Broithe

"Compass swinging" used to go on quite a bit.

Looking at a few pictures of the Heathrow fire - wondering if one of "my breakers" might be involved. My stuff wouldn't burn like that, but it could ignite other things. The big fires usually come from the 'bulk oil' devices, mostly the transformers these days, but there are still some old bulk oil breakers about and one of those letting go would be like a napalm raid by a B52. The newer breakers would disintegrate very sharply*, with a fairly brief flash and fire, plus a dramatic shrapnel effect, which might involve other equipment indirectly. They tend not to explain the details of these things publicly - and I don't really care any more... *We blew one up at a test plant next to the Kellogg's factory once, putting in a few of their windows and damaging things in the car park. I've always believed that they owe me some royalties for Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, as they were launched a few months later. I am 100% convinced that some debris entered the production and was felt to be an improvement.

Keep an eye on yourself - and the others. Sometimes you do just have to prioritise things - you can't do everything, even if seems as though you must. I remember the worry here when it was silent after the earthquake, not really knowing your location in relation to it. Your event will have been of great benefit in relation to the anxiety issues. There is nothing anywhere near as good as dealing properly with a real event for some confidence in yourself. Etc... But, you know all this anyway.

These are later and my 'memory' says the colour looked a bit 'greener' in the past. That is - https://www.flickr.com/photos/firehuse999/14598555280 And this was in front of me at the lights last year.

Leave space for a turnstile, you'll need to control visitor access efficiently.

Remember the old proverb. Bantry wasn't (re)built in a day.

I have mentioned his Twitter on here before, but it's always worth a look through. https://x.com/seaniecain

I have met Mrs 84C and would be fully confident in her abilities to supervise the necessary labour involved.

Excellent! Raising Lazarus from the baseboard.

He tells us the truth now, or we turn all his photos upside down again.

Nice. I did the 1/48 one and found I needed a large amount of nose weight.

Talk elsewhere of the culture of avoiding reality in management responses has reminded me of this flowchart, of great use in predicting the outcome of an activity.

Where I worked was massively disorganised. The only thing the management understood about real modern management was how to parrot the fashionable buzz-words of the time. The Japanese concept of JIT - Just In Time - stock control seemed a good idea to them, which it is, if you actually do it properly, but they had no chance, or even the slightest genuine intention, of doing it to any degree at all. The boss at the time had the initials JTL, which everybody knew, as that was the code for him in minutes of meetings etc. He went by his middle name, Tom, and nobody was supposed to know his first name was Joshua. I had a phase of putting up spurious 'official' notices at the time and invented a stock control scheme that would be more in tune with the real possibilities, given our management culture. The notices I put up explained the new scheme - JTL - Just Too Late... He took it very badly.

In the 90s and early 2000s, I used to come over on the train and ferry as a foot passenger. I was always 'interrogated' at Holyhead by highly-trained security people who had no idea of the details of what they were asking about... Where are you going? Laois. Where's that. Er, Ireland... Yes. North or south? * A bit south of the middle. In the Republic? Well, yes. What county is it in? Laois. ----Ad infinitum--- On one occasion I had to spell it for him, which didn't really help... * I always intended to have Donegal as my destination, so I could truthfully say it was in the north.

Where I worked, we had an engineering laboratory, which would get involved with all sorts of odd stuff from outside the business. The amount of really interesting stuff declined steadily, as the accountants increased their power to stop things happening. One chap I often did odd things with told me about the first job he had had as an apprentice. There was an interest in how the airflow varied immediately in front of a propeller disc. So, he was tied to a post in front of a Griffon engine driving a Dowty prop with a pipe in his hand, running back to a pressure sensor. Another chap stood behind the propeller with a bamboo stick, indicating where he wanted the open end of the tube to be. Obviously, he did survive this, though he said it was very exciting at the time. "They told me that I was selected for the task because I was the smallest and would cause the least disruption to the airflow, which might have been a small part of the whole reasoning..."

I think I can hear the turntable squeaking...

It wasn't really mine, though I was contracted for permanent way construction and maintenance, and I had rights as an operating company. The big figure of eight all round the outside must have been over 100'. The original part was in a garage, then it expanded out through the door under a long closed-in car port, for the mine and the power station. The power station is up the road here now, renamed as Ferbane. We once got a 181 to pull a few carriages round as slowly as possible, just creeping up the slope to the bridge, and it took over eleven minutes. It could have been longer, if we hadn't had to allow for the possibility of stalling on the slope... It was notable that the Metcalfe and Superquick buildings, when exposed to vast amounts of sunlight through the polycarbonate roof of the car port, did look better, less new and pristine. I have a lot of the infrastructure packed away and it may resurface in some form - eventually.

