JeremyC

22 minutes ago, Andy Kirkham said:

 

Are you sure about the Brown Windsor? According to this account https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/victorian-brown-windsor-soup it is a myth, with no authenticated appearences on menus.

21 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

 

It was a regular on menu cards in P&O Containers.

IIRC it used to to appear on the menus on Denholm's ships.

2 hours ago, johnofwessex said:

 

The position around Colston is complex but there was basically a Victorian 'Cult' built up around him partly I suggest with a view to keeping the lower orders quiet

My view is that the issue about Colston was that when telling his story he was portrayed as a philanthropist and the bad bits of his story were carefully omitted.

While their locos are smaller, we should remember the Ffestiniog Railway successfully operated their engines as oil burners for many years.

A problem with the original subject for this thread is that we are only getting one side of the story and that is from people who are unhappy with a situation (and possibly have an axe to grind).

On the issue of the attitude of some managers when handling volunteers, yes there are bad or arrogant managers no doubt of it, but nowadays some things have to happen because the regularity authorities require it. Unfortunately there are those who, no matter how nicely they are managed, simply take the attitude that "nobody's telling me what to do" (an attitude that is sadly becoming more and more common)  or it's "health and safety gone mad", so in the end management has to crack down and take the attitude of 'do it or else'.

One of the D34 Glens was originally named Glen Gau, except there is no such glen. it was later 'corrected' to Glen Gour, (though some writers have questioned whether this was the Glen intended as Glen Gour is in Highland Railway territory!)

8 minutes ago, ERIC ALLTORQUE said:

The falure here lies with who lets the ship sail,it was tripping the power numerous times on its stay in port,it will have been i guess get it our of here to see the back of it for now,its been in trouble before hitting a dockside..

 

 

The Belgium incident was 8 years ago and the ship has, according to some of the Youtube commentators, passed numerous inspections without major defects since and also the crew onboard are unlikely to include any of the same personnel so I don't think we can really draw any conclusions from that incident.

I was at sea as an engineer for over 40 years and I can't think of any ship I was on that didn't, at some point, have a blackout.

28 minutes ago, Siberian Snooper said:

 

 

Most cruise ships have at least two engines and props, but an awful lot of merchant ships have asingle massive engine. I don't know what particular ship has. If you have two engines you have a chance to retain some control if you loose one, but if you have only one and loose the lot.

Two engines wouldn't have helped if, as some are reporting, the ship had an electrical blackout, because all the engine auxiliary services (e.g. lub oil pumps, cooling water pumps, fuel booster pumps etc.) are electrically driven so the engines would shutdown on the safety systems when they failed. This is why in confined waters you always run multiple alternators so a single failure doesn't cause a power loss.

My first large show was what is now Model Rail Scotland at the McLellan Galleries in (I think) 1970. The only exhibitor I can recall is the Edinburgh & Lothians MRC and that's because I subsequently joined them and am still a member.

This video of the Plettenberger kleinbahn shows (at 7m 25s) the narrow gauge locos shunting standard gauge wagons off the transporter wagons. The offset buffers can be seen in various shots earlier in the video.

The shots of trains traversing some of the curves on the street sections and sidings of this line are interesting.

I think that was intended to be the Barclay Fireless, but that leaked out at Doncaster!

If you look at 'Gerrit's Tagebuch' on Miniature Wonderland's YouTube channel there have been quite few videos on the huge amount of development and problem solving involved in the creation of the Formula 1 system.

On 13/02/2024 at 18:38, Deeps said:

There needs to be redundancy built into the manning of a warship. Having been involved in three wars, and having seen the problems first hand when there are injuries amongst the crew, I can categorically state that when the proverbial hits the fan you need crew members that have been trained to immediately take on alternative duties. The apparent surplus crew members may seem an additional strain on the budget but it is essential, and not all damage sustained will be terminal. This is applicable during peacetime operations as well. My experiences were predominantly on submarines, where the crew are highly trained for just such eventualities.

Thing is if some people are to be believed in a few years ship's will be remote controlled or autonomous so will not have a crew, so who is going to do the damage control then?

