MS Walk 6th June 2010

As you may know Jane and I are supporters of MS Australia. Multiple Sclerosis has touched our lives and through this we realise the importance of having a support organisation such as MS Australia to those with MS and their family and carers.

MS Australia has an Annual fun run and walk on the 6^th June. Jane and I and another have formed “Team Alistair” (you can guess who the other is) to do the 9km walk (or trot in Alistair’s case). We are looking for sponsorship for our team or better still people to walk with us.

You can join in by going to the MS Walk page at http://www.mswalk.org.au/nsw/about/chip-timing.asp and either elect to donate or walk our team is “Team Alistair” which you can find by entering Team Alistair in the search engine on the page. We are the ones with the cute picture of Alistair!

If you want to join us on the walk, which starts at 10:00am, you need to register first

Donations are tax deductable.

This is our third MS Walk and we are looking forward to it especially watching Alistair trying to steal sausages at the end of walk Sausage sizzle!

It is a long trip to Broken Hill

As an outback town Broken Hill is reckoned to be not all that far away and from a South Australian perspective maybe it isn't, but from Sydney it is a long drive and for the organisers of the 2010 Outback and Beyond Conference is has also been a long 18 months or so. So here we all are ICOMITES and TICHS waiting for the Conference proper to start.

To get here I forsook the plane and the train for my car and the back roads of NSW. I decided on the route through Cowra, West Wyalong, Rankin Springs, Hillston and Ivanhoe. Leaving at 6:30 I got to Ivanhoe by 5:30. Ivanhoe was quite desolate so I decided to push on to Menindee some 200k by dirt. I stayed the night at the Menindee Caravan Park.

The landscape from West Wyalong onwards was essentially flat with the odd range of hills. We had been promised plagues of locusts and while swarms were not obvious there were enough locusts to force several window cleaning stops. The locusts are a sign of the good rains we’ve been having this year.

Another sign is the flooded Menindee Lakes refilling from Queensland flood waters from the Darling River.

Menindee has the lakes (a series of lakes with lunettes) and the Darling River. It was for a time the terminus of the standard gauge line from Broken Hill which reached Menindee in 1919. There it stayed until a lifting bridge (for the river boats) was completed and the line through to Dubbo and the rest of the NSW rail system was completed.

This is the bridge in question, shorn of its concrete weight that provided the counter balance to allow the bridge to open but also showing in the foreground the pump inlet – I think for the water pipe to Broken Hill.

After driving around Menindee i headed west towards Broken Hill. About half way Stephens Creek in encountered and after that the first sign of my destination – the Barrier Silver fields could be seen.

The blue line of the distant ranges. Therein lies the richest sliver lead zinc lode and 125 years of Australian mining history and of course heritage.

It was on fire when I lay down on it

The title of this post refers to the opening of an insurance claim regarding a burning bed and serves to point out the inevitable consequences of things not being right at the start.

I refer to my Steam Era Models IA “Tommy Bent” wagon. as a case in point. I think the kit was bought for me by Jane in 2004 when I was housebound with a broken foot. She made the trek to Toms in West Ryde and bought me some kits (much to the surprise of the Toms crew).

Now the kit is basically the short 4 wheel underframe from the M wagon kit and a new “box” to go on it. However, you do have to trim the M wagon underframe to fit the “box” as a bit projects on each side.

Now as I look at the IA wagon in 2010 I see misaligned sides, gaps filled with body putty which has got everywhere obscuring the interior details of the wagon all stemming from the indisputable fact that I didn't cut the body square!

All the fitting and fiddling stems from my neglect of this basic task.

The model is salvageable, after all the wagons did look quite battered and distorted by the ‘60s, and with something to go in the interior the odd blobs of putty will be hidden.

Still I should learn to cut straight!

The end of Z 102

Z 102 was a second series Z class tram built by Comeng in 1978-79 and issued for service on 2nd January 1979.

Now I am trying to recall what I was doing, but I think in either 1981 or 1982 when I was living in Dennis Street, Northcote I was at home. I recall hearing the fire engine and looking out from my house seeing smoke and thinking it was about the site of the Northcote RSL. Bruce Ruxton was the outspoken (arguably racist) leader of the RSL and Northcote was his club so I thought maybe someone has firebombed the RSL. Grabbing my trusty Mamyia SLR I popped around to High Street .

At least one fire engine (an International Pump Escape) was at work and as you can see the tram was well alight.

According to the tram driver the fire started at the rear of the tram in a seat. as it was smouldering they decided to head on to the Northcote Fire Station to get them to put it out. The trams didn't have fire extinguishers at that time so they had not means to put any fire out. But as you can see things developed! I wonder if in continuing the journey they fanned the fire. Anyway they abandoned Tram near the Northcote RSL.

According to VicSig Z102 was scrapped following the fire. Nobody was hurt but I imagine the tram crew would have some explaining. Later that year I noticed fire extinguishers appearing on trams presumably as a result of this event.

Deaths in Web 2?

As some readers may know there have been two recent deaths in the Web2 world I inhabit. The first, some weeks ago now, was Railpage  which seems to have died on 22nd January 2010. the second was the Perth Military Modelling Site (PMMS) whose owner/operator Terry Ashley has decided to stop adding content.

Railpage was a great and unexpected loss. It simply wasn't there and all the Gb of useful and useless information has simply gone.I am feeling its loos as I would browse the Railpage forums at least once a day – particularly the Model Railway and Railway Archaeology forums. There seem to be a number of knockers – some complaining about over moderation, others like Bob Cooke accusing posters of being slanders and stating that legal opinion was some posts were libellous (posting on the Aus Model Rail Group 3rd March 2010).

There was certainly a mixed bag of posters, some seemingly naive in their view of the hobby and the businesses that support it, others seemingly delighting in taking a view and defending it to the death and others were trolls. But in all that there were some who genuinely tried to provide good creditable information to help modellers.

I hope it comes back but its been almost 2 months.

PMMS was a reviews site which mostly dealt with model tanks, guns and other military items. It proprietor Terry Ashley was known for his detailed and accurate reviews of kits never being afraid to point out errors and omissions. as such he ran foul of Dragon and some serious nutters from “the Panther Project”. As a result I felt he seemed discouraged and drifted away from his site leaving the Review field to the ignorant and the hagiographers.

Again as someone who would view the site about every 2-3 days this development is a big disappointment.

We rely so much on the Web these days that when favourite sites disappear it leaves a hole in life.

The mysterious workings of JCIS

For various reasons in late 2009 various projects that JCIS had worked on but had stalled came to life and so we are busy writing reports. We finalised one last week and so this week we have been getting ready for the next one.

The problem is finding all the items that allow a report to be written. There are images and videos on my computer, PDF’s of previous reports. Paper files and reports from the depths of the filing cabinet. Plans and excavation notes along with the artefacts were last seen (by common recollection) in the garage. However they were not obviously there.

Two days later I can report that – the garage is clean and reorganised. A car load of material (and a small brown dog) has gone to the recycling depot and we have come back with nothing new! