AndrewC

Greetings from the boring borough. Congrats and commiserations to all as appropriate. Sunny but cool this morning. Autumn is around the corner. Been a merde week. Still no builder, still no response. Looks like it will be up to the courts now. In the meantime this weekend will be "Operation Bedroom", where we attempt to complete the room to a reasonable standard ourselves so that we can move back in. Bits of floorboards are up and the path of the central heating pipes marked out. Using Speedfit I should have no problem installing the radiator. That was my biggest worry. I know that really I should be able to cut a bit of copper pipe and solder the joints but I'd have to invest in the soldering and cutting gear for what would be 4 elbows and less than 3m of pipework. The engineered flooring will be time consuming but with luck we'll have a habitable room by Monday. POE is unlikely as I've been covering for half the practice this week and still have my own work to get through before the end of day. Tonight, however will be a few Dutch beers from Brouwerij Emelisse at Eebria's tap room. We've both earned that. The offspring is famoose after a kerfuffle at his place of work a few weeks ago. A pair of smack heads tried to make off with a large basket of shopping. They ended up with nothing but a few bruises. (as did the offspring and a couple of his coworkers) Not impressed with the local constabulary as this pair are allegedly quite well known in the area and have tried this stunt in a couple of other shops since. They are quite visible but the old bill has had to put out requests for information on their whereabouts. That is what results from cutbacks. The police don't have the resources to even spend an hour wandering behind the high street shops where they'd likely find the scroats fairly quickly. that's it from me. Have a great extended weekend.

Depending on circumstances some would be speaking a whole octave higher of her.

Sadly the calibre of our politicians is such that it isn't possible to fire them out of cannons into the sun. Bun fights on here are like watching car crashes in slow motion. You know what's coming, you can see it coming, but it takes sooo long before the big bang, and you just can't seem to look away. These are gentle compared to the flame wars on the old news groups like rec.hobbies.model.railroad and similar. I still remember one long running saga that started when someone referred to the paint department at Bachmann as the "Big Dipper". (before there was a Bachmann UK that is)

On that note.......

It is legal, just. They have mandatory courses for internal crap throughout the year. Those are not included in the pay back requirement. However, part of the job condition/description/requirement is to keep certified and up to date on the core supported platforms. I either do it at my cost, or they pay and I have to stay or pay back. Some of these are £1000 for a 2 day webex session.

Greetings all from the boring borough. Belated birthday wishes to Andyram. AndyID: Brussels is a very nice city now. There are also too many good beer bars to visit in a single day. Its also a good hub for rail travel into Europe if you are starting with the Eurostar. Little happening here. Another course to take today. The employer's method of reducing the massive flight risk that currently exists amongst us senior consultants and architects. "You must take course, you must take certification, oh and if you leave in less than 6 months you get to pay back the cost." No sign of the builder. Not unexpected. About it from here. Enjoy the day.

I've got all my music in iTunes as a catalogue as well as for the phone & Sonos. There are metadata tags that allow you to change the album and artist sort order. I've put all mine under last, first as far as sorting goes. However, bloody Sonos ignores this and sorts by the artist and not the sort order tag. Unless you are looking directly at the "on this phone" list, then it uses the sort order as imposed by the Apple app it is reading from. Argh!!!!! In other news the builder failed again to show up. Not even a courtesy "pathetic excuse #36" text. Letter sent to him, email, and to his company's registered office. Complaint registered with BidVine. The doors of the last chance saloon have swung closed. Sadly it now means having to look at either eating a reasonable chunk of cash that was paid in advance for materials, or small claims. In the case of the latter, he was paid directly and not via the company so my quickie free solicitor guidance was to file against him personally and not the company as the money went to him. That makes it harder for him to weasel out as he can't just fold the business and restart. It also presents an easier target if bailiff collection is needed. Stay tuned. the only real bit of work I'm not comfortable completing on my own is the refitting of the radiator. It will need some under floor plumbing as the new one is a lot smaller than the old one was.

Greetings from the boring borough. Nothing of note happening here. I shall bid you all a good day then. Good day.

Some posts here around up turned vehicles and other road nastiness. There seems to be a general increase in stupidity on the roads as of late. The stretch of A2 between Danson and the M25 is rife with scrap metal these days. The eastbound junction with the A2018 seems to attract cars that like sleeping up side down. I've seen at least a dozen in the past year where the driver hasn't made the exit and managed to flip over back onto the A2. Westbound A2 has had a recent outbreak of BBQ car syndrome. In the past 3 weeks, 3 car fires all with the burning vehicle at the side of the road within 300 yds of each other. As you approach the Black Prince interchange you can see the 3 black spots on the hard shoulder. Bizarre.

