ejstubbs

I bought a Parkside PC58 LMS brake van kit from a private seller on eBay. It was described as "In unopened packaging", which appeared to be the case when it arrived today. When I opened the packaging I found, as per the thread title, four identical sprues of underframe parts but no sprues of body components. Before I go back to the seller to query this, can someone confirm that I am not going mad, and that these kits should indeed contain the body components as well as the underframe parts?

You can use Audacity to edit audio without using it to record it. It just seems a rather tedious process to capture audio which already exists in a digital file by recording it in real time. You also have the potential issue of the PC making other sounds e.g. pings, beeps and bongs for notifications and the like, which are also captured in the recording (been there, done that, in other circumstances).

Wouldn't it be a lot easier, and quicker, to use a grabber app, rather than recording stuff in real time? get-iplayer is available for Windows and does a good job job of downloading BBC Sounds audio files. There may also be a GUI front end for it - I know there is for MacOS. There are a number of grabber apps for YouTube and other video sources. I use ClipGrab (which is also available for Windows) but others no doubt do just as good a job. If all you want is the audio then there are plenty of apps around that can extract just the soundtrack from mp4 and other video formats (on Mac the standard QuickTime Player app will do it, possibly Windows Media Player also has that facility?)

Hmm, sounds a bit like the old Lima GUV, where you pushed the windows in to get the roof off. Thanks for this. It's actually the non-corridor coaches that I want to disassemble, I got that wrong in my first post. When you say that there are two clips on each end, is that at the actual coach ends, or towards the ends of the coach sides? EDIT: I located the clips you described. After about ten minutes fiddling about with them and trying carefully to separate the body from the underframe without causing any damage, I decided the job was beyond me ☹️

I'm trying to find out how to go about disassembling the Hornby period III LMS corridor coaches - the new "super detail" ones, not the RailRoad ones. So far online searches have not been fruitful. Can anyone offer any guidance?

I was just using the distance between them as a convenient basis for measuring up the other dimensions from the photo. Yes, I realised my mistake yesterday - see my post. Very useful, thanks.

Are you suggesting that an older one might have been narrower, or wider - or just of a different construction? Sorry, not intending to challenge what you say, just to understand what it might mean on my between-the-wars era layout. I'm also thinking that my estimation of the buffer locations was wrong - they should be ~1ft further apart than the rail gauge, which I think makes the width of the dock face more like 12-13ft.

@Sitham Yard Thank you for that: a much better photo than I'd been able to find trawling through my books and t'Internet. So, on the basis that the buffers are positioned vertically above the rails, by viewing the photo at its maximum size and applying a ruler to it, the face of the dock seems to be roughly 9½ft wide, offset slightly due to the presence of the platform ramp on the right. That gives me something concrete* to work around for the one on my layout. * See what I did there?

How wide would a typical end loading dock in a goods yard have to have been? I'm assuming that the vehicles which were loaded and unloaded couldn't have been significantly wider than the wagon carrying them - and in fact less wide, in the case of a closed wagon like a CCT. But would it have been required to allow a certain amount of space on the dock at either side over and above that e.g. for people involved in the loading and unloading to have safe access alongside the vehicle? I suppose that if the vehicle was being driven on or off the wagon then no such intervention would have been required, but if for some reason it wasn't able to move under its own power and it was having to be manhandled then there would seem to be a need for a bit of heaving room.

Multiple reports indicate that the volunteers in question were indeed told NOT to do something - strictly, not to do it again - but that they went ahead and did it anyway. That's not really acceptable from anyone in any organisation, in any kind of role. (Except perhaps for certain politicians...but let's not go there.)

The South African Grand Prix was a regular fixture on the F1 calendar from 1962 to 1985, with another two races post-apartheid in 1992 and 1993. There had been efforts to reinstate South Africa in the F1 calendar, and even a provisional/leaked calendar for 2023 showing South Africa taking Belgium's place, but that initiative eventually fell apart. Rather more obscure is the Moroccan Grand Prix. The first Moroccan Grand Prix was run in 1925, but of course there was no F1 in those days, and no drivers or manufacturers championships. Various other Moroccan Grand Prix took place at a couple of different circuits on and off during the 1930s and 1950s, but the only year it was an official part of the F1 calendar was in 1958, when it was run at the Ain-Diab circuit near Casablanca as the final race of the F1 season. That race was notable as the one where Mike Hawthorn won the drivers championship by one point from Stirling Moss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Moroccan_Grand_Prix

