Michael Hodgson

I used an electric microwave to cook spuds just now - should I be using a blowlamp?

Oh yeah, I've still got an electric immersion heater that I've not used in years. I thinks it's on a radial circuit with its own 15A fuse. I suppose they could put an electric boiler in the airing cupboard.

All very well for new housing, but I don't see it happening quickly for existing buildings unless there are massive financial incentives & do it for free for those in social housing. My parents had night storage heating for 30 years, until eventually mains gas reached the village, by which time most of the street had already ripped out their clapped out heaters and installed coke, oil or bottled gas, then needed to redecorate the whole house. The electric heating was unreliable anyway because every time you really needed the heating, the supply cables would be blown down in a storm. So what sort of installation would be likely ? Will everybody go back to night storage, will it be underfloor heating, will the politicians change the rules and force everybody to have active smart meters limiting load during peak hours? Rip out pipes and radiators, floorboards up, new wires all round the house? I suppose it would help solve the post-covid unemployment problem to retrain many thousands to work as domestic installation engineers and another lot as decorators to sort out the mess the first lot make.

So what's the problem with this Olivia? I have never had any dealings with them Does the firm have a bad reputation?

I thought it was just my prejudice, but track with plastic ballast reminds of the old grey Triang "Standard" track. However I do like the idea of the point motor being so easy to fit - but it was almost as easy on the Triang stuff also.

The situation is not all that different from ordering something on "special offer" at a good price only to find they can't supply because they've sold out in the meantime to other people who saw the bargain before you..

Indeed, but there is a still a limit - it's determined by how many will stay on the rails, not divide, develop mechanical faults etc.

Well she had their own waiting room at Wolferton, couldn't they create a royal taxi rank or fly the Royal standard on the signpost? In Holland the royals go by bike ...you could always paint a Boris bike purple.

I thought that those sites didn't report publicly the passing or whereabouts of royal trains and nuclear waste ? I'm not suggesting the two things are connected! But with their own dedicated reporting numbers that's not exactly a difficult bit of programming.

As the waste product is H20, won't we raise the sea level still further and eventually run out of oxygen to breathe if the whole world switches to that?

Quite so. My only doubt about ring mains is that they work on the principle that a fully loaded 30A ring carries 15A on one lead from the fusebox and 15A on the other so that it won't exceed the rating of 2.5mm T&E cable. But you have no way of knowing if the ring somehow becomes broken (eg one wire accidentally disconnected from one of the sockets) unless there is also some other fault which causes the fuse to blow. Surely you can't even prove that the ring is complete when you first connected it to the fuse box? If 30A of appliances happens to be running all on one side of the break, that cable is then carrying double its rated load but still won't bother the 30A fuse. So why isn't there a fire risk in the cables buried in the wall? Are we relying on a theoretical safety margin in the rating of cables?

When prices get silly one has to wonder whether there is shill bidding.

Train detection should be a piece of p*ss on a 3-rail layout. Perhaps he could usefully have spent slightly longer on his baseboards and a little less on control gear?

That seems a tad harsh. I'm sure the town crier with his bell and his worship the mayor will make a point of turning out with his chain bowing and scraping and a couple of council workers will roll out a red carpet and curtsey. Councillors tend to like flummery and not to have republican leanings. And there's sure to be a photographer from the local rag. Royalty seems to be one the few things that still sell newspapers.

I've never built my own points, but would consider kit building. This looks very promising, dependent of course on price, although I'm not in the market for track at present. Peco have dominated this market for far too long, so it would be great to see some competition.

Aerobatics? I suppose they could try flying inverted briefly in order to get everybody to order more drinks! ... but if you fly Ryanair to save money you probably don't want to get drinks from the trolley anyway.

I hope it's not in one of a couple of thousand containers that fell overboard from the One Asus the other day!

I'm sure I have seen photos of locos embellished as described, but I'm not convinced that these photos show anything more than the light landing a little differently on the areas concerned. Except when specially cleaned up, the soot on the dished smokebox door would usually be slightly rougher in texture and appear in B/W photos darker than smoother surface of the steel hinges. However that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't also white paint showing through the muck. But thank you for telling me to look for locos in my local market - I don't go there very often (only once since lockdown!) but I've never seen any there.

Probably not relevant to the OP's problem, but doesn't this mean a resistive axle that works OK on a 4088xx might fail to trigger a railcom detector? If so, you presumably need to use lower resistor values for reliable operation if you have any 50xx devices

Does a window box on a balcony count as a garden? If it's big enough to accommodate a gnome, I suppose it must be.

Oh well, if they nationalise the railways, they can always bring back the stale cheese sandwich to give the newspapers something to talk about.

He can't have died - I'm sure he was on telly only the other day with Robin Hood!

Of course you need to steer! Why else would that great big wheel be there? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Class_108_driver's_cab.JPG/1024px-Class_108_driver's_cab.JPG I was once on a railtour that was overbooked and somebody (not some uninterested journalist or a politician with an axe to grind, but an enthusiast, no less) decided to sit in an unmanned guard's compartment and screwed down a large red wheel to make it easier to sit on. That carriage had to be detached at Reading - and some of the other passengers thought it was a joke when they were given the reason "flat tyre" for the delay.

I drink my tea black but when I make a brew I usually make a milky coffee for herself. But it's never even occurred to me to offer the cat a cuppa! Does he take sugar? ... the dog is definitely partial to biccies.

Yes, this getting older business is a bu**er. What with my irregular heartbeat, my knee replacement, diabetes, arthritis, having to have kidney removed, a hearing aid and now I've got a letter saying I need to have my eyes tested again ... doesn't leave enough time for modelling.