2 myths about the French

It is often said that the French hate to queue.

I've lost counts of the number of times I've been to France and have never seen any evidence for this assertion. How could it be other wise? If 10 Frenchmen arrive in a post office or at a railway booking counter or a patisserie or at a bus stop or at a hotel reception desk, what would happen if nobody queued? There would be pushing and shoving and fighting and shouting and nobody would get served. That simply does not happen. People queue in France as they do here in the UK.

Just as frequently, it is said that the French appreciate British visitors trying to speak French to them.

Obviously, if one shouts in English to make oneself understood then that will go down badly. But I find that a simple apology for not being able to speak French allows one then to communicate in English without any difficulty.

In my own case, French residents actually beg me not to speak French because they can't stand the mixture of hesitancy and tortured pronounciation.

On the bank transfer front, I emailed the German bank concerned and they replied almost immediately with the instructions for transferring euros to one of their accounts. They signed off their email with "Best wishes to Glasgow."

Hotel Les Vagues, Arcachon.

Having great difficulty transferring euros to Germany to pay for those TEE carriages purchased from eBay. Will try again tomorrow.

In the meantime, here are some photos of a lovely hotel in Arcachon.

It boasts a very traditional French restaurant with s wonderful view.

And fantastic food.

eBay triumph.

Perhaps "triumph" is the wrong word, but when your bid is successful in an eBay auction they email you with the message "Congratulations. You have won." or something similar.

Anyway, I can't be bothered trying to fit that DCC chip into the loco so I'll report on this auction.

The dilemma that faced me was (as I reported in an earlier blog) that I had purchased the wrong set of carriages to complete my model of the Trans Europ Express. The latter's locos and carriages belonged to an earlier incarnation of the TEE. I won't re-outline the dilemma but basically I had decided to resolve it by selling the new set of carriages on eBay and then search around the internet for the correct set.

But being lazy, I decided to look for the replacement set now and leave the selling of the wrong ones for another day.

After a considerable search I discovered a second-hand set of three carriages on the Netherlands eBay site.

I've bid for stuff on eBay before and what I really like about it is that it is a secret auction and you don't, as a bidder, get driven higher and higher in your bidding by trying to fend off your rivals. You decide how much you are willing to pay - in my case 85euros - but on the auction site is presented a much lower figure - one that is just a couple of euros higher than the existing highest bid. So the existing highest bid was 20euros and my bid caused this to rise to 22.5euros.

There were 11 bidders and the second highest bidder was only willing to go to 50 euros. And this is the bit that I like - I didn't pay 85 euros, eBay adjusts my bid to a couple of euros above the second highest so I get the carriages for 52.5euros. A real bargain if they arrive safely AND are the right ones this time! This is what I should end up with.

And this is a youtube video of a lucky chap (or chappess) who has the complete set up and running. There are quite a few of these videos on Youtube and most are accompanied with a soundtrack by Kraftwerk - but not this one, I'm afraid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hg5gfjgN2M&feature=related

Fitting the DCC chip Part 1 (of 1500)

I need to have one loco fitted with a DCC chip so that I can lay the track with all its wiring and test the DCC control system. It's a matter of urgency, really.

The question is: into which loco should I try and fit it? My first thought was the Renault ABJ because it seemed to have plenty of space inside it and I knew it worked. But on opening it up I was met with a nightmare in the form of  a spaghetti of micro wiring, plugs, and a circuit board whose complexity and size rivalled that for our washing machine. Why was all that electronics needed to run a set of headlights and tail lights.


So, plan B was to open up a little French shunting engine that I had bought second-hand on the internet (by Jouef).

First of all, I checked that it actually worked. It did and it had a little light bulb inside that lit up - not quite sure why. Then I turned it upside down to see how to take the body off. Miraculously, only 2 screws had to be undone.

But would I be able to fit the chip inside it? Better leave that attempt until tomorrow once I have done some more reading on the topic.

Can't believe it.

Regarding the earlier blog and the hassle with the precision screw drivers not fitting the small adjuster screws in the Bachrus Running Stands.

Just about to pack everything away for the night when my foot kicked something on the floor. It was a small polythene bag containing a specialised and tiny allen key provided by Bachrus to adjust their allen screws.

Oh well.

Poetic licence and anachronisms.

There is going to be a fair amount of poetic licence behind this French railway project. For a start, the location is going to be an amalgam of French towns/cities. But I'm going to have to accept accusations of anachronism which are more difficult to square with poetic licence.

This is certainly the case with my selection of a Renault ABJ Autorail car for the layout. Autorails were self-contained single vehicles. I purchased one last month on my visit to Mulhouse. A bit of a bargain, actually. I loved its dark green livery and the word NORD displayed on the side. I could picture it occupying a specially constructed short section of platform at the far end of my station. Sitting there ready to take home commuters from the big city to some quiet town 50kms away. Its regulars would know that their train would always be there, at the same special platform.

Can you see the special platform?

However, the futuristic shape of this autorail duped me into thinking its heyday was either the 50s or 60s. In fact it was of the 1930s. But my layout is supposed to be set in the late 50s/early 60s.

Why do I accept this example of anachronism but not the example (mentioned in an earlier blog) of the TEE from the 1970s whose carriages I  mistakenly purchased and which arrived yesterday?

Not sure I'm cut out for this.

After the success of getting a loco to move, the next step was to run it in using the highly recommended Bachrus Running Stands. These are ball-bearing based runners that sit atop the track and thus are in electrical contact with the track. The loco then sits on the resultant cradle and works without going anywhere.

However, one has to adjust the individual stands to the width of the track. This is achieved by loosening and then tightening screws. It is clear that the screws are reached by inserting a precision screw-driver (recently purchased by moi) down the very obvious holes which house the screws. And this is where I could have screamed and thrown the whole project out the window. The dam screw driver couldn't find any screw at the bottom of the hole - absolutely no sensation of  engaging the slot that one finds at the top of a screw. Thinks: perhaps I should use one of the precision Phillips screw drivers in my new set of precision screw drivers. But, the smallest one available was too thick for the hole.

Now, at this point, I should have counted to 10, stepped back and had a good think. Perhaps even returning to the challenge tomorrow. But no, a child-like impatience gripped me. These runners had to work tonight. So, against all mature advice, I forced apart the runners through brute force to fit the tracks. That actually worked, but I don't feel it deserved to work.

Next challenge was fitting the train wheels to the runners. This was accompanied by new irritations: poor lighting and a work-surface that was too low. One had to crouch down most uncomfortably to peer at the intersection of train wheels and ball-bearing runners. I suppose these irritations are resolvable in future.