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ROY'S DRIVEL


cleanerg6e
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  • 7 months later...

I took a break from the garden railway today to pay for my funeral. No I'm not about to pull out my mortal coil (as far as I know) but thought it would be a good idea then my niece wouldn't have to pay for me as she's the youngest living next of kin.

It will be a simple ceremony and is $2,000 cheaper than dad's. Dad always wanted to have a pre-paid funeral but just never got round to doing it.

So $4,860 to transfer my carcass, freeze me (so I don't go off) and BBQ me. Unlike dad's funeral where as soon as we walked out of the chapel mum was handed the bill for the above. Dad's funeral was conducted by one lot and the cremation by another lot. I'm having mine done by the cremation lot only. If the family decides they want extras then that's ok. They just have to pay for it.

Whether I die tomorrow or in thirty years or more time it will still only cost the above amount.

The only things not included are flowers (don't need those they're very bad for my hay fever) and notices in the local paper.

I didn't pay the cremation people but a separate funeral management company. The reason being is if the cremation lot go bust ( and yes it does happen) I would lose my pre-paid funeral. Then my next of kin would have to pay current prices which is the last thing one wants to think about.

A Yorkshire workmate of mine, his mother in law was cremated at the same place as dad and when he went to collect the cremains (ashes) he said he had a bucket and shovel in the car. His mother in law was 99. When he pick up the box containing her cremains he said 'chuffing eck it's heavy, the first weight she's put on in ten years. The staff were slightly shocked. He and his wife were taking her back to England to be placed next to her husband. His wife said 'oh lovely mum's going home in a shoe box.

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  • 2 months later...

Well on a slightly different note I had the dreaded "man test" or a prostate examination. When my GP put his gloved finger up the proverbial to feel my prostate I asked him "does this mean that we're engaged. After all my ring is on your finger". He roared with laughter.

He said what a pity I don't come in more often as he likes to have a good laugh. My prostate (according to the GP) is good.

I'm also being pressured by work to take some holidays. I only have 13 weeks accrued, oh yes and 12 weeks of long service too. If I wait for another year I could have six months off but wouldn't want to go back to work.

The government here wants to raise the retirement age to 70. By the time I'm due to retire the age will be 80. Many here don't want to retire because their super won't support their lifestyle. Mum is now better off financially pension wise than she was when dad was alive. She gets $400 a week from the pension as a single person but only got an extra $150 dollars as a married person.

Our pollies of course have huge salaries and in their job get paid to tell lies for a living.

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cleanerg6e said:

I've 'bitten the bullet' (so to speak) and I'm in the process of uploading photos of my loco stud, as it stands at the present....

Yes, I've been watching your expanding collection. I'm not sure I could endure all the unboxing and boxing up again in order to take all those photos in one go - is that what you've been doing or were the photo's taken over a period of time? Are they all kept in their original boxes when they're not being used? I see quite a number that I've also got in my collection along with a few that I ended up letting go.

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I still have the all original boxes for the locos Mick, but the coaches and wagons are all in homemade boxes. Boxes I've made out of thick card bought from a local art shop. One of the very few items worth buying in there as most of their inventory is cheap Asian junk.

I should add that I have on a separate disc photos of all the locos that I have so they have been taken over a period of time and not all at once. The locos have a secret mark on them all which is known only to me so I can identify them in case of a theft.

Some of the locos such as City of Truro, Midland Compound, Lion, Falcon, Kestrel are in their manufacturers boxes.

Although Falcon is in BR blue I was looking at repainting the body shell but not into one of the liveries in which the real loco ran. I asked George Dent if the plastic body could handle automotive paint as I'm thinking of painting it in a light metallic blue called Nitro. If nothing comes of it I can always buy another body shell in a different colour.

