It should be no secret that I am a MAX developer, I’m trained in it, I worked with it for years and well, it makes sense. So, I tried Blender, like I’ve been doing for years, I did have previous experience, but as in the future , I’d like to go over to Linux and therefore Blender, it would make sense for me to try it. I just wish I could get hold of a PineBook Pro (they look interesting), I would go for the MNT Reform, but the prices are quite “Galactic” for what they are. They have some nice features and nice Right To Repair ideas, but still. Or even Framework would be a choice, despite my laptop of choice is actually a Toughbook.
So I started my first object as a test, this used splines, just splines, this is how it looked.
It was meant to be a Wickham Railbus, downsized to 25% of the screenshot size, which was built out of lines, or spline modelling, using diagrams as a start, then using a surface modifier or Blenders equivalent of, to form the shape. It wouldn’t be out of my comfort zone if it was max as I now do this almost all the time. But as the UI on Blender and the naming of tools is vastly different, its a lot harder. So I left it, wanted another go for something simpler to get the basics of it, so I built this thing.
Now I spent about 3 hours on it, the screenshot is what I started with, however, its not how it looks. I noticed a lot of mistakes and I keep finding them, so I had another go and the model below is how it looks.
Yeah, not much, but there is one bigger twist! So I tried it on my Hyper-V virtual machine which I use in and outside the house. Then found that Hyper-V doesn’t support a feature that Blender requires, meaning it won’t start Oh well, back to the drawing board. Hopefully, this will look more like a 10T or 12T wagon, its slow, but I’m learning how Blender works and my god, the amount of tutorials (and Google) I needed to even get this far.
God, pretty much half way through my life (I am guessing, but with the age I’m expecting to live to) and this year, my birthday sucks, hard, literally. You’ll see below what I mean.
The time came to deal with being 40, to be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it, until I got my pressie which for birthday’s, is a rather odd choice, considering that if someone was given it, it will be thrown out the window pretty quickly, especially if your husband buys it and you didn’t ask for it.
So, leading up to my 40thh (the day I write this), it was marked with depression issues, of them and even at 6 months out, my family wanted to know “what do you want for your birthday?”, lets just say, if you had the same idea I had, 116 123, call that. To be honest, I have a lot of issues with depression recently, not because I don’t want to feel depressed, but things aren’t quite going the way I would like them to and the horrible habit of comparing myself to other people, especially from the school I came from. What makes it worse, is that I am focusing on the stuff I don’t have, which is a wife, kids, a house (although I now have the money to move out of my dads place when needed – with a little help with a mortgage) and I feel held back considerably.
Actually, it is the first time I’ve talked about this on my blog and don’t worry, I have thought about seeking help, its on my todo list. Also recently, as I became an eBay seller to reduce my computer collection substantially, I’ve been doing a lot of selling, my god, one package has become extremely stressful, because Royal Mail decided not to deliver it, instead, it was at my local delivery office for 10 days with no activity. It was suppose to go elsewhere (not Chichester). So, I had a pretty understandably frustrated buyer wondering if I scammed them.
I’ve tried to be helpful as much as possible as well. Yes, registered a complaint and guess how far that got? Nowhere!
So there is that, the thing I have to focus on and I am not very good at doing that, is what I achieved. Now I’ve not really spoken about it, but I was considered a SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) pupil at school – before SEND was a thing, so my education hasn’t been great, left with 2 GCSE’s when many leave with 5 or more, one C and one E grade, couldn’t go any further, couldn’t do A levels, couldn’t do six form, so ended up in college. But what I didn’t expect was to go into university, that was a very last minute decision, because of a course I liked and that was thanks to “Trainz”.
Now I am working in London. I broke records at the school, now I am probably still breaking records after I left. I’d love to know how many pupils actually did go to University and graduated, even more so, how many actually work in London for a large company that millions depend on daily. Many from my school will be going “you’re boasting about what you have done”, actually no, I’ve actually got a bigger challenge and its not about me, its not about others, its about SEND and this is borne out of my frustration of life, you see SEND, jobs and education becomes hard, VERY hard. IT shouldn’t be, but the stigma is still there, the stigma of society as a whole see people like me with Asperger’s Syndrome as “pretty stupid” when actually, we are really really smart, its changing perception of that and as much as I hate to say it, when I come from a far more diverse background, I’ve had that exposure of seeing what the person can do, those that come from state school where SEND isn’t a thing, still have that stigma. That’s what I want to change, just became my education background isn’t that good, doesn’t mean I am less able, in fact, I prove I’m just as able – I just need a bit more support to understand what is the social norms and how to interact (as I interact differently).
