ejstubbs

I know it's not March any more, but I thought this fellow I encountered last weekend was behaving fairly madly:

(Feel free to mute the music if you find it too 😖)

Just as a follow-up to my posting on this thread back in 2021:

There has been a lot of new housebuilding going on in the Millerhill/Shawfair area since 2021.  A week or so ago I passed over the road bridge on the B6415/Old Craighall Road which crosses the line near Millerhill and it looked to me as if the track was even more overgrown than before, and even as if some might have been lifted.  If this current bout of rain ever stops I may consider taking another wander down there to see if anything is still left in situ.

Coming rather late to this discussion, the solution I was going to use on my layout (before progress was forced to come to a grinding halt ☹️) is as follows:

• I used 20mm x 6mm x 1.5mm N52 neodymium magnets*.  These have the north and south poles on the opposite flat faces rather than at the ends, and were used in pairs as outlined below.
• Track was laid on grey 1.5mm thick x 36mm wide closed-cell foam, with 24mm gaps left in the foam where uncoupling magnets were required.
• The gaps in the foam were filled with 24mm x 36mm rectangles of grey 60 thou** plastikard, with two 20mm x 6mm cutouts to hold the magnets , with a 6mm gap between them, as per this photo of one that was in the process of being constructed:

• The magnets were slotted into the cutouts, one with its north pole facing up, the other with its south pole facing up, and the track was laid over the top.  The magnets, being aligned with the rails, created the magnetic field going north-south between the two rails as required to activate the Kadee trip pins.
• Once the track was ballasted ballasted the magnets were more or less invisible (a dab of grey paint might have helped to make them even more camouflaged but I didn't think of that until later).  I would have marked their position with suitable bits of trackside clutter/vegetation but things hadn't progressed to that stage before all work had to be halted.

I devised this solution after a fair bit of experimentation with magnet sizes, strengths and so forth***, and testing with the above configuration of magnets under the track indicated that it would have been reliable in use if only other things had not intervened...

*  From Guy's Magnets - unfortunately they are showing as out of stock on that web site at the moment, so some shopping around might be needed if anyone decides that they'd like to have a go at this solution themselves.  A quick google suggests that this size is fairly widely available in lower strengths.  My testing was done with N52 strength magnets so I don't know whether N42 or N35 magnets would or wouldn't work as well.

** i.e. 1.5mm as near as makes no odds.  You can see from the slighty skew-wiff cutout photo that absolute precision was not regarded as a requirement!

*** Anyone want a collection of assorted shapes and sizes of neodymium magnets?  No, thought not...

This thread having risen from the dead once more thanks to Johann Marsbar, I went on a wee stravaig around t'Internet and found this page about the layout on the Midland Railway Study Centre web site:

https://midlandrailwaystudycentre.org.uk/model/index.htm

This appears to date from ~2015, going by the names of the .jpg photos in the "extensive gallery" linked from that page.  They aren't kidding when they describe it as "extensive" either: as well as the 'front of house' there are photos of the operating station and control panel, the storage sidings and even the baseboard supports (dexion, as mentioned earlier in this thread I think).  I rather like the approaching bad weather on the backscene painting, which evokes nostalgic memories of childhood outings in the Peak District...

There is even a video on YouTube of the layout in operation:

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

the docks were often situated in quite odd places, even spanning point-work

An example which survives today being the cattle dock at Highley on the SVR:

https://glostransporthistory.visit-gloucestershire.co.uk/images/SVR_2013_07_Highley station_cattle.jpg

I think such an arrangement might not suit some modellers, who perhaps would prefer somewhere out of the way where they can 'park' their cattle wagon (however non-prototypical that might be) rather than having to run complicated shunt manoeuvres to simulate loading and unloading cattle from a dock which is 'in the way' of other movements within the station.  Not everyone is a fan of "operational interest" to that degree.  Of course it doesn't help that it is probably next to impossible to model the actual process of loading and unloading of cattle (though it wouldn't surprise me if some has had a go at doing so).

Hence, I suspect, the somewhat cliched shortish siding serving a both cattle dock and an end loading dock, providing a convenient place to park a couple of single-purpose wagons out of the way of the to and fro of more general purpose freight stock.   Of course, just because it's a bit of a cliche that doesn't mean that it never existed in the prototype (buses have been known to pass over railways on bridges, after all!)  but at may be that such arrangements occur more frequently in models - and perhaps more especially track plans - of fictional locations than was actually the case in real life.

