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Guavanaut posted:There is no conceivable climate in which Well they tried putting the entire train inside a big succ tube at the crystal palace exhibition but while it apparently worked it only went a couple hundred yards. Otherwise you need some way of connecting the non-succ train to the succ-tube that pulls it along, and that means you need a big gasket running the length of the tube for the connector go through. And leather and tallow was all they had. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaRVy31lTlQ Apparently the one they built in Ireland worked quite well for a couple of decades.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:09
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:You are probably correct (depending on how you define 'white' - Europeans especially from the Med countries are described in various racist tones too). "Wogs start at Dover" is both a joke and an absolute article of faith for basically the entire Victorian not-working-class.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:14
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OwlFancier posted:Otherwise you need some way of connecting the non-succ train to the succ-tube that pulls it along, and that means you need a big gasket running the length of the tube for the connector go through. And leather and tallow was all they had.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:27
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That was actually the other problem with brunel's version which was that the engines actually couldn't, they kept breaking down, and ended up not really being more efficient than just... putting them on a locomotive. It ended up burning like three times more coal than it was supposed to.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:28
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There should be no situation where a large stationary steam engine is less efficient than a locomotive, but I guess using compressed air as your transmission medium will do that. There's a good reason why anything larger than bench tools prefers hydraulic.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:32
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Did a democracy today. Hopefully this is the last important vote for a while, I'm all voted out.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:34
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You might have local elections soon.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:35
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I doubt it, the Labour party will have spammed my inbox by now if there was anyone to vote for in the near future.
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Feb 27, 2020 22:37
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Sanitary Naptime posted:No you’re describing the SNP Well Edinburgh Central isn't like that 
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Feb 27, 2020 22:45
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double nine posted:I mean I'm assuming the brunt of that is mobile devices but even if it's 1% laptops that's still 50 laptops?! Like I dunno anyone that's been given a work laptop that hasn't ended up keeping at least one iteration of it. I dunno if all those count or are properly written off.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:00
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Azza Bamboo posted:I doubt it, the Labour party will have spammed my inbox by now if there was anyone to vote for in the near future. London mayoral election coming up!
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Feb 27, 2020 23:06
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BalloonFish posted:If I may (slightly late) actually put my dusty and neglected degree to good use to talk a bit about the Great Central Main Line: This is fascinating, thank you. I'm just an enthusiastic ... enthusiast, it's good to get some real details on it.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:12
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I voted. I didn't enter a second preference for leader, as I honestly didn't want to split hairs between Nandy and Starmer. Did I do a bad thing? Will my vote for RLB just be read as my overall preference?
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Feb 27, 2020 23:19
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I don't anticipate there being a round 2 race between Nandy and Starmer.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:22
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Guavanaut posted:Good post. What do you think would be the least ecologically damaging HS2 route? Preferably one that avoids Birmingham. I wouldn't really know enough to speculate on a least-damaging HS2 route. My knowledge/experience was nerdily limited to the ex-GCML formation and no further. As a layman, I'd rather callously say that I suspect it's impossible to draw a line through the Midlands without blasting through several dozen ancient woodlands/SSSIs/unique habitats etc. so it becomes a cold cost:benefit analysis. Which on ecological grounds it rather seems that HS2 doesn't meet regardless of the route taken. People have dedicated careers to trying to work out what Brunel was getting at with the South Devon Railway and how he made such an obvious blunder. I think he was undone by his usual practice of seizing on a promising but experimental technology and decided that he could single-handedly bring it to reality on a previously unheard of scale. It's what his father had done with the Navy's mechanised pulley-block factory and with the tunnelling shield for the Thames Tunnel. IKB had done it for the Clifton Suspension Bridge, he'd done it with the Great Western Railway and he'd do it again with his bridges in the West Country and with all three of his ships. He saw the potential in the silent, fast, safe atmospheric system with its greater efficiency and power and reckoned that he could willpower his way around the flaws and problems as they arose. The prototype atmospheric railways built by