Visting the French city of Grenoble back in May 2005, I was impressed to discover that the ticket machines on the tram stops offer an English language option. As I don’t speak French, this was rather useful.

Unfortunately, after buying a ticket in English, the display says that Croydon Tramlink wishes you a good journey!

The the unofficial Croydon Tramlink website has oodles of information about Croydon Tramlink, and its ticketing systems - presumably Grenoble used the same software!

Three or four years ago I went to a model railway show in Sutton, south London, where someone was selling imported Czech resin bodyshells for building models of various Czech(-oslovakian) locomotives. At least one of the bodies on show was suitable for an Iraqi loco - perhaps a T669. Unfortunately I didn’t buy one at the time, and I didn’t take the details of where they were made and who imported them. Does this sound familar to anyone? I could be tempted to acquire one now if anyone knows who the supplier is!

Anyway, an RMweb poster called Fosterboy has identified some possible candidates for conversion into models of IRR locos.

IRR DEM2200 loco.


Piko SNCF BB 567590 model.

IRR DEM2700 loco

Bachmann Chinese DF4D model

IRR DEM2800 I think you need the cabs of ??? and the body of ???
Unfortunately the links from RMweb to the Roco website have got mangled, and I can’t figure out a way to reverse engineer them, but this class has been described as “the body of a TE109, the front ends of a M62 and the roof fixtures of a 2TE121″, which could help pin down suitable models (why are so many model manufacturers’ websites so appallingly bad?).

The DES3100 is available as a brass kit

DK-Model brass T669 locomotive kit

More suggestions would be very welcome.

At a meeting with his Iranian and Afghan counterparts, the Foreign Minister of Tajikistan proposed that a railway which is planned to serve a Chinese copper mining concession at Aynak, east of Kabul, be routed through Kunduz, Panj and then to the Tajik capital Dushanbe. A line would be built up the Vakhsh River valley and onwards to Kashi in China. This route avoids the difficult Wakhan corridor.

The Phantasrail website has been updated with some new photos of freight operations on the Aqaba Railway in Jordan.

Aqaba Railway Corp’s 300 km freight-only system carries phosphate ore from the mines to the port at Aqaba. There are approximately seven train loads from the mines to docks each day.

Probably not, concludes Brett Holman in a posting on his Airminded blog entitled The widening margin. It is an interesting analysis by someone doing a PhD at the University of Melbourne, examining the impact of airpower propaganda on the British people between 1908 and 1939. The whole site looks worth a poke around.

Lastly, here’s a counterfactual which I’ve long wondered about. Between 1933 and 1935, the Air Ministry put a fair amount of effort into researching the feasibility of using acoustic mirrors as a comprehensive early warning system. The acoustic mirrors were, mostly, concrete hemispheric dishes for focusing sound, which had been used as early as 1916. The biggest ones, at Dungeness in Kent and Maghtab in Malta, were 200 feet long curved walls. Land was actually purchased along the Thames Estuary for the beginnings of a national acoustic mirror system, but work never started because radar came along. But if it hadn’t, then in 1940 Fighter Command might have relied upon a network of these acoustic mirrors all along the coast. How useful would they have been?

The experimental mirrors had a maximum detection range of 22 miles (on very windy days it was a lot less). I’ll be generous and call it 25 miles, which is then added to the 50 miles from the coast to London for a total distance of 75 miles. The Thames Estuary acoustic mirrors probably would have come online in 1936, and so again I’ll be generous, and assume that London at least would have a working early warning system from that year.

Taking all this into account, the results can be seen above [article has a graphic]. And sadly the acoustic mirrors wouldn’t have made much difference — a margin of only about 10 minutes, not much improved on the 5 minutes with no warning system. Of course, even a few minutes’ extra warning was worth having, but the Air Ministry was right to terminate development of the acoustic mirror network in order to concentrate on the far more promising radar.

Read Holman’s full article (and some warnings about the assumptions made).

Which indirectly raises the question of whether there are any railways in Bahrain? As far as I know there aren’t, but rather bizarrely thay have an ex-British Rail Mark I coach in use as a restaurant!

According to the Southern Electric Group, buffet car 69338 from 4Big unit 2206/7054 is the station restaurant for the Gulf Corporation in Bahrain.

Photos by David Kelso, March 2003

Babar must have crossed the river Amu somewhere near Termiz. This is the famous crossing site of men and armies. The most famous in recent history being the Russian army of 1979 through the Bridge of Friendship, named in contrast to the act of invasion.

The bridge still stands. It is used by the trade traffic. Not only does it have a road but also a railway crossing from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. To establish a station for unloading goods, they built a town named Hayratan, a dismal place with a railway yard and some houses belonging to the railway workers and army personnel. The town is so recent that it doesn’t even show on some of the older maps of Afghanistan. These days you cannot go on the bridge directly, but a guard will direct you to a place from where the bridge and Amu Darya are within sight.

The bridge is a steel construction, painted pale yellow on the top. Amu is a big river in the region, made famous in Arabic historical writings as the “Nehar”. Arab historians have given the area beyond a name so beautiful and descriptive, “Mavara-un-nehar”. The railway does not go beyond Hayratan. This is the only part of Afghanistan where there is a railway built by the invading Russians. It is their legacy.

Babar writes in his book that after crossing the Amu on a raft, he landed in Afghan Turkistan where he was greeted by vast flat grasslands.

Fuel Line Vol. 3, 2006 from Defense Energy Support has an article “Voruz Earns Bronze Star Thanks to Many Logistics Professionals”. This describes removing a vast quantity of fuel from a US base in Uzbekistan to one in Afghanistan in a hurry during 2005, by rail and lorry. There is a small photo of railway tracks at Hayratan.

There is a common misconception that electronic warfare began with the Second World War but, even if it was not so labelled, it played a significant part in the First World War at both a strategic and a tactical level.

Fans of sound mirrors might be interested in the tale of how the Eiffel Tower was used to confuse Zeppelins.