Adam88

When I was eleven years old I became a commuter of sorts and travelled to school by trolleybus. Sadly it did not last as they were all scrapped and replaced by slow and smelly diesels. We always used to let the diesels go past whenever there was a chance of a trolley. In more recent years I have found trolleys in various overseas places although and even managed to take a ride. Last summer I saw some very impressive new ones in Rome which are battery powered in the city centre and then automajically connect to the wires once they've reached the suburbs. Regarding car rides, I thought there were only two passenger states - pink or white knuckles.

Fantasy of Flight was set up by a very wealthy man, Kermit Weeks, who is a lifelong total aviation person. I first came across his name when he bought the Short Sunderland flying boat from Edward Hulton and had it prepared to fly back from Calshot to Florida back in the 1990s. At the time I had a colleague who had his ear to the ground on such matters. When work took me to a meeting in nearby Orlando in 2014 I travelled a couple of days early and took the opportunity to visit. Kermit was flying the Mustang - low and slow so everyone could get some good snaps and after he landed he circulated and nattered. It was a very interesting day and the restoration to flying condition of many of his aircraft was really top-notch. As an example current aircraft engineering specs do not allow or would frown on cotton-covered, rubber-insulated cabling so Kermit's team uses current spec cables and then sends them away to be braided so they appear genuine. There is no functional benefit, it's an extra cost and few people ever see it but it feels right. Since 2014 the focus of the collection has changed, moving away from a venue principally for enthusiasts to something with a wider appeal.

I went there once as well and also went on the stores and workshop tour. As you say, the whole set-up is very impressive and just shows what can be achieved with determination and a not insignificant quantity of cash.

... and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:King_William_III_Statue2,_Petersfield.jpg

I once knew an ex-tanky and we reckoned that in his regiment (not RTR) they used a ring gauge rather than a BFT. If you fitted the ring then you could get through the hatch otherwise you were out. This chap had no line of sight from head to toes.

On the contrary, decimalisation and general metrication occurred slighty too soon for advantage to be taken of calculators and spreadsheets. Were we still to use £sd then the spreadsheets, etc would have the functions already incorporated, after all they represent and display dates pretty well and they are much less structured.

As someone said at the time: "They should wait until all the old people have died before they change anything".

Michael Bentine gave the definitive description of the RAF's approach to innoculations - https://youtu.be/7BRMqDmdYvQ?t=215.

Another source is regional fiction. The late Tom Harland's Bramblewick is closely based on Robin Hood's Bay and the name Bramblewick comes from the novels of Leo Walmsley who grew up there as a boy. There have been numerous layouts with a Wessex tone drawing names from Thomas Hardy's works and many other examples spring to mind.

I was getting worried that they might be in line for downsizing too until I read a little further. What it must be to have friends in low places.

Pleased to see you posting again, I was starting to miss your erudite contributions. I confess that the only work of George MacDonald Fraser which I have read is Quartered Safe Out Here, his memoir of serving in Burma with the Border Reivers. He read it in installments on R4 and it was difficult to read the book without then imagining his Borders accent. I found it extremely well written and it has acquired a reputation as being one of the finest books to come out of the war.

That reminds me of a public lecture I attended on pyrotechnics where the speaker related the tale of being able to shoot a tallow candle through a church door. Not having an oak door at his disposal he fired his candle through five sheets of plywood, I don't recall how thick they were but I would say that they were at least three-eighths each, i.e. equivalent to about two inches in total. The weapon he used was some sort of muzzle loader with a charge of home-made gunpowder. Of course in this the key thing is to impart sufficent kinetic energy to the projectile and not its strength. It's a shame I don't remember more of the details, particularly the name of the speaker - I think he was a chemist from one of the midland universities but it was a long time ago. A better known pyrotechnician is of course Rev Ron Lancaster and for those many NM-ers who are 'interested in interesting things' there is a very good film of him in action here (10 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf1mCiAodl0 . NB a) he's still got all his fingers and b) his PPE is limited to a comfy old lab coat. There is an unexpurgated version (c85mins) - here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M03esB_HBzM

This often happens with systems which are highly optimised. They are sometimes described as brittle. In a similar vein I can be on a main road in the country and get caught behind a tractor and trailer bumbling along at 20 or 25MPH. How I might curse. On the other hand there must be many motorists caught in their local stop-start urban traffic who would be only too grateful to be going as fast as 20MPH.

Well that sent me looking for my copy of his autobiography "The Brabazon Story", Heinemann 1956, which does mention his interest in the hobby when discussing a patent: It doesn't mention the MRC, well not as far as a quick skim through revealed, although there are plenty of other interesting, and often self-promoting, topics therein.

Are they Aveling and Porter's?