Samuda worked well enough, as did the early full-scale adoptions in Ireland, France and on the South Croydon Railway. I suspect that Brunel, for all is reputation, might have been a bit blinded by the potential in the system and bought into Samuda's sales pitch a bit too readily. But really, I dunno. As you say, cable-haulage was a tried and tested system for railways in hilly terrain, and while there were problems in adopting it on the scale and speed needed in South Devon, they were nothing to the problems obvious in using an atmospheric system. Brunel could just as well got his teeth into solving those issues, and probably with greater results. It's also worth noting that the attraction of atmospheric and cable railways was that they got around the low power outputs and limited tractive effort of early steam locomotives. Just as Brunel was building his atmospheric railway was when steam locos were beginning to reach some sort of useful maturity. By the time the railway was operational it was 1848 - Stephenson had introduced the 'Long Boiler' locomotive with far more power and efficiency than existing designs and by the end of the year the 'Jenny Lind' locomotive was being mass-produced, not to mention the Iron Dukes on Brunel's own Great Western (albeit most certainly not to his own designs!), which were capable of 80+ mph. The problem that the atmospheric system had been invented to solve no longer existed. The issues with the sealing flap have already been mentioned, as has the fact that those problems are immediately obvious to anyone considering what would happen to a strip of leather left outside next to the sea in all four seasons. Just as obvious are how you arrange for junctions or level crossings when there's a massive sealed pipe in the middle of the tracks, how you allow trains to stop at stations between the pump houses, how you arrange for fast trains to overtake slower trains, how you arrange and operate shunting yards and so on. Brunel intended to use different-diameter pipes so that trains going uphill had more power than those on the level or going downhill, but never satisfactorily explained how you could do that without changing the piston on the train. Would you have to attach a different 'drive wagon' with an appropriately-sized piston at each section? In which case why wouldn't you just attach/detatch conventional locomotives at the same places? OwlFancier posted:That was actually the other problem with brunel's version which was that the engines actually couldn't, they kept breaking down, and ended up not really being more efficient than just... putting them on a locomotive. It ended up burning like three times more coal than it was supposed to. This was because of the lack of a reliable seal at the pipe. The engines and pumps were designed to produce a maximum of 15in of vacuum, to ensure 10-12in throughout the pipe. In practice the vacuum in the pipe could be as low as 6in due the leaks, so Brunel ordered that the engines were to work at 20in, which was their absolute maximum. The railway's operations were also inadequate as there was no communication between the engine houses and the stations, so the enginemen had no idea where each train was. Thus they had to set the pumps working by the timetable, even if the train hadn't reached their section yet. This led to the pumps banging away at maximum effort, and often entirely pointlessly, while consuming vast quantities of fuel.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:23
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BalloonFish posted:Trainset stuff Thanks but it's a bit weird and uncomfortable when someone that seems to know what they're talking about comes into the thread and explains things. Just my opinion but I think in general we should probably try to steer clear of this kind of thing.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:26
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Guavanaut posted:There is no conceivable climate in which The London & Blackwall Railway is my personal favourite of the various Victorian "Why do we have to have the engines move?" ideas*. For a start it was the very first railway designed to be what we'd now recognise as a metro railway - passengers only, very frequent stops (for context, the DLR, which took over its long-disused viaducts, has only half the stations on that stretch), running as frequently as possible. The problem is that the technology as was (we're talking less than 10 years after the Rainhill Trials) just didn't exist to do this. Engines of the time accelerated so slowly that with stops sometimes less than a hundred yards apart the journey time from Blackwall to Minories (now Tower Gateway) would be barely better than walking speed, and signalling technology was so primitive that even on the faster bits it would be perilous as hell. It would also need to be able to get up a very steep incline from below ground level at the Blackwall terminus (to get under the old Poplar Great Eastern terminus) to a 30-foot viaduct to get over the roads into the docks. So they went back a step in railway evolution and decided to have a cable-hauled railway - these had been used long before the invention of the locomotive, especially for steep inclines, and work really well for simple point-to-point applications. However this doesn't really work for multiple stops, so they went with a system previously used for colliery railways - iron clamps on the train would grip the rope to accelerate, and let go to stop. The problem is of course that the rope speed is limited because the train has to accelerate from 0 to the rope speed instantaneously - you can make the rope and the clamp strong enough for this not to be a problem, but not the passengers necks. Obviously you *could* stop and start the rope but you're then trying to remote-control a train two miles away (and are back to the inefficiencies of accelerating and decelerating). They also had the problem that the train would have to accelerate and decelerate 8 times on the run, bad for the rope, but also inefficient - why bother stopping the train every time just for a few people to get on or off? So