I actually had a longer post prepared on SEND, but I never completed it, so that is on the back burner.
So why does my 40th suck? What did I ask for, for my birthday? Well, everything I touch either doesn’t work, needs emptying frequently, the filters clogged very quickly, you need to untangle the bloody thing and no matter what manufacturer you use, its the same situation, so when I go and clean the house, I want the bloody thing to just bloody work. I asked for something that became my companion at work, I remember them at school too, with his great big smile and eyes, that great big trunk sticking out and made a machine human. Outside the UK, he’s not as well known, but inside the UK, he has a dependable reputation and has many other friends in different colours…
.. he’s not a machine, he’s a life long companion! Many people would absolutely hate having a hoover for their birthday. Me? I wanted a Henry. So I finally got my own Henry Hoover. Finally, I can clean the house with a hoover that is reliable and easy to fix. That’s the other complaint, every Dyson I’ve touched, breaks, can you find the bits for them? God, nope, because they stopped making them. Henry’s? Dead easy and dirt cheap! That’s why he isn’t a machine, but a companion for life.
(Side note, I managed to complete a yearly task, trains and daffodils, this is on the flower bed at Haslemere station with the only daffodil I snapped at the time.)
… Passenger Point Queue Generator, the program that took my site offline once.
Its not often you hear a site taken offline for a program that well, does what its not supposed to. I spent quite a while developing PPQG (Passenger Point Queue Generator – for Trainz) and it’s suppose to help with randomising and creating queues for rolling stock for passenger trains. I might enhance this to include freight queues as well, as some of my projects also have freight queues (parcels) included. Not unusual for Railbuses.
I wrote this about 8 years ago in Visual BASIC 6, yes, really, on the train to and from work and it took quite a while. Across several computers and never finished. The reason why I never considered it finished, is because I left a module unfinished and never went back to it. Yes, I use it a lot, I’ve offered it out with its source code on this site which was fine for a number of years, until suddenly, my site got shut down because of it – because it contained malware. Got it back online, hosted it on Google Drive and it looks like its been deleted again. I have scanned it and some sites saying its clean, some are saying it has malware.
It looks like this, doesn’t actually do any file handling and its only 40KB long. I hope it’s bugless but it can probably be buggy accidently. (If you do find some, let me know please).
So used VirusTotal and it says 3 out of 71 providers consider it to have a virus which isn’t bad news, it just means that there is a way and style of my code writing matches a pattern in a Trojan or Virus. After all, all virus scanners look for is patterns in the code, if it matches that pattern, its a false positive. This could also be related to the VB6 libraries and embedded code to identify it as a VB6 programs but without asking a question to why, I will probably never find an answer. Nor would they tell me how their virus scanners work, because of intellectual property and secrecies that could be used to beat the virus scanner. So with that in mind, I started thinking about completely re-writing from scratch, this time, I used Visual Studio Community edition and the skills I already learnt.
The thing I find is that to understand the language as VB.net is vastly different than VB6 (the language structure is different and its more Object Orientated and its compiled rather than interpreted. I could develop it in C++ which isn’t beyond my capabilities, or C# or Java, just all 3 take a lot longer for me as I rarely program in those languages. When I go over to Linux, I might look at that, but then I may end up using GAMBAS anyway.
So, I started off like this on an old laptop that I was going to get rid of and ended up in use on my desk. (Dell Latitude E6430 ATG).
To get the randomisation to work took…. ages! But I worked it out with little help from the internet, which shows that I understand the basic language structure. When I started programming, I had high expectations of myself, thinking an experience programmer would understand off by heart all the required libraries. C++ is a strictly typed language and my god, it can be hell to work with. (Actually, in the office, that is a point, I wonder if the other 2 capable programmers understand C++?) until one of my tutors at the time pointed out that there is 25,000 libraries from memory, approximately! Yeah, I can’t memorise 25,000 libraries and what they do, that would be nearly impossible. Its bad enough understanding union rules for train crew or understanding the limits what you can do on the infrastructure. I know the other 2 understand VB, but Visual BASIC for Applications (which I avoid due to its flexibility). One has a basic understanding of VBA and had to explain to them how the VBA IDE (integrated Development Environment) window, like debugging features – inserting break points and the intermediate window, which is VERY powerful and you can understand how the program is working. But the code? That’s something else. The other understands VBA to a deeper level than me. (Oh one understands I believe Python that I find it difficult to get on with and understands Blender, whereas I tried Blender and struggled.) I like structured rather than spaghetti code, so all my loops and decisions are always indented to which one I am applying my code to (good programming practise) and I was always taught “Do not use GOTO statements”, its not quite true, but yeah, avoid them. Your code is messy! I always use modules; they allow reuse and small code. Goto statements? Don’t. How to get into a mess quickly and have zero usability of code.
