ejstubbs

I recall my materials lecturer at uni describing - IIRC - how useful early data about fatigue cracking was collected by a crew member on board a ship who had noticed a crack in a bulkhead, and kept a record of its growth up until the point when it failed catastrophically and the ship sank!

Very much so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagani_Zonda#760LH (Reading that Zonda Wiki page, I couldn't help noticing how many examples of a car produced in relatively small numbers were described as having been damaged in accidents.)

The geometry of the Peco and Hornby Setrack curved points is identical for all practical purposes. This diagram (originally from Antics web site IIRC) shows how both manufacturer's products can be to make a crossover between and R2 curve and an R3 curve: Note that the combination of track sections to make a curved turnout is the same in both cases. It may be worth bearing in mind that the outer track, although nominally R3, is made up of a combination of R2 curves and short straight sections - this would likely be an issue for any rolling stock that doesn't like R2 curves. The Streamline curved points are probably a significantly better bet for reliable running, but they require a lot more room to construct a crossover on a curve - I reckon more than double the overall curve radius cf the nominal "R3" using Setrack, which for the space-constrained may not be feasible. You'd basically be using up 18" or more of extra baseboard in each direction. While using ordinary (i.e. 'straight') Streamline points with Setrack is reasonably straightforward, incorporating Streamline curved points in to an otherwise Setrack-based design is another level of complication IMO.

I believe the IAM still teach not to indicate if there's "no need" or "no-one to see it", and doing so counts against you in their tests. Certainly an IAM-trained driver I know insists that that is the correct procedure, and will accept no arguments to the contrary such as the one you cogently outline above. It seems that it's more important to be able to pass the IAM tests than it is to actually be a considerate, actively aware and erring-on-the-side-of-caution driver. That's one of the reasons why I have no interest in the IAM. <Stands back to wait for a slew of IAM drivers to defend their organisation...>

This might be the product you're thinking of: https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/magento/gaugemaster-gm619.html. The identical item can also be found under other brand names (including on Amazon, as you mentioned).

That joke was old in the 1990s, when management kept going on about "doing more with less" - it was pointed out that if you just do nothing i.e. expend zero effort, you become infinitely efficient. See also: "don't work harder, work smarter," to which the response was "Hey, if I was that ****** smart, I wouldn't have to work for you": https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-14

He's not a "Right Honourable" - that's reserved for members of Privy Council, peers below the rank of marquess, and certain lord mayors (provosts in Scotland) and the Lord Lyon King of Arms. Since he never actually made it in to the House of Commons he was never in a position to insist on being referred to as plain "honourable" (and anyway, in the case of MPs in the House the use of that term is solely a convention of address, not an actual title). I think the best description of him these days, given his affiliations on the other side of the Atlantic, would be "the member for Trumpton".

"February fill-grave" Norman Nicholson called it.

@Derekl Thanks for that. It does make me wonder whether a "brake van or vehicle with a brake compartment at the leading or trailing end" would include a luggage & parcels van (GUV in BR parlance) which wouldn't seem to meet the 'brake' criteria but would surely provide equivalent protection? I found a report on an incident at Crewe in 1939 which involved a luggage & parcels van and a corridor third being involved in a collision while being shunted by the train engine - another example of the van being marshalled behind the loco. @bécasse Thanks also. Might the 'convenience' aspect potentially include being able to drop off the van from the rear of the train at an intermediate station, if it was not going to be required for the remainder of the trip?

Thank you, I shall listen to that shortly.

@Jim MartinI think you managed to find the member for nowhere at all's marginally less inflammatory version. His Facebook post (go there if you dare) was notably nastier, accusing the RNLI of becoming a "taxi service for illegal immigrants". Or perhaps, as a past supporter of the RNLI, he actually did it as a sneaky way to help raise funds for the organisation - because that's the effect it seems to have had: Donations to RNLI rise 3,000% after Farage’s migrant criticism Note: this is not a political post, it is a purely personal response to a particular instance of the revolting bile that the individual in question apparently chooses to share with the human race from time to time.