There is a standard which defines the dimensions of the NEM pocket, and its height.  Kadee make their NEM couplings to comply with that standard.  As 96701 says, some British manufacturers - Bachmann particularly - failed to follow that standard in the past, specifically with regard to the height of the NEM pocket.  Those errors have since been rectified in newer releases but that's little comfort to someone who has bought one of the older models with an incorrectly positioned NEM pocket, either as a new item from a retailer, or second-hand.  Bachmann actually produced their 'cranked' tension-lock NEM couplings to help solve the problem - but since it was a problem that they had created in the first place, that's really the least that one would have expected a half-way responsible manufacturer to do.

Kadee aren't ever likely to produce cranked NEM couplers because 99.99999999% of the models that their products are designed for - bearing in mind that Kadee is a US company which primarily targets the US model railway market - have the NEM pocket in the right place as laid down by the standard.

Bottom line: Kadee don't make a NEM coupling that would solve the problem of the incorrectly positioned NEM pocket on your Bachmann  wagon.  Possible solutions include:

• Make a cranked Kadee NEM coupling by 'frankensteining' the head of a Kadee NEM coupling onto the 'tail' of a Bachmann cranked NEM tension lock coupling.  I know some RMWebbers have claimed to have done this but personally I would never fully trust the glued joint.
• Reposition the NEM pocket on your wagon to the correct height, possibly by making use of the Parkside coupling mounting blocks.  These have a cutout to accommodate the fishtail on the back end of the Bachmann NEM pocket.  All you have to do is work out where the coupling mounting block needs to be to put the NEM pocket at the correct height, which will likely involve using some plasticard packing between the mounting block and the wagon chassis, once you've removed the original Bachmann mounting block.
• Discard the Bachmann mounting block and NEM pocket and fit Kadee gear boxes to the wagon chassis.  You can then choose a Kadee coupling from full range of height and length combinations they offer for gear box mounted couplings (my preference is the #14n 'whisker' coupling series).  The downside to this is that if there's only one item of rolling stock in your fleet that has its NEM pocket at the wrong height then it can work out quick expensive, both in terms of getting equipped to fit the gear boxes, and then sourcing different height and length combinations of coupling until you find the one that's right for that particular wagon.  The upside is that, when you've been through the process once you'll be much better prepared to do it again if/when you run into a similar problem in the future (e.g. if you ever take a fancy to a wagon which has moulded or screw-on TLCs).

Other more bodged solutions are available.  Judicious use of the search function should turn up lots of Kadee-related threads in which this and similar problems are discussed ad even more nauseam than the above diatribe.

15 hours ago, uax6 said:

Charge-discharge working was certainly used for large exchanges that were commissioned here in the UK up until the mid '60's. With the reliability that the National Grid brought to the electricity supply, the GPO saw savings in only equipping each exchange with one battery, which was float charged (at -50v dc for Strowger), the battery  being big enough to cope with the full exchange load for some time (was it a day? I can't remember now). They also had standby generator sets, that could maintain the 240V mains supply in case of failure too.

One financial services customer I worked with back in the 1990s, which shall remain nameless, ran their data centre in central London on the diesel generators 24x7, with the National Grid as backup (I assume there must have been batteries somewhere in the mix as well).  They probably did explain the rationale behind that to me, but that information is no lost in the mists of time.  I suspect that wouldn't be allowed these days.

Another company that I worked for a decade or so later had a diesel generator that cut in automatically when the grid supply failed, with a battery UPS to cover the switchover time.  The generator was on the roof of the building and I remember a couple of times when we had power failures the whole IT team sat poised with bated breath until we heard the generator fire up!  Having the gennie on the roof was actually less than ideal, as they found out when the substation in the building's car park blew up and the building was without power for several days.  The only way to keep the generator supplied with fuel was to manually carry diesel up the stairs in jerry cans, since the lift wasn't working - and wasn't certified for carrying hazardous substance even if it had been!  They invested in a proper disaster recovery site shortly after that experience...

