Adam88

I heard it explained that the vallum was dug in order for Geordies to grow their giant leeks.

So for my two penny-worth, not that I intend claiming for it, is that I had several occasions to fly from London to Washington. The policy was Premium Economy flights would be permitted if the flight duration was over eight hours. The standard booked flight time, Heathrow to Dulles, for most airlines is 7h50m - longer than a standard working day and, by the time you've travelled to the airport, checked in, etc and similar things at the other end the whole experience is closer to 14 or 15 hours. Sometimes you were in luck, sometimes less so. On one flight I did get a seat in P/E and as I passed through First Class (doing the self-loading cargo bit) I saw the company's topmost honcho (about a zillion grades higher than me in the pecking order) and paused to say hello. After a few hours he came out of his cabin and whisked me away from the hoi poloi as his guest in First Class. It was going quite well as we sorted out everyone else's problems until a hostess took exception to my presence in her first class bar and I had to leave. To his credit, he joined me at the back where we finished our drinks and conversations. Even before then I had time for him in a way I never had for any of his predecessors or his eventual successor.

If you haven't already, then you need to read up on Marian Rejewski.

It was interesting to see those houses because one set of my great-grandparents lived in a terrace in Retford. Their house was in Queen Street on the east side of the railway so unlikely to appear on the model. According to the 1901 census my grandmother was 6y/o and her two sisters were aged three and one. In fact my great aunt was actually born on 1st January 1900! Father often recalled going to Retford to visit and stay with his grandparents in the 20s and 30s and of course the LNER was a memorable feature of these visits. My great-great grandparents live 100yds away in Cobwell Road. Incidentally the page from the census showing my great-grandfather's family also shows that next door lived a 57 y/o railway engine driver and his 26 y/o son, a railway engine stoker. Next door but two lived a railway clerk and further down lived another railway engine stoker and a railway engine fireman (are they one and the same job or was there a distinction on the Great Northern?). Amongst the various professions and occupations listed. One neighbour's occupation was given as Fitter/Tomb Railing, I don't think there are so many of those around nowadays!

I like to distinguish between what someone is paid and what they earn.

I remember Ron Spiers wrote an article in the Railway Modeller about using the pantograph machine to make parts for Midland locomotives. One of those occasions when the Modeller provided much more than a stretched target for its purported 'average enthusiast' readership.

I saw one once on a car which I assumed belonged to a funeral director: 2 MB

Is that a halo? Is it a saint?

Did someone just mention the fallen Madonna with the upside down calculator?

See also this recent video The Last WW1 Trophy Guns

Don't forget various curators, trustees and managers and their occasional malign influence. A long time ago I went to see an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum relating to the great age of Antarctic exploration, focussing on Shackleton and it was very poor. Around the same time I went to a similar exhibition at Shackleton's alma mater, Dulwich College. which had been put together by one of the masters there, Jan Piggott, and it was superb. It appeared that all avenues had been explored to find relevant artefacts and documents to display. The catlogue which could simply have been little more than a booklet with captioned photographs was a real tour de force. I see that he has published several history books on a variety of subjects, perhaps the teaching was just a sideline. He certainly curated a very enjoyable and interesting exhibition. In my very humble opinion the NMM went down when they scrapped the paddle tug Reliant. I have never had any professional connection with any museum so, as @Phil Parker suggested above, perhaps I should keep quiet. It's a bit like education - everyone has been to school therefore everyone has views on education - whether they should express them or try to influence the associated processes is another question.

Have you followed it up by (re-)watching this BBC classic? I just noticed that there is even some Radiophonic music (pre-Delia Derbyshire apparently, but redolent of Dr Who) playing in the title shot and 21:12.

How can you kill a railway museum?

My apologies if this has been discussed here before but I found this a disturbing, but measured, rant from one of @New Haven Neil's fellow rock dwellers.

Has this news item been mentioned yet? https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/heritage/section-of-historic-yorkshire-railway-line-to-be-removed-over-traffic-safety-fears-4208570

Incidentally, i once had a contract to do some simulation work for the Post Office Engineering Centre and that entailed visiting a number of Parcel Force sorting offices. Those visits were really quite interesting and eye-opening - with manual systems everything gets thrown around most of the time, it literally was a game of pass-the-parcel - with the automatic systems it was equally brutal but everything moved in greater volume and much faster. One of the things they were trying to work out was whether some of the earlier automatic systems should be upgraded or scrapped. If you scrap a system and replace it with a large number of posties there is a complex trade off between investment, running cost, labour cost and system performance (this latter is what I was working on). In those days there were no minimum wages and labour was cheap and relatively plentiful. As an interesting aside, our POEC customers told us of a large sorting office in the USA (I think it was one of the private parcels firms, not the USPS) where they did a time and motion study and found that (not surprisingly) everyone's performance (parcels/hour probably) dropped off three quarters of the way through a shift and then sped up as the end of the shift drew near. Some bright spark decided that if the speed of some key conveyor belts, etc were tweaked then the dip in performance could be compensated for. When the unions found out about this the performance of the system immediately dropped to zero parcels/hour!

I can list two instances this year when the GPO damaged books I'd ordered. Once in the New Year when the book was left out unprotected in the garden to get damp - luckily I got to it just in time, the second time was two or three months ago when I heard a thud as the book sailed over the garden gate - one dented corner and several crinkled pages. A third time, three or four years ago, and it ended up at a not-too-local [in]convenience store instead of at the local, much nearer (ten mins walking distance) sorting office. On that occasion two or three books had been loosely loaded into a far-too-big box with hardly any packaging - publisher's fault and they were consequently sent a bit of a snottogram. More by luck than judgement no damage was done on that occasion.

The recent news event of father and son dying simultaneously reminded me of the sad demise of the first Lord Stamp, chairman of the LMS, and his son who were atomised by a German bomb as they sheltered together. It was decided a) that his lordship died immediately before his son and that his late son had to pay death duties and b) that after the new second Lord Stamp died his heir (his brother) had to pay death duties again on the now much diminished estate.

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Clayton railcar in Poland This link doesn't 'tick the LNER box' but it is an interesting footnote. On my one and only visit to Poland I bought a book on Polish railways which had a photograph of one of these ralcars (90002) and a reference to another built by Sentinel (90004). The book's photos are not always the clearest and you would need to be able to read/translate Polish - I cannot but the link fills the gap. A few weeks ago I did not have the book to hand and tried a Google search but couldn't quite get there. I did find a photo of a very smart Polish Crampton but that wasn't the goal on that occasion.

Regarding Edmondson pasteboard tickets, my father had a couple of stories going back to his time in the Royal Air Force during the war. I forget the exact details but it seemed to be based on being issued with a chit when going to a new posting, on leave or for a '48' and this would be exchanged for a real ticket at the station. These would be currency in their own right if not dated or punched so in some circumstances - long queue, train about to leave, dark wintery day, harrassed/indifferent ticket inspector, etc you could present a Gilette blade, wrapped in blue waxy paper for punching instead of a real ticket. The other evasion related to the local swimming baths which issued Edmondson tickets for admission and these too could also be misused on the long-suffering railways. Of course I'm not saying the RAF had a monopoly on such crminality and I am certainly not implying that my father engaged in any such practices himself, just that he was aware of their allegedly happening.

Phew, I was worried it might stop as it crossed the bridge.

From Talbot's book

That reminds me of something from Nigel Rees' much-missed programme "Quote ... Unquote". Overheard by a passenger sitting behind two amply formed ladies on a Huddersfield trolley bus: "Budge up lass, I've nobbut got one cheek on".