ejstubbs

I did notice that on Morley's web site, and I wondered if it might in any way be related to the modification explained by mikesndbs in his post on another thread in April last year:

It depends on the mail system you are using, and more particularly what you are using to access your e-mails. If you are using a web-based e-mail system whereby you read your e-mails in a browser then you never really do "get" the e-mail in the sense of a copy of it being delivered and stored on your computer - unless you specifically ask for a copy of the e-mail to be downloaded as a file. Even then, your Inbox is still on the server and the e-mail is still in it until you delete it from there. If you are using an IMAP (or old-skool SMTP) client such as Thunderbird, or Apple's Mail application on a Mac, then the client will download copies of e-mails from the server to the Inbox your computer in the background. It will leave a copy of each e-mail in your Inbox on the server. IMAP keeps server and client Inboxes in sync, so if you delete a message from the Inbox on your computer then IMAP will tell the server to delete it as well - but if you file an e-mail from your Inbox in to a mail folder held locally on your computer (ie not synced on the server) then it will be removed from your Inbox on the server. Read receipts and message recall are not consistent within and between proprietary e-mail systems (e.g. Exchange) let alone e-mails sent and received between generic clients using open internet protocols. Outside of a single organisation's email system it's rarely possible to make any authoritative statement about whether or not an e-mail sent from person A to person B can or cannot be invisibly recalled. (The Exchange system in my company does not support "invisible" message recall - I assume this is a configuration setting that they have chosen to disable.)

I'd be a little concerned about the robustness of those wing rails alongside the frog vee. I know that they are supported along the whole of the inner face but there are only two clips on the outside face. However, if the cut in the wing rails had been made further towards the pivot with the closure rail then IMO that would have left the part with the pivot poorly supported. I also think that a slitting disc is a bit of a clumsy tool to use for the job (which might be what kevinlms was hinting at). A thin sawtooth disc might have made a neater job and cause less damage to the rest of the point. AIUI, isolating the wing rails from the closure rails is primarily done to mitigate the risk of shorts between the frog and the wing rail. If the frog and all the wing and closure rails are the same polarity (which Peco's under-the-sleepers wiring is specifically intended to achieve) then that risk shouldn't exist. By adding jumper wires between the stock and closure rails you re-introduce that risk, which has to be mitigated some other way, typically by isolating the closure rails from the wing rails. The Streamline short Y is a very compact point that doesn't have as much "real estate" to work with (rail clips/supports in particular) as the physically larger points in the range, even the sort radius left and right turnouts. I suspect that Peco know that all too well (very likely from bitter experience) which is why the short Y, as supplied, doesn't have the gap between the wing rails and the closure rails - they know that it would weaken the point too much. If you're happy that the stock (and especially the wheelsets that they are fitted with) are good enough to keep the short circuit risk to an acceptable minimum then you probably don't need to isolate the wing and closure rails. If you are concerned about the reliability of the electrical contact between the stock and closure rails then, as BR60103 suggested, a solution that only switches the frog after the point blades have moved (eg some kind of delay timer before the frog switching is triggered?) might be the answer. Again, as per BR60103, I don't bother with separate frog switching for my short Ys (of which I have...well, probably too many, but needs must when space is limited - and of course rule one applies...)

On a desktop machine, hover over "My eBay" and "Messages" is the bottom item on the drop-down list. Go to the "Sent" folder and there will be a list of the messages you sent. It's a bit like webmail except that you can't reply/reply all directly from the messages screen: you have to go each intended recipient's profile page and message them from there. It'll be tedious. More to the point, however - and easier - you should also have received a confirmatory e-mail from eBay for each message you sent. In the e-mail there should be a link that takes you directly to the recipient's profile page, from where you can contact them with a suitably apologetic message. Good luck, and next time: step away from the keyboard.