Returning briefly to one of the questions in the OP: in the recent episode of Great Coastal Railway Journeys in which Michael Portillo visited Exeter, he clearly pronounced "clerestory" as cle-rest-ory in his voiceover to the segment in which he visited Exeter cathedral, when he was up on the roof with one of the restoration team.  I'm not saying that I regard that as firm evidence in favour of that pronunciation, I just thought I'd mention it...
 

(ISTR there was a bit of a hoo-ha on here a while back about his pronunciation of Alnmouth!)

Oops, I boobed, and forgot to update my layers selection on Rail Map Online.  So, the Skye Marble Railway is on it (I thought I'd remembered seeing it there before) as is the Ord Quartzite Quarry Railway:

(Although maybe it wasn't when @KeithMacdonald started this thread, and Matthew saw it and rushed to add it!)

Most of the other ones in Simms' book are also shown, apart from the sawmill railways at Broadford and Portree - both of which were very short (15m in the case of Broadford, 18m at Portree) - and the Uig pier railway which, if it actually ran the length of the pier as extended in 1894 as Simms seems to suggest, would have been about 300m long.

Apologies for any aspersions inadvertently cast.

1 hour ago, KeithMacdonald said:

The quarry might be the site next to the sheepfold close to the river.

The Ord Quartzite Quarry Railway is mentioned in Railways of Skye and Raasay by Wilfrid F. Simms.  The map in that publication does indeed show "animal pens" on the other side of the road from the quarry.  The OS grid reference for the quarry is NG 62625 12643.  It is visible on this Google Maps aerial view; the red-roofed building to the north-west is described in the book as a "combined office, tool and staff room" for the quarry, and as "now in good order having recently been repainted by the local farmer" (bear in mind that the book was published in 1999 - though the building does still look in decent enough nick on Google Street View).

I'm not all that surprised that this railway didn't make it on to Rail Map Online, given that it was only 120 yards long (per the above reference) - basically running from the back of the quarry to the roadside.  Simms notes that: "Unfortunately records differ as to the exact gauge of the railway," but he seems to have found sufficient evidence* to say with some confidence that the railway was 2ft gauge.

In fact Simms' book lists eleven railways on Skye and two on Raasay, none of which appear on Rail Map Online.  The best known is probably the Skye Marble Railway, clear remnants of which can easily be found alongside the road from Broadford to Torrin, and apparently even in Broadford itself, from where the stone was shipped to its final destination(s) by sea.  Simms' book includes two photographs of that area from the 1970s, one showing one of the the brick support piers for the girder bridge that used to carry the railway over the Broadford River, and another of rails inset into the cobbles of the New Pier at Corry.  Whether either of these features can still be seen today I'm not sure (I did go looking for them once, but without any real success - though whether that was because they are no longer there, or because my search was somewhat cursory due to the utterly foul weather on the day, I don't know).  There are still marble quarries being actively worked in Torrin, but all the stone is carried out by road these days.

* Including, a wagon visible at low tide off Ord beach, a photo of which is in the book, and of which he writes: "Exactly how the truck came to end up here is a matter for conjecture, although the area near the river bridge appears to be composed of industrial backfill".

You're right that true PAYG is very difficult to find; in fact the last time I looked it did seem to be completely impossible.  But £10 a month for pseudo-PAYG?  My rolling contract gives me unlimited calls and texts and 14GB of data each month for £7.50.  I don't get anywhere close to those limits with my normal usage but it's still cheaper than the PAYG option so who cares?  (Oh, and I get free roaming within the EU as well, which comes in handy every now and then - especially since it would be a bit difficult to use my landline when I'm out of the country...) 

Michele Alboreto's Minardi shed its right rear wheel on leaving the pits after its second stop.  Two Ferrari mechanics and two Lotus mechanics were hit by the errant wheel and required hospital treatment.

More seriously, and oft-overlooked, Rubens Barichello had a fairly major crash at the Variante Bassa during the first qualifying session on the Friday.  He swallowed his tongue in the accident but Dr Sid Watkins managed to restore his airway before he was taken to hospital.  He also suffered a sprained wrist and a broken nose, and did not take part in later qualifying, or the race.

