Ronaldo47
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Posts posted by Ronaldo47
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Perhaps CRT are worried about the possible cost of an environmental assessment requiring them providing a corresponding number of trees to compensate for the ones they cut down?
I seem to recall that, when Crossrail were planning to site a depot at some long-disused sidings where the rails were still in situ, although hidden by abundant sapling growth, an environmental assessment would have required them to create a corresponding area for wildlife had they cleared the site. Rather like the stretches of substitute abandoned canal that have had to be provided for wildlife on the restored Monty. In the event they built their depot elsewhere and the saplings had become small trees the last time I went that way.
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Thanks for the clarification, it's been years since I commuted into London.
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My recollection is that the DLR on-train staff were called "Train Captains" when the first lines opened. I don't know what they are called now. It was reported that, when Her Majesty officially opened the DLR, she arrived early and, as there was no easy way of over-riding the automatic system to make the train depart sooner, the Royal party had to wait for several minutes until the train started at its pre-programmed time.
The busy suburban lines from London into Essex have/used to have around five sets of four-aspect colour light signals to the mile in the inner area. When a train passed, a signal, it would go red. When it passed the next signal, that red would go to single amber. When it passed the next signal, the amber would go double amber. It would stay double amber for the next few signals passed, and then go green. So the driver of a following train would know roughly how far ahead the next train was, and adjust his speed accordingly.
If you were sitting behind the driver's cab, you could hear the audible signals the system generated through the wall. From memory, green produced no sound, double amber sounded an electric bell, and (when the line was congested and trains were crawling, a not uncommon occurance when approaching Liverpool Street in the morning rush hour), a single amber sounded a hooter. I understand that attempting to pass a red would have applied the brakes. The sound signals allowed trains to continue running at around 90 second headways in the fogs we used to get at one time but rarely get now.
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Here's some screenshots from the article I provided a link to last Saturday. It mentions that the water louse can thrive in water mains, and does resemble a terrestrial woodlouse.
The local water company should apparently be contacted about this sort if problem, always assuming that the water does come from a public supply.
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This illustrates our traditional clothes drying method in 1977!
The boat did also have gas-fired central heating and an airing cupboard to complete the drying.
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Several decades ago there was a serious infestation of harmless freshwater shrimps in the water mains in the Southend area of Essex that actually made it to the national TV news. My friends were living in the affected area at the time, and they used to filter their tap water until the water company sterilsed and flushed out the mains. I could't find anything about it on Google just now, but it did turn up some info from Essex Water about water treatment. The issues with shrimps and other, harmless, animals that can sometimes find their way into water mains and live there happily, and how they can be eradicated, are discussed in detail towards the end.
link here:
https://essexwatersupply.com/water-treatment-and-purification/
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14 hours ago, Wanderer Vagabond said:
At the time we said that a proposal to link all of the motorways going into London (M1, M2, M3,M4 etc) all with a motorway also only containing 3 lanes (as it was originally built) was insanity and would rapidly be overloaded, and what happened?........they had to build more lanes, quelle surprise! Whoever 'planned' it obviously didn't see that coming
One of the other attendees at a course I was on at the Civil Service College in the 1980's, was from the Department of Transport. He told me that, what usually happened was that they would be asked to design a road, which they would do, taking into account the expected growth in traffic and service life. The government would then tell them it was too expensive and ask them to change the design to something cheaper. This might result in fewer lanes or road surfaces with a shorter life. The subject had arisen in conversation, as stories about premature deterioration of a motorway in the Midlands were featuring in the news at that time, something that the guy said was entirely predictable.
The Humber Bridge construction project was a topic on that course in the context of how government decisions are made. The need for votes in a crucial by-election was indeed identified as the key factor!
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Here's an extract from the textbook [☆] from which I got my information about factors affecting landslips. It seems that there are many possible explanations, and that site surveys and soil analysis are usually required to establish the reasons with any degree of certainty. Removal of overburden as a cause of failure in railway cuttings in clay is mentioned.
Blaming it on climate change without having first made the soil tests and other investigations that such a landslip warrants, seems a bit presumptious!
[☆] "Catastrophe- the violent earth", Tony Waltham, Macmillan, first edition, 1978, ISBN 0-333-22595-3
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I have heard of people whose car was legally parked and they were not in it when it was hit by another car, being penalised by their insurers.
I wonder how those unfortunate people whose cars were written off by that fire in the airport multistorey car park last year got on?
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20 minutes ago, IanD said:
I know some big companies like BT self-insured cars/vans rather than paying out premiums, on the principle it was cheaper for them to pay directly than allow insurers to cream off a profit.
I believe that it is a legal requirement to have third party insurance for motor vehicles. Certainly GEC (when it was a large company!) only used to take out third party insurance for its company cars as the cost of fully comp insurance would have exceeded the cost of repairing or writing-off damaged vehicles. The Government does the same sort of thing in relation to insurance in general, which is why the disastrous fire at Windsor Castle a couple of decades ago was not covered by any insurance.
I adopt the same practice regarding breakdown insurance for domestic white goods, which are normally pretty reliable these days: I don't take any out.
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When we first did the Llangollen, we hired a Friday-to-Friday boat and virtually had the canal to ourself for most of Saturday. But that was more than 20 years ago.
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It's also possible that a factor is the original constructors' ignorance of the fact that previously-buried soils can progressively lose strength over decades due to aerial weathering causing chemical changes in their structure, something that only became known from experience. That has been identified as the cause of failure of numerous railway cuttings that were built in the Victorian era that have suffered this sort of slumping many decades after their construction. Increased rainfall making the ground wetter won't have helped, but I think we have had wet weather episodes well before climate change was on the agenda.