On Err GoTo Hell.
You may not understand that! Anyway, I think I topped out for PPQG VB6 at less than 500 lines of code. I’m waiting to find out how this one is doing, but you will need Windows 10/11 at least as I’m building it for .Net Version 8. I prefer 3.5 as it doesn’t need 8.0 or even 10. No doubt I’ll talk about more of its development over time.
Russ the roofer – does it leak? No it doesn’t!
In other news
You may of noticed I’ve done some changes to the site too, small ones on some pages. I finally found the problem with my templates, so I’ve locked the sidebar, footer and header which resolved most issues on most templates and there is a search bar now. I’ve also put some files up, I had a separate page that just directly linked to a Google Drive as I wanted a publicly accessible drive for all the stuff that I’ve not put onto a page, but that didn’t, so I went the manual way. I’ve got some sources to put up and yes, you can download them and do what you like with them. There will be more in the future. That came from my WIP server and if you are after something that isn’t on my site, just drop me an email, the contact me page should work now and I’ll send it over. I also plan to add some sort of feedback to the side bar, so I’ll see how that goes – more importantly, time. Considering I’m feeling like “Bob the builder” at the moment. “Can I fix it? No I f***ing can’t!” As well as – going around the country on the coldest week on record!
Lets just say a Northern guard had a bit of a shock when I hid under a hood and a scarf covering my face, then presented them with my Southern ITSO card, my Staff ITSO card, my PRIV card and my PRIV rate ticket. – it was blowing a gale at -2°C. I had a good laugh, just the Class 150 I was on, (between Ribblehead and Salford Cresent) went from nice and toasty, to the time we got to Blackburn – (or was it Bolton?), it was bloody freezing.
Yes, that is an Class 805 Evero, yes, that is Ribblehead, Yorkshrie. Unfortunately, I’m not friends with Class 800s now, one took me and a lot of passengers prisoner at Carlisle by refusing to release the doors on 5 out of 10 coaches, with loads of alarms going off in the cab as the train refuses to co-operate with the door release buttons. Considering I was a full fare paying passenger in that I actually brought an advance single on a Disabled Railcard.
EDIT much later (next day in fact!):
A partially wasted Sunday with little to do, I was able to get it working. Well, I say wasted, I did manage to rearrange my desk so it was more usable for my height. But, after a lot of head scratching and finding out why variables weren’t parsing, I managed to fix it:
Only 4 or 5 hours to get back into it and produced something useful. VB6 skills are still relevant. (And I didn’t resort of Xojo – another BASIC IDE!) – hopefully, it’s easy to read. I can add a crap ton of comments if you REALLY want.
Its that time again, onto 2026 and I already have some “new years resolutions” (targets). I have a nice easy one, go to the office at work more. Yeah, 2 days at home I didn’t particularly enjoy, in fact, 3 days in some cases. However, as there is some engineering projects affecting me next year, I might find that 3 days at home or 50% in the office over 2 weeks will be the norm (and we have gone for more hybrid working where I work, not less).
For me, what has happened this year? Well, a lot actually, some really big changes too. The only thing that hasn’t changed is my job, but the industry I work in has changed and is changing more and more.
The bad
I lost Buddy – the dog very early on, back in January in fact and to be honest, it still is quite painful seeing Buddy going through his last moments on earth in the worst way possible. I feel the vets should of been much more supportive but they weren’t and yes, I do miss Buddy a lot.
Then came more concerns. I’ve not mentioned it on here, but I had a few health issues that were concerning, it started with issues that I kept getting with a certain type of cold that requires anti-biotics as it causes breathing difficulties over time if it worsens, so I was scheduled for a “spirometry” test as I also been diagnosed with eczema/dermatitis (my skin is a big problem, those that seen me know that my hands are littered with flaky skin and splits!) , so they think I was potentially asthmatic. I’ve been given an inhaler but I only really use it when required,
You thought that would be it? Well, when I was with my friend who was driving to Kidderminster with the dogs from Llandrindod Wells, I noticed a lump on my head that grew out of nowhere and it was hard like that for about a month when I got it checked out. Then on the same side of my body, 2 more lumps appeared. One was really bad, which is a suspect insect bite, one was considered an ingrown hair, the other when I went to A&E (the insect one burst and kept leaking), I was told to get it checked out as there was a 1% chance it could be cancerous – small, very small, so I did, turned out to be a wart. So for about 4 weeks, I was worried I had the signs of cancer because being naturally red headed, the risk of skin cancer is really high. At least I got it sorted when I did.
