Adam88

46 minutes ago, polybear said:

I never realised that Poland worked on cracking the Enigma machines long before Britain did

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

On 23/07/2023 at 20:15, sandra said:

Hello Tony,

 

I have posted a few photographs on here which have the houses in West Carr road in the background. John McCrea has been building these houses for some time. I am pleased to say that the houses themselves are now finished although they still need front gardens.

 

Here is a photo of the houses:

I must thank John for his hard work in building this impressive row of terraced houses. As they still exist today John has visited them a few times to get details right. They still form the backdrop to the real railway today but now there is a lot more vegetation between the houses and the railway.

 

Heres another photo of the houses but with a train passing in front.

This is a new Locomotive for Retford on test. It is passing along the down goods line with the 14 coach stock of the Northumbrian. The locomotive is built from a DMR kit and is to become 61616 Fallodon. It’s now virtually complete but obviously still needs painting.

 

Sandra

 

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!

2 hours ago, polybear said:

On the telly news just now....

Seems the Saudi's are keen to sign up some kickball player called Mbappe - for £0.25Bn.....

Oh yes, and reported 1st year earnings of £600M.

Bluddy Hell.

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

14 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Does this qualify for prosecution in the USA?

 

 

Kevin Dare's picture of the blue pannier at Didcot.

 

I'm surprised the GWS didn't jump on the bandwagon and call this poor loco 'Thomas'.

 

Doing this to a  pannier tank, however prototypical, is the same as people who dress up their pet dogs in human clothes.

Is that a halo?  Is it a saint?

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

On 16/06/2023 at 06:34, Phil Bullock said:

On a hill overlooking Erwood is a German gun

 

 

More info here …. The Garth Gun. Allegedly it’s sighted on to The Wheelwrights Arms in the village.

See also this recent video The Last WW1 Trophy Guns

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Easy!

• Dumb it down
• Ignore those visitors who love railways whilst “reaching out” to those who have absolutely no interest in either railways or visiting a museum.
• Make it “relevant”
• ”de-colonise” it
• install cheap and soon-broken interactive media
• Allow the “gift shop” to grow like a cancer and take up ever increasing amounts of museum floor space.
• Stock said “gift shop” with cheap trashy and tacky items, 90% of which have nothing to do with railways.

Trust me, it’s a tried and true approach.

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.

On 14/07/2023 at 22:46, Dave Hunt said:

 

I became quite fascinated with the whole history of railways in the West Highlands, especially the proposed Glasgow North Western and the potential of extending the Invergarry & Fort Augustus to Inverness. On a family holiday to Scotland in 1981 I spent a whole day exploring the route of the I&FA, finding such things as the piers of a viaduct, remains of bridges and parts of the trackbed while Jill entertained the kids. That cost me more than a few brownie points!

 

Dave  

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.

8 hours ago, polybear said:

 

I'd put good money on their being several die-hards who blew a few gaskets when they saw that.

 

IIRC (I don't remember the details - anyone?) that when Flying Scotsman was painted in the "wrong" colour (whatever that was) the owner received death threats.

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!

On 30/06/2023 at 15:44, polybear said:

Bear here....

A visit to the Chemist followed by the joys of the Co-op; the good news (hopefully) is the Boss of the Chemist would be most surprised if they're down to be closed - he reckons there are a few candidates that are far, far closer to the top of the list.  Apparently such decisions are likely to be made in the USA - and I thought Boots was a UK Company; a quick Google confirms it was - once....

 

In other news....

Bear spied a rather nice book at the Duxford Air show on Saturday (The Royal Navy Lynx - an Operational History**) - though I did wince at the twenty five quid price tag.  So I made a note of the title and then did a search once I got home - which turned up a copy from "World of Books" on the 'bay for a tad under six notes, which is much more like it; it was described as being in "Very Good Condition".  Well it arrived today......and I suspect it was in VGC (new, probably) when posted.  But since the Tw@ts posted it in a plastic bag with zilch protection the inevitable drop thru' the door of Bear Towers did little to improve the two top corners of the book 🤬🤬.  Are they f.stupid or what?  A Snottogram has been sent....

(Guess what?  They're now listing the same book, also in "VGC" for.....Nineteen Quid.  Huh?).

Yep, Rant.

 

(**A quick scan at the Show revealed numerous references to a friend in the RN I once knew & worked with - he also did "rather a lot" during Desert Storm so I'm expecting it to be quite interesting)

 

Bear gone.

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.

10 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

I remember when our postman used to wear a proper uniform jacket, long trousers, polished boots and a peaked uniform cap.  THAT was civilisation, we're in the End Days now...

 

 Like this?

See next

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.

23 hours ago, Annie said:

Latest spot of silly nonsense, - attempting to get a driveable bus functioning correctly.  That engine sound file seriously needs some attention.  And the hedge on that corner has since been cut back to clear the road.

 

 

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

From Talbot's book

4 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

Why the h*ll don't standees kick up a fuss about luggage on seats - or, for that matter, guards (or whatever they're called nowadays) insist that all seats are available for a*ses?

 

So many are a bunch of spineless wimps!

 

CJI.

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".

A thread started by @Andy Kirkham will likely appeal to haunters of this one ... https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/179855-yours-sincerely-c-hamilton-ellis/