’t a tradition. Nowadays, many places in Wales have some sort of modern Mari Lwyd, like the Newport one. Going into private houses: out. Actually taking people’s food: out. Groping people: very definitely out. The modern Maris (Mariau?) are all suited to the modern world, frightening people only if they like it.

Being a skull on a stick, the Mari comes across as a very gothic, a very pagan figure. That’s probably not really true originally either. The name Mari might very well come from the Virgin Mary, although there’s an alternative explanation that, being a horse, it’s just from the English word “mare”. As a tradition, like other British hobby horse traditions, it probably doesn’t date back any earlier than the 16^th century. It’s become a very Welsh icon—there was a large Welsh flag being carried by someone at the Newport one this year—but very similar traditions are found in other parts of Britain too with different variations. In Derbyshire they used a ram’s skull instead of a horse, which is why Derby County football club still has a ram as its symbol. That, though…in folklore, that’s kind of irrelevant. Mari Lwyd might have been different in the past, but the Mari Lwyds happening now, like the one we took part in, are very real and just as genuine. They’re still folklore, but folklore being endlessly created and recreated, today and in the future. Some day, in years to come, a folklorist will write down that the song “Crazy Horses” is deeply associated with “the Newport Mari tradition”, as an ancient survival; until someone else points out the song was only released in 1972, in summer, so really shouldn’t be associated with a seasonal winter tradition.

In a sense, all this is unimportant. We were carrying out a Welsh pagan tradition, because we made it one. And moreover, as I said near the start, it’s great fun for the participants. Even if the Mari never did get her Greggs sausage roll.

Keyword noise: Wales, Cymru, Newport, Casnewydd, Mari Lwyd, folklore, tradition.