Curving the inclines adds to the effort required to pull things up. If you're running decent locos, rather than older ones, and short trains, you can have steeper and tighter runs - but you would be advised to experiment and find what works reliably. Also, smaller bogie diesels will pull better on curved inclines than bigger (long) steam locos will. It's hard to give a hard and fast prediction, there are many variables at play. On the straight 8' ramps above, we could pull long trains with Murphy 181s, but some older, more highly geared things struggled with the weight. Shorter trains will be easier to raise, obviously. In general, modern, all-wheel drive diesels will be better than bigger steam locos. The lower the gradient, the better things will be - and the greater the radius of any turns on the inclines - you could, if necessary, even reduce the gradient on the curved sections, increasing it slightly on the straights to get the height back. Whatever happens, in the space you have, you will have to compromise. I would be inclined (hah!) to drop the ground under the bridge, if you can, to have the bridge going over a hole, rather than raising the track to the whole height of the deck. You could still have a bit of an incline, to keep the effect, but have the 'height' under the bridge. Or have the track raised above the board all the way road, but dropped a bit away from the bridge. You could do all of these approaches at the same time, with the lower parts of the towers reduced also... Also, if the bridge is 'at the back' - i.e., four feet away from where you can stand, make sure you can reach it for any issues that might happen, and to clean the track occasionally.

You'll struggle with it on a board that size, as it comes. You could shorten the base of the towers, of course, to reduce the lift required. Having the approaches including curves will also add to the struggle to get the lift required. I had one here, with the full height towers and straight approaches. I think I used hardboard for the ramps and they are eight feet long - full lengths from a sheet. It was usable, but not really ideal. You could also drop a 'well' under the bridge, below the level of the sheet, to get the height without the whole climb.

https://www.facebook.com/NorthYorkshireWeatherUpdates/posts/pfbid0GG7otBWtoicem31Qwatkpz8sTfRkfjfBs1XSTSqu4HQ3i2jbqzZfS8QnNZieuBjZl WCML at Beattock yesterday.

I've known a few over the years, it's a remarkable level of real physical skill. The chap who did this, by hand, on an old scrap of plywood, is a true artist, in every sense of the word. I once had to do a banner on a plastic tarpaulin. I did that by drawing it out on a sheet of paper and photographing it, then projecting the slide onto the banner, so I could draw the outlines, then fill in the spaces. Long-winded, but not as long as it would have taken me to do it the 'real way', even though a true sign-writer would have done it in a few minutes from scratch.

In a similar way, but not really railway-related, there are many sources of "free nice materials". I always retrieve the long leaf springs out of old wiper blade. It's a nice material and has many uses. I fixed this thing the other day. It's for holding a queen bee as you mark it, apparently - but the foam-faced plunger had gone very sloppy and it was hard to use reliably. I suspect that the foam block was the 'friction brake' originally, but had worn too much to hold the weight now. A few seconds grinding a bit to length and a little 'set' in it to give a friction load on the plunger and all was well again. A sweet job and it got me a free pint last night. It's very handy stuff for light leaf-springs.

That's up to them - they offer it for sale at a price and that price is acceptable to you or not. That its the Free Market. Conversely, I have had someone get really stroppy with me because he offered me, out of the blue, a reasonable price for something that I had no intention of selling - he seemed to think that his offer must be accepted... My favourite, though, remains the time I asked a bloke how much a Sandvik carbide scraper would be, having decided that I would go to £2 for it, if necessary. He required me to make an offer for it. He was a good bit older than me and I felt that he would easily understand my offer of 'thirty bob'. His response to that was "Oh, no! I need at least fifty pence!" So, I reluctantly gave him a third of what I had actually offered him... The other smaller scraper there was a great buy - nice-looking, but also hugely useful. And it is a product of a firm that proudly embossed on the blade "Cutlers to Her Majesty". No doubt it took her ages to repaper the whole of Buck House.

Perhaps a similar reason that I found this planimeter at a boot sale. "How much for the planimeter?" - "What?" - "That!" - "That's a compass." - "Is it? How much is it?" ... It is used for measuring the areas of flat shapes, a difficult task back in the days of real maps, etc. You just set the arm length to the right dimension for the scale of the map and the unit that you want to measure in, with some common examples in the chart on the bottom. A remarkable device that I had always wanted, after seeing one at school once - and I got it it a reasonable price, due to the ignorance of the vendor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter