Broithe

The last few years, the Ras na mBan has passed few miles away and I have ventured out to watch. On the first year, a chap was sitting in his car 100m away, with sandwiches, etc. I assumed he was also waiting, but he wasn't - it was just a coincidental stop. he kept looking at me, sat under a road sign at my preferred vantage point. Suddenly, a horde of Guards arrived and he became concerned that he was embroiled in a dangerous situation, as he thought they had come, en masse, to arrest me, as suspicious as I look. Once that emergency was resolved, he then had to establish a change of route, as his intended road would not be available for a while... The ladies were very impressive - that day involved going up to 500m... Last year, there was just me and one cop - much less of a sideshow, but the race was still as impressive. We waited for the last tail enders to pass and let the traffic off again - actually, there was very little disruption. It looks like I can do it again this year - https://rasnamban.com/2025-route/ Worth having a look, if it passes close to you.

Having received the promised 4am weather report from @Georgeconna, we headed off south to do the Sugarloaf and Knockmealdown - for the third time, after having miserable visibility on the previous two attempts. We arrived towards 7am and the weather was far better this time - it was a great day out. Still recovering. Hopefully...

I had a situation once in Stafford station. I was picking up an old dear who was generally a bit scatty, but we usually coped. There were hourly trains from Euston then, with a single stop in Rugby. I had a call from her daughter to say that she was on the train due to arrive at 7pm. I arrived at the station a few minutes before 7, just in case it was on time, and heard the announcement of its impending arrival, so I was on the platform as it rolled in and the doors opened. No sign of her. Knowing the chap on the platform, we quickly agreed to a quick scan of the train, from each end, as he knew her from previous events. We met in the middle and agreed that she was not on it and all toilets were vacant, so we let the train off. We were going to the office to alert Rugby, as she must have got off there by accident - not an impossibility and she was on the train when it left and not on it when it arrived at the second station stop. This seemed to be the only possibility. We were discussing this, and the possibility that Rugby could alert the local cops there, if she wasn't found in the station area quickly, when another staff member casually mentioned that that hadn't really been the 7pm train, but was actually the 6pm one which had been conveniently exactly late enough to 'look right'. So, she was still on the train, but still a good hour away, sitting on a stationary train looking at some fields somewhere. Another minute or so and we would have initiated a search, or two, and I would have informed her daughter of the apparent situation...

Tom unfortunately died, just as supplies of the essential raw materials from Malaya were beginning to come back on stream. His brother, Johnnie, took over, but the railway market was gone by that point, and he took the business in a very different direction.

If the reg number is wrong, an ANPR check would flag the car up as 'not insured', too.

I went to the open day at Abbeyleix House on Sunday - I took 191 pictures. Imagine the cost with a real camera forty years ago...

It's the same sort of thing as the water-powered cliff elevators* do. Fill up the tank on the one at the top, use the excess weight to pull the lighter car at the bottom back up, after if has emptied it's tank, allowing for the difference in passenger weights in each car - and repeat with the two cars in sequences, as often as the water supply will allow you to. The difference with the train here is that the energy from lowering the weight is being stored in a battery, rather than dragging another empty train back up, via a cable, as the heavier one comes down, then using that stored energy to drive the train back up. And the whole thing is just a lot bigger - in every way. *I think the one in Bridgnorth operates this way.

If you're moving the heavy cargo downhill and returning an empty train back up, then you can use the potential energy of the extra mass of the cargo travelling down to charge the batteries enough to return the lighter empty train back up - if you get the numbers right.

Some of us can remember the range anxiety on a motorbike in Wales, Scotland or Connemara on a Sunday - it's just a matter of being organised.

We had a forty foot straight on a layout once, in a carport with a polycarbonate roof and the ends closed in - we had considerable expansion/contraction issues, until we fitted Fleischmann joints with most of an inch of movement I was reminded of it by this photo of the current heat expansion issue that the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway has. They have run trains over that, apparently - gently, and with trackside personnel monitoring the progress to detect derailments... As far as the layout was concerned, I remain convinced that the principal effect was actually the baseboard contracting, as the humidity was driven out, rather than the rails expanding in the high temperatures, although that would add a bit to the problem. The expansion of the metal was predictable to a fair degree of accuracy and was nowhere near enough to account for the total dimensional changes that we got.

Where I worked years ago, it was known that about half the people in the office, of around twenty five or so, were in a pools syndicate. We eventually had a win - the organiser got a large cheque from Littlewoods - when I say 'large', I mean that it was physically big, for theatrical advertising promotion purposes. He showed it to the members and two of us took the opportunity to run into the boss's office with it, him being aware that we had had some sort of win, but not having the details. Waving the giant cheque, with "Littlewoods" almost all that was legible from his viewpoint, we shouted "We've won the pools, you can shove your jobs up your arse - we're all off home now!" I had my thumb carefully covering the end of the actual amount on the cheque. The twelve of us had actually won £17. We revealed that after he went all 'legal' about notice periods, etc....

This year's is confirmed now and I may well be around for it again - we'll se.

Before the upgrade to the carpark at Ballybrophy, this was the 'ersatz Armco barrier' that would stop you running off the edge.

Maybe someone who's prepared to believe it might buy something and let us know what happens?