this is where they got really Laudanum levels of creative. Instead of an "up" and a "down" line they'd start a train at Minories, and as it approached the first station (Leman Street, less than a hundred yards away) the end carriage of the train would detach and brake to a stop. Same again a few hundred yards later at Cannon Street Road, and so on until just two carriages ran into Blackwall. The rope would then be reversed, all the carriages would grab it, and be hauled back to Minories (and think of the gigantic, cast-iron balls that would be required to be the guy with the big levers at the front of one of those carriages shooting into Minories at 30 miles per hour having to brake to re-attach to the stationary carriages already there). This seems like a bit of a pain for someone wanting to just go from, say, Limehouse (now Westferry DLR**) to Poplar - they'd have to catch the train all the way back to Minories then back out to Poplar for a journey of a couple of hundred yards - but the system was so quick and efficient that this was still much quicker than a conventional loco would be. Alas, the system was a complete failure. Even with the cunning running, the (7-mile-long) ropes wore much more quickly than expected, and breaks were frequent - even with two ropes per track, the railway was often completely broken. It was also fundamentally limited to just this one route, with no way of interchanging despite crossing multiple other railways. After just 8 years they swallowed their pride and went to conventional locomotives, and the 12 minute journey from end to end became 40 minutes (the modern DLR takes 15 minutes for the same journey, to give you an idea of just how quick the system was). This wasn't the L&BR's last brush with unconventional haulage though - they extended their line down to North Greenwich (now Island Gardens DLR). While the owners of the London Docks and Limehouse Docks were content with steam trains shooting sparks running past them (although with a roof and wall on the track to stop sparks reaching the docks) the much larger docks on the East India and Millwall Docks were much less happy with naked flames going past their warehouses and docks stuffed with all the most exotically combustible products of Empire and successfully got locomotives banned on that branch - so at Millwall Junction the loco was detached, and a team of horses hauled the carriages down to North Greenwich. It also has left the modern railway system two legacies - the first a local one, with the viaducts it used now being used by the DLR (and a small orphaned stretch between Mudchute and Island Gardens, abandoned when they moved Island Gardens underground for the link across the Thames, now being used as a very long and thin nursery school among other things). The other is that next to Minories station William Henry Smith opened a newspaper stand and book shop to sell people stuff to read while they waited for the ropes to be replaced, the first such stand at a railway station anywhere in the world (tedious fucks will point out the first WH Smiths (and first retail premises of any kind) *in* a station was at the much more roomy Euston station, but Minories is where they realised that they could flog stuff to people to read on the train). * At least of the ones that were built - I'm ignoring stuff like the proposed railway along Regents Street powered by catapults and the "hydraulic railway" idea floated for the first iteration of the underground where conventional locos would not have a firebox but would instead have their boilers filled with high-pressure steam at valves at stations. ** Almost none of the original DLR stations have the right name for where they are. Shadwell station is in Ratcliff (although we can blame the Victorians for that because they were literally trying to scrub all references to Ratcliff as a place name because it was that lovely a place), Limehouse station is in Stepney, Westferry station is in Limehouse (yes it's on Westferry Road but at the end that has literally nothing on the road itself - number 1 Westferry Road is almost half a mile away), West India Quay and Canary Wharf are on North Quay and Middle Quay, Heron Quays is a mile away from where Heron Quay was (and I don't even know where the loving plural came from). poo poo still gets me heated 30 years on, and I can't help but think estate agents had something to do it.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:27
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Lord of the Llamas posted:Well Edinburgh Central isn't like that Not sure I believe a CLP meeting is not horrible.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:27
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Azza Bamboo posted:I don't anticipate there being a round 2 race between Nandy and Starmer. Nandy somehow being in striking distance with RLB coming in 3rd is true chaos timeline stuff but given that she was even more knee deep in the chicken coup than Starmer it's not obvious she's a better choice at all. Given that Starmer is likely to win it's even more important we go to all the boring CLP stuff and make sure his feet are held to the fire in conference votes and that good candidates are selected for elections locally and nationally. Hoping enough lefties stop participating because Starmer wins the leadership is literally their strategy.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:29
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Sanitary Naptime posted:No you’re describing the SNP The SNP have this great luxury of being as centrist as they like as it doesn't matter. They only care about 1 policy, everything else is there to get them into power.
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Feb 27, 2020 23:30
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Aramoro posted:Not sure I believe
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Feb 27, 2020 23:30
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Aramoro posted:Not sure I believe a CLP meeting is not horrible. I always enjoy watching the right wingers lose votes and long may Edinburgh Central CLP be a place where that happens!
