ejstubbs

A word of warning: neodymium magnets are also quite brittle, and can shatter or snap as a consequence of being allowed to perform such acrobatic feats. Small shards of metal in the eye are not pleasant. (There is normally a note included with mail-order neodymium magnets to this effect, but it doesn't hurt to repeat it.) This sounds to me like this could be an instance of using magnets that are more powerful than necessary. It doesn't take much force to uncouple Kadees and given that (as you have realised) ferrous materials which can behave in unwanted ways in the presence of magnetic fields can be found in unexpected places on model railways, it's probably worth ensuring that uncoupling magnets, whether permanent or electrically energised, are only as powerful as they need to be to do the job required. In the case of your electromagnets, it might be worth experimenting with fewer turns on the coil? My recollection (I don't have any loose to 'play' with just now) is that the on-top-of-the-sleepers Kadee uncoupling magnets aren't particularly powerful. You can use a magnetic compass to get a rough idea of how strong the field created by a particular magnet or set of magnets is, by moving the compass towards the magnet(s)/uncoupling location and observing at what point, and by how much, the needle starts to deflect. This can also give you an idea of whether or not the magnetic field is oriented in the appropriate direction. (One of those tiny toy compasses of the kind that sometimes turn up in Christmas crackers might actually be better for this purpose than a full sized navigational compass.) For Kadees the magnetic field should be perpendicular to the track in the location where uncoupling is required to occur; ideally there should be minimal "leakage" of the field beyond the ends of the of the uncoupling location. I would strongly recommend against using iron filings to try to get a "picture" of the magnetic field. For one thing, they have a nasty habit of sticking irremovably to permanent magnets (especially neodymiums). Conversely, if spilt or otherwise let loose on the layout then you have tiny bits of conductive material getting up to who knows what mischief and very likely causing havoc with the electrics, sending the smoke to all sorts of places you don't want it to go...

And their general deception of the innocent UK customer whose only fault is to want things ridiculously cheap. (You can usually tell if an item is really going to come from China by looking at the expected delivery date. Although some sellers lie about that as well, of course.)

I've just returned from a trip to the Dolomites. I can report the following observations: FARTs (Forty All the Ruddy Time) do exist in Italy. However, given that Italy is metric, they go at 40kph, not 40mph. God help you if you get stuck behind one of those on a mountain pass. They also have middle-lane hogs on the autostrade. However, almost every one I saw did actually move over into lane 1 if another driver rather pointedly moved all the way back to the right after passing them. (Their equivalents in the UK are more likely to persist in their bloody-minded behaviour, no doubt muttering some spurious justification to themselves while tut-tutting other people's inexplicable preference for driving in compliance with the Highway Code.) Just like in the UK, the most homicidally dangerous drivers on the roads seem to drive white vans*. More than once I had to haul on the anchors to avoid one halfway over on to my side of the road coming round a blind hairpin bend while apparently attempting to achieve warp speed. I was driving a Golf, which handled pretty well - I suspect a lot better than a Fiat 15cwt van - and I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to negotiate those corners, in those vehicles, at such insane speeds. Regarding said hairpin bends on said mountain passes: far too many drivers going round the outside of a hairpin bend seemed to stray towards to the apex in the process of negotiating the turn (this included locals, who should know better). This was a little disconcerting to say the least if you were coming the other way; it's not easy to tuck in tighter when you're already pretty much on full lock just getting round the corner! I think this is partly due to a subconscious fear of going "too close to the edge" making people turn in too early. Approaching the bend with a little less brio would probably help. But then we were in Italy, I suppose... There were a lot of bikes about: road and mountain pedal cycles, and motorcycles. Most of them behaved well (though some of the bikers could have done with being a little more aware of how much more space they take up towards the inside of a bend when they're leaned well over) and most of the drivers behaved safely and considerately towards them: allowing the PTWs to pass, and giving the human-powered ones plenty of room when passing or waiting to pass. (The only driver I encountered who was recklessly inconsiderate and rude to both me, and a bunch of cyclists coming the other way, was...behind the wheel of a white van.) In general I'd say that many of the stereotypes of Italian road users were not observed, or only very rarely observed. Mind you, we were about as far north as you can get in the country. My brief experience of driving in Naples suggests that it is further south that the more 'inventive' driving behaviours are most likely to be found. * Note: Saying that all the homicidal maniacs seemed to be driving white vans is not the same saying that all white van drivers are homicidal maniacs.

