Where Worlds Collide

Electric Nose reminds us that the Model Railroader’s Layout Planning issue is out, and tells us why he thinks Model Railway magazines in the US are so much better than those over here in Britain.

Despite zero interest in American outline modelling, I always find MR’s annual “Model Railroad Planning” issue inspirational reading; many of the ideas are just as applicable to models set in Britain or continental Europe, and the standard of presentation and writing does make British magazines look amateurish by comparison.

Another weekend, another train show!

This weekend it was the London Festival of Model Railways at Alexandra Palace.

It’s organised by the publishers of “British Railway Modelling” and “Traction” in association with the Model Railway Club, who formerly organised the Easter shows at Westminster Central Hall I used to attend back in the 70s and 80s. Like Doncaster there are rather too many traders, but thanks to the MRC’s involvement the layouts were of the highest quality.

Unlike some 4mm-centric shows, there was plenty of N gauge, and a fair amount of non-British prototypes

British N was represented by the superlative “Acton Main Line”, which has been on the exhibition circuit for several years now; a very accurate and highly detailed model of the first station on the four-track main line out of Paddington with it’s associated stone terminal and sorting sidings; set in 1989 it’s definitely a historical model now with a large number of locomotive hauled passenger trains and first generation DMUs. There was also “Sea Wall”, a 1960s transition area model of the famous sea wall section of the West of England main line between Dawlish and Teighnmouth, with no less than four tunnels through the distinctive red cliffs. The layout had no station, no pointwork, and only a single building on the cliff top. Just like the prototype. The whole area is instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the area, even though the Castles and Britannias were rather before my time.

Representing prototypes from across the channel we had Zertrummelt, set in Germany in 1945 under allied occupation. It represents a bombed out town where the RAF had done their worst, but the military engineers have managed to get the trains running again through the shattered station, using whatever German trains had survived supplemented by rolling stock bought in by the allies. It gives the builder the opportunity to run German, British and American rolling stock side-by-side on the same layout. Then there was the French Givry-Vignoux, set on the diesel-operated Paris-Basel line. I’d seen this a couple of years ago at the Maidenhead show in it’s earlier form as an end-to-end with fiddle yards at each end; now it’s reconfigured as a continuous run with a fiddle yard behind the scenic boards. Finally there was the tiny Swiss layout Understadt, built on a plywood door just 6’6″ by 2’6″.

The exhibition is also a place for manufacturers to showcase new products. Bachmann had pre-production samples of the “Western” in maroon, and in “Chromatic Blue”. I’m not sure how popular a short-lived one-off livery is going to be, but I’m more tempted by that than the horrid maroon 50 they did a couple of years back, which is still cluttering up dealers’ shelves. There was also a First Great Western “Flying Fag Packet” MkII. I’d wondered whether it’s actually possible to reproduce this complex livery in a small scale, and the model was something of a compromise, but Colin Albright of Bachmann told me this was a first attempt, and they hope to do better.

I also had a long chat with Ben Ando of ATM, who are making a new range of high-quality ready-to-run models of modern freight wagons. First model, already on sale, is a five-unit articulated car carrier; under development are two types of container wagon. I’ve very interested in their next project, which will be a “Silver Bullet” china clay slurry tanker. I’d like a block rake of these to model the famous Burngullow to Irvine train behind a pair of 37s; I wonder how many I’ll be able to afford!

One good thing about the British show circuit is the way you meet up with old friends on a regular basis, such as members of my old club from before I moved to Manchester. Gives me the chance to chat (or simply annoy) people like Alan Monk, Steve Grantham, Stu, and Roechard Wibb. I won’t say who it was that speculated as to why Electric Nose has been totally silent over the new Bachmann 20 which is shaped rather like a class 20!

There is something worse than the dreaded Virgin Voyagers. It’s called the Virgin Pendolino

The railway press has been gushing praise about this train; I don’t know if Virgin have been plying them with so many free drinks that they’ve been ignoring the train’s obvious flaws, or whether they’re taking the Railway Modeller line; it looks OK at normal view distances (i.e. not from inside), and will improve with running-in.

On Friday night I travelled on one of these horrors for the first time. All I can say is that Pendowobbles are to Voyagers what the Voyagers are to the good old Mk3s. Clearly nobody from Modern Railways or Rail has travelled in the Standard class portion of one of these things on a busy Friday night.

The interior resembles the inside of a plane, and not in a good way. The combination of high seat backs and the ridiculously small windows makes them very claustrophobic indeed. A significant percentage of the seats have no external view at all; imagine facing a blank window pillar all the way from London to Glasgow. And if you are lucky enough to get a seat by a window, you find the lower sill of the window digs into your arm. And finally, just like the Voyagers, there’s a serious lack of luggage space.

Game WISH will be coming to an end after number 100. In keeping with this theme, Game WISH 89 asks:

How do you handle character death, as a player and/or GM? What makes a good death or a bad death? Have you ever had a character die? What happened?

I’m not counting all those DnD ‘Deaths’ followed by resurrections; when death is nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, it’s not really death, at least in my book. I only remember a single PC death in any long-term face-to-face games, which happened very early on, and I don’t even remember my dead PC’s name. The gaming group has a general philosophy that once PCs had survived the first few sessions, they never died.

