PatB

He sounds positively left-wing by mining industry standards. He'd better be careful he doesn't get labelled a Communist or his colleagues will shun him.

That LNWR layout is interesting. It explains a similar block diagram in The Model Railway Encyclopedia, which I always thought looked rather unlikely. Goes to show what I know .

Nice. A Lima 37, a couple of Mk1s from wherever, a Dapol (Ex-Airfix) Interfrigo van kit or two and presto, an interesting, economical and scale-length late Blue era train that will fit on an 8x4 or similar sized layout .

A little unfair there. A lot of us did either know or suspect what was going on. Most others, I think, never gave it much thought and simply accepted the Agriculture lobby's assurances that all was well. What's changed is the recent whistle-blower footage that was sufficiently graphic and unpleasant, and seen by enough people, that the whole issue has become impossible to ignore for a much larger number of people than was previously the case. I don't think the livestock industry is going to get away scot-free this time, simply because the electoral maths has been fundamentally changed.

All true I'm afraid. I'm actually Operative AU3301/95G-776 and I'm typing this from a sub-basement at GCHQ.

I get the feeling there's some overthinking going on...

True, and I abhor waste. II believe much more could be done to use the resources we have more wisely. Nonetheless, providing the global population, or even a substantial proportion of it with near effortless, on-demand mobility, for example, would take an awful lot of energy, however efficiently it might be done. Maybe there simply isn't enough.

Well, they might come in handy for something......

It's not hoarding when it's tools .

Australia already had plastic banknotes when we got here in 1996. Whilst they took a while to get used to (quite apart from the material I still think they look like Monopoly money), I've come to love their indestructibility and their unattractiveness to forgers. Not that there aren't duds floating around, but they're rare and apparently fairly easy to spot.

The one place I see biofuels having a place as a real solution is in aviation. It's the one transport field where there is no realistic short to medium (maybe even long) term alternative to burning carbon molecules stored and transported in liquid form. Whilst it's not an area where I'd even consider myself a well-informed layman, I'd have thought that if someone was working on a realistically practical solar-powered airship, for example, we'd have heard about it via reputable sources. All other transport modes have a fairly clear route to practical alternative technologies. Rail electrification has been a mature technology for longer than most people have been alive; problems in the UK are principally those of management and/or cost, not limitations of available tech. It is entirely possible, technically, to build a rail system that is not dependent on more than a tiny fraction of liquid carbon fuels at point of use. Universal clean (at point of use) road transport is still a way off but is entirely forseeable over the next couple of decades given the technology we either currently have or can be realistically expected to develop from current research. Again, the question is no longer if, but when and how much. Biofuels might have a place as a temporary stopgap for those applications where electrics are still not quite there yet, such as heavy vehicles operating over long distances, but shouldn't be seen as a long-term solution, because they (probably) won't need to be. There is, of course, the unpalateable possibility that there simply isn't enough easily harvested energy around, from any source, renewable or not, to allow the levels of consumption we in the OECD now take for granted, and more and more of the developing world aspire to, without causing significant damage to the planet's ability to support 7 billion large predators.

For 7-core, trailer flex might work. Plenty of colour-coded cores and not too stiff. I concur that the loom out of a modern car is likely to be acceptably clean and made up of surprisingly thin wires. It's also practically worthless to a breaker so shouldn't cost more than a bit of beer money.

Traditionally, with several coats of shellac. The shellac,if well thinned, penetrates the surface to create what is almost a fibre-reinforced resin material that is surprisingly tough and resistant to damp.

I'm not sure if lack of bike space is anything new. I remember complaints back in the early 1980s that HSTs couldn't (or possibly that the staff wouldn't) carry bicycles.

And that's against a population that has probably getting on for doubled in the intervening 48 years.

As noted, I'm quite tolerant of most things but the lack of outside frames on things purporting to be 08s really jars. The frames and flycranks are such a key feature of the Gronk it's very, very hard to forgive their absence.

I must have low standards as I'm quite happy with severely compressed track layouts, settrack curves, 3 or 4 coach expresses, dimensionally inaccurate stock and a whole raft of other stuff that tends to be dismissed as toylike or, at best, outdated. However, even allowing for those compromises I do prefer purposeful operation and reasonably realistic driving. I can live without operational signals but think the trains should operate as if they were there. If signals are depicted, although I can accept considerable simplification and the sort of compromises forced by compression, they should be not be positioned overtly wrongly. Oh, and a supposedly working model should work. Unreliable locos and constantly derailing stock render the whole exercise a bit pointless IMHO.

Colin Binnie occurred to me just after I made my previous post. He was responsible for some fascinating stuff. However I'm not sure just how influential he really was, as I don't recall seeing that many of his ideas and techniques adopted all that widely. Great guy though.

No mention so far of DGs. Whilst I've no direct experience of them they appear to offer low(ish) cost, easy fitment to a variety of stock, delayed action and, perhaps crucially, a buffing action that makes their use on sharp curves a bit more feasible than other "scale" couplings. Fiddly to make, though.

My main objection to smoking related sweets was that they were all flamin' 'orrible. The white sweet cigarettes tasted like slightly sugary chalk, and the ricepaper wrapped chocolate ones (which came in a ciggy style pack IIRC) were, mercifully, 95% flavourless. I say mercifully because that remaining 5% really wasn't encouraging . Regarding smoking marketing tie-ins, I also remember a condom brand (possibly Virgin, or maybe Jiffy) marketing their product in a flip-top cigarette style box because it was perceived to be "cooler" than conventional packaging. That would have been 1986 or thereabouts.

Perhaps in the UK, but here in Oz it's alive and kicking for anything that looks to have been abandoned. A few years ago, when I was working in Canberra, I regularly walked past a latish model large Audi that had been in place so long that strata of notices had built up into a respectable 4mm mountain range of papier mache. I was particularly fascinated by the fact that someone's shopping was carefully placed on the back seat and there was a pair of obviously quite expensive sunglasses in the centre console. A Teutonic Marie Celeste of the National capital . I was most disappointed when the powers that be finally got around to moving it.

I remember at least some of those. Mind you, I also remember a Not The Nine O Clock News spoof one as well.

Would have thought so. However the plaster based fillers I've come across have been a bit stiff to reliably fill detail. Depending on the consistency of your ready mixed stuff you might need to wet it down a bit.

I seem to remember a series of somewhat cryptic ads for Silk Cut on billboards in what must have been about 1990. Id take issue with some of the labelling on that graph. Although cigarette advertising may have gone from the TV in 1965 ads for cigars and pipe tobacco were around well into the 1980s at least.

You can get some quite runny fillers which should sort the detail problem, and a polyester based filler (most of them) will set to a level of strength adequate for mould removal faster than plaster. Or should do anyway. I'm not sure how significant the difference would be though.