Would that be Mr Schwab's emporium? My one and only highway blow out was on the I90 coming into Spokane way back in 78. Excellent service and as I remember equally good free coffee while I waited for them to fit a new tire. I actually ended up replacing all 4 as they had a sale on. Morning all from the soggy bottom of the boring borough. Quiet day today thankfully. Met up with some old friends from YYC who are on holiday. Nice Italian meal followed by drinks in Cask beer co near Victoria. Bit tired as we didn't get home until around 12:30 this morning. Today I shall be mostly painting the bedroom during my work breaks. The rest of the house has cooled from "fusion reactor" back to "pizza oven". By tomorrow it should be down to "feck its cold in here". That's about all from me. Enjoy the day

Ahh, parking. The bane of life in most places. We're very fortunate in that we have a private alley way and most people park around back. There is a car dealer nearby that takes up many of the side street spaces but the council is in the middle of making them resident permit parking. That should get rid of that problem. Out front is all yellow lines and a bus stop for good measure. Our alley is also a designated LFB access point. That means even though it is private property, many little private properties actually, a call to the council and any illegally parked vehicle is removed very quickly. The newest owner of the nearby car dealership discovered that to his expense soon after he tried parking a couple of his "products" outside of a neighbour's garage. Both cars vanished within 30 mins of the phone call I'm told. The saga of the builders continues. They were supposed to finish this week (revised again, and again, and again) after the plasterers wrapped up last Friday. No sight, no calls, nothing until this morning with a rather sh1t text apology and assurance that they've be back next Wednesday. Solicitor thinks I have grounds to just dismiss them and recover any costs for having to get another contractor to complete. However, she also says by the time I get someone to start work the existing ones may actually have done something. The decision has been made that if they don't show up on Wednesday, don't complete 5 working days later, and clean up the snag list, we will terminate them and file in small claims for costs. We'll also be reducing the final payment (if any) by the cost of the extra 8 weeks storage we've had to pay for their fcuking about. This will be 34 days wasted. If anyone wants a recommendation of a SE London builder NOT to use, I'll be happy to provide the name in a DM. Useless little c**tpuffin.

Romanes eunt domus

I thought that only happened to me. kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit............

good thing there aren't any modified GMD-1s left. 5 axles.

Good morning all from the boring borough. No Doom Bar here. A shadow of its former self now brewed in Burton. May as well drink Marsden's Pedigree. On the topic of beer. Off to the London Craft Beer Fest shortly. Now to find a cafe for some pre-alcohol buffering. Enjoy the day.

taking the numbers from Statista and cs trains 2+2 does = 4. If we take as read there are similar numbers of modellers in the UK and US, the UK industry sales are about £13.6m per year for 2016. The closest number from the US indicates around $900m for the whole model railroad industry. Peel off the non-modelling bits like construction materials, videos, second hand market, etc and you still have at least a 10:1 ratio in sales per person. Exclude the cost heavy nostalgia modellers of Lionel & similar and the spend ratio is still over 3:1. This seems to be borne out with the batch sizes of production runs. UK circa 4k US (Horizon) 12k.

That has nothing to do with sales and the size of the market. Since we are discussing the closure of a factory that dealt in rtr, what is on a layout in the UK and US are similar in quality. I'd say US outline is ahead in terms of quality over Bachmann or Hornby. In terms of direct sales it is down to how much is being produced and sold in each market. Its simple maths that a large room sized layout will generate a lot more in sales per person than a 6' long blt.

I think its a pretty accurate dip test. Sales of used correlates fairly accurately to sales of new items in most industries. I would say the lower UK numbers may in part be due to a larger percentage of UK modellers not being internet savvy. Then again looking at a random sample from both the UK and US on eBay, there seems to be more new items in the US listings and more over priced old junk in the UK. Getting way off topic though. Suffice to say, like Kader dumping customers from their factories, this is going to impact a load of the newer small manufacturers in the US. (Tangent, etc) Jason @ Rapido had so many issues with factories when he started up that he created his own. Dunno if he has the capacity to take on some of the shortfall but who knows. His company may become the model for the future. (lease space, hire good people, keep the tooling very very close)

About the same survival time as some glacial lakes. I have gone for an unplanned swim in one of these lakes. Bloody cold. Remembering my survival swimming course the consensus then was better to slip into unconsciousness through hypothermia than the panic of drowning and having your lungs fill with water. NHN: all donations of rain gratefully received. 31c in the boring borough according to the weather app.

