Castle Aching

[Tankerman]

I found the posts about the armed forces interesting as P&O Steam Navigation was somewhat similar. I joined Trident Tankers in 1968, which was formed by P&O in 1962 to manage the tanker fleet, as placing a few tankers with each of the constituent companies hadn't worked too well.

 

The third ship I joined was the Maloja, built for direct P&O ownership and completed in 1959. The ships plans for the midships accommodation decks were named Engineers deck, Officers deck and Bridge deck. Obviously those who got their hands dirty making sure that the ship got from port to port were neither Officers or Gentlemen.

[Andy Hayter]

1 hour ago, brianusa said:

I have never understood why these military officers ended up sorting out railway problems, ever since Victorian days.  What qualifications did they have for the job?

         Brian.

 

Originally many came from the Royal Engineers and as such had a better education in and understanding of technical and logistical things.  Once the pattern had been set, I suspect it was hard to break.  

[St Enodoc]

25 minutes ago, Tankerman said:

I found the posts about the armed forces interesting as P&O Steam Navigation was somewhat similar. I joined Trident Tankers in 1968, which was formed by P&O in 1962 to manage the tanker fleet, as placing a few tankers with each of the constituent companies hadn't worked too well.

 

The third ship I joined was the Maloja, built for direct P&O ownership and completed in 1959. The ships plans for the midships accommodation decks were named Engineers deck, Officers deck and Bridge deck. Obviously those who got their hands dirty making sure that the ship got from port to port were neither Officers or Gentlemen.

...which reminds me of the difference between an engineer and a gentleman.

 

A gentleman washes his hands after he goes to the toilet.

 

I thank you.

[Regularity]

40 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

...which reminds me of the difference between an engineer and a gentleman.

 

A gentleman washes his hands after he goes to the toilet.

The engineer has worked how to go to the toilet without the need to touch anything...

[St Enodoc]

1 hour ago, Regularity said:

The engineer has worked how to go to the toilet without the need to touch anything...

There's a very long joke along those lines that I'm afraid is totally unsuitable for RMweb - is that what you had in mind?????

[nick_bastable]

I think you miss the most prominent  example a certain Colonel Stephens 

 

how the track laying  / Joining James ?

 

Nick  B

[TT-Pete]

9 hours ago, Tankerman said:

The third ship I joined was the Maloja, built for direct P&O ownership and completed in 1959. The ships plans for the midships accommodation decks were named Engineers deck, Officers deck and Bridge deck. Obviously those who got their hands dirty making sure that the ship got from port to port were neither Officers or Gentlemen.

 

A fine-looking ship

[Regularity]

8 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

There's a very long joke along those lines that I'm afraid is totally unsuitable for RMweb - is that what you had in mind?????

If it involves waiters, pieces of cotton, soup spoons and a time and motion study, I think we are thinking as one...

[Tankerman]

1 hour ago, TT-Pete said:

 

A fine-looking ship

 

Pete,

 

Thanks for posting this, it looks like a Skyphotos image which were always the best. It also brought back some good memories and the shock of realising that it was 50 years ago this year that I sailed on her as Lecky.

 

She looks a bit rough in appearance, which could be because she's nearing the end of her days. She has the P&O group funnel markings, which were introduced in 1974, and she was scrapped 1976 in Taiwan. Nearly all the Trident Tankers men were unhappy with the lost of our distinctive funnel markings. My avatar is my cap badge, which is our funnel marking superimposed on the P&O houseflag.

[rocor]

16 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

 

And, through The Great Near-Death of Technical Education and Training, which inflicted British industry, public and private sector alike, from the 1980s until quite recently, they continued to train and educate people properly, which is part of why 'exes' from any technical branch are so employable.

 

No idea if the same is true for British forces, but this article indicates that American troops do not get the technical training that they previously did, due to equipment maintenance being conducted by the suppliers personnel.

 

https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/even-the-american-military-is-struggling-with-right-to-1841531517

[rocor]

3 hours ago, Regularity said:

If it involves waiters, pieces of cotton, soup spoons and a time and motion study, I think we are thinking as one...

 

It does sounds complicated, could it not be simplified to a loop of string, or if you wanted to be boastful, a chain.

