ejstubbs

To my great astonishment* the whole series is available on Channel Five's own online catch-up service: https://www.my5.tv/the-great-model-railway-challenge/season-1 * Not really.

Drinks cans are usually aluminium whereas blades will be steel. Mixing them up like this may make the waste non-recyclable (and possibly not just yours, but any waste in the load that yours goes in). I'd be inclined to use a baked bean tin or a soup can that you know is ferrous (you could use a magnet to check). (AIUI metals are commonly sorted for recycling by being shredded and then passed under an electromagnet. Ferrous metals stick to the magnet, aluminium and alu alloys don't. I don't know whether the shredders would do enough to completely separate the blades from the remains of the can. Using a steel can would seem to me to be erring on the side of caution.)

You may stand by everything you said. You're still wrong. Title to the funds does not transfer to the bank. If you make a cash deposit ie you hand over notes and coins, then title to the cash does transfer to the bank. You cannot later get back the notes and coins you deposited, and I would humbly suggest that it would be idiotic to expect that. However, as has already been pointed out by at least one other poster, notes and coins aren't "money": they are a representation of value which can be physically exchanged between parties in a transaction. Since notes were introduced and coins ceased to be minted from precious metals, cash* has no inherent value in itself. Deposit cash with a bank and the cash becomes an asset for the bank (you can even think of it as sitting in a big safe somewhere) but with a balancing liability on the bank's books due to the positive balance in the account in which the bank holds the funds in your name. Your account with the bank is a liability for the bank, not an asset, because you can ask the bank to return the funds to you at any time (subject to the terms and conditions of the account eg 30 days notice of withdrawal - which you will have signed up to when the account was opened - as well as any regulations which the bank has to observe, as previously noted). If you ask to withdraw the funds in cash then the bank has to draw down on its assets (reserves of cash, in this instance, which may or may not include the physical notes & coins the bank took title of when you made your deposit) to do that. When the bank hands over the cash to you then title to the physical notes & coins the bank gives you transfers to you. But the title to the funds never changes: title was yours while the funds were held by the bank in your account as a liability on its books, and title to the funds remains yours once the bank has discharged that liability by handing over an equivalent value of cash assets to you. While your money is on deposit with the bank your account with the bank is an asset to you. The bank's position is essentially flat, because it holds an asset (the cash which it took title of when you deposited it with them) and a matching liability - the funds in your account. So in the overall balance of things, you are still the one who's ahead, because you are the one who owns the asset (the funds in the account). If it sounds complicated that's because it is. It gets more complicated still when you start trying to understand how it works when there is no physical asset like cash involved, eg when using a payment card, writing a cheque, or making a electronic banking transfer. Trying to argue that there are obvious, simple ways to understand this stuff is fundamentally mistaken IMO. It has taken lots of clever people** hundreds of years to build the financial systems we have today. Unfortunately those systems don't succumb to simplistic analysis just because we want them to. And arguably that is a problem, if the users of a service can't readily grasp at least a basic idea of how it really works. Then again, most people haven't the slightest clue how mobile phones really work, but it doesn't stop them using the things obsessively... * For the purpose of this discussion "cash" should henceforward be understood to mean coins & money, rather than in the accounting sense of liquid funds. ** With varying motivations, some not always entirely honest and transparent.

Did you really mean "misogynistic" - were they upset about Kathy being a judge, or the presence of (swoon) women of the female gender on some of the teams? Another day, another reason not to bother looking at Facebook. It's Twinsta'sapp for me from now on! (<---- This is a lie.)

Wrong. No, they can't. No, it isn't. Checks on large deposits and withdrawals are mandated by anti money laundering legislation, and other regulations which banks are obliged to comply with. Nothing to do with deposits being owned by the bank, everything to do with trying to make sure that the money is legitimately owned by the person trying to withdraw it. (Something the proverbial shoebox under the bed cannot enforce.) Are those sterling accounts or would you have to make deposits in the local currency? If the latter than you need to take a look at the local inflation rate to know whether the interest rates are any good. (Inflation is basically a measure of the loss of value of money: transfer funds from a low inflation currency to a high inflation one and it loses value quicker.) Also worth checking how easily you could get the money out i.e. what exchange controls operate in the country in question. And what your tax position would be on interest earned in that country. And whether there is any kind of depositor guarantee scheme. And what legal jurisdiction you'd have to get involved with if you ever ended up having to sue them. And so on and so on. But I'm sure* these are nothing more than piffling trivialities when it comes to getting rich quick. * No, I'm not. That was a lie.