Morning all from the tropical wasteland that is the boring borough. Bedroom is getting plastered. Wish I was. Oh well, tomorrow is the London Craft Beer Fest. Aka hipster city. Lurker's comment about swimming reminded me of how few people in this country seem to have had swimming lessons. For a tiny island surrounded by the sea that seems a bit bizarre. It's been part of the physical education curriculum in most if not all Canadian provinces since the 60s. coffee has been consumed. The cockwombles at work all seem to have taken the day off, so its a peaceful friday so far. Roll on 16:00. Enjoy your day and weekend.

I've heard the same. The big difference is in purchasing and actual market size. Same number of modellers but the US/Canada has a much larger volume of sales. An average modeller in the UK has a smallish layout with half a dozen locos, a few detail bits, and maybe 20-30 items of rolling stock. An average American modeller will be filling a much larger space and be looking at 30-50 locos and a couple of hundred items of rolling stock. My shed layout is small by American/Canadian standards but the staging sidings (fiddleyard) can and does swallow over 200 cars.

Greetings from the boring borough. A good evening was had with good company. (see Roundhouse's post earlier) Unlike them we had a stress free trip home. Wandered to Bermondsey tube with our haul of takeaway beer, 2 min wait for the Jubbly, & a straight change at Canning town had us in Woolwich 40 mins from departing the bottle shop. Decided to head back to the Hop Stuff Taproom for pizza and wings. Once again the travel deities were kind and we had a 3 min wait for the bus that drops us off within 5m of our front gate. Construction once again ground to a halt. The plasterer never got the builder's text so was double booked this week. Another 3 days wasted. They're here now and not thrilled with having to redo a fair bit of the ceiling boarding that the builders had done. I'll just sit this one out and let them get on with it as it won't cost me anything but an extra day before the work is done. Hopefully we will be in a position to paint the main bedroom on Sunday, flooring & skirting on Monday, back to having a proper room by Monday night. That just leaves the stairs and a bit of flooring in the hall to complete. (tempting fate) They should be finally done by the end of next week. 21 weeks on a 10 week job. But with around 30 days lost for various reasons. 15 weeks of actual work, 75 days effort. Now that the shed is no longer filled with building materials, tools, and furniture it is time to take stock and decide what to do with it. 1 of the staging track boards got damaged and it may not be repairable. I'm thinking along the lines of emptying it. New roof felt and insulation, use any leftover flooring from the house to create a more comfortable work space, and build a completely new layout that is partly modular. Decisions, decisions. now for more coffee and to work. Enjoy the day.

My nifty plant identifier app thinks it is a fraxinus excelsior or common ash with 72% confidence.

There have been several threads on this. Basically the Knaupf and Celotex are moulded sheets of medium density. They are great for scenery and easier to shape but not suitable as a load bearing baseboard structure. The lower density material will warp over time and is not as stable as the much higher density blue extruded foam. Celotex gets much of its stability from the foil coating acting as a laminated ply structure. Remove the foil and it is weakened greatly. I've built over 20 modular boards with foam as the structural base in the past 8 years. The Knaupf and Celotex warped and shrunk slightly. The Dow Floormate blue is still perfectly level with no visible shrinkage. After all it is designed to be used under flooring. I can and have walked on my modules. Peeled Celotex will leave a dent. Floormate won't. Smaller sheets of the blue in varying thickness can be found at 4D models. Any larger amount and it is worth getting a pack of 5 sheets from Sheffield Insulations.

Greetings from the Gobi desert boring borough. We had about 8 drops of rain on Saturday. Then again that could have been the wind and a neighbour's sprinkler. Large parts of the weekend spent painting the front room and dining room. Still lots to do but enough completed to let the builders get the skirting boards down after they showed up on Saturday morning to finish off the flooring. Tonight we have to strip everything out of the bedroom so they can start demolishing it tomorrow. We can actually see the home stretch. Sadly the idea of keeping the newel posts on the stairs was a non-starter. 4 hours and half a tin of Nitro-mors has barely shifted the nuclear bomb proof layers of paint. Shame in a way as they are the only original bit of the house left. We did manage a couple of hours on Saturday to visit the newest micro-pub in the area. Happily it is quite literally a door to door bus ride. Yesterday evening was quite interesting. SWMBO had booked us on a TfL Hidden London tour many months ago. So long in fact, we'd forgotten about it until the reminder email last week. Down 105 steps into the depths of Down Street station we went. Not cheap but well worth it. The tour guides are all regular TfL staff and one of them by day is a signalling engineer on the Metropolitan line. Quite something to be standing far closer to the track than the yellow line as a train goes past at full speed. Albeit with a wire screen door between you and the train. My only regret is that I was unable to get any video as it was just so dark at times and whenever a train did come through we had to lights out so as not to dazzle the driver. I'll try flipping some of the few pics I did get of other parts of the station, the right way round and see if they will upload. On that note, have a great day everyone. Coffee awaits.