It'll be the removal of the excess glue that helps. Cyanoacrylate polymerises rapidly in the presence of water (specifically, hydroxide ions) and since there is almost always water vapour present in the air, it quickly forms a 'skin' which can slow down polymerisation of the glue deeper within the joint. Hence also why applying multiple, thin layers can result in a better joint. Two properties of cyanoacrylate are relevant when using it to glue staples to coupling droppers: it bonds weakly to smooth surfaces, and has a low shear strength. That's probably why it is (IME) pretty easy to remove a superglued staple from a coupling dropper, although for uncoupling purposes the bond only needs to be strong enough to 'tip' the coupling hook so massive strength isn't really a requirement for the application. (Wikipedia says that cyanoacrylate forms an adhesive filler when combined with sodium bicarbonate aka baking soda. That suggests that dusting a judicious amount of bicarb into the joint area before applying the cyano might actually produce a stronger joint. Assuming that were needed...)

Copper is a non-ferrous element (and a component of brass, of course) and solders just fine. To put it bluntly, and with a reckless disregard for proper English: non-ferrosity does not imply unsolderability. Aluminium and Al alloys are difficult to solder, primarily because of the oxide layer that forms on the surface. This prevents the solder from 'wetting' the substrate and forming the intermetallic bond between the solder and the substrate. It's that bond which makes a solder joint different to a glued joint: the molten solder (usually the tin component*) effectively dissolves into the substrate metal to form the metallurgical basis for the joint. Your "wipe with a file" may very well be precisely what makes the process work for you, by removing the oxide layer in the region of the joint. Another way to solder aluminium is to use a very aggressive flux which attacks the oxide layer. With this technique it's necessary to clean the joint thoroughly afterwards, to void the risk of any residual flux continuing to attack the substrate. Solders specifically intended for soldering aluminium are also available, usually zinc-based. I think these are intended to form a better intermetallic bond with the aluminium than tin does, although for our purposes the bond formed by tin-based solder is probably adequate. (I suspect that you'd still need to deal with the oxide layer in some way when using zinc-based solder, though.) * When soldering copper, this means that you get a microscopic zone within the joint which consists of a copper-tin alloy - on other words, bronze!

Bear in mind that Hornby isn't just model railways. There is probably as much residual goodwill towards Airfix, both as a brand per se and for its products, as there is for the model railway side of the business - arguably with Humbrol and Scalextric not far behind. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are threads similar to this one up and running on forums relating to those parts of the group's business as well. In that sense it's a pity that (as far as I could see) there's no breakdown of the figures across the brands. It's interesting that Mr Davies has specifically called out the change in approach to discounting as a cause of the poorer profit performance in these results, and basically asks investors to trust him and the rest of the board that this will be a one-off hit that will be corrected over time as the longer-term strategy delivers the planned benefits (assuming that it does, of course).

It sounds as if you might have a bit of a misconception about how Amazon Marketplace works. It's up to the UK retailers to sign up to and use Amazon Marketplace, if they want to. Many don't bother because they prefer not to have to pay Amazon their cut of the resulting business. If a retailer chooses not to be on Amazon Marketplace, there's nothing Amazon can do about it. It's not like those aggregation sites that trawl the web (usually not very thoroughly or very well) in order to return lists of retailers they've found who stock an item you've Googled for. Those sites make their money from the adverts they display alongside their "hits", (They are also pretty annoying because they tend to clog up Google's own search results.) Back in the dim and distant, Google used to do something similar but, because of their much better trawling and indexing technology, did a much better job of it. Then they decided to make Google Shopping a revenue source in its own right (rather than just being a.n.other source of revenue from targeted advertising), and it became much less useful. Are you sure you're not using ebay.com rather than ebay.co.uk?

No. See also http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/134569-out-of-order-or-good-business-sense/ The EEA permits goods to pass free of tariffs between member states. It says nothing about how much retailers can or should charge their customers.

Might you have been thinking of this post of mine earlier in this thread? No matter if not: there's plenty of info online, easily found by the power of Google, about using neodymium magnets for uncoupling Kadees. The key point is to make sure that you have a north pole adjacent to one rail, and a south pole adjacent to the other. That way the magnetic field goes perpendicular to the track, same as it does with the Kadee uncoupling magnets - that's all there is to it.

