ejstubbs

According to some, that way lies damnation and torment in a pit of eternal poor running. Or something... I use isoprop a lot as a general degreaser, e.g. preparing a surface for adhesives, and first-port-of-call gunge remover. As I say, there is some stuff it won't shift (and very likely a lot more that I've not yet encountered). In the case of jar label glue, it seems to soften it a bit but not actually dissolve it, which means when you give it a rub it just spreads a thin layer of the sticky stuff all over the place. Not good. The only stuff I've got at home that reliably removes recalcitrant jar label glue is a bottle of Homebase Value Paint Brush Cleaner that is so old I can't even remember when I bought it, and I've now only got about a quarter of it left. It used to be blue, but has lost almost all its colour now. I've no idea what's in it, so when it does eventually run out I'll probably have to resort to experimenting with different brands of "blue stuff that's sold for cleaning paint brushes" to see if any of those do the job. It leaves a bit of an oily residue but that's easily removed with washing up liquid. It's quite smelly, though, so I usually have to throw any cloths, rags or paper towels I've been using straight in the wheelie bin before they stink the garage out. None of which addresses the core of the issue which is: why do some manufacturers of fruit-based preserves feel it necessary to attach the labels to their jars with what appears to be military grade, nuclear-proof glue that can only be removed using no doubt carcinogenic concoctions of aromatic hydrocarbons? What exactly is wrong with a label that will come off cleanly after a few minutes soaking in hot water?

Well that's confusing - The Range's web site says it comes in 250ml bottles @ £7.99 - but then says it's £2.72 per 100ml, which would make 250ml only £6.80! Someone's got their sums wrong... Still cheaper than Hobbycraft's £10 for 250ml of the "professional" Daler-Rowney stuff, though, so thanks for the pointer. Isopropanol = isopropyl alcohol = IPA. It's very diluted when used as a wetting agent. Does meths (aka "denatured alcohol i.e. ethanol with toxic stuff added to it to put you off drinking it) attack acrylic paints? I believe - but am very open to being proven wrong* - that isoprop is what the art restorers on programmes like Britain's Lost Masterpieces and The Repair Shop mean when they talk about using a "mild solvent" - it certainly won't shift a lot of the types of goo left behind on jars when you soak the labels off (SWMBO does a lot of jam making...) This rather handy infographic suggests that isoprop is indeed a milder solvent than ethanol/denatured alcohol/meths - though how either product interacts with specific materials such as acrylic paint may well be another matter: (Note also the rather interesting comment about isoprop being better as a contact cleaner than denatured alcohol.) * Put it this way: I'm not planning to take a bottle of isoprop to the family Rembrandt...even if the family had a Rembrandt, which it doesn't.

Thanks all for your suggestions. I already have a bottle of Brass Black so I've ordered some brass wire. Regarding the diameter: 0.6mm is what I measured the two remaining sand pipes at, and I'd prefer to keep the look of the thing vaguely consistent. It's only a Hornby model, albeit a supposedly "super detail" one; I've done nothing to it apart from sorting out the pickups that had gone a bit haywire. I've looked in to florists/florist/floral wire and, frankly, there seem to me to be at least a couple of issues. Firstly, it seems to be difficult to be sure what you're actually getting - apparently it can be stainless steel, aluminium or iron (presumably 'soft iron') but most retailers don't seem to bother saying what their particular product is. OK for flower arranging I guess, when you don't expect the thing to have to last too long, but for a model I'd prefer to know what I'm getting, like I do when I buy from Eileen's and their ilk, or even eBay sellers. On top of that, florists/florist/floral wire seems to be sold in quantities rather greater than I am ever likely to need. It's not as if it works out significantly cheaper per metre than wire of a known material - and even if it did there's no saving in paying more in total for more than I need versus paying less in total, albeit perhaps slightly more per metre, for the amount that I do actually do need. Bottom line: I prefer to stick with known materials in the right quantities. Others may feel differently, and that's fine too.

Having had persistent issues with the pickups on my Hornby Fowler 2-6-4T (see also this thread - not mine, but my experience was similar, although my solution was different) I replaced the lot - chassis bottom plate, pickups and keeper plate - using the Hornby X9182 spare parts pack for this loco. Unfortunately I failed to notice that the chassis bottom plate and keeper plate as supplied in the spares pack did not include sand pipes (there is pair of sand pipes on each of those parts on the original model), and of course by the time I did notice it, I'd thrown the original parts away and couldn't recover the original sand pipes. I've measured the two remaining sand pipes on the model and they appear to be 0.6mm in diameter. I think I can fairly readily source wirre of the correct diameter from places such as Eileen's Emporium and the like, but what would be the best type of wire to use? Eileen's seems to offer piano wire, brass wire, nickel silver wire, soft iron wire and many more types besides. I can imagine that piano wire might be a bit of a mare to shape accurately, whereas soft iron wire might be rather too prone to getting bent out of shape. So which type would folks recommended for this job? Of course this problem wouldn't arise if the spare parts pack from Hornby actually contained all the necessary replacement parts...