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On 15/01/2024 at 12:08, magnetman said:
exactly. A proper Fire admits air from beneath the grate (bottom air) or above the flame (top air).
I also have middle air on mine which is a threaded tube with a cap which directs air straight to the embers. Originally designed so I could put a blowtorch in although never needed to.
Christmas 1960. We had recently had to go over to smokeless fuels as we were in a smoke control area. The fire in the front room had been in for two days and was a bit tired. I had just been learning about steel making and coal gas production in chemistry lessons at school and remembered the bit about how air was blown into coke to heat it up. I got mum's cylinder vacuum cleaner, which blew as well as sucked as they all did then, and tried blowing air in through the front firebars (it was a drop front all-night burner fire). It soon got the fuel up to white heat, and when the ash was cleared out a day or so later, it was found that the cast iron firebars had got so hot that they had sagged.
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When we used to burn coal and/or smokeless fuel on our open fire at home, the soot was always loose and powdery. For the past few years we have been burning hardwood logs that have been seasoned for at least two years, as we now have access to a free supply. The soot from burning wood is very different, forming hard porous clumps. I can see that wood burning might cause problems with the narrow flues used on narrowboats if not swept regularly, and that a stiffer brush would be needed when burning wood compared with coal or smokeless.
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My understanding is that they would need to prove:
a. That copyright still exists, and
b. That they own it, by providing evidence in the form of an unbroken chain of written assignments of copyright, in the case of a pre-1911 photo, normally from the person who owned the camera film.
While damages for copyright infringement is covered by civil law, my understanding is that demanding money that you know you are not entitled to, is an offence under criminal law, so they would need to be very sure of their facts before taking legal action. Of course, my understanding might well be incorrect.
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A photograph taken in 1910 would have been covered by the Fine Arts Copyright Act of 1862, then by the Copyright Acts of 1911. 1956, and the present act of 1988. Transitional provisions apply to copyright subsisting at their commencement. For the present Act, if something was out of copyright on 1st August 1989, then it is not resurrected and the longer term of copyright afforded by the present Act dies not apply.
N.B. A footnote in the standard work on UK Copyright (Copinger & Skone James, 1991 edition) in the section of ownership of copyright in photographs under the 1911 Act, states "The copyright in all pre-1911 photographs will by now have expired."
Possibly this explains why the book discusses the pre-1911 situation for other artistic works, but does not address pre-1911 photographs other than in the footnote.
The date of first publication of a previously unpublished work can also trigger copyright term, but this is not really the place to discuss this topic as Copyright law can be a bit of a minefield, especially where it has had to be amended to comply with subsequent EC directives which could have had the effect of resurrecting expired rights.
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4 hours ago, Bacchus said:
Similarly duped here...
I made a small custom basin out of wood for the camper - off-cuts stuck together with sikaflex and a few coats of Danish oil. The base is ply, easily cut with a hole-saw and fitted with an off-the-shelf plug 'ole.
The original "Butler" sinks were made of hard wood to reduce the chance of accidentally chipping expensive china when washing up.
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If the image dates from 1910, copyright could well have expired years ago. I have seen lots of examples of unsubstantiated assertions of copyright ownership from people, and even organisations such as museums, that seem to think they own the copyright in photographs or printed documents that they have in their collections simply because they own the copy. Unlike Patents, there is no specific criminal offence for claiming copyright that you do not possess or which no longer exists, and to establish, in legal proceedings, ownership of copyright in a work you did not create yourself, you would normally need to produce a chain of assignments in writing between the original creator or owner of the work to yourself, as transfer of ownership of copyright must be done in writing. At least, that was the law as I understood it when I retired more than a decade ago, and I am not aware of any significant changes since.
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In spring 1976 I was one of a group of 14 who hired Black Prince's original fleet of two boats, Nelson and Rodney, from their original base at Cosgrove. Both were brand new Harborough Marine 60'-ers. One had two sea toilets, the other two Elsans plus a shovel for burying their contents if we found ourselves with no access to a sanitary station (which we did have to use in that year's restricted lock opening hours due to the drought). Gas fired central heating and decent showers.
The only problem we had was when the knob that you had to press to open the oven door, came off. As the only one who had brought any tools, I was able to fix it, which involved taking the door off its hinges and removing its back panel to re-attach the knob.
I don't remember the cost of hire.
Each boat was presented with a hand-painted wooden plaque on our return. BP were still doing this the last time we used them, but using circular slate plaques.
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When using a hole saw on thin metal, it is best to support the metal on a piece of scrap wood.
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But which year?
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I think it's sometimes not so much a question of taking decades to settle, but more of the fact that some types of quarried material, especially clays, might well be strong enough to support a slope when first used. However, changes in their chemical composition when exposed to the atmosphere and atmospheric weathering, make them progressively weaker, resulting in slumping.
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I think it was mentioned above that the slip has moved further since the video was made and now blocks the tow path.
In Italy, when it was found that the ground conditions were too longterm unstable for a cuttting for a new road, they built a cut & cover tunnel instead, constructing the tunnel walls in the cutting and then backfilling the earth.
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"Toe weighting" is a term of the art in Civil Engineering to refer to the weighty material put at the foot (specifically, the toe as it is right at the very end) of an unstable slope with a view to prevent it slipping any further. This is from a book on natural disasters. It is an extract from a passage that describes the geology of Folkestone Warren and the steps that have been taken to prevent damage to the railway line that runs across it.
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Louse In Drinking Water
in Living Afloat
Posted
The Easex Water document at the link in my post of last Saturday (24th Feb) contains an explaination as to why bubbles can appear in tap water.