[Regularity]

A man drops his soup spoon whilst eating his first course at a fancy restaurant. He is surprised by the rapidity with which a new one appears, and asks the waiter how come it was quick.

”Well sir, management brought in a time and motion expert to see if we could be more efficient, and he identified two ways we could do this.

”The first was that the most frequent interruption was due to dropped soup spoons, so we all carry one in our breast pocket: if you look around, you will see them - I need to replace mine, sir, but I can do that whilst next passing the cutlery stand.”

”What was the second improvement?”

”Ah, well sir. If you look carefully you may notice a discreet piece of black cotton hanging out of my trouser flies. The second improvement was to speed up the time we spent going to the lavatory, which is of course a necessary routine, but there was a lot of time spent washing and drying hands.”

“So, why the cotton?”

”Ah yes. Well, the cotton forms a loose noose around my, ahem, manhood, sir. When spending a penny, I unzip, then use the cotton to extract my gentleman’s accessory from my trousers and undergarments.”

”Amazing. Does the cotton help get it back in? That sounds difficult...”

The waiter winks, “Well, I don’t know about the others, sir, but I find the soup spoon very helpful!”

[monkeysarefun]

I'm not sure exactly how relevantly this ties in here, other than it is a military equipment / officer tale that happenned yesterday.

 

I work in a military headquarters helping to look  after one of the many disparate networks that infest  these places. Our manager got a call from a guy working on one of the other networks asking him if a particular piece of equipment in one officers office was ours.

 

The nature of these places is that a position is filled by a particular officer for the length of a posting cycle, usually 3 years. At the end he hands over the office and everything in it to his replacement posting in, gives him/her a hand over spiel and goes off somewhere else.

 

A new incumbent of this particular office had a computer terminal in the corner of his office that his predecessor knew nothing about and had been chasing up the different network owners to see if anyone knew what it was.

 

My supervisor went over to see and came back with one of these.

 

 

Apparently the latest occupant of the office had been told by his predecessor that he had no idea what it was for, and that his predecessor had told him the same thing, and presumably the same  thing had been said at each handover since 1983 which is when Radio Shack/Tandy stopped making the TRS-80 model 3, and it has been sitting in the office ever since.

 

 

It does still work too.

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[St Enodoc]

11 hours ago, Regularity said:

A man drops his soup spoon whilst eating his first course at a fancy restaurant. He is surprised by the rapidity with which a new one appears, and asks the waiter how come it was quick.

”Well sir, management brought in a time and motion expert to see if we could be more efficient, and he identified two ways we could do this.

”The first was that the most frequent interruption was due to dropped soup spoons, so we all carry one in our breast pocket: if you look around, you will see them - I need to replace mine, sir, but I can do that whilst next passing the cutlery stand.”

”What was the second improvement?”

”Ah, well sir. If you look carefully you may notice a discreet piece of black cotton hanging out of my trouser flies. The second improvement was to speed up the time we spent going to the lavatory, which is of course a necessary routine, but there was a lot of time spent washing and drying hands.”

“So, why the cotton?”

”Ah yes. Well, the cotton forms a loose noose around my, ahem, manhood, sir. When spending a penny, I unzip, then use the cotton to extract my gentleman’s accessory from my trousers and undergarments.”

”Amazing. Does the cotton help get it back in? That sounds difficult...”

The waiter winks, “Well, I don’t know about the others, sir, but I find the soup spoon very helpful!”

You're a braver man than I, Gunga Din.

[jwealleans]

12 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

the TRS-80 model 3, and it has been sitting in the office ever since.

 

You should see whether the Museum of Computing at Bletchley are interested.  They took an Amstrad Emailer from me.

[Nearholmer]

I was just about to suggest that.

 

If anyone hasn't been there, it is a very interesting place - you need to check what you are buying entry too, though, because it is on the same site as the code-breaking museum, but separate, and it contains the replica Colossus, which is integral to the code-breaking story, while the replica Bombe is in the code-breaking part ........ and the National Museum of Radio, which is small, but excellent, is also inside the code-breaking part, although it isn't really directly part of that story.

 

Confused? Best just set a day aside and be prepared to pay two entry fees. Sundays are best, because there are more "explainers" on-site than in the week, and they have various machines running, including my favourite, which is one from Harwell that uses ten-state thermionic valves, rather than binary.