As for the metallic paint effect, I can hear Sergent Wilson from Dad's Army saying ' It's all sparkly, it's just like fairy land'. He was looking down the barrel of Pike's gun. Pike had cleaned it using Harpic. Mainnwarring berated him for introducing foreign substances to his weapon. Pike counted that Harpic wasn't foreign it was British. :lol:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sometime ago I bought a Bachmann sound deltic. D9007 Pinza. What an odd name. 247 Developments sometime does one off etched nameplates and I thought of making the loco D9022 "The Kings Own Keeper of the Stool"

I also have a Bachmann Warship D818 Glory. But I was thinking of changing it's name to D823 "Herpes" instead of "Hermes" if I can get 247 to do that name plate as well.

It just goes to show what a warped sense of humour I have.

Roy.

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247 Developments is run by a guy called Gary Wells, and I know that as I type this he is a very busy man on the exhibition circuit. I am also waiting for some one off's from him.

Ian

cleanerg6e said:

Well Grockle sod the rivet counters and the anoracks. If 247 Developments won't do the Kings Own nameplate, being 9007 would make it a good candidate for James Bond. Anything but Pinza. How about Pinza Needles.

 

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  • 1 month later...

Today I had a little diversion in the way of filming an indoor railway which belongs to a friend of mine who like me used to work for the railways here and is now retired.

Although the railway is only in the construction stage it does have all the track down. He's called it the St Barnabas Railway but I couldn't find the Vicar anywhere and boy did I look.

The railway is in HO (as OO is very British only) and Australian. He wanted to originally have a garden railway but his wife said no. So he turned the old garage into his railway room. He had an old American double stack container wagon to hold the camera in. It was a beast to rail as the bogies are up underneath and not easy to get at with your fingers. I knew I should have taken my Peco re-railer with me.

He and I both used to belong to a model railway club which had a large layout in an old Nissan hut. Eventually the land which had a newsagent on it was sold and the club dissolved. To give you an idea of the railway layout in the old club there were four drivers sitting on an elevated platform and various people controlling stations and freight yards. From memory I think the size was around 45ftL x 35ftW. It was all DC as DCC hadn't been invented.

One young man often liked to do his own thing particularly shunting with no thought to the timetable and another was a man with a very short fuse. One of his locos was giving trouble so he violently grabbed it from the track and threw it with great force onto the floor, which was concrete. I was absolutely flabbergasted. The loco came off the floor in a brush and dustpan.

These days my railway friend belongs to a railway circle and they go to each others houses and play trains and my mate said that it's a much better setup than the old club which didn't even have a toilet. Behind the hut was bushland and the call of nature was taken in there.

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I hear a lot about railway clubs and the personalities. I think it's inherent in most organized hobby groups. It is why I prefer to be a Solo operation and do the round robin by inviting people over who like trains.

hmmm... no toilet. Definitely not prototype, even locos have toilets now.

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Well Griff the bushland is full of wild animals who attend to a call of nature so why not humans. Perhaps we humans are getting a bit soft.

That bloke with the very short fuse (who's wife was my music teacher at school) turned out to be a pedophile and was ostracised by everyone in the club. He hadn't been to the club in years and when he showed up he was asked to leave and never return. He committed suicide soon after so at least one good thing came out of it and innocent little girls would not have to suffer his depravity.

On a lighter note I also had a meal for lunch with your name as the manufacturer. You must be one of the 1% rich Americans that the one time owner of Amazon.com said on the TV here the other night. He wants the basic hourly rate risen to $15.00 per hour. He said that waiters in cafes and restaurants have an hourly rate of $2.13 per hour which is why they rely so heavily on tips. He also said that if something isn't done to help many Americans out of permanent poverty then there will in time be revolution maybe 20-30 years time.

Roy.

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I recently bought a load of DVDs from Telerail and they are of the civil engineers through the years. Footage showing the derailment of locos to test concrete sleepers (a L&Y A5 tank and goods wagons). The relaying of the junction tracks at Newcastle Station etc. I also bought two DVDs with railwaymen reminiscing in the Carnforth Lostock Hall areas. Everything from being a cleaner to fireman to driver. One old man said that they never knew that the 3F 0-6-0's were called "Jintys" as they called them "Humpys" because they humped wagons up and down goods yards.