The Wills goods shed (the Craftsman kit) is of that design, but I've no idea what the prototype, if any, was.

I'd be inclined to leave the goods shred at the slight angle it is to the platform. Having everything lined up in parallel tends to look a bit "trainset-y" IMO. Seems a shame, after having got those nice flowing curves, to tighten one of them for the sake of a 'tidiness' that was by no means always achieved in the prototype.

Simpler to use smaller neodymium magnets. My first thought when I read NoelG's post was that his magnets sounded a tad on the large side. My experiments to date have been quite successful with 3mm diameter magnets, which fit nicely between Peco code 100 sleepers and are still quite strong enough to do the job. IIRC, somewhere in the Camel Quay layout thread is a video of one-way uncoupling using a single neo magnet adjacent to one rail.

Such things are by no means restricted to the public sector. So long as by "politics" you include internal company and even inter-company politics as well as part politics, there are examples of what you cite everywhere in the private sector. Can you say "Carillon" or "G4S"? And it is by no means always the case that such failures don't bear on the public purse. The two just named will have cost the government done money in patching the holes left by their failures. Another example: RBS was a listed company when it did most of the damn stupid things that led to it being bailed out. Having worked largely in the private sector throughout my career, it alternately amuses and annoys me when I see it suggested that broken decision-making and the influence of 'politics' are exclusively to be found in the public sector.

I think the answer is, in the immortal words of Sir Patrick Moore: "No-one really knows." It is a new law and certain aspects of it (in particular the bits that are new cf the old directive) have yet to be tested in/through the courts.

Point of information for the barrack-room lawyers: GDPR applies to the personal data of all EU residents, regardless of where the actual data controller (the "spam merchant" in this case) is located (reference: GDPR Article 3 Territorial Scope). So the ICO are legally obliged by the regulation to give at least a few monkeys (GDPR Article 51 Supervisory Authority). Hence actions such as reported here on 24th May being taken by some companies: ...a growing number of companies are taking the nuclear option to ensure compliance: blocking all European users from their servers. Instapaper, a service owned by the US firm Pinterest which enables users to save articles to read at a later date, became the latest to disconnect European customers on Thursday. It said the cutoff was temporary while it made the required changes, and told users: “We apologise for any inconvenience, and we intend to restore access as soon as possible.” Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment. Other companies have taken a more permanent approach. Unroll.me, an inbox management firm, announced it was completely withdrawing services for EU companies due to an inability to offer its product – which is monetised by selling insights gleaned from reading users’ emails – in a way that was compatible with EU law. “We are truly sorry that we are unable to offer our service to you,” the company told EU users. American media network A+E has blocked EU visitors from all its websites, including History.com, and some multiplayer online games, including Ragnarok Online, have switched off their EU servers.

Other news reports have emerged suggesting that the detectors were isolated when the railtour train was in the station, but the fumes turned out to have hung around longer than anticipated after it departed*, so the alarm went off when the detectors were re-activated. * I wonder if that could have been related to the very still, humid weather that we've had recently. The other day when I went to look at the surface pressure map in the Met Office web site, I thought it was broken - I had to zoom right out to see any isobars!

If you and your wife use separate eBay accounts, that's a personal data breach.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? Certainly the eBay support agent thought so. All that the unsubscribe link on the e-mail did was to set the "Watch alerts" option to "none". As I pointed out to the agent - again - I was not watching the item. And I do want to get alerts about items that I am watching. So the unsubscribe link is not a blind bit of use, and in fact actually does something that I actively don't want to happen. After a long career in IT I actually find it quite annoying that people still seem to have few qualms about foisting rubbish, broken functionality like this on their customers. I still suspect that their system is somehow convincing itself that I do want to watch certain random items that I peruse. I have noticed that the function for toggling watching off and on can be extremely flaky at times - sometimes appearing not to register when I click the "Add to watch list" link on the item listing page (because it doesn't change to "Watching"), but when I look at my actual my watch list the item is there. Or vice versa. At least I'm not getting any e-mails about saved searches unless I've subscribed to get e-mails for a particular one. So at least that seems to be working for me. (I have noted that, every time you save a search, you do get subscribed by default - but it is very easy to opt out using a checkbox on the pop-up dialogue box that confirms the saved search.)

