TheSignalEngineer

Another winner from Dan. Ordered through website on Tuesday night, acknowledged Wednesday, shipped Thursday, arrived 10.17am Friday. Total bill was £4 cheaper than the competition as well.

I bought a wagon off him once when he was actually the cheapest on Ebay for it.

I can think of at least two but neither would get through the filter.

Railway Infrastructure Maintenance Is Now Impossible.

Perhaps that could be classed as an accessory. I did think of doing a major goods depot layout but needed a working capstan system and wagon turntables.

Yes, spot on, but it started getting silly on WCML when I had jobs which needed two men to do the work and five lookouts. The only way to do some of them safely was a two line block so they had to wait until they fitted the possession pattern with other work.

For the cabin on Black Country Blues I used evergreen strip glued to clear styrene sheet for the windows as they were small and I couldn't get anything off the shelf. Firstly I drew out the window and taped down a bit of clear sheet over it. Then fine strip was added to make the panes. Different profiles were ised for the different parts of the frame. Each frame was 4 panes x 2 panes, the finished frame being about 17mm x 13.5mm

I remember taking the depot H&S meeting one day and handing round a new HQ brief about using ear defenders with a noisy bit of kit we had. The instruction said to use touch lookout warnings when using it on or near the line. My ever-sharp LDC H&S rep immediately asked "If the operator needs ear defenders why doesn't the touch lookout standing next to him need them?"

If the railway hadn't been fragmented and most of the bits without running lines on sold off it could well have done.

I found a big problem in trying to start from scratch was to build up enough stock to get people interested. The conundrum was to have enough time to develop a business which made enough to live on without giving up the day job. My son on the other hand was in the position where the office he managed in the West of Ireland was closed down and he was offered a job in Dublin. He and his girlfriend who worked in the same company decided to set up themselves and have done well out of it to the extent of buying a house with land for cash. He says the biggest problem is balancing how much work to do and how much to pay yourselves in order to minimise tax.

I had the same sort of experiences at times. There were familiar places where you could hear something or a subtle change in the background noise told you there was one on even though the Lookout hadn't got it in sight yet. It saved me on one occasion when during an industrial dispute I went to investigate a TC fault. It was in a area with curved viaducts so I spoke to the box and got the line blocked. The fault was easily fixed although smelling of sabotage. As we were starting to go back to the access I sensed something and got myself and mate clear of the line ASAP. The bobby had seen the TC go clear and set a route straight through us. A few seconds later I saw a 47 with a loaded tank train bearing down on us.

About 30 years ago I dabbled in secondhand records, books, etc but I was hardly making a profit from doing it in my non-dayjob hours. It wasn't just the time taken in selling, mostly at fairs with a bit of mail order, but getting and checking stock, lugging the stuff backwards and forwards, etc. I recently found my old cash book from the venture and it showed I was right not to continue as in two years I had barely made a profit other than my stock, most of which ended up being sold a car boot and raising a couple of hundred pounds. At least a few of the items I didn't sell off cheap made a bit on Ebay in later years.

I had a pair of Doc Martens work shoes in the 1960s. They suited me as I have quite broad feet and they comfortable. Around 1972 whilst they were still classed as work footwear I bought a pair of boots which I used for walking for about 15 years. They were the most comfortable boots I ever had and ended up as gardening boots for another five years. It must have been around the 1980s I bought a pair of their Chelsea style for casual use. I still have a pair of the traditional style bought about 20 years ago when we moved to the Peak District which I have kept for inclement weather wear and they are still in excellent condition. In the 1990s when it was a fashion for teenage girls to wear them I bought my daughter a yellow pair which she customised. They all used to paint things like flowers or coloured patterns on them. Probably the forerunners of today's Pride Boots.

Something to clear any crowd (well, almost any) is a recording of Francis McPeake singing Wild Mountain Thyme made by Peter Kennedy when collecting folk songs in Ireland in 1952. It was recorded in the kitchen of a house in Belfast and all of the participants appear to be well under the influence of the Hard Stuff. Not the easiest of listening!!

Don't get many BBQ problems here but in the past whilst living in a modern poorly -built semi I had a neighbour who was fond of having annoying pop music on a bit loud in the garden. I found that two minutes of Wagner usually did the trick - my HiFi was about 10 times the power of his portable wotsit and was quite capable of making his rooms resonate if the volume was turned more than a third of the way up. Psycho warfare at its finest.

I can remember going to catch a train at a Southern Region station where the codes were shown with the timetable. Made it easy to get the right one.

We have both reached the point where we are fed up with flying. Even on domestic flights it doesn't seem a good experience. Anne used to fly round the world with her job up to about 15 years ago. Pre 9/11 it was usually OK and on domestic flights I can remember getting to Glasgow Airport for a flight home less that 30 minutes before take-off. Nowadays taking ages to get through security, late flights, drunken chavs, Burger King odour everywhere, delayed flights, electronic passport gates, machine doesn't recognise me with glasses on, can't read the instruction screen with them off. Best solution I found to the latter was to tell them that I couldn't work the machine and that Anne was my carer, we got taken through a priority channel straight out to the other side.

The housing estate is on the Anker Mill site outside the historic railway boundary. During WCRM a proposed new underpass was designed to get traffic from the Leicester line to the Down Slow, but abandoned in favour of the new connection from the Birmingham line near the bridge over the main line to just north of the former Ashby Junction. The connection as originally proposed would have enabled trains from Coventry to Leicester to reverse in the station.

You would probably have been at Polesworth when I was in charge of designing the interfaces for the TRUST train describers between Nuneaton and Runcorn. I had the pleasure of having to visit every one of the boxes on that line to agree siting of the equipment on the operating floor.

In colour light signalled areas you can't have a green signal reading to a red which is what the one on the top platform seems to do.

ETE = Electric Traction Engineer or Equipment. I've seen it used for both.

We looked at the option of running to Abbey Junction for turning back at Nuneaton c2000 when it was decreed that we couldn't have timetabled moves across WCML on the flat but it was decided that the time penalty was too much. It was decided that it was better to terminate Coventry trains and make passengers for beyond change at Nuneaton. At Leamington the Nuneaton locals already depart from Platform 4. The problem with the line between Coventry and Leamington is that the single line sections are too long to reliably run more than about 6 trains per hour in total.

An old colleague of mine was once asked how he got so deeply involved in railway preservation. His reply as that he had been engaged, but was spending half of his weekends at a preservation project. The others he was on-call at work. She gave him the ultimatum of the railway or me so he broke off the engagement, sold the house and bought a steam loco.

I wish them luck with Nuneaton. A dive-under was designed from the Leicester line to platforms 1 & 2 during West Coast Route Modernisation but I expect that was lost in the mists of time. The gradient and curvature was a bit wicked and would have severely restricted freight loading which is what we really wanted it for, so another solution was found. IIRC we may have built, at fantastic cost, a Newt Pond, but ran into difficulties when it was discovered that on the site where the shed dumped the water softener and boiler sludge there was a colony of a rare protected variety of butterfly normally only found on the UK on chalk downs in Kent.

The Southern Railway workshops had a 10 year full repaint cycle for coaching stock, running in line with various steps in the overhaul cycle. Given the dates of the start and finish of blood and custard that would mean 60% of their coaches were due for a repaint in that period. As the 59ft stock was built post-war it would just be at the point of repainting when regional liveries were introduced.