Broithe

Talk of Chinese manufacturing elsewhere has reminded me of this. We had noticeboards all over the place and many spoofs would appear on those. A regular poster was quite a good cartoonist. One of his, which I may still have a copy of, appeared as digital watches were starting to become popular. We were still using relays for control systems and were probably about thirty years behind the rest of the world by then. He put up a drawing of "The GEC Digital Watch". This was a chap struggling along with a wooden pallet tied to his left arm. This pallet had 100 watt bulbs arranged in a grid, to form the numbers as they lit up, as an LED watch did back then. With his right arm, he was pulling a fully laden hand-truck behind him - on this trailer were a couple of dozen car batteries to drive the bulbs and a grandfather clock with a nest of wires coming from the face and hands to control which ones were illuminated at the time.

I once made a vegetable plot for someone who wasn't the most agile person. I suggested that we could make a watering arrangement for it that would only require her to turn a tap on and off now and then. The idea was to use one of the oscillating sprinklers that will cover a rectangular area, thus we wouldn't waste water. The area can be adjusted by blocking nozzles for two sides and by adjusting the drive linkage from the turbine-driven gearbox for the other two sides. Subject to it not being too windy and the water pressure being fairly reliable, then the area watered could be quite accurately controlled. In those far-off days they were generally about £30, if you were lucky, and not widely available. I suggested that we keep an eye out for 'the right one' and we didn't need it straight away. The next week, she announced that she had bought one that she'd seen in a garden centre - "How much?", I asked, hoping that she had got the right sort, as she hadn't seemed to understand what I had in mind - "£2.99" was the answer. I admonished her for buying the wrong sort, imagining that she had got a cheapo rotary sprinkler, but, no, she had purchased a "Chinese copy" that was 99% as good as the European item that i had in mind. I doubt that we could have sent the empty box back to China for what she paid for the whole thing, even if we had flattened it. Each nozzle was an individual brass fitting, pressed into the main tube - and there was an attached tool supplied to deal with any blockages.

Releasing this sort of information on the first of the month is just going to get people checking their calendars...

I've not been paying a great deal of attention. What is this Brexit thing? Is there a vaccine for it yet?

Some really old stuff will even have flanges that hit the chairs on Code 100 track.

I'm off to Google that... ...and I'll be blaming you...

The Red Cross can get rather bizarrely awkward about their symbol - on the basis that it must remain exclusively theirs, or people may begin to reduce their acceptance of the reality that it expresses. Some years ago, they objected to the use of the red cross on the costume of a nurse in a pantomime performance. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12135540 The cross was changed to green, as you will frequently see on first aid kits, etc.

There is a fairly widely available beer on the Big Island called 'Lancaster Bomber', when I first came across it, I was rather surprised to see that the roundel that they used to adorn the product and its associated peripheral items, beer-mats, etc, had the RAF colours reversed. This, of course, turned it into a French roundel - and France did have the odd Lancaster after the war, though mostly (perhaps all?) were naval aircraft, featuring an anchor superimposed on the roundel. I approached the brewery about why they had done this - a series of rather odd emails passed between us, before I gave up - the person involved in the replies was of the opinion, for some unfathomable reason, that the RAF roundel was 'copyright', but the French one was not... On the subject of model aircraft markings, there are rather more significant restrictions on, particularly, Revell aircraft of German WW2 prototypes. There will be no swastikas on the transfer sheets - and not even on the box artwork. I've never been in a model shop in Germany, but I wonder how they cope with models from foreign producers?

One of the buzzwords of the 1980s, from the Japanese Kanban organisational system. It's something that you really need to be "Japanese" to do properly, it was trendy in the UK to pretend to be doing it, but it mostly led to even more chaos. We normally referred to it as JTL, rather than JIT - Just Too Late, not Just In Time. This was a win-win situation, as the boss's initials were JTL, so it also annoyed him slightly more. It's one of those things that can be done, but only if you actually do it.

The people across the road told my father that were going away, so that he would be looking after their house. He asked them where they were going and was told they were flying to Venice. He suggested that he thought that was a bit extravagant and it would be a lot cheaper to go on the train, and it wouldn't take much longer. Anyway, they left the discussion at that... A few days later, we found out that he thought they were going to Ennis.

I spent ten minutes of a journey down from Heuston, about twenty years ago, coaching the ticket man on the pronunciations of the stations on the 'back line'. Being of African origin, he had really struggled with most of them - Cloughjordan presenting the most difficulty, you could hear the relief when his announcements got as far as Birdhill...