Doesn't meths have a purple dye as part of its formulation? I'm pretty sure that isopropanol will do the same job i.e. reducing the surface tension (I've seen recipes for home-made screnwash that use isopropanol for that purpose) and aiding flow amongst the ballast granules, and it's colourless.

I think I've read this suggestion elsewhere - IIRC the thought was that a tube of matt medium diluted to same consistency as scenic cement worked out cheaper (you used to be able to buy matte medium quite cheap from The Works but they don't seem to do it any more). Some folks don't like the way that PVA sets rock hard and transmits the vibrations of the trains' movements to the baseboard, where they are then amplified. I don't know whether scenic cement/matt medium is any better in this regard. I know that some recommend diluted Copydex as an alternative, which cures to a less rigid finish and dampens the 'drumming' a bit. On the other hand, other suggest that it has a disadvantage in that it goes off/discolours over time.

I think/hope you mean West Hill Wagon Works i.e. the Hunt couplings that have been referred to elsewhere in this thread. When I first read your post I thought for a moment that someone had come up with yet another coupling that was incompatible with everyone else's - just what we need!

Bl00dy hell, I think I was at that one, too! On my Aprilia Pegaso, no less - I still have a photo of me just as I was setting my front wheel down after cresting the Mountain. Two years later I traded it in for a VFR, which I still have.

I think Rouen was a better circuit than Reims, having rather more - and more interesting - corners, and some fairly dramatic changes of elevation. The other one from that era was Charade which looks bonkers. Dijon-Prenois looks fairly dull on paper but did have the benefit of being a bit uppy-downy, and saw some good racing e.g. Villeneuve vs Arnoux in 1979 (gotta love Villeneuve drifting his flat-12 Ferrari sideways out of La Combe - I thought ground effect didn't work properly if you were going sideways?) Paul Ricard was never that great, then they made it worse...

Is it just me, or is it a bit odd that they should apparently spend so much time and effort looking after an aircraft that crashed due to pilot error and all the crew survived with only one relatively minor injury? It's not as if it could reasonably be designated as a war grave (in the UK at least, such sites are not open for leisure diving AFAIK). I'm also surprised that no-one seems to have worried too much about pollution of the drinking water by leaking fluids and decomposing materials on the wreck. AFAICS it's basically military litter, and I struggle to understand how it can be regarded as a particularly "historic place".

On some of the other (not model railway related) forums that I frequent the mods are somewhat less tolerant than Andy and his cohort. The tone of some of the complaints that have been posted on this thread would have resulted, on those other forums, in the users being summarily barred from the forum (and if they had paid for a premium level service, having their money refunded). IMO we should consider ourselves very fortunate to have this forum, and to have it managed by people who work hard to keep it running against sometimes insuperable odds and who seem prepared to put up with sometimes unreasonable levels of aggravation from their users and who only very occasionally - and quite understandably - feel the need to resort to a slightly 'vinegary' response. I just hope that their management understand the great job they are doing, and appreciate their efforts as much as the majority of us users do.

Tell that to @AY Mod

If this farrago - and half the other things that you mention in that post - is even close to true (and I have no reason to believe that it isn't) then all I can say is how depressing it is to find such petty, stupid and disgracefully self-interested behaviour being exhibited by people whom one might otherwise regard with a degree of respect due to their experience, knowledge and expertise in the subject. This kind of thing is far from unknown in other fields as well (data communications protocols, and OSI in particular, being one that I have had experience of in the past - though my memories of the painful details have thankfully faded somewhat over the intervening years).

The classic example of precision vs accuracy!

Post WW2 my Dad used to work at the Solid Fuel Research Station in Greenwich, researching things like improving the efficiency of solid fuel stoves. The gas works was a handy source of coke, along with the odd spare sack of coal, for their research. He used to relate the story of a time when a gleaming white cruise ship came up the river past their lab and moored for a couple of days in the Pool of London. Two days later a very grey-looking ship, apparently of an identical design, was seen heading downriver out to sea... (He reckoned it was actually the lead in the paint that reacted with something or things in air - perhaps sulphur fumes?)

