Broithe

The US Navy did it for a while.

The D & M of D & M Models.

There's still a few places doing them now. E.g., http://www.horsedrawncaravans.com/ We had one in Galway around 1967/8, from a bloke called Michael Og Fahy, near Corrandulla. The horse was called Peaches and she was a remarkably placid thing. One night, we parked up near the shore of Lough Corrib and there was just nothing to tie the long rope to, so that she had scope to graze and wander about. My father decided that it would be OK to tie her to the caravan itself, so that she didn't just wander off. That would have been OK, if she hadn't got the urge to investigate the lake at 2am and pull the caravan in behind her...

I went to the Knock (Tipp) tractor run in November, no sign of one in my photos, but do let me know if it is likely to venture out to on in the future.

100 gallons per hour, or a gallon every 40 seconds - that does seem rather excessive.

Central Powers Line.

The rebuild of the centre bench is (mostly) done. There will be some additions to the storage zone beneath the top at some point. It's at the same height as the bench along the rear wall, which has proven itself to be 'right for me' and it means that big stuff can be laid across the gap between the two, if necessary. I've moved onto the run of shelving along the back wall. This is not straightforward, for various reasons, but it is progressing in stages. The battens are up for the right-hand half. I need to produce beams for the hangers and relocate some of the electrics now. I replaced the fluorescent tube with six 5W GU10 LEDs. A better spread of light, a nicer colour and a 'floppy hang', if they do ever get hit by anything. I did get a laser cross-beam projector level from Lidl and it has proven to be a God-send in all this work. Well worth €30 in time saved and cock-ups averted. Lidl also had some self-adhesive steel metre tapes. Having one mounted on the bench seemed a potentially good idea, but I felt that it needed to be 'inlaid', rather than just stuck on the surface. I have some router bits here, but the router itself is 200 miles away. However, I managed to codge up a device to do the fairly lightweight job - from a cordless drill and a Wolfcraft drilling jig. Used with care, it did a better job than I expected. I only needed a half-inch wide groove by about half a millimetre deep. This was done with a 12mm cutter, so it needed a slight nudge sideways for a second pass for the required width. It all worked well and the tape is installed now.

Somebody was wise enough to ensure the word 'modern' was included, before we spent days shooting them down on here over the Drumm...

I'll leave that for the poster.

The package was accepted at the Post Office as being 250g, but reweighed when subsequently arriving at 'Royal' Mail and declared to be 2g overweight, resulting in the recipient being surcharged for the delivery.

One of my abiding regrets is failing the see the Macc Lads live. We did borrow a video of a live concert - from a bizarre source. One of the secretaries at work overheard us mention them and said she had a video, if we wanted to borrow it. She was the most delicate, genteel little flower and it was hard to believe that she'd even heard of them.

It's an easy mistake, if you buy the ticket in a hurry.

And be careful about being near the weight threshold in damp weather.

Mountmellick to Kilkenny seems to have not many pictures, beyond a few around Abbeyleix around the closure time. Birr/Parsonstown to Roscrea went before photography was a widespread hobby, I suppose - I've only recently realised how much of the station buildings still exist in Birr.

It may all have ceased.

They presumably don't have this facility in Waterford...

Anybody doing modern image Hazelhatch may need to spend some time on interior details.

Mmm, I've just done it again from scratch and got 59mm, so you might want to consider 60mm as the absolute minimum 'safe' height...

I have a test-track of Peco wooden sleeper Streamline on MDF. I make it 58,7mm from the surface of the MDF to the top of the wagon.