1860 UK denomination

[jcm@gwr]

All branches of Metro Bank have coin counting machines,

no commission and you don't need to be a customer.

[BernardTPM]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I must be a couple of years younger than you guys, but was also taught ‘full imperial’.  . . . All those bizarre imperial things leaked out of my brain very swiftly, and I really struggle to work in pounds and ounces, and stones are totally beyond me.

I still have to mentally convert lengths to make any 'real' sense out of them and I still bake in pounds and ounces (well, mostly ounces; not many cakes need more than 16 oz of any one ingredient).

No idea what I weigh in metric, but I'm between 1 and 2 metres tall, roughly.

[kevinlms]

20 minutes ago, BernardTPM said:

I still have to mentally convert lengths to make any 'real' sense out of them and I still bake in pounds and ounces (well, mostly ounces; not many cakes need more than 16 oz of any one ingredient).

No idea what I weigh in metric, but I'm between 1 and 2 metres tall, roughly.

I guess not many people (young children excepted) are outside the 1 - 2 metre range, so you are very 'ordinary'!

[burgundy]

1 hour ago, BernardTPM said:

I still have to mentally convert lengths to make any 'real' sense out of them....

Strange, but many of us on this site probably routinely mix metric and imperial when we model at 4mm to a foot. I can cope perfectly well with mental arithmetic that results in 1mm equalling 3 inches. However, in the US, modellers seem to stick exclusively with imperial measurements, divide by 87  and then work to 3 decimal places of an inch. At that point my brain starts to hurt.

Best wishes 

Eric 

[John ks]

5 hours ago, burgundy said:

many of us on this site probably routinely mix metric

 

I tend to use imperial when referring to Gauge, in Queensland the gauge is 3' 6" & standard gauge will for me always be 4' 8½"

 

16 hours ago, Reorte said:

there's talk of removing 1p and 2p coins anyway

Here in Oz we went metric in 66 & The 1c & 2c coins were deleted in 89 & 90

LSD become $ & c

£1 become $2

Notes were $20, $10, $2 & $1 The $5 note arrived in 67 followed by a $50 in 73 & a $100 in 84

Coins were 1c,2c,5c,10c,20c & 50c

The $1 & $2 notes were replaced with coins in 84 & 88

 

For cash purchases the rounding is as follows (there is no rounding on card purchases)

1c & 2c are rounded to 0c

3c & 4c are rounded to 5c

6c & 7c are rounded to 5C

8c & 9c are rounded to 10c

The rounding applies to the total purchase

 

The first polymer note produced was the $10.00 note & they look like this

 

 

John

[kevinlms]

1 hour ago, John ks said:

 

I tend to use imperial when referring to Gauge, in Queensland the gauge is 3' 6" & standard gauge will for me always be 4' 8½"

 

Here in Oz we went metric in 66 & The 1c & 2c coins were deleted in 89 & 90

LSD become $ & c

£1 become $2

Notes were $20, $10, $2 & $1 The $5 note arrived in 67 followed by a $50 in 73 & a $100 in 84

Coins were 1c,2c,5c,10c,20c & 50c

The $1 & $2 notes were replaced with coins in 84 & 88

 

For cash purchases the rounding is as follows (there is no rounding on card purchases)

1c & 2c are rounded to 0c

3c & 4c are rounded to 5c

6c & 7c are rounded to 5C

8c & 9c are rounded to 10c

The rounding applies to the total purchase

 

The first polymer note produced was the $10.00 note & they look like this

 

 

John

The plastic notes are great once used to them. Better than paper ones.

I wish I had more of them!

[spamcan61]

14 hours ago, Kickstart said:

I was 3 when we went decimal, but at school we were taught both. And I tend to use them interchangeably (not the more esoteric measures though) , and even mix them.

 

All the best

 

Katy

I can still recall during my last year at Junior School (1972) writing out metric and imperial measurement tables, including rods/poles/perches (maybe they expected us to buy allotments...)  plus Ancient Egyptian measurements - never did understand that one, never found cubits to be a particularly useful unit of measurement.  To this day I mix and match units, fairly inevitable when you work in RF design where many of the components and raw materials are designed and manufactured in the USA.

[Kylestrome]

All this talk about coins is interesting but 'so yesterday'!

 

Since I started using contactless payment it's been months since I last had a coin in my pocket.

 

David

[spamcan61]

15 minutes ago, Kylestrome said:

All this talk about coins is interesting but 'so yesterday'!

 

Since I started using contactless payment it's been months since I last had a coin in my pocket.

 

David

Much the same here, still got the same money in my wallet from March, other than 20p coins for the town centre car park.

[Bernard Lamb]

I still work in "real" measurements.

1 Acre = 1 Chain x 1 Furlong which can also be expressed as 10 Square Chains.

I believe it was originally derived from the area that a horse could plough in a day.

Bernard

[eastglosmog]

Dealing with old mine plans as I often do, I still need to know about rods, poles and perches.

[Reorte]

12 hours ago, BernardTPM said:

I still have to mentally convert lengths to make any 'real' sense out of them and I still bake in pounds and ounces (well, mostly ounces; not many cakes need more than 16 oz of any one ingredient).

No idea what I weigh in metric, but I'm between 1 and 2 metres tall, roughly.

 

Most things I have to convert mentally to Imperial to get any feel for them (other than in the very roughest sense), apart from temperature, where it's the other way around. Small distances though (i.e. anything that fits on your typical ruler) I've enough of a sense of either.

[Reorte]

1 hour ago, Kylestrome said:

All this talk about coins is interesting but 'so yesterday'!