There were also minor injuries to a police officer and eight spectators from flying debris resulting from the collision at the start of the race between Pedro Lamy's Lotus and JJ Lehto's stalled Benetton.  That was the incident which led to the ridiculously inadequate safety car (an Opel Vectra, more of a repmobile than a high performance car suitable for piloting a pack of F1 cars around a circuit - one wonders whether there might have been money in the form of sponsorship involved in that choice) being deployed, the slow pace of which caused tyre temperatures on the race cars to fall - which in turn meant that the tyre pressures dropped - either or both of which may have been a contributory factor in Senna's loss of control, over and above the primary factor of the failure in his car's steering column.

1 hour ago, St Enodoc said:

Jaycar don't seem to offer an (ON)-OFF-(ON) switch

Miniature  (ON)-OFF-(ON) toggle switches are pretty easy to find elsewhere, though, even/especially the bay of e.  You just need to ensure that the contact rating is adequate for the intended purpose.

18 hours ago, brossard said:

However, the relay only does one turnout so that seems expensive to me.

The GM500 can switch the polarity of two turnouts at once, so would work well e.g. for a crossover where the two point motors would be 'fired' off a single pulse from the CDU.  See the second diagram in this article on the GM website.

On 28/03/2024 at 15:57, Ozexpatriate said:

Earlier this thread had illustrations of dolphins around the Forth Road bridge. The adjacent newer (?) Queensferry Crossing has undefended piers (though the centre pier has a small caisson surrounding it).

The Queensferry Crossing is indeed newer than the Forth Road Bridge.  It was opened in 2017, fifty-three years after the Forth Road Bridge.  I was one of 50,000 granted the privilege of walking over it on the weekend before it opened to traffic:

As it's a motorway class road, that would be illegal now.  (Pedestrians can still cross the firth using the footways on the Forth Road Bridge.)

The Forth Bridges web site has this to say about the protection of the Queensferry Crossing:

Quote

Protection from potential ship impacts was carefully considered during the design of the Queensferry Crossing. The main shipping channel is between the south and centre towers, so the south tower and the nearest south approach viaduct pier had additional strengthening incorporated during the construction process. The centre tower is founded on Beamer Rock, and this acts as a natural protection.

You can see Beamer Rock in this "firthview" photo from Google Maps.  (I would note that Google Maps' aerial view of the Queensferry Crossing seems to be somewhat out of date: if you turn off labels it looks very much as if there is still construction work being carried out on the bridge decks, and around Beamer Rock.  The photo seems to have been taken when the tide was a fair way in, going by how much of the South Queensferry foreshore is covered, so there might not have been much of Beamer Rock exposed anyway.)

Beamer Rock is also shown on the 1:25,000 OS map - which in fact also shows the dolphins protecting the piers of Forth Road Bridge:

On 25/04/2024 at 10:37, PhilJ W said:

Southend pier has been cut several times.

I think Ozexpatriate meant bridge piers, not pleasure piers.  (That said, Southend Pier is the longest pleasure pier in the world so potentially is a greater risk of being hit by seagoing vessels than other such.)

On 25/04/2024 at 10:08, Brian said:

Do not connect two solenoid motors together (in parallel) linking from first motor to second

Far be it from me to quibble with the author of The Newcomer's Guide to Model Railways and owner of this immeasurably useful web site, but if you mean wired from the CDU (via the switch) to the first solenoid, then from the first solenoid to the second, then back to the CDU, then surely that's in series, not parallel?  Or is my aged brain becoming even more addled than I realised?

On 25/04/2024 at 10:08, Brian said:

Best is to run wires from the switch position to each motor

That's what I would call parallel wiring.

34 minutes ago, Hogan22 said:

im not sure as to the specifics of the switches I’m using (non locking sprung vs locking switches) the switch doesn’t spring back to centre off after switching if that’s what you mean 🤷‍♂️

 

the switches I’m using are these:

https://www.jaycar.com.au/spdt-centre-off-miniature-toggle-switch-solder-tag/p/ST0336?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIrc62gKzahQMVPmoPAh062Q4BEAQYAiABEgIylPD_BwE

Those are normal SPDT switches.  If using them for point motors you'll have to remember to re-centre the toggle after every point activation.  As DCB said above, leaving just one point switch in either of the non-centre positions will prevent the CDU from charging.  For solenoid point motors I would have thought that it's always better to use what are called momentary toggle switches, which return to the centre position automatically when you take your finger off the toggle.  These are also sometimes described as (ON)-OFF-(ON) switches, where the brackets indicate that the toggle does not 'latch' in those positions.  