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Feb 27, 2020 23:35
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I follow Jonathan Cook and he's posting links to Craig Murray's reporting on the Assange trial. I haven't read any yet. So this was posted a few pages ago on Assange. I suppose it is a legitimate question to ask yourself, how do you judge someone who you have never met? Obviously the correct way is to say you shouldn't judge someone you haven't met. But in the case of a public figure like JA or becomes more difficult. But let's try. So you want to assess him. And if you want to be fair to the man, let's discount all the media coverage of him which was negative. Let's go even further and assume every story written about him was for the benefit of the establishment and those journalists who interviewed him and described him as an egomaniac who was slandering the women who accused him of rape, were all hacks. Let's put aside the fact that when he made the decision to not come to the British courts, he hid in an Embassy but wouldn't shut up about it, ducking over a country that chose to give him sanctuary. Let's also ignore how he was alleged to have assisted Trump in winning the US Presidency in the hopes he would get a pardon. If we put all that aside or discount it as attempts to defame his character, what are we left with? He is a man who when a number of women accused him of rape, his response was not to engage with the investigation and to clear his name. It was to hide in the UK and to try and wait the clock down on the Statute of Limitations. That fact alone tells you everything you need to know about his character.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:02
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Hey goons sorry a few pages behind so if this has been mentioned ignore me!Does anyone know what the Ir35 changes are? I'd never even heard of it until today but my wife has gotten a spate of recruiter contacts this evening say things like "please don't get annoyed if you are a contractor, yes this is a permanant job but with the ir35 changes coming in its worth saying hello" I've googled around and found stuff like "HMRC said: “Customers will not have to pay penalties for errors relating to off-payroll in the first year, except in cases of deliberate non-compliance”. Which doesn't seem... Relevant? Any ideas?
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Feb 28, 2020 00:07
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I can't help but think estate agents had something to do it. goddamnedtwisto posted:So they went back a step in railway evolution and decided to have a cable-hauled railway - these had been used long before the invention of the locomotive, especially for steep inclines, and work really well for simple point-to-point applications. However this doesn't really work for multiple stops, so they went with a system previously used for colliery railways - iron clamps on the train would grip the rope to accelerate, and let go to stop. The problem is of course that the rope speed is limited because the train has to accelerate from 0 to the rope speed instantaneously - you can make the rope and the clamp strong enough for this not to be a problem, but not the passengers necks. Obviously you *could* stop and start the rope but you're then trying to remote-control a train two miles away (and are back to the inefficiencies of accelerating and decelerating). They also had the problem that the train would have to accelerate and decelerate 8 times on the run, bad for the rope, but also inefficient - why bother stopping the train every time just for a few people to get on or off? It's a giant lovely mess that would go through wheels and brake shoes like anything, but would preserve rope lifespan, which is more of a pain to fix. Where's my paregoric and vin Mariani? The Question IRL posted:That fact alone tells you everything you need to know about his character.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:08
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The Question IRL posted:I suppose it is a legitimate question to ask yourself, how do you judge someone who you have never met? If they've posted here you tell them theyre a moronic piece of poo poo and move on to your next board game or whatever. The Question IRL posted:... what are we left with? But this is straight up worthless. Like yes if we ignore many things then we can have a completely ignorant view of something... ok thx for that.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:16
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Mebh posted:Hey goons sorry a few pages behind so if this has been mentioned ignore me!Does anyone know what the Ir35 changes are? I'd never even heard of it until today but my wife has gotten a spate of recruiter contacts this evening say things like In short, the very-soon-happening IR35 changes will change everything and kinda screw things up. The new chancellor Sunak however has said that oh, actually don't worry, we'll make sure it's not too great a change in the first year or so. The problems with his statement are that 1) it's too late 2) all he actually said is that he'll instruct HMRC to not enforce the new IR35 system too strictly in the first year. Like, what the gently caress does 2) even mean? You can just... not comply with the new IR35... except they also explicitly said no actually you can't "deliberately non-comply"? So what exactly could I do then, as a contractor? And more importantly, how am I gonna convince any client company to change their strategy to... what, non-compliance again? Something else, what exactly? Be specific. (Spoilers: they're not being specific) So, from early April, things will be different, but I guess nobody really knows exactly how, and now the chancellor has also made it more muddy rather than, I dunno, making it more clear.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:22
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Is Jon Ashworth good? Seems decent.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:23
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Oh dear me posted:I wish people wouldn't do this, it's what the melts want. I mean even if you are absolutely certain that nothing can be done inside Labour for the foreseeable future, it does no harm to let your membership expire naturally, and would allow you to support the left if by any chance you happened to be wrong. Sorry, just a poorly-judged joke to go with my IT ignorance. (I was starting to suffer from completely irrational ratfuck-anxiety cos every wobbly Starmerite I know had already received their ballots. Got mine as well now.) I'm too stubborn and too fond of being miserable to cancel my membership. Getting motivation and energy from the top down was nice, but only ever likely to be temporary in a country like this. The parliamentary party has been a pile of shite just about all my life, but there's still a bit more to Labour than that. I'd be lying if I said I was raring to spend my limited mental energy and free time flying the banner for damp-eyed Remainy deadendism, but if staying gives me the chance to spite and hassle and bully centrists in our nominally socialist party, even in the most limited and feeble way, then I'll stay.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:25
