ejstubbs

Well, I joined the group earlier today simply by clicking "Join"... This is what it says on the group's home page on Yahoo, under Group Settings: This is a public group. Attachments are permitted. Members cannot hide email address. Listed in Yahoo Groups directory. Membership does not require approval. Messages from new members require approval. All members can post messages. Apart from the limitation on posting by new members, it's open to all. Postings to conversations may well be moderated - in fact the guidance under "Message content" would suggest quite strongly that they are - but membership of the group and therefore visibility of what other people have posted isn't. At present.

What's this then: "0". It's a numerical digit, and it's not the same as this: "O". Wiki says: "0 is both a number and [my emphasis] the numerical digit used to represent that number in numerals." Pretty much the whole point of zero in place value number systems is that it is a digit: it means "there is no quantity of this power of the base number". Oxford reckons the word "zero" in English dates back to the early 17th century (although Wiki says late 16th), derived from either the French or Italian equivalent word, via Old Spanish from Arabic ṣifr ‘cipher. I don't know if that's what you had in mind by "more recent"? People who can read binary are very likely to read the binary number "10100" as twenty: the string of binary digits represents exactly the same quantity as it does expressed in decimal as "20", in octal as "24" and in hexadecimal as "14". I suspect you and I might both be justly accused of over-thinking this... FWIW, my mobile number begins with a "zero" but my landline begins with an "oh" - at least, they do when I recite them for other people to note down. No idea why, just habit I guess!

If you have a Yahoo account you can join the group immediately as membership is not moderated. Go in to Yahoo groups and search for "16mmngm". Since the Yahoo group is open to any Yahoo member, I honestly don't think Mike's compunctions are valid. I'm posting the words that Mike refers to here: it's in white font so you need to select the 'empty' space below with mouse or the space bar+cursor keys to read it. If you really think it's confidential in some way then don't do that. In the first few days on site there was definitely a feeling that it was necessary to keep the volunteers in the dark in order to create a challenge rather as “Scrap Heap” or some elements of “Bake Off” are done, and because of this much of the talent of the participants wasn’t actually used constructively. Once the realisation struck that the project was a hard physical challenge in itself, and various of the volunteers had had some serious conversations with Dick and the Producers, there was a change in attitude. If someone can definitively demonstrate that the text shouldn't be here, I will remove it. In my opinion it's in the public domain. I notice that someone on that thread commented on the utter failure of the rack and pinion system. It occurred to me as soon as I saw them laying it that there was probably going to be some problems with clearance at the fishplates. I didn't expect it to be wrong everywhere - that really was poor!

That's probably where I got the idea from, too, as a callow youth! Arthur Ellis (ex professional football referee - and English in case you hadn't guessed!) was also a judge for Jeux Sans Frontières - which was an international franchise based originally on a French game show called Intervilles. I think Arthur may have used the crossed 7 as well - probably to avoid confusing our friends from over the Channel/North Sea.

I didn't see Paul coming out of it particularly badly. I can understand that his manner might not appeal to all - he seems to be rather too flippant when discussing serious matters* but that could be nerves as much as anything else. He didn't make wasn't shown making any more glaring mistakes than any of the other team leaders AFAIR. In the first episode he stood up to pressure from Hadrian to carry on working at a point in time which would have meant his team members having to skip a meal for no good reason (that was in the very early days of the project when the track laying teams were making vastly better progress than the driving teams so there was no risk to the objective in taking a break for lunch). That was good team leadership IMO. IIRC Paul and Jenny shook hands as Silver Lady passed the "golden spike" point where Team C and Team D met up. (Of course it's possible that they were 'persuaded' into that gesture of friendship by the production team - but I'm sure that Jenny would never tell!) IIRC Hadrian was all too happy to take credit for the track design during the kick-off meeting in Episode 1. It became clear almost as soon as they started driving Silver Lady northwards that the track was inadequate for the loco, even on the Caledonian Canal towpath but especially given some of the rough ground it had to be laid over later on the route. Hence the driving team having to be accompanied by people holding the track level (using a hi-tech tool fashioned from a bit of stripwood and a shelf bracket, if I'm not mistaken!) I have no idea whether the inadequate track design was a result of a decision by the production team based on cost constraints, or a failure of engineering. Either way, it was that shortcoming which truly put the project's goal in jeopardy IMO. * If you can ever call any thing to do with trying to drive a miniature steam locomotive through the Great Glen on plastic track "serious"!

