Joseph_Pestell

No it doesn't have a simple answer. In so far as the fire spread across the building in the way it did it unequivocally did not meet the requirements of the Building Regulations because the Building Regulations state:

 

The external walls of a building shall adequately resist the spread of fire over the walls and from one building to another, having regard to the height, use and position of the building.

 

 

However that is not the question realy being asked. The question realy being asked is does the material and design comply with the Approved Document (AD B parts 1 and 2) that sets out the practical standards and design norms that if complied with will be deemed to meet the requirements of the Building Regulations. The Approved Documents are very technicaly heavy documents that require professional knowledge to understand and implement.

I can just imagine the barristers having endless fun with that. Is the cladding the "external wall of the building? Or is it just something fixed to the external wall?

A new drinking experience for me and SWMBO this evening.

Unkindly, we often refer to red wine as "vino losso" after being served by a Chinese waitress in Venice. Tonight, we will toast her with a glass (or two) of Cabernet Sauvignon from her home country.

Just opened it and it is touch high on the tannins but rather good. £8.50 from Tesco - on the bottom shelf.

From the excellent Theakstons brewery Masham- Old Peculier 5.6% just the ticket after a game of 5-a-side in tropical temperatures.

 

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Wouldn't be my choice at this time of year!

All very pleasant.

 

Currently 27° after a highest temp of 34° this after noon.

 

A very passable tipple at 4.0 abv and available at the very reasonable price of under 30p per 500ml bottle.....

You are presumably not in Cardiff at the moment. Or did you bring the beer back with you?

The new 'Borismaster' has finished production. No more will be built largely due to the extra 20% cost per bus.

A pity. They are rather comfortable and well-equipped.

Will we be getting a Khanmaster, I wonder? His dad was a bus driver IIRC.

The MCW Metrobus was a decent design badly let down by corrosion problems with the rear end frame. Many needed some serious welding to keep them in service and there were tails of engines falling off when the frame they were mounted on failed.

That once happened to me with a Triumph 1300. And it had passed its MOT only three days earlier.

Not wishing to confuse but a train running up the valley would be a down train.

I don't know much about bikes. But a neighbour's son, now in his late 40s, has just bought a beautiful looking Triumph. Retro but in a very modern way. Apparently quite comfortable for the 150 miles from Hertfordshire to here.

I'm not claiming that flammable cladding is a brilliant idea, just that the risk it presents might be mitigated in other ways. I don't know, maybe it can't. Maybe use of a non flammable cladding would introduce a different risk. None of this is stuff I know about specifically, I'm just saying that when a risk is identified then there are often several mitigations available, and it's not always necessary to do all of them.

I rather doubt that you do. And I don't think that you would clad a tower block with a flammable material.

But freehold remains with the Council.

Yes but a freeholder does not, under current law, have carte blanche to do whatever it wants.

And in this case, I think that the freehold is actually held by a company owned by the Council. That will throw up its own set of legal issues about directors' liability, etc.

Easy to say that now, and don't be surprised if the regulations are changed as a result.

 

But if other mitigations are in place it's possible that a non fireproof material could be safely used - I'm not saying that is the case here as I have no facts or knowledge to go on, but in my experience there are multiple solutions to many problems, and it is not necessary to use all of them in a given situation.

No, honestly, this is not hindsight. The whole basis of fire safety in tall buildings is containing fire within each individual unit. You can't do that if you put a flammable product up the outside of the building. Anybody with an IQ of more than 60 should realise that.

no supprise to me at all we currently live in a two bedroom council flat on taking the tenancy some 8 years ago we were informed that the flat was fit to hold 7 adults ! we have one smakk double bedroom and a single where all these people are supposed to sleep etc nobody knows . we currently have two froends staying in the single and the house already feels over crowded another three adults wtf ?

Not much space for a train set then?

Also, the BUILDER should be complying with any relevant standard. Even if the management suggested a non-compliant method/material be used, the builder ought to have enough guts to say 'I can't build it like that, its AGAINST THE LAW'.

The builder must be regretting not bailing out of the contract/using unsuitable materials.

 

As I see it, any politicians level of guilt, stops at not supplying sufficient funds, if the builder was forced to take short cuts. But as I just said, the builder ought to have jumped ship, rather than do a dodgy job.

I fear that we are going to find that the Builder and Architect did comply with the Regulations: i.e. that the Regulations are hopelessly inadequate.

Whether, under Civil Law, there may be a claim against them on the basis that they should have used their common sense and used a genuinely suitable material rather than just slavishly follow the Regulations is another matter for m'learned friends.

My late father often commented on the human propensity for overlooking the obvious. You would think that any five-year-old would use a totally fireproof product on a 24-storey building.

And there lies a big problem. Who are the owners? Under right-to-buy, many of the flats were owned leasehold by their occupiers.

I don't know of a UK supplier - although I am sure there must be one.

If you are going to Paris (or know someone who is), take a look at Weber. They seem to have everything!

1. I do not know if this has been mentioned earlier but Mousa Models have some resin MR wagon kits and more in the planning stages.

 

2. Surely with advances in technology it is easier and cheaper to produce the necessary plastic molds for polystyrene kits than it was prior to computers ?

