Michael Hodgson

As i understand it the rules are also different as between the likes of Hornby producing batches of them for sale, and an indivdual producing a on-off scratch-built example for his own use.

I believe the original use of the term Jellicoe was strictly the coal trains supplying the fleet in WW1, and named after the Admiral. But the term seems to have entered general usage and was also applied fairly widely to troop trains (not necessarily naval personnel) to Thurso for the fleet at Scapa Flow. Similar services also ran during WW2 as my father talked about being sent on one of the Jellicoes to get to various airfields along the Moray coast, presumably changing at Inverness.

Of course the English could pronounce it. They even made a film there

They'd have made less of an impression if you stood clear!

That's not what most railway modellers do!

An admission of guilt on the part of the bridge? "I'd like 30 similar offences taken into consideration yeronner."

Cutting your losses is always a difficult decision. Unfortunately many "entrepreneurs" seem to prefer your alternative

We're not in a position to know which brand(s) are affected. It could be any if them. Or it could be a case of systematically applying a poor corporate approach across all of them.

This appears on another thread.... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/335356510561 Of course it would take more than 30 class 86s to get the stock figures down, but it may be an indication of the sort of thing that's needed. This though is more likely to be a retailer who's in the same boat on a much smaller scale.

If retailers won't take something, it's not their fault. The blame remains with the guy who ordered production of the goods in the first place. Harry Truman got it right ...

If it's 30-years old stock that's not saleable, it shouldn't be in the stock figure at all. If they have a mountain of stock they can't sell, their current assets are overstated, and if their auditors are doing their job properly they would have looked closely at the valuation. Holding useless stock cost you money in warehousing and insurance. If you really are storing a lot of junk, a fire sale may well be a good idea even though the proceeds won't be enormous. If they have to borrow funds to produce new stock that hopefully will sell, their bankers will look closely at the balance sheet, and bankers just don't make unsecured loans to companies whose stock-in-trade they consider to be excessive. What constitutes excessive varies over time, and according to general levels of inflation and its associated interest rates. High interest rates make it even more important to achieve a high gross profit margin in order to make investments worthwhile. What is considered an excessive level of stock also varies by industry, but comparison with competing firms can often act as a good indicator to those who putting up finance.

Let's not get into what the Welsh get up to with sheep!

It was my understanding that the bridge was stationary at the time of the collisiion.

I don't think I've heard of a case where Swiss train operators fall out of their trains - or do you mean it is their regulators who are falling overboard?

Sounds like you've got a punter whose finances are too tight and his credit card is maxed out. There could be exceptional circumstances which are such that he will come good, but the odds are against that. I sold something in January which the buyer couldn't collect immediately. It's big and awkward to transport, so was listed as collection only. He still hasn't collected it, but is going to do so in a few days time. It's been so long ago now that the item is no longer listed on the ebay history, so I assume we can't leave feeedback for each other anyway. The important difference here is he paid me immediately; he's the one carrying the risk.

What a period piece! I was perhaps more taken by the idea that 30,000 people all wanted to go to Epsom at the same time to watch an earlier form of high-speed transport! It's easy to forget the sheer amount of bureaucracy and clerical manpower needed to design a timetable and collect fares before the days before computers. What work is available for these people now? And it's the first time I've ever seen long-welded rail hauled by steam. Interesting that credits at the end say that the fim was produced by Britain's propaganda miniatry, the COI for LTE at the request of the Foreign Office. What on earth was their interest - was the aim to impress foreigners about how modern post-war London was? An early version of the I'm backing Britain campaign of the late 1960s?

A couple of days trading later, the share price is still above 30p, having been a half to two-thirds of that for most of the past year, and only really picked up to its current level a couple of months ago.

Good name for a pit. You'll have to lose the K if it's supposed to be in Wales though!

If you ask the masses what they want in the way of transport safety they will tell you they're absolutely in favour of it, "You can't put a price on a human life". When you ask them about the cost of safety measures, the company should of course pay up and install anything that will improve safety by even the slightest amount. When you ask them about the price of the tickets, they'll tell you the reason they go everywhere by car is that the fares are far too high, especially for a large family. The reality is that people will run all sorts of risks rather than pay for greater safety, but they will also hire expensive lawyers to sue any transport undertaking that could have provided more safety. And bewigged judges will accept such pleas and award damages.

The railways' phonetic alphabet was one of many. For example A for 'orses B for Mutton C for Thighlanders D for Dumb E for Oar F for Pheasants...

