Broithe

I've been around a good bit longer and used to admit to 14, but I've had a hard couple of years and will accept 15 now.

If you enjoy doing the landscape and aren't keen on complicated trackwork or buildings.

And there were camping coaches at one time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camping_coach

One of my 'claims to fame' is that I've never been arrested by anybody without a gun. By far the most dangerous one also involved a bayonet, and was the only time that I felt that I was really in danger. All I was doing was watching a Cyprus Airways Trident doing circuits and bumps.

You could always defend yourself by asserting that you are "a trainspotter, a loner, an anorak, a nerd with no friends". I'm sure a few of us could easily convince people of the veracity of that position. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-16760464 Unfortunately, i can't find how that case finalised.

At least the chassis aren't black.

A survey yesterday revealed that the car park is pretty much finished, with just a bit of wall still to rebuild, but it's operational in full. With additional spaces on the resurfaced access road. In total there are around a hundred spaces now. Plus these covered cycle spaces. There is no sign of a ticket machine (yet), it may be the intention to have the whole system 'online'. The notices suggest various methods of doing this. There wasn't really anything of an actual 'railway nature' to report on at all, this time. A rather circuitous route home allowed me to include Bridge 202, just this side of Templemore. This, again, looks like a replaced beam structure on original abutments, but it was hard to get much of a picture of the 'outside' of the bridge. Apart from the obvious 'rustic' panels, a lot of the original stonework to either side was replaced by 'modern' concrete blocks, although the ivy was hiding a lot of that. From there, I headed back towards safety via Lisduff, where there was no activity going on. I did record these access pads ... ... and some sort of monitoring device.

I have now added 'rail tour organiser' to my CV.

Have you gone? We expect postcards and sticks of rock.

There is one through train on the way back from Tralee to Charleville, but it's probably too late for a 'day trip'.

1 change - Mallow, I would presume.

This is what I see for tomorrow, that might be possible for a day trip. Charleville Tralee 10:59 12:58 12:58 14:58 Tralee Charleville 13:05 15:02 15:05 17:02 17:05 19:02

On the Big Island, I sometimes pick people up at the station in Stafford, on the WCML. I once heard a perfectly serious announcement - The train approaching Platform One is the delayed 15:35 train to London Euston. This train may go no further than Watford Junction - I was the only person who laughed at it, everybody else thought it was 'normal'. I went to pick someone up on a train from Euston to Liverpool at 7pm. She is not the 'most reliable of people', but had been put on the train in London by her daughter, so we stood a good chance. The train came in about on time and was announced as the seven o'clock train to Liverpool - fair enough - but, my charge was not on the train. It was a short London Midland and easy enough to search. My charge also had no mobile phone. I was left with no choice but to inform her daughter that she was just not there. There was only one stop on the way, at Rugby, which does look a bit similar... Anyway, it turned out that she was actually on the train, miles away, stationary in the countryside somewhere near Tamworth. The train I had searched was actually an hour late and should have been there at 6pm, but it looked enough like the 7pm to be announced as that, avoiding the word 'delayed' - it mattered to nobody but me. I once heard "That's the Cork train coming in now" at Port Laoise, to the point and concise. At Oxford, I heard an announcement that said "Please pay no attention to the information screens, all the details on there are wrong and we can't even turn them off" - the staff member on my platform seemed unconcerned about this aspect, now that it was 'solved', until I asked him what they were going to do about deaf people - or all those foreign tourists over there, studying the details on the screen... I heard an announcement at Birmingham International, serving the airport. I had no idea what it was and having flown in from Prague, I wondered if it might even be Czech, knowing that there would be a few Czechs on the platform. I asked the Czech girl next to me and she said it wasn't Czech, but she didn't have any idea what it was. About a minute later, it was repeated, and I managed to pick out enough to realise that it was in English.

Sod that...

The brazier thing often seems a bit odd to me. Both in model form and in real life, you often see braziers that are only going to warm parts that are empty of water, unless water is actually flowing, when it wouldn't matter anyway. This one at Henley-in-Arden is a case in point - in this situation, there would be no water above the bottom of the horizontal section. and the heat is going to be of little use to the bit that does have water in, the vertical column, up to the bottom of the horizontal section. I suppose you could get a frozen blockage there, if you had a slow leak that froze and built up over time..?

Ballybrophy, if it's of interest. The chain is 'hooked', to avoid the possibility of it swinging around in the wind, into the path of a passing train.

I spent a lot of my youth messing about in old bomb shelters. Most were, as you say, earth-banked - this provided added loose mass to 'soften' the blast, and a bit of 'shape' to allow it to pass, having less effect. I was never happy that few of these place had a secondary access - so, if the door became blocked, the occupants would be left in the hands of those outside, who may have other priorities, by that stage. I have seen it suggested, with an air of confidence, that more people may have died in the UK from TB contracted in shelters than may have been saved from death due to the bombing - who knows? If you ask people on the Big Island where in the UK, outside London, had the greatest WW2 bombing casualties, by far the most likely answer is Coventry, when it was Belfast, by a long way.

Interesting stuff. Could be more interesting, if you were snorkelling in the wrong place...

Those Seacell containers are owned by a woman, but you can buy them off her, from her place down on the coast. She sells Seacells by the seashore.

I remember a story a while back, before the Y2K bug fixes got going, about a chap who was booked in for some significant dental work. The system generated a letter, based on his birth date, which only had space for the last two digits of the year, as was normal practice in the last century, until the millennium was on the horizon. The letter instructed him that he should be accompanied by at least one parent or guardian. He was unable to comply with this requirement, as he had no 'guardian' and he wasn't 8 years old, as the system had assumed, but 108 years old, and both his parents were unfortunately unavailable.