The end is nigh – for the franchise
The big one? I changed employers and got TUPE’d over, I went from First Group to DfTO from the 21st May 2025, that has been a big change and was it positive? Well, putting it on here will upset one or the other, however, as things go, I’m not going anywhere.
However, as part of this, my box card which First Group employees get, was coming to an end, so what was idea? Use it! Plus my 40 odd tickets a year friends and family discount (which was £6 a ticket and rarely used it). So first of all, I went to Hull, using Hull Trains, an open access operator I wanted to use for years, I finally did it and it was a really smooth great experience. That was on the bank holiday weekend in May. I was going to post my thoughts on Hull (its alright), but to be honest, I didn’t find much to do for an overnight stay, apart from the aquarium, it was a fishy trip, that’s for sure.
The Deep, Hull – 03/05/2025
Weekend after that, I went with the older sister to London with the dogs for a day and did a long walk that Finn and Bailey – oh, I’ve not mentioned those yet. I need to – to Brixton from London Waterloo, it was warm but OK.
Weekend after that, I took my mum and younger sister with their 2 dogs and my 2 dogs to Bath, that was a nice trip but got too warm, this was a sign of things to come with the weather,
The final weekend, it was again, my mum and younger sister to London and a walk around London. This was the final weekend of the franchise and it was a goodbye and hello. If I don’t fall foul of a policy, I’ll post my thoughts on the franchise. I’ve been in the company from the Stagecoach days and there were some good ideas, don’t get me wrong.
A change of direction – in my spare time
Politics talk. I kept quiet about this, but in July, I became a councillor for my local parish council. This being Fishbourne (Sussex), yes, I am now into politics and making positive changes. This was influenced by my mum and the big reason for doing it was quite simply crime. Sussex police I had arguments with their PCC where crime was going up and nothing had been done about it. So, I did something and I started recording things. I’ve now started a database and I have met many residents to hear their views. I now have a bigger project in the wings (yes, its one I want to sort as well) which is Fishbourne Roundabout, its dangerous, its a hot topic here and the whole A27 (the road that runs from Romsey to Eastbourne) runs right through the middle of the roundabout metaphorically. There is many things I’ve heard and not to upset a certain influential person on this blog, I’ll keep my mouth shut – but I was not impressed when I heard it. (I do agree that the northern bypass wasn’t a good idea anyway as I got my own interest that will be on a direct collision course with them anyway – called railways and a line I want to build and one I want to reopen.) Theres lots to do and I’m getting started. Its slow, but I’m getting there. For those wanting to make a difference, I’ll recommend joining the council, there is one important rule though, you can’t act individually, you have to act as a collective – including all decision making. This maybe a new career if the railway goes Pete Tong. However, if anyone gave me a bribe, I’ll send it back to where it belongs. Sorry I’m happy with what I have got, it doesn’t come with strings.
Work challenges
At work, I’ve not progressed, we are relatively stable at the moment, so the opportunity isn’t there, but work life has been interesting. I’ve gone to a situation of doing nothing to doing lots to doing nothing. Big thing, I actually got involved in 2 events, the 9 day Portsmouth Direct Line closure as I diagrammed the crew on the last trains (yes, I didn’t expect that!) and a small contribution to a railtour, so small, its almost insignificant, but had I picked up something, it would have a massive impact. Yes, I would of been affected by my own problem. It ran, so I wasn’t worried. I even got involved in the Class 701 introduction for a day, that was an interesting experience and that was back in March.
Related to the PDL and being affected by my own work, I also saw all 3 signal boxes on the last day! I managed to take some photos too, with my camera as phones are frowned upon, 2 still exist (Petersfield and Haslemere), but one has now bit the dust. I understand the reasoning however (and that’s a wider subject I can’t talk about on here).
Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland. Belfast/Dublin/Coleraine/Coach Tour of several Irish Places and nearly got sick! Because the roads are rough and I was at the back (June) Llandrindod Wells again/Aberystwyth – Vale of Rheidol Ralway/Barmouth/Bala-Bala Lake Railway (Oct)
I have to say, I mentioned Hull previously in this post because it formed part of the end of the franchise for the company I work for, but going to Northern Ireland in June was scary! No really, it was, it was when there were demonstrations about immigration and when I came across some graffiti that read “locals only, no foreigners – keep out” in Bangor, that scared me. You cannot judge someone’s origins from how they look. Yes, I’ll fit right in – in Ireland as I am red headed and IC1, but the moment I open my mouth, I will be picked out, because I don’t sound Irish, I’m from Southern England which is known to have a posh accent (apparently!), so that was quite honestly scary. Then add the Land Rover Tangi’s roaming around, it wasn’t reassuring at all, I thought I was just about to walk into the next civil conflict since “The troubles“. No, I don’t ever want to go down that route, I don’t want to see it a second time in my life. Keep everything at peace, keep everything going as it is. After all, we are all human. Be peaceful and run trains, you will achieve a lot more, plus your economy does better with tourism.