He wasn't being hounded by the media, it was Transport Questions in the House of Commons. And knowing what constitutes a "road user" should be pretty much general knowledge for anyone who ventures outside their front door. Everyone who has passed a driving test is supposed to have been examined on their understanding of this kind of thing. That's millions of ordinary people in the UK. By no stretch of the imagination can it realistically be regarded as specialist technical knowledge. Being extremely disappointed that the minister responsible for such things appears to be ignorant of such basic information hardly seems to be unreasonable.

I think you left out: c) I'm so knowledgeable and clever that nothing I think or say can ever possibly be wrong, so there is no reason for me not to share my ineffable wisdom with my subjects sorry, I mean, the electorate at every opportunity so that they will never forget how wonderful I am and will keep voting for me to receive my index-linked, tax-payer funded pension in a few years' time. If a) is actually what they think then they should logically keep their mouth shut until Sir Humphrey has given said advice, rather than making stuff up on the fly and then trying but failing to dig themselves out of the hole of their own making, all the while with no reference to any authoritative source of information!

If you're referring to Chris Grayling then what he actually tried to argue was that where there is a cycle lane, cyclists aren't road users: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/transport-secretary-chris-grayling-says-cyclists-are-not-road-users-a7524061.html Where you have cycle lanes, cyclists are the users of cycle lanes and the road users are the users of the road. It's very simple. The only simple thing about that statement is that it's simply wrong. Whether on the carriageway or the footway, anyone using the highway is a "road user". The introduction to the Highway Code clearly states: "The most vulnerable road users are pedestrians, particularly children, older or disabled people, cyclists, motorcyclists and horse riders. It is important that all road users are aware of the Code and are considerate towards each other. This applies to pedestrians as much as to drivers and riders." There is also an entire section of the document dedicated to rules about "road users requiring extra care, including pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists, other road users and other vehicles." FWIW the person who was knocked off his bike by Mr Grayling carelessly opening the door of his ministerial car (contrary to Highway Code Rule 239) wasn't in a cycle lane at the time. Grayling also failed to report the incident to the police, contrary to Section 170 of the 1988 Road Traffic Act - but no action seems to have been taken.

As a regular rider on the top deck of Lothian Buses going in and around central Edinburgh, I can assure you that plenty of people seem to actively choose buses (and lorries) to cross in front of in preference to cars. Perhaps they think bus = slow. But it's a 20mph limit across the whole of the city centre (and before the question of enforcement comes up: sadly, buses and lorries seem to be equally likely as cars to be exceeding that limit ).

I built my own black-and-red-bow-tie objects. Pretty straightforward to do within AnyRail itself.

Debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam - Googling will uncover many sorry tales of such scams, a goodly proportion of which seem to have required minimal if any actual "social engineering" to persuade the mobile network provider to issue a replacement SIM.

The saga drags on... The unusually cheap item which was mysteriously delayed in transit, I am now told by the seller, was returned to them by the carrier as undeliverable and they have cancelled my order. Given that the seller was a large multinational named after a south american river and the item was to be delivered to one of their lockers at a supermarket near to me - ie they had complete control over the delivery process - I regard this as a flat lie. They did generously offer me the chance to order the item again - and of course the price has now gone up, to nearly twice what it was when I originally ordered the item. If they had had the item listed at the wrong price and they'd just been honest and said that they weren't prepared to sell it at that price then I could have accepted it as just one of those things - mistakes do happen - but this just feels like their trying to make out that it's my fault that I didn't get the item, rather than admit that they messed up. I contacted the marketplace seller of the "not as described" item for which I was sent a return postage label that wasn't. They sent me another label which did have an actual address on it - but it also had "Postage Required" clearly marked on it. This was after I'd explained to them that the item they had sent me was not what I ordered so it's up to them to take it back ie they are liable for postage. I'll go one more round with them directly and if they still fail to cover the return postage I'll escalate to Amazon. If that gets nowhere I'll initiate a chargeback through my credit card provider and they can go whistle for it back unless they turn up at my door and ask nicely for it. But it's all a load of faff for something which is entirely their stupid fault. I am still waiting for a response from the seller of the other "not fit for purpose" item. It suspect that they're just letting their response time limit run out and hoping that maybe I won't follow up with eBay. Hard luck. If they don't respond in time I'll be straight on to eBay who will give me an immediate refund. So that's three fails out of six in one weekend's online shopping, all of which have become much more effort for me than they needed to because of the lousy, slipshod (and in one case I believe deliberately deceitful) customer service of the sellers.