 

Since I started using contactless payment it's been months since I last had a coin in my pocket.

I've been using contactless. I'm looking forward to things eventually returning to normal and going back to cash.

[Reorte]

1 hour ago, eastglosmog said:

Dealing with old mine plans as I often do, I still need to know about rods, poles and perches.

What sort of mines (and when and where)? I've not spent much time looking at original plans it's something I've been interested in for a long time, I've encountered fathoms often enough but not rods, poles, and perches, but books on the history of a mine are probably not going to be quoting the technical details of the plans defining the area.

[eastglosmog]

1 hour ago, Reorte said:

What sort of mines (and when and where)? I've not spent much time looking at original plans it's something I've been interested in for a long time, I've encountered fathoms often enough but not rods, poles, and perches, but books on the history of a mine are probably not going to be quoting the technical details of the plans defining the area.

Copies of 19th century coal mine plans, usually (sometimes iron mine plans).  These days it is scanned copies obtained from the Coal Authority, but in days gone by it was the originals in the area NCB old mine plan offices.  The scans are much easier to deal with!

Shallow old coal workings can seriously impact on stability of overlying excavations and houses.

[kevinlms]

2 hours ago, eastglosmog said:

Dealing with old mine plans as I often do, I still need to know about rods, poles and perches.

So do fishermen & bird keepers!

[Hibelroad]

Decimalisation of the currency definitely made it easier to carry out any form of repetitive financial calculation, prior to that we had to use books containing endless tables of figures know as ready reckoners. However I am puzzled as to why the UK still resists metrication, why measure food in kilos but people in stones and pounds?  I have used metric measurements since I started to work with wood, it’s easier to divide millimetres than ths of inches. Modellers try to have the best of both worlds by working to mm to the foot. But I’m still not sure about metric time, I’m happy to stick to seconds and minutes and also our strange year of 365 and a quarter days, give or take the odd second. 

[burgundy]

I buy petrol for my car in litres and then it tells me its fuel consumption in miles per gallon.

Best wishes 

Eric 

[The Stationmaster]

On 26/11/2020 at 13:06, Fenman said:

 

You seem to be ignoring the key difference: most of us hardly ever have to add up columns of times! 

 

Paul

 

But some of us in our working lives not only had to add them up but also adjust the resulting time by an hour - one way or t'other - because our trains ran in two time zones.  It got even more amusing on the night clocks changed - fortunately finally synchronised across the EU in the second half of the 1990s - when someone booked on duty in one time zone but booked off duty in the other one (we were used to that but it got a bit more complicated on the night the clocks changed.   and of course we needed yp agree it all in two, sometimes three, languages.

 

We also had a far more useful train on occasion which allowed passengers to legitimately welcome in the New Year twice in a single journey.

[antrobuscp]

All this reminded me that tax rates used to be expressed as so many shilinngs and pence in the £, not as percentages.

You could therefore have a basic rate of 7s 9d in the £.  So, you'd divide the number of pounds by 4(5s), add half of that(2s 6d), and then add 1/10th of the figure added at stage 2(3d), in order to work out the tax. All good fun, added to which you had an "Earned Income Relief" which, if my memory is correct, reduced earned income(i.e. not investment income) by 2/9ths.

 

Like most things you become familiar with, it didn't seem difficult at the time.

 

 

[Fat Controller]

6 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

But some of us in our working lives not only had to add them up but also adjust the resulting time by an hour - one way or t'other - because our trains ran in two time zones.  It got even more amusing on the night clocks changed - fortunately finally synchronised across the EU in the second half of the 1990s - when someone booked on duty in one time zone but booked off duty in the other one (we were used to that but it got a bit more complicated on the night the clocks changed.   and of course we needed yp agree it all in two, sometimes three, languages.

 

We also had a far more useful train on occasion which allowed passengers to legitimately welcome in the New Year twice in a single journey.

Working the night shift on the eve of the hour-change was always nervewracking; there'd always be some one who got things wrong. To be fair, my own reliefs almost always turned up on time, or on one occasion, an hour early.

[eastglosmog]

13 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

But some of us in our working lives not only had to add them up but also adjust the resulting time by an hour - one way or t'other - because our trains ran in two time zones.  It got even more amusing on the night clocks changed - fortunately finally synchronised across the EU in the second half of the 1990s - when someone booked on duty in one time zone but booked off duty in the other one (we were used to that but it got a bit more complicated on the night the clocks changed.   and of course we needed yp agree it all in two, sometimes three, languages.

 

We also had a far more useful train on occasion which allowed passengers to legitimately welcome in the New Year twice in a single journey.

And some of us still have to add up degrees minutes and seconds!

[Hibelroad]

8 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

Working the night shift on the eve of the hour-change was always nervewracking; there'd always be some one who got things wrong. To be fair, my own reliefs almost always turned up on time, or on one occasion, an hour early.

When I worked nights a good relief would split the difference with you i.e come in half an hour early or late as appropriate. But there was always one who would take advantage and wouldn’t come in early. Also I have now remembered that the time calculations were a pain as part of the job was to compile total boiler running times from all the on and off times logged in the day, decimal time would have helped there. 

[Hroth]

48 minutes ago, Hibelroad said:

When I worked nights a good relief would split the difference with you i.e come in half an hour early or late as appropriate.

 

A flexible working approach that resulted in Quintishill...

 

[Michael Hodgson]

I do remember one price that went down as a result of decimalisation.  The Severn Bridge toll had been half a crown but went down to 12p because new halfpence were too much bother to handle on every transaction and increasing the tolls needed an Act of Parliament!