Kent & East Sussex Railway

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I just hope for all our sakes that there was no VPL…. Around 30 years ago there was a loco owning consortium at the Caledonian Railway Brechin known as the Angus Railway Steam Engineers’ (Yes, there really was, it’s existence was noted in the daily sketch column in ‘The Scotsman’). And if you travel another 30 miles north you can meet up with the ‘Bon-Accord Locomotive Society’. The world of railways is littered with acronyms, it’s nothing new. I remember someone here a few years ago struggling with the news that ‘A1A had been asked to leave the NVR’.

 

No doubt named every bit as deliberately as Simon Groom's legendary "What a lovely pair of knockers" and comment that for hedging 'you need a good length for a good lay' on Blue Peter, which for decades people naively believed were mistakes, giving his sly sense of humour far less credit than it deserved.

 

Which makes me wonder if the Spa Valley's original moniker - TWERPS - was inadvertent (or not).
Pat

 

Yes, it was deliberate, from memory a two fingers at someone. One of the consortium suggested a change of name to ‘Steam Ecosse’, the opinion was, ‘no thanks’. Back in those days there were so many loco groups/consortiums we needed acronyms to keep track of who was who, CTSLG, CTSPS, TTG, SPS/SDPS, BRPS, CRB, CRDG. Then the Strathspey Railway has the wonderfully named BOGGOS….

 

All industries have abbreviations, especially TLA's.
In aviation Rockwell Collins (one of the big avionics OEM's) actually produced an A5 book that ran to about 40 pages of them.
The fun was always seeing if the engineers actually knew what they stood for as over the years the systems were only ever referred to in the short form.

 

In Simon Groom's case winding up producer/headmistress Biddy Baxter.

I always found SLOA a wryly amusing acronym for a body running steam locomotives on the diesel/electric railway.

 

Not forgetting the strong presence of the LAPD - the Look And Point Department.

 

In the spirit of the long gone JY Prog, TTFN….

 

So LNER, LMS, GWR etc. are all verboten in your world?

 

Er...

 

I understand your desire to point out the contradiction, and I get the joke, but I feel the need to be pedantic, and observe that in the real world, languages appropriate vocabulary from each other all the time.

Ironically, English (the focus of that contradiction) is particularly prone to do this: it was originally a North-West Germanic language (Anglo-Saxon), which soon acquired injections of Northern Germanic (from Norse invaders); after 1066, it was overlaid with Anglo-Norman French. There have been numerous waves of Greek and Latin incursions; initially from the Latin spoken under the Romans, more in the Renaissance era, and finally, recently, from the vast wave of technical neologisms, which generally use Greek and Latin roots (e.g. 'xerography', "from the Greek roots ξηρός xeros, meaning 'dry' and -‍γραφία -‍graphia, meaning 'writing'").

Sorry for going off, all; I've been studying the evolution of languages, recently.

Noel

 

This thread is going somewhat off topic and relevance to the KESR

 

Am I right in thinking that, Television borrows from both Greek and Latin in the same word?

 

OK.

On the volunteers group on Facebook, there has been some discussion regarding the timing of the first departure from Tenterden, on the normal base timetable.

For many years the first train was at 10:40 / Ten-forty.

Currently it is at 10:20 / Ten-twenty. Some visitors seem to find this too early.

I was wondering whether this was a general move towards the first train being at 09:50 / Ten-to-ten.

Because "Ten to Ten from Ten Ter Den" sounds so good.

Shall I get my coat?

 

IMHO Q’s WRT the K&ESR & RVR R OK.

 

And there was me thinking you legal types preferred to use a dozen words where one will do.

 

But charged for at the per-word rate for each letter of the abbreviation.

 

Nah!

 

Indeed it does - and famously, C. P. Scott of The Guardian remarked that as a result, "no good will come of it".

("Tele-" is the Greek bit, "-vision" is the Latin bit.)

 

I hate to be pedantic (but I'm going to be anyway - this is, after all, a railway forum and pedantic is what we do)...

Jimmy Young actually said "This is JY saying BFN - Bye for now"

TTFN was said by Mrs Mopp in It's That Man Again, aka ITMA.