There was a spark eroder available at auction last week for next to nothing. I was tempted but I would not have a clue how the thing works. If anyone on here wants one, I will keep my eye open for another one.

News today that First MTR have ordered Bombardier Aventra trains to replace the Siemens units that SWT had ordered for the Windsor/Reading services.

I can't see any easy way to divide up that area to make portable boards. And by comparison with Little Bytham you have a lot of point motors to take into consideration.

For me, this says L-girder. That would allow you to make up some areas of trackwork on ply sub-bases and then fix the ply sub-bases to risers off the L-girder. Joy of this is that you can easily shift the risers slightly to get round the point motors.

The L-girder base can be constructed very rapidly once the loft is finished.

There were still some Swifts when we visited Malta nine years ago - shortly before the Arriva fiasco.

Maltese roads have some fairly spectacular potholes so I don't think that any integral body vehicle such as the Solo is going to survive long there.

Ah.. the addendas, classic entries like the (made up example) 0847 Bradford Interchange-Weymouth does not run. Add extra train 0915 Leeds-Weymouth calling at...., when it would have been far simpler to state the 0847 from Bradford Interchange now starts at Leeds at 0915 as shown - delete time at Bradford

There was one summer timetable (1974?) where all the various addenda added up to more pages than the original. Or so some reckoned at the time.

I wonder how many golf courses have their own beer. Had lunch yesterday at our local club, Rushmore Park, where the cask bitter is Rushmore Gold brewed very locally by Waylands Brewery, Sixpenny Handley.

Would the pannier have enough coal, though, for a run like this? There was a shed at Llandovery, mainly used for bankers on the bank to Cynghordy; perhaps locos were swapped there? An account of a visit by the Worcester Locomotive Society in 1962 had three Llanelly 8Fs and a Shrewsbury Black Five on shed.

I was thinking more of the Standard 4MT. I don't think a small Pannier would have gone that far (as per other answers).

Stopped on the way back from Salisbury last night at The White Horse, Quidhampton. Pub that I had not been to before but very welcoming and some of the best pub food that I have had for a long time. Guest beer was Salopian Oracle, one of the trendy citrus-aroma beers. Absolutely perfect on a hot day.

If you buy full price tickets, you can avoid any transfer fees and that's surely the best policy if you are going to cut it that fine.

 

I often fly on discounted tickets but would never leave my arrival at the terminal so late that an hour's delay could cause me to miss the flight.

 

I always set off assuming plenty of delay and even do so when travelling on full price business class tickets, more often than not, arriving more than two or even three hours before the flight departs.

 

Flying from my local airport I can reliably arrive an hour or so before the flight but, travelling down to Heathrow from the West Midlands first, it's best to dig out those belt and braces.

 

Besides, what's not to like about a nice leisurely train journey, I normally go XC to Reading, change for Paddington then Heathrow Express, making a meal of it, but when you've got luggage with you it does make it all rather easy and relaxing.

But she was not "cutting it fine". And we don't object to the principle of an additional charge for transferring to the later flight. But £800???

But in relation to this thread, the real issue is way of getting to Heathrow. SWT was for some reason running late so she just missed one RailAir coach. The next one was already delayed by the traffic and I simply don't understand why the coach goes back onto what is known to be a blocked motorway when they could get to Heathrow perfectly well on ordinary roads.

I concur that the stretch along Swansea Bay was very pleasant- once you had passed Swansea Prison, the houses were the sort of large three or more storey ones that you find facing the sea in many coastal towns, most being B&Bs or 'Commercial Hotels'. After passing the bowstring girder foot-bridge that spanned the 'main line', the Swansea and Mumbles Railway and Oystermouth Road, the line didn't have any buildings around it until it turned inland to follow the Clyne Valley.

The mail traffic was significant, and remained so until the demise of the Swindon Cross-Country units on the Shrewsbury to Llanelli services. In the days of TPOs, the vans would be attached to the Aberystwyth- York mail train at Shrewsbury.

Large tanks did work northbound long-distance services, presumably being replaced somewhere en-route. P144 of 'Red Dragon..' has a view of a BR Standard 2-6-4t on the front of the 12.20 pm service to Shrewsbury, formed of a Van 2nd and a Brake Compo. The former looks to be a Collett, and the latter is a Mk 1. Another shows a 74xx pannier (7437) on a Shrewsbury- Victoria service at Mumbles Road, taken in 1964.

I don't see why one would need to change the loco on a run like this. Plenty of stops to take on water.

It may be no comfort, but there is a difference between Security, which is a Heathrow Airport Ltd. function, and getting you on an aeroplane, which is the airline's responsibility. Hopefully SWMBO now appreciates the need for timeliness when dealing with scheduled aeroplanes.

 

Jim

SWMBO is a very timely person. But if you get stuck on a coach on the M25 for more than an hour within site of the terminal because the RailAir link people are too daft to send the coaches on the ordinary roads, there is not much one can do.

We don't have an issue with the security people. What we object to is BA charging an extortionate amount to transfer to the next flight.

We got stuck in a not dissimilar situation a few years ago. Then, the much maligned Ryanair got us back to the UK at short notice. Yes, we did pay rather over the odds and got back to Stansted rather than Southampton. But it was nowhere near £800.