Another Shovelful of Steam

I went back to the Railway Museum last weekend, and invited my mother along. She's 86, and leaps at the chance to go out and about. It's one of those things she misses greatly since my father died, the way he'd say "Let's go somewhere", and take her on a meandering journey interspersed with lunch at some quiet market-town, a stop at an ancient castle, or a stately garden.
So yes, carpe diem is her motto. And she carpe'd with both hands, pausing only to grab her trusty walking stick, scarf, and handbag.


"Do they have any trains from the Great Western Railway?"she asked.
"Of course", was the reply. I directed her toward a great green locomotive, Lode Star, by name.
This loco was built in the Great Western works at Swindon in 1907. At the time when her father, after coming home from the sea, and marrying his sweetheart, was an engineer for the GWR at the Swindon Works.
Near the loco, two museum staff members were working, and she asked them questions about Lode Star.


This locomotive did two million, five thousand eight hundred and ninety-five miles in service before being retired in 1951.

Steamy Thoughts.

No, not those sort of steamy thoughts................

"Tornado"
Pulling the "Peppercorn Pioneer", Feb 1st 2009
(See YouTube at end of post. Worth watching just for the whistle!)

As my blog's name might suggest, I'm a 'tinkering with the greasy bits' sort of person. If it's mechanical, I want to figure out how it works and why, and what for. I admit I'm a bit less enthusiastic these days for lying under a vehicle in freezing rain, changing the differential gears. These days I like it to be indoors and I want, at the very least, an old bit of carpet between me and the concrete.

"Soubriquet decided to install a rotary spit in the new kitchen. So far so good, now he has to catch a giant hamster to power it."

Oh the stories I could tell of remote repairs, far from the madding crowd, a snapped off gearlever, and eighty miles to go...
Remedy? take the top off the gearbox, the tunnel cover out, and shove the selector forks with a screwdriver...............
What fun we had. Actually, gearboxes is a bit of a sore point. When my beloved was over, last summer, we were out for the day, had just negotiated some rocky tracks, and had returned to smooth roads when BANG!... Gearbox fail.

Well, I could engage first and fourth, so we got home, albeit a bit lumpily, with a stink of hot atf, and the occasional loud bang as a drifting fragment was caught up and spat out again. Rebuilding the box was not an option. Sharp things had been propelled about so often and explosively that everything in there was a mess. Luckily a friend had a spare LT77 box, and I paid to get it fitted, because I was lazy.

All this preamble is really to introduce my love of the National Railway Museum at York.
(York is about twenty five miles from home).

Mallard.
Holder of the world speed record for a steam train, 126 miles per hour in 1938, pulling six coaches and a dynanometer car, STILL the world record holder seventy years later.

You see, I suggested, jestingly, to her that I could take her to the rail museum. Imagine my surprise when she said "Yes please! I love trains". I checked carefully. After all, we men are used to being humoured, or tolerated... No, it really was true. She wanted to visit the rail museum. So we did.
And what fun it was. -You just wait, I'm going to buy her her own toolbox, she wants an old red pickup truck, I don't think painting my old Land Rover red will suffice.
So trains...

Japanese Shinkansen "Bullet-Train"

The Model collection at NRM is amazing.

60163Tornado,
A newly built A1 Pacific, Peppercorn class express loco, completed 2008.


Agenoria is the oldest preserved railway engine in the world.

The same company built another loco just like Agenoria, in 1829, it was called
The Stourbridge Lion, could pull eighty tons at five miles per hour.....
It was the first ever railway locomotive to run in the new United States of America.

Built in Britain, for the Canton-Hankow Railway, 1935.

Sorry about the blur

Argh Look at the time! Bedtime! work tomorrow. I'll add to these later.

Grapefruit Moon, Tom Waits

Over at Red Dirt Mule there's a bit of a Moon theme going on.... She missed this one.
Well, I dare say she missed a plethora of other moons too, but this one I always liked, by Tom Waits, -others have performed it, Southside Johnny, Nanci Griffith, but Tom's gravel voice is the one that works for me.



Grapefruit moon, one star shining, shining down on me.
Heard that tune, and now I'm pining, honey, can't you see?
'Cause every time I hear that melody, well, something breaks inside,
And the grapefruit moon, one star shining, can't turn back the tide.

Never had no destination, could not get across.
You became my inspiration, oh but what a cost.
'Cause every time I hear that melody, well, something breaks inside,
And the grapefruit moon, one star shining, is more than I can hide.

Now I'm smoking cigarettes and I strive for purity,
And I slip just like the stars into obscurity.
'Cause every time I hear that melody, well, puts me up a tree,
And the grapefruit moon, one star shining, is all that I can see.

