BR60103

Is RMWeb social media? Then I am on.

elsewise ...

VIA Rail in Canada is trying to replace cars built in 1954-55.  Need a good government authorization and funding.

I will try to remember someone's distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Science Fiction assumes an extension of our current science with possible future discoveries. Fantasy makes an assumption contradictory to our current beliefs e.g. magic works.

The better fantasy follows rules (that they may have made up) like "using mind magic to lift things takes as much effort as lifting them with your arms."

Grizz might find the attached interesting.

derailment technical reports

srt track

Steve Munro is Toronto's top transit fan.

Last July one of Toronto's rapid transit lines suffered a notable derailment. This is an orphan line that has passed its best before date and was due to be replaced by the end of last year. It ran on a linear induction motor with the induction part between the rails. Part of the cover rose up and derailed the last car of a train. Steve has been trying to get the reports on maintenance that was (not) done. (2nd link)

If anyone gets excited, ask and I'll bore you with political history.

Many parts of the Toronto subway now have slow orders because of out-of-spec track.

John was a professional photographer.  He took a close-up photo of a friend's locomotive and told him "Every place where you can tell it's a model is a chance to improve your modelling."

He also had a wicked sense of humour. He did ads for one of the model companies that included scenes like the lynching of a diesel salesman. And G&D #13 was a dinosaur for switching in the yards.

The Canadian national anthem was written in French and later translated. The Quebecois don't sing it because it's about Canada. The rest of us can't keep up with the changes in the words to match changing social feelings.

Of course, I know the original words to the American national anthem but don't dare sing them. To Anacreon in Heav'n, where he sat in full glee...

One of my friends is very into folk music. I lent him my 5-string banjo (that I never learned to play). He said he had the same problem with it as the ukulele: the nearest string is the highest.

I think that ukulele tuning matches guitar top 4 - except for the string that's an octave too high. So guitar chord fingering works on it.

For junior school (called "public" school over here*) I was in a small town and we had 90 minutes to go home for lunch.  There were no lunch facilities.

High school had a cafeteria where it was possible to buy a hot lunch or salad and a few extras. It was not compulsory and most students brought sandwiches from home. The meals were adequate to good, although the English staff tended to cook the vegetables too long in hot water.

Most of our teachers were good and reasonable. There was one who was abusive and threw things. I found out from my father that she was known for that even to the high school staff.

* public school to distinguish it from the separate (C******c) school.

5 hours ago, SteveyDee68 said:

So in all likelihood @BR60103 your singing was/is better than you think!

 

It can't be better than I think, but I have been told differently.

I like to mix grey shades on coach roofs. A few decades ago, PollyS made a range of Dungeons and Dragons paint. It was fun to use Gargoyle Grey and Ooze Grey.  Some of my first class seats are in Beholder Eyestalk Purple.

(PollyS is now defunct)

I fancy that I'm quite musical, but the first year I was taking clarinet when they changed my class after 2 months and the new class was taking strings. Playing a violin terrified 12-year-old me so I switched to art (at which I was next to hopeless).  I later found my metier doing folk dancing, but I also picked up a guitar.

I've also discovered that the wonderful sounds I hear when I sing are not what everyone else hears.

I put the number on one side of the brake van.  The directions give 5 or 6 sample numbers which have an extremely wide range (they all start with 1, though) so I made one up.  Some LNER expert will come over and tell me off about it.

I was wondering as I worked on it, why don't they print number series as given in random number tables, or maybe the digits from pi.  I wonder if we might find suitable numbers in that, rather than the 1234... sequence as printed.  If you needed loco 6789, then you'd have to cut them out just as we do for all the other ones. 

14 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Although "Olympic Sized Swimming Pools"  is a recognised unit of measurement here, used at times when "Sydney Harbours" is too big an order of magnitude,  I'm not familiar with the "Sugar Beach Umbrella" measurement, can you convert it to the still-not yet updated unit  - "Double decker bus"?

