The Night Mail

[rodent279]

3 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

I have an Olympus aEM 10 DSLR and the video quality is superb. 

Jamie

I guess the distinction between video camera and still camera is blurred almost to the point of indistinguishable nowadays.

[rodent279]

47 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

I don’t think they’re taking the p1ss, my Dear Bear; they know their target customers very well: their customers are the sort of people for whom finding an extra 20 quid in their wallet would be similar to (or less than) you or me finding an extra ha’penny in our pocket change.

 

The prices I quoted in my post above were the starting rates for a standard room at the hotel; when you start looking at the prices of a suite (whether mini-, executive- or presidential) then the sky is – almost literally - the limit.

£10,000/night anyone?

 

There’s an awful lot of people for whom dropping £10,000 on three days in London is a matter of little consequence. It is no fluke that during the past 2+ years of the pandemic the one sector that has shown (and continues to show) robust and healthy growth is the luxury goods and services sector.

There's a series on the BBC called Amazing Hotels (or something similar). It's got Monica Galetti of MasterChef fame, and Giles Coren in it, and they go to high end hotels around the world, and work as part of the workforce, to get a behind the scenes glimpse of the hotel.

All have something distinctive about them the Ice Hotel in Iceland for example. At some, rooms/suites go for as much as £40K per night. It's on iPlayer, and a real eye-opener.

Edited January 9, 2022 by rodent279

[Happy Hippo]

12 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

There's a series on the BBC called Amazing Hotels (or something similar). It's got Monica Galetti of MasterChef fame, and Giles Coren in it, and they go to high end hotels around the world, and work as part of the workforce, to get a behind the scenes glimpse of the hotel.

All have something distinctive about them the Ice Hotel in Iceland for example. At some, rooms/suites go for as much as £40K per night. It's on iPlayer, and a real eye-opener.

Quite frightening!

 

All I require of a hotel room is a warmish, clean place with a comfy bed.  I'm going to spend the majority of my time sleeping in it.

 

I would never pay money to stay in an Ice Hotel having had the same wonderous experience (for free) up on the Brecon Beacons in January, huddled at the bottom of a slit trench. 

 

After that, anything with a roof and hot water on tap is very luxurious.  The same can be said about the respective breakfast menus.

[TheSignalEngineer]

12 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

 

I would never pay money to stay in an Ice Hotel having had the same wonderous experience (for free) up on the Brecon Beacons in January, huddled at the bottom of a slit trench. 

Probably not quite as bad, but when I was in the school cadet force we had a night excercise there.  It was August. I was to lead a patrol of three 'local partisans' tracking an enemy detachment. It was a fine evening and we soon tracked down their camp, so sneaked in and told them their errors in defending it. It started raining just before dark so I told them to reset there arrangement while we took a rest and we would be back around dawn. We sheltered in a corrugated iron spotters hut above an artillery range for food  a couple of  hours sleep. When we came out around 0400 to resume our patrols there was frost on the grass.

[PupCam]

11 hours ago, Florence Locomotive Works said:

We are currently drinking tea, working on a 1972 Lotus and listening to 10cc. 
 

All thats missing is a salt and vinegar crisp sandwich.

 

 

Apart from the tea, what's not to like!

 

2 hours ago, polybear said:

 - however in the last ten(?) years or so there's been a real trend to charging extra for it (and often the thick end of twenty quid) at many places,

 

The RyanAir business model although they haven't quite grasped where the decimal point should be

 

Talking of which; "Does Sir require the use of the toilet?   Oh that will be an extra £520.00 + VAT then.  What?  Paper as well!"

 

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 their customers are the sort of people for whom finding an extra 20 quid in their wallet would be similar to (or less than) you or me finding an extra ha’penny in our pocket change.

 

And then realising that they haven't been legal tender for  30+ years

 

Alan

[iL Dottore]

24 minutes ago, PupCam said:

…And then realising that they haven't been legal tender for  30+ years

 

Alan

Hardly, I suspect many of the truly wealthy know very well about the vagaries of legal tender (or, more likely, have very highly paid experts to tell them about it). Furthermore, when you are talking about the sums of money these people drop at at these hotels, I’m sure that hotel management will have absolutely no difficulty in accepting antique banknotes (I read somewhere that if you have the right connections in the right places you can still exchange for current currency the old White £5 notes that ceased being legal tender in 1957).

[Winslow Boy]

6 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Hardly, I suspect many of the truly wealthy know very well about the vagaries of legal tender (or, more likely, have very highly paid experts to tell them about it). Furthermore, when you are talking about the sums of money these people drop at at these hotels, I’m sure that hotel management will have absolutely no difficulty in accepting antique banknotes (I read somewhere that if you have the right connections in the right places you can still exchange for current currency the old White £5 notes that ceased being legal tender in 1957).

