webbcompound

People treat Waterloo as if it was some kind of decisive event, when it was simply another battle in the eleven hundred year long war between the Germanic tribes of East Francia and Middle Francia, and the Germanic tribes of West Francia, which all started with the division of the Kingdom of the Franks into three parts on the death of Louis the Pius, Charlemagne's only heir, in AD840, and only ended with the Treaty of Rome in AD1958

A Victorian fleet magically disappears and resurfaces in a drowned future version of London in this tome I imagine. Or do you mean Admiral G.A. Ballard?

i have a recollection that a cache of various quite old posters was found in a station attic/cupboard/mystical wardrobe or something somwhere or other (note use of accurate research referencing here). That would imply that the posters were posted to station masters, and that what was put up depended on the whim, chracter, or interest of the official involved. If they had been put up by roving agents you would think such a person woukld have appeared in popular fiction of the railway/detective/romantic sort, as featured on station bookstalls in yellow paper covers

And on Emmet's Prawnbeach line the loco would end up as a unicycle.

And you could make use of existing track by fastening two gyrotrains together side by side. Oh, wait....

May be operationally difficult for the railway bit of the model, but you can always park a Shilovski outside the station

You might have poroblems with stock falling on the floor until you revise your trackplan though..

Although that affair in the Crimea wasn't exactly an unalloyed success all told.

Maybe not go down this route eh? The grave isn't desecrated. It still has a perfectly satisfactory gravestone which says everything you need to know about the dog and his owner. It sits on an active RAF base. The RAF has pretty clear guidance on these things.

And including a number of men with mostly improbable moustaches

I thought that as soon as I saw Nearholmer's photo, but I was too polite to raise it.

Nein, ich suche nach Schloss-schmerzen

And so another scenic strand is added to the Aching Arcanum. A mystery German airship scouting out the coast of Norfolk for possible landing sites. Carruthers and Davis will no doubt soon be in the case. Is that the Dulcibella moored in the river?

there are difficulties with accuracy in all these ventures of course. Revell was obliged to withdraw its' 1/72 kit of the German WW2 "Hanebu 2" flying saucer because of its inaccuracy. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/nazi-ufo-model-revell/

It depends wteher you are painting a newly outshopped loco, or one that has been out for some time. The new one will be very black (one drop of yellow in the tin of black), and the longer it is out the more green it will look.

It is worth looking Bob Symes' biography up if you feel the need to think you haven't done enough with your life. Being Robert Alexander Baron Schutzmann von Schutzmandorf, and WW2 Royal Navy MTB commander in the Med is only the start of it.

This sale appears to be a result of a bidding war between 2***6 and u***c which started when one of them bid £100. Three days, and 40 bids later they had reached £450 at which point r***4, who had started the bidding at £40 and then dropped out jumped back in with 5 seconds to go on the clock and bid £460. Most of the bidding took place around breakfast time each day, so them being drunk seems unlikely. Perhaps they were teenagers, just about to go to school, with access to dad's ebay account. That still doesn't account for r***4 sniping at the end, unless he had put the wrong settings in his sniping software. All in all a stunning microcosm of human folly.

I note that the Happyland train "makes a realistic noise" when the driver is inserted. At c£40 you could buy a set just for the sound, how does this compare to other available sound chips?

reminds me of a song we sang at school (in the neolithic) which had the last line: "Life is butter melon, cauliflower".

Worse than that the play was originally performed by children

Ah, so now we are entering the absolutely non-contentious realm of folk song lyrics. In the earliest reference (1613, in the play The Knight of the Burning Pestle) The Lord is called Barnet, and elsewhere Darnell, and all variants on these names appear in different versions, so any connection with Barnard Castle is as likely as a Barney eye-test.

depends on your idea of success, and what the "drive to succeed" entails. For me the idea of success is sufficient to be comfortable and enjoy the things I like. Most people are in this category I suspect. If the drive to succede is envisaged as succesfully devising or creating, or maintaining something useful to everyone then this is good, though mostly the people who succede at this fail at the other definition of success, which is the one used by the media and some politicians, that is the ability to amass far more wealth than you can possibly use for your own benefit in your own lifetime. In most, probably all, cases this wealth is amassed at the expense of the comfort and enjoyment of others for whom being comfortable and enjoying life is success. Railways are a good example of all this. Engineers don't tend to get to be very wealthy; railways running for the comfort and enjoyment of the population, and the health and wellbeing of their employees, don't make lots of money for shareholders; and railways that are manipulated to make someone lots of money don't operate very well for the comfort and enjoyment of the population. Politic hue is irrelevant in most of these cases. The only issue is the pathological greed and lack of empathy that characterises those who amass their heaps of wealth. As for the huge charitable foundations they set up in claimed mitigation, this is just putting the comfort and enjoyment of the population in the hands of proven pathological non-empaths. Limiting the ability of the pathologically greedy to amass obscene levels of wealth increases the happiness and comfort of everyone except the psychopaths, and allows the innovators to carry on inventing and running beneficial inventions. Permitting the pathologically greedy to amass obscene levels of wealth decreases the happiness and comfort of everyone except the psycopaths, and constrains beneficial innovation. This applies whether we are talking about dictatorial politicians in socialist systems, or oligarchs in capitalist systems. Good governance lies in restricting the activities of these individuals for the benefit of the others. Unfortunately we haven't got that in the UK at the moment. Which, to bring things back on track, is why our railways are in a mess.

Although there are much more rocky versions available (I've always sung it at the same pace as the Young Tradition. The middle ages was probably just as keen on heavy drumming as we are, but playing on an organ progs it up a bit, even whilst keeping a slow pace

They certainly appear to buy locos for specific projects, then rapidly sell them on. As far as labour is concerned I would think that was the normal employment pattern for navvies who moved from contract to contract

Not just presidents. On the tartan register I found the Australian Donkey Tartan. Don't know if it is supposed to just be worn by donkeys, or whether (your choice of) particular politicians are included. I bet there is an early Australian loco called the Donkey though so it might look fetching in this.