Broithe

https://www.facebook.com/Oldphotos10/posts/pfbid0aSR44MZq6SBj4EjQVfzf3e54KasFcuebCMXojjZdMMT7Tbf9KxG5kx85hRQMw3tkl "August 1935. Workmen painting girders beneath the roof of Liverpool Street Station, London. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)"

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/lancaster-bomber-flies-in-for-armed-forces-day-display-in-larne-this-weekend/a762359719.html

I knew someone would do that, but I didn't expect it so soon, when we've only just begun.

A good bit smaller - between that and a 727, really. The story of the one that had an emergency landing at Izhma, ending up in the forest, being dragged back out, repaired enough to be flown out, then repaired properly and flown on for another decade, before being retired and put on display outside the airline's head office is a very 'Russian' thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alrosa_Flight_514

https://irishrailwaymodeller.com/profile/129-dave/

Hydrogen was, and probably still is, used in large generators for cooling purposes, in order to reduce the windage losses that would occur with 'thicker' gasses. Sealing issues were never-ending, the tiny molecules will always find a way, it seems. This did involve rotary seals on the shafts, which were the main source of the leaks, but stuff was kept outside as much as possible. Leaks did have the handy feature of disappearing upwards very quickly and the fire risk was probably a good bit less deadly than, say, LPG leaks would be. It was also not 'personally detectable', but I suppose a smell could be introduced for that purpose, as the low viscosity wouldn't be a feature that people would be desperate to keep for vehicle propulsion purposes... Hydrogen fires are generally not as fearsome as the Hindenburg would lead you to believe, a lot of that was the fabric covering and its associated paint, then the remaining fuel. We also used SF6, a non-toxic inert gas - for insulation purposes, and for controlling arcs during the opening of circuit breakers. It is, at atmospheric pressure, the densest gas around, you can actually float a tinfoil boat in a tank of it, at the air/SF6 surface, and it appears to be just floating in space. The opposite of hydrogen. This gas though, could drown you, if you unwittingly descended into a trench or cellar full of it, and there would be no 'breathing difficulty' to give the game away, you would just faint away with no distress, and then die. If the leak came from a circuit breaker, then there would be a smell, from the liberated fluorides, but if it was 'new' from a cylinder or from gas that was purely for insulation, then it was odourless. The dodgem car has never gone away.

The stowing of the main undercarriage is just such an elegant thing to watch.

I had an interesting landing at Brize Norton on the only occasion I was there. We were in a Britannia that had already had a failed take-off trying to get out of Akrotiri. After a few hours of some blokes on step ladders fiddling with it, it had another go and made it into the air. People's calmness was not helped by one of the other passengers having done quite a bit of work on 497, 'our plane', in the past and sharing his very low opinion of it. At full weight, it was struggling and we had the pleasant view of all the fire wrecks below as we headed the few miles to the sea at a few hundred feet and the slowest climb rate I ever experienced. From there on, we meandered around, trying to avoid thunderstorms the whole way back, unable to exceed 18,000 feet, due to a cabin pressure leak. I had taken the usual precaution, before the first attempt, of reading and memorising the evacuation information on the sheet behind each seat. It didn't seem fully relevant to the layout of the plane, but they did vary, depending on what was being moved - then, I noticed some helpful advice that mentioned the noise of the gear descending just before landing - "Mmm, I thought, you're not likely to hear that in a Britannia" - then, a bit of further reading revealed that the 'safety leaflet' was for a VC 10. About an hour into the flight, the window surround fell into my lap - then the perforated hardboard that formed the inner face of the fuselage, fell inwards against my leg, with the fibreglass insulation following it, revealing a frost-covered aluminium sheet. After a few seconds, I realised that that was the outer skin, so I left it alone. Then I noticed the Dzus fasteners on quite a few places in the engine covers were slowing turn round with the vibration - my attention having been drawn to the engines by the odd piece of flaming soot that shot out in the exhaust. By the time we reached northern France, we still hadn't crashed, so I started to relax, despite the plane having been thrown about violently for some hours. As we flew over southern England, the weather calmed down a lot and a thick fog resulted. As the landing approach progressed, some bright spark felt it advisable to explain that we were being driven by a 'trainee under instruction'. Great... As we approached the runway at dusk, there was no sign of the ground at all, just the top of the odd tree - then the trees stopped appearing as we sank into the fog and we hit the ground rather hard, bouncing back up out of the fog - twice. Whoever was doing the instruction presumably judged that there was still enough road left and we stayed down at the third attempt. Passenger seats in RAF transport planes were generally fitted facing backwards, to give you a bit more support in a run-off, and that seemed a welcome feature at the time, although we did stop before the grass started again...