 

That is a local reference. The council installed some sort of umbrellas on Sugar Beach and there was some sort of controversy. I've never been there, so I don't have a reference.  I'm not sure if it's a metric or imperial unit.

On 29/01/2024 at 02:50, SM42 said:

 

Yes they do. 

 

I treat my old Woodhead and other older pressfix transfers with Microsol's Liquid Decal Film. 

 

It doesn't turn them back into press fix, but does allow you to place the Decal and soak off the tissue carrier. 

 

They do move about while doing this, so care is needed and pushing them into final position with a wet brush is required before gently pressing down.

 

I also use setting solutions when doing this. 

 

Andy

Andy:

Thanks for the advice.  I managed to find a bottle at the train shop and have now put a couple of the transfers on each side.  The next step is the number, each of which will be 6 little bits. 

The shop didn't even know they had it.

22 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

Ummm, that just may be a bad (or wrong) decision. I thoroughly enjoyed my parents photo albums and still have them.

Well, our heirs are our sisters' kids.  I saw what my sister did when cleaning out dad's place.

Dad told me that the Youngs men tend to marry women who throw things out.

A newspaper story about re-routing the mouth of the Don river in Toronto. For years (near century?) it's had a right angle bend just before it enters the lake and that's to go.  The new channel is being filled with water. from the story:

They're taking 300 cubic meters an hour from Lake Ontario. That's enough each day to fill four 40-foot shipping containers. 

armour stones used to lay out the riverbed is enough to fill up Roy Thompson Hall. (riverbed is 1.3 kilometres long)

The total amount of water to be pumped in is the equivalent of 30 Olympic sized swimming pools.

The river's deepest point will be 6.5 metres. That is about the depth of two Sugar Beach umbrellas.

I don't know how we're going to make out now that we've sold the 30' motor home.  That had lots of storage room.

I think that for our first 3-week overseas holiday we had two large suitcases and a carry on.  They were a little large for British Railways.

We have been shrinking our stuff this week month. Dayle has decided that our heirs will have little interest in our scrapbooks and photo collections. We also have bits from 3 "households" -- a trailer, the motorhome, and our house. 

Around here, there are signs saying the road is closed between two streets that I've never heard of, and by the time my wife finds them on the map, we've passed them.

Check the tension locks that came off the vehicles. If the shank is flat, the box is at the right height. if there is a step or crank in the shaft, the box is at the wrong height and fixing it is a bother.

Somewhere someone talked about gluing the Kadee shank onto a cutoff Bachmann shank.

The wrong height boxes are randomly distributed through the range.

Question for jjb

The startup screen on our computer is currently showing a picture of Singapore. (second one in a row) Prominent in it is a set of three office towers with a block across the top. I called it Stonehenge when it first came up.  Can you tell us what it is?

We still have some old-fashioned post offices (one in Guelph) but there are lots of sub-offices in drug stores.  The Ontario government has said that its bureaus (car, maybe health) will be moving to a large stationery chain.

Went to a railway store near the big city. Didn't find anything on my list; bought 2 magazines. They have shifted everything around and it now feels like a warehouse.

Marco has been spending a lot of time lately looking under the fridge and another bookshelf. He's even skipped a few of his evening teats. This morning I woke up to a call that there was a dead mouse (or possibly a cat toy) at the bottom of the stairs.  It was a mouse -- quite cleanly killed -- which then went into the composting.

Marco has been behaving more normally today , sitting in my lap at the railway workbench.

A bit of looking under things tonight.

My NMRA standards are half a century old, but I think may still be in force.

Standard S1 gives "Center of coupler above top of rail".  For TT this is 9/32" or 7.1 mm.

There was never a standard for where the coupler shank or pocket should go.  This is why there are so many variations in the Kadee HO scale couplers.  They did design a universal pocket for HO and specified a mounting height, but I don't know if any have been made lately.