Broithe

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.

Things have calmed down on the Big Island over the years of this century, but from around 1990 to 2005, you would hear fireworks every day from around mid-September to the end of the first week in January. In the midst of this period, I was listening to a drama documentary* about the bombing of Germany, when I started to think that the soundtrack in the background was getting a bit repetitive - then, I suddenly realised that the next day was bin day, so I decided to put the bin out before I forgot again. When I opened the front door the 'soundtrack' got louder. I had actually been hearing, inside a house, with all the windows closed and the radio on, a firework display at a 'stately home' over four miles away. There can't have been a cat or dog left in the area... Also, until the 400th anniversary finally came around, you could have stopped a hundred people in the street and asked them when the Gunpowder Plot happened and you would have been lucky to get any answers in the right decade. I would applaud the plotters for not doing it in midsummer - I've had quite a bit of stuff come down in the garden still burning. I went to a "popular classics" concert at Milton Keynes Bowl. Of course, there had to be the 1812 Overture to finish the evening, complete with a professional firework display. The fireworks were very carefully designed to stop burning just before they got back down to the level that they had been launched from. But, the crowd was on quite a high embankment, forming the amphitheatre around the stage. This meant that the thousands of people attending, many with picnics on blankets, etc., were subject to what had become, essentially, an incendiary raid. There was quite a bit of fairly mild panic and I didn't see any injuries, but I was most impressed by the chap in front of us whose blanket was hit, he calmly took the lid off his Thermos flask and put it out - no running about screaming for him... *Len Deighton's Bomber.

It all seemed simple enough to do it with a submarine in the Fantastic Voyage documentary... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060397/

This thread should be held as an example of this forum at its very best!