The website Another big thing, ever since my original site got taken down in 2013 from memory, I’ve been trying to produce a new site with a content management system. Joomla is what my old site used from 2009 to 2013, I then went over to “NetObject Fusion” which is a piece of software that does websites with a storyboard interface and is more of a WYSIWYG editor that builds entire static websites than a content management system. I’ve been messing with WordPress for years, just I never knew how to create a template, even though I had a blog in a sub directory which was used to convey my thoughts. Until I started messing with WordPress properly and found lots of stuff I never knew existed. This allowed me to use my template dated from 2017 to be used and that’s what kicked everything off. Just the ability to create my own template and put them on my site. It worked! That’s what I wanted to do from day one. Once I unlocked that, I spent 4 weeks on and off producing this site. Then launched it quietly. I’ve not changed much. I did have a Google Drive link, but I have had to remove it. I’ll add it back into the future at some point.
I’ve also done a lot more 3D objects for the site, I still am, on and off, just pause for other reasons, then restarting.
Personal life
My life has a change of direction too. I’ve complained about being single for so long, now this is where it gets really weird (such as my life), certain dating site, my ex was on it, just flicked through her profile and noticed that October last year, she left a like. That said site kept trying to match her and me together and I kept avoiding it, I decided to go with it, liked her and matched. This was in January and yes we dated in February, March and April, but haven’t seen each other since, so its a bit of a limbo situation. However, I’ve been hijacked a lot by my family (my mum and sister) as they moved from Fareham to Southbourne, so you can guess who did a lot of DIY work. You got it in one! (ME!) I reckon I spent out of 52 weekends, 26 of them there – or there abouts. It got difficult to manage and it put a strain on my life too. Thank god I don’t have any kids.
In short, change of employer (same job), involved in some special events, travelled to several places, became a councillor, launched this site, dated my ex (x4) and did a ton of dodgy DIY. What a year.
The worst bit: Under 2 months until I am 40 and apparently, I look nowhere near it. That might explain why I seem to be getting young ladies coming up to me recently and the usual youths I have problems with, think I am their age, that will be funny when I turn around to them and point out that I am old enough to be their dad – and scary!
(Something I never thought about before until I started talking about my age, especially when I talk about slammers to my boss who is 8 years older than me and everyone around me is like “what is a slammer?” Slam door train – think Classes 411/412/421/423, even I have managed to travel on Mk2s, Mk3s and now Mk4s on the mainline and Class 310/312s on the mainline. Not forgetting one Class 101 on the mainline – Stockport to Stalybridge, one way in 2001)
Next year goals
Next year, what do I want to do? Get my blue Espace on the road, spend more time in the office rather than at home, do some changes to my desks at home as I got a really uncomfortable chair and go to France. I’ve been saying that for 2 years so far and Jersey is close enough. Now I have some new stuff to try out for my desk at work (a leather seat and a trackball), it would be natural to spend more time at work. At least I don’t have to put up with my horrible low backed seat. Oh wait! I’m sitting in a low backed mesh seat while I type this at home that is begging to be replaced. I’m not bothered about the back, but the base – ouch!
Fun fact, in a year, I’ve travelled by Car, Train (Narrow and Standard gauge – steam, diesel, electric, passenger and ECS), Bus, Coach, Ship and 3 planes, an ATR 72, Airbus A319 and an Airbus A320. Fascinating fact, I’ve nearly thrown up on a coach (rough road), car (rough road – rough driving), plane (turbulence on approach to Belfast City Airport – the ATR72 was too small anyway), but this time around, not the ship. The car decks kept me up on the Belfast to Liverpool overnight sailing though! I’ll never forget the car alarms going off below me.
Photos
Oh photos! Yes, you like photos. A selection of some published and previously unpublished photos for the year.
All I can say, what an incredible and here in the south of the UK – record breaking warm year and lets see what 2026 brings.
One final thought
Oh yeah, I didn’t mention one thing, I left it off accidently, in the words of someone I watch a lot of YouTube shorts (swearing);
This fucking thing!!
Coventry VLR – 07/06/2025
I actually rode it, talked to the designers and gave my input into future ideas of the overall design – make it modular and other interesting design ideas. I won’t take credit, as some may notice how I design things, how about a tiller handler used to remove, add or swap modules in a depot to vary the length of a train? The idea of the Class 475 was that and it had a more important reason for its short coaches. Its to do with where I would like the train to go. Chichester on a tramway, from West Street to South Street, round the cross. Buses do it every day, why not trains? (Not that you can at the moment, you can’t as there is no tramway).