It's an excellent and very moving film (pity the aspect ratio is messed up on YouTube, though). It's scheduled to be broadcast on BBC Four on 11th January coming at 23:00: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00794gz. I can understand why they might choose to show it other than on the actual 40th anniversary. Mousehole has its own remembrance ceremony each year: at 8pm on 19th December most of the village's Christmas lights (which in 1981 had been turned on by Solomon Browne crew member Charles Greenhaugh just two days previously) are turned off, leaving just a cross and a pair of angels shining across the village and out to sea. Apparently the government of the day attempted to tax the £3M+ raised for the relief of the people of Mousehole following the disaster. Nice. I think that to suggest that "they were only doing a job" may be a rather unfortunate - though no doubt accidental - misrepresentation. As LCDR Russell Smith USN says in the film: " These people don't do it for money. They do it for the giving, the volunteer work: they give life to other people." No-one made them do it, or paid them to do it. They set out in those horrendous conditions* of their own free will because they believed it was the right thing to do: to go to the help of strangers in mortal peril rather than do nothing and leave them to die. * In a 46ft 9in wooden-hulled boat capable of 9kt, against hurricane force winds. The current Penlee Lifeboat, now based at Newlyn, is a Severn class 56ft 9in vessel with a fibre reinforced composite hull and capable of 25kt. This, as well as more modest but no less essential stuff all the way down to the iconic RNLI yellow wellies, is the kind of kit that the RNLI is able to equip its crews with these days, funded solely by voluntary donations from people who care, and funds raised by hard-working volunteers onshore..

In their single volume tome on LMS coaches, in regard to the D1870 luggage and parcels van Jenkinson and Essery state: "The early examples were given full livery and with their generally coach-like styling, looked very much at home in passenger trains." Given that the van has no corridor connections, where would it have been marshalled within a corridor train? The obvious options are either immediately behind the loco, or at the tail end of the train. Would one or other of these options have been the preferred one - either for convenience, or in order to comply with the regulations?

Hardly a huge surprise when you consider (a) the UK's history of industrial canal building in the 18th and 19th centuries, and (b) that the area of the city of Birmingham is 26,780 hectares, wheres the main island of Venice (the 'centro storico', which is what most people would take this oft-quoted 'statistic' to refer to - and there really aren't many canals at all elsewhere in the lagoon) is 520 hectares. It's basically a meaningless statistic which tells you just about nothing, The actual figures are 56km of canals in Birmingham vs 42km in Venice. So Birmingham has about one and third times as much length of canal as Venice, while being fifty times bigger, meaning that you are phenomenally more likely to stumble across a canal in Venice than you are in Birmingham. In fact, having been to both cities, I can state categorically that at busy times of year you can literally hardly move for canals in Venice.

How Netflix’s Drive to Survive turned Americans into F1 fans ...at the risk of it turning into something that repels fans of actual motorsport?

The templates are definitely still there on the Peco web site. I actually find that if you Google the part number of a particular turnout then, bizarrely, the template is the first hit. Alternatively, if you go to the Peco web site and search or browse for a particular turnout then there should be a download link for the template on the web page for that turnout. (I don't know what scale/gauge you're working in, but I believe that Peco don't have templates for absolutely every one of their Streamline products. They certainly don't seem to do them for Setrack.) All that said, the Peco web site does seem to be responding in a distinctly 'leisurely' fashion at the moment, to the point of being effectively unusable ☹️. Although a Mac user myself 99.9% of the time, I do have a virtual machine running Windows 10 in which I run AnyRail, not having found any track planning app that runs on MacOS that met my needs. If you do choose to use a track planning app I'm not sure why you would need to print anything out at 1:1 to see if it will fit. It should be pretty straightforward to take measurements from the plan, to set the limits of the space within which the plan is being drawn, or to draw the space that you have available as a background shape in the planning app (that's what I do with AnyRail).

Farnells have always seemed to work out significantly more expensive than e.g. RS or Rapid whenever I've been been looking for leccy bits. (eBay suppliers cheaper again, but maybe not the best choice for stuff which has a potentially hazardous failure mode like lithium batteries.)

Looks like I've managed to answer my own question. There are three two shallow tabs along each side of the coach body. These can be released by easing a narrow plastic blade (I used a thin guitar pick) between the bottom of the coach body and the underframe. Once the tabs on each side have been released, there is a further tab at each end of the underframe which engages rather more positively with the coach body. To release that you need to gently bend the underframe out from the body, by pulling it in the middle, until one of the end tabs releases. In the immortal words of just about every Haynes manual ever produced: 'Refitting is the reverse of the removal procedure'. Oddly, the one that I used for the above exercise turned out to have some kind of oily substance between the coach body and the underframe on each side. No idea why that was there. I'm slightly intrigued as to whether the other examples I have will be the same. (The coach I experimented on was actually a Replica Railways version of the model bought second-hand. AFAIK the model was largely unchanged when Bachmann took it over, except for the bogie mounting - certainly the tabs that hold the body to the underframe are in the same place.)

