Broithe

When I'm on the Big Island, I live not far from a fairly recently constructed canal facility. It comprises of many boat moorings and a restaurant, farm shop, etc. It is closest to a small village called Aston, which is located on an 'out and back' from the main road, and in forty years of living eight miles away, I've only been to the village twice. Anyway, the canal facility is made much more obvious to passers-by, with signage on the main roads, pointing to it - Aston Marina. I can't go past that sign without thinking that it sounds like one of the most alarming vehicles ever proposed, like a Lotus Cortina, but doing 170mph, with the brakes and handling of a Lidl trolley.

. This reminded me of why I very rarely use that term for super-glue. Our circuit breakers did have a tendency to blow up, but usually for plausibly valid reasons, and generally in a 'safe' manner, with nobody nearby at the time. However, one was blown up in Middlesbrough in the mid-1980s. This time, a chap had been operating it manually and 'off-load' at the time - purely mechanical operations. These were still fairly violent and produced a good amount of noise. After one operation, he heard a 'different' noise, but carried on to find out how many stored operations it had left. But, it wouldn't operate at all, so he stepped back to see what was going on - and fell over the centre interrupter, about a ton, which had fallen twenty feet onto the gravel just behind him (making the 'odd' sound). 'They' got very upset about what was a potentially fatal incident and denied that the operations had been carried out in such a manner that the closing operation had been initiated whilst the opening operation was still happening - this could cause the drive rod to buckle and demolish the whole structure - automatically, this wouldn't happen, but it was possible, if you really tried, to cause it by flipping the manual handle fast enough. This is clearly what happened, but it was denied. So we went through a process of sticking strain gauges all over an identical breaker on the same site and measuring what actually happened when it operated - they refused to allow me to simulate what I knew had been done, so we just ended up showing that it couldn't have blown up at all... Anyway, the point of all this is that they wanted their own strain readings and had a bloke called Jack doing it for them. He hadn't the slightest idea of what he was doing and spent 90% of his time trying to watch and copy us. He had personally discovered super-glue just a few days before the tests began and took every possible opportunity to educate anybody he could trap about the features of it - including what he would reveal its 'correct' name to be - cycroanylate To this day, I have to check myself and practice in my head, before I try saying cyanoacrylate.

Rail travel is generally quite a safe form of transport, but there can still be hidden dangers.

The code is the height of the rail in 1,000ths of an inch. There are adapters to run Code 100 & Code 75 rails into each other. Peco SL-10 joiners will do the job of joining Code 100 lengths together. SL-11 for the insulating joiners.

Stafford 2022 was intended to be in February, as 'usual', but it was moved back to September 24th & 25th when things started looking a bit shaky - but that does mean that I may actually be around for it.

Like a Bring Your Own Bus Replacement Service...

OK, it did survive, it seems. https://ribblesteam.org.uk/exhibits/diesel/english-electric-ee788-1930/

We had a battery shunter where I worked - not sure what happened to it in the end, though.

Fireman's pole from the room above?

There's also these concertina doors still available - not ideal (is anything?) in that they will not give you the full opening when they are, er, open, but they can be useful in some situations.

If I ever need my heart valves doing, I'll be making a booking.

People get blasé after a while - and in many industries there is/was often little genuine quality control of the actual process. And there can develop a sort of bravado about "pushing the edges". People I knew had cause to go to Sellafield and were left with a bit more scepticism than they had before the visits. I worked where we made stuff that ran at 400kV out in the open air - tested up close to 1,000,000 volts and yet some people had a grasp of electrical principles that was little above witchcraft. One chap I worked with would always attach the earth wire to his watch-strap when working on the mains at home - because it was the "safety wire" - I never managed to get him to understand the reality of what was going to happen...

The madness of the cavalier attitude is hard to believe - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619830-600-lid-blown-off-dounreays-lethal-secret/ There an attempt to sort it out just about beginning now, but there's little genuine knowledge about what is actually in there. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-48036793

The health issues were known about for many decades before people started living long enough (in large numbers) to be affected by them, before then, something else would usually get you before the 'gestation period' was over. A chap I worked with died from it in the mid-90s - he had spent his first twenty years in the oil industry in the Persian Gulf, then moved into the electrical industry, both heavy users of it, so it was never established where the 'blame' lay. The building we worked in was built in 1917 and regularly modified, with a culture of 'don't ask, don't know' about that sort of thing. And we would be repairing older equipment that often had parts of unknown provenance, Power stations themselves, of course, were awash with it, as were ships, etc. People would recount how they had seen pipes plastered with wet asbestos paste by hand. It can be in the most 'unlikely' things - vinyl floor tiles and lino are a 'good source' of it, in older buildings - usually safe enough, until you start removing them, as it is in many other situations.

