Darlington_Shed

Through some parts of London, the M25 will take you past gold-diggers and winos.

Thought for the day: "It was once said that owning a model railway is rather like having access to a country where you don't actually live. In these days, when we are assailed daily with news of rising prices, material shortages, industrial disputes and whatever other disasters the mass media might discover between the time we write this and when you actually read our words, such a refuge is extraordinarily attractive." CJ Freezer, Railway Modeller, April 1974.

Actually, I think it's the right tree - at least, that's the tree I found from the viaduct pictures. As for species, I'm going with sycamore, based on leaves and bark. The leaves are lime-like as per southernman46's suggestion but I don't think the bark matches. Bark looks quite birch-like but the leaves don't match.

One of my formative experiences came when I was a member of the ATC (an aviation-focussed version of the scouts) back around 1970. The highlight of any given week was when we were visited by a member of the Catterick barracks - I'm still partially deaf in my right ear from an evening when we were allowed to fire an anti-tank weapon (elf and safety was not a thing then). But I remember one particular evening when the explosive nature of any fine dust - flour and sawdust were the chosen materials - was demonstrated in the car park. Take one 1970s dustbin, fill it with said dust, and lob in a lit match. Kaboom!! Never to be forgotten!

Greetings to all and Sunday. On Friday I had the pleasure of driving from London to Newcastle for Mrs Shed's father's 90th birthday celebrations. Eight hours it took, starting with the car park that is the M25, the M1 closed near Leicester while a collision was dealt with, and torrential rain for the duration. I have just returned home in a somewhat-less-tedious six hours. The rain was equally torrential. Thanks to a cunning arrangement of business meetings, Mrs Shed travelled to Newcastle by train from Edinburgh on Friday, and will return home by train tomorrow. I wll be partaking of something medicinal and Scottish later this evening.

Bum bum, as Basil Brush used to say.

My experience, too, when I did jury service about 6 years ago at Southwark Crown Court. I can only imagine it's worse now.

Jamie, you've just reminded me of two things. The first is that, continuing to plough through the RM digital archive, this afternoon I came across an article from the Christmas issue of 2017 (I think) that described a layout you still seem to be working on! The second was me wondering whether you're familar with the Dordogne Mysteries, written by Martin Walker? I know it's not exactly your part of the country but so many of your posts make me think about scenes in the books. Highly recommended anyway, to anyone who likes a police procedural with a lot of food and wine appreciation thrown in!

Regarding the NHS discussion, it reinforces my view (held for some time) that we no longer have a National Health Service - we have a variety of regional health trusts that range in quality from very good to absolutely absymal and, even within the good ones, the individual care is extremely variable. Mrs Shed had to rush to Newcastle on Wednesday because her Dad had been taken into hospital. Last month he had a consultation about heart surgery - he has a leaky valve. Surgery was scheduled, meetings and consultations were had, and 24 hours before said surgery, the surgeon said there would be no problems because there was no history of heart issues. FIL pointed out that he had had open-heart surgery - in that very hospital - 35 years earlier. Oh, said the surgeon paging through his file, there's no mention of that here. Result: surgery cancelled. On Wednesday, he suffered a collapse because of radically low blood pressure caused - apparently - by the meds the hospital had prescribed for his untreatable condition. It is, in my opinion, a lottery where the losers die. @Oldddudders is right - the hagiography needs to stop and a grown-up discussion needs to happen.

Another day done, another day when I accomplished absolutely nothing. And I'm curiously okay with that. I think I was born to be retired!

You need to increase the flogging, Dave. Everyone knows a productive crew is founded on regular flogging* * This may be untrue but is the basis of management in every organisation I've ever worked in.

If I ever knew I don't remember now. But I always enjoyed the name. Some time in the mid-80s I had a small wager with a colleague who insisted that Unix would become the pre-eminent operating system for PCs. He's probably dead now but he owes me a fiver.

Also see the Unix-like operating system GNU, which stands for GNU's Not Unix.