Spammer Alert.

I hate spammers. Some low creature posted a comment on my blog recently, under the heading of "Antique Doorknob", I replied thus;-
"Antique Doorknob,
I revile spammers like you in the highest, you piss-poor excuse for a human. Spammers are the cockroaches of the internet, they are the filthy bottom-feeders, the stinking corruption, the slime.....
Ahhh, someone else said it better fully four hundred years ago:

"You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the spammers, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere."

And your spam is deleted. Begone, stinkpit."

This coprophilic slitherer posted a "comment" that was just a heap of links. No, I did not follow or examine any of them. I just deleted them, as I will with all others of the spamfilth ilk.

I don't know who follows these links, I assume the pillocks who perpetrate this abomination make money somehow out of it, but not with my help.
Delete, delete, delete.

Okay. I've had a quick rant, I feel better now.

A Tough Day in the Lighthouse

Life's a bit stormy right now. Calm will come, eventually.

These Lighthouses are at Raz de Seine, Finisterre, Brittany, France.
Strong tides and thirty miles of rocky reefs cause this area to be a sailor's nightmare in bad weather.

The top of the lantern is 33.9metres (110 feet) above mean sea level.

La Vielle was completed in 1887: it was originally manned by two keepers, but has been automated, since the 14th November, (my birthday!) 1995.

"To the south the water is shallow. To the east and west, mooring is not possible due to marine currents ranging from six to fifteen knots. La Vieille can thus only be approached from the north side, and even then only during the three days either side of the quarter moon, if the sea is perfectly calm. If the sea is rough, swirling backwaters of 40 to 50 metres can be present."

P.S. Such is the odd nature of the internet, and the propagation of ideas and images that I'm no longer surprised when multiple sites post similar things at similar times.

Robert, at A Welsh View
posted the same video on the same day, and I'm pretty sure he did not copy from me, nor I from him, I'd been trawling You-tube for video of storms, and it was a toss-up between this and a trawler in heavy weather off Iceland.
So I like serendipity, and I like the quirky things A Welsh View posts, and I'm 50% Welsh myself, so iechydd da, Robert!, I recommend my readers check out your site. Keep your toes above the waves, boyo!

The Day the Saucers Came -Neil Gaiman

That day, the saucers landed.
Hundreds of them, golden,

Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,

And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,

Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us

And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow

But you didn't notice it because

That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,

Was the day that the graves gave up their dead

And the zombies pushed up through soft earth

or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,

Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,

But you did not notice this because

On the saucer day, which was the zombie day, it was

Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us

A ship built of dead-man's nails, a serpent, a wolf,

All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could

Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out

But you did not see them coming because

On the saucer-zombie-battling gods day the floodgates broke

And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites

Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities

And charm and cleverness and true brave hearts and pots of gold

While giants feefofummed across the land, and killer bees,

But you had no idea of any of this because

That day, the saucer day the zombie day

The Ragnarok and fairies day, the day the great winds came

And snows, and the cities turned to crystal, the day

All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the

Computers turned, the screens telling us we would obey, the day

Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,

And all the bells of London were sounded, the day

Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,

The fluttering capes and arrival of the Time Machine day,

You didn't notice any of this because

you were sitting in your room, not doing anything

not even reading, not really, just

looking at your telephone,

wondering if I was going to call.

Corkscrewing, Style, Panache, Revisited.

More toys for boys, more snow transport machinery.
-Some time ago, I posted a video showing a helical screw-propelled vehicle developed by Zil in Russia, which provided transport on snow, ice, marsh and scrubland, and appeared to be pretty invincible, yet did not seem to have been developed further. Some years ago, a british team attempted to cross the Bering Straits with a similar vehicle, and competitors on Britain's Channel 4's "Scrapheap Challenge" built one as a tugboat.

Scrapheap Challenge Machine

Here, without apology, is the Zil 29061 again.


However, I just recently came across an earlier incidence of a similar machine, built by Armistead in Michigan, filmed in 1924, here, it's a longish clip but worth watching especially for the car conversion toward the end:



Armstead Snow Motors from Seeking Michigan on Vimeo.

I saw this elsewhere being touted as a russian invention of the nineteen thirties, there are some pictures of a similar device in deep snow. Also, elsewhere, you might find a nineteen thirties claim that an Austrian invented it. However, perusal of the Austrian video shows something remarkably like an Armstead, It's quite possible, of course that great minds think alike. Yet these things seem to have hit an evolutionary dead end. Given the evidence in the video, they seem to work pretty convincingly. Why then did they not thrive? what hidden flaw or achilles heel did they have?
Anybody who knows, please enlighten me.

Anarchy!