14 hours ago, melmerby said:

IMHO they have totally broken it.

How do I complain?

Click on the three horizontal lines (aka "hamburger") icon at the top left of the YouTube web page and scroll down to the bottom of the pop-out menu and you should see the option circled below:

22 hours ago, kevinlms said:

No, it doesn't work on Google Maps, you only get the option of adding destinations in the 'Leave Now' option. Others are only a starting and end point.

As soon as you add a second destination, all the timing options are removed and it just gives the end-to-end journey time (presumably on a 'Leave Now' basis, though it doesn't say that).  This is for Google Maps in Safari on a Mac.  In Chrome on the Mac it doesn't offer any timing options at all.  So Google's own web app is less functional in Google's own browser than Apple's?  Go figure.

The same goes for the Google Maps app on Android.  How peculiar.

21 hours ago, C126 said:

Had one of these calls Saturday, which was dead and then rang off when I answered.  The Bristol number (I do not have it with me, alas) is listed as a fraud site on the www.  I enjoy repeating, "From where did you get this number?"

This was likely an autodialled call.  They are programmed to call randomly generated telephone numbers (so they don't actually "get" your number from anywhere, they just get a "hit" every so often) and if it's answered but they get silence or what sounds like an answering machine, they hang up.

A call blocker phone stops these, and all other spam calls, dead in their tracks.  It lets through calls from numbers in the telephone electronic phone book, but calls from an unrecognised number are directed to an automated "concierge", which screens the call for you and puts it through once the caller has said who they are or who they are calling from.  This stops autodialler calls, since the autodialler interprets the "concierge" as an answerphone, and hangs up.  You never even know that the call was made.  All you need is to have caller ID on your line - which I believe is a no-cost feature bundled with most if not all landline providers these days - and a call blocker phone which is a one-off cost.

As for wasting their time in relation for them wasting yours, that really is cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Just hang up.

7 hours ago, Captain Cuttle said:

Now if we prefer to use RM we have no choice but to use Tracked 24/48 which with the 48 service can take longer but with compensation upto £150 is better suited plus i can print it and pay at home so less time in the Post Office.

Best not to go near a Post Office with RM Tracked 24 and 48 I think. Apart from anything else, it costs extra to drop a Tracked package off at a Post Office (16p it would have been for the last small parcel I sent). If you're able to wait in, you can get it collected from your home address for free - they'll even bring the address label ready printed off you can't be bothered to fit that yourself. Otherwise drop it off at a local RM delivery office, or in one of their parcel post boxes (locations of which they give on their web site when you buy the postage).

I'm with andyman regarding the reliability of the Tracked 48 service: not had a problem with it to date.

I never buy postage through eBay; apart from anything else, in my experience it's poor to unusable for selecting anything more than the base level for a given service. I much prefer to buy postage direct from RM online.

eBay don't 'encrypt' the buyer's address, they just insert a code of their own part way through. As that's just for their own admin purposes, you don't need it if you aren't buying the postage from them. I just take the postcode they give you and feed it in to RM's reverse postcode lookup tool to confirm the buyer's postal address. It's quite common for the official postal address that RM have on file to be subtly different from that given by eBay - likely due to buyers not really knowing their own postal address properly, and eBay not checking. Using the official address as known to RM reduces the risk of the item going astray.

1 hour ago, 009 micro modeller said:

I’m sure I read somewhere a few years ago about sellers removing stuff from EBay (ending the listing) and selling for cash to local buyers who had messaged them, or something similar, for similar reasons. I suppose for an in-person exchange you could take a photo of yourself handing over the cash in exchange for the items, though I’m not sure this would satisfy EBay etc. if there was a fraudulent complaint.

If the seller removed the listing from eBay and sold the item as a private transaction then neither party would be able to claim redress, fraudulently or otherwise, through eBay.  eBay is very clear about this in its Ts & Cs, and its guidance to sellers and buyers: do the deal outwith eBay and you're on your own.

