Hroth

"Then he nailed right through a cable POP And out went all the lights!"

But it IS nice to buy the cakebox, consume the contents with a nice hot cuppa and then pop the diorama inside..... ps I've been scribing setts in DAS and I'm not convinced. I needed cheering up!

Having head-butted a fierce easterly whilst coming down the River Trent towards Torksey (for the Fossdyke Navigation and Lincoln) in early June, wondering what season we were actually in, I can but agree that the eastern side of England is ruddy cold! Btw there is a railway connection, the Fossdyke, built by those pesky Romans, was leased to the GNR in 1846, why I don't know. Did it penetrate a competitor territory?

In the 70s, my parents had just bought a house which the previous occupants had installed storage heaters. The first winter we were there coincided with a vicious long cold spell and yes,there was often ice inside the windows. The storage heaters were about as much use as a chocolate fireguard! That summer, they had gas central heating installed, though double glazing didn't follow for quite a while. However, the house never felt so cold again! Just remember "Visit Wales, its not always raining!".

If you wait until Christmas, you'll probably find some red and blue cellophane wrapping in a box/carton/tub/tin of chocolates! Make your own 3D glasses!!! We're railway modellers, we can do that....

On the other hand, if you model in OO, then you're at least letting the side down by not going the extra 1.5/1.8 mm, if not actually lacking in moral fibre. However, because some people have that itch that drives them to go the extra distance, the models they produce are well worth examining. As someone who plays at OO modelling I can appreciate the effort they put in and the results they achieve. I just don't need to put in their level of commitment to enjoy MY railway modelling.

Should do better - my cranky old Airfix 14xx (with original traction tyres) pulls an Airfix autocoach, which has rusty axels and rolls as if it has binding brakes, plus a couple of recent Hornby Mk1s without any problems! I was thinking that Hornby might have cherry-picked the limited-edition locos from the heap to ensure that they were the best available. Looks like they didn't... Here's the culprit, with its autocoach and Mk1s. For completeness, in the background is the cab and tender of a Hornby TTS King (George I) which worked well out of the box, one of the later old tooling B12/3s, a high-speed Caly Pug, a six-legged Oxford Rail Toad and a Caledonian Belle trainset.

Over the past few years, Hornby have offered a seasonal "Advent Calender" of offers and competitions, generating interest and repeat viewings of the Hornby website. This year it seems conspicuous by its absence! Perhaps someone at Hornby Towers forgot to link it in to the web page or is this the continuance of the "Less is Less" marketing philosophy that became apparent at Warley? Such retrenchment is a worrying sign!

I often think of the gulf between the various 4mm gauge standards in terms of The Frost Report "Class sketch". Cleese is, of course P4, Barker EM and Corbett OO. Says it all, really..... H,C & O (as rapidly as poss)

You could have killed two birds with one stone by having a magnetic reed switch under the barn roof, put the roof on one way, the magnet activates the switch, the other way and its off! Slow? Nahhhhhh.......

No pictures at the moment, but the rails are now embedded in DAS, ready to be scribed into setts once dry and shrinkage sorted out. Its not going to blow away in a breeze! The warehouse has bricks, doors, a roof and glazing, though that needs removing to have a go at glazing bars. I also need to address the railings on the viaduct parapet.....

Had a look around the local Asda megastore yesterday evening, not a sight of any Hornby Junior sets, even though they had good sales (ie sold out), with the Hornby "Country To Coast" cod-LNER trainset at £60 last year. Argos are doing Junior with a funtastic £5 off RRP. Its a toy, it doesn't have to be branded to the hilt with anything other than Hornby. And the more Hornby trainsets that get given as chrissy prezzies, the better.

All the public water supplies were fed from the aqueduct terminals via lead pipes, so it wouldn't be just the "elite" who would be nutters! Anyhow, I thought that once the inside of a lead waterpipe oxidised and furred up, the amount of lead in the water dropped to near zero. As for wine, its possible that the amphorae used to store the wine would have lead-based glazes, so lead would leach into the wine over time, again affecting most of the population, especially the poor as rotgut wine would be more effective in stripping lead out of the glaze! Female usage of lead-based makeup (discounting some of the more theatrical loony emperors) would be more consistent with possible poisioning of the upper classes...

3D is always a gimmick, no matter how well it is done. However as a bi-colour album of model railway pictures, the Pendon supplement works reasonably well, especially as a Christmas treat! Perhaps BRM should include a 3D image of the main layout in each issue from now on.... I found the review of the Hornby Junior trainset interesting too, especially the return of the early Triang wheel profile! Ok, it won't always work on a real layout, but for a toy train that'll see its first outing on the floor its understandable. I must say that the Marklin "My World" system seems a bit better thought out, with the remote control and sounds that the Hornby Junior lacks, even though the Marklin is at least £20 more expensive. If Hornby wants to make an impact at this end of the market, they need to take on board what the competition has been doing for some time now.

Well, they cooked their goose (Prop. Bishop of Winchester, I believe!) when they didn't support the Squire!

Spam cans always had a key to open them, hence the question to Ollie Bulleid about the Q1, "Where do you put the key?"

By gum! What size ducks is MIss Dollmann feeding?

Only because he adsum iam forte!

As far as loopholerry goes, you could say that its two separate scenes, each in their own cakebox which, when taken out, form a harmonious whole. It might work, OTOH it might not....

Roman calculation was carried out using variations on the abacus. Literally, they would "calculate" a computation using pebbles (calculus) on a board, and record the result using Roman numerals. No faffing about multiplying cxi by vii on a wax tablet! The medieval exchequer used a similar tool, the chequered cloth used to place the counters on. We were still struggling to get to grips with arabic numbers and the decimal point in the 17th century! (If I remember correctly, there is something about the matter in Pepys diaries, and he was the civil servant in charge of the Navy!)

They were completely Pointless.....

Its because the alleged "Harry Potter" train rescued the canoeists a couple of months ago..... I'll dig it up on the C4 streaming service, sounds like it'll be good viewing for a cold, wet, windy afternoon!

There's a variety of inexpensive 7mm resin bodies to go on Hornby 0-4-0 mechs at Smallbrook Studio ( http://www.smallbrookstudio.co.uk/products/4569521210/0e---7mm-Narrow-Gauge ). But if keeping it as it is, I've one of the Hornby Santa Express sets, which I set up on a baseboard with a small Xmas tree in the middle. The fun thing was using an Arduino to control it!

I like the idea that it could get into "orbit", although I don't think it would get that far if they had to bring the coal and water for the loco through the carriage*..... * See the box-end illustration above the main pack!

As an aside, I'm using a Triang TT diesel shunter and wagon in one of my Cakebox Challenge entries. TT3 is just the right size, big enough to see, small enough to get it all in!