murphaph

I would politely ask you to at least get your facts right about the project before criticising it. It will interchange with DART at Tara and also not at Drumcondra but at a brand new station at Glasnevin Junction. This station will become akin to the Irish "Partick" for anyone familiar with the Glasgow system. DART+ West and DART+ South West will enable Irish Rail to (theoretically at least) let Intercity services stop at say Parkwest and Cherryorchard to allow airport bound customers from the provinces to wait for a (frequent) DART to Glasnevin Junction and from there take the metro to the airport. Sligo line inctercity customers can expect to interchange directly with metrolink at Glasnevin. The metro if built will IMHO be extended to Donabate to interchange with DART and Intercity services there some day. Rome wasn't built in a day and all that but metrolink will very definitely serve passengers from all over the country. Notwithstanding that, Dublin is the capital and principal generator of revenue in the country. It needs infrastructure to compete with other similarly sized European capitals to continue to attract investment and jobs. Starving it of that investment is folly.

I'm quietly confident they are really serious this time. If ML goes ahead, DART Underground will eventually follow as it's such a no-brainer.

There seems to be an increasing realisation even among the traditionally neutral nations of Europe that ultimately we are all in it together and our prosperity is based on the peace and security of the whole continent. The Swiss military recently deployed to Austria with Bundeswehr troops also involved in Exercise "Trias": https://militaeraktuell.at/en/8-questions-and-answers-on-the-swiss-armed-forces-trias-exercise/ Sweden and Finland have obviously gone much further and fully joined NATO itself. It's good to practice together in any case so our IDF members can benefit from NATO best practice and I am sure we can teach them a thing or two as well.

Not my content but interesting nevertheless. Irish Defence Forces kit on a Bundeswehr train with a 60 year old Bundeswehr shunter on duty:

Fran usually creates two versions of these blog posts, one in EUR and the other in GBP. The GBP one gets posted on the AS website and places like RM Web and presumably in the mail shots where the customer is known to be UK based. It's probably a simple oversight that the EUR version wasn't posted here this one time.

Settle down now James. It wasn't arrogance. It was factual. These people are dirt poor. I was expressing sympathy for them living in trailers that are literally falling to pieces, but still not seeing how they are about to start subsidising the ultra-wealthy by picking up the tariff tab on cheap Chinese made products, so Trump's class can pay no income tax.

You should probably give the pack numbers as folks will often be after specific running numbers that they missed out on

Trump isn't even trying to hide the actual purpose in his mind of the tariffs. He has stated many times that he intends to eliminate income taxes and to replace them with tariffs, thereby shifting the tax burden from the ultra wealthy to the low and middle income demographic. And his dirt poor supporters lap it up.

China (and everyone else) buys US government debt in the form of Treasury Bills. The US has historically had to pay very low interest rates on this money so it can use it to fund whatever it wants, including the US DoD budget. The US is in a unique position in the world in this regard.

Nice one, flying snail ones ordered

Yup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege

I'm about at the limit of what I'm prepared to pay for models. I could not justify €300 a loco type prices. That's the message from these companies and it takes a brave CEO in the US these days to stand up to the current regime so kudos to the leading figures in our hobby having the bravery to do that. The industry depends on lower cost labour and a certain skillset. If China is "taken out", it would take them out of manufacturing so many other more important things that finding replacement manufacturing capacity for models & toys would be right down the bottom of the world's list of priorities. Our RTR hobby would basically be gone or be the preserve of the very wealthy and they would have to settle for a vastly reduced assortment. It's simply not possible to exclude a billion+ people from the world economy and expect things to somehow continue as before. China is not North Korea.

Exactly. These jobs are not coming to advanced economies because even at 145% tariffs a loco would still be cheaper if built in China rather than in the US or Europe. This whole thing could backfire massively the more I think about it. What would the CCP do in the event that the western world effectively stopped having products built in China? They have an army of idle workers, getting more and more agitated. They could let them overthrow the government (unlikely) or they could give them something to make. The CCP would have little to lose if it started using all that labour to produce weapons. Throwing a huge spanner in the works is such a huge mistake with so many potential unintended consequences. Global trade has some downsides for sure, but it has a massive upside in that we all grow more dependent on each other and are less likely to start wars with each other.

Eoin are those commercially available fibre optics or did you make them up yourself?

That's true. Would be great to get final clarification from the lads though