Broithe

There are few examples of the US military buying foreign - the only one that I can think of off-hand, the AV-8, is theirs now, in effect, the UK doesn't even have any Harriers left flying.

Ryanair didn't win the bidding, then?

I only have a two-digit number plate..... You can make currencies work for you - some people have some very strange ideas about exchange rate arithmetic...

Mmmm, I've got the same badge on the front as their new ones have.... ..I'll just head North and hide out at yours..

I'm going to start using £/s/d again and see what happens. "I'll give you thirty bob for it.."

I wonder if that excuse would work if I was caught at 60mph in a 60kph zone?

If somebody did it the other way round, you would be able to hear the moaning on your side of the water....

Indeed, everybody wins - it wouldn't happen over here, though...

The seeds from the local willows used to blow in and I often thought of getting something Yank, as we had 00 scale tumbleweed blowing around - but it did get into the works sometimes. Flies often seemed quite suicidal - we had a few track fatalities. Just to the right of the suspension bridge, you might see four of these Fleischmann expansion joints - looking like a crossing. ..they saved us a lot of trouble on the long straights..

I'll send you an invoice - in Euros - with VAT.... Apart from a few leaks, we never had much water trouble - the rain never got in much above the baseboard level. The heat was the greatest problem, in fact - apart from expanding the rails a bit, it shrank the woodwork a lot as it dried out after the winters. The cold was just unpleasant, but didn't do much harm - it made the live steamer very impressive - I have some video of that somewhere.... It was well worth putting up with the problems for the sheer size of it - I once got a Murphy 181 and a few coaches to take 11 minutes to go all round it. Even at a reasonable speed, a train would go over the crossover into the garage and be almost forgotten about before it came out again..

They're mostly Metcalfe and Superquick cardboard kits - the mill is a Wills kit and the mine came from a continental manufacturer - the balsa/paper power station was meant to represent our local Meaford station, but it is now Ferbane on a different layout (videos also on there) and only has two towers in "operation" - the towers were turned from solid wood... There's some Skaledale stuff and the big station is a balsa/paper affair. They had no special measures taken - the cardboard ones did fade in the Sun, but it was no great detriment - weathering by the weather, I call it...

If you click on the title, it will take you to it in YouTube - you can then click on the channel and there's two other videos of it, one at night.

The car-port is on the left here - - it goes right back as far as nextdoor's garage front and then the "internal" part in the garage starts. There's a polycarbonate roof and the front is boarded in, as you can see. The long edge is mostly nextdoor's woven fence, with plastic sheeting to avoid the driving rain and wind. The garage was lined with 25mm expanded polystyrene foam. We had no great trouble, really. Willow seeds, dead flies, the odd roof leak, expansion/contraction (solved by expansion joints), a bit of oxidation on the rails in really damp times, etc... No more trouble that the real railways have..

It was under cover, rather than fully outdoor - that bit of polythene in the far corner and the two sponges are there for a small leak we had.... (though, the chipboard top never really objected too much, it had a good slap of primer before it went in) It's about four feet deep there - just able to reach the back. Full tour.

No, hardly at all over six years, and it was under a polycarbonate car-port roof in strong sunlight - some of the cardboard buildings faded and a lot of the "grass" did, too. Modern plastics are much more resistant to UV degradation. Yes, there was a crossing there, so the outside track was a figure-of-eight with the other loop inside the garage.

Yeah, you can do what you like at the back. It's the front that needs some thought.

We had a hardboard fence along the back, as you can also see, but the Perspex looks a lot better (in the sense that you can hardly see it!) and gives you good vision for re-railing, track cleaning, etc. It will follow round a fairly tight bend, too, as you can see. That section is seen in the early stages and got a bit more stuff as time went on.

I had one that had a three-foot drop onto concrete, and we had a live steamer on it, so we put a two-inch high Perspex "fence" - it cost a few bob, but just one catastrophe would have cost more...

It's long drop from that causeway.......

Hence £14.99 looks a pound less than £15.....

Actually, the fare was IR£2 - and he would take UK£2 - it then changed to €2.50, and he would still take UK£2. Everybody got a ticket, so I presume that it was all sorted out afterwards and DB got the due fares. I haven't used it for a few years, I drive now, and he has retired, so I don't know the current situation. He was a good chap with an interest in merchant shipping and we often had a chat at Heuston, as that was the last stop and there was frequently only me left on by then.

The 'hobby' aspect doesn't really matter, above a certain turnover threshold* any business must be VAT registered, below that level they just pay the VAT on their supplies and can't claim it back. * currently £82,000 in UK and €75,000 in Ireland - so, around €1,500 a week turnover. At the risk of being 'political', a lot of people from GB do tend to think that the rest of the world should be in tune with them. When I used to travel over as a foot passenger, there were always people on the bus to Heuston and Connolly that were amazed that they couldn't (officially) pay in Sterling, although the driver would always facilitate them. That would not happen over here.

Indeed, it is more reliable - but you do have to put a switch in then, for the electrofrog arrangement.

Coventry. I installed one of the floodlights in the ruins of the old Coventry cathedral. A friend had the job with two colleagues and the one that could drive was off, so I got roped in for that day. It is set in the ground, where the bloke in the turquoise shirt is, in the far corner, here. I remember looking up at the remaining stonework and thinking that some of it looked very ropey. About a fortnight later, one of the pinnacles blew down, just where we'd been working. Missed the light, though...

I've used "blade-switching" successfully without much of a problem. It's worth checking each point for clean operation before installation, some tweaking of the wiper contacts is sometimes necessary.