Broithe

The Scammell Routeman always seemed the pinnacle of both style and function to me, but without being comfortable enough to allow the driver to nod off to sleep...

I spent Septembers in Ireland from 75 to 80, and not at all again until the early 90s, by which time the future had arrived. A particularly noticeable thing on the roads in those years was the absolute preponderance of Hinos, although they were virtually unknown on the Big Island. Harris seems to have started assembling them as early as 1968, but it may have taken a few years to corner almost the whole market, to the extent that they eventually did. As a 'marker' of the second half of the seventies in Ireland to me, a Hino would be as necessary as a few cars with different coloured doors...

We've all splashed out on trees at some point, when it has been necessary...

Concrete, like tarmac, is never the same colour as another piece. They used to say, of the US colour TV system, NTSC* - Never The Same Colour... In real life, patching hardstanding will never merge in, even over considerable time. If you ever need to hide a body under some, put it in from the side, without disturbing the visible surface. * OK - color, in the example given...

Search terms can sometimes be quite unexpectedly ambiguous. I once needed to stop two adjacent doors from swinging into each other and getting the paint chipped by the handles hitting the faces of the doors. Both doors would never really be open at the same time, so I just needed to limit the swing available to each, so they wouldn't go far enough to strike the other, closed, door. I fancied something like those sliding arm things that you sometimes got on cupboard doors, but a bit more substantial, to cope with the mass of the 'full-size doors'. I decided to do an image search to help weed out the lightweight items. Wondering what these things might be professionally termed as, I decided on "door restraint". About a quarter of the pictures that were suggested to me showed young ladies, tied to doors and not wearing adequate PPE.

Mmm, it works OK with four-figure years. Presumably, / and : don't 'count as a real characters'..?

Is it 8.3cm, perhaps? Or 83mm.

Cork-backed rules seem to be still available. A lot more friction, but the risk of a slight parallax issue, unless you keep the blade at the same angle carefully. It's not a great problem, compared to the benefit of the lack of slippiness.

I have one stashed away somewhere. The intention was to use it as the basis for a garden railway. One of the possibilities was to have a tunnel section and there was concern about what would happen if the signal was lost. Investigations found that it defaulted to full speed, which seemed like a reasonable result for the circumstances. Another one of the many things that may still happen - if I live to be a thousand years old.

Oh, how much fun we mechanicals had, showing the old Yellow Pages heading to you lot..

Yeah, but the rails don't go right to the extremities. Don't be dispiriting the lad - he's probably already done about a quarter of it...

No point in imposing unnecessary limits - just do the whole island in 00 - it will fit neatly inside Phoenix Park.

I think that time it was the airport tug, after Tonka wouldn't start. Maybe they went to best of three..? The tug was because we had a hovercraft to move the forgings around between gantry crane runs. It was much easier to 'organise' things to be in the right place, when you could manoeuvre with more flexibility than only running on rails. This meant filling in the flange gaps in the inset rail lines, to avoid losing too much air. Just done with bits of wood, if someone could remember where they had been put after the last time the hovercraft was used... Not twisting your ankle when cross the many tracks around the place was an important skill, particular outside. One morning, glancing down to be sure I was OK, I saw a foot, with a blue trainer on, flash in, as though to trip me. Ready to sort out my assailant, I spun around to find there was nobody at all there, And I was in the middle of an outside yard, with 100 feet of empty space around me - odd, but I just put the hallucination down to overwork. Then, in the afternoon, I had a cup of tea and put my feet up, to reveal that I had a black leather safety shoe on one foot, and a blue suede trainer on the other...

Fear not! They'll have a crew out in one of their many submarines, making sure that things will progress in their favour. https://boskalis.com/activities/offshore-energy/subsea-services/subsea-irm

As can be seen in a large-print format from the Old Cork Road. https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9060615,-7.3534544,3a,15y,320.82h,84.55t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sCbvzOpCMQpLBvd1t7iLEhg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D5.452206932572238%26panoid%3DCbvzOpCMQpLBvd1t7iLEhg%26yaw%3D320.820653124462!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTAyOS4yIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Oh, come on! It's not like he just spends time posting on here, like a lot of us do. Oh, hang on! He does that as well...

Looks to have hit a small landslip on the bend in the distance above.

The Shap derailment.

I'll admit that I wasn't aware of the existence of this, but it seems that it is about to close now. https://www.shuttlewood-clarke.org/ulverscroft-grange/model-railway/ https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/local-news/closure-model-railway-attraction-ultimate-10616445

There's plenty of WW2 pictures of aircraft being railed, but I can't find any WW1 ones, so far. It would, presumably, have been something along the lines of this road transport arrangement. Probably fuselage and wings on separate wagons for most things. And then reassembled at the destination by riggers.

At least the flag is the right way up. It's remarkable how many you see on the Big Island that aren't.

This came up in conversation today, leading me to find this - https://www.gov.uk/maib-reports/near-miss-between-ro-ro-ferry-stena-superfast-vii-and-royal-navy-submarine And then, this - https://www.gov.uk/maib-reports/collision-between-the-stern-trawler-karen-and-a-dived-royal-navy-submarine

Mashima - a marvellous supplier, who closed down in the most organised and pleasant manner - so 'Japanese'...

We had some big machines, finishing 100-ton forgings. so there was quite a bit of swarf - on a Thursday night, you needed to be aware of the swarf train sneaking up on you, pulled by the yellow loco here - which someone had made a nameplate for - Tonka.