 

I would have thought that the sort of people that stayed in these hotels didn't handle money, they had staff for that.

[Northmoor]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

If you like industrial quality food.
I once had the misfortune to stay in a Premier Inn  for The Warley show (quite some years back, I admit). The room was OK, but whilst you could eat as much breakfast as you liked, apart from the sausages, there was nothing on the hot buffet I found more than edible (and iD is a serious trencherman). The sausages were also “industrial” but there’s something appealing about cheap sausages (one of my few culinary lapses).

Years ago I used to stay in Plymouth about six times/year to work in the dockyard.  Over a few years we tried all the chain hotels and found them much the same; standard (often stuffy and slightly tatty) rooms, constantly changing staff and breakfast buffets on hot plates so you needed to time your arrival to when a new batch had just come out.  Some contractors said they loved the Novotel near the Marsh Mills roundabout, because you could get breakfast at 5am.  Lucky them, because I once had to eat what appeared to be the same breakfast still there 3 hours later.

 

Eventually we started staying at the Duke of Cornwall, which was a Best Western.  I think these are a franchise and not a chain, so have individual character (no two rooms are the same on any one floor).  Breakfasts were cooked to order, you saw the same staff from one year to the next and they even remembered you and your personal preferences.  Apart from one occasion when they had no vacancies, we stayed nowhere else for the next three years.

[rockershovel]

A propos payment and conditions for staff in high-end hotels, see Down and Out in Paris and London. Much of what it describes seems depressingly familiar, 90 years later. 

 

I'm usually a fan of Best Western. I've stayed in some interesting ones and some distinctly mediocre ones; the one near York racecourse, with its glazed dining room roof is worth a visit. I stayed in one in Skegness where Jools Holland and his entourage stayed for two nights - and good company he was too.

 

I did stay in a seriously dud one in Felixstowe last year, mind.

 

Travelodge have improved their premises considerably, or more correctly purged the more run-down ones in recent years although their minimal facilities and often, out of the way locations do them no favours.

 

Prem Inn are the best of a poor batch and tend to be the best-kept premises.

 

 

[Oldddudders]

12 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

Not sure about the Ferrari but the Europa was often called the bread van.

 

This is THE breadvan. In 1962, Venice's Count Volpi commissioned Piero Drogo & Giotto Bizzarini to design a car based upon Ferrari 250GT (not GTO) underpinnings. Relations with Enzo cooled dramatically thereafter...

 

 

 

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, Winslow Boy said:

 

I would have thought that the sort of people that stayed in these hotels didn't handle money, they had staff for that.

Indeed, as I alluded to in my first sentence (“….have very highly paid experts to tell them about it”). 

However, having met some very rich people in my time (including a billionaire)  I’ve found to be as diverse as any other group of people - in regards to money some have “people to take care of that sort of thing”, others not only know how much they have but also where and how it is spent - sometimes down to the last ha’penny.

 

It’s true that money can’t buy you happiness, but it certainly buys you a better class of misery!

[PhilJ W]

7 hours ago, Tony_S said:

That is a nice looking car. I am always intrigued by US number plates but I had to Google Idaho plates to work out what the motto was as I didn’t think it was “lustrus potatoes” which was my initial impression. 

Idaho is famous for its spuds and very proud of it.

6 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

That’s unusual, Phil. I thought that “all-you-can-eat” joints expressly prohibited doggy bag - for obvious reasons. There’s only so much a human can eat at one sitting - which is what these places count on - providing as they do bulky high carb items to fill up the punters*, once they allow customers to fill up as many doggy bags as they wish they’d quickly go broke.

Not all the 'eat all you can' eateries offered doggy bags but those that did offered quite small bags and/or forbid you to fill them from the buffet, only what was left on your table/plate. Many of the buffets were once its gone its gone and only replenished if the number of customers warranted it. This obviously kept the overheads down and reduced the amount of food to be thrown away. I was surprised how cheaply you could eat in the US, far cheaper than the same fast food chains here in the UK and often better quality. Another American fast food chain is Dunkin Donuts, at the time they were unknown in the UK but I think that they now have a few UK branches. They had about fifty different types of donut, including IIRC lemon drizzle, bears please note. 

[rodent279]

We went to Vegas a few years ago, for Mrs R's brother's wedding. We stayed at the Monte Carlo, which was not high end, I'd guess very average.

