DavidB-AU

Shades of Bourne End.

The station and bridge arrangement isn't a million miles away from the EH&LR/LNER Edgware station. In an alternate universe you could imagine a fictional branch of the Edgware, Highgate and London Railway that wasn't part of the New Works Programme and somehow survived long enough, although with most track removed, to become part of the Great Northern Suburban with 313s to King's Cross and Moorgate.

This is somewhat closer to the shade of green worn by 3830 and (going way back) 3813.

It's quite easy to turn off S mode. Even MS tells you how to do it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of-s-mode-in-windows-4f56d9be-99ec-6983-119f-031bfb28a307

Have they changed the shade of green on 3801 yet again? There will be letters to Railway Digest about this! The number of letters debating the "correct" shade when it was painted light green was bewildering. Although a (sadly now passed) NSWGR engineer once told me the correct shade of green for a 38 was "whatever Eveleigh mixed at the time".

Having seen reports of people at US elections waiting in line for 8 hours to vote and it now being illegal to given them water, I was somewhat smug that it took less than 5 minutes between getting out of the car and placing my ballot in the box. I actually had to wait longer in the queue for a democracy sausage!

I prefer Robson Rotation used in Tasmania and the ACT. Ballot papers are printed in equal sized batches of every possible permutation of candidate order. That spreads the effect of donkey voting across all candidates. In the ACT which has multi-member electorates, party columns are arranged randomly and candidates are arranged randomly in party columns. Don't know about Tasmania, but in the ACT this resulted in political parties more or less abandoning how to vote cards. The ACT also has electronic voting (you can choose to vote on an air gapped computer at a polling place) and the software does the random order generation each time. I know some people don't like the idea of electronic voting but there has never been a single problem or a single complaint from any political party about this in the ACT. The hardware is off the shelf and the voting software is open source, completely open to scrutiny. A major benefit of electronic voting in the ACT is the result is usually known about 45 minutes after the polls close.

In fact the biggest polling place at every federal election is Australia House in London. Typically around 15,000 people vote there.

There's an interesting story about Benny Hill. He absolutely idolised Charlie Chaplin his entire career. Shortly before Hill's death, he was invited to tour the Chaplin home in Switzerland and was taken into the study which had been left untouched since Chaplin's death in 1977. On one of the shelves was a row of Benny Hill records. You can imagine how he felt to be told "he was a big fan of yours". The Two Ronnies were very popular in Australia. They made two season of their show in Australia in 1979 and 1986. I have no recollection of the first but do remember the second. Some of the sketches were reworked from the BBC original with a few changes to reference local politicians and celebrities, but there were some completely original sketches that worked quite well. Although of course by then that style of comedy was becoming quite dated. The 1986 episodes are on Youtube.

Can't park there, mate

They did that at the last federal election. I voted early and out of my electorate. It was all done electronically and they didn't even have House of Reps ballot papers on hand - they were printed as required. The bath towel Senate ballot paper was pre-printed.

The BFI rated Cleo the best and I have to agree. "Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me."

Surely it would be playing Thunderstruck?

Two unrelated scenes from the same 1992 episode of The Bill. Who can work out the ironic connection?

Surprisingly you could buy leather hoses off the shelf in the 1820s! The Coste and Perdonnet drawings of Lancashire WItch show a hose (C) between the tender and the bottom of the feedwater pump (P). Rocket had basically the same system.

You might be able to reach 3-4 ft now, but that may not be the case in future years. As to the track design, back to first principles and follow the prototype for your desires location and era. Avoid the temptation to cram in as much track as possible.

Those might be better in the Preservation Scene topic.

The first revenue standard gauge train to the Port of Brisbane since 2017 and the first regular standard gauge trains there since 2005. It followed a light engine test on 10 September.

Ian Futers has entered the chat.

Occasional Comic Reliefs notwithstanding, I miss those unexpected novelty songs in the charts. Now it's all manufactured stuff. The Funky Gibbon reached #4 in the charts just 3 months after Wombling Merry Christmas reached #2.

"Swimming lesson" isn't the term that comes to mind when I read this...

Even if you went back to 1889 and ensured he was never born it may not have made much difference. As many historians have pointed out, he didn't create the mood in Germany in the 1930s. He took advantage of it. If not him, somebody even more ruthless and calculating might have come to power.