Bringing myself back to the subject, its an interesting vehicle and to be honest, has some really brilliant ideas, some I thought of, some of my ideas I’ve shared and some I’ve learnt off them too.
I mentioned about this in my previous blog post, but yes, again, I broke my site again!
Its the contact me form again. I had issues in the past with the site going off line randomly and I’ve been trying to sort that since June or July (yeah, none of that stuff please? You know, the month numbers?) 2025, I can’t remember which, but the site kept going off line, disabled multiple plugins and my site host started a new server, still kept going offline but a lot less than before, so I kept disabling more and more plug-ins. The previous contact form was driven by JetPack, which is a plug-in for WordPress which comes with a handy contact form builder and has other nice features like the ability to update via an app on a mobile device, which I used extensively on my blog when it was in a sub folder before I rebuilt everything and got to grips with how WordPress works (I actually was planning to go back to Joomla as I previously have done, WordPress just has a load of plug-ins).
So disabling JetPack = no contact. Luckily I had another way to build contact forms, which came from PageLayer. If I thought about it, I could of built it from scratch for 4 times the time it would of taken and that’s an estimate as it would require some PHP coding. (I don’t fancy that!)
So imagine my surprise and excitement when I got an email on the 23/12/2025 from a user, read it and great! I can’t respond, because I would be responding to myself.. how the hell? Did some investigation, tests, runs and found a setting I had enabled. “Ooops”. This is in a plug-in called “GoSMTP”, great. So I tried again, it worked but some clients weren’t sending emails. Great.
So with all the plug-in problems I’ve had from the same provider, I thought “Ok, lets fix this”, I did, tried every way possible, removed GoSMTP, it worked – this is the classic developer thing of “it worked on my comptuer.” WRONG!
So tried it on my work computer and guess what? The email bounced! Great, more figuring and testing. It looks like PageLayer uses the existing email client to send a computer which will work if you don’t have an exotic OS. I use a mix of Linux, Windows, Android, iOS and occasionally, MacOS.
Then discovered that GoSMTP doesn’t do what I want it to do as it is for sending emails from the site, not for receiving email (it seem to work that way), so tried pagelayer and that then stopped sending emails via the submit button, so tried the WP form which is driven by… Jetpack. But it also doesn’t work the same way, it sends an email, my wessexelectricnut address never gets it, so goes via my home address. All fun and games.
So if you have tried to send me an email and didn’t get a response, I do apologise, try now. (and I got a lot more bugs to fix! Like the blog pages, I’ll find a way – its to do with the templates).
Ok, short but sweet blog, well ok, a little longer as now I have 4 1/2 days off work (YAY!) and a pile of stuff to do at home (Boo) and places to go in the new year, I.e. hunting Avanti West Coast services on the Settle to Carlisle line (opens in a new window, leaves the site) – which unlike last time as I could do it for free with my box card, will cost me a pretty penny, still with PRIV rate and it looks like with all the engineering work going on, I may sample some new Aurora trains that East Midlands Railway, similar to the Everos I’ll be travelling on, not a great thing but at least the seats are far more comfortable on the Everos than their Great Western Railway cousins.
Anyway,
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!!
Hopefully that is clear enough. Things that I may mention in the future, all dependent on time and what policy I’ll break next as there is a social media policy in place that I have to be careful of and I’d like to keep my job.
This might feature and it will require explaining. (I was on it for a start!)
And no, I can’t talk about anything else, please don’t try, messages about them will be binned, not that you can contact me at the moment as I found an issue which will be explained in another blog post to do with the site.
I’ve also started a year in review for me (back in October) and you might be shocked with what I got up to.
Also, for those who read this post on Christmas Day, please do tell me what you got up to. I’m writing this ahead of time but as I don’t have any kids and nearly 40, unmarried (so bachelor) but with 2 sisters and both parents, I’ll be spending time with them, with DIY tasks (please, please don’t go there, its a sore point of mine) and helping with Dinner with 4 dogs going nuts and 1 at home going nuts. (2 bitches, 3 dogs, one dog is at home).
Then I’m back to work on the 29th for 3 days, off for one, back to work on the 2nd for reduced hours (preplanned, possibly working from home), off up north with a friend, then back to work 5th, not decided if it’s the office or work from home. All I know is that I asked for a chair – oh yeah, I am sort of getting something for Christmas.
/!\ TANGENT WARNING /!\
Going off on a tangent!
