Broithe

8 hours ago, BosKonay said:

Trouble is the experience is always regional. 

It can vary over a few miles.

I had a lot of deliveries on the Big Island last month and everything worked exactly as it should.

People I know, literally a mile away in a straight line, moan continuously about some of the services - it may just depend on the actual people who are involved in your provision.

1 hour ago, Metrovik said:

Hold on to your sandwiches!

You may need to augment the signage.

I gannet get enough of this kind of thing, but I do hope that everybody gets a tern.

Might they have been a bit easier to paint, if you stuck them on a skua?

Did they come with feet?

Or do you have to find your own on the web?

45 minutes ago, jhb171achill said:

Seems strange in our modern affluent age - if a carriage in that state turned up on the 15:35 to Tralee today, Joe Duffy’s phone lines would be jammed by the outraged in their BMWs in the station car park.

But such things were commonplace at one time. Look at any picture of, say, probably the worst examples - the Cavan & Leitrim in CIE days, or the SLNCR, or some UTA stock in the late 60s, and you’ll see carriages that look practically derelict - and, I can attest from my own memory, weren’t any better inside!

I’ve a set of 4 of these GSWR ones. I had suggested to Eoin to make the brake look a whole lot worse than the others, which appear well-kept and only slightly work-stained.

The idea here is prototypical; these old brake coaches often inhabited the same rural branch service for several years, with visits to Limerick or Inchicore for painting being less frequent than the “passenger” stock.

At one of my many schools on the Big Island, there were some kids who came in by train. They taught me the technique of spotting an empty compartment, cleaning a patch on the outside of the window, then trying to get to that seat before somebody else did, and then wiping the fag smoke off from the inside, so that you could actually see outside.

I once saw a layout where the weathering included this feature on a few of the carriage windows.

At the end of my period with a proper job, I ultimately worked for Alstom and we had a giant sign on the building, with letters maybe even six feet high, plus all the headed paper, etc., but a surprising proportion of people who worked there were unable to spell or pronounce it correctly.

There was a weird determination that it should include an R - Alstrom.

I never could see the reasons behind this, but it was more than just the odd person and you still hear it in the town now, when their presence went at least a decade ago.

It may not have permeated into the railway side of things, but you never know.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.7982738,-2.1023791,3a,51.2y,190.95h,114t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sDXgVQ-Y6BKhR39aqz12ERA!2e0!5s20121101T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu

There had been the earlier Alsthom spelling, but that hardly seemed a reason for the insertion of the R...

11 hours ago, Mayner said:

John was extremely enterprising individual along with his day job, he provided a taxi service for our team of directly employed workers from Westmeath, installed part of the project's rainwater system on a piece-work rate during weekends and indulged his Greengrass instincts by trapping game and vermin.

We had a few country gentlemen in the factory and a steady supply of free-range non-domestic victuals.

One chap was a legitimate gamekeeper and was able to supply wildfowl, etc. One day, as I entered the foremen's office, I heard a conversation that i understood, but would have sounded a bit odd to anybody who wasn't aware of all the underworld stuff that went on. We used a lot of epoxy resin and had a dedicated cold storage arrangement for it.

Without looking at each other, one of the foremen, filling in the day's attendance sheet, asked the other "Is Jim Cook in today?" the answer would have seemed enigmatic to anyone who didn't know - "I haven't seen him, but there's a duck in the fridge". - the sheet was duly ticked and they carried on with other stuff.
 

We had another chap who was very much less official in his activities. Fred would supply anything to order, wild or otherwise. He was the slinger in the fabrication shop and had a 'cabin', a small steel shed in the centre of the shop, to hang his slings, chains, etc. This also served as a bonded store for stuff that he had brought in for people. The foreman of the shop was a rather gruff character, that it was generally best to avoid, I found. One day, at a time when Fred was going to 'find' some brass sheet for me, I heard some soft noises from the shed, so I stuck my head in to ask how he was getting on on that score. He had about thirty rabbits hanging up and was gutting them into a bucket. Having ascertained that my needs would be fulfilled later that day, I left the scene.

I was then apprehended by the foreman - "Have you just been in Fred's shed?" - expecting some admonishment, I had no choice but to answer "Yes". He just looked at me and said "I've never been in there" and walked away, shaking his head.

We had a chap who was a trendy, cravat-wearing, finger-in-the-ear folk-singing aficionado. He had a fondness for all things 'traditional'. He asked Fred, "Could you get me any real turnips these days?' - the next day, he arrived at his desk to find, on his seat, a huge sack of turnips, and soil, freshly dug from a field a few hours before, before it got light. It took him three days to get them all home.

