Metroland

 

Planners, architects and builders are not the only ones who create cities. The suburban landscape of north-west London owes its existence, largely, to the imagination of the Metropolitan Railway’s marketing department.

One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1915, the railway’s publicity people devised the term “Metroland” to describe the catchment area of villages stretching from Neasden into the Chiltern Hills. The railway had bought up huge tracts of farmland along this corridor in the decades before the first world war, and it was ripe for development. All they needed was a sales pitch.

The first Metroland booklets were filled with illustrations of idyllic cottages and dainty verses about “a land where the wild flowers grow”. A semi-rural arcadia was offered to Londoners sick of crowded conditions in the city. The campaign proved a roaring success. After the war, the white-collar workers who sought space and greenery flocked to the north-west of the city.

Over the next 20 years, the railway’s development company and its building partners unrolled commuter estates from Neasden out into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Fields were filled with endless avenues of mock-Tudor “country” villas: semi-detached dwellings with steep roofs, bay windows and half-timbered gables. The Metropolitan’s PR people had accidentally invented

23 and 24 Leinster Gardens

 

Leinster Gardens is a street in Bayswater, London. It has two false façades at numbers 23 and 24, constructed in the late 1860s, at the time of the original steam engine-hauled underground railway that had a short section exposed to the surface in the space between residences at numbers 22 and 25.

Locomotives were fitted with condensers to reduce fumes, but "venting off" was still needed in open-air sections to relieve the condensers and keep the tunnels free from smoke. In this up market area, the railway company hid this unsightly practice from residents. The false façade also maintained a continuous frontage along a prestigious terrace. The façade is 5 feet (1.5 m) thick, behind which is a ground level opening above the rail line. The façade includes 18 blackened windows and front doors with no letter boxes.

In the 1930s, a hoax was played on guests who were sold ten-Guinea tickets to a charity ball at Leinster Gardens, only to turn up in evening dress to discover the address was fake.

London Underground battery-electric locomotives

London Underground battery-electric locomotives, most commonly known as battery locomotives are used for hauling engineers' trains, as they can operate when the electric traction current is switched off. The first two locomotives were built in 1905 for the construction of the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and their success prompted the District Railway to buy two more in 1909, which were the only ones built to the loading gauge of the subsurface lines.

The locomotives have a cab at each end and are built to the standard 'Tube' loading gauge so that they can work over all lines on the London Underground network. They are equipped with buffers and draw hooks, for coupling to standard main line vehicles

The body sides panel are  louvers to allow ventilation around the batteries, the panels are hinged to allow the batteries to be removed. Following the withdrawal of steam engines, the vehicles often worked on open sections of line,

The traditional use of these locomotives has been to haul trains using power from the rails until they reach the area where work is to be undertaken, where they switch to battery operation if the traction supply has been isolated. They are also used for transporting diesel powered equipment such as track tamping machines through tunnel sections. Normally one locomotive is marshaled at each end of the train, allowing the train to be reversed easily.

EACH BODYS READY

A poster showing a bikini-clad model with the caption: 'Are you beach body ready?' has been voted the worst advert of the year. 

The billboard produced by Protein World claimed to promote weight loss but came under fire from feminists and body image campaigners who said it was body-shaming. 

Many of the posters, which appeared in the London Underground, were defaced and a petition calling for their removal received more than 70,000 signatures. London Transport has since had all these poster removed.

Posters showing the 24-year-old model Renee Somerfield were vandalised with feminist messages such as 'your body is not a commodity' and a mass protest was held in Hyde Park.

The company denied it was 'body shaming' and said it aspired to make the 'nation healthier and fitter'.

London Underground D78 Stock

 

The London Underground D Stock operates on London Underground's District line, except the Wimbledon to Edgware Road service. Following the withdrawal of the C Stock in June 2014, these are now the oldest subsurface trains in service on the London Underground. The first units were withdrawn in January 2015 with all due to be replaced by S Stock by December 2016

The D stock was ordered in 1976 to replace the pre-war CO/CP Stock and post-war R Stock on the District line. Seventy-five six-car trains were built by Metro-Cammell, Birmingham, the first entering service on 28 January 1980 with final delivered in 1983.

 

These trains are my first attempts at creating my own rolling stock.

I began with the purchasing some second hand carriages and engines from a locate  train show earlier this year, disassembling the engine from the bodies and cutting the carriage down in length

My first idea was to build the D stock out of Dapol trackside model C047 Rail buses  but I had brought 3 kits and discovered. I  would need  a lot of parts to build these trains

 

In the end I used the kits and second hand carriage,  I had cut down using rail bus wall panel to create the opening door panels added  a coat of paint and had completed my first of many D stock trains

 

 

The Baker Street's station network is rather complex. The sub-surface station is connected to the open-air Metropolitan line station. This is a terminus for some Metropolitan line trains, but there is also a connecting curve that joins to the Circle line just beyond the platforms, allowing Metropolitan line trains to run to Aldgate in the City of London. Below this is a deep-level tube station for the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines. These are arranged in a cross-platform interchange layout and there are connections between the two lines just to the north of the station. Access to the Bakerloo and  Jubilee lines is only via escalators.

My station is a blend of the two networks. It has the arch of the sub surface line and the colour and tile pattern of the deep level tube