Broithe

Or... I'm going down the pub, get your coat on. Ooh, am I coming? No, but I'm knocking the heating off on the way out.

Triang/Hornby had a gravity unloading hopper arrangement for years. I did a set-up for a chap with a mine and a loading conveyor at one end and a power station with an unloading drop at the other. Keeping it all working was a full-time job. Here's a description of how the dropping hoppers worked. https://www.southportmodelrailway.org.uk/page21/page117/page78/index.html

At first glance, I thought these were the now-familiar green boxes... Phew....

I had a thirty+ foot run of 00 in an unheated boxed-in car port with a polycarbonate roof - temperature and humidity levels were rather variable. There was a straight along the back and life was a bit difficult before these Fleischmann expansion joints were fitted - they offer most of an inch of movement and solved the issue fairly completely, whilst masquerading plausibly as a crossing. I felt that the majority of the movement was humidity-related - shrinkage of the 'wood', rather than expansion of the metal rails.

Mention of 'Leo' might lead you to fall foul of the "No Politics" rule.....

I recall a radio programme around 1970, about the life of a chap in New Guinea, who was from one of the last tribes to be contacted - he had been a stone age cannibal until the age of twenty, but had, since then become fully accustomed to modern life, over a period of just a few years. Anyway, he offered his opinion that the choice cut of 'long pig', as it is known in Pidgin English, is the forearm of a woman. It's only a matter of time before it's on special offer in Lidl.

Wikipedia says - On Starlink 2, one of the satellites has an experimental coating to make it less reflective, and thus impact ground-based astronomical observations less.

You can get the strip as (cuttable) self-adhesive rolls or as 'solid, plug-together' strips. The necessary transformers can be separate items or the direct 'plug-in the socket' type. You can even get strips where you can control the 'colour temperature', so you can alter the 'weather' and the 'time of day'. Kralovstvi Zeleznic in Prague has a section which cycles through the whole 24 hours every fifteen minutes, although they were using fluorescent tubes for that when I went around 2010-ish.

The old Kilkenny stub at Port Laoise.

I have agents in the Fresno area, if I could find a physical location I was going to get them to have an actual look, but I can't. And the website seems to have come into existence fairly recently.

Comparing prices across decades, you really need to rate them by "Hours of work required" a lot of stuff is cheaper now, in terms of how much time you need to work to pay for it. And there's a lot more to consume your money now, things that didn't even exist back then.

It's often worth seeing if you can go direct to a shop's own website, rather than their eBay shop, they need to allow for the fees when selling via a third party...

"When" - not "if"....

It has also been noted that, whilst rabbits are frequently casualties of road traffic collisions, it seems that hares very rarely are. The difference is not accounted for merely by the respective population figures. Whilst hares are far less numerous, this does not equate to the very low numbers that are found as road-kill. An extensive research project found several different reasons, a significant one was that rabbits will make an individual decision to cross a road, and often an erroneous one, too. Hares, however, have been found to cross in groups, and the younger hares rely on the experience of older individuals to select a safer crossing situation. When driving, you may sometimes see an old hare lurking in a hedgerow. there will often be a group of younger hares, out of sight, waiting for his signal that it is safe to cross. These older hares, who take on this communal task, are known as hare traffic controllers.

One of our itinerant, short-term MDs was a proper posh-boy, who had been to the sort of school that you should have heard of. He had a habit of using Latin phrases, to boost his own (self-perceived) superiority and keep the people who did the real work 'in their place'. He once, after a long meeting, stated "Alea iacta est!", folded up his papers and got up to leave - nobody else had the slightest idea what he had said ("The die is cast", meaning that the decision had been made). Sitting next to my boss, I felt the urge to state "Quanta est canis in fenestra". He didn't quite catch what I had said, as I had intended, but he knew it was Latin, so had to nod his agreement, as I had also got up to leave,and so was presumably going along with his decision. On the way back to the office, I was grilled "What was going on there?" - I explained the quote about the die being cast - "And what did you say to him?" - "It was Latin, it's OK, he agreed with me" - "I know it was Latin, but what did it mean?" - "How much is that doggie in the window?"

