Adam88

It's obviously not the Flying Scotsman.

https://imechearchive.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/guest-blog-a-matter-of-time-and-space/ "Analysing Mallard's Run of 3rd July 1938" by David Andrews If the hour has passed then you might instead look at this article.

https://imechearchive.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/guest-blog-a-matter-of-time-and-space/ "Analysing Mallard's Run of 3rd July 1938" by David Andrews If the hour has passed then you might instead look at this article.

... hence the Piece Hall. (There was a similar building in Huddersfield, I discovered when I did my PhD, but it was demolished int he 1870s.) Let me correct you a little, Huddersfield Cloth Hall was demolished in 1930, not the 1870s, there is a short article here: https://huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Cloth_Hall,_Huddersfield

July 1st has always been such a day. However, to get back to train-related content sounds a good idea.

Not if you've ever read King Leopold's Ghost.

That is a fascinating document - even a quick scan of some of the names sends one off on a trail through the great and the good as shown in thepeerage.com. Seeing the name Wyndham Spencer Portal for instance leads you to ask are these Portals related to Sir Charles Portal? They seem to be through a common Huguenot ancestor in the C17th and the current Archbishop of Canterbury is the Sir Charles' half-brother's grandson. Again, Wyndham Spencer Portal's daughter-in-law was the granddaughter of George Carr Glynn, 1st Baron Wolverton of the LNWR of course and Glyn's bank. That just came from one name in the list of directors. When I was first at school we used to sing Mrs C.F. Alexander's words: The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate. I think these were often very applicable to Victorian railway directors. I could go into great digressions about her too having been taken to an exhibition of her life last year. The Anglo-Irish can lead you into some pretty deep rabbit holes too. Returning to the LSWR, here is a simply outlined set of maps showing the growth of the railways in NE Hants on this web site http://www.bdrs70d.com/CT_Pages/CT_basingstole_date_maps.htm - most of them are South-Western but not all.

You may jokingly refer to electrickery but in Oslo the tram system is called the Trikken which is derived the from the Norwegian word elektrikk.

... and mothballs which work.

There's an article by Anthony Dawson in the July 2020 edition of Backtrack entitled "The First Train of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway". It only arrived a few days ago and I've not yet read it but it looks as though it will be rather interesting.

Is there a parallel with the Stevensons - several generations of engineers building lighthouses and then they throw up a novelist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Firbank It would appear that Thomas Firbank was one of JTF's grandsons. I first read his book 'I Bought a Mountain' when I was a similar age to the author's at the time he wrote it. It was never clear how anyone of normal means could afford to buy an estate as large as Dyffryn Mymbwr at such a young age even at the depressed land prices in 1930. Being a descendant of a wealthy Victorian contractor could explain where his money might have come from. However, this doesn't answer the original question, it is just an interesting rabbit hole.

https://www.huntleyarchives.com/preview.asp?image=1004990&itemw=4&itemf=0001&itemstep=1&itemx=1# Check this out from 1:30 onwards - the differences being a) the engineers and railway involved and b) we are talking pushing rather than pulling. With appropriate cut-offs, oil on the rails perhaps anything is possible. As a boy I was taken to hear Dr Tuplin give a talk but it's so long ago that the only thing I really remember was that a demonstration he gave went wrong. It was based on a home-made boiler set up over a spirit lamp or Bunsen burner and the top of the boiler blew off so he had to restart it. I seem to recall the bolier was base on a cocoa tin but cannot remember what he was using the steam for - perhaps a small Stuart-Turner engine or a Pelton wheel. I have several Tuplin books, but as you say they do come with a bit of a health warning.

The Mini looks appropriately decrepit, BMC/BL cars of that era only had to be breathed on to rust to oblivion. What I do question though is the way the broken windows are represented as neither laminated nor toughened glass breaks like, say, a greenhouse. Having had recent dealings with Autoglass I was told that even now not many marques use laminated glass on their side and rear windows, apparently Mercedes is one. In the 70s and 80s toughened front windscreens were the order of the day and a simple chip would craze the whole windscreen instantly and make the car undriveable.

Your typo was: Speaking of fiction-fit drivers................ so not true - do they wobble?

The Google aerial view show enormous 'up-stream and down-stream' yards too.

I was being flown, the big fiddle yard was definitely rooted to the ground.

Funnily enough I saw it flying into Vienna a couple of years ago. I didn't realise: a) that there were any such yards left (at least outside North America, as you surmised) and b) how large they could be. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zentralverschiebebahnhof_Wien-Kledering&prev=search

Big fiddle yards can be prototypical though.

In New York they say that there ain't a noun that can't be verbed.

Paper sizes used to have names like foolscap or half elephant. This is often a giveaway in period dramas and films.

The other features sound useful too as I still have a few boxes of 120 slides which I have never been able to scan. I'm not sure I've even projected them, all I could afford at the time was a simple slide viewer which was just a torch bulb, slide carrier and a big convex lens. Again, many thanks.

Jamie, Many thanks. Things have obviously moved on and this looks a most capable piece of kit and definitely worth investigating further. Adam

granddaughter

May I ask what you use to scan your slides? Your results look pretty good to me. I have an old slide scanner which while very slow produced very good results but it only had a SCSI interface. I have not been able to use it with either of my last two computers and SCSI interfaces are virtually non-existant nowadays, at least as far as laptops are concerned.