What's wrong with Skegness?

It's worth investigating text books on signalling such as those by H Raynar Wilson who was signal superintendent for the L&YR - "Mechanical Railway Signalling" and "Power Railway Signalling". These were republished 'recently' (1990s?) and, although possibly out of print, are readily available.

Something similar happened after William the Conqueror died. He is reputed to have exploded causing his mourners to beat a hasty retreat at his funeral in Caen because of the smell.

That would be akin to colourising colour images. We are only seeing a camera's interpretation of the event - with particular lighting: intensity; colour cast; direction; diffusion; etc, film type (incidentally, I doubt Fuji were selling film in the UK at the time this picture was taken), processing, duplication, scanning, etc. The blueness of the BR totem is probably a reflection from the blue sky of a sunny day. There is though sufficient information here for the picture to be helpful, we know the location, the type of locomotive, its number, its crest, its task, its lamps of course - important for WW readers. It's difficult when people try and colourise monochrome photographs and film. I generally don't like it, apart from the contemporary Alf Cooke/"F Moore" type images published in The Locomotive and the Railway Magazine in days gone by where I think the photographs were used to help the artist. Even then much depends on the artist using the information. This example intrigues me, an LNER locomotive in an attractive hybrid GNR (brown frames)/LNER livery. I don't think this is a true reflection of the prototype but is it helpful? Other prints of the type lighten the frames to grey to help show detail. The perspective here shows that this picture is based on a photograph, probably one of those superb builder's photographs where everything was painted in matt black, grey and white. In one recent example a colourised photograph used on a book's dust jacket there were green L&Y carriages! The further we move from the time and date of the photographer the worse the problem becomes. Tony has often alluded to this with his comments on photograph captions. Often information is lost forever - sometimes almost as soon as the shutter was pressed, there has been much discussion about Eric Treacy's collection. In the modelling domain we also get further from the original with all our compromises, for many the trick is to pull it back as closely as we can to whatever we are trying to achieve.

Tony, Is it an optical illusion or are the slide bars out of alignment? They don't look to be parallel with the cylinder centre line. If so, then doesn't the piston rod bind or are the clearances sufficient for this not to matter? Adam

I would visit this shop if I ever had cause to go to London for work purposes, time permitting of course, and perhaps once a year would have a special book shop trip to places such as: Charing X Road, Motor Books and Ian Allan's. The other shop at the corner of Lower Marsh mentioned above was also worth visiting and they do (did?) have other branches including one in Southampton Row or thereabouts. There is a limited railway selection at the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden. I also used to go to Kings Cross Models and W&H in New Cavendish Street but those visits were very many years ago. I never managed to get to Bond's O' Euston Road but did visit them occasionally after they moved to Sussex where they had a small area at the back of a rather good ironmonger's, alas they too are gone. On the plus side, there are still some very dedicated railway book shops and publishers who have very good on-line ordering systems although it's never the same as being in a shop and seeing the books themselves and occasionally picking up interesting looking titles.

I would have loved to have shared that film with my father. He started at St John's College in York in 1939 so possibly would have witnessed the frozen Ouse, I don't recall him talking about it though. One thing he did recall was that on occasions students, operating in pairs, would reach out of the corridor windows to drop a destination board near the river (from the Scarborough Railway Bridge perhaps?). Apparently the boat house had quite a collection of these. I doubt that this was approved of by either the college or the L.N.E.R. but they probably never knew what was going on. He did not have many good things to say about the Duke of Kent so perhaps it's as well he never saw it!

Tony, The reason for '88' is far more prosaic. When I signed up for RMWeb the name Adam had already been taken so I just tapped a couple of times on the keyboard at random to distinguish my handle. When I was young I knew no other Adams but nearly every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be called Adam nowadays. Had I been a child of '88 I would have missed out on a number of fascinating steam era railway experiences - going to on holiday to Robin Hood's Bay, luggage in advance, changing at York (seeing the ex-LNER pacifics) and Scarborough. When I was about three or four years old my mother took a part-time job with Neilsen's market research agency and that involved a lot of travel by local steam-hauled train to the regional office for a briefing and then back to the station for another train ride to wherever she had been sent and the reverse in the afternoon. There seemed to be several mums doing this as I can recall that the offices had a collection of Dinky and Matchbox toys to keep myself and a few other children out of mischief during the briefing. It was a formative age and gave me a life-long interest. The line we're drawing may not be straight or continuous but it will do for now. All the best, Adam

Tony, Let me not divert the thread too far from important things like lamp irons and chimneys but it is interesting to investigate these words on-line in say Chambers or Collins and compare with what is given in Merriam Webster. The latter gives definitions more in keeping with your usage, Collins also gives your usage as American English.