Having ascertained that the far end of the platform is 4,900 metres from my house arrest location, I ventured out to see what has been going on. Very little, really, the car parking issue has eased a bit for the present, of course, and there might be a bit of activity to increase the provision..? A special detail for those modelling in the very recent 'modern image'. The branch rails are looking rather unused. But the loop rails seem to get the odd run over still. New LED lighting has appeared. Some weathering detail on the Rawie. Just checking that the Outside World is still there, beyond the 5km radius...

Sometimes, frogs can be found at some distance from points.

Done.

A little extra detail for your track workers...

Royal Mail charged me £8 for the privilege of them 'handling' the £3 tax that was due on the item.

There are some bonkers issues going on in food "economics" for many years now. I remember two facts emerging during some sort of chicken-based emergency a few years ago. At that time: 1, The two largest sources of chicken imports to the UK were Thailand and Brazil - neither seems handily placed to me. 2, The UK exported almost exactly the same amount of chicken to the Netherlands as the Netherlands exported to the UK.

It did. It was more of a train set than a model, but it kept him occupied. Often, I would start a bit and then leave him to carry on for a day or two - between us, it all got done in the end. I made most of the proprietary card buildings, apart from half the ones at Lowe End - the "specials", like the power station, etc., were 'picked up' here and there. The cooling towers were turned from solid lumps of wood... I had a plan to fit a 'misting unit', one of those ultrasonic things that "shakes" a mist from a supply of water, but we never got around to that. The points were all mechanically operated, sometimes in pairs. He liked "things that did stuff", hence the electrified crane, winding wheels, coal conveyor and the self-emptying hopper wagons. There was also a TPO with a pick-up and drop-off for the bags. I've a vague idea that there's a building with a smoke unit in there somewhere.

Yeah, I didn't procure that one - it'll be in a box 200 miles away - I'll have a look one day... I got most of the stuff that was on there, but bits would appear from other sources, sometimes. I used to slip stuff in and see how long it took him to spot things. Weeks, sometimes. That would explain why it's on the wrong side of the road.

By the boiler transporter? I'm not sure about that, or even where it came from. This layout was in Stafford, which has a history of producing generators and transformers, then dragging them through the town causing traffic chaos. There should be a Pickford's transporter with a transformer on somewhere... There are a few other 'local' items around - the Stan Robinson lorry is another. The power station was originally based on Meaford, north of Stafford and now obliterated. It has been relocated to a layout in Laois, where it is now Ferbane, the current owner having been involved in the construction of that one. One or two buildings and a bit of rolling stock are on there two - the rest is in boxes. (One day..) Well spotted!

Most of it was built over a three/four year period around 2005 to 2010-ish. The section in the garage was first, Two 'circular loop tracks, with a couple of siding set-ups and a loop platform at the back. As was inevitable, it was decided to expand into the larger area of the car port. This was done via four points and a crossover, so it could operate as independent loops or a full figure-of-eight. Outside, in the car port, the inner loop was originally intended for a couple of live steamers, so any possible accidental connection of the two systems was avoided by having the inner loop totally separate from the outer. Eventually, there was a mine at one end, with a power station at the other. The coal could be loaded at the mine, via the conveyor, then transported and dropped at the power station, by means of the automatic hopper wagons. It took some fiddling to get it all to work, but it did in the end. The final extension at the far end was the result of one of our associates passing on and a lot of items from his layout were reused to crate a small town for the power station workers. his name was Ken Lowe, hence new signs were made to commemorate him. Of course, it was never 'finished' - we had plans to run a narrow gauge set-up under the boards, as a mine railway. Apart from the conveyor, the mineshaft wheel were also motorised, as was the 'dockyard' crane, though it was never fully reliable. There was a permanent control set-up in the garage, with a Model D - and two plug-in points for a portable Model D in the car port. One set of 'banana' sockets can just be seen in the bottom left corner above, with a slide out shelf below. One aspect that the Old Boy really liked was running it in the dark with the lighting on. The street lamps there are LED, but most of the rest of the layout was grain-of-wheat bulbs, running in series pairs at 16 volts, so getting 8V each - this gave a pleasant olde worlde glow, and greatly extended the bulb lives - in fact, we never lost one - if we had, we would also have 'lost the light' from the one in series, of course, but it never happened, and all the wiring was quite visible underneath the tables.