(Reminds me of an old third engineer I sailed with who said he'd believe in computer control when it could go out and repair the fault it had flagged up)

1 hour ago, Curlew said:

Has anyone mentioned these?... best of both worlds

 

Yes, those are the ones that worked the Lauder Light Railway.

Then there was the Lauder Light Railway in the Scottish Borders which was operated by J67 tank engines coupled to ex NBR tenders so they could run with empty tanks to reduce their axle loading.

I model UK (Scottish) railways, German narrow gauge (and a bit of Welsh narrow gauge as well) in various scales. At shows I enjoy any well built and operated layout of any prototype, except, for some reason I can't really explain, North American models which leave me 'cold'.

We drove down from Edinburgh for a weekend away to visit the show. Had a very enjoyable day at the show on Saturday. A good selection of quality layouts both large and small. My personal favorites were 'Hills of the North' , Copper Wort, Ashgate and Calstock's Halton Quay, the last two were also my wife's picks.

If I was to make one minor criticism it was that while we were handed a free sample BRM containing a show map there seemed to be no dedicated show guide. The magazine contained an about Alexandra Sidings, but there was no information about the other layouts.

A small matter of detail; signal box diagrams I've seen represent the signal box as a rectangle with a line and a dot inside. The line represents the lever frame and the dot the signalman. If the line is at the side of the rectangle nearest the track and the dot at the back then the frame is at the front with the signalman facing the track (and vice versa.)

https://wiki.openraildata.com/images/0/08/Signalling_symbols_2011.pdf see page 22 item 35

In industry the max permissible winding temperature depends on the class of insulation. For example class A insulation (The lowest) can be allowed to reach 105C within the winding. These figures usually assume a max ambient temperature of 40C.

(OK; although I knew about the different insulation classes from my days as an engineer in the merchant navy, I did have to look up the actual figures 😁)

https://www.motioncontroltips.com/what-does-motor-insulation-class-specify-and-why-is-it-important/

43 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

Friends who have been through Shrivenham say the same. It was when we still had exchange visits from senior Russian staff. One notable lecture included the remark that they couldn't believe we (NATO) had repeated every single mistake they had made in Afghanistan (but made it worse).

A number of years ago while we were still in Afghanistan there was a documentary on TV about the history of foreign involvement there up to the, then, present day. One of the people interviewed was a former Russian general. He was asked by the documentary's presenter what advice would he give to those countries with forces there; his reply was "Go home".

14 hours ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

..................... Like many CMEs Stanier was a production man, not a detailed designer.............

An interesting point; we all know the names of the CMEs; Stanier, Gresley et al. They obviously set out the overall design policy, but how much did they influence the detail design of locomotives compared to the chief draughtsman, people like Tom Coleman (LMS) or Bert Spencer (LNER)?

Also given Britain had a huge independent locomotive building industry it is interesting to note we seem to have little or no knowledge of who were the design 'movers and shakers' in those companies.

9 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

I'm wondering what they mean by 'motor', given that these ships have diesel engines and a gearbox driving propellers?

 

It's probably a lot more complex than somebody wiring up an electric motor the wrong way round by mistake.  

A motor ship is a ship driven by an internal combustion engine (usually a diesel). Whether the original reporter understood the definition or just used the term is another question.

15 hours ago, Manxcat said:

I venture to suggest that, with the end of the Warley NEC show,  Model Rail Scotland will now be the largest show in the UK

I think that York is probably bigger than Model Rail Scotland. There was some discussion earlier about one day shows so it's possibly worth pointing out that both of these are three day shows.

I tried to encourage my two sons into railway modelling with partial success. I failed with the railway , but succeeded on the modelling. Both of them (now adults) are heavily into building Games Workshop / Warhammer models.

So I would encourage your grandson into the hobby, but be prepared, if he does take up modelling, for him to follow a different modelling path.

14 minutes ago, JeffP said:

Sounds like they were very much like the real ones?

When the motor problems appeared on the first batch of 00 Claytons I can remember comments along the lines of "it's an accurate model, it's even as unreliable as the prototype"