ejstubbs

I usually just stick "rmweb" (without the quotes) at the end of the search string and the top hits that come up are all from RMweb. Only if Google refuses to find something that I know is here do I bother to retry with the longer "site:rmweb.co.uk". (And then I usually find that my certainty was mistaken and/or I got one or more of the search keywords wrong.) I hardly ever use the site search functions; I find Google just as easy and often better, especially since you can get at it directly through the browser's address field these days (ie since several years ago!)

This might help as a starting point. OK, I'm not being entirely serious (and apologies to the OP if it came across as a bit mean) but I am actually only half joking. After all, it's got ten 5-star reviews, and the one other review is 4 stars I learned a lot of basic stuff about electrical circuits, solenoids and the like with the help of that book. Switches made out of drawing pins and paper clips, isn't it, hmm? Jumpers for goalposts. Rush goalie. Two at the back, three in the middle, four up front, one's gone home for his tea. Beans on toast? No, a lemon, and two terminals cannibalised from an old dry battery. Matron, my tongue hurts and my tummy feels funny. Yummy yummy yummy. Ohio Express, 1968. Marvellous. To put it another way: I think we sometimes need to consider that not everyone has even that level of basic understanding of how electricity works*. * Of course, anyone who's worked on old cars knows that it actually works by smoke. So long as the smoke stays inside the wires and other stuff it's OK. You can tell when things have stopped working because you can see the smoke leaking out.

That was the Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway - hardly in the 'north' of Scotland (map), it's south of Glasgow and only ~50 miles from Gretna Green by road (by contrast, John O'Groats is ~360 miles from GG). Stagecoach did pretty much exactly that in the early days of local bus deregulation. In Darlington, for example, Souter drove the competing bus company out by letting people ride his buses for free. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission described Stagecoache's tactics as "predatory, deplorable and against the public interest". But he got away with it.

Exeter (n.) All light household and electrical goods contain a number of vital components plus at least one exeter. If you've just mended a fuse, changed a bulb or fixed a blender, the exeter is the small, flat or round plastic or bakelite piece left over which means you have to undo everything and start all over again. With grateful thanks to Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

Plenty of people actually seem to want to buy them!

The Greeks built the Diolkos in around 600BC to enable portage of vessels, or at least their cargoes, across the Isthmus of Corinth. The track was paved with limestone, but had grooves for the wagons to run in (shades of the Haytor Granite Tramway), although it's disputed whether these were deliberately cut or simply eroded by traffic. The 'gauge' was roughly 5ft 3in (yes, like in Ireland!) Motive power appears to have been either human or animal. The track was engineered to avoid the steepest gradients, much like a wagonway, plateway or railway. It lasted in use until the first century AD, so the Romans would certainly have known about it - the Wiki article about wagonways says that there were similar tracks in Roman Egypt.

I've always been a bit sceptical of the supposed benefits of keyless entry. Seems like my doubts were not unfounded. At least the more conventional type of remote key fob only broadcasts when you press the button.

The cars were often spectacular but the racing itself very often wasn't that close. It tended to be dominated by a single manufacturer - particularly McLaren, and later Porsche. Chaparral was the real innovator, Jim Hall introducing many aerodynamic ideas on his Can-Am cars before they were taken up by F1 teams. There is a Chaparral museum in Midland, Texas which my BoL has visited and says is very good. (Mind you, he was based in Midland for work - I doubt it's worth the hike otherwise, Midland is a tad out of the way.) Apparently they run the cars from time to time, to keep them in good nick. I used to enjoy watching Formula 5000 at Brands and Mallory back in the day. Similar idea, but open-wheel cars. Cars from both series still occasionally turn up in Formula Libre at hillclimbs and sprints, and they are still impressive to see being driven with the gusto they deserve.

And the obligatory "cooking breakfast on the coal shovel" scene. (IIRC a number of RMWebbers with knowledge of this sort of thing have mentioned on other threads how such a practice would not necessarily have been recommended on the 'real' railway, given some other uses that the coal shovel was sometimes pressed in to...) I did wonder where on Skye the scenes with the seanchaí were shot - it looked awfully like the coastline just down the road from where we stayed on the Misty Isle this summer. Duirinish is quite as charming as depicted in the programme. Disappointed that she didn't mention that Thomas Telford engineered the bridge that carries the 'main' road across the Allt Dhuirinis.

I'm still trying to work out what the word "skewed" is doing in the thread title. Does the OP expect Hornby's marketing activities to give equal prominence to Bachmann's products, or something?

It doesn't matter which is north and which is south so long as you have opposite poles on either side of the track, so that the magnetic field (which runs N-S) is at right angles to the track. It's the same with the Kadee between-the-rails uncouplers: it doesn't matter which way round you fit them (in fact it would likely be a complete PITA if it did matter). A number of different approaches to using neodymium magnets for uncoupling Kadees have been described on RMWeb and other online forums. These include using small bar magnets to replace sleepers, and using rod magnets buried between the sleepers to achieve a similar effect to Zorcan's approach. Google should turn up most of them. I don't think I've seen other folks use the tinplate sheet before, though. One intriguing approach that I must try sometime soon was described in the Camel Quay layout thread: if you put a magnet on only one side of the track, the uncoupling apparently only functions in one direction - useful for run-rounds and the like.

