JimC

Checking my back email I ordered that can in Apr 2017. So date it, and if gets to more than say 3 years old consider decanting it.

Sadly its part of the carcase rather than a loose shelf.

To put a little more meat on the above, this only applies to MEK Pak with the "contains halogenated aliphatic... " text on the safety label. It will eventually corrode tin containers from the inside out, but it take years. One precaution would be to sit the tin in a suitable ceramic or glass vessel so if it does escape its contained. Moving it to glass vessels will also be effective, but they do need to have lids without plastic that is susceptible to the vapour.

Yep, makes sense. Now I only have to deal with a book shelf that will be emitting chlorinated hydrocarbons for some considerable time... I should have known it was a chlorinated hydrocarbon, but carbon tetrachloride and methylene chloride were the ones I've had most to do with, and it was neither of those. Nearly all evaporated from the tin now before I could find a suitable container, so it must have been a very fresh leak. Nail varnish not a feature of my house, so that strategy would be doomed to failure! Thanks all for contributions.

The rust ring is strange. I would surely have smelt the stuff if it had been leaking for any length of time. I think it must have developed quite quickly, days rather than weeks. I was once an industrial chemist, and like to think am still reasonably aware of solvent smells.

Yes, a vinegar bottle would probably be best, but at the moment I have nothing suitable so it's relegated to the yard and I'll see if any is left when I can find a jar.

Walked into the room I keep modelling stuff this morning to be greeted with a strong smell of solvent. Seems my tin of MEK has rusted out and sprung a leak. B******d up the bookshelf too. Is this a thing I should have been aware of. Going to get grief from SWMBO if the solvent smell doesn't clear too.

I suppose if we want to imagine super power freight locomotives, we also have to imagine that in say 1890 RCH/Board of Trade mandating that by say 1931 all freight wagons were to be railway owned with continuous brakes and safe to run at 50mph. Sadly I can't help thinking the actual result would have been roads jammed with coal lorries by the late 1920s. Mind you we can then continue imagining utterly different tax regimes for road repairs etc.

I submit that another factor in bringing about the end of steam was cleanliness. With more and more jobs being indoors and clean passengers were increasingly moving away from the perceived - and actually - filthy railway in favour of transport where you didn't get soot smuts. To my mind 'self-cleaning' smokeboxes were a major own goal.

I have a vague recollection - so don't place much value on this, I could be wrong - that they might have been occasionally used for delivery of sand to sand furnaces.

Its by no means unknown for a management that is faced with evidence that a grand plan is not financially viable, to hurtle along regardless and make sure there is little evidence of its problems to be found. A cynic might consider that a management which considered dieselisation inevitable/unavoidable, but knew that the cost would be unacceptable to their political masters, might decide to head down the road regardless, carefully avoiding the sort of extended evaluation and testing which might demonstrate the financial problems to come, and rely on sunk costs and propaganda to get them through. Not, perhaps, realising that the financial problems might result in the political masters imposing a even worse result a few years later.

Oh yes, no problem, They'll do you a scan by email. The 1366 GA comes as a 8MB 21200 x 14800 pixel image. Not small but not particularly cheap either , but then archives cost a lot to run. Look for the section making and ordering copies. https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/research-and-archive/further-resources/copying-and-copyright

NRM. There's a contractual restriction on distributing copies of NRM drawings, but I figure a tiny extract like that ought not be a problem. Unfortunately like most NRM scans its in black and white, not grayscale, which means fractions are pretty much unreadable.

That's true of course. But dynamometer testing should have been telling them exactly what power the steam engines were actually delivering to get up the hills. And given even a half **** prototype testing it should have been obvious from the LMS twins and the SR prototypes what could actually be delivered. Of course its never been a problem for management to fail to hear the unpalatable.

The GA Drawing shows angle brackets from the frames, but the outer face does appear to be in contact with the back of the steps. I don't see anything connecting to the footplate.

If I read RCTS correctly I think they all started life as Peckett's E Class. Once they were with the GWR they were all classed under the same diagram, but over time there were minor differences - not all received GWR chimney's for instance. So by the time they got to BR there were certainly variations, but I don't think the variations related to who owned them 30 years before.

Are you sure it's of railway origin? Sometimes a summerhouse is just a summerhouse!

Rail 254/365 is at Kew, not York. The other registers up to 1951 seem to be there too. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4350208 Description: Register of condemned wagon stock Date:1924-1929

The second sample argues against it being an S. He forms the S in Sold quite differently. That presumes both are the same hand though. I tend to agree that what looks like a first character could be just a downstroke and we have three letters. Are there any other similar mystery entries, or is it just the one, and are there any entries that are unequivocably RSB?

I'd like to see a few more entries too. Are there any more that seem the same? And does the number of wagons involved give a clue to the size of the Co? Of course there's always elimination - are there any constituents not noted in your list that you'd expect to see?

By which definition the GWR 94xx are side tanks. I think not!

Good stuff. I'd like to find a MSWJR 4-4-0 tender for a similar conversion, but I can only find etched kits which is beyond my pay grade.

and meanwhile the 4709 group are nursing their sore knuckles?

It's quite evident that many do. The worst thing about Wikipedia is the insistence on *not* using primary sources. A classic example of this was in the article about the GC London extension, where the Wikifanboys insisted the article should retain the nonsense about it being built to Berne gauge, since that was in a book, whereas the original gauge drawings were a primary source and invalid, and evidence from people who work on the preserved structures was original research and invalid! The talk page is both amusing and frustrating in equal measure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Great_Central_Main_Line. Someone eventually managed a form of words the fanatics would accept. I particularly like the statement that Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth.

My impression, reading RCTS, is that duties wouldn't have overlapped. The earlier bananas were geared for 60+ mph which might have been a bit of a struggle for the steam units. Lower geared branch line cars didn't appear until 1938. So while the very last steam and the first diesel units might have been seen together occasionally, at least at Swindon, it seems to me that the new didn't directly replace the old on the same services.