Alison Graham is the editor of RT. TBH I don't think much of her: far too many of her editorials seem to be based on her own personal preferences ("I don't want to see..." style 'observations') rather than objective assessments of a programme's quality (or lack thereof). When I find that she likes a programme that I enjoyed it's usually nothing more than coincidence (quite often the things she says she liked about a programme bear no relation at all to what appealed to me about it).

AIUI one reason why Yealmpton was that way because the line was originally going to go onwards to Modbury. I believe similar reasons lie behind the location of the Fairford goods yard (though not involving Modbury, obviously). So the history behind a line sometimes also has a hand to play in the layout of stations.

Last I heard was that, following the initial performance tests on the Inverness route, NR had said there was no way the IET was going anywhere near the Highland Main Line without significant improvements being achieved.

Funny - except that it's Wabtec who are fitting the retention tanks (just not quickly enough). I'm not sure that the unrefurbished Mk3s will have been anywhere near Wabtec, AIUI they're from a different source (possibly XC?) to the ex-GWR ones that are going through Doncaster and causing the problems - mainly due to unexpectedly high levels of corrosion in difficult-to-access places from what I've heard. (Hmm, maybe GWR's HSTs weren't quite so immune to the soaking they sometimes got at Dawlish as some people liked to suggest.) There is almost always a Wabtec van parked up at Haymarket depot when I go past on the tram. The HST refurb programme does seem to be keeping them quite occupied.

The plastic wheels are easily swapped eg for Hornby metal 14.1mm two-hole or disc wheelsets (I don't know which is correct for those particular coaches). Or, with a bit more surgery, you can swap out the bogies for Bachmann LMS bogies with metal wheelsets. The Airfix and Mainline versions of these coaches can also sometimes be picked up cheap via eBay or second-hand dealers. They tend to be slightly darker in hue than the Dapol ones (which might suit the OP), otherwise they're identical. In the case of the non-corridor ones they can be better, because the Dapol ones all use the same roof moulding after the Airfix mould for the brake 3rd roof became damaged beyond repair. There's also something awry with the ventilators on the composite roof.

The judges in Strictly don't compare dances. They score each dance according to criteria relating to the particular dance style (hence things like points deducted for illegal lifts, legs too straight/not straight enough depending on the style, and so forth) and how well it was executed (level of difficulty attempted/achieved, musicality, whether any mistakes were made, performance value etc). What they don't do is try directly to compare one couple's waltz to another couple's jive, or even one couple's waltz to another couple's waltz. That comparison emerges from the scores awarded according to the (supposedly, largely) objective criteria. It's largely unarguable that most members of the Great British Viewing Public will adopt a much more subjective approach to their voting. In fact they are pretty much encouraged to do so - they are always being told to call or vote online "If you want to see <couple x> dance next week". No criteria set, just what the viewers "want". Hence 'comedy'/'novelty' participants like Ed Balls, Mark Benton, Dave Myers, Russell Grant and John Sergeant often end up lasting much longer in the competition than some others who are incontrovertibly better dancers, because the audience votes keep them out of the dance-off week after week. If we're talking difficulty in comparing things, I actually think it's difficult to compare the 'fairness' or otherwise of the results in a show like Strictly which uses a combination of supposedly objective scores and audience vote, versus TGMRC (and Bake-Off) which uses a largely opaque scoring/marking/judging method and, after a bit of flannel between the judges and the presenters, just announces a final decision. Strictly actually has an obligation to be more transparent (note 'more' transparent, not 'completely' transparent) because people spend money voting for their favourites by phone. That's why they had to introduce the fudge after the semi-final in 2008, when it became clear that a lot of phone votes would inevitably be wasted because of the way the judges had scored the couples during the show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strictly_Come_Dancing#Phone_voting (IIRC they eliminated the three-couple semi-final round in subsequent series, so the final programme of the series always starts with three couples these days).

With all due respect, this topic has been done to death on RMWeb. Google "track spacing rmweb" (leaving off the quotation marks) to find all the past threads on the subject and fill yer boots...

Fine-nosed tweezers worked well for me the one and only time I lost a spring. Which surprised me somewhat, as I had read much to put me off the idea of even trying if it ever did happen to me.

Is it pantomime season already?

If you're referring to the incident with Villeneuve junior in 1997 then, although the race stewards deemed it as such, the FIA disagreed and placed the blame firmly on Schumacher and disqualified him from the WDC (although his race results and points scored that season still stood). I tend to agree with MarkC: a superbly talented driver but with a tendency to step over the fair play line on rather too many occasions, perhaps fostered by an unfortunately over-inflated sense of entitlement which almost seemed to arise from that very talent. (I actually feel the same about Ayrton Senna; I certainly felt that the film Senna erred rather too far towards being a hagiography than an honestly balanced documentary about a human being.)

I managed to lose my wallet a week before going on holiday earlier this year. It contained a debit card, a credit card, a supermarket gift card, my photocard driving licence and ~£80 in cash. Once I had confirmed that it was lost, I called my two banks and the supermarket, who stopped the relevant cards immediately and started the process of issuing new ones. I also filled in a form on the DVLA web site. By the end of the week, 48 hours before we were due to fly out, I had replacements for each of the financial cards and the driving licence. I ended up out of pocket by a total of £20 for a replacement driving licence - plus the ~£80 cash, which was gone for good from my perspective, regardless of whether or not anyone had found and spent it. We took a short break in Turin between Xmas and New Year 2001. On the return journey on New Year's Eve we had a stopover of a few hours at Schiphol, so we decided to take the train in to Amsterdam and find a bit of lunch. Only when I went to the ATM in the airport to withdraw some Guilders* did I discover that no cash was to be had, because everything was in the process of being changed over to Euros... No problem: everything from train tickets, to a very pleasant lunch and a few souvenirs was paid for using plastic. * I remember the first time I tried taking cash out of an ATM abroad - it was in the US in the early 1990s - I found myself being relieved that it had given me dollars and not sterling! Then I told myself not to be so daft, and went to the pub. Where, of course, they were more than happy to take plastic. I pay London bus & tube fares using my personal contactless credit card, and use a print-out of the TfL online account page to claim the expenses back (so all that the accounts department sees is my TfL journeys, none of my other spending - probably just as well!) The expenses repayment hits my current account before the credit card even comes due. No need to go through the extra step of loading an Oyster card. If your corporate card is contactless I'd imagine you could do pretty much the same.

Any chance of a link to the relevant post? I've searched for "rules" on the first ten pages of the thread and still not found any attachments. There was a previous thread running before the series started which seems to have been deleted now - at least, I get "You do not have permission to view this topic" if I try to follow the link that Google returns. This is probably as a result of Andy Y's shutting down of those threads as he stated in the first post of this thread. If they were attached somewhere on that thread then maybe they're gone.

Could you (or someone else in the know) point out where the rules can be found, please? I've seen at least one other post mentioning that they've been posted/linked on this thread but blowed if I can track them down!

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to bare any of my holes if someone was coming at me with a length of SL-300. The very thought brings tears to the eyes...

I'm sure I could spend 20 hours and still not come up with anything bearing any kind of resemblance to a tree!