What you may be thinking of is the scam whereby a buyer completes the purchase on eBay paying by PayPal or, more likely these days, directly through eBay, but requesting collection in person.  Having collected the item, the buyer then files a non-delivery claim and very likely gets their money back (given that eBay tends to favour the buyer in most disputes).  To avoid this, sellers can (a) decline/not offer collection in person, or (b) insist on cash on collection.  Taking option (b) means that eBay isn't involved in the financial side of the transaction, so the buyer can't fraudulently claim the money back from them.  The seller and/or buyer could still gather photographic evidence of the in-person transaction - or maybe get a signature on a "received with thanks from...in payment for..." chitty - just in case the other party decides to try something funny.  This is a [sadly not so] rare example where using cash is actually preferable to using electronic payment mechanisms.

I have in the past refunded a buyer's PayPal payment precisely because they asked to collected the item in person.  The request for collection in person was perfectly reasonable since they were quite local, but I still insisted on cash payment (as I had stated in the listing) and in that case they were happy to comply.

On 14/03/2024 at 06:49, Wheatley said:

For further examples see the Victorian interpretation of an inguanadon with the thumbspike on its nose (its in a park somewhere)

It's in Crystal Palace Park - there's actually two of them.  The mistake was made by Gideon Mantell, the discoverer of the first, incomplete, iguanodon fossils.  In his defence, he was working with the specimens he had at the time; it was only when more complete specimens were found later that the mistake was recognised.  Bear in mind that he made his first skeletal reconstruction in 1834, and the Crystal Palace iguanodons, which were built nearly 20 years later, were still constructed with the erroneous nose spike or horn which they retain to this day*.

What's probably more egregiously wrong about the Crystal Palace iguanodons is that they are depicted as heavy, pachyderm-like creatures, contrary to what Mantell had worked out about them five years earlier.  This error was based on the views of another paleontologist Richard Owen, who still clung to creationist ideas and believed that the iguanodon was fundamentally mammalian, and could not have "transmuted" from a reptilian form into modern mammal-like species.   (Owen became the Superintendent of the natural history departments of the British Museum in 1856, which gained their own premises in 1880 in what we now know as the Natural History Museum.  His rather forbidding statue stood at the midway point of the main staircase until 2009, when it was replaced by a statue of Charles Darwin having a nice sit down - but no cup of tea 🙁.  Owen was widely regarded as being not a very nice person, to put it mildly.)

* They were retained during the 2001 renovation programme, thankfully, preserving the original mistake.  All the models in the Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park were kept as as close to original condition during the renovations as was practically possible, given the state of deterioration of some of them.  Some had actually gone missing, and had to replaced with fibre-glass replicas.  As of 2007 the site is Grade I listed, and quite right too.  When I was a nipper and my family lived in Bromley, we used to visit the dinosaurs quite regularly.  They were looking pretty care-worn even back then.  I was very pleased to find them lovingly restored when I visited the park again in the early 2000s, more than 40 years after I'd last been there, despite it being a bitingly cold day (we eventually retired to the nearby indoor cafe for a restorative cuppa and fish finger sandwiches - the latter being a delicacy I had not previously experienced but which proved to be eminently sustaining in such weather)..

2 hours ago, Andrew P said:

More than likely he just told a member of staff to do their job properly, and that person got offended, and so complained that they had been told off.

And you know this how, exactly?

Quote

No information about the female employee involved has been made public nor have any details of the complaint.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/09/christian-horner-makes-his-case-against-controlling-behaviour-claims

Until more information emerges, I'd suggest that you desist from uninformed speculation about a potentially sensitive subject.

3 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I think they've made a general business decision to change from the £1 maximum fee to these percentage offers, so that's not related to your having sold something expensive.

Hmm, not entirely convinced.  My wife was still getting the maximum £1 selling fee offers long - as in at least a year - after my original eBay account was only receiving the 80% off selling fees offer.  That's partly why I set up my second eBay account, and lo and behold I got the maximum £1 selling fees offer almost straight away.  Then when the first thing I sold (in May last year) meant that they lost out on nearly £40 of commission, no more maximum £1 selling fees offers for me.  Yet my wife was still getting them in October and November last year i.e. five to six months later*.

Of course it's possible that the maximum £1 selling fees offers stopped for good in November, but nonetheless I'm pretty sure they do profile users' selling history as a guide of which selling fee offers to make to whom.

* Since when she has had no selling fee offers at all, and of my two accounts only the new one has had the 80% offer.  Looks like they went all-in in the run up to Christmas and are now in bit of a cooling down period.