Compound2632

Schools are required to have a "British Values Statement" amongst their paperwork. These are unexceptional statements of what I would consider generally-accepted human values but I find they are increasingly un-British compared with the values espoused by those said to be representing us, or with Government policy.

Curiously, given its Danish origin, Lego is in fact resolutely Imperial: the basic unit of brick width is 5/16" and of height, 3/8" (or 1/8", with three flats or plates stacking to equal the height of a brick). Stud diameter is 3/16" and height 1/16".

To nail this one, No. 1 Son off the top of his head says:

It looks to me more like a fixed bar with latches; note the bolt heads along its length. How that was worked is a question, since it would seem to need a man on each side. At any rate, the latches or catches are on the end of the side-sheeting. The horizontal strap on the side is probably a washer plate for a more substantial catch on the inside. I don't think there is anything there extending out beyond the wagon side?

Mike Lloyd's Private Owners on the Cambrian (WRRC, 1998) - perhaps the book you are thinking of? - gives examples of wagons from the North Staffs coalfield (Florence Coal & Iron Co.; Midland Coal Coke & Iron Co., etc.) and Cannock Chase (J. Hawkins & Sons, Old Coppice Colly; Cannock & Rugeley Colly; Cannock Chase Colly). From Rapido's point of view, several of these firms' wagons were widely distributed, with examples photographed in the popular south-of-the-Thames area.

In a twisted way, I quite like it - it's the sort of maltreatment a preservation group might meet out to a poor unsuspecting semi-derelict ex-PO wagon.

When I started there, in 1995, the area around what was then the main entrance was recognisable in the film and the ship tank building was still standing, though disused. (The oft hear cry of the library staff was "Oh no the ducks have got in again!") We specified our new labs in 1997 and finally moved in in 2007, by which time that specification was well out of date. (Oh the joys of the PFI process and lack of engagement between designers, contractors, and final users.) Much of the stuff I was involved in has moved again to an Advanced Metrology Lab back in the vicinity of Bushy House, close to where it had been before.

By the time the real 2112 was that old, it had been a 3F for half its life! (According to Summerson Vol. 4, built Sharp Stewart Oct 1892, H boiler June 1904, reno. 3389 July 1907, G7 boiler (i.e. 3F) Jan 1924, reno. 43389 Mar 1950, withdrawn Jul 1962, just short of its 70th birthday. Allocated to Skipton, Hellifield, and Carnforth in Midland days.)

The Midland's North & West carriage marshalling book for July - September 1911 [Midland Railway Study Centre item 00615] shows this same pair of carriages from Bradford, except that the Midland carriage is allegedly a corridor composite rather than brake composite. However, most Bain 54 ft composites and brake composites had at least one half-compartment. The only diagram I can find with two first and three third class compartments (each seating four and six passengers respectively) is D472, ten brake composites built as lot 686 in 1909; these were to the reduced height of 12' 8" to clear the Met loading gauge. This has the Great Western brake compo as a corridor carriage whereas in your 1912 document it appears not to be. But two first class compartments seating 10 and four thirds seating 28 is strongly suggestive of a non-corridor lavatory carriage. The E39 Falmouth Coupe as seen in the Lime St photo above would fit, I think?

According to No. 1 Son, geologists and in particular glaciologists are highly sceptical of that very early date for the Happisburgh footprints, for highly technical reasons that I only half-understood when explained to me and have now forgotten.

It was in course of a series of tests conducted under Smith's direction that Class J No. 1517 achieved 90 mph.

4GWR-007 3 plank wagon with round ends and iron u/f - so the penultimate version. I think that's chiefly because it's translucent and has no below solebar clutter - i.e. brakes - but also it may be riding a whisker high.

Has been done... Best cure is to post something OT. He's my progress with @drduncan's kit: I stopped to think about brakes then got distracted onto something else...

Thanks, got me digging properly. Wikipedia tells me that John Southern, working for James Watt, invented the indicator diagram apparatus in 1796 but it was kept a trade secret - being used to improve Watt's stationary engines - until leaking out in the 1820s. So the technique was already there at the birth of the locomotive engine but I can well imagine that so inquisitive an engineer as Clark would have been among the first to make use of it. He would have been in his late twenties at the time of his experiments and only 33 when his classic Railway Machinery was published in 1855. That can be read online: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_kpgOAAAAYAAJ/mode/2up See Chapter II, 'Of the Behaviour of Steam in the Cylinder; of the Indicator; and of the Steam-Diagram' from p. 63 onwards (p. 94 of the online document) in the quaintly-named section 'Physiology of Locomotives'.

It's not ornithology the cat has in mind...

As far as I'm aware, no physical adjustment is made to the clocks in the satellites. The frequency corrections are made in software, along with all the other corrections you mention. It's the comparison with the master clocks on the ground that enables this correction to be made.

Exciting! (Apologies for thread drift!) What does note A say? Equally exciting is that the Midland brake compo for Plymouth has come from Bradford hand-in-hand with a Great Western brake compo for Kingswear. What date is this?