Latin was pretty much the only thing I did at school after the age of ten that has had any use at at all. I once had a bizarre interview at Ford's truck division, me and seventeen of 'them', four of them had to sit behind me. One of them asked me his killer question "What's the difference between a trans- axle diff-lock and an inter-axle diff-lock?" - "A trans-axle locks it across the axle and an inter-axle locks it between the axles." - "How do you know that? It's a rather niche piece of knowledge." - "I did Latin..." It was also the first time I used my killer question - "Is there anything you would like to ask us?" - "Yes, what's the worst thing about working here?" There was utter silence from all seventeen of them as they struggled to think of anything they dared to say in front of the others. A total revelation. I used it a few times and only ever got one straight answer - the car parking wasn't quite adequate, apparently... Despite having a 'technical job', the most intricate maths I did was generally the monthly fault-finding task when the pay-slip arrived. Latin is there, hovering in the background all the time.

Next year will be along shortly...

Not strictly a modelling tool, I suppose, but I have a few of these Black & Decker Jobbers in various locations - much more useful than a standard Workmate, and much less 'in the way' when they're not in use. The 'frame' is effectively a tray, which can contain a few tools, too. The removable steel jaw faces are a useful feature - and they should come with clamps to use on a kitchen table, if you can get away with that.. Not in production any more, I believe, but they turn up at boot sales, etc - if those days ever return...

Also, some piercing saw frames are 'fixed', but an adjustable frame will allow you to continue to use broken blades, by shortening the frame gap.

Mmm, "lightning conductors" have several modes of operation. One is to reduce the attractiveness of the structure to being struck in the first place, and then to protect it to some extent, if that strategy fails and it is struck. There is no completely satisfactory solution to it. If your 'discharge' facility, aimed at reducing your chance of being struck, is actually struck, then the resulting current will be enormous. A glance at the lightning protection on large buildings, etc, will reveal the size of the conductors that are used. They are that size in order to survive being struck (hopefully!). Anything at all will suffice for the discharge situation, but, if that is not adequate to avoid a strike, then the pulse can vaporise the conductor, but still leave an ionised path to (the real) earth - resulting in some damage and injury from flying debris and a risk of fire. The section in Gulliver's Travels about the dispute over whether to eat boiled eggs from the big end or the little end is a joke about the arguments over the preferred shape of early lightning conductors. When i had a real job, we made circuit breakers which, generally being of a 'spiky' shape and located in exposed outdoor substations, were frequent targets for lightning strikes. We used 1" x 1/4" copper strip to conduct the energy to the ground mesh. It was necessary, for stuff exported to some countries to camouflage the copper strips by scraping rust onto them from exposed steel plates, whilst they were covered in silvery wet paint, to make them look like steel strips - or they would be removed within days and turned into jewellery by the local population...

I'm not doing a lot of modelling these days, but I did escape from the Big Island when I could see how things were likely to evolve. My mother is on her own these days and, at 89, it wasn't an easy situation for her. So, having domesticated the shed systematically over the last few years, I decided that I could isolate myself fairly effectively in there and avoid potentially contaminating the house. I had only been back there for ten days, with little contact with the natives and I still have no symptoms showing nearly a fortnight on since my escape. I have a gas cooker, microwave, fridge, woodburner, internet - all mod-cons really. Even the toilet facilities are separated. There are two, and one has an outside door, via a push-button combination lock (to avoid my father traipsing mud through the house), so we have no cross-over, except as "neighbours". We have neighbours supplying, but I brought my strategic reserves with me. I expect to survive.

It'll probably just be the material used, though I can't see what grade they're using. Most 'stainless' steels are based on fairly high proportions of chromium and nickel, plus a few other elements. The protective oxides that form can have insulating properties, which might not be what you want, if expecting to take power or data from the track Presumably, they have investigated that aspect thoroughly and found no problems.