Broithe

A friend of mine opened a hand grenade shop. All was well for the first few hours, as everybody who bought one paid with cash. But then a bloke wanted to pay with a card, so he asked him for the PIN...

Well, we missed this bit of excitement - https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/burton/live-sainsburys-evacuated-after-reports-2950723? - Sainsbury's is just across the road from the exhibition venue. The cops said - "At 5.30pm we were called to reports of a piece of unexploded ordinance in Robian Way, Swadlincote. What was believed to be a small World War 2 bomb had been found by a member of the public and a 100 metre cordon was put in place. This resulted in a number of premises being evacuated as a precaution. After consulting the Explosive Ordinance Division from Chetwynd Barracks, Chilwell, the device was found not to be live. The cordon was lifted at 8.20pm and all premises were re-opened to the public. We would like to pass our thanks to members of the public for the patience whilst this situation was resolved." From that statement, the venue would have been outside the cordon, the discovery was about 200 metres away.

The reversing of the tipper truck is almost impressive...

Excellent! Is that the Long Mynd in the distance..? I'm surprised you can see it today.

You can often grind/file excess material away - and weathering plus a bit of ballast can cover up a lot.

Oh, so it is! I'm less behind than I thought...

Should be - always a good do.

Someone gave me an old Samsung Galaxy S5830 phone, which I've never got around to unlocking and just use as a "Minox spy camera", in situations where a bigger device might be awkward - music events, etc. I experimented with it on close subjects and found it to be quite good, so I used it for a lot of the recent pictures of the Sleaford show. And, the size of the construction means that the depth of field is quite large, too, which is useful. It did, however, receive undue criticism from @Mike 84C for producing rather too detailed views of some of the board joints... I also took it to the DEMU event, but I was unable to use it there as I had broken one of my Golden Rules - never shut the memory card door with the memory card out - Doh! It was still in the adaptor from uploading the Sleaford pictures the previous night. It is very 'pocketable', but it's easy to get fingermarks on the lens. It will accept up to a 32G card, which is thousands of pictures and I'll probably never fill it up. Another thing that I have failed to do with this camera, now that I think about it, though it has been done with the other two, is to take an initial picture containing enough detail to get it back to me if I was to lose the entire camera, or just the card - a mobile phone number is enough.

There's one on Amazon for seventy five quid.... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruabon-Barmouth-Line-Reflections-Railway/dp/1899889973/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=56857148767&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhpGR2OrN4gIVia3tCh25MgMHEAAYASAAEgI4ZvD_BwE&hvadid=259058027188&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1007121&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=b&hvrand=9976689430284695920&hvtargid=kwd-317650414548&hydadcr=24404_1748884&keywords=ruabon+to+barmouth&qid=1559582841&s=books&sr=1-1

I do like a nice fiddle yard... There was a 1/72 Flower Class Corvette, for those who miss the dormant Dazzle Ships thread. 0 Gauge gets more attractive with each passing year...

I've had a few trips to the Far East lately, Hull last Sunday for a non-railway event, Sleaford yesterday for the Annual Bantry Assessment and I noticed that Accurascale would be at this year's DEMU Exhibition yesterday and today, which is only about thirty miles from here, so i felt obliged to go and provide a level of supervision. I found half of them there (the other half presumably lounging about at IRM Towers over the long weekend), but they were ideally situated to collar victims on entry to the venue. There was loads of interest there, a lot of trade stands with excellent displays, but manufacturers and retailers. However, the layouts were truly superb, the 'killer' was the entire Forth Rail Bridge, with adjacent coasts, in T-Scale, with signals and running automatically - and flawlessly. A lot of the stuff is 3-D Printed, on the buildings it has worked remarkably well, the 'layering' has produced a very plausible 'tiled' texture. The Hornsey layout was really a three-dimensional historical document - the adverts alone could occupy a viewer for some time... Plenty of other layouts to peruse, too. The mixer drum was revolving, in N Gauge...

On returning to the car, I discovered that I hadn't posted my voting slip for the Best In Show, so I had to nip back in and post it, obviously I voted for Bantry, but only because the Lemon Drizzle Cake was not on the list for some inexplicable reason...

Market Deeping turned up with their Cannon Street, which survived the destruction by not being selected for this year's home exhibition... And a few other things... A few stray Bantry pictures. And the outdoor exhibit. A Ruston - obviously...

There were some other layouts, too....

So, the annual pilgrimage to the Far East occurred today. Obviously, the principal reason was to inspect the progress on Bantry, and I found @banntry and his glamorous assistants coping well, though operating under great strain, due to unauthorised staff absence. From here on, any leave requests which may impact upon core activities need to be on my desk by the end of the preceding financial year.

I'm not at all interested in gravity, I just don't see the attraction.

Apologies - I'll try to be more down to earth.

That's a bit old, don't you think? Can't we have some more current jokes?

Soldering is generally more successful with as small a gap as possible, you may find the time and trouble to lift the thin sleepers worthwhile in the end, I suspect. And it will 'look' better, too.

Tell her that you've now switched your direction towards the railways of Sweden, as a result of her influence. Then you will have an alibi for Googling "Swedish models"....

Order some bubble bath as a treat for her and hope they arrive on the same day. "The bubble stuff is here, Dearest" She won't notice the other box in her excitement and you won't actually have lied to her.

The Drumm revitalised....

We had one where I worked, it was yellow, but not quite as bright as the picture above implies. There was a generally accepted "crane yellow" that was applied to lifting machines of all types. The driver, Tommy Long, had a real 'feel' for his various machines and could move items that were way over the officially allowable weight. He would often move things by quickly raising them a foot or so, turning and putting them down quickly, a yard or two away, and repeating - with the overload bell clattering and the rear wheels just lifting. I often saw daylight under the wheels, but he never had an incident of over-ambition...

Of course, humans are apes. The internet has failed to throw up a case of non-human apes vandalising a railway exhibition. In general, non-human apes are fairly innocuous chaps - monkeys are much more easily led astray.