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Correct. I went on the Saturday and it was heaving! Good show but not a great venue. I have a feeling I did it after a night shift too! Couple of hours at the show, an hour looking round the cars downstairs, then another hour at Wellesbourne looking round Vulcan XM655.

It seems it was a combination of the load (12 Mk1s), the route (on a curve and a gradient) and the presence of a flange lubricator that caused the slip and the inability to restart the train. There's a few flange lubricators on the network that cause problems for steam that don't affect other traction.

A rare bird at Shuttleworth last month! DH104 Dove G-OPLC (formerly Devon VP962) taking off for the journey back to Ireland after the de Havilland fly-in event at Old Warden.

Despite how CAHC have been portraying themselves, it was a business, not a charity. They had a short lease on the hangar that the council decided not to renew. Yes, the council aren't entirely innocent in all this and ideally they would've renewed the lease but they didn't, and the tenants had to go. It's a pity the VC10 is being scrapped and the front section of the BAC 1-11 is going to Solent Air Museum, but it could've been avoided years ago if the lease had been extended.

With or without the wife?!

We still get some post occasionally for the previous owners of our house. We've lived here for 6 years, and they rented it out for about 6 years before that after they moved to Australia. The two items we regularly receive are for the wife's car insurance (so she must still be renewing it automatically despite emigrating 12 years ago), and the statements from the husband's Swiss bank account!

No, DMUs only had marker lights initially. Tail lights didn't appear until much later, a tail lamp was used until then. Though I believe red discs could be slotted in over the marker lights but weren't widely used.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/166376684255?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=pnL59Ii6Qjq&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=dltlllrnrym&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY Tested how exactly?!

Unipart Rail have a reputation for charging a lot of money to the various TOCs for supplying parts and spares, far in excess of what you could buy the equivalent for on the high street. A few years ago a simple toggle switch like that for a class 319 headlight was £180! The joys of needing the suppliers to be fully accredited and all the testing that was required to make sure components are fit for railway use. A pretty much identical switch was available in Maplins for less than a quid at the time.

The rather delightful Comet at Shuttleworth last month.

One for the Joy Division fans...

Bit late now, they've been in Letchworth for over a hundred years. Greys are relatively rare around here.

Couple of photos taken this afternoon of the black squirrel that has been feasting on the seeds from the sunflowers in our garden.

This landed in the school field opposite the house a few weeks ago. Luckily the casualty wasn't seriously injured and the air ambulance wasn't required. The helicopter has landed there once before in the time we've been in this house, but we were out for the day. This time it woke me up as I was trying to get a nap before nights! That was on the Friday, and on the following Monday it had to land again to collect someone else.

Is demand high though? The very first run on its first day in public service has a completely empty carriage at present, and only 18 tickets booked in total. The other three trains show 19, 12 and 8 tickets sold so far. Some of the midweek trips don't have a single ticket sold on them yet. There's only one other train out on the days the T3 is running, and for 9 days it's half term. Families aren't going to pay for one round trip that doesn't stop anywhere, and especially not when it would be £115 for 2A+3C! A normal family return ticket is £47. The loco doesn't owe anything at present, the overhaul was funded by grants and donations. It just seems a bit greedy of the railway to whack such a premium on what is, to the general public, a completely unknown loco. I agree about the Victorian dining trains though! Shame they've only got Mk1s and the dining set is out of action after being vandalised a few months ago.

The loco has now commended loaded test runs! Looks and sounds excellent. Just a shame they've priced the first runs way out of my budget, and probably that of many other people. £30 for one return trip from Swanage, but unlike when 60103 visited, the other services cannot be used by 563 ticket holders. So if you park at Norden it's an extra £17 return or £25 day rover per adult, meaning each ticket costs more than when 60103 visited. Lovely loco, fantastic achievement getting it steaming again for the first time in 75 years. But to command a higher fare than Flying Scotsman? Hmm...

Probably yes, plus the fact Farish haven't released any more since the initial batch. They seemed to sell ok and didn't hang around on the shelves for years on end.

Is the drive shaft properly fitted been the loco and tender?

It appears the ashpan sprinkler was left running on 80136. It's fed from one of the feed side of one of the injectors, so if the fireman was using the other injector he wouldn't have noticed the feed to first one was still on. Hence why the loco has managed to use 2000 gallons of water in less than 6 miles!

Bit late to this, but nothing has changed. Class 387/1s and 387/2s, virtually identical EMUs, built a couple of years apart, have different components fitted in places! Windscreen wiper motors being the one that sticks in my mind, having had to change a couple. Different design, different mounting holes. Why?! But then again, they're Bombardier products. I could give a nice long list of things that don't make any sense about how they were assembled. They have an obsession with hiding all the fixings in the passenger areas, so they look good. It means exam work isn't too bad on them, but repair/maintenance work is an absolute nightmare. For example... The screen wash bottle is L-shaped and fits under both the power-brake controller and the DSD pedal, and it takes all shift to replace one due to the amount of stuff that needs to be removed and refitted. One of the bolts holding the covering panel on has to be slightly shorter than all the rest, as otherwise it goes through the side of the bottle. Passenger door open buttons for the external doors, you wouldn't expect to need to take roof panels down to be able to change one! Inter-coach door buttons can either be changed in two minutes or two hours, depending which one it is. Obviously it's the two hour one that regularly breaks. Passenger information screen replacement? Good luck with that! Be easier to cut a hole in the roof and go in from above than the way they've been designed. Ventilation fans for the toilets? Buried in the roof space with air con ducting in the way, yet there's loads of room to put them elsewhere. Simple things to change but access is a nightmare. A component that can be changed in 15 minutes needs the unit to be booked on depot for a day to allow it to be stripped down and put back together again afterwards. I'm sure it makes sense to somebody...

Likewise. It looks like one of those massive skyscrapers that get built in the Middle East has fallen over.