As I understand it the limit of six pre-built items applies only to scenics - buildings, trees etc. I doubt that there is much objective, points-based scoring involved. On Bake Off (at least in the discussions that are filmed and put on screen) they seem to work on the basis of person X got this and this badly wrong, person Y did well in the signature, OK in the showstopper but poorly in the technical, person Z aced two of three by a country mile. Then they announce that person Y is baker of the week, and nobody seems to mind all that much. Strictly, which does used points-based scoring by the judges, seems to get much more stick along the lines of "how did <contestant X> get an eight from <judge Y> for that???" - especially from people who think they know about ballroom/latin/make-it-up-as-you-go-along dancing. (Not to mention the endless debate about the show's supposed bias towards/against people of colour.) Strictly does add the audience votes into the mix, though, of course. And a the end of the day it's an entertainment show. I don't know whether there is any prize money involved, although I rather doubt it. Just the honour of winning a somewhat contrived* but hopefully enjoyable contest. * Although, actually, aren't all contests contrived in some way or another? It's not like the Nobel prizes, the Pulitzer Prize, the Fields Medal or the Piolet D'Or where outstanding achievements in a given field are judged in a much wider context.

You can register your contactless card with TfL and get a record of your trips, including the amount charged, via their web site. You can even do it retrospectively, in a sort of: "That debit card that was used for a few journeys last week? That was me," way. I've never used Oyster so I don't know how its system compares with what you can see online using a contactless card but I would be surprised if it's much different. I assume it would work the same with Apple Pay and Google Pay, since AIUI they still use the payment card details for the actual financial transaction. (I don't know the technical details of how the apps work but I would imagine that, fundamentally, they're just a different way of presenting the card details contactlessly.)

I can't help thinking that, if the judge feels it appropriate to accept the "exceptional hardship" argument for not actually banning the driver, they could at least increase the remaining 'hardship' from a trivial £253 to a suitably punitive but non-'exceptional' amount. If £16,000 would wipe out the guy's profit, up his fine to £6,000 so his profit is cut to £10,000. A bit of enforced belt-tightening might help to bring home the message - and reduce the feeling that he "got away with it".

May well be the same in Edinburgh (certainly the signals displayed on the single aspects are the same). I've never hung around long enough to find out TBH. I once saw a bloke on a bike follow a tram along the westbound platform line at Haymarket, then pull out to pass the tram when, predictably enough, it came to a halt. This manoeuvre meant crossing the eastbound tram lines at a very acute and therefore dangerous angle. Which was bad enough, but the tram tracks turn quite sharply left and downhill just west of the tram stop, which meant that with a westbound tram already in the stop and him on its right, he had absolutely no way of seeing whether an eastbound tram might be approaching. If one had been, he'd have found himself stuck between a stationary tram on his left and a raised tram platform on his right, with a tram bearing down on him from directly in front. Why on earth he thought this would be a sensible position to put himself in I doubt even his god would have been able to explain. Basically, he was an idiot, and a lucky one. Bear in mind that there is a perfectly good road running parallel to the tram tracks just the other side of the tram platform. There is no need for these people to break the law in order to get where they want to go. Mind you, I have seen motor vehicles happily drive along other clearly signposted tram only sections of road (although not against the direction of the tram, with no way of knowing whether a tram might be approaching, with no ready means of escape to the side). I have recently noticed that the incidence of people riding bikes along the actual tram platforms seems to have declined, which (speaking as someone who walks that way twice a day at least during the week) is nice.

In Edinburgh they do have separate signals for the trams, but at most junctions they simply operate in sync with the traffic lights. For example, this set of lights at the Princes Street/Mound/Hanover Street junction. (The tram signal is the single aspect one sharing a pole with the pedestrian light and press button. Notice also that the tram track has no stop line.) At each end of the Haymarket tram stop there is a pelican crossing which has only tram signals for road traffic. That's because the tram stop has a clear no entry sign at each end, with an "except trams" sign beneath it. This is all fine, until a cyclist decides to ignore the no entry sign and ride through the tram stop (between the raised tram platforms, and running the non-trivial risk of getting a wheel caught in the track...but that's another rant). Not having the slightest clue what a tram signal means, some such cyclists see fit to breeze through the pelican crossings even when pedestrians have a green light. One nearly took me out the other morning. I'd have remonstrated with them if I hadn't been so shocked at almost being run in to (not unlike a day or two earlier when an impatient van driver had mounted the pavement to pass a car waiting to turn right, nearly running me down as I walked round the corner of the junction on the left immediately following).