The breakfasts were huge, more or less all you could eat. What shocked and annoyed us was how people would pile their plates high with bacon, bangers, hash browns, eggs, waffles etc., eat half of it, sometimes less, then just leave it.

It wasn't particularly cheap either, so we started going to McD's, which was a totally different experience to over here. It was much cheaper than the hotel breakfast, and much more sensible quantities.

Edited January 9, 2022 by rodent279

[PhilJ W]

4 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

We went to Vegas a few years ago, for Mrs R's brother's wedding. We stayed at the Monte Carlo, not high end, I'd guess very average.

The breakfasts were huge, more or less all you could eat. What shocked and annoyed us was how people would pile their plates high with bacon, bangers, hash browns, eggs, waffles etc., eat half of it, sometimes less, then just leave it.

It wasn't particularly cheap either, so we started going to McD's, which was a totally different experience to over here. It was much cheaper than the hotel breakfast, and much more sensible quantities.

I found that McD's breakfasts in the US were very good. When I was there I didn't adjust completely to the time difference, I was ready for bed by about eight in the evening and often up before dawn. All the motels could offer at that time of the morning was coffee. However you could usually find a McD's open from about five in the morning. By not adjusting to the time difference in the mornings I had the roads to myself and was able to cover a considerable mileage.

[Happy Hippo]

I have just spent an a very pleasant hour thinning out unwanted stuff in my workshop.

 

It will no doubt be wanted in the next fortnight or so, but it has probably sat in there for a number of years without so much as a glance, let alone moving.

 

Of course the euphoria of the previous sixty minutes evaporated in an instant when I tipped an open box of drills sub 1.00 mm drills, all neatly divided into various sizes, over the freshly cleared floor.

 

You would have thought I'd cleared the floor deliberately in order for that to happen.

 

Once I've had a cup of tea, I'll clear the floor and sort out my small drill collection..... again!

[rodent279]

The Law of Uncluttered Spaces strikes again......

[polybear]

 

55 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

Another American fast food chain is Dunkin Donuts, at the time they were unknown in the UK but I think that they now have a few UK branches. They had about fifty different types of donut, including IIRC lemon drizzle, bears please note. 

 

Noted.  In triplicate......

[Winslow Boy]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Indeed, as I alluded to in my first sentence (“….have very highly paid experts to tell them about it”). 

However, having met some very rich people in my time (including a billionaire)  I’ve found to be as diverse as any other group of people - in regards to money some have “people to take care of that sort of thing”, others not only know how much they have but also where and how it is spent - sometimes down to the last ha’penny.

 

It’s true that money can’t buy you happiness, but it certainly buys you a better class of misery!

 

Point noted iL Dottore but being the cynic that I am I wonder just how well paid that they are.

[Mike Bellamy]

3 hours ago, rockershovel said:

I'm usually a fan of Best Western. I've stayed in some interesting ones and some distinctly mediocre ones;

 

The Best Western Hallmark Midland Hotel opposite Derby Station has been closed for over a year and is expected to be closed all of this year as it has been block booked by HM Government for housing asylum seekers.

 

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/derby-news/historic-derby-hotel-closed-almost-6446536

 

As a result the Swiss Railway Society has had to move their planned AGM and Exhibition in April to the Crewe Heritage Centre.

 

Quote

There has been a change of venue for the 2022 Society AGM.  We could get no guarantee that the Midland Hotel in Derby would be available to hold the 2022 AGM and therefore the Board took the decision to cancel the booking and seek an alternative venue. Unfortunately, despite considerable effort, we could not find a suitable alternative within the City of Derby, but we were offered the Crewe Heritage Centre, which, whilst not a hotel, will provide us with a suitable venue for 2022. The AGM will be a one day event, still held on 23rd April from 10:00 until 16:00 with the actual AGM being held at 13:00.

 

[Happy Hippo]

4 hours ago, Northmoor said:

 

 

Eventually we started staying at the Duke of Cornwall, which was a Best Western. 

I stayed there at Easter 1994 when I was on a military resettlement course.  I paid the difference between a single and a family room and for the extra few nights staying there and took the rest of the tribe with me. They went sightseeing and I went to be resettled.  I had no real intention of settling in the West Country, but as I was entitled to look I took the opportunity to do so.  I also went to Rosyth in Scotland as I'd always wanted to cross the Forth Bridge by train!

 

The Breakfasts were exceptional, and Nyda still remembers the quality of the porridge they cooked for her. It was served with fresh cream.

 

After the course I managed to fit in such delights as the 7.25" gauge line at Dobwalls.

 

I am now suitable composed to be able to go and sort out the drills.

 

I will be some time...