 

We have a very good museum of telephony locally too, which sort of completes the story ......... set two days aside and cover both.

 

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Tom Burnham]

3 hours ago, jwealleans said:

 

You should see whether the Museum of Computing at Bletchley are interested.  They took an Amstrad Emailer from me.

There's also the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (in a rather unprepossessing building on the Coldhams Lane industrial estate, accessed by a small level crossing over the Bury St Edmunds line).  When we visited last year, we (unexpectedly) encountered a couple of very interesting talks about LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

[teaky]

18 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

I'm not sure exactly how relevantly this ties in here, other than it is a military equipment / officer tale that happenned yesterday.

 

I work in a military headquarters helping to look  after one of the many disparate networks that infest  these places. Our manager got a call from a guy working on one of the other networks asking him if a particular piece of equipment in one officers office was ours.

 

The nature of these places is that a position is filled by a particular officer for the length of a posting cycle, usually 3 years. At the end he hands over the office and everything in it to his replacement posting in, gives him/her a hand over spiel and goes off somewhere else.

 

A new incumbent of this particular office had a computer terminal in the corner of his office that his predecessor knew nothing about and had been chasing up the different network owners to see if anyone knew what it was.

 

My supervisor went over to see and came back with one of these.

 

 

Apparently the latest occupant of the office had been told by his predecessor that he had no idea what it was for, and that his predecessor had told him the same thing, and presumably the same  thing had been said at each handover since 1983 which is when Radio Shack/Tandy stopped making the TRS-80 model 3, and it has been sitting in the office ever since.

 

 

It does still work too.

 

I learnt to write programs in Basic on one of those.

[TheQ]

On 08/12/2020 at 13:05, rocor said:

 

No idea if the same is true for British forces, but this article indicates that American troops do not get the technical training that they previously did, due to equipment maintenance being conducted by the suppliers personnel.

 

https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/even-the-american-military-is-struggling-with-right-to-1841531517

The American military system is very different to ours.  I worked with them in Saudi..

 

Flat tyre on aircraft

Uk one or two men come out take the assembly off, replace it, take the flat one back to the workshop and repair it.

 

US system. man comes out and says it's flat...

second man comes and removes wheel with tyre.

third man takes tyre off

4th man inspects tyre 

 5th man repairs tyre

3rd man puts tyre back on.

 

They were absolutely amazed we'd take a piece off a radar, fix it down to component level and then put it back on.. They'd have a line of 20 men doing each level at a time..

 

Saying that, much more has been pushed up the line to suppliers in the UK, with the last UK radar I worked on, GEC started running the avionics bays on the airfields, the flight line guys just changed boxes.

The GEC staff got less pay, didn't require military accommodation, didn't require military training.. and it meant the flight line guys got stuck with more military duties, and needed less training..

[Edwardian]

36 minutes ago, TheQ said:

The American military system is very different to ours.  I worked with them in Saudi..

 

Flat tyre on aircraft

Uk one or two men come out take the assembly off, replace it, take the flat one back to the workshop and repair it.

 

US system. man comes out and says it's flat...

second man comes and removes wheel with tyre.

third man takes tyre off

4th man inspects tyre 

 5th man repairs tyre

3rd man puts tyre back on.

 

They were absolutely amazed we'd take a piece off a radar, fix it down to component level and then put it back on.. They'd have a line of 20 men doing each level at a time..

 

Saying that, much more has been pushed up the line to suppliers in the UK, with the last UK radar I worked on, GEC started running the avionics bays on the airfields, the flight line guys just changed boxes.

The GEC staff got less pay, didn't require military accommodation, didn't require military training.. and it meant the flight line guys got stuck with more military duties, and needed less training..

 

 And I thought your post would read:

 

Flat tyre on aircraft:-

 

- UK system: One or two men come out take the assembly off, replace it, take the flat one back to the workshop and repair it.

 

- US system: New aircraft provided. 

[Annie]

6 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

 And I thought your post would read:

 

Flat tyre on aircraft:-

 

- UK system: One or two men come out take the assembly off, replace it, take the flat one back to the workshop and repair it.

 

- US system: New aircraft provided. 

That was just about the system my Dad saw the Americans use during WW2.  He was a LAC with the RNZAF during the war in the Pacific and the US Air Force had a base nearby.  The Kiwis obtained a good deal of their spare parts and materials from the US base dump since the Americans would throw just about anything away if it stopped working even for a fairly minor reason and wouldn't fix it.

