Oldddudders

5 O'Clock Chateau - Bob James

Nineteen - Paul Hardcastle

I am aware that several RMwebbers have made smashing models of this area's railways, but this chap clearly found it to be a major contribution to his wellbeing. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-68735058

I find Aliexpress offering me Piko locomotives, at what I imagine are good discounts. But while the electric and diesel models look like modern production, the two or three steam models look decidedly old-school and lacking in C21 superdetail, and their prices are far from pocket-money. None is to my taste anyway, nor my choice of prototype. .

Yawn.

An implausibly huge number. WCRC really need some very good arguments to be effective against that stat.

Point well taken - but the ambition in a driver is to be the best, and how better than defeating Max in the same car?

Pedant mode on : I haven't seen the pic, but must gently point out that in 1971 zoom lenses were rare and comparatively expensive. What it may well have been is a telephoto lens of fixed focal length. I had bought, in 1969, a 200mm f4.5 telephoto lens from Dixons which worked well enough. There were various brands on offer at the time - but they still cost a week's wages for many. I lived at home, so life was cheap! As far as the Holmethorpe trips were concerned, my early gricing at Redhill (1961-2) showed lots of sand in the 4-foot way in the down middle road and the up sidings. And by 1971, Alfie Fox, the Guards Controller on another shift from mine in Redhill Control, had gone off permanently sick with stress - he lived in a cottage opposite Holmethorpe sidings.

Under the watchful patronage of St Leonard, Hastings DEMUs always had a high level of care and availability right back to 1957. It is no surprise to find the present owners are continuing that fine tradition.

CV29=46? So you are using Railcom? If not, make it 38.

Projects, and the roles of the PM, take many forms. Some have a known outcome - for example when I was appointed at short notice to manage the closure of Tunbridge Wells - Eridge, where it was a case of finding alternative berthing sidings and scheduling formal Consultation with staff, mainly traincrew, which enabled the project team to identify a feasible date. Then there was the Touche Ross initiative in 1990, for which as Project Director, my task was senior hearts and minds within Sectors and Regions, about budgets, project manager skills and generally enabling BR to spend its capital forecast. The 1992 General Election, with the mandate for Rail Privatisation, rendered the whole thing irrelevant. In late 1992 I was asked to take on Tribute, a large IT project hopelessly out of control, with the internal supplier failing to impress his sponsors, InterCity and European Passenger Services. Since the new system was required to sell tickets for the forthcoming Eurostar service, as well as providing InterCity with a better system that included reservations and ticketing in one terminal, there was a lot of pressure. I instigated the first - and almost certainly the last! - real User Acceptance Test team on BR, and they drove a coach and horses through each release of software. They cost a bomb, but when summoned by the Board's Director of Business Review (the late Andrew Jukes, later pilloried in the press as a "Fat Cat" for his purchase and sale of a ROSCO to good effect, not to mention founding Exactoscale) he endorsed my approach unreservedly. The unexpected overnight transfer of EPS to being a GOCO withdrew part of my sponsorship and my role lapsed forthwith. My next role, as Project Controller, BRIS Privatisation, was a bit different, with Timeline Gantt charts being my responsibility on a monthly basis, as well as minuting, and occasionally chairing, meetings with every BRIS Unit. At no time, on any of those projects, did I run a spreadsheet, and had little idea how to do so!

I think the Gravesend ferry from Riverside tied up for the last time last week. Kent CC and Thurrock DC have struggled to finance it - no surprise with the calls on limited cash all councils are suffering - and operators are not queuing up, either, so that may be that for the foreseeable future. In effect, this is a late victim of BR Privatisation, since it was originally a railway-owned service.

Just so you, Stu!

I only watched the BBC online lap-by-lap data and commentary, but Russell nailing Piastri at the end was a bit of a consolation for another lacklustre Merc weekend.

The Shadow Of Your Smile - Brother Jack McDuff

I have ordered a few of the colliery versions. I don't need many, as they simply passed by Halwill Junction, where as there was no coal trader, a couple loaded, and a couple empty, will do fine. Every evening there was an olympic shunting exercise with freights from Bude and Padstow being amalgamated and sorted in the platforms, and a couple of empty colliery wagons will help. Down freights seem to have needed less sorting.

I feel that one of the big changes among both docs and dentists in my lifetime is the expectation of how hard they need to work. In my yoof I feel they were always at work, and well-rewarded by average salary standards. Not for nothing did Sherry and my GP drive a Jaguar (JRP47). As the years have gone by, in common with many others, they have increasingly sought a better work/life balance, and so docs' on-call at all hours now tend to be covered, probably by agency locums. The objective is to spend more time elsewhere, e.g. on the golf course, enjoying the fruits of your years of study and hard work. Private medicine/dentistry makes that easier to achieve with fewer days at the coalface. Like the rest of us, these guys and gals only get one kick at life's ball. Are they really being greedy or selfish?

I last visited Riverside on a filming train circa 1992 for LT&S Resignalling. Infrastructure design engineers really benefit from being able to check site details visually in the office - a lot of saved time! - an idea pioneered, I think, on East Grinstead electrification, with Barry Cox and his video-camera. The Saturday of the filming was an inauspicious choice, as some uncouth soul had detonated a bomb in the City overnight, [was it St Mary Axe? the office fax at 70 Old Broad St was spewing out glass fragments for some days afterwards!] and Fenchurch St was closed. District Line to Barking and a phonecall to LT&S Control at Southend revealed the film train would start from Barking, so all was well filming east thereof.

Take more water with it.

European plugs don't have fuses, either.

I'm sure he washed everything first.

Indeed so, but as one of the democratically-elected (?) elite, they are vulnerable to blackmail, and other pressures like bribery, that the man on the Clapham omnibus is not. Dating sites are used by the full spectrum of singles - and some not-so-singles - straight or gay, to fulfil basic human needs. But an MP needs more circumspection than this chap exercised.

This section of railway has more trains than ever before - and seems to suffer more incidents, too. The same customers suffering again today.

Other nations have taken fingerprints for years. My sole adventure to the USA required me to give prints at Orlando in 2007. [For the very clear avoidance of doubt, I was NOT there to see Mickey Effing Mouse!] And I have a Carte de Séjour for France valid 10 years that required me to offer prints. If fingerprints are too demeaning, holidays in the UK can be rather nice!

Life In The Modern World - Crusaders w Ivan Lins