Amber isn't necessarily - or even primarily - an indicator of scarcity: it's considerably more nuanced than that: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/uk-conservation-status-explained/. Primarily it's to do with long-term or recent trends in numbers of individuals or breeding pairs, although things like habitat loss or highly localised breeding sites also factor. As an example, the House Sparrow is on the red list, although there are still 5.3 million breeding pairs of them in the UK so it's hardly "scarce". The red status is due to the ~70% in breeding numbers since 1975: The Grey Wagtail had a sharp decline in the late 1970s but has been bobbing up and down a bit since then, although recently it has been on a noticeable downward trend: The number of species on the UK red list has doubled in the last 25 years. It now stands at 70, which is roughly one on eight of the 570-odd species on the "British List" maintained by the British Ornithologists Union (which includes rare visitors and "accidentals" - some of which have been seen in the wild in the UK just once - as well as the familiar resident and migratory species). The above graphs are from the BTO Birdtrends web site. I find that, although the RSPB web site is good for quick reference information, the BTO is better for in-depth data. The BTO also runs training courses in bird ID and survey methods, so that you can help contribute to their store of data (it also publishes some useful bird ID videos on YouTube to help with that). I'm going to be attending one of their virtual songbird ID courses from next week, as a matter of fact, and going on one of their field training courses soon after that (you don't have to be a BTO member to sign up for these). As a member of both the RSPNB and the BTO, the way I look at it is that the RSPB is primarily an organisation that campaigns for, raises funds for and actively pursues conservation activities for the benefit of birds and other wildlife, while the BTO is more of a scientific data and information gathering organisation, with both professional and 'citizen' scientists on its roster. The BTO collaborates and shares data with other similar organisations beyond the UK, and works with organisations like the RSPB to help inform their conservation work. The BTO isn't quite as 'slick' as the RSPB in its presentation - that's scientists for you - but it nonetheless performs extremely valuable work and is a virtually inexhaustible information source if you're a serious bird geek.

Grey Wagtails aren't all that rare: we certainly see a fair number on river walks around here, although to be fair we are in the right part of the country for them. The RSPB does say that their distribution within the UK varies according to the season: "Scarce in central and eastern England in summer and from upland areas in winter" is what their web site says. It's true that there are significantly fewer breeding pairs in the UK than there are pied wagtails, though. The least common UK wagtail is the yellow wagtail, which people often claim to have seen when in fact it was a grey wagtail, which also has quite a lot of yellow on it, as you observed.

There some rather optimistic exaggeration in that thread, IMO: "...in the age of steam, there would always be at least a couple of Clydesdale or Shire horses around the depot that could pull the wagons around." Yeah, right. The responses in this past RMWeb thread seem to be helpfully considered and nuanced: I suspect that the Stationmaster's initial answer in that thread sums up the situation up fairly well: I guess if you're modelling a real location then the presence of a prohibition sign would be a strong clue as to the operational rules in effect there. (Though there could equally well have been staff who believed that "rules are made to be broken"!)

As I suggested before: given the effort they apparently put in to making the physical surroundings in which the action takes place reasonably convincing - leaving aside whether the actual storylines are even remotely realistic or believable - it seems to be uncharacteristically sloppy to make such a howler with the railway scene. Then again, given the very much "they all lived happily ever after" ending of the episode in question - and that it was the last episode of the current series - I suspect that there will be no more series, so perhaps the production team was just getting a bit demob happy towards the end.

Except that Grantchester never had a station so that would have been historically inaccurate as well! There was Lord's Bridge station where the Varsity Line crossed the A603 - where the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (which of course uses part of the route of the Varsity Line) is now - but Cambridge station is actually marginally closer by road from Grantchester than that. One reason for that is because the University didn't want the station to be too close to the city centre - allegedly because, amongst other things, it might encourage the students to spend too much time away from their studies in the fleshpots of the Great Wen. It's roughly 50 miles from Elstree to Chinnor vs 40-odd from Cambridge to Peterborough - though heading in the wrong direction I guess, if you're starting from or heading back to Elstree. Then again, an additional 80 miles to go to Peterborough from Cambridge and back vs a 100 mile round trip to Chinnor doesn't make it sound like an overwelmingly convincing factor. But suspect you're right that the apparent convenience of - and likely familiarity with - Chinnor might well have been influential in the rather unfortunate choice of filming location.