A new chair in the office and a mouse which became a requirement. The mouse itself is a trackball and for me, I come from an age where trackballs were king, some people swear by them, some people hate them. Its like some settings I’ve enabled because the era I came from. DSTN screens anyone? Old tech, slow refresh rate, plenty of ghosting and what happened to the mouse pointer? You lost it as the mouse often moved between refresh rates, meaning it was hard to track. Even with modern displays, I still lose the mouse. So the solution is simple, mouse trails, visual clue to where the mouse is and moving. Its rather fun at work:
Them: “Why is your mouse laggy?”
Me: “Its an accessibility thing, comes from the era of DSTN displays.”
Them: “What?”
Me: “Errm, look up what a DSTN display (opens in a new window, leaves the site) is, it’ll answer everything, but every laptop in the 90s had them.”
As for the trackball? No one will touch my desk with a trackball to the dock, even though I thoughtfully retained the original mouse, put it in a draw with Sellotape and a note saying “If you don’t like the trackball, feel free to use the mouse in here” on one side, then “and a wireless charger and a lightning cable” on the other side.
/!\ PUN WARNING /!\
(its not very punny!)
I think everyone has just worked out what I am like to work with in the office now. Except, one of my colleagues also had to put up with my tea puns that got me intohot water (at least they didn’t boil over) , I couldn’t sugar coatedit any other way. He was totally tea’edoff at the end of it as I milkone more pun out of it. And that was the PG Tip(s) of the iceberg with what I was talking about, just I felt mugged off at the end of it. I better stop there as I’ll be talking about CUPS(link opens in a new window and/or leaves the site) next, that’s on my Linux machine. Just don’t take a tea leafout of my book and don’t have a drink to that.
This is sort of how the Class 205 is looking at the moment, unfortunately, progress is crawling as it is stuck in development hell. The other problem is how the scaling has affected the model data in GLB and I’ve also removed the textures for the time being, but yes, it appeared in Connex colours (remember them?). Model is a bit of a mess at the moment, but it is just to show you the progress. The bogie however or the trailer one, has been shown on another entry.
However, I also spent a few hours, note not a lot of time on this too:
This is one of these older models I based it on and improved on – well I had some railbuses as in previous posts (here, here and here) and naturally, what would come up? The Class 141 railbus. Its slightly shorter than the original model, which was slightly out of shape. The scale was wrong. In this model however, its not 100% there as believe it or not, there is no textures, its all self coloured materials (And as a result as it has been optimised in 3DS max, exported to FBX and imported into Blender to exported to a GLB file), so because it has been optimized to take up less space and keeping hold of my precious 5GB of web space, its not the final version and some bits of detail have got lost because of the compression and optimisation, like the rubber on the doors, or the way I built them. As it is also one “final model”, it also got optimised as one. Also, you may of noticed it has something at the front.
For those that know a little history about these units, 13 of them went to Iran, as a result, some of the changes they made, one got painted into an interesting livery, a silver, gold and green livery from memory, although most stayed in WYPTE, they gained mirrors, buffers, screw link coupling (which lost their multiple working), an obstacle deflector and mirrors either side. I don’t think as reported elsewhere they got converted to left hand drive (which would have been difficult),
One day, I’ll look through the history and track what is left, all I can say, of the 13 that went to Iran, their history or whereabouts is unknown as Iran is difficult to get photos or even information from at the best of times. 2 went to the Netherlands and I believe they never got used, last known to be still there rusting away. One got scrapped while in the UK before entering preservation, however, 2 more have been scrapped since preservation, which means there is 2 left, 141 113 (which my model was heavily based on) and 141 108. It would be also interesting to track the other pre production and post production units, Lev 1 still exists, Lev 2 sadly bit the dust in 2020, Lev 3 (also known as R3) was in Northern Ireland, its now in the UK in Wales, RB002 is still in (the republic of) Ireland, in its resting place, there is a movement in trying to bring it back to the UK, but last I heard or understood, no one knows the owner. RB004 is happily preserved, but has been around many railways, the 2 car demonstrator which I don’t have a designation for, but I’ve called it RB005 (basically a 2 car version of RB002), the whereabouts is unknown. As it was used on metre gauge railways in the far east, it may of long departed or even rusting somewhere.
The Class 142, 143 and 144s in one way, more difficult to track (there were 96 Class 142s, 14 Class 143’s and about 23 Class 144s, 10 with MS coaches that have a different history to the rest of the unit – I.e. not owned by the ROSCOs) as they are larger fleets, but also easier because there is a LOT of history on them and some even went abroad to try and gain orders from international customers, which is well documented.
I would love to hear of any information about these oddities, if you do, please send me a message.
