Bogies (no giggling at the back, please) Trucks:
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Modern. Kettle. Hmmm… anyhoo:
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Unlikely.
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If it ain’t broke:
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Today I spent £4.95 on a bunch of high-res B&W images of the railway sidings, goods depot, and long-since vanished original station in my old home town. This sort of a thing:
Not even my boots are sticking out of this rabbit hole now.
HEAVY hits of nostalgia underway.
I’m just old enough to remember the very last year of steam operations in BR’s Southern Region. Thanks to the above pics and archives, I now know for sure my very earliest solid memory dates from when I was three years old. My mum took me to see the last-ever steam express from Waterloo to Bournemouth as it crossed the river Avon in Christchurch.
I remember this giant black moving lump of landscape - so big it was unfeasible. Dirty, rusty, greasy, smoking and steaming. So heavy it made the ground we stood on heave, and so hot I could feel it on my face as I looked up at it passing twenty feet or more overhead. I remember the damp, oily, sulphurous smells of its exhalations like it was yesterday.
I mind the long shiny green caterpillar that followed behind it, too, with its rhythmic clanging rattle that hurt my ears - steel wheels on steel rails on a steel bridge… Two years shy of sixty years ago.
That and the ramifying landscape of goods sidings, red and yellow semaphore signals, endlessly-varied 4-wheeled box vans and coal tubs hauled in great long strings along the embankment over the water meadows, the great looms of telegraph wire on endless pitch-pine poles, the signal boxes, parcels sheds, linesemens’ huts - prefabbed or bodged from tarry old sleepers… Its all lived in foggy memories and recurring dreams for nearly six decades.
Nearest thing to time travel this is 
/sadoldgit
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Rabbithole-as-fuck…
Also small things with wheels may have started arriving in dribs’n’drabs…
And photos of my old haunts 60 years ago are piling-up in (computer) folders…
Like the drunk old boy killed on the level-crossing 5 minutes walk from here 150 years ago: I did not see this coming… 
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Just to gauge the particular cost of said digging, plain DC or DCC?
I have memories aged 6 running across a bridge (Shirehampton) just to get engulfed in smoke from the train passing underneath.
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I guess you like.
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This much:
[…and if we have the usual weapons-grade pedants aboard:
- Yes, I know they’re usually called coffee pots or biccy tins…
- Yes, I know banana vans were never actually bright yellow, but if I wanted authentic ca. 1967, absolutely everything would be a uniform filthy faded rusty brown with bits falling off]
DCC-enabled, and used - I Want The Thing, I am very far from sure if I’m ever actually going to play with any of it - in the half century since puberty there’s only been one thing I’ve played with, and a declining T-count / nervous-breakdown (which I assume this is) can only carry me just so far…
…it is, however, all ridiculously cute and adorable and smol 
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When I had a OO setup I had the lovely Hornby model of the Bulleid Q1 which of course was a wartime design hence the stripped back look.
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A Q class, slightly off the wall choice. There is one currently in the NRM and the quality of the panel work is quite comical in a sub-Leyland way.
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I love the absurdity of it all - it was a proper austerity design: easy to maintain and absurdly powerful for what was basically a shunter on steroids, and I love the quirky looks of all Bulleid’s unmodded designs, even the crazy kettle-wearing-a-diesel’s-skin thing (forget the name, only made one because it cooked the firemen 
).
The quality of the models now is astounding - my last train set was 55 years ago, and OO, and it was MILES off this teeny N-gauge stuff, even if the proportions are harder to make work: you only notice in macro pics mind!
Yep - I like uncool freighty old wrecks towing long strings of dirty brown box vans, prolly because that’s what I remember as a kid. On our line, everything else was featureless EMUs.
Restored locos have gone down the same road as classic cars: the restored ones are WAY the fuck better finished than they were when they left the factory, and that poor old Q1 was mostly either worked to death or sat-around outdoors being ignored for decades because people just don’t love nameless black wartime things unless they were used to kill people. I’d love to see it working again - it’s the only survivor of the 40 made, and the first one too.
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Let us know what loco modelling foo is about. It will exist.
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Oh yes.
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Pinnacle of weathering. Don’t tell them about cables.
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At some point, I expect to meet people who will make hifi geeks look relatively high-functioning.
I’ve already discovered that trainspotters (who call themselves something else nowadays) have a whole rich and arcane argot all their own, and think nothing of piling into a coach and spending the entire night from dusk-to-dawn driving the length of the cuntry going door-to-door to the last few traincare depots and knocking on the front door unannounced hoping to get a behind-the-scenes tour. Which they fairly often do.
I found an old pic of them on the last ever day’s working out of Bournemouth West in 1965, before it was obliterated without trace, and thought “You’d never see scenes like that nowadays, there’s prolly only three of them still into it!”
1965 - hundreds of mad bastards, some of 'em up signal gantries! :
Then look at this lot at a couple of different stations in 2020 - just to see-off a superannuated overgrown diesel shunter!
Bit more H&S mind!
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Um…
Did someone mention weathering?