It’s a different story in convention-style one-shots. I’ve played quite a few horror games (a genre more suited to one-shots, in my opinion) with a high PC body count. One PC death that sticks in my mind was the finale of an Unknown Armies game, where two of the last three survivors thought they were being rescued by the third. Another PC had already died in the attempt, eaten alive by horrible grey dust. But instead of saving us, our would-be rescuer proceeded to shoot both of us, in order to save our souls.

PC deaths in online games tend to be the result of players dropping out of the game; I’ve had to GM several of these; sometimes with little warning. The best one was the death of Cylene in my Kalyr game. The city authorities had press-ganged another PC, Reylorna, to perform telepathic scans of everyone trying to leave the city in order to catch an assassin. On identifying a suspect who tried to make a run for it, she attempted to throw a dagger at him, only to roll a critical failure. Just at that moment Cylene appeared as an innocent bystander who got in the way of the mis-thrown weapon. That was the only time I had a retiring player write their own death scene. This had severe repercussions on the plotline of the game; Cylene was a noble from a powerful family of the ruling kandar race, while the hapless Reylorna was (and indeed still is) one of the downtrodden human underclass. She had the be smuggled out of town in a hurry just ahead of the lynch mob. The rest of the PCs caught up with her a few moves later, in an extended quest plot that’s kept the whole party out of town.

More recently we’ve had the death of Jaldaric in the same game; his was a more straightforward death in combat. At least one other PC insisted that he had a proper burial and carried his body back to civilisation. We’re just about to run his funeral scene.

Where Worlds Collide is two years old today!

Not an embarrassing intestinal complaint, but my RPG system of choice (well, one of them, anyway). The third edition of the game came out way back in 1986, aeons ago in RPG terms. Since then the system has accumulated massive amounts of cruft in terms of additional rules and patches from the hundreds of sourcebooks and suppliments. A new edition of the basic rules is long overdue. Today, Steve Jackson Games announced GURPS 4th Edition.

In August 2004, at GenCon, Steve Jackson Games will release GURPS Fourth Edition, starting with the two-volume Basic Set. Fans have been asking about a new edition for years, and we’ve always said it wouldn’t happen until we could justify the change in terms of both rules and presentation. Well, we’re there.
Sean Punch, GURPS Line Editor for the past nine years, and David Pulver, a key contributor responsible for many of the core GURPS supplements, took two years to break the system down and rebuild it, guided by a decade and a half of gamer feedback. The new rules are designed to enhance the key strengths of GURPS: compatibility with all genres and flexibility for the GM. You’ll still recognize it, but a lot of little things - and a few big ones! - are different.

The physical quality of the line will take a big jump with the Fourth Edition. All books now on the schedule (and we’re scheduling three years ahead) will be hardcover, with full-color interiors. And we won’t accept any art that’s not gorgeous. The two Basic Set books, for instance, will have cover art by John Zeleznik, who has done a lot of our best covers over the years.

I just hope it lives up to the hype. I think it will; I only need to get another six months use out of my 1988 rulebook, which has defied all odds and refused to fall apart.

Electric Nose tells us what he really thinks of magazine reviews, naming Model Rail as the worst offender. As we should expect by now, absolutely no punches are pulled.

But it looks perfectly acceptable at normal viewing distances, and will probably improve with running in.

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops has taken delivery of a new locomotive, and is speculating on liveries. I think they look good in the original Swedish orange, personally. Scandinavia’s revenge for the GM Nohabs.

Perhaps we Brits should take revenge for those class 66s, and sell Amtrak a vast fleet of Virgin Voyagers. Or would that just be cruel?

Webcam technology has reached the stage where there’s a camera small enough to fit on a N gauge train. Here are some of the results, including some taken at the Farnham club’s superb “Basingstoke” layout.

In the aftermath of the atrocity in Spain, the usual suspects of Warbloggerdom are trotting out the predicatable stereotypes of ‘European appeasers’ and spouting garbage like “Welcome to the real world, Europe” (one of Tim Blair’s commenters). That last asinine quote reminds me of an obnoxious troll from Denmark immediately after 9/11 who had the same line in his .sig, except with “America” replacing “Europe”.

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias is rather closer to the truth.

For the record, anyone who think this may be the incident that forces Europeans to get serious about terrorism is a moron.

Most Europeans were plenty serious about terrorism before this happened. So was the Democratic Party. It was George W. Bush who, along with José Maria Aznar, Tony Blair, and Silvio Berlusconi who decided that terrorism was such a serious problem that it should be pretty much ignored except insofar as it was a useful rhetorical prop for the selling of an unrelated war.

Unlike Stalinist twits such as George Galloway, I don’t think the overthrow of a vile a brutal dicatorship is a gross moral outrage. But I still believe it was a strategic and tactical mistake to invade Iraq the way we did. It may well be that we’d have had to deal with Saddam Hussein sooner or later, but the timing always seemed to me to be more driven by the American electoral timetable than anything else. And there are some very serious questions to be asked about apparent lack of though in planning for the aftermath. But maybe the Dr.Strangelove and Milo Minderbinder types in the Bush administration really did believe they could parachute in a bunch of exiles with no power base in the country and expect to smoothly start running things.

The biggest problem I have with the invasion of Iraq is the way it’s divided the west. When Bush’s administration doesn’t even have the confidence of half his own people, it’s hardly surprising that European leaders and peoples regard him with deep scepticism. With his parochial world-wiew he doesn’t seem remotely interested in the concerns of anyone outside his narrow domestic power base. But he still expects European leaders to put their own civilian populations in the firing line to support purely American policy goals that had little to do with the real threat we faced.