Michael Hodgson

Not that rapidly - they've been doing it for decades!

It looks as though its been kept in a chicken shed!

Pooh!

That is a cat with real character !

Also happens in 12":1ft scale, and they don't usually paint the rail sides with acrylic paint. The moral is clear - run trains regularly - it's not your paint job that's causing your diffculties.

There's one on Ebay - item no 285813409764. It's not one of the ones I'm trying to flog though!

Don't give me AI. Yesterday I wanted to hang out the washing if the weather was going to hold. Alexa told me it would start raining at 12pm. I've always understood there was no such time, there's 12 noon and 12 midnight, given the meaning of the Latin abbreviations. And I'm wary of those times having had to fix Cobol programs that had been specified for a clock running from 0101 to 2460 hours. So I asked Alexa "What is pm?" and it told me that was currently Rishi. OK, fair enough I suppose, so I rephrased it "When is pm?" It told me that 8pm started on 12th March 2023 at 4am !!

Basic is a convenient if old-fashioned programming language for this sort of thing. The first thing I did with my BBC Micro was to modify the Clock program that came with it (written in Basic) to a fast clock (8 times normal speed) for running a model railway to a timetable. I also wrote my own spreadsheet system for maintaining an inventory of rolling stock. Microsoft used to come with a version called qBasic. This was extremely useful and I wrote a number of program using this for various purposes. One was to operate a full size block instrument by offering train using the standard bell codes, and operating the dials. It could also generate random emergency codes. The more difficult part was getting it to interpret bell codes sent to it using a tapper. It can still be used with Windows running a DOS box. It can of course be written using other programming languages, it's really a question of what you have readily available and what you have familiarity with as there is a learning curve with all progamming languages. This could be done if you develop an interface to software like iTrain - which is a better piece of software than any AI system I've yet seen..

Yes, but thanks to the latest achievement of our glorious political leaders, more bandwidth will become gradually available as nobody born after 2009 will be allowed to produce smoke signals.

If he's got a lorryload of spare tarmac he's probably the chap being paid by the council to mend the potholes.

The formation is interesting too 4 x 2 car units, 156493 + 156493 + 156477 + 156477 - with the running numbers duplicated

Those were called Mk 2 couplings. So Mk. 1 was presumably the original Rovex ones

There's a lot of chip shops in Yorkshire, so there should be enough second-hand oil, so the NYMR is doing the right thing if it moves to oil firing?

Welcome to the West Highlands! Which train are ye going back on? They should throw in a swarm of midges to complete the effect.

Absolutely. I will be up for one of these (unfortunately it would be difficult to justify more than one of them). But it's got to be in 4mm.

I'm going with their competitor.

At the moment Zebedee and Macavity are fighting over who's in charge. Pooh will come down shortly to tell them both he's in charge. The dogs both know their place; even little Snowdrop pulls rank on them !

If these people are going to waste my time, I'm happy to reciprocate. I prefer to tell them I'll just call the boss and leave the phone in front of the dog.

If you run all the wires together in trunking like that, you may suffer interference problems, especially with DCC. It may well be OK, but it's preferable to run DCC cabling separately to avoid that risk..

Surely you mean the back seat?

I have my doubts about it being that simple. Each council sets its own rules on recycling, and they can't even agree what colour bins we should all use. Grey bins here in North Herts are for recycling, but in South Cambs they're for landfill. What I can chuck in which recycling bin here isn't the same as what I'm supposed to do there. The rules ares as clear as mud. It's all very well for central government to say emptying the bins is a local matter, but if they want people to do the right thing we need consistency across the country, and its unrealistic to expect everybody to be able tell one sort of plastic from another. A lot of things are made of mutiple materials. For example if I take a broken chair to the tip I may ask one of the staff do I chuck this in the skip for metals because that what its legs are or does it go into "bulky waste". If I go to a different tip or even just ask a different operative I can expect to a different answer! And now they employ a bloke to stand at the gate asking for proof that I live in the county - heaven forfend that I cross the border into Bedfordshire using a car registered in Hertfordshire to dispose of broken furniture for a disabled lady in Cambridgeshire ! Rant over. None of these issues are the fault of model railway manufacturers of course, who are to be commended on trying to minimise damage to the environment.

With a Swiss Army knife? 😁

The ScR tokenless block was relatively late - first used in May 1969 I understand. The WR version used in the rest of the country preceded it, quite a different design and method of operation. I believe the WR's objective was to allow token to be obtained without the signalling being there full-time, so that he could be freed up to do other duties such as selling tickets, whereas the Scottish version was more like Absolute Block and just did away with the need for physical handling of tokens. The other advantage of Tokenless block was that the section didn't need continuous track-circuiting. Where a platform needed to be usable in both directions, direction lever working (different regulations) was common.

For information, the Spring 2024 edition of the Signalling Record (issued to SRS members) has a 12 page article by Mike Norris on Carlisle No 5 (Crown Street) Signal box at the southern end of the station, apparently the first part of a series of articles covering the period 1951 to 1973.