Broithe

Do call in here occasionally, as your time and circumstances allow. One day, the embers may reignite the considerable fire that was burning before. I've been in a (very much smaller) hole for the last few days and achieving something - anything - is usually more helpful than seems reasonable. There are things that need to be done, but achieving something that you want to do is hugely beneficial - whatever it it.

And the postage to the Canaries might be a deal-breaker.

We really should have piggybacked this onto the fuel protests.

I wonder if some unnecessary parts were removed? Possibly for use elsewhere or as spares. I'm not aware of an stl, but there's a good chance that somebody on here has an sti.

Dick does look to have a black chassis in that picture. Is there an official record of the livery details?

The chap next door had a CX in the 80s. I drove it a few times and it seemed a large luxury car at the time. A couple of years ago, I found one parked amongst modern stuff and it looked like a half-scale model. At one point, he nursed a dodgy starter motor a bit too far and it failed totally on his drive. This was a bit of an issue, as it was lying on the floor by that point, with no possibility of getting any sort of jack under it without digging a hole for it. It needed the hydraulics pumping up, to get it up in the air and get the starter out from below - but, it wouldn't start to pump itself up... In the end, we fitted a pulley to an electric drill and pumped the suspension up into the 'maintenance' position, to get at the starter

The conversations in the echoing room add to the atmosphere - almost like station announcements.

I was in an agricultural spares emporium a few months ago and, wandering around, as things were being arranged, I realised that it seemed far warmer than might be expected. Eventually, I spotted the heater - a stainless steel, diesel-fired thing, making the slightest hum. Even coming in from outside an a frosty winter's day, with a 'clean nose', there had been not the slightest detection of "fumes". This became even more remarkable when I realised that there was no exhaust to the outside world, it just vented straight into the building from the heat exchanger/combustion chamber pipe. The exhaust was at about head height and it was possible to stick my nose into the slight draught of warm "air" that emitted from it - still no nasally-detectable "fumes". I looked into it afterwards, as it seemed quite magical to me, but an external exhaust was not deemed necessary, if the building was leaky enough. This was in a converted steel farm building, with a bit of additional insulation - the two chaps working in there, for about six hours before we arrived, showed no adverse symptoms whatsoever.

Hornby have proven the technology for electrically heated live steam engines in 1/76 - it's just a matter of scaling it up to 1:1. Steam DARTs and Luas - it is the way forward.

It goes on everywhere. When I had a 'proper job', I had an old pressure vessel that had been used for development work and became surplus. I saved it from scrapping and it was used for all sorts of work for a good few years after, but it was spotted by a 'seagull manager' who declared it made the place look untidy and must be scrapped. I bet him £10 that we would buy another one within a year. It was just six weeks later when one blew up on site and a spare vessel was urgently needed. For various reasons, including general disorganisation, factory closures and a general history of not paying bills, it took about eight months to get one. I never got the ten quid.

For anybody wanting a small shunting layout. This would be fairly easy to scale down to 1/76 and shove a motor in. Picking up power from the rails would be an issue, but it could be battery powered and radio controlled. The recharging port could be hidden by the tail. The aerial could be hidden in the reins. It wouldn't need to be re-gaugeable for 21mm. Tractive effort could be an issue. It would need to be as heavy as possible, or perhaps magnets in the hooves, and running on a steel sheet hidden by ground cover material? Uncoupling might still need to be manual. It is going to be difficult, though, to sort out a small enough speaker with sufficient bass response. The technology could then move on into cattle, and possibly even sheep. Poultry could be possible eventually, with only two legs to deal with, but fowl and flying birds in general will be a good few years away yet. But, we shouldn't count our chickens before they're hatched (that would be a difficult feature to incorporate). Probably not reasonable to expect this much before 2028.

Send him round here after, I'm only getting the sound.

Perfectly understandable. No bones were broken.

If any of the boxspotters that follow this thread happen to see this one anywhere, then the Gardaí would be interested. It disappeared about a year ago, in Laois, full of donated goods for a project in Africa. I think it's a 30 footer?

It seems OK to me. possibly a tiny bit slower than normal, but very little, if it is.