The location sequences in Grantchester are mostly filmed in the places where the action is supposed to take place i.e. Grantchester & Cambridge. There are a good few preserved lines within a reasonable distance of Cambridge that aren't yet another homage to the bucolic GWR branch line. The Nene Valley Railway is only 40-odd miles away (half the distance from Cambridge cf the Chinnor and Princes Risborough railway, which was the location actually used) and is used a lot for filming - its web site actively solicits such business. Given that the series is set in the mid to late 1950s they don't need - in fact should actively be avoiding - a pre-nationalisation "feel" (the pannier was carrying its pre-nationalisation number) and it should not be beyond the wit of man to find a preserved railway in that general part of the country that could rustle up a reasonably appropriate loco and more than just a couple of carriages. That scene did make me laugh, it was such a ridiculous choice of location. Of course one doesn't know all the constraints within which the production team had to work but a pannier tank in what looked like little more than a sleepy village did rather smack of laziness on the part of the locations team, along the lines of "this is where we go if we need a steam train". It could be that the location filming in Grantchester and Cambridge is so cheap* that the general location filming budget couldn't stretch to paying for time on one of the slightly less "twee" heritage railways. Or maybe the C&PRR is just handily close to where Kudos Productions is actually based? About as much less obvious as "Inverness Midland" or "Norwich Caledonian", I'd say (from some of the comments on here I get the impression that a fair number of folks don't have much of an idea where Cambridge actually is). And, as I pointed out above, there hadn't been a GWR for roughly a decade in the time that Grantchester is set. It seems a shame, given the apparent care that they seem to take over things like the cars and motorcycles that appear in the programme**, that they couldn't have put a little more effort in to making the railway scene slightly less ridiculous. * Though the colleges can be quite sniffy about letting film companies inside their walls. For the filming of "Chariots of Fire" Gonville & Caius (Harold Abrahams' alma mater) and Trinity College both refused access, and the Great Court Run scene was filmed in the School Yard at Eton (which is a reasonable architectural stand-in for Trinity Great Court, though significantly smaller). I can remember seeing a TV news crew being summarily turfed out of Trinity by the porters on one occasion - though to be fair they probably had strolled in without seeking permission first. ** With the caveat that my knowledge of 1950s motor vehicles is sadly lacking, so I'd be more than happy if someone wants to point out all the automotive anachronisms committed in the series!

Talking Pictures TV has a catch-up web site now, if you really want to check: https://www.tptvencore.co.uk/Video/The-Bridal-Path?id=715cb4cd-a6a8-421d-b0be-14de02bb37c1 Not tried it myself, mind. Apparently you need to register to see any of the content. No idea whether the streamed content includes ads (though I suspect it will, given the nature of TPTV's operation).

Strictly speaking you can't renew your Road Fund Licence at all, and haven't been able to since 1937 when the hypothecation of the revenue from vehicle excise duty was abolished (although the Road Fund itself survived - more as a Treasury accounting mechanism than anything else AFAICS - until 1955).

Apparently pothole repairs are being impacted by a shortage of bitumen arising from Mr Poo-tin's unfriendly visit to his next-door neighbour. https://www.scotsman.com/news/transport/fears-over-pothole-repairs-to-scotlands-roads-due-to-bitumen-supply-shortage-3628243 The article specifically says Scotland's roads - but that's probably just The Scotsman for you. AFAICS similar reports can be found for other parts of the UK*. There certainly doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why it would only be Scotland that was affected. * I thought it was Berwick-upon-Tweed - which is in England - that was supposed to still be at war with Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwick-upon-Tweed#Relations_with_Russia.

I suspect it's more to do with what URLs Google has stored in its unbelievably large and complicated index, and how often its crawlers re-visit the site. Sounds like that is happening slowly if some are now correct. Other search engines might give different results - Bing, anyone? Oops, no - that seems to have the same problem, but affecting different individual search result hits i.e. some Bing hits work where the same hit with Google fails, and vice versa. (AFAIK DuckDuckGo uses the APIs for the "mainstream" search engines in the background - it certainly seems to trip up on the same search hits as Bing, based on a tiny sample.) It might be that @AY Mod or one of his minions could somehow arrange a redirect that would automatically correct the outdated reference to the "/community" URLs (which might also address some of the other glitches that one or two folks have been reporting) but I suspect he has other things on his plate ATM, especially given that there is actually a minimal-effort manual workaround. (Hmm, maybe a suitably skilled individual could craft a Firefox add-on that would automatically remove the offending string? Not that I use Firefox myself, mind you.) I know the site has its own search engine but TBH Google is still my go-to, if only because I can usually get to what I'm looking for by typing a single search string and scanning a shortish list of search hits (plus it quite often finds relevant hits on other sites as well, which can be handy). RMWeb's own search engine is still my backup on days when my Google-fu is weak, though.