ejstubbs

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).

More than once I have been tooted at angrily by a cranio-genitally enhanced person because I had the temerity to stop at an amber light when they were up my arse following me, very often with less than the recommended two second gap between my vehicle and theirs.

Generic e-mail sent over the 'net has no guarantee of delivery - just having a copy sitting in your sent items folder is no proof of receipt. I'd suggest that the best way to get proof that the local authority has received the report would be to submit it through the appropriate portal on their web site (if they have one - most LAs do these days even if it's a generic one), and either keep screenshots of the submission process or (and better, assuming that they provide one) the acknowledgement e-mail they send back to you (although that might also get eaten by a bit-gobbler in the cloud on its way to you, of course!)

IME if you tighten the screw connector on to a soldered end of wire too much, it can crush the soldered end so much that it breaks in two. A crimped ferrule will 'give' a bit as the screw is tightened, and allow the individual cores to rearrange themselves as the pressure increases, making the whole assemblage a bit more resilient and reducing this risk. Up to a point.

Facing points on passenger-carrying routes introduce a risk: points moving under passenger train. The risk can be mitigated by putting additional controls in place, which in the csase of facing points would be an FPL. If the mitigating controls are unreasonably expensive, or unfeasible due to other constraints, then the facing point would be ruled out. On the other hand, other constraints - such a space, as indeed seems to be the case in your situation - may mean that a facing point is the only option, so the mitigating control has to be put in place. This post by Stationmaster Mike is a fairly succinct summary of the situation over time on the real railway. The rest of that thread is worth reading through to get more background on the subject.

For a moment I mistakenly thought that this thread was about model Audis...

I would tentatively suggest that a more effective way to 'challenge' it would be to build a model railway of your own to showcase your particular philosophy, rather than trying to explain at length why everyone else is doing it wrong ("it" being a personal hobby, after all, which ultimately has minimal impact on the wider world). It's OK, you don't have to watch it if you don't like it. I used to think that Horizon was an informative and educational science documentary series but, since it seemed to stop being that some time ago, I stopped watching it. Being an IT professional, not a TV producer, it was unlikely that anything I was in a position to do would result in the programme changing simply to satisfy my own personal taste. I'm sorry that it went downhill the way it did but there are other programmes to watch, and indeed other things to do to pass the time rather than vegetating in front of the telly, so in the grand scheme of things it ranks about the same as Eagle comic's decline and eventual disappearance from the newsagents in the 1960s i.e. very, very far from earth-shatteringly important. So far, in fact, that even my Dad wouldn't have suggested driving there for the summer holidays (and believe me, that's a long way).

Grand Designs evolved from property porn in to little more than a drinking game many years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/nov/13/kevin-mccloud-grand-designs-drinking-game https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11229505/Kevin-McCloud-my-secret-Grand-Designs-drinking-game.html (Note: I'm not suggesting that a drinking game can not also be exciting, challenging and rewarding.)

I believe that there are different cities represented on each side of the power car. On one side are (reading left to right): Edinburgh represented by Edinburgh Castle (specifically I think St Margaret's Chapel and the small cupola'ed turret from near which the One O'Clock Gun is fired), and the Royal Scots Greys monument in Princes Street Gardens; Stirling represented by the Wallace Monument; Glasgow represented by the Finnieston Crane and the Squinty Bridge. I presume the landmarks on the other side represent the other four cities: Perth, Dundee, Aberdeen and Invernes. I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with those cities to identify any of them. (Full disclosure: I've never been to Dundee or Aberdeen. I've never really noticed anything during my rare visits to Perth that I would regard as being a landmark, and although I've been to Inverness twice it was only to collect and drop off someone at the station so I was concentrating on driving most of the time!) EDIT From what I can gather, the landmarks on the other side of the power car are (reading right to left): Inverness represented by Inverness Castle and the statue of Flora MacDonald (should probably have recognised those from the final episode of The Biggest Little Railway in the World); Dundee represented by the war memorial at the top of Dundee Law; Aberdeen represented by the statue of William Wallace* in Union Terrace Gardens; Perth represented by the view south-west along the River Tay from Smeaton's Bridge, with the spire of St Matthew's Church on Tay Street to the right of Queen's Bridge. END OF EDIT The coaches have various landmarks on them as well, including the Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel. Sad that neither Abellio ScotRail nor the design company involved seem to have been particularly motivated to satisfy interested people's curiosity. * So William Wallace gets in twice, and Walter Scott not at all despite there being monuments to him in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth (and quite possibly some of the other four cities as well). To say nothing of Rabbie Burns, William Henry Playfair, James Watt, Thomas Telford etc etc. So five out of seven of Scotland's cities get represented by a nationalist military leader (twice), a castle (two different ones), a war memorial, a military regiment and a member of the post-Culloden Jacobite resistance. References to the country's artistic, engineering or scientific culture and history are vastly outnumbered by its military history. Boo.

I suspect more because of the shiny new cars that got trashed than the rusty old railway bridge* that might have been knocked out of alignment. And FWIW the road that is crossed by that rail overbridge is actually King's Place - although to be fair it does simply change its name to Marshall Place just a couple of blocks to the East. There's no clear delineation point as you drive along it, but Google Maps, the Ordnance Survey and OpenStreetMap all agree. * Although it actually looks like it got a fresh coat of paint not too long ago.