Hmm, not one of these then: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/volkswagen-golf-harlequin-was-multicolored-weird-m-259745 (There is an example of the Polo version of the harlequin special edition alive and well and living in Edinburgh.)

I do, but I'm not thrilled at having to contribute to the ever-growing quantity of landfill that our local authority has to manage simply because some lazy so-and-so can't be bothered to arrange a proper return. She's nearly £24 out of pocket on it as well. I can't help thinking that she is expecting me to send it back, but if she thinks I'm going to pay for it then she's sadly mistaken. There's no sign of a postage paid return label on my eBay account or my PayPal account.

I used eBay's returns process for the "not as described" and not fit for purpose items. It does work. But it's a pain, when you have ordered something on the basis of the clear description in the listing, to find something else turning up for which you have no use - and the seller seems to care so little that they don't even want it back. The not fit for purpose item was a GoPro mount which was so dimensionally wrong that it was never in a million years going to cinch down on the camera's 'prongs' firmly enough to hold it in place. It might have been one rogue out of spec item but the seller is being annoyingly uncommunicative. Don't get me wrong, I use online retailers of one type or another quite a lot, and will likely continue to do so. I just seem to have suffered a spate of bad products turning up on my doorstep this last week, compounded with with lackadaisical follow-up service when reporting the issues. Which is all a bit dispiriting.

None of it is model railway related. Sellers are a mix of eBay professional sellers (in that they have sold multiples of the same item over time, they're obviously not just selling off stuff they don't want/need any more), Amazon, and Amazon market place.

I'm beginning to think that online shopping is more trouble than it's worth. Out of six items recently purchased I've had two that, or arrival, simply weren't the items they were supposed to be ("not as described" to an extreme degree), and one which was not fit for purpose. For one of the "not as described items", the seller has provided a 'return label' which is quite unlike any kind of return label I've ever seen before. It doesn't even have the seller's return address on it. I suspect this one is going to be hard work. For the other "not as described" item I received a very prompt refund, but no return label. I'm not going to pay to send it back so it looks like the seller is happy to leave me stuck with it. Which is annoying. Another item was due to be delivered last Wednesday, but at the last minute I got an e-mail saying that it was delayed, and since then the tracking info has been non-existent. I did buy it at a surprisingly low price, and I'm wondering whether the seller actually wants to cancel the sale but is trying to get me to cancel it myself by 'delaying' delivery. So that's four our of six items which are unsatisfactory, and which will end up costing me extra time and effort to get rectified. The two "not as described" items are so obviously wrong that I can only assume that the sellers were either utterly careless in what they shipped, or they just didn't care. Anyone else getting the run-around from online sellers?

It's the way round that it was at the actual Liverpool Street Metropolitan station, more or less, per the maps in my posts yesterday morning and lunchtime. I agree that the layout as drawn has limitations, but I think you'd need to blame the Met and the GER for that! I think CJF's idea was that the station would be the scenic part of the model, with everything else being off-scene. Hence the sizeable fiddle yard with the crossover between the two running lines. Not very space efficient, though. In the book CJF does say: The lines shown are for exhibition use, and demonstrate how easily one can produce a layout where over 60 per cent of the tracks are 'off-stage'. (My emphasis.)

As others have said, there are no reliable hard-and-fast rules as to which Kadee couplers work with which UK stock - there are too many variable factors, both with the stock and with the layout it will be run on. The best advice probably is to buy a few Kadee couplings*, or the Kadee starter kit, and experiment. That may sound potentially expensive but IMO switching to Kadees is not something you should even think about doing if your funds are tight anyway. See also this topic: * This is made a whole lot easier if all your stock is fitted with NEM pockets which comply with the standard. That way you just need a pack of each length of the NEM couplers to experiment with - and you can probably omit the shortest ones (#17) to begin with anyway.