APS did not use 35mm film, it was 24mm wide. 35mm cameras are not obsolete: you can still buy 35mm film, either ready-loaded in cassette or on 50ft or 100ft bulk rolls that you can load into your own cassettes (I chore I used to subject myself to in order to save money as an impecunious youth). I still have a small collection of 35mm film cameras, including my Dad's old Yashica rangefinder camera with a built-in CdS meter, a Zenit (which could also be used as a self-defence weapon, it's that heavy), an early 1980s Chinon SLR (which was actually available with autofocus lenses back in the day) and a couple of more modern compact rangefinder cameras. I've put film through each one of them in the last year and had perfectly good prints from all of them.

You need a 12ft ladder: https://12ft.io/https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/heritage/five-volunteers-suspended-from-north-yorkshire-moors-railway-after-station-group-accused-of-carrying-out-unauthorised-work-and-taking-safety-risks-4411596 or a copy from an archive https://archive.is/uOG0x According to a post on the Rail UK forums, the suspension happened a while back, and followed a warning that appeared to have been ignored: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/nymr-is-there-an-issue-at-levisham.253670/post-6386675 (note the date of that post).

Why do RB (and AM) have to attend?

Reported here that Russell has got a two-place grid penalty for the Brazil race for "driving slowly" in the pit exit. Inconsistently applied rules yet again?

Anyone know how to disassemble the Hornby long i.e. corridor clerestory coaches? I know how to do the short, non-corridor ones: undo the screw underneath to remove the underframe 'detail' and release the roof, then carefully ease the roof locating tabs at each end out of the slots in the coach ends. Job done. Is it a similar process for the long (corridor) clerestories or are other tricks required? And are the 'new' long clerestories (R4198,R4120 etc) different to the old (R435,R436 etc) ones in this respect?

That'll be the ex Royal Bank of Scotland Fettes Row data centre and Dundas Street IT department offices, now being turned in to bijoux apartments and the like IIRC. Must have been around 2015/2016 when I last worked there, on a programme that literally no-one doing actual work on it (as opposed to the senior management who'd dreamed the thing up) believed would ever see the light of day - and not long after I moved on to pastures new it was, to no-one's surprise, canned. But only after several millions had been spent, including renting capacity for the not-so-new system to run on, in a data centre which was owned by an American corporation - despite the potential ramifications of the PATRIOT Act on any bank data held there being spelled out in some detail when the idea was first floated... King George V Park, next to the playground which now occupies the site of Scotland Street Station, was a pleasant place for a lunchtime stroll to get away from the madness within. A hundred years or so previously it had been the site of the Royal Patent Gymnasium, a Victorian outdoor fitness centre - which does sound a trifle bonkers, but was apparently quite popular for a while. It might have been entertaining to include a session on the 'Great Sea Serpent' during my lunchtime peregrinations. Remnants of the aforementioned attraction have been now discovered under what used to be the Royal Bank's not-really-a-car-park* during the new construction work. * It was never properly surfaced. According to RBS folklore this was some kind of business rates fiddle, in that they could argue that it wasn't a staff car park as such, just a piece of empty ground that staff happened to park on. How they explained away the manned security barrier was never explained. Every six months or so an e-mail would be sent round announcing the temporary closure of the not-really-a-car-park while the surface, such as it was, was regraded. As I used to take the bus to work there, it made no odds to me.

Unless I imagined it, there was a 'trailer' between programmes on the Beeb the other night saying that they're releasing a number of Classic Who series on iPlayer at around the same time as the 60th anniversary specials. IIRC there was a Tom Baker one and a Peter Davidson, plus at least one other. Or maybe I read it somewhere? There is a brief mention of it in Digital Spy's announcement of the 60th anniversary specials (starting 1st November) so it seems it's not a complete figment of my imagination. (I didn't think Jodie Whittaker was as bad as some people seem to, though I do think a lot of the stories during her time on the show pandered rather too much to her "just playing herself", per the interview with her in this week's Radio Times. And a few too many of the stories were just weak and unengaging, perhaps partly for that reason.)

