Broithe

Oh, and I picked up one of these, as well.

There were some nice fiddle yards. A couple of bits I missed earlier. Having mentioned the lack of lighting on some layouts earlier, there was one which, although nicely lit for the viewers and the (front mounted) operator, was a bit of a bind for everybody else... There were "real trains" outside, too. And a cordless, rechargeable lawnmower.

I went up today - and thought it was a bit quieter than previous years, though the numbers yesterday were up a bit, apparently. Not using the 'new' car park would imply that my version may have some accuracy - but I did still manage to get the car out again at the end... Lots of interesting stuff - a good bit of London Underground and a selection of 3mm layouts. I have recorded most items, but one or two unlit ones were not really up to a usable photo, and they seemed to be concentrated in the darkest area, too, for some reason.

You're just trying to get us to Google "Swedish models", aren't you..?

If you're still spending your confirmation money and elect to use the M6 Toll Road near Birmingham, you might just notice the fully-functional, but empty, new aqueduct, where there hasn't been a canal in living memory. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Birmingham/@52.6551436,-1.9015137,99m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4870942d1b417173:0xca81fef0aeee7998!8m2!3d52.486243!4d-1.890401 https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6549237,-1.9009359,3a,37.5y,306.07h,87.32t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1se9kHn70NFdTyAYrAIisMcg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Probably less resistance to German products in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe at that time...

This would imply CKD for the vans as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Volkswagen_in_Ireland

Blonde, I would say...

Lovely - I can nearly hear it from here.

If that's the wheelbase, it's 1/54. (If it's the width, it's 1/41.) There may be a tendency for these 'picturesque' style models to be made to a size to fit nicely into one of a few standardised box sizes, rather than to a set series of scales?

The wheelbase was, I think, 2.4m and it looks like 52mm in the picture above. So that would be 2500/52 = 1/46 in this case.

There seems to have been two slight length variations, but the width would be 6'4" / 1.93m and the wheelbase was 8'4.4" / 2.55m. Any chance of measuring the model for a fairly definitive answer?

I used to 'look after' some rented houses for various oversees-dwelling owners. The main skill is to get the right tenants, and the absentee landlords just had to trust me. I needed a new set for one house and had some prospective tenants come round - i had got pretty good at assessing things, and had decided straight away that they were OK, but there was a subject that they were finding hard to bring up - there were three of them - a local lad, his Romanian girlfriend and her cousin - the cousin, it turned out, had a dog, a Husky - would that be a problem? "Certainly not" (it would be something for me to pop round and play with when they were at work)... Anyway, as they were moving in, I still had a few little jobs to finish - but the dog was in the back garden and spotted me in the house on my own - that was it! From that day on, it wanted to kill me - genuinely. A couple of years after they left, I went round to their new place and the dog, though unable to see me through the garden wall, smelt me getting out of the car in the road. It's the only dog that has ever hated me - and there is just no compromise to be had over the matter.

Unfortunately, I think so - more suitable for 0, I would think - subject to competent confirmation...

And still the site of one of the, if not the, first suspension bridge in Europe. The castle grounds are most certainly worth visiting.

It has been discussed before, I'm sure - but, it's hard to find a successful search term Somebody should remember properly, but I have a feeling they are around 1/43.

This archived RTÉ article from 2009 has official advice on eating in these conditions... https://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0202/113451-snowtips/ ...it's about half-way down, after Driving...

Travel was a factor in the Spanish Flu, perhaps for the first* large scale event that kind. It happened around the end of WW1, even precipitating the end, in part - then commercial shipping reemerged, as the U-boat threat disappeared, and large numbers of troops were shipped home, all over the world. Not as fast as air transport would spread things today, of course. In terms of the current situation, there's little point even informing 'us' that it's going on at the moment, but it's free news and they need to fill up their spaces with stuff that's 'different and interesting'. Every time there is a successful containment, it essentially just raises the scepticism that it will ever happen on a proper large scale and require 'us' to take difficult measures ourselves. * The bubonic plague was transport-related, I suppose, but much slower, of course.

Where I live, on the Big Island, there was an infected farm about a mile and a half away. There were no precautions of any sort anywhere that I saw during the whole event, apart from a feedstuffs yard that did have straw down at the entrance. I saw a bloke walk out of a field of sheep, swill his wellies in a puddle, then get in his car and drive off.

There are loads of these things out there - one day, there will be a Big One again. More people died from the Spanish Flu after WW1 than in the war itself. These days, though, we do have the possibility to recognise the first stages and react. People can get blasé about it when successful containments occur, one after the other, and usually a long way away. It can be like the Y2K computer bug - I know people who believe that was all a con*, because they are unaware of any problems resulting from it, largely because they were preempted. * I'm sure there were cons around that, but I do have an old (unconnected) machine that can't cope with the real date, but it doesn't matter, so I leave it alone in its own little time-warp.

1, @WRENNEIREshould be totally safe then... 2, Four masks and a bar of carbolic are already on order for IRM, surely?

Some people have been struggling with Corona issues for ages.

If we want to worry, there has been rabies in Co Cork. https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2020/0125/1110841-cork-animal-rabies/ But, it seems likely to have been contained.