Fred never had a car (or any form of licence!), or even a bike, and lived ten miles away. He would get to work by standing in the road and stopping any passing car. If things got difficult, he would sometimes 'borrow' a Ferguson and drive in on that. I was late more times in any week than he ever was in his whole time there.
 

Most people in there had a 'side hustle', as the youth of today term it. Mine was selling woodscrews. I had a little display board with the various types, finishes and sizes on and would collect orders, until I had enough to get a good discount from a chap in Exchange & Mart. He would trade from the start of the tax year until he was just under the VAT threshold, then stop, so this kept prices keen and I could supply myself 'for free', with screws purchased using the discount for large orders. He would tip me off as the annual sales hiatus approached, so I could keep my customers happy.

The mention elsewhere as to veracity, or otherwise, of some writing in blue crayon, reminded me of what seemed like a great wheeze at the time, but escalated way beyond our expectations.

The engineering director was based at another factory site, sixty miles away. He would come down every few weeks and annoy people in our factory.

He would drive down in his Granada and, not having a designated parking spot on this site, he would just dump it in anybody else's that was vacant and 'pull rank' on them.

He was a very pompous and argumentative bloke, so he usually got his way. One day, driving in, he spotted a space that was almost always occupied, by the car of a chap as awkward and obnoxious as he was himself. This absence of a vehicle was taken to mean that Harry was not in work that day, so Pete abandoned the Granada in the spot and went off to annoy people. However, Harry was only at the dentist and came back after half an hour, to find Pete's cat there, he parked an inch from the bumper, leaving no possibility of getting the Granada out without negotiating its release.

He had had run-ins with Pete about parking before, so he went inside, wrote a note and put it under Pete's wiper. The note said, in blue crayon and block letters "DO NOT PARK HERE AGAIN". Harry was not under Pete's auspices in any way, working for a completely different organisation, so he was well up for arguing with him, on the few previous occasions that it happened.

Someone came in the office and said "Harry's put a note on Pete's car, this could get interesting", so we went down to look at it - Harry had only used to top half of the A4 sheet. After some effort, I managed to locate another blue pencil and we added "YOU BASTARD" in the bottom half - then went off to wait.

The effect was rather greater than we expected - down the corridor, we heard "Did you put this on my car?" - Harry shouted back "Yes!", which, whilst true, was taken to mean the whole text, including the added part that Harry knew nothing about - they were both well into their sixties and we had to separate them from the scuffle that erupted...

They are both dead now and neither of them ever spoke to each other again - or knew the full context of the Rumble in the Corridor.

28 minutes ago, DJ Dangerous said:

Will IRM be releasing an operational grain silo model, including scale grain, to load these?

Do Faller do a combine..?

1 hour ago, Horsetan said:

Don't eat chips in their presence. 

They'll have the chips out of his locos...

There can be a surprising amount of dead, and dry, matter from last year, especially in areas protected from outside interference. I took this picture in April three years ago - it was at 400+ metres, so the new growth hadn't got above the remaining  'tinder' in the local climate.

The 'snow' is just last year's used grass.

You felt that, if you sneezed, the whole place might go up...

2 hours ago, Patrick Davey said:

I have just bought 48 seagulls.......

9 minutes ago, Patrick Davey said:

Or corrugated opens - I just bought a second packet!!!

 

The sellers must think you're a bit gullible.

35 minutes ago, LNERW1 said:

Have to tell that to my uncle Andrew. As well as being one of our modelling brethren, I’m pretty sure he’s been to every Pogues gig. Like, ever.

I saw them three times. The Burton one was weird, as the stage was halfway along the long side of the room, rather than at one end.

I also saw them in Oakengates Town Hall, a bit of a posh place and the manager was utterly horrified when he saw the queue lined up outside. He clearly thought he'd booked something like the Clancy Brothers and expected a few people in Aran sweaters to turn up, not several hundred degenerates. He actually locked the doors again, whilst he deliberated about whether to let them in or not. After about thirty seconds, he realised it might be worse if he tried to keep them out...

The chap in front of me in the queue was wearing an old army blanket and had a Mohican in the style of a TV aerial.

12 hours ago, LNERW1 said:

Piano Man, Billy Joel. Just after listening to Don't Look Back In Anger, Oasis. Before that, Mr. Brightside, The Killers, and then Dreams, The Cranberries. If anyone beats that for variety, I'll build a kit for my layout and name the building after them.

I went to see The Pogues play in Burton on Trent, in a converted bowling alley, around the early 80s.

For logistical reasons, we arrived quite early and waited in a fairly reasonable pub.

After a few minutes, we became aware that the jukebox had no consistent theme and played stuff from every possible musical genre.