[Florence Locomotive Works]

16 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

Not sure about the Ferrari but the Europa was often called the bread van.

 

 

11 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

I have an Olympus aEM 10 DSLR and the video quality is superb.  And you can take stills whilst recording video just by touching the shutter button.. if you looknwt my Random American photos over theclast couple of days there areca setbof stills of  the Big Boy leaving Laramie. The gieo isclinkedcat the end of the post.

My dream car from thecarly 70's. I always fancied one in the John Player Special livery.

 

Jamie

According to dad this isn’t the bread van variant as this is the Twin Cam Special version with the lowered sides. It’s painted in white JPS livery, which I think would have looked excellent on the F1 car. (You could order Europas in white or black if ordering a JPS)

 

 

The car under the tarp is a ‘86 Porsche 928, which is being eaten by a ‘79 928 for parts.

 

The Ferrari is a very famous 250 gto variant with the rear panel made level with the roofline creating a flattened van look. 
 

More here:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_250_GT_SWB_Breadvan

Edited January 9, 2022 by Florence Locomotive Works

[Tony_S]

5 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

I read somewhere that if you have the right connections in the right places you can still exchange for current currency the old White £5 notes that ceased being legal tender in 1957)

That would be me then. I personally would use the DLR to Bank from Limehouse and make use of the entrance to the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street. 

[Oldddudders]

17 minutes ago, Florence Locomotive Works said:

The Ferrari is a very famous 250 gto variant with the rear panel made level with the roofline creating a flattened van look. 
 

More here:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_250_GT_SWB_Breadvan

Not a GTO, as I said. It has the mechanicals etc of a 250GT SWB Berlinetta. At the time it was built, Enzo Ferrari was refusing to sell a real GTO to Count Volpi, so he declared UDI and this glorious one-off was the result. Your pic seems to have been taken at Goodwood, perhaps? Mine was at LM, the 2018 Classic, as you might imagine.

 

Later in life, Drogo's company  became Ferrari's body-designer for the racers, e.g. 330P3 etc while Bizzarini made exotica under his own name, and designs for Iso. Count Volpi ran the Serenissima team - that being a name for Venice - and I met his chief mechanic, Alf Francis, formerly Stirling Moss's mechanic, socially in 1965. Alf's daughter had been at my school, and his wife was a good friend to my parents. 

[polybear]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

However, having met some very rich people in my time (including a billionaire)  I’ve found to be as diverse as any other group of people - in regards to money some have “people to take care of that sort of thing”, others not only know how much they have but also where and how it is spent - sometimes down to the last ha’penny.

 

It’s true that money can’t buy you happiness, but it certainly buys you a better class of misery!

 

Bear recalls a British Multi-Millionaire being interviewed on the radio (he was worth £500M-ish IIRC) - not sure how he made his money, but he'd written a book about it.  His Accountant asked him if he knew how many houses he owned (all staffed 24/7, 365 days a year) - he tried to work it out but couldn't) - the accountant said he should keep his favourite 3 or 4 and sell the rest, as they were costing him a fortune; he advised renting if he wanted to go somewhere for a few months etc.  He also had a private jet that he'd used about twice that year - again, sell it and charter a jet if required.

He was asked what was the worst thing about being so rich?  He replied:  "You'll never make another real friend ever again" - presumably cos' you'll never know what their true motives are.  He added that the friends you've had for life will be the best friends you've ever had.

 

1 hour ago, Mike Bellamy said:

 

The Best Western Hallmark Midland Hotel opposite Derby Station has been closed for over a year and is expected to be closed all of this year as it has been block booked by HM Government for housing asylum seekers.

 

 

Presumably many or all of which have come across the channel from a nice safe country - so illegal immigrants....

I'd Google the cost to the UK Government, but it'd only get me wound up.

There was a TV clip by a UK Camera Crew showing a boat launch from a French beach (the Gendarmerie turned up just afterwards - funnily enough.....); they asked one who was about to board the boat how long he'd been in France:  "Seven Years" - he then added that he'd spent five of those years in Prison.  No doubt he's in the UK now.

 

Now that definitely is a Rant.

 

In other news:

Bear spent the morning messing with a piece of kit that'd "flipped out" and had stopped working; yesterday it was looking like a replacement would be required (at the wrong side of a ton) but more playing/resetting/messing with the programming today scored a result  Puppers would be impressed I'm sure.

Only time will tell if this is a permanent fix or not.....

[Compound2632]

On 08/01/2022 at 09:24, rockershovel said:

I don't care for wine. I usually find that indigestion appears long before any significant intoxication. 

 

A friend of mine claims to be incapable of becoming drunk as he falls asleep first.