A couple of times recently I have received e-mails from eBay encouraging me to bid on items that I have briefly looked at, but not bid on or added to my watch list. I've checked the communications settings on my eBay account and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop these. I can ask eBay not to tell me if the auction for a watched item is coming to an end, or if I've been outbid, but for something I've neither watched nor bid on, nothing! Anyone else experienced this? I'm currently embroiled in a chat session with eBay customer support trying to get them to understand that I am getting watch alerts for items I haven't watchlisted. It is hard work... ...and I've given up. The support agent kept going on about my watch alerts, seemingly unable to grasp that I was not watching the item! eBay are basically breaking the law by sending me e-mails I don't want, and with no way to stop them. Even if it's a system glitch (which I actually believe it is) they are obliged to stop it happening ie fix it!

I realise that this isn't much use to you now, but for future reference it may be useful to know that you can tell eBay not to accept bids in certain circumstance, including: blocking specific buyers (admittedly not much use if the culprit keeps changing their user ID); blocking buyers with a negative feedback score; blocking buyers with non-payment strikes on their record. They also have a category for "Buyers who may bid on several of my items and not pay for them". I'm not sure how that works, but it looks like it might be useful to control the misbehaviour you have been experiencing. You can also tell eBay not to allow blocked buyers to contact you. More info here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/resolving-buyer-issues/blocking-bidders-buyers?id=4082 Note that eBay does say: "Select buyer requirements carefully as it may reduce your selling success." I'm not sure how 'successful' your selling is supposed to be if time-wasters keep winning your auctions... I currently have three blocked bidders. One was added to the list after e-mailing offensive nonsense when I declined to allow him to BiN on an active auction; lot of good that did him. I also block bids from anyone with negative feedback, two non-payments within the last month, or located outside the UK (sorry, it's not worth the hassle for me as a private seller).

Similar thing happened when Tornado was doing the SRPS Fife Circle railtour back in 2015: https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/transport/fire-at-waverley-turns-out-to-be-steam-train-1-3822129. I had just come off the morning run and was waiting on Waverley Bridge to get some shots of the afternoon run departing when the fire appliances turned up. At the time I couldn't believe that it was because of Tornado, but it was confirmed to have been that in the later media reports. That was members of the public calling the fire service, though, not an automatic smoke detector. So even turning off the detectors (which I imagine would need to be covered by a fairly comprehensive risk assessment) won't be a guarantee of no false alarms on the day! (There have been steam railtours through Waverley before and since without incident, so it looks like that incident can be chalked up as a one-off.)

If this upsets you, lodge a complaint with the ICO: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/. I would first check whether the unwanted e-mails have an unsubscribe link: if not then that's pretty much illegal in itself (GDPR Article 7 section 3, amongst other things). The ICO won't take action unless someone points out a suspected breach of the law. (Would you expect the police to know that your house has been broken in to without you telling them?) The potential financial penalties available to the ICO under GDPR are quite sufficient to put the Del Boy chancers out of business. Or we could just not bother making any laws at all, because they clearly never stop anyone from doing anything wrong...

Indeed. Browsing eBay can sometimes lead to the discovery of stuff you never knew existed - or you never imagined people might try to sell, like this. (As suggested by moneysavingexpert.com, no less. Sometimes I do wonder exactly how grippy Martin Lewis thinks his subscribers are...)

The catch with this approach - and I'm partial to it as well - is that you need to know roughly what the thing you are wanting to buy is called. In the past I have occasionally resorted to photographing the thing and putting it in to Google image search to see if any reasonably close matches show up, and then looking to see if one of the web pages with a matching photo divulges the name of the thing. I've also posted the photo to online forums like this one, where the clientele, taken as a whole, generally has a fairly wide knowledge of the world, and asking "what's this thing called so that I can search for one on eBay"!

I realise that you are a retailer and that you claim to be speaking from experience, but can you point to the legislation that says that overpricing is, of itself, illegal? It is illegal to put misleading pricing on an item (eg to display two prices, only the higher of which you would actually be prepared to sell at) but as far as I am aware there's nothing to stop you putting whatever price you want to on an item provided it is clear and not misleading. The displayed price is only ever an "invitation to treat" anyway - there's no contract in place until retailer and customer agree on the actual price that is going to be paid & accepted. There's a reasonably informative debate on the subject here: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=3425203. (If anyone wants to refer to the Price Marking Order 2004 referenced in that thread then it can be perused here.)