Edit (a little later):
You may notice at the moment, my work is fluctuating a lot with time I can commit. We are mostly getting ready for Christmas and the London Waterloo block, which as I write this, London Waterloo station is closed from the 25th December to the 29th December. Then the slow lines are open which is 2 out of 8 lines. This is to allow Network Rail to replace the points around Queenstowns Road (Battersea) – see here (navigates away from the site) and a lot of planning went into it. If I am honest, so far, it’s the biggest project I’ve been involved in since I came into my current job. No, I cannot talk a lot about it as there is a social media policy, which I may of fallen foul of.
With the DEMU project, I decided to take on a massive undertaking. Massive isn’t the word, but we will go with it anyway. Rebuilding the bogies. If you seen the previous model in this post, you will see the old bogies. These were built slightly differently. I exported them out of Max 2009, into FBX exporter, into Blender to do the rest. Also, this is my first render in Blender, I’m learning it slowly, its taken me a long time to get this far though.
As for the GLB file?
Although not finished (spring planks and a few minor corrections), it stands at a colossal 20,000 polys. Oh and it was built in 3DS Max 5. Either way, enjoy. Please add comments if you like it.
I did show it in Facebook and I was told “We need this for Train Sim World”, I developed this for Trainz, but if anyone wants the mesh, well, my inbox is always open and I don’t mind handing over an incomplete mesh for a donation (or wait until it magically appears in my Cloud Files section)
I finally went further south, its been quiet for me on here (even though in the background, I’ve been busy) as I have been doing a lot of computer stuff, mainly because I am a councillor, so I’ve been trying to sort out a machine. I also ended up travelling quite a bit, here is a selection of photos from a weekend away, I went as far south as I have been for years, in fact, 49 degrees north. a country not in the EU or the UK but a British Crown dependency. That being the island of Jersey.
For a railway free holiday, oh wait! “Railway free?” Ermm, it has one, 400 metres of it which I didn’t use, but out came my camera(s) and out came the snapping, enjoy. I’ll put one in my end of year review (which I started already).
What did I think of Jersey? Well, a rich (rude word) paradise. It also has quite a bit more crime than when I visited the Isle of Man, the stench of cannabis was all so present on the island but I didn’t feel unsafe. Everything seems to centre around St. Helier and the island is too overpopulated, so it just didn’t feel as wild as it could of been. But when you try to cram 100k residents in an island about 46sq miles, it will feel overpopulated. I compare it to the Isle of Man and the Isle of Man does have a lot more going for it for me anyway. The weird bit is that I found it easier to socialise on the Isle of Man than Jersey. I know the Isle of Man feels stuck in the past, but if I am honest, that isn’t a bad thing.
(Final note, I do often say that when a friend and myself go away, something goes wrong – an airline went bust the night we went over – BlueIslands! It did affect us in a good way, we got back to Gatwick Airport early.)
So I thought I’ll post the latest progress, the 3Dmodel below probably doesn’t do it justice as it is a plain colour, mainly to allow a smaller file size.
However, below is a rendering taken from my program of choice – an older one too. (Mainly because developing in modern versions isn’t easy at the later versions tend to s*** themselves with the outdated plugins and data structures!)
So the static rendering gives an idea how thigns are looking at the momnet.
But what is also interesting is that I used this model again as I like to during mid development is mess around with it. So, I created a 57ft coach (basically its a seating bay taken out) which has the wrong seating moquette and gives an idea what I am thinking of creating next. The good news is development would be easy as of 3 coaches, 2 are identical as both end coaches are essentially the same bodyshell with different underframes. I am also looking at a way around that, but thats the easy part.
The DEMU on the other hand, I’ve built 3 vehicles of the “Hampshire variety”, but someone where I work pointed out that there is so many variants, its difficutl to keep track fo them, he was right! The Hampshire units have a lot of differences – but only on their trailer coaches. The Berkshire units add to the complexity, but are easier to deal with. Most of the problems stem from the DTCL coaches, where the compartment behind the drivers cab seems to be different on ALL of them. Some drawings show a second class compartmen, some show a luggage compartment, some show a first class compartment, etc. 2052101/205205 was even more unique as it was refurbished. Being refurbished meant it had a lot of nice additions to it, except it seems to carry all second class accommodation, I’ll have to look over the drawings again, but of the 33 units produced, its a nightmare. (Not forgettting the 2 car Hampshire units that were formed to go over the Watercress Line and then augmented with an EMU trailer.). Just enjoy my suffering!
Oh and I found some inaccuracies, the body is too rounded which made modelling the windows on the doors harder. Looks like a rebuild is in order.