That's a lot of sheds!

You need to shed these inhibitions, Dave. There's nothing shameful about the word... unless you don't have one, of course - no adult should be without a refuge from the trials of modern life.

I have also visited, during a family holiday in Tremadoc in 1970. We liked it so much (Tremadoc) that we went back for another holiday the next year. And, having checked to make sure of my spelling, I now learn that -doc is deprecated as a hangover of English imperialism and should now be -dog. Appropriately enough, in the context.

My eyes read the words but my brain heard "fitted to the member's crossed leg". I winced.

Not sure about cameras in the cab, but there are plenty of "driver's view" videos on Youtube from cameras mounted on a wagon.

A grand plan! Sadly, a condition of the planning permission was that easy conversion back to a Christmas guest room was a high priority. Since I had long ago converted the "summerhouse" into a woodwork shop for my exclusive personal use, I was on a sticky wicket in demanding further concessions. I spent almost all of my career as a journalist in the IT/personal computer industry so am very much a technologist but my own layout will be DC controlled for the reasons so clearly explained by previous posters. For obvious reasons the PC hobbyists were very early adopters of the Internet, web and email so I was somewhat taken aback by their slow penetration in another "technical" hobby. But to give credit where it's due, railway modellers were early adopters of much other tech - RM was publishing computer-aided artwork back in the 90s, and all kinds of mysterious electronics projects as far back as the 60s and earlier. I had a particular blast of nostalgia from an article about using a Sinclair ZX81 to generate target wagons for a shunting puzzle, complete with the program listing on that weird, silver heat-sensitive paper that was the low-cost entry to PC printing back then.

I mentioned recently that I had invested in the Railway Modeller digital archive (I suppose I'm allowed to mention that around here). And what a wonderful education in the recent history of railway modelling it has been - recent as in the last 70 years, that is. Interesting to see - in detail - many of the classic layouts that are often mentioned on RMWeb. Since my current interest involves very small layouts I've been particularly taken by the Art of Compromise and The Piano Line, among others. After much lobbying after Ms Shed Jr went off to university I was eventually given permission to use the smallest bedroom as a modelling room but Covid put a stop to that - daughter came home, never returned to uni but commandeered the room as a study centre and eventually, as she is now fully employed, as a work-from-home office. So my current plan is a "railway in a box" that will fit into one of the larger Really Useful Boxes and can be quickly set up on the dining table. Still, 100x30cm-ish is quite a useful size in N Gauge and slow progress is being made. One of the curiosities I've become mildly obsessed with is email and website usage - I'm now up to the year 2006 and those technologies were still very rare in the modelling world, although fax machines were still going strong. I was particularly amused by one dealer's advert that said, "Web site available; call for details" 🤣

Spoilsport! In the end I'll probably resort to my original plan - poke it till it looks right. In N gauge it's only about 40x16mm so precision engineering isn't going to be possible around here. But those pics of the Intentio kit are helpful.

Genius! And thanks ever so for the very instructive graphics 👍

That's awfully pretty! Although as with most small boats, I fear that once in I'd never get out again!

A kind offer, Andy, but one I'll hold in reserve if you don't mind. The object of the exercise is to get me back into old-fashioned model-making and see if I can't revive some dormant skills. I have a dimensioned drawing so the plan at the mo' is to build the basic box and then craft a roof template using flexible card that can be encouraged into shape before trimming to size. Said template will then be reproduced in thicker material for covering with something like this stuff: If the roof was flat planes it would be trivial, but the extreme curvature is the thing: 7mm kit from Skytrex It's stirring the old grey cells which is a good thing.

Agreed! There's something so distinctive about the colours, particularly of the brickwork that tends to a rather glaring shade of pink. On a related subject, has anyone built a GWR "pagoda" shed? The basic walls and associated details look easily doable, but that droopy roof seems potentially troublesome. For info, I'll be modelling in N Gauge 😟