That's from the "PSL Book of Model Railway Track Plans". Plan 46 in that book is called Bishopsgate, and is based directly on the Metropolitan station "in steam days", including the junction to the GER station. It does include a facing crossover to access the bay from the up/eastbound line, which isn't visible on the OS map: (Apologies for the rubbish scan.) And here is a 1951 1:1250 OS map of Liverpool Street showing the track layout as it was then: Note that the junction to the GER station has gone, but there is now direct access to the bay from the up/eastbound line. I assume that the crossing over the down/westbound line must have been a single slip, to give access to the down/westbound line from the bay. (CJF does say in the PSL book that he made it a double slip "to allow for more complicated working"). This impressive diagram of the Metropolitan line in 1933 shows the same layout at Liverpool Street (bottom right of the diagram, just before Aldgate). It would still be interesting to know, when the junction to the GER station was still in place, whether there was a facing crossover to the west of that junction, or up/eastbound terminating trains really did access the bay by reversing on to the down/westbound line.

Here's a screenshot of the relevant bit of the 1896 1:1056 map (the only one at that scale on the NLS site): (Note that the Metropolitan station was called Bishopsgate in those days.) The map only shows trackwork that was visible from above, and there isn't anything there that looks notably Minories-like to me. Apart from anything else, the Metropolitan line station is primarily a through station, not a terminus, so there is not the same requirement to be able to arrive in and depart from any platform that Minories, being a terminus, tries to cater for. In "60 Plans..." CJF says that Minories was "inspired by" the Met station, which is not quite the same as "based on". He also says that the bay platform (presumably the one to the south of the running lines in the above map) was used "to turn Aylesbury trains". Going by the trackwork visible on the map above, that would seem to imply that arriving Aylesbury trains reversed back over the crossover to access the bay. Alternatively it's possible that there was a facing crossover to the west of the station (and the junction for the GER station) which isn't visible on the map due it it being somewhere under Finsbury Circus (though I tend rather to doubt this). I suspect that a key element of CJF's 'inspiration' might have been the way that Aylesbury trains were hauled in to the bay, and then taken out by another loco which had been stabled on the spur, freeing up the loco at the buffers. Again, in "60 Plans" he says: "in the days of the Met. electric loco-hauled trains...one of those lovely Bo-Bo's [sic] sat permanently in the loco spur". (I'd have thought that the fact that the loco spur is open to the sky would have been nigh-on essential in steam days - assuming traffic was worked the same way.) I reckon that CJF was inspired much more by the method of working terminating trains at that station, rather than the actual track layout. He does say that "After several attempts to turn it in to a compact terminus, all of which ended up hopelessly entangled, I doodled a design incorporating a pair of crossovers which clicked..." I'd take that as further evidence that the actual track layout at the Met station wasn't a key element of his inspiration. It sounds as if he more or less abandoned attempts to replicate the actual Met layout, and came up with his own self-inspired solution to modelling the train operations that he found so inspiring.

Where in the Highway Code does it say that? There is nothing to that effect in the section pertaining to roundabouts: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/using-the-road-159-to-203#roundabouts-rules-184-to-190 The "Signals to other road users" section does show all the signals as seen from the rear, but the purpose of that section is solely to illustrate what the signal should be. It says nothing about which road users they should be used to inform. If indicators were only supposed to be for the information of following traffic then the lighting regulations wouldn't require them to be fitted to the front of the vehicle. Finally, as Coryton pointed out, clear and timely use of indicators is not just for the benefit of other motorists: it provides useful information to pedestrians and cyclists as well. As it says in Rule 184: "Time your signals so as not to confuse other road users." Again, show us where in the relevant section of the HC it says that? It doesn't. Of course you can't turn right on to a roundabout* - and one thing you can be pretty sure of is that most roundabouts above the size of a mini roundabout will have round (i.e. giving an order) Turn Left signs facing each entry point: Hence the advice in Rule 184: "On approaching a roundabout take notice and act on all the information available to you, including traffic signs, traffic lights and lane markings". Bear in mind also that, if you are using a roundabout correctly - unless it's a funny, not-very-round shape - then you should be turning to the right until you get near to your exit. How else can you steer your vehicle in a clockwise circle? And of course you can take an exit from a roundabout which is to the right of the straight on direction viewed from your direction of approach. (I realise you probably weren't trying to suggest otherwise but it could easily be read that way.) * A pal of my Dad's got his driving licence before WWII, in the days before there was such a thing as a driving test. However, he never actually owned a car, or even sat behind a wheel, until the 1950s. When he did decide to acquire a car, he wisely chose to take some driving lessons before venturing out on to the roads alone. In the first lesson, as he approached a roundabout for the first time, the instructor told him: "Turn right here". So he did. Much confusion ensued, although fortunately no physical damage resulted (the roads were a lot quieter in those days).