Having finally got round to trying to progress the modification of my Bachmann Period 1 LMS coaches to use the Keen close coupling system I now find that, even having trimmed the 'delta plate' to within an inch of its life, the wheels still foul the baseplate of the CCU. I think this presents me with three options: 1) Insert a spacer between the bogie and the coach floor. This would make the buffer height too high. 2) Replace the current 14.1mm disc wheels* with 12.6mm ones. However, apart from the fact that the wheels would then be too small, it would also make the buffer height too low. That could be sorted by inserting a compensating spacer between the bogie and the coach floor, but the overall result would likely look a bit odd. 3) Remove part of the coach floor to accommodate the CCU - despite the apparent assertion on the Keen Systems web site that this isn't necessary. If I'm going to go with option 3) then I need to do so working from a proper understanding of how the coach goes together, so that I don't remove anything critical. Which brings me back to my original question of four years ago: can the bodies of these coaches be disassembled in a non-destructive way, and if so how?? * These are what the coaches came with, and are also the standard fitment on the Bachmann LMS bogies that can be bought separately. AIUI, though, they should be two-hole disc wheels.

James May has already demonstrated that it's possible to be a house out of conventional Lego: More or less...

Jolyon Palmer pointed out in the linked YouTube video that the 15s of total penalties that MV managed to accumulate did mean that he didn't have the necessary cushion to duck in to the pits for new tyres to try to get fastest lap.

Fife: Woman stopped by police after 'unbelievably' filming a car crash on her phone as she drove by

I use the Kadee #256 tap and die set, and purchase screws to match the die size (IIRC it's a UNC 2-56 thread) in various lengths (between 3/16" and 3/8") from https://www.modelfixings.co.uk - no connection, but would recommend. I actually buy stuff from them for quite a few applications where I need small, difficult to source screws and the like. For Kadees specifically I use their hex button head screws (they also sell the 1.3mm hex wrench that fits them). I use a swivel-head pin vice like this one to drill and tap the holes.

He always seemed to be bleating on the radio about other drivers doing things that "shouldn't be allowed". The irony is deafening... I don't usually watch the races these days, but I did watch the highlights of this one on C4 just to try to make sense of the rather confusing and difficult to follow live reporting on the BBC web site. I ended up watching most of it with the sound muted, having found the inane babbling of the C4 commentary team both annoying and depressing at the same time. One vaguely useful piece of information that I think I did glean from DC, during the brief periods that I had the sound on was regarding the "tactics" about where Max wanted to give back the position to Lewis. I think DC said that you are supposed to give up the place for at least one corner, which rather suggests that taking advantage of DRS to nip straight back in front again may not be kosher (and might even be why MV eventually gave the place up again?) The coverage of the end of the race was marred for me by the producer concentrating on LH circulating on his own for pretty much the whole of the last two laps, when Ocon and Bottas were at it hammer and tongs for third place. All in all I thought it a pretty disappointing race IMO. And I have to say that I'm not looking forward to the season finale, given how close it is and the questionable attitude of one of the competitors concerned. That didn't make any difference to the result, though, because Schumacher had to retire from the race as a result of the collision and Villeneuve carried on to score the points he needed to win the WDC. In fact the only difference it made was that Schumacher was disqualified from the championship: all his race results and points from the season were retained, it's just that he wasn't awarded any place in the championship results (Heinz-Harald Frentzen took second place in the other Williams, and everyone else was also bumped up one place - DC got third, equal on points with Jean Alesi but classified ahead on race wins I think). Ferrari still came second to Williams in the constructors' championship.

Ah, I thought you said you'd only been able to find a 1946 map. You could try looking on the NLS web site to see if they have a paper copy of the map you want. If they do then it might be worth a trip to take a look at it (they usually allow you to photograph selected bits of their material for research purposes). If the trip would be too far then maybe some kind soul who lives locally and who has an NLA card might be able to help? Or you could investigate the Promap option. Edit to add: this is the web page for the NLS maps reading room: https://www.nls.uk/using-the-library/reading-rooms/maps/