They even towed trucks and jeeps out of the dump and got them running again without much work.  A quick coat of paint and they were RNZAF property.

[monkeysarefun]

4 hours ago, TheQ said:

The American military system is very different to ours.  I worked with them in Saudi..

 

Flat tyre on aircraft

Uk one or two men come out take the assembly off, replace it, take the flat one back to the workshop and repair it.

 

US system. man comes out and says it's flat...

second man comes and removes wheel with tyre.

third man takes tyre off

4th man inspects tyre 

 5th man repairs tyre

3rd man puts tyre back on.

 

They were absolutely amazed we'd take a piece off a radar, fix it down to component level and then put it back on.. They'd have a line of 20 men doing each level at a time..

 

Saying that, much more has been pushed up the line to suppliers in the UK, with the last UK radar I worked on, GEC started running the avionics bays on the airfields, the flight line guys just changed boxes.

The GEC staff got less pay, didn't require military accommodation, didn't require military training.. and it meant the flight line guys got stuck with more military duties, and needed less training..

 

Their IT systems are similar. We  Australians will look after everything on a particular system - operating system, middleware stuff like databases,  weblogic or whatever plus the applications themselves which are typically US developed specialist military applications.

 

In contrast the US airforce have specialists that will only look after their own particular part of the system - the system administrator that looks after the OS will never touch the applications and so on. When there was an exercise that Australia hosted a couple of years ago there was myself and one other Aussie who looking after our system, I was based in the HQ while the other guy went bush to look after the deployable network.

 

The US deployable that they brought out came with a staff of 8. One bloke we called "The reboot specialist" because that seemed to be his primary function.

 

I will say though that they were very good at their particular jobs and were very friendly.

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[TT-Pete]

8 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

There's also the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (in a rather unprepossessing building on the Coldhams Lane industrial estate, accessed by a small level crossing over the Bury St Edmunds line).  When we visited last year, we (unexpectedly) encountered a couple of very interesting talks about LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

 

If archaic and obsolete audio/AV tech is your thing (as it is mine) there is a very interesting channel on Youtube "Techmoan" where he aquires, fixes and tests old equipment. The lengths he sometimes goes to in order just to get ancient dratted things to work again for a seriously underwhelming result make me think he must also be a railway modeller... Some of the kit he finds is seriously obscure.

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan

[webbcompound]

On 09/12/2020 at 14:50, TheQ said:

Saying that, much more has been pushed up the line to suppliers in the UK, with the last UK radar I worked on, GEC started running the avionics bays on the airfields, the flight line guys just changed boxes.

The GEC staff got less pay, didn't require military accommodation, didn't require military training.. and it meant the flight line guys got stuck with more military duties, and needed less training..

In the 18th Century a lot of countries had civilian artillery drivers. Of course they couldn't be relied on when fighting started. Can't help feeling that we have been here before

Edited December 10, 2020 by webbcompound

[jcredfer]

1 hour ago, webbcompound said:

In the 18th Century a lot of countries had civilian artillery drivers. Of course they couldn't be relied on when fighting started. Can't help feeling that we have been here before

 

Late 60s to 70s many jobs were civilianised, lorry drivers, storemen, even troop transporting, the list goes on.  Then...  there were a few incidents...  in a couple of conflicts.  In one {Aden I think, but I'm perfectly happy to be corrected}, the Brits decided to leave the area.  Troop reductions followed, with the area covered reducing accordingly...   until...  the MoD put in a bid for the last 3 planes to take the last of the troops back home.  The pilots asked who might be defending the airfield, while the troops were loading and the take off?  Informed that the troops would indeed be defending the airfield while the loading was taking place and the last ones will be walking backwards to your aircraft.

 

"No they won't, because our aircraft won't be there!"

 

The lesson was learnt, back then, that you can't simply order civilians into conflicts, just because they can be employed more cheaply when not involved in conflict.   As usual, similar cost savings have crept in since, despite the Falklands nearly faltering for similar reasons.  Lessons learned again, but the creep to cheaper civilian contracts persists.  You can teach an old dog new tricks, with patience, but politicians are impervious to the lessons of history.

 

Julian