There are really just two rules in physics: What goes up must come down. What goes in must come out. Experience shows they're of general applicability.

The corrections are applied in software - there's quite a bit of post-processing which results in a prediction of the correction to be applied in real time.

I have the later version of the Zafira (a 1.6 litre 10 reg); before that I had the earlier version (a 1.8 litre 03 reg), both grey. I recall the first time I came out of the supermarket: "now which one is mine?" Not having memorised either the registration or exactly where I'd parked, I had to go round discretely pressing the key fob until one responded...

I've found the Facebook post again and there have now been several replies saying what you're saying but also pointing to known cases in the 1960s when the banker wasn't coupled up. The photo of the model could be interpreted as being shortly after the guard had uncoupled - but long enough after for him to have gone back into the cabin!

No, rather the opposite. The problem in the Ozarks is that they're all in the same inertial frame and don't move around relative to one another nearly enough.

There was a photo recently on a Facebook group devoted to "Realistic Railway Modelling" of a 4 mm (IIRC) S&DJR layout with the banker - an LMS standard 3F 0-6-0T, Bagnall to you, Jinty to the hoi polloi - dropping off the rear of a freight (I think this was on the other side of the hill to you). I asked what prototype practice was, since my understanding is that the general rule was that the banker should be coupled to the train it was assisting - following accidents in which trains had left the banker behind and the banker had then caught up, violently; this would mean coming to a stand at the top of the bank, to uncouple, though in some instances slip couplings were used, which exposes everyone to the same risk of catching up. However, there were many exceptions to the rule, the Lickey Incline being one such. So I was wondering what the rules or exceptions were on the S&DJR in your period. Needless to say, I didn't get a reply to my question from the Facebook poster!

Galileo has been designed primarily as a commercial system, with enhanced features for those commercial organisations willing to pay fees. A second is a second is a second in the inertial frame of the clock. The clocks in the satellites, doing their 90-minute orbits around the Earth are moving relative to the clocks on the ground, so as seen from the ground, the frequency of their 'ticks' is blue or red shifted relative to that of the clocks on the ground - the clock going past in its satellite is like the pitch of the siren of the ambulance wizzing past you. This is all explained by Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and the appropriate corrections applied by the algorithm your receiver uses. Also, the clocks in the satellites experience a weaker gravitational pull than the clocks on the ground, being further from the centre of the Earth (the acceleration due to gravity is a bit less up there), which results in a slight shift in their tick rate. This is all explained by Einstein's theory of General Relativity and again, the appropriate corrections are applied. As I'm sure you all know, the second of the SI system is defined in terms of the 'ticks' of a caesium atom - specifically the frequency corresponding to the energy gap between its two ground state hyperfine energy levels, such that this frequency is defined to be 9,192,631,770 Hz (the hertz being the reciprocal of the second, 1 s = 1/9,192,631,770 oscillations of the radiation corresponding to this energy level difference.) In order to build a primary frequency standard or clock - one realising this definition, and against which other clocks can be compared - one has to tickle the caesium atoms with microwaves at the right frequency to make them giggle. This is best done with about a million or so atoms, so that the giggling is loud enough to be heard. Also, the best results are got by tossing them up and checking that they're still giggling when the come back down about a second later - the so-called caesium fountain. (For the technically-minded, this means your microwave source has to have superb short-term stability.) If you had a bunch of caesium atoms at room temperature, they'd be all over the shop by the time they came down again, so they have to be got really cold so that they stay huddling together - within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero. (This is done by sapping their kinetic energy using laser light.) So, instead of a single caesium atom at rest, we have a great crowd of them pushing and shoving and crying 'whoopee' as they ride the fountain, all of which gives rise to niggling little shifts in that hyperfine energy level splitting. These effects have all been studied to death, with the result that after thirty years of development, the best caesium primary frequency standards realise the SI second with an accuracy of around one part in ten to the power sixteen, or about a millionth of a gnat's whisker compared to the diameter of the Earth. Anyway, the point of this digression is twofold. Firstly, the clocks in the GNSS satellites are not as accurate as this but need to be sufficiently stable to hold their tick rate between synchronisations to the timing ground stations. These, again, are not as accurate as the primary standards but are syncronised to them, via the international timescale UTC. (The complexities of which I won't bore you with here.) Secondly, the General Relativity effect has to be taken into account both within the caesium fountain itself (the frequency shift is about one part in ten to the power sixteen per metre change in height above the centre of the Earth and the fountain is about 0.3 m high) and when comparing the tick rates of these primary clocks. The UK's ones are at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, SW London, a few metres above sea level, while the USA's are at the National Institute of Standards and Technology's campus in Boulder, Colorado, over 1.6 km above sea level. If you are interested and in the area, I would thoroughly recommend booking a place at the National Physical Laboratory's Open Day on 20 May, when some of my former colleagues will be showing off the caesium fountain primary frequency standards. (Spoiler alert: it's all happening in a high vacuum system under several layers of magnetic shielding, so you can't actually see the atoms going up and down!)