One bloke told of a story where he and his mate would work a "shifty". His mate the driver would get off the engine outside his house and the fireman would drive and fire the light engine (usually an 8F) back to Rose Grove Depot. He said that once he had to stop for a horse in the 4' at Rose Grove Station. An inspector was on the other platform who was a nasty piece of work. If he could get something on you he would. So this fireman closed the window the fireman's side and stood on the fall plate thereby block the cab interior view from this inspector. It was only then that he noticed the horse in the 4' and he left the cab and went down to it to move it. Realising that the horse was much bigger then him and with this inspector now walking down his platform he returned to the loco and opened the cylinder drain cocks and cracked open the regulator. The horse moved out of the way and he returned the 8F to the shed. He told them "I've brought you an iron horse and a real one too" as the horse had followed him and was running around the shed yard. Today Rose Grove shed has gone and in Rose Grove lane the two gate posts for the shed entrance are still there. But if you look over the wall you look at a motorway now.

Another one was of a first firing turn to London. This bloke said that the journey seemed to gone on and on forever. Finally they got to Crewe which according to him was all lit up like Blackpool illuminations. He said the he told the driver "thank heavens that's over". The driver replied "no it isn't we still have to get to London but don't worry it's all downhill from here". he said "downhill it may have been but the regulator didn't close". :lol:

Roy.

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  • 1 month later...

I have been hesitating for a while now but finally bit the "bullet" and bought a new full size video camera. Although the action cam is good it is very hard to film full size trains.

My first video camera I bought in the not so distant year of 1998 and at that time it was the "bees knees" of high end camcorders. I still have and it still works fine. It's Sony CCD TR 920E and on Sunday I bought a Sony HDR- PJ 820E. I thought the action cam was full of goodies but OMG this one is even more so.

Things like a 64GB internal hard drive, record to 5.1 surround sound, instantly transfer footage/photos to a variety of media, balance optical steady shot in which the lens moves independently of the camera, variety of memory card types, I can playback images or video via the built in 200" projector and many more features. With this camera there is no titles as nowadays one does that via an editing software program.

So know doubt it I'll be uploading footage taken on it, hopefully this weekend due to a double headed steam run that may or may not run due to an outside safety inspection lot who may or may not give the go ahead and therefore deprive many people of enjoying a ride behind steam.

Roy.

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I am going to have to steal that image! ha ha

My dad saw that American guy talking about the impending revolution. I could go on and on about wages over here. It's sort of amazing how people are getting squeezed and mostly through uncontrolled rents and high house purchase costs. In the 12 years since I bought my house for what I thought was a ridiculous price, it has tripled in value. But you know, a house is worth a house, so it's sort of a relative thing if you aren't in the house buying market in order to do a paint and flip onto a new buyer.

It's those kind of investors who are driving up costs for us normal folks. They watch trends all over the country and then all swoop into a hot market where people are moving to an area and buy things. Then they just tidy it up and sell. But as they all do this swooping it makes less houses available on the market so people get into bidding wars. But we don't want to keep people from making money in America even if it is actually hurting other Americans because that's market control and would make us into something akin to communists. ;)

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The housing market is squeezing people here to Griff with most homes in the Sydney basin valued 2-300,000 above their real value. Most of the buyers are investors from China. The chance for young first home buyers getting into the market is near impossible.

Here's the website for my new video camera. Mines a HDR-PJ820E and in the UK it's a 810Ehttp://www.sony.co.uk''>http://www.sony.co.uk'>http://www.sony.co.uk

On the site go to electronics, click on video cameras, click on handycam camcorders and click on casual shooting and the 810E comes up.

Roy.

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Another one on the Telerail driver reminisces was the crew that had to turn a loco on a triangle (wye) and at the entrance to the triangle was a pub. The driver spoke to the signalman and said he had a problem on the engine and could he give them some time to fix it. So the driver went to the pub for a few pints and the fireman very slowly turned the loco on the triangle and picked up the driver when he'd finished.

Unlike today's crews which need a gymnasium, steam crews were very fit and work very hard so why not have a beer or two on the job. Brewery workers did.

Also the building of a structure at york station (the structure is now demolished) with men who went to finishing school as they walk perfectly upright.

Roy.

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