Good work - it's easy for these things to propagate and 'become fact', although there would probably be no fatalities. It stood out to me as the bridge is too 'chunky' for Bourton and there is no Swan there - it is here - https://www.google.com/maps/@51.760364,-1.8353223,3a,75y,33.37h,87.86t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipOPT2NhDDxBEVddHzSiiaodzEOpfy-JdSGL0K5I!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOPT2NhDDxBEVddHzSiiaodzEOpfy-JdSGL0K5I%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi0-ya292.48138-ro-0-fo100!7i10240!8i5120 Bibury is well worth a visit, though.

I wonder if, based on the Goathland layout location, @Jaz avalleymay be the nearest to Leeds on here, and, therefore, more culturally in-tune than most others on here? The 'Yorkshireness' can be a real issue for some people, I generally live on the Big Island, in 'normal' times, but I still have to be ready for it. Charlie is as deeply afflicted by Yorkshireness as anybody that you are likely to ever come across - he is not going to be saying 'Bye' fifty eight times before he puts the phone down, as some of us might be used to. It can come across as dismissive, even aggressive - in fact, it can be hard for outsiders to tell if they have offended a Yorkshireman or not. I have, as I've said, only had one (possibly two) face-to-face cash transactions, so I haven't suffered any of the other circumstances that have been related on here. When I'm on the Big Island, I generally eat once a week in a nearby pub - they have a Polish (I think) waitress who is similarly 'direct' - it can be very entertaining to watch. My favourite time was with a chap who was fairly regular, so it wasn't hit out-of-the-blue to him. He had also been leaned on by the quack to reduce his sugar intake... She arrived to clear the plates away - "You want anything else?" "Oh, yes, please, I'd like a cup of coffee, thank you." She looked at him for half a second, to give him a chance to add to the order, he didn't, so she left. She returned with the coffee. "Your coffee." "Oh, thank you - do you have any sweeteners, please." "No," She looked at him for a full second, to give him a chance for a supplementary question, but he couldn't think of anything to say - so, she left. Eventually, a local staff member came past, so he tried again. She went off and looked, then returned with - "We don't seem to have any at the moment, sorry." "OK, thank you very much." He was much happier with that, even though he still had no sweeteners and could just have believed her in the first place...

I think that picture is actually Bibury, just in case anyone goes to Bourton to survey the scene - all much in the same style, though.

From 6 to 10, I lived in Bourton on the Water - it was just like that - I will be paying more attention here now. Oddly, I just had cause to post a picture of the Weird Hedge there, on another Forum a few minutes ago - I took this two years ago, but they look exactly as they did in 1965 - there is a prototype for everything.

I have a few brush/flails like this - They had a brief popularity in the 80s and still turn up at boot sales, they have both an impact and a brushing action, which you can 'calibrate' as you use it. I find them quite useful, although you need to be aware of the potential for dismemberment - also, most of them were plastic-bodied, but nothing has ever come apart on me. I have one mounted on an extension, to run up and down the woodburner flue. Just a thought.

Do you obtain the sleepers cut-to-size or do you cut them from sheet yourself? If you are cutting them from sheet, maybe it would be worth wire-brushing the whole sheet?

He had a brief period of activity on here, some years back. https://irishrailwaymodeller.com/profile/173-charlie-petty/

I did wonder about putting that line, it's a delicate area these days. You get yes/no, this/that sort of answers, no 'fluff' or pointless pleasantries.

I bought my first 181 off them - I had gone to a train fair to buy stuff for somebody else and it just caught my eye on their stand. I had no idea that they even existed. It is really the fundamental reason that I am here now, years later. It was a simple 'there and then' transaction, involving no logistics, and it may be the only time that I have dealt with them, although I may have bought a book a couple of years later. They are very "Yorkshire", which can produce cultural difficulties when interacting with them, perhaps.

One of my friends is involved in the fragrance/perfume/aftershave world and roped me into a 'research session' about some unisex fragrances. I was asked "Do you wear a fragrance?" - I replied that "I only wear White Spirit by B&Q", as it does 'sound like a perfume', when said in the right context. Later on, I checked, and it does exist :- Tell The Boss that you've got her a bottle of white spirit for her birthday... It seems to be only these islands where the term is used for that particular solvent.

I remember a kid at school moaning that a science question was too hard - the teacher brought in an actual exam paper that he had sat at the same age - for one of the questions, you had to estimate the likelihood that your next breath would contain a molecule that had been in Julius Caesar's dying breath. This required all sorts of knowledge, from biology, chemistry and physics. What volume is a breath, how many molecules in that amount of air, how large is the atmosphere, how much is 'lost' from the atmosphere, and how much returns, and after how long, etc, etc. I think the answer was around 50/50.