You might find some further illumination on this thread which I started a few years back, regarding a similar track plan to yours at a real station.

Having failed to find any of the RUB clones in Flying Tiger earlier in the week, I did discover today that Office Outlet are doing the genuine Really Useful 0.55 litre box (the 'pencil box') for £1.99.

Another, related, question, about ash pits and inspection pits. I presume these were not the same thing ie you weren't expected to inspect the underside of the loco from atop a pile of smouldering remnants recently dumped from the firebox. So, thinking again about the 'typical' branch line engine shed, would there be a clean(ish) inspection pit inside the shed (and thus potentially not visible in a model) and a separate ash pit outside eg next to the coal bunker?

I suspect the guys in this movie would have been a little less cavalier in their approach: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046268/ (Parodied magnificently by the Goons shortly after its release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fear_of_Wages)

The Freelander 2 uses the Haldex electronically controlled 4x4 system, similar to what's fitted to my Yeti. That can certainly handle the car being driven on a smaller diameter space-saver spare wheel (though the maximum speed in such use is limited by law to 50mph) so I would have thought it should be OK with different sized wheels fore and aft. Not sure I'd be completely at ease with it myself though, from a handling perspective if nothing else. Depending on how much tread is left on the rear tyres (and how old they are) - and, of course, what I could afford at the time - I'd be inclined to get all four changed at the same time. In the absence of any specific advice by the manufacturer, informed advice (eg from the AA*) is to put the new tyres on the back, so if the OP only replaces the tyres on the front wheels, he should also get the wheels rotated fore and aft. It's widely suggested to be a good idea to rotate fore and aft on a regular basis anyway - and it's specifically recommended in my Yeti's handbook, for example. I do it when I swap from summer to winter tyres and back. Apart from anything else, it evens out the tyre wear and makes it more likely that all tyres will come ready for replacement at roughly the same time. In terms of insurance companies needing to know about non-OEM wheels, so long as the aftermarket wheels are of a size which has been type-approved for the vehicle then there shouldn't really be any need (assuming that the wheels meet the appropriate standard - I'm not sure what the standards regime is for wheels, maybe TÜV?) It should be possible to get the vehicle type approval information from the manufacturer. It's not a long or complicated document - it wasn't in the case of my Yeti, at least, and it confirmed the legality of my choice of wheel size for my winter tyres (R16 rather than R17, and narrower, to provide clearance for snow chains). * Even Kwik-Fit make this recommendation, though I wouldn't normally include them amongst the purveyors of informed advice. They advise against rotating tyres, for example - can't think why...

In my experience most if not all flat-pack furniture if this kind has no floor in the base, so a sack of ballast wouldn't be much help. You could install a floor yourself, but that would suggest that you are aware of the topple risk in the first place. And most buyers of IKEA furniture don't expect to have to modify the item during or after construction anyway (far too many apparently sentient and physically able individuals seem to struggle with the construction in the first place, sadly). But you don't have to modify it in any case: they provide an effective mitigation for the topple risk as part of the product you buy. They even tell you about it. Just not in big enough letters, apparently. Perhaps some of the words were a bit long as well. Another example of the some people's clod-headed refusal to recruit adequate numbers of brain cells for any task that involves anything more complicated than looking at a screen, tapping, swiping, or stuffing food in to the mouth, IMO. Many of these settlements are reached because it's cheaper to settle than to fight the case. Especially so in the US, where there is a significant risk of having outrageous punitive damages assessed against you if you do lose, which means you then have to give more money to lawyers to get the amount reduced to a half-way sensible level (reference Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, for example). It's also better for the company's reputation to admit they were wrong (even if they don't think that they were) and draw a line under the issue, than it is to pursue a legal argument against someone whose darling kiddywink has perished horribly under a pile of particle board and melamine.

Any money-making enterprise that expects its employees to break the law in the performance of their job is little short of a racket IMO.