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51649640 (My bolding of last sentence in quote). quote:An ex-Labour activist has been charged with an offence under the Communications Act after a probe into alleged anti-Semitism in the party. Meanwhile https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...y-a9364086.html quote:‘We’ve allowed high-profile cases of antisemitism to go undealt with and unaddressed, and by doing so, we’ve given a green light to antisemites everywhere that they had a home in Labour,’ says Lisa Nandy
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Feb 28, 2020 00:32
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Xeno posted:Is Jon Ashworth good? Seems decent. I heard him on the radio talking about being duped by his now ex mate into getting recorded saying labour weren't going to win. I think hes a pretty genuine bloke. But he does not support the right people always so hes kind of losing on points.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:35
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Guavanaut posted:
I agree with you that he doesn’t deserve CIA torture. And that goes for everyone, even rapists and nonces. On the flip side, I do think he deserves to face justice over what he has done. And that’s everything. He absolutely deserved to be a in a jail for refusing to go to a UK court and for spending a number of years hiding in an embassy shouting “stop being mean to me.” He should have been brought to Sweden and made stand charge over those rape allegations. And if he is convicted, should be made serve time in a Swedish prison. Just because he was a part of a group that did some good things, does not mean he should have everything against him pushed aside.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:36
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51649640 Theres probably more than these four cases? Theres nothing contradictory here really.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:41
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The Question IRL posted:I agree with you that he doesn’t deserve CIA torture. And that goes for everyone, even rapists and nonces. In an ideal world, he'd have spent the determined amount of time in the highly human rights compliant Swedish justice system. I'm not going to stop opposing throwing him to the lovely American one for the crimes of making America look bad just because he hasn't though.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:46
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Guavanaut posted:Estate agents will be the new Masons. As well as a good chunk of the old ones. Fundamentally the rope wear problem is a factor of a non-straight 3.5 mile run - there's always going to be friction because there's no way of keeping the rope taut without fouling the clamping mechanism, so the rope wears out scraping along the bottom and sides of the channel. Steel ropes and grease are your actual solution to both the rope wear in the run and the slipping problem for smooth acceleration - ironically the first (wrought iron) cable works in the UK opened - at Fore Street, almost directly under their Limehouse station - a year after the L&BR switched to locomotive haulage.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:53
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Guavanaut posted:Sure, but there's a ton of people who deserved to spend time being rehabilitated into (or segregated from) society for things that they did who never saw a courtroom nor a cell. Doesn't make it right, but guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished and all that. Bear in mind, the reason he never spent time in the Swedish Justice system was because he chose to hide out in England and refused to engage in the Swedish system. He says that was because he saw everything that was happening in Sweden was a sham. It could also be because he is a sexual predator who doesn’t want to face any consequences for his actions.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:57
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Fundamentally the rope wear problem is a factor of a non-straight 3.5 mile run - there's always going to be friction because there's no way of keeping the rope taut without fouling the clamping mechanism, so the rope wears out scraping along the bottom and sides of the channel. Steel ropes and grease are your actual solution to both the rope wear in the run and the slipping problem for smooth acceleration - ironically the first (wrought iron) cable works in the UK opened - at Fore Street, almost directly under their Limehouse station - a year after the L&BR switched to locomotive haulage. I love a good double-entendre, but when you make it this easy it just takes some of the fun out of it.
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Feb 28, 2020 00:58
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The Question IRL posted:Bear in mind, the reason he never spent time in the Swedish Justice system was because he chose to hide out in England and refused to engage in the Swedish system. How do you know any of this? We're discounting the media reports, no? Don't worry I already know all I need to know about his character.
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Feb 28, 2020 01:02
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feedmegin posted:If that were true we would never have had Corbyn. I might not agree with them for doing so but someone voting for Starmer after the trauma we just experienced is not necessarily doing so because they want Blairism 2.0, which is why Starmer is not standing as Blairism 2.0. That candidate was Jessflaps and she went down like a bucket of cold sick, note. talking about scotlab here, not uk labour also it is both simultaneously true that assange is a sexual assaulter piece of poo poo and that him being prosecuted in any way at all, let alone the heinous poo poo we know they're gonna do to him, is a loving travesty. it is also sadly true that a lot of people with really shity attitudes on rape issues felt like they finally had a popular champion and boy did they run that poo poo into the ground
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Feb 28, 2020 01:41
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I love a good double-entendre, but when you make it this easy it just takes some of the fun out of it. Probably won't help you if I tell you that there were a lot of cable works on what came to be known as Cable Street but was at the time known as Back Lane, will it?
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Feb 28, 2020 01:47
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