Have you ever seen a Train?

[Olham]

Olham, an 'anorak' in English usage comes from the train spotters who used to wear them.

Nowadays it means someone who knows everything about a certain subject down to the last detail and tells you all about it.

I was (Ahem) being ironic.

...about yourself, as I see it?

No, we don't know any other meaning for "Anorak" here, than a warm windbreaker with a hood.

[Dej]

Olham, an 'anorak' in English usage comes from the train spotters who used to wear them. Nowadays it means someone who knows everything about a certain subject down to the last detail and tells you all about it. I was (Ahem) being ironic.

 

Putting mine on for a minute, Jim's quite right about the trains in OFF. They are somewhat anachronistic. Most of the rail activity, certainly on the British side, was narrow gauge, laid specifically for the purpose by the War Department Light Railway (WDLR) whose history is an interesting subject in itself and one I mean to get around to, eventually:

 

WDLR Wikilink. There is a WDLR website, but it no longer works.

 

There was 'standard' gauge activity too, of course, run by the Rail Operating Division (ROD). 11 Great Western Railway Class 4300 2-6-0 Moguls definitely saw service in France in WW1, in khaki livery. One survives in preservation at Didcot Railway Museum.

 

Link to Image

[JimAttrill]

To explain to you Olham, Dej is now over anoraking me

[Olham]

Mmuahahahahahahaaaa!!!!!

[JimAttrill]

Being anoraked is rather like being hit from behind with a machine gun in OFF. You can at least get another pilot and have another go

[Dej]

To explain to you Olham, Dej is now over anoraking me

 

Heh, true. Need the voice though, which you can't emulate in text. Olham, best thing you can do to imagine the 'train spotter' in British society is to find a Spitting Image video of John Major.

[Olham]

Well, there are lots of vids - here is "Stupid Voters" - but what exactly do you Brits mean with "train spotting"?

I know there was a film with that title, but I never saw it.

 

[JimAttrill]

Hi Olham, the film 'trainspotting' (one word) was actually about Heroin junkies in Edinburgh Scotland. The only connection I can come up with is that both 'spotting' trains and being a junkie are a form of compulsive behaviour.

 

Trainspotters would live on railway platforms (sometimes wearing anoraks ) and note the numbers of all trains passing through. A rather wierd pastime really. DB trains are also numbered so maybe they exist in Germany as well?

 

Aircraft spotting doesn't seem to have caught on at all ....

[JimAttrill]

Here we go - anorak on I have examined my books and found that a 4-6-0 was not as unusual as I thought. In the USA they were called 'ten-wheelers' and tended to replace those wood-burning 4-4-0s that you see in cowboy films!

 

But a 4-6-0 made in great numbers was German! Originally Royal Prussian Union Railway (KPEV) 1906 named the Class P8. By the end of WWI 2,350 had been made and although many were given to other countries as reparations they carried on in Germany through WWII. Eventually 3,438 were built in Germany and about 500 in other countries. Anorak off

 

So there you go. I must say that in a picture the driving wheels are separated at the back to give an effect that looks like a 4-2 rather than a 6.