Broithe

At last...

This undated picture is in Drumbeg, Co Down. Possibly late 1960s, based on the car* and what looks like no motorcycle helmet. * Sunbeam Alpine? The picture was missing, but I don't seem able to edit any more - hopefully it will be here now.

Ah, so that's the mysterious 'forthcoming product announcement' - tractors.

There's always clues in these posts... I'm predicting buildings, starting with the Central Bank.

I can't find any sign of activity on the rails, but:- Edit - This picture may actually be from the Big Island. The 'Lobitos' name is still in use for a tyre depot near Chester, presumably on/near the site of a similar operation to the Larne one.

I could imagine vast cattle trains crossing the pampas, entirely self powered via a conveyor system, leading to a digester wagon behind the engine...

It is probably more efficient to burn the methane in an internal combustion engine, rather than using it to boil water for a steam engine. There are examples already running - https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/biogas/scandinavia-boasts-world-s-first-biogaspowered-train

The explosive risks seem to be quite well contained these days, but I do remember this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbeystead_disaster - happening. I've always been surprised that the general drains don't cause "issues" more than they do - I always wince when I see a dog-end flicked into a grid... "Some lads I knew" once set light to a cess pit with a concrete slab 'roof', with two rows of four holes - it took us, sorry, them, hours to finally put it out. Every time it looked over, it would erupt from a different vent.

Methane harvesting is growing. Sewage plants have done it for many decades and it's been spreading(!) into agriculture in recent years.

And the possibilities of IEDs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25922514

Pempoul. And this one, whose name I forget. Two excavators and a wagon, moving a pile of gravel around. Enthralling to watch.

It's not just us...

There are supposed to be drivers on the Big Island into double figures. On the marvellously interesting "Bombay Railway" programme, the driver they followed wasn't sure of his exact number, but he remembered when it had passed seventy...

From '95 to 2008-ish, I made regular boat/train crossings, initially to Dun Laoghaire, then later to the North Wall. The initial system was to use the DART to Tara Street, then the 90 to Heuston. After the change to the North Wall, there was a bus for foot passengers, which did a Connoly, Busaras, Tara Street , Heuston run. It was almost always the same driver, and the "regulars" got to know him. i used to bring all sorts of stuff, in my 'disposable suitcase' - a large cardboard box, strapped up for the journey, and which I didn't need to return with, empty. On one occasion, he began to think that he was being set up for some bizarre 'candid camera' caper. I had brought over a bundle of guttering for our sheds, to avoid using 'huge' stuff where it wasn't necessary, but I had omitted to bring the dimensions with me, so I had left it all in the supplied two metre lengths, which was a bit of a game to get into the bus, past the passengers, pushchairs, suitcases and giant rucksacks, etc. No soon had I managed to get in and sat down, with a few people prepared to cope with my pack of guttering on their shoulders, than another chap appeared from the carousel door - this time with a bundle of full-size house guttering - in four metre lengths. After we had convinced the driver that this wasn't a set-up and a telegraph pole was going to appear next, we managed to feed it in through the rear emergency exit and pass it over the heads of the lower floor passengers.... Will there be an accessory pack, containing a selection of guttering?

"Roadmap" is, obviously, a hint that we're going to see Hino trucks?

The Chinese run a turborprop conversion in Antarctica.

Nice! The Hunter was a civilised plane. Somewhere, I may still have a 'Restricted' document, that I once got arrested at bayonet-point for possessing*. It included some crash reports**. One involved some Jordanian Hunter pilots being trained to attack gun sites in Wales. The "attacks" were being filmed by two chaps in a pretend sandbagged enclosure just below a hilltop. They were also in radio communication with the "attacking" Hunters - the general technique was to fly directly at the gun site, so that your fire would '"suppress" the fire from the lads in the gun site. Most of the initial "attacks" broke off far too early. People were repeatedly advised to press home the attack until the last possible moment, to maintain the fire-suppression. The final pilot decided that he was going to be the best - but this ended up with him taking the top two rows of sandbags off, removing the cine camera and burying the two chaps, who had elected to lie down on the floor by this stage, under a deluge of sand. One of the statements to the board of enquiry was along the lines of "By this stage, I had ceased to directly observe the situation, as I was lying face-down in the bottom of the gun pit". * There were other potential offences at the time, but I was never actually charged. ** RAF crash reports of the 60s and 70s could be quite 'entertaining'.

Weathered?

The clue is in the 'water'. They're doing Ulysses. And in O Gauge, too.

A Hercules is going to lift nowhere near that weight, even if you could shut the door. I was thinking along C5 lines, but it seems there were no civilian operators of the Galaxy.

Seconding all the best wishes above. I was going to say "Best foot forward!",... ...but, I've decided not to.

Not rotating, but I presume this is a points indicator at Ballybrophy - in 2008 - all gone now. There was still a ground frame there then.

It always struck me as slightly 'odd' that they used a 'Soviet' aircraft, although it was a good PR stunt to get some positivity back from the delays. Being late was (is?) standard for British industry in my day. Both in terms of the initial product and in the responses to the subsequent failures. For many years, the British still had large 'captive' markets in the ex-empire, as well as at home, with organisations run by British managements. They could virtually rely on them to carry on putting up with the same sort of stuff, and there were often pseudo-commercial strings to the funding arrangements that made it very difficult to find the cash to go to other suppliers. Where I worked, we made some truly dreadful things, but we also made things that were almost perfect, but they were hugely expensive to buy and were really unsaleable in most of the market after 1970-ish, although they are still sitting out there now, working well, sixty years on - you would have spent a lot more money over that period buying, replacing and fixing the stuff we made later. People in Irish procurement were much more likely to look at the past, and a plausible projection into the future, and base decisions on that. You can still see it today in things like the Air Corps fleet and, dare I say it, Ryanair...

Sometimes with a bit of pomp and circumstance...