pete_mcfarlane

Some of the eBay seller's feedback is from people who got hit by VAT, presumably not having realised that this would happen (or noticed that the item was in China). So not everyone is that clued up. There is some good railway and railway modelling stuff on Facebook. Random examples that are in my most recent views: https://www.facebook.com/groups/287574851395841 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063285277206 https://www.facebook.com/groups/178540989016069 But yeah, there is a lot of weirdness on there. The recent fun with Jacobite central door locking seems to have brought out a lot of badly spelled rants. I think it depends on how well moderated the pages are - some of them are a lot better than others.

Not to people on Facebook it isn't. If you look at the post on Dapol's page it's full of people demanding to be told exactly what to 'avoid'... (And in fairness, there are some people talking sense on there as well).

BuT wHy WoNt Dapol pOsT tHe LiNk To ThE cHeAp FaKeS sO i CaN aVoId ThEm?

Colorblindness runs in my family. Only an hour ago I was googling the numbers on Humbrol paint tins to work out what colour they were. These days there's a mobile phone app called 'Colorgrab' which tells you what colour things are - really useful.

I suspect that's less likely given the production runs involved in model railways. Injection moulding tools should last for years if looked after - witness all those Airfix 'classics' reruns of 1960s kits or Hornby churning out stuff from the 1980s and earlier. Maybe this is part of the problem, as Chinese factories are sitting on large quantities of no longer used (by their Western owners) but perfectly serviceable injection tools.

I lost interest in that letter when they started talking about 'huge costs'. And as for saying that WCRC's fleet is '60% of the heritage rolling stock in the UK' without any qualifications. I don't think those MPs grasped the key point that accepting a time limited risk by giving operators an exemption whilst they fit CDL is not the same as letting WCRC carry on ad infinitum without it. Assuming that they wrote the letter themselves.

This is of course true of any organisation. The kind of people who are good at driving startups aren't necessarily the kind of people who can run the business in the long term. You can see that with some of the more prominent Silicon Valley types, who are good with the 'cool' innovation stuff, but less good at giving the impression of being a steady hand on the tiller.

Going back to jjb1970's comments on Managers vs leaders, the problem is that Managers tell people to come back in the office, because their Manager has told them to make it happen. What you've described is what a leader would do. (I'm sure that a lot of Managers could be replaced by an email forwarding rule, that simply forwards emails from their manager on to their team. It would be a lot cheaper.).

Thanks you for that reply - very interesting. As for flexible working, that is a whole can of worms at the moment. Weirdly I was going in the office 5 days a week, as I found it less distracting sitting in a virtually empty office on Mondays and Fridays than being at home. But that's just me. One thing I'd add to the list is the tendency of some managers to shape their team's work in a way that encourages lone working* and then wonder why these people aren't that interested in coming back to the office to work collaboratively. Something interesting I read recently was that some people can view things (in this case 'how I allocate work' and 'my team coming back in the office') as isolated islands, rather than linking them up in their heads. I wish I'd known that 25 years ago, as it explains all sorts of stuff like how it can sometimes be difficult to explain stuff to certain people. (* Because if you give task A to Fred to do on his own and B to Mary to do on her own, it's easier to see what people have delivered when you come to writing their end of year review. Rather than having Fred own task A to won, and asking him to involve other people, which would encourage them to work together and come back in the office.)

OK then, how should I have phrased it? My intent being to convey the idea that the manager was possibly behaving in a particular way (not understanding other people's situations being different from their own) because of who they were and how their brain was wired up, rather than due to any deliberate malice or failings. Which is important in understanding some of these culture clashes within organisations, where everyone means well in their own way, but they all somehow end up upsetting each other due to mutual lack of understanding. I'm temporarily 'resting' between jobs, so wasn't aware that it was Autism month. If I was in a job I'd probably have had a bulk email from HR telling me all about it, with stories from a couple of employees about their experiences and so on, as I've seen in previous years. What I've never seen in any of the past communications is something on how to talk about neurodivergent people in a way that doesn't make them uncomfortable(*), which is food for thought. So now is the chance for somebody to educate me. (* Because as a manager you want to be able to say to people "Fred likes to work in a particular way because of who he is, which is different from your way of working, so be understanding" without upsetting Fred)

Unbolt the lamp irons from the footplate and use their fixing holes? The Southern one on the Nelson has windows at two heights, which suggests that the lower ones are for people sitting down. Another variation not pictured here was something like a sentry box with a door on either side of the smokebox. Since there were two of them, does this mean that there was a set of indicator equipment for each cylinder? And that the King and the Nelson have bigger shelters as (being 4 cylinder locos) there is an engineer and a set of kit for monitoring each cylinder? This LMS one is interesting as it appears to have a removeable section in front of the smokebox door. https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/lnwrrm775a.htm Presumably the 'garden shed' ones with full width planking at the front weren't in place for long, and had to be removed to open the smokebox door for cleaning purposes?

Isn't there something with National Employee contributions where it's marginally cheaper to employee multiple part-time workers than a smaller number of Full time ones?

I like the way that they quote the court case as if the verdict went in their favour, rather than the Judge ripping their case to pieces. I think WCRC are already working on that....

I was waiting for a NYMR train at Whitby about 5 years ago, and the people in front of me were being given instructions on how to use the train to get to the Harry potter station. Which thy were struggling to understand ("Look out for the signs with the station name..."). So at least some of these people probably have never used a train of any kind before.

Reading the petition hurt my brain. It's also on change.org so means absolutely nothing. It's the online equivalent of writing a letter to your local newspaper in green ink (as opposed to the ones on Parliament's website that at least can trigger some sort of parliamentary debate)

The information is very much tucked away in the website, so that's not surprising.

According to their website it's still possible to buy tickets for a shorter journey: https://www.nymr.co.uk/ticketing-information Just not online. https://www.nymr.co.uk/pages/category/book-tickets And not as obvious as the 12 month pass option. It also doesn't let you do what I did last time I was there, and travel from Pickering to Grosmont for less than the full line fare. The trains to and from Grosmont were a lot less full than the ones heading to Whitby.

The Crystal Palace dinosaurs are really important, because they show how the scientific consensus evolves in the light of more evidence. The irony is that we now think they are related to birds. As for Owen, he seems to be up there with John Chester Craven in the Pantheon of unpleasant Victorians. Nowadays we probably recognise him as having some kind of personality disorder. Anyway, as for colourisations, the best story I heard was about the colourised version of King Kong. Having gone to great lengths to do this, Fay Wray pointed out that they'd got the colour of her dress wrong.

Google gave me this link https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-london-festival-of-railway-modelling-2024-tickets-722011956197 which I used to buy a ticket about an hour ago.

Didn't someone on here correct the SEF D1 by shortening the bunker?

Would that give them extra capacity to run more trains and provide more seats? Every time I've been on it recently the trains were full to bursting, so adding more capacity would help.

The only other Heritage railway type place I've encountered it is the Tramway museum at Crich, although it makes more sense for them as their model is for people to have multiple short tram trips, look round the museum, and then use the pub and cafe. That's something that can stand repeat visits. I suspect there might be a bit of "we did it this way in my previous job so it must work everywhere" going on with the NYMR adopting this.

Nowadays you can order the sides as spares from the Phoenix Paints website. So it should be even more straightforward to do.

Yes, you get common parts for the D1 and E1 with half etched lines to trim some of them for a D1(*). Otherwise it flies together. * In case anyone is thinking that Albion cheated and used the same body for both types and ignored the dimensional differences, like Finecast did.

Aren't the grilles slightly different between the two? In a way that 10 years ago wouldn't have mattered to a RTR manufacturer....