This 100%. I was taught the same as Titan in the late 1970s. If the DVSA have decreed that driver behaviour needs to be different then they ought to tell everyone about it. That hasn't happened: the Highway Code hasn't been updated to reflect the supposed new teaching, which would be the very minimum one would expect for a change which could easily lead to drivers taught in different eras coming in to conflict over road space. Rule 186 encapsulates exactly the same advice as Titan and I were both taught. It's difficult to see how anything above and beyond that could have the authority of the DVSA behind it. As alastairq says, it's possible that some people are misunderstanding what their instructor is trying to teach them. The fact that I see what I would regard as misleading right-turn indications at roundabouts pretty infrequently - certainly less frequently than would readily be explained by newly-qualified drivers - would tend to suggest that this might actually be the case. A contrary view might be that it's yet more evidence that most people actually forget a good deal of what they have been taught once they pass their test, with clear and informative use of the indicators being one of the first skills that seems to fall by the wayside.

It does seem to be quite common, and extends to multi-way roundabouts as well: indicate right until you're passing the exit before the one you want, at which point stop indicating altogether. Never, under any circumstances, indicate left at any point. Here is an example of a roundabout which doesn't have clear lane markings on any approach road. There's nothing if you approach from the south, west, or north (admittedly the northern approach is a single lane). It might look as if the eastern approach is clearly marked but in fact it's not: the left-hand lane is clearly marked for turning left, but the right-hand lane is clearly marked for straight on - which would actually take you back on to the road you'd just left. There is no marking for turning right. What actually happens is that people turn left from both lanes, with the self-important/impatient people doing so from the right-hand lane because there is otherwise comparatively little traffic in that lane, because so few people want to go straight on (for obvious reasons) or turn right (because the road to the north doesn't go anywhere particularly interesting or important). This is actually the junction between the A1 and the Edinburgh City Bypass: two major, two-lane dual carriageways which carry a lot of traffic. But the markings on the approach to the roundabout are far from clear. (This is also one of those roundabouts where self-important/impatient drivers approaching from the west turn right from the left-hand lane, for much the same reason that that type of driver approaching from the east will turn left from the right-hand lane. Basically, if you're approaching the roundabout off the A1 you will all too often find it being treated as a devil-take-the-hindmost free-for-all - ironically, very often by drivers who don't seem to bother to get much of a move-on once they've actually negotiated the roundabout and reached a freely-moving open road.)

I like the "tooltip" functionality in the topic lists for each individual forum, whereby it shows you the first and latest posts of each thread if you hover your mouse over the thread title: (Well, I say that I like it but it's still not as good as the old forum software which would show you the first, first new and latest posts by clicking on the down arrow button.) However, this doesn't seem to function on activity streams - specifically, on the activity stream equivalent of "view new content". Would it be possible to get this working on activity streams? Sometimes all I want to do is to check whether the latest post is back on topic before going to the actual thread... (I would also add a vote in favour of being able to see the topic lists output by the activity stream paged, like the individual forum lists and the search output lists are, rather than having to use the "load more activity" button. Happy for this to be an option selectable by the user if there are differing opinions on the matter.)