Easily found on eBay and elsewhere: search for 'pluggable terminal strip'. The commercial product has sprung connector pins so the strips plug together securely without needing any screws tightening (or loosening, when you want to dismantle the baseboards again). Depends on how often you plan to be assembling and disassembling the layout, I guess. I suspect the sprung pins and/or the holes they plug in to may go slack after a unknown number of insertions/disconnections anyway. If you're going to be connecting and disconnecting a lot then a connector system designed to stand up to that kind of mechanical use would probably be preferable.

When I was a kid it was still quite common in certain places - mainly European countries I believe - for 1 and 7 to be distinguished in handwriting by putting a horizontal dash across the middle of the 7. That was because the digit 1 was written as it appears in Arial (ie RMWeb's default font) with one short slanting upstroke followed by a full-height vertical downstroke. The absence of the "foot" such as in Tahoma ("1"), Verdana ("1") or Times New Roman ("1") means that, written clumsily, a 1 can easily look like a 7. For a while at school I took to writing my 7s with the crossbar, as a sort of teenage affectation. My maths teacher soon persuaded me of the error of my ways! There seem to be very few computer fonts that use the crossed seven. On my Mac only Lucida Blackletter, Handwriting Dakota and Bradley Hand Bold use that form of the 7. EDIT: According to Wiki, the use of the crossbar to differentiate 7 from 1 is still common in continental Europe and "increasingly in the UK and Ireland". That latter statement I would seriously question, based purely on my own observation and experience. I can't remember seeing a crossed 7 on a handwritten document from anyone in the UK since the I stopped doing it myself in the 1970s!

I think that was just rather obviously and gratuitously taking advantage of the Flora MacDonald statue outside Inverness Castle to play a somewhat over-wrought version of A Well Known Scottish Song as background to the general (and certainly deserved) celebrations. (I was actually a bit miffed that they felt it necessary to add some utterly unmemorable background music over the sequence of the loco approaching the station, drowning out the piper that was playing. I mean, I know some people aren't that fond of the pipes but hey, suck it up, we're in Scotland!) Speaking of railways on Skye, in the early 1900s Skye Marble Ltd built a 4 mile long 3ft gauge railway to carry (you guessed it) marble from their quarries at Kilbride to Broadford. Unfortunately the company didn't last long, going in to liquidation in 1912 with the railway equipment was sold off in 1913. You can still walk the trackbed from Broadford to Kilbride - and there is an operational marble quarry in Kilbride these days (albeit using road haulage to transport its product). There's even a remote Flora MacDonald link, since Kilbride was where her bonnie boat landed when she made the trip over the sea to Skye carrying Charles Edward Stuart in drag. There were other industrial railways on Skye at various times, built to help exploit deposits of quartzite and diatomite. There was also an opencast iron ore mine on Raasay which had a railway. In the late 1890s there were a couple of proposals for "real" railways on Skye. The Highland had an idea to build a railway from Kyleakin, on the other side of the water from Kyle of Lochalsh, to Torrin a bit north of Kilbride. A more ambitious proposal was the Hebridean Light Railway, with the North British as backer, which envisaged a line from Isleoronsay, via Broadford, Sligachan and Portree to Uig, with a branch to Dunvegan, giving a total length of around 70 miles. Needless to say, neither of these came to fruition. Having spent time at Isleoronsay last summer, I do rather think that in this instance the presence of a railway might actually have spoilt the location somewhat (heresy, I know).

And there was me thinking that nothing could be less interesting than the nit-picking, though frequently mistaken, pseudo-pedantry on the "Channel 4 model railway challenge" thread.

There is a minimum speed limit of 30mph on motorways in the Republic of Ireland.

Well, the process has finally reached its tortuous conclusion. The seller failed to respond within the initial deadline so I escalated the case to eBay and they immediately found in my favour. The process was actually very straightforward: eBay provided a prepaid mailing label so all I had to do was to re-package the damaged item and drop it in at a PO. It was delivered to the seller today and eBay have issued my refund, one day short of two weeks after the item was originally delivered to me in its damaged state. I am a tad miffed with the seller, for two reasons: 1) If they had replied promptly to my original refund request, we could perhaps have agreed a partial refund to cover the damage and I could have kept the loco as a repair job. As it is, they now have a damaged item that they'll have to try to sell in that state, and I have to look for another. 2) In the time it took for the process to be completed, another example of the same loco was listed, at a very similar price, but got snapped up before my refund was issued (I also note that the seller still has the item - even using the same photo as their eBay listing - showing as available to purchase in its non-damaged state from their standalone online shop!)

I think a lot of these people aren't 'on the phone' in the sense of making calls. From what I've seen from the top deck of buses they're texting, surfing the web, and "keeping up" with Facebook, Twitter and all those other giant leaps of 21st century communications technology that mark the inexorable progress of mankind towards its ultimate fate destiny.

Peco no longer do templates for Setrack turnouts. It's difficult to tell for sure with the perspective of the photo but I think what the OP has is the more modern version of the Setrack curved point where both roads are nominal 2nd radius. I say that because, looking at the outer rail of at the toe end of the turnout, it seems to my eye that the rail starts off straight before the curve begins. A Setrack curved turnout is basically one 2nd radius curve superimposed on a 67mm straight followed by a 2nd radius curve - and that's the 67mm straight bit I'm seeing in the photo. Add more 2nd radius track segments to each road until you have two 90° bends (you need one of the 11.25° half curves on the inner road) and you end up with two parallel tracks at the standard Setrack 67mm spacing. The Streamline curved points are based around two curves of different radii - and significantly larger radii then the Setrack ones to boot.

99% of the people I see doing it round my way (as I said previously, there are two roundabouts near me where it happens on a regular basis) are driving expensive cars with Scottish registrations. I don't think they're all Polish plumbers, just arrogant, entitled s*ds. Same as the ones that think it's a good idea to pick an argument with an artic over road space.

Covered in Rule 187: In all cases watch out for and give plenty of room to...long vehicles (including those towing trailers). These might have to take a different course or straddle lanes either approaching or on the roundabout because of their length. Watch out for their signals.

I'm certain that the Highway Code used to say that if there were two lanes on the approach to a roundabout then you could use either lane if going straight on provided that the straight-on exit also had two lanes. The important point is that you were not supposed to change lanes as you went through the roundabout - it was pick one or the other and stick to it. It doesn't seem to say that these days. Here's the picture that accompanies Rule 185 in the current online version: If they fiddle about with quite important rules like this on the quiet, it's not surprising that we end up with different drivers each thinking the other is breaking is the rules. (Next thing you know, they'll quietly change it to say that the correct way to join a motorway is come down the slip road at any speed you fancy, bang your right indicator on, and blindly go for it. Sometimes I think it must already say that: it seems to be standard procedure for so many drivers.)

There was a brief shot of it at the start of episode 3 but the train didn't get that far up the line during the episode. I think the viaduct is on the concrete spillway from the Caledonian Canal down to the River Oich just north of Bridge of Oich ie here. Screenshot from the programme to compare: As an example of how the edit plays a little "fast and loose" with the timeline, I offer this sequence from episode 3: 1) Aerial establishing shot of Laggan Locks. Note that the lock gates 'point' north, so the loco will be arriving along the road which enters the frame at the right-hand side, and will need to cross the canal from right to left. (Inverness is off the 'bottom' of the screen.) You can see the truss bridge waiting to be deployed on the left-hand side of the canal. 2) The truss bridge deployment team standing next to the bridge and spotting the driving team approaching. They're looking and pointing in the right direction in this shot. 3) Two seconds later, what is obviously meant to be understood by the viewer to be a shot of the driving team approaching Laggan Locks. The only problem is, this location is actually a mile and a half further along the route, approaching the Laggan Swing Bridge at the south end of Loch Oich. According to the narrative, the loco's not even supposed to have got there yet! (Google Streetview image of the same location here, in case you don't believe me.)

Rule 185 of the Highway Code actually contains some sound advice on this point: "watch out for all other road users already on the roundabout; be aware they may not be signalling correctly or at all". (Arguably the first rule in the "Using the road" section should be: "watch out for all other road users; be aware that they might not be signalling correctly or at all, observing traffic laws or the Highway Code, acting rationally or with any evidence of a sense of self-preservation - and they may indeed give every impression of actively trying to kill you.") Another example of bad roundabout behaviour is approaching in the left-hand lane when you actually want to turn right - the reason being that there's a bit of a queue in the right-hand lane. Perpetrators of this inconsiderate stunt usually don't indicate until they're past the first exit, at which point they put their right indicator on. I suspect this is a feeble attempt to disguise their selfishness, maybe hoping that people will think, "Oh, he must have changed his mind, I'll be kind and let him in". No, more often than not they're just rude, impatient b*st*rds. Prime locations for the observation of this kind of behaviour in my neighbourhood are the roundabout coming off the A1 (southbound) to join the A720, and the southern roundabout at the Lothianburn junction coming off the A720 to join the A701 northbound. (The latter only has left and right turn options, so by turning right from the left lane you run the real risk of getting squeezed out at the right-turn exit. You pretty much put the onus on the other driver - who is doing what they're supposed to - not to drive in to you, simply because you chose to ignore the rules because of your selfish impatience.)