I just checked my copy, and there's nothing of substance about the Alnmouth to Alnwick branch. It does briefly mention that it was opened in 1850. According to Wikipedia and Railscot, what is now Alnmouth Station was originally named Bilton, though your dad's book refers to the junction as Lesbury. The Alnwick to Cornhill railway opened 37 years later, running from a significantly upgraded Alnwick station compared to the original terminus of the Alnwick branch (the passage in your dad's book about this is quite interesting reading). There is (or certainly was, last time I passed by that way) a set of ex-NER coal drops still in-situ in the old goods yard of Belford station: These photos were taken about ten years ago. The latest Google Streetview photo suggests that the drops are still readily visible beyond the somewhat menacing-looking metal gate. That photo seems to show rails at ground level in the yard, but there's nothing like that visible in my photos, or in the 2009 Streetview photo. Google's satellite view does show a single siding, but it stops short of where the 2023 Streetview photo seems to show rails, so I assume that it's just materials being stored there.

That's a bit of a rip-off if you ask me. The Certificate of Conformity for my two Skodas was free of charge.

I used to work for a multinational computer company called Tandem Computers. The UK CEO once received a "cease and desist" letter from a representative of the Tandem shoe shop chain. They were swiftly advised to get lost. AIUI (though IANAL) you can only trademark a term for a defined use, or range of uses (which can nonetheless be quite wide), and the primary cause for complaint by the trademark holder would be if there was a potential for confusion of the businesses, either intentionally or by accident, or damage to the reputation of the trademark holder e.g. "borrowing" the name, or a clear reference to the name, for a wholly unrelated business of questionable legality/ethics. In the case of Tandem, it was pointed out that anyone confusing the computer company with the shoe shop would quickly realise their error, or have it politely corrected for them. I suspect that the band Easy Life could have had a good chance of defending their case in court, but absolutely couldn't have afforded to do so, and EasyGroup Ltd knew that. So not dissimilar to a SLAPP in some ways: a large corporation bearing down on a largely innocent third party pretty much just because they could. I suppose it's possible that they may have felt that the content of some of the band's songs was not something they would want people to associate with their insurance products. Conversely, the band may have decided, on having the potential for confusion pointed out to them, that they didn't want people mistakenly to associate them with insurance salesmen (a sentiment I can sympathise with).

We've had a good year for butterflies here, as it seems everyone has: UK butterfly numbers at highest level since 2019. One highlight for me was a comma landing on my arm when we were out walking in Roslin Glen. Apparently they've only recently started to recolonise southern Scotland after recovering from a population crash in the mid-1800s which saw it pretty much confined to the Welsh border counties. We do have one buddleia, in fact we've had it for years, but we never see butterflies on it. The only lepidopteran we've ever seen feeding from it was this year and it wasn't a butterfly, it was a hummingbird hawk moth. Which was nice, since we've not seen one in our garden before. Fortunately the butterflies seem quite happy with the other nectar-bearing plants we have. I spotted a Silver Y moth the other day on my way to the bus stop. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those here so that was nice, too.

Interesting/amusing article about just that here Travis Kelce says NFL is ‘overdoing’ his connection with Taylor Swift:

All I can find on the Guardian web site is: "A man in his 60s has been arrested by officers investigating the felling of the world-famous Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, police have said." The individual is not named (I can't turn up any mention of his name on the web site) and the only other thing it says in relation to the arrest is that he remains in police custody assisting officers with inquiries. The Mirror is carrying a similar story to that in the Mail and the Independent. Going solely by Google hits, The Sun seems to be all over it like a rash. I can't see any reference to Renwick being sacked in any of the articles I've scanned. According to the Mirror piece: I'm not sure where you're getting a "previously established propensity for ill-advised direct action" from, unless you meant it as applying to whomsoever does turn out to have committed the deed - but as yet we still don't know what their motivations might have been, so this seems to be fairly speculative. I have a feeling that this may start to get a bit Christopher Jefferies-ish (and if anyone recognises the reference they will no doubt also be aware of the financial penalties which were imposed on certain newspapers for fomenting false speculation in that case).

Apparently the rumour going around the local mill is that the 60yo had some kind of a grudge against the National Trust, and co-opted the lad to carry out the work. Very much an unsubstantiated rumour at the moment, though, so don't be surprised if the truth turns out to be entirely different.