pete_mcfarlane

I finally went to the reopened 'The Museum of Making' today. Firstly, the new museum is pretty dire. The building looks great after the renovation, but here's very little actual content. Just a random selection of artefacts carefully displayed with minimal labels, in that virtually empty fashion of modern museums. In some cases they are arranged by material, for no obvious reason (because the curators didn't know anything about the objects but could see what they were made of?). There's a tiny little bit of information about local industry - for example Rolls Royce has half a dozen wall panels with a short paragraph on each, and single jet engine on display (the previous museum had loads). The railway gallery contains the rebuilt model. It's not very well presented, with poor lighting and no backscene. But it's there, and running twice daily (at 11:00 and 2:00, for about half an hour). I say running - a succession of trains did circuits, train set style, without stopping at the station. The poor lighting makes my photos look like something Brian Monaghan shot for the Railway Modeller in 1974. Gone is the stock on display in cases - these are the only non-operating stuff on display. These are some of the few things in the museum with decent labels. The other good not utterly terrible bit of the museum is a kind of open store, with various random items jammed in. Lots of railway stuff, including endless block instruments, an early APT model, and a mock up of the Fell. No idea what it was used for - as I can't image they wind tunnel tested it... So the railway is back, working regularly (unlike before) but in a very poor museum.

Which reminds me of this Viz strip from a few years back: https://jodrell.org/2012/05/08/34-year-old-obsessive-war-workshop-assistant/

I find my local Games Workshop a bit odd. Go in for a can of spray paint and I get pounced on by the staff, who try and pressure sell me gaming stuff that I'm not interested in. It's a retail experience that you normally only get in the States.

Did the conversions retain the art deco tubular chairs? I travelled in the restored one on the NNR the other month and they are of the slightly uncomfortable kind found in some buffet cars, presumably designed to stop people hogging them for too long.

I think the boys ended up as black as soot in my 1970s copy of the book. It was a bit unusual to see that word in children's books - I think the only time I ever encountered it was when Alan Quartermaine tells you not to use it in 'King Solomon's Mines'. I do remember thinking it odd, even as an 8 year old, that a lot of the villians in Biggles were described as 'half caste'.

Didn't one of the European countries store their strategic reserve locos in a tunnel? Not all of these incidents may have been from the UK.

Ordered something on Sunday and it turned up on Tuesday. Which surprised me, as I normally expect orders to take a week or two.

It's a clean electric car, but only when the regulators are testing it..... His autobiography 'Life as Sutch' is quite a good read. It goes into a lot of his experiences of touring by-elections, and shows how clever and incisive he was. And a lot of his joke policies are now law, and he managed to put the SDP out of their misery. The less said about some of his music the better though.

Strictly speaking this is film, rather than Video (and he takes great pains to point of that he shows real archive films). I went to one of Rob Foxon's 'Railways Remembered' film shows last week at the Palace Theatre in Newark. This was the second time I've seen him there - when I was a member of the Railway Society in Grantham (as a kid in the 80s and early 90s) he was a regular fixture, but it was only recently that I realised he was on at the Palace. The latest show was LMS focussed and a mix of public films (Royal Scot in the USA for example) and internal railway films (the correct use of hand cranes). The Christmas show last year was a bit more mixed - and included this gem about the Ohrid railway in Tito's Yugoslavia (the 60cm one with WW1 vintage Brigadeloks) which is also on Youtube. So well worth going to see if you're in the area -- he's on again in Newark in November (and at other places in the Midlands). https://www.palacenewark.com/whats-on/instances/railways-remembered-christmas.php

The mention of full length step boards on Gresley carriages reminds me of this scene. Enjoying watching this build. I'm tempted to have another go at building one of two of these carriages.

You also have to wonder about how well those MDF and kitchen unit conversions will perform in the event of a fire.

Or ghosts. In fact we seem to have fewer ghost photos these days. Almost as if accidental double exposures aren't possible on camera phones....

"Not our circus, not our monkeys"

Surely the situation in France in the 30s wasn't much different to here - with large scale electrification being confined to a a couple of the private railway companies (Midi and the Paris-Orleans). Not much different from the Southern going after large scale electrification on its own.

It's also worth watching the 1980s Soviet film 'Come and See', which is set further south in Belarus, and deals with Partisans taking on the SS. Reckoned to be the best war film ever made. They also used live ammunition when filming, to make sure it sound right..... RTM in the Ukraine do some nice looking static resin kits for Soviet diesels and electrics. https://rtmodels.com.ua/ https://www.facebook.com/rtmkits There was also Russian a supplier selling resin steam loco kits on EBay, but they disappeared off it when we disconnected Russia from the World Economy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66909732 A cynic would say that a small amount of public wavering over HS2 is a ploy to generate cross party support for keeping the current plan.

I think it did generate a lot of noise at the time, but that has been carefully forgotten about once a) it was built without concreting over all of Kent as predicted and b) has been proven to be a success.

Might get a bit expensive......

Is that The Toymaker? I'm assuming they're dredging up another villain from the past, and the list of classic villains who have yet to return is now quite short. Sadly the Quarks have yet to return.....

It's a steam heating van (for pre-heating carriages, especially sleepers). More photos here. https://www.departmentals.com/departmental/041978 It does look like it has appeared in an episode of 'Pimp my ride'.

Which sounds similar to BR using Kensington Olympia as a 'London' station for cross country trains.

There's also a big Gauge One show in the agricultural centre in Bakewell. Apart from that, Spalding and Loughborough are now the only big East Midlands shows I can think of. Having gone through this with am AmDram groups, the extra work was a) stuff we should have been doing anyway (but didn't, because previous committees decided that the law didn't apply to them) and b) mostly one off tasks like writing policies and getting lots of people DBS checked. After that it was just a steady trickle of form filling. Like a of of these things it was going to be a complete disaster and unworkable, until you actually started on it. Having a couple of former members in the paper with child porn convictions also helped to silence doubters....

The real trick is to position the gas powered barbeque against the kitchen wall, the other side of which is the gas powered cooker. As a middle class person I feel the need to point out that conspicuous consumption is dreadful, and that most of that stuff was bought on credit with repayments which they can't quite afford as some kind of insecure 'keeping up with the Joneses' thing. And that the male host will be wearing an 'amusing' apron.

It's always an interesting experience crossing the Trent viaduct at Radcliffe when the fields are flooded. I commuted from Grantham to Nottingham for about 5 years and it flooded once or twice a year. The viaduct itself is a bit odd, having a junction in mid air with the newer viaduct on the colliery branch to Cotgrave (most of which is now walkable - a very cheap footpath conversion as you walk on the old ballast). The city tends not to flood since they built the sluices up stream from the viaduct.

I do wonder if Wilkos have suffered from changed work habits. The Wilkos near my office was useful for popping into at lunchtime to buy random cleaning products or other bits of hardware that were needed urgently. With a lot of people spending fewer days in the office, they must have lost a fair bit of that kind of trade. They had been doing something to address whatever problems they had - a few local stores did close in the last few years. Including the one in Grantham, which was tiny and tucked away near the bus station. That kind of illustrates the randomness of their approach - the stores all seemed to be of different sizes with different ranges of products, I once bought some 'HSS' drill bits (either from Wilkos or Boyes) and managed to bend one of them. HSS isn't supposed to do that.