Looking at it the other way round, when I was doing Computer Science at Uni, the lecturer whose job it was to teach us the rudiments of COBOL opened his first lecture with the following story: Hundreds of years in the future, the buried remains of this computer laboratory may be discovered and excavated by archaeologists. They will carefully conserve and document their finds, and put some of them on display in a museum. A fragment of FORTRAN might be labelled "Apparently used primarily for programming scientific and mathematical functions". A scrap of BASIC might be identified as "a simple programming language designed for end users with limited technical knowledge". A deck of 80 column cards containing an entire COBOL program would likely be categorised as "probably used for religious or ceremonial purposes". (Note: this joke usually only works with computer scientists of a certain age.)

Buy a cheap second-hand Windows PC/laptop on eBay/Gumtree? If you still want to use the Mac then run the free VMWare P2V tool on the Windows machine to get a virtual machine image that you can import in to VirtualBox (also free) on the Mac, then install your Windows layout design tool of choice on that. It's what I do. Or try running AnyRail or what-have-you under WINE. It is reported to work but I've not tried it (I found WINE impenetrable, whereas virtual machines make sense to me). It's really not necessary to be tied solely to the OS that comes installed on your computer these days.

Quick answer: see post #220 on this very thread.

uksteam.info has her doing the Cumbrian Mountain Express in August this year, and the Waverley five times across August and early September. Is the Railway Touring Company going to have to change its plans? Hmm, checked their web site and it says the 4th August CME will be hauled by 60103, and offers a list of three possible locomotives for the Waverley - though still including 46233 at the moment. The Princess Royal Class Locomotive Trust web site says: "The Railway Touring Company ‘Cumbrian Mountain Express’ trips are operated by a pool of several locomotives of which 6233 ‘Duchess of Sutherland’ is one. The dates on this list are ones which 6233 is currently planned to operate but this is subject to change." I couldn't immediately see a formal announcement on there that she is going to stay 'down south'. Was any reason given for this decision?

This is precisely my concern, and I can't immediately think of an elegant way to resolve it. Perhaps a registered letter to the seller stating that if they don't contact me within x days of receipt of the letter to arrange return of the item at their cost, I shall consider them to have renounced any claim to it and will treat it as my own property to dispose of as I choose.

Aah, gotcha. It's not on a tab - I'm still on the old non-tabbed version of the page for some reason - it's way, way down at the bottom of the screen (and I can access the original listing from there, too). They didn't move it there straight away, though, that's what confused me. It was definitely still sitting in the main body of the purchase history, with the 'return requested' indication against it, for at least 24 hours before they moved it. That wasn't confusing at all... I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens. It's annoying, though, that they're taking so long to respond, because I've seen another item I'd like to spend the money on instead and it'll probably go while I'm waiting for this to get sorted out. Hey ho. If I get my money back the seller doesn't respond to further communication, I wonder how long I have to hang on to the item before I can legitimately treat as mine to keep or dispose of as I see fit.

I bought a loco on eBay last weekend. When it arrived the front buffer beam was cracked and broken - one buffer was completely off and rattling around inside the box, the other one fell off as I unpacked it. I requested a return via eBay the same day, stating the reason as "damaged in transit" and provided some photos in evidence of the damage. eBay acknowledged my return request but I've yet to hear from the seller. I've checked the seller's activity and they've listed a fair few items in the last few days, so it doesn't look as if they're on holiday or anything like that. Oddly, the purchase has disappeared from my purchase history. The acknowledgement of the return request is still in my eBay Inbox, though. I've also discovered that the listing I purchased it from has completely disappeared - even searching on the item number turns up nothing. Is this normal with return requests? eBay have said that if I haven't heard from the seller by the 27th I can ask them to intervene. If I do that, and the seller doesn't respond to them either, then I suspect that eBay will just refund me anyway. If that happens, what am I supposed to do with the damaged item? If I send it back to the seller at that point I'll be out of pocket the cost of return postage. But if I've been refunded the purchase price then surely the item doesn't belong to me so I can't keep it. I can't recall ever having to return an eBay purchase for this reason before, so I'm unsure of how it is all supposed to work. (I feel a bit bad for the seller because the loco was packed pretty well - he'd even put some extra foam inside the manufacturer's packaging. But it clearly wasn't enough to save it when Royal Mail dropped it - though there's no obvious sign of a serious impact on the outer packaging so I assume they must have dropped it square on its end, and the loco slid forward inside the box and whacked its front end hard enough on the interior of the packaging to break the buffer beam.)