Guage

Wolf K. said the following on 18/01/2008 16:43:

You don't have to pay membership first. The Society puts on public shows around the country each year, and has a stand selling Society products to anyone who wants to buy them. You also don't necessarily need to buy P4 stuff from the Society either - Ultrascale, Exactoscale and C&L both sell all you need to get you going and you can buy P4 wheels easily enough. Really, the Stores is offering readily available stuff at discounted prices for members - it doesn't need to make a living from selling stuff. There is some stuff only available through the Society, but AFAIR nothing essential. Don't forget also that the EM Gauge Society also supports P4 if you happen already to be a member.

Also, this policy is common to every society I'm a member of, so it certainly isn't unique to the Scalefour Society.

This is a bit of a sensitive area - just mention "CRS" and watch some Society members flinch :-)

This is a genuine question - why do you think it isn't easy to try out P4? Of course it should be easy, so it would be interesting to hear a non-member's opinion of why it isn't. Attracting a continual flow of new members is essential to every society, so if there are reasons why people are being put off they should know.

As have a few S4Soc members...

Spot the similarity/dissimilarity

Cough Bough Though Through Enough Hiccough Burrough*

You have to love the English language. Unless you're learning it. :) But, being Australian, I guess that disqualifies me - on both counts :)

Steve Magee Newcastle NSW Aust

• is it pronounced "burr-ow", or "burr-a"?

Re-gauging Bullied pacifics without throwing away the any of the proprietary chassis stops me...

To be even more brutal, the whole P4 scene seems to revolve around two ways, either:

1. Building over several decades a stock of exquisitely accurate steam locos in no more than single digits total, and running them on layouts the size of a short plank;

or

1. Only doing diesels/electrics, which happen to be easier to convert

Neither of these appeal to me, so I stick with the inaccurate but more straightforward to get into 'Intermediate 00'. I can buy RTR to my heart's content, and know that I only have to adjust the back-to-backs occasionally to get a vehicle running well, and then I can fairly quickly enjoy the pleasure of running my stock, not just building it all the time.

I'd love for 00 to be replaced by an 'Intermediate 18.83', but I don't think it will ever happen ('Intermediate 18.83' is my term for the idea of a set of standards that aren't as anally retentive as P4, which is trying to be as accurate as it's possible to be - fine for those micro engineers who want to live to those standards, but useless for the general modeller).

All the above is, of course, all in my humble onion.

Ian J.

Normally 'burr-er', it's the Americans who tend to say 'burr-ow', especially when pronouncing 'Edinburgh'

Ian J.

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:45:15 +0000, MartinS wrote

I'd describe 'hotel' as an English word absorbed from the French language

It's each unto their own. These days I prefer making things to running them, previously the reverse was to some extent true. Neither is right or wrong. While making something, fiddling about with it to "improve" it is no big deal, but even now I'd not be happy buying something ready-to-run and then having to fiddle with it to make it work. That somehow goes agianst the grain, even if it's not terribly logical!

Cheers Richard

As is almost every word ending in "..able" - change the pronunciation and you got a quite large French vocabulary straight away. Add in the Latin, German and Hindi ("Bungalow" etc) and we've actually not got much left!

Cheers Richard

In message , Ian J. writes

And there was I thinking that "Intermediate 18.83" was alive and well, and called "EM".

Hmmm. I think you know I meant 'intermediate' to mean in the way the track and wheel standards are applied, not to the gauge itself...

Ian J.

Yanks more sophisticated? You gotta be kidding. Yanks hate the French - remember Freedom Fries?

Do you mean "Borough", as in Scarborough?

Ok, thanks for setting me straight.

But I didn't get that impression from the website. I judge a site by its homepage, and it was not obvious from it that P4 supplies were commercially available. There was a link to page of "supporters" or something like that, but that could mean anything. I didn't go there.

