Oldddudders

ISTR a French modeller doing that, with a single-unit railcar. Can't quite recall the mechanism, but it was DCC-driven.

Joy house - The Incredible Jimmy Smith

I'll try!

Thanks. I will make it my business to order from Kernow on that basis, too. My existing H2 - in umber - is unpowered, having been made for me from a Jidenco kit by a former skoolmate no longer with us.

I think RMweb requires files of less than 1mb these days. Meanwhile, phones and cameras just produce bigger and bigger files. There is an image editor provided on the forum, and it works quite well.

The Wind And The Rain - Johnny de Little (obscure or what?)

I was in London on the day of the Hyde Park bombing. Indeed, I may have been at the Old Bailey, I think. Oi - as a witness! My office at 70 Old Broad St had the windows blown in by the St Mary Axe bomb, and the fax had glass fragments in it for days afterwards, which really helped it to print! And ISTR in another place reading that Andrew C was closely thereabouts for the 7/7 Tavistock Square horrors. On less violent topics, I have merely been beheading hazel. Note the small h. We have 5 such bushes here, and some of the straight, vertical cuttings are more than 12' long. The bushes are now at head-height. Best to get them shorn before they have leaves, I have found.

You Stepped Out Of A Dream - Sergio Mendes among others

This development of a realistic service is the icing on a very fine cake, Andy. Inevitably it will continue to need tweaks for a little while, as you find better ways of achieving moves - and some of those may then lead to wholesale alterations to make it even better still. Such things evolve. In this, you are replicating what big railways do, as train-planners don't always manage to cross all the 't's or dot the 'i's first time either. I think, though, that intead of Rota, you could justifiably call your train-plan a Working Timetable, or WTT for short.

Ladas? Isn't that some sort of LNER Pacific?

Red scarf matches your eyes

Purdah! I do recall in 1997, prior to the General Election, that the work I was a consultant to had to be stopped for that reason - the Acting Chairman of the BR Board came to see us to say stop work - and the Big 6 consultants were laid off, while I, and my client, he then still a BR employee, were required to stooge about awaiting developments after the new Government was formed. It made for a pleasant Summer, with very little to do, really, and my client then got another job, so I was left waiting for a decision from the Secretary of State, via Whitehall. As the task was further privatisation of a remaining BR organisation, that never came, and by October I had been released. In the meantime, my fees had been earned inter-alia by helping the head of the organisation - a thoroughly bright and personable Scots lady - with understanding about certain aspects of car purchase, as well as checking resale values on her husband's company Mercedes, which he had been offered at lease-end. Purdah is not all bad news!

I'm happy to endorse all Andy's proposed new locos as great models, but the S15 would never have been allowed this far west, I think. Meldon Viaduct has a lot to answer for! And both my O2s and my 0298s are fine runners with sensible length trains, albeit on a fairly level layout.

ISTR the lauch of a new model by Ford some years back, with lots of bread-and-butter versions immediately available, but the super-dooper boy-racer version only shown in the brochure, with delivery some way off. When asked why this was, the Ford man replied that they didn't want to let all their fireworks off at once. Hornby and others do well to think the same way - at least all the time they have some tenure of manufacturing slots in future, so this year we buy the model that isn't exactly in the config we wanted, and next year we buy a new version that is.

Lard bard sounds like a fat poet?

Yes, really, but I shall not be supplying details.......

Actually, John, some grandmothers can be really quite fun in that situation.........

We all have different tastes in desktops. I found it easy on my iMac to clear absolutely everything off - I just have the mountain pic they provide, bringing the dock up if I want to run something. Win 10, like Win 8 before it, is utterly cluttered with live links I don't want. In fact I don't want anything at all, being far happier selecting progs from a drop-down list. Your many, many icons simply clutter what I can see is an attractive image. If Win10 made the desktop more easily customisable and less phone-like it might have more friends.

Interesting, but makes perfect sense. We were taught that March 21st was Equinox, but in a Leap Year that has to come back a day.

Walk, don't run - Ventures

And I suspect you've hit the nail fair and square. The rise and rise of the tablet and phablet (a larger phone) means Microsoft is anxious to get its wedge of that market, hence the Windows phone, challenging the Apple/Android duopoly. Meanwhile, PCs and laptops are probably not enjoying boom times, but having the same software modules for all means Win 10 looks like a phone set-up. I hate rubbish Iike MSN, and have no desire for it to be on the front page or anywhere else. I had been a happy PC user for many years, still have a couple of heritage Win 7 desktops and a laptop, but really my iPad mini and Retina iMac get far more use now.

Anent the Wenford empties trip, I'm not sure a fitted head would be needed - my recollection of cycling it about 20 years ago suggests it's uphill all the way from Boscarne!

Morning all Grey days with that wretched north-easterly still spoiling the party. Luxembourg was an odd mixture. Leaving aside the limitations of the transmission medium (sorry) it seemed to operate on two levels. There were live djs spinning discs in real time, but they tended to be used for short fill-in slots. From 1961 ISTR someone called Ted, playing several versions of the same song, and declaring the Sarah Vaughan version to be the best. Yet Luxembourg's real income, and the reason the transistors were under the covers for the youngsters, was Top 20 stuff, in which Ms Vaughan would not feature. Programmes of 15 and 30 mins were pre-recorded by EMI, Decca, Philips, Pye etc and so on, and sent over ready for transmission. The recorded DJs were top line people, e.g. David Jacobs, Pete Murray, Jack Jackson, Jimmy SaVile, and included some slightly more cosmopolitan names like Ray Orchard, who added a transatlantic sophistication, and David Gell, with a more jazzy orientation. The pirates did for Luxembourg, just as they did for stuffy Light Programme, and were ulitmately the cause of the Beeb losing the requirement to play a large % of live music, which was increasingly unpopular with the target young audience, and less concern about 'needle time' although these silly anachronisms blighted the early years of Radio 1. A grey cat is rolling on the bed between washes. Very relaxing! Hope your Sunday delivers.

Jock - and maybe others - please do not infer that I have had any sort of run-in with the Big C. At no stage before or since my prostate op last year has there been the slightest suspicion of cancer. With so many of you coping admirably with that wretched disease, personally or in a loved one, my trivial bladder problems are simply that - a minor inconvenience (!) and not much more. I can't even claim to have needed painkillers. Let the famous ERs sympathy and support continue to be offered where they are deserved, please. I do not qualify!

Didn't Karl-Heinz Stockhausen write a symphony for transistor radios? Every performance unique! Sorry to read Grandadbob's sad news. I hope this is a breech into which you can step. Anyway, as my pretty but damaged - in the Purley train crash of 1989 - assistant Mary would say "Well, stap me vitals!" The urologue was delighted to find my plumbing performing really well! Mind you, Fred Karno was about. After all, while consulting with another patient, he suggested I nip off to the loo and empty my bladder, so I'd be able to do so calmly, and he'd measure the residue in early course. So off I snuck, and while in the loo the lights went out - power cut! Came back after I'd fumbled my way about and opened the door enough to be able to see to wash my hands, found the electric towel dispenser wasn't working etc. And the IT was still down, so no chance of booking to see him in three months, either. But things are better, it would seem. So feeling quite pleased with life I drove home, and got a crack in the windscreen from a stone....... Anyway, opening champoo shortly!