As far as I know it never has been HD, in the sense that the broadcast video stream has not been in HD resolution (ie 1920x1080 pixels). I'll confirm that as soon as I can get on to my HD PVR and check the resolution of one of the Talking Pictures TV programmes. There are quite a few non-HD channels on the HD multiplexes. The term "HD multiplex" is misleading in that regard. A DVB multiplex (of either flavour) is, at the end of the day, little more than a one-way digital "pipe" that uses broadcast wireless as the physical carrier rather than wires, fibre, cellular radio or short-range wireless such as WiFi. As I mentioned in my previous post, the multiplexes that carry the HD channels use a more up-to-date digital terrestrial broadcast technology called DVB-T2. DVB-T2 has significantly greater bandwidth (bits per second) than the original DVB-T technology - you could think of it a bit like 3G vs 4G mobile data, or 802.11n vs 802.11g WiFi. That higher bandwidth is required in order to be able to handle the greater bitrate required for HD video. Because the DVB technology just provides a "pipe" that that you can send any digital data down (fundamentally, it doesn't care whether it's SD or HD digital video - or even e-mail, web pages, or anything else so long as it's a string of 0s and 1s), it also means that there's more room for SD channels on a DVB-T2 multiplex. At the moment there are three DVB-T2 multiplexes: the original one that was created specifically for the public service broadcast (PSB) channels (ie BBC, ITV1, 4 and Five) and two others that were added later (but only on certain transmitters) that provided capacity for more HD channels. Takeup of that additional bandwidth was slower than expected. (Bear in mind that even Five only went HD on Freeview this year, several years after Freeview HD had launched.) So Ofcom decided to allow Arqiva, which operates those multiplexes (called COM7 and COM8) to sell space on those multiplexes for SD channels too, and that's how Talking Pictures TV original made its way on to Freeview. I believe that those additional HD multiplexes may not have much of a long term future, as the frequencies they use are planned to disappear as part of another radio spectrum shuffle for 5G or some such other massively important technology for keeping the bovine hordes glued to Farcebook and Twatter on their somaphones. In that sense, having Talking Pictures TV on COM6 rather COM7 is probably good for the channel's long term survival on Freeview. UPDATE 1: According to Talking Pictures TV, if you currently receive the channel on Freeview then you will have to retune to continue to get it after it moves from COM7 to COM6. If you don't currently get it on Freeview, but you do get Yesterday (channel 19) then you should be able to get Talking Pictures TV after November 30th (whether that will require a retune I'm not 100% sure - it may depend on your TV/digibox). UPDATE 2: I've now had a chance to inspect a decrypted video stream from Talking Pictures TV. The resolution is 544x576 pixels. That's a fair way short of HD, in fact it's not even SD which is 720x576. That kind of resolution is often used by minor channels to keep their bandwidth down - bandwidth being what you pay the multiplex operator for. The bit rate on the Talking Pictures TV film I checked was 1.81Mb/s. In comparison, a film I recorded from Film4 recently was 720x576 pixels ie full SD resolution, at a bit rate of 2.40Mb/s ie 33% more than Talking Pictures TV. CONCLUSION: Any perception of high picture quality on Talking Pictures TV is going to be down to the upscaler in your TV. On the plus side, it shouldn't be any worse when the channel moves to COM6 - in fact Talking Pictures TV have said that it definitely won't be any worse. FINAL THOUGHT: It now occurs to me that your comment about "colour quality" might have been a subtle joke based on the fact that Talking Pictures TV usually shows films and TV shows shot in monochrome. In which case: WOOSH, and D'oh!

Talking Pictures TV on Freeview is moving to a non-HD multiplex (technically, a DVB-T rather than a DVB-T2 multiplex) at some point on Thursday afternoon next week (ie 30th November). That means that it should be available in areas which don't have the extra HD channels, and to people who don't have an HD Freeview box or an HD Freeview tuner in their TV. I understand it will keep its current channel number (81). If you currently receive Talking Pictures TV on the HD multiplex then you may need to re-tune your Freeview box or TV to continue receiving it after it moves. Or it may 'just work'. Unless there's something you're desperate to watch or record at around that time (and bear in mind that Talking Pictures does tend to repeat its programming over time) I'd probably wait to see if the technology works it out on its own, before interfering and potentially breaking something. Looks like I won't have to bother buying that DVB-T2 tuner for my computer after all. More money for trains, hurrah!

You can buy it from Maplin.

Blast, they don't have any left in the Edinburgh store (I did ask). Probably swept aside to make room for a tidal wave of seasonal tat. Bah humbug! Roughly what size are the ones you got? (I don't do N gauge so please don't say "enough for half a dozen wagons"!)

According to Den of Geek: Redshift Research, a London-based market research company has conducted all of the Pointless surveys online since the show began in 2009. They identify people to take part in a range of research surveys using their Crowdology online tool and pay them for the time they spend filling in questionnaires. The key thing, according to host Alexander Armstrong is that the people polled aren’t aware they’re answering Pointless questions. “You can’t ‘apply’ to be one of the 100 people because that would then affect the outcome.”

Nowadays it seems that everyone is responsible for their own safety unless they happen to be staring at a mobile phone, when it becomes everyone else's responsibility to protect them from their own stupidity. Can't see any other reason for roadside clutter like this: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/traffic-lights-pavement-smartphone-users-look-down-dutch-pedestrians-netherlands-a7584081.html to be considered a good idea.

An alternative to the graphite pencil is dry graphite powder eg https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BTOBHH6 You may want to be careful how you spray it around in the vicinity of things containing electrickery. Also, be careful of the stuff that's sold for locks: that often has the graphite suspended in oil, which is emphatically not what you want for close coupling mechanisms. WD40 do a dry PTFE lubricant: https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-40-Specialist-Lubricant-PTFE-400ml/dp/B006UCJ4Z4 - much cheaper ml for ml compared to Labelle but I can't swear that it would be precisely as effective (although if it is then 400ml would probably be enough for all the close coupling mechanisms in the UK!)