To put this in context for the benefit of younger readers of this forum, STD was not what the Americans call an "antisocial disease" but stood for Subscriber Trunk Dialling, introduced in the 1960s. Before STD came in, you had to call the operator to place a long distance call (one to an exchange outside the local area) even though the phone probably had a dial for local calls. Some places still had phones where all calls required an operator to make the connection; I remember being sent to call to my school when the bus broke down (mid 1960s) - the number I called from consisted of the Exchange name and a single digit number, and of course I'd been given 3d to hand to the householder to cover the cost. In this era of the ubiquitous mobile phone and the concept of landlines as old-fashioned, it may not be obvious to youngsters that most houses didn't even have landlines, they were something more used by businessses, an expensive modern luxury for most people. If you needed to make a phone call (perhaps to fetch the doctor out, which was something that you used to be able to do when somebody was ill enough!), you had to find a public call box or one of these telegraph offices. Most other transactions would be less urgent and would be done with paper and pen, but the reliable postal system made more than one delivery a day. Anything really urgent would be sent by telegram from a Post Office and delivered by messenger (my father did this by bike when he left school at 14) or via the railway's own system. The GPO was already using teleprinters in main offices by WW2, and Dad moved onto maintaining them before he was old enough to volunteer as aircrew. Even if you wanted a home phone installed you had to put your name on a waiting list, as you had to for a council house, and the wait would typically be a year. We first had a phone in about 1960 (and had priority installation) because my father was on the emergency call-out list for any incident at a nuclear power installion. My mother used to say that as a little girl (in the early 1930s) she had to recite something for her Sunday School (I think that's who it was for). She spent a lot of time in a general store/sub post office, so she chose A piece of text based around the then very common sign "You may telephone from here". This blue enamelled sign was to be seen outside many sub-post offices, Indeed until a couple of years, there was still such a sign outside a general store/sub post-office in Letchworth.

You'll need to do bit more filing to convert that coupling to a modern tension lock!😁

There's a lot to be said for sending busloads of kids for an automated wash.

Was this DC or DCC? It would be important that their speeds were more or less the same. With mismatched speeds on DC they might waste energy fighting each other, but I think with DCC using separate decoders you should be able to set speed curves that balanced them out. Alternatively there may have been voltage drop using an analogue controller as the two locos together require more current than either on its own.

I ordered one these from Japan in January and it finally arrived yesterday. I'm still wondering whether/how to try motorising it although it's clearly designed to be a static display and even comes with moulded plastic track to stand it on. The simplest approach would be to fit proper axles instead of those provided and fit couplings and just haul it. The leading bogie differs in detail from the rear, but both have a wheelbase of 22mm with a wheel diameter of 10mm. So the smallest SPUD 24mm x 10.5mm is only slightly too big, although probably also too high at its pivot, which means that part of the floor at one end would need to be raised and some of the interior detailing removed/modified. The trailer car is not on bogies, it's a long wheelbase 4-wheeler, so another option might be to put a single axle drive mech into that, although doing so would also presumably occupy space for which the kit provides a detailed interior. On balance a SPUD at the rear of the main unit is probably the least intrusive option. No need for an interpreter. The instructions run to 16 pages of A4, mostly pictures, the first two pages being text in Japanese, English, French & German to act as a legend for the pictures. The rest consists of detailed exploded drawings of sub-assemblies, annotated with codes indiciating parts not to be glue, what colour to paint etc It's an extensive kit - about 300 components, two main body mouldings, 6 sprues moulded in yellow, 3 in grey, 3 in black and two clear for glazing/lamp faces plus a sheet of transfers. Even unpainted, the colours should be about right, although it clearly warrants painting before/during assembly, even has transfers for the control desks. At a scale of 1:80, it's closer to OO than to HO. Pity the prototype differs from the particular models of tamper that we have in the UK. but it does have the general appearance of the sort of plant used here. The main obvious difference is that in Japan they have this movable glazed side screen hiding the tamping mechanism to act as a noise barrier - that could easily be omitted to make it visually resemble a (noisy!) British example. Turn those screen upside down and fit them to an old RTR van, and you'd have a passable Thomas 4-wheel coach! Another unusual feature of the kit is its crew of four - a driver who just needs painting and glueing into his seat, two (armless and headless!) blokes with what appears to be a brush for use externally, and another standing, presumably the gaffer. I suppose fitting the arms and heads separately might make painting slightly less dificult.