I remember them arriving, in an era when there were Belfasts, Argosies and Beverleys around. It was about the time that Transport Command became Air Support Command - a move that kept signwriters happy for a few years. It was also the time when I canoed down the Thames in a two-man vessel with RAF Transport Command emblazoned amusingly down both sides. Even for a two-man vessel, these canoes were fairly enormous and drew some attention, especially over the identification down the sides. We managed to convince one bloke in a riverside pub that they had actually been converted from experimental floats intended to allow a Beverley to land on water. And, to be fair, with both of us paddling, we were probably faster than a Beverley...

The Soviet Union converted a Tu-154 to fly on hydrogen back in the 1980s. As the Tu-155, the clues were the vent pipe on the tail and the pipe fairings in front of the engines. It also flew later on LPG.

We all just need to do our bit and buy more die-cast models.

If they're twins, then the best option would have been to give them identical names and then it would simply be [NAME]s' birthday. No need for all this unnecessary difficulty. In a pub a few weeks back, a chap came in and didn't recognise the girl behind the bar, actually the landlord's niece. "Who was that behind the bar?" Sarah, Willie's daughter. "Oh, how old is she now?" Twenty. "Oh, how many kids has he?" Two, twins, a boy and a girl. "Oh, how old is the lad?" Everybody just looked at him for the fifteen seconds it took for him to realise why.

Well, not actually a miss, but not as severe a hit as it could have been... https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/irish-rail-worker-injured-after-27099662?fbclid=IwAR046frObOjgNymVmlRyLxw4YZ3k40RqOakJoUpld5VlqC4WviBLkuCjj2w

Pedal-powered generators at every seat on the new Cork/Dublin carriages - partial refunds of the ticket price, dependant upon how much you put back in? I'm writing to Eamon Ryan now.

I used to do a bit of work for an old boy who was 96 by that time. He had a garden railway (on posts, because he struggled to get back up off the floor by that point), with self built live-steamers running on it. The terminus and sheds were in his 'dining room' and access to the main line was via a removable bridge that was dropped in place when the patio doors were open. He also made his own mobility scooter, before the electric ones became widely available - this was done by removing the cutters from a ride-on mower and using it to nip up and down to the shops. This was right next to a police training centre and he got a lot of "looks" from them, but nobody wanted to be the one that booked him.

A cat flap to a loop in the outside world, for good days?

https://www.facebook.com/steamtrainsireland/posts/pfbid02h3QZgteaBU9Kk4zwz6KSJmZGUHaXk5cJuWPoawSd4ifZkJf2YwXmFB48wQpAXrXXl

Three Chipmunks, including this one that I first saw sixty years ago... Two heritage flight ones - 168 had a bit of a slight misfire for the first flyby, but flew out successfully later on.

Train running in Abbeyleix today... Odd mix of liveries and the chassis were black. Best not to mention it to someone... I think it was a battery electric device - three of them running all day. Open Day and Airshow at the old De Vesci place - marvellous day!

https://www.radiokerry.ie/podcasts/kerry-today/heritage-hunters-ghost-train-may-31st-2023-333137

Ballybrophy. The piers were later used to provide some shelter for passengers on the island platform.