BTW poor homepage design is not unique to clubs or societies - many, many businesses haven't clue about how to lay out their home page. My pet peeve is a homepage larded too many images, or worse, with videos and music, as if the visitor had happened on their site by chance, the way you chance on a TV commercial when channel surfing. Websites are always _chosen_, usually from a search engine list. That means the visitor wants real information. TV commercials have no place on a website - they just waste time and bandwidth.

HTH

Steve wrote: [...]

Erm, it's spell 'borough', and the -ough is the "unstressed mid-vowel", which I think you represent as 'a' in your "burr-a". BTW, how way of pronouncing -burg do you know?

A language is what's spoken. Kids (and most adults) have no trouble learning English (or any other language, even Strine -- heh heh). They do have trouble learning to write it down.

Um, I think this thread should move to alt.language. Or alt.language.english.spelling.reform. It will go on even longer there, I'm sure. Heh heh.

HTH

On 19/01/2008 12:17, Ian J. said,

Hmm.... I partly agree with you there with the current generation of RTR. However, Bill Bedford is introducing a range of frames (see ) that take a lot of the pain away. These use the original mechanism but allow for suspension and obviously conversion to P4. There's always going to be some work until (ha!!) the manufacturers produce RTR P4.

Many people don't have space for anything more than a short plank, so if that's all the space available, then make the most of it. You can put a P4 chassis under an RTR body, and many do. Current RTR is certainly up to a very good standard. If you build all the track from scratch, then a large layout will take ages. Why not use P4 flexi-track though, with the Exactoscale or C&L point kits? That'll make track-laying barely take much longer than OO.

Many people would not see that as a disadvantage. If diesels are your thing then P4 is an even easier prospect. Just buy a drop-in wheelset and off you go. Well, almost.

OK - there are always "operators" and "builders". The main manufacturers don't make P4 stock, so if you want to model P4 then you have to do some building yourself. That's inescapable. If you're not the build-it-yourself type, then you won't be modelling P4.

For a while, I thought Bachmann & Hornby were heading towards RTR EM gauge stuff, because some of the stock really did seem almost ready made for it. Brake blocks lining up with EM wheels, that sort of thing. Looks like that was a dream though. Hornby's new Maunsell stock has reverted to narrow gauge brake blocks!

Er, actually, it isn't :-) P4 is a compromise - S4 is the "as accurate as possible" standard!

That's fine!

Is your hotel bungalowable?

Imagine if you were a yank, wouldn't you want to be more sophisticated? As if "French fries" wasn't already an insult to the French.

It might be doable.

Technically, English is a creole - a mixed language. Its grammar is Germanic, its primary vocabulary a blend of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norman French, with a surprisingly large dollop of old Scandinavian. The secondary vocabulary (ie, the one used for trades and professions, the arts and sciences, etc) is mostly Latin and Greek based. The main exception to that are vocabularies of very ancient trades, nowadays largely reduced to "handicrafts" (I dislike that word.)

Socially, English is a language of both regional and social (class) dialects. This may explain why English speakers are willing to adopt and adapt words from other languages, and even from each others' dialects, the occasional tiffs about "proper English" notwithstanding.

BTW, if the stem vowel is i or e, the ending is usually -ible, not

-able. But that distinction is disappearing. It's easier to deal with only one ending. Eg, 'collectible' is (correctly) accepted by this program's spell checker, but not 'collectable', which is becoming the usual spelling hereabouts.

HTH

On 19/01/2008 16:29, Wolf K. said,

Do you mean the "hosted traders" bit? Basically all that is is to provide a web presence for traders that don't have their own website.

My own personal opinion is that the page you get to when you click the "Site index" link should be the home page, but there you go! Incidentally, the BRM "Moving to P4" article is available on the website at .

The worse websites belong to comanies that manufacture computer accessories!! I'm currently looking at building a new PC, and trying to trawl through the various websites is like wading through treacle. Anyway, commercial websites have no excuse because they're paying someone megabucks to make them work that badly, but club and society websites are maintained by volunteers working within their abilities.