Titan

Has anyone any evidence that additional firefighters would have made a difference? When you consider how crowded the stairs got there was not room for any more firefighters. There were forty pumps attending, so there was not any room for more fire engines either. The original fire was put out within a few minutes of the emergency call. Most of the fire was out of reach of the firefighters on the ground, which is why there was such a problem. The amount of crews and equipment quickly mustered at short notice does not point to inadequate resources, indeed it was an impressive response by our emergency services.

Hmm. Lima also made some HO mk2s which might go with it...

This makes it seem like there is no excuse for the government of any colour: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40406057

Who told you that? Almost all span wires are copper. It is not a good idea for them to be anything else due to corrosion from using dissimilar metals. Feeders are usually aluminium, with special bi-metallic connections to connect them to the copper conductors to avoid corrosion. The preferred dropper is now flexible copper, compared to the previous stainless steel type. Aluminium AWAC Catenary wire is no longer used for new construction, unless interfacing it with existing equipment. It was used for Mk 3B equipment and the policy is to change it to copper where practicable.

You may have a point, however I would expect a sprinkler to be able to spray all four walls of the room that it is in. If the room is too big for one head to do this then two would be installed to get coverage. It might not have been able to slow the fire down much, but as it seems that the cladding only just caught fire, it would not have needed to. Then again the tenant having his door open as well would not have helped either...

I understand that no one has ever died in a fire with a building fitted throughout with sprinklers. I would expect in this case the fridge fire would have been doused before the cladding caught, so the answer would be that all lives would have been saved.

Near derailment - no exaggeration either! https://youtu.be/L4ntnt4DL60

There are two wires shown in each socket - one is the control/interlock wire, the other one the power wire. the interlock wires are crossed in the coach, but the power wires are not. If this coach was supplied with DC, then the current would flow through the heaters in one direction, and would flow in the opposite direction to that shown in the drawing when the coach is turned through 180 degrees.

In which case my thoughts regarding polarity are correct, if a coach is wired such that the wires run parallel, and the left side is positive and the right side negative, marshal that coach the other way around then the left side of that coach becomes negative and the right side positive.

I may have discovered that I have been making an assumption for a long time - do each of the connectors carry both positive and negative, or is one cable positive and the other negative? I had assumed the latter...

Looks like Mk1 to me, which would make sense with the LMS railway warehouse. I suppose that narrows it down to anywhere between Euston and Manchester/Liverpool! What I can tell you from the OLE is that the photographer is standing with his back to an over bridge, if that is any help?

I think that all the Mk1 ETH was just some heating elements wired across the train supply. As such they would work on any voltage AC or DC up to 1000V. The lighting would still be provided by dynamo and batteries only so no compatibility issues there. If you think about it you can't have an ETH system that works on DC alone, since if a carriage is turned through 180 degrees the polarity of the supply is reversed. It must therefore must be able to work irrespective of the polarity of the supply, which is not much of an issue if the heating is just a bunch of resistors which aren't fussed about which way the electricity flows through them. Air conditioned stock would have motor/alternator sets to provide the required AC to run the ventilation and air conditioning. These would have 'Universal' motors that would run on AC or DC, and be controlled to run at the same rpm irrespective of input voltage or frequency so that the generator part give a steady ac output at the required frequency for the air con. So almost all stock could be run off any loco from the 1000V AC of the 25kV electrics to the 650V DC of the Deltics With the HST trailers to save the cost of motor alternator sets (both in purchase and maintenance) they were wired to take three phase AC direct from the power cars.

To be fair trapped in any diesel locomotives engine room whilst running flat out is hardly going to be quiet!

Was a bit worried about the p-way crew for a moment!

Most unusual working I saw was Mentor sandwiched between two class 309's. There had been a spate of de-wirements at the time involving 309's and I guess they were measuring pantograph behaviour with three pans up at 100mph.

Interesting. The normal method of fire fighting for tower blocks is from the inside out. Something like the pump gets plugged in to the dry riser and pressurises it with water, the fire crew go up inside to the affected floor and attach hoses to the dry riser outlets, and fight the fire from there. This is a very quick and effective method of deployment and fighting a fire contained in a flat, which is what normally happens. Not very suitable for fighting an external fire though, trying to dangle a hose out the window won't work particularly well especially if the fire is already moving up. Once it has got out of reach of any hoses that can be deployed outside it is pretty much game over as far as containment is concerned. So it could be the case that the original fire was extinguished within a few minutes, but unfortunately it was already established on the cladding by then.

Was not upset, just annoyed at what seems to be total disregard to what the police are actually saying. As it is live statements direct from the police, the media and their reporting or the way they work has nothing to do with the actual words used which are plain and absolutely clear, direct from the horses mouth, and in no way in any form of denial. It is bad enough what they have had to go through and to add false accusations of denial is pretty low.

I have always thought that the rods on an 08 looked rather spindly.

Most likely burst motors due to overspeed. This would often cause bent rods/shifted cranks due to one axle stopping whilst the others keep turning, or at least try to... I wonder if anyone has a pic of an 08 with bent rods?

This is so blatantly untrue it beggars belief that people think it let alone say it. Not only have the authorities not denied anything, at every announcement they have stated 'this number will increase' i.e. they knew that it was not going to be the final number and telling everybody so, the exact opposite of the denial that they seem to be accused of! It would seem that the only way anyone could think that is a) selective deafness b) such a poor command of the English Language that they cannot understand the meaning of the phrase "this number will increase" or "confirmed dead" and therefore take the number given as a final number.

Straight from the horses mouth...

Deltics carry over a lot of oil whilst idling, or on low power. This gets burnt off at high power. Once a Deltic has been running at full power for about 15 mins the exhaust will be crystal clear - in fact usually cleaner than other diesels as there is no trace of black or grey smoke due to the engines being de-rated by a substantial amount - Marine versions of the class 55 engine typically putting out 2,200-2,500bhp, turbo charged versions can do 3,200bhp, the charge cooled versions I think do even more! This also means that the colour of the exhaust at any given time is no indicator of engine health, more an indicator of how long the engines have been idling. If they are left idling too long there can be sufficient carry over in the exhaust for it to catch fire once the engines are worked hard. This is what it is like at west Ealing after presumably idling for a long time at Paddington - and the engines are quite healthy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoktXA1VWHw Originally on Class 55 the engines operated in unison, each power unit running at the same rpms and power, i.e. half power would mean both units working on half power. This changed when the Deltics were fitted with ETH. The ETH was taken from the main generator, and this could only provide the required volts when running at near full speed. To avoid ETH only being available at full power, the governors were arranged so that the power unit providing the ETH would spool up first. This meant that at half power you would have one power unit running flat out whilst the second was just idling. More power demand caused the second unit to spool up. It is why it might seem as a Deltic is pulling away that only one engine is running - one will be revving up and smoking whilst the other is still idling - until the controller is moved passed half power then the other unit starts to catch up with the first. Drivers were instructed not to use low power for long periods for this reason - less than half power for any length of time and the train would get cold! To solve the problem of providing ETH at idle, the two generators were connected in series to get adequate volts.

Ridiculous fuel consumption. The voyagers are known to be very thirsty. Also much higher maintenance costs. Over specifying has a big impact on the bottom line, money which the railway industry can't afford to waste. The best designs are those which do exactly whats needed, no more, no less.

Do remember that the driving trailers have pantographs, low floors and 25kv transformers etc. underneath them, so the 5 cars cannot have any more diesel engines than they already have.