As this went on, we started to think that everything had been covered, heavy metal, pop, bubble gum, progressive rock, light classical, country & western, musicals, folk, skiffle, rock and roll, blues, jazz - everything...

There had been about twenty completely unrelated records when I said, "That must be it, the only thing missing is Slim Whitman".

The next record was "Rose Marie"...
 

I was then accused of having set this up somehow.

3 hours ago, Ironroad said:

... washed sand as is used in kids' sand boxes.  

Kids have sandboxes now?

Actually, that's a great idea - it will give them better traction on frosty mornings, as they walk to school.

Just make sure to keep topping them up weekly from October to March.

Trying to explain Horslips to someone, I spotted the nice train in the background from about 1:20 in.

9 minutes ago, irishmail said:

And don't  forget the third loco for 'Standby'  purposes... 

Steady!

He's been missing for five hours now...

4 minutes ago, Newtoncork said:

IE 163 arrived this morning, herself was here, so had to own up. She especially liked the dayglow panels and how heavy it is. The distraction tactics worked. Next one is that they worked in pairs..........

You need to sign out now, assuming she doesn't have access to your password - then sign back in hourly and report on your wellbeing...

1 hour ago, Flying Snail said:

Now that we've seen he's a dab hand at the old metal work too, I fully expect him to decide to mount it on a steel under frame and wheels by summer .... watch this space!!!!  

It's up on blocks now, someone pinched the wheels a few weeks back.

43 minutes ago, Flying Snail said:

You'll have an old pot belly..?

Not if he keeps working at this pace.

 .

2 hours ago, Horsetan said:

Just imagine it's the caravan that Father Ted, Father Jack and Father Dougal stayed in when they went on holiday!

This reminded me of an event with one of the circuit breakers described above. Actually the one where the scalpel was dropped on my head.

The bloke who dropped it was called Jack and worked for the CEGB, the ESB equivalent on the Big Island. He had no idea what he was doing, but also no understanding of how little he knew. He was also the dropper of the scalpel.

They blew up one of the breakers in a dramatic and potentially fatal way. I know what they did, but they denied it and tried to blame us, saying it had 'just blown up', so we had to go through a pointless pretence of trying to find the "reason".

The operation of these devices is fairly violent. In normal operation, though, the system stopped the mechanism from reversing until the operation had been completed, but, when hand operated, a person could defeat this delay, if they really tried,  and cause the operating tube to buckle and break the pressured porcelain column that held the interrupter head up in the air. One of their chaps had blown the centre phase up, by doing this and only narrowly avoided killing himself in the process. He admitted hand-operating it and hearing a 'funny noise', then finding that it wouldn't operate again (because the loss of gas pressure had locked it out), so he got up and stepped back, falling over the ton of interrupter lying in the gravel just behind him, having caused the 'funny noise' as it fell down. So, we had to go through the process of seeing that the stresses were well within a reasonable range, when it really was operated properly.

This involved sticking strain gauges all over the surviving breaker on the site and operating it in the manner in which they claimed to have done to the exploded one.

Anyway, the aforesaid Jack, who had no idea of what he was supposed to be doing, spent a lot of time trying to see how we were setting up our strain gauges, so that he could copy us.

The CEGB had said that they would supply a caravan to house the rather delicate electronics that we brought up with us. They had no shortage of money at all and I expected a caravan the size of a decent house, but, possibly in a further effort to stop us showing that it was not our fault, they supplied the smallest caravan that I've ever seen.

My colleague, Barry, of whom more may be said at a later date, was the strain gauge king, so I left him to it in the caravan, as there was very little space. Jack, determined to see what was going on, went in there with him, but had to crouch and lean back against the door. The 'safety officer' felt the need to say something to Barry, for some reason, and grabbed the catch of the door - caravan doors open outwards - this was all that was holding Jack in place, like a coiled spring - and Jack, prestressed against the door, shot out horizontally, like a missile, taking the safety man off his feet and carrying him a yard back into a concrete pillar, winding him so violently that we considered calling an ambulance.

I was nearly hyperventilating to the same degree...

You could make a reasonable cutter, particularly for aluminium, from a drill with the diameter of your router's collets.

I did something similar, although in wood, when I wanted to rout a shallow groove to mount a tape just below a bench surface, to avoid it snagging and getting scraped.

My routers were 200 miles away at the time, but I bodged up a reasonable device from a cordless drill and a right-angle stand.

17 minutes ago, RobertRoche said:

I'd rather try the proper way for this, but being that it is aluminium I may be able to use a router sled if all else fails 

That's a better idea, but potentially less 'entertaining'...

Now that you've done this as a prototype, will you be releasing it as a brass kit?