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    BBC story about Richard Trevithick's Penydarren Locomotive

    Poor old Trevithick, now spinning in his grave at being compared to a couple of computerised nazis.
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    Starting bell signals

    One buzz, sent in reply to two buzzes, to mean "We can't go yet, we haven't got the road". One long buzz, to mean "I SAID WE HAVEN'T GOT THE ROAD YET". Down platform at Droitwich, early/mid 80s. That was the only occasion I ever remember hearing a code other than two buzzes.
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    Most cost effective improvement?

    Go on, make it permanently impossible for me to use the railways ever at all for anything, why don't you. You reckon? To me it seems closer to the other way around. We cut corners and cheap out on things to the point that a new project can handle exactly and only the very specific service that...
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    Necessity of the routing guide

    I was intending to write the necessary software, so that aspect isn't a problem. However, "freely available" and "needs registration" are mutually exclusive as far as I'm concerned. And it's entirely unreasonable to "require registration" in any case when the PDF version does not. On top of...
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    Necessity of the routing guide

    Well, yeah, that's my point. As are most of us, I am "ordinary public", restricted to doing it with whatever is generally and freely available, so I don't have a choice: it's scrape the PDFs or nothing. It would work, if only PDF wasn't such a horribly unscrapable format.
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    Could electrically-heated steam locos be a solution for preserved railways?

    It is true that extracting a decent percentage of the heat from the flue gases during their notably short passage through the tubes is a major source of inefficiency for a conventional steam locomotive. But I don't think anyone's suggesting just putting a heater where the fire used to be. The...
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    Necessity of the routing guide

    I tried to do a backend for this once. The problem itself isn't conceptually too hard (although there's an awfully boring lot of it); the principal difficulty was getting all the data to put into it in a form that made that actually possible. It's there, but it's all in flipping PDFs - lots of...
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    Bridge to Dartmouth

    Yes. There were such ideas, both to get to Dartmouth and to start a line heading further west from that point (which seems pretty daft to me, but it was a good time for daft ideas then). Problems included making the descent from the ridge of the peninsula to a suitable site for a bridge without...
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    London to Leeds routing

    This is true, but my point was that the station itself is still on the same alignment, just translated a couple of hundred metres north along Ashburnham Road. This is still apparent from the "road side", from the similar distances-off from the more or less parallel Prebend Street along Midland...
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    Merseyside Transport 1970s Liverpool Loop and After Plans

    Maybe they should have told people about this, then they might still be going, perhaps. Certainly I (along with many others on this thread, it seems) never thought it did anything apart from its name appearing on dole cheques. I used to wonder what it actually was to be doing nothing else but...
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    "TOPS" loco class classification - when did this actually start?

    You've not programmed with strings in C, and then at some later date found yourself having to make the code work with strings that have nulls in? It's an inevitable concomitant to the decision of whether or not to hijack a particular "unlikely" in-band value to indicate an out-of-band meaning...
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    London to Leeds routing

    In a sense it still is. It's aligned to the slow lines, which north of Ford End Road bridge are straight, so when it was moved northwards a couple of hundred metres it didn't change alignment, and it still points pretty much straight at the original bridge over the river on what used to be the...
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    Accidents in January

    Yeah, I've read it. Like most of these situations where the crew died and the mechanical systems were all fine, they basically have no information to go on beyond the obvious and so stating the obvious, however unsatisfactory it may be, is all they can really do. I also know that bit of line...
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    Auto Transformer Modelling using LT Spice.

    It is not a 4:1 autotransformer. It's two autotransformers, each 2:1 (or 1:1 with centre tap, which is another way of expressing the same thing). The inductors for each autotransformer do need to be coupled, otherwise it isn't a transformer. But the two pairs for each transformer need to be...
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    Preacher on SWR

    The square bar out of the inside of a door handle fits too.
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    Don Coffey cab ride video discussion

    Just watched this - thanks again! Nice bit of new mileage, and I agree about the bridges, it's a shame we can't see them actually operating any more.
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    Baildon landslip

    Interesting how that has revealed what look like some earlier kind of revetting works underneath what has been washed away.
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    Grantshouse - Penmanshiel Tunnel avoidance

    In that case the new alignment has a 1 in 80 gradient, which the tunnels didn't, and I think that's quite a bit steeper than anything else on the original route. The new alignment gains 20-25m in altitude going up that valley, and then loses it all again quite quickly coming down into Kidsgrove...
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    Grantshouse - Penmanshiel Tunnel avoidance

    It's a bloody mess is what it is... the geology at that particular location is nuts, and not great for building a stable cutting either. In unstable ground a tunnel is often better than a cutting because you can avoid destabilising the slope by digging away its support at the bottom, and you...
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    Why is rail travel in Cornwall so cheap ?

    It's particularly annoying when officialdom comes out with it after fares have increased in an attempt to make out that they're not really eye-wateringly expensive, they just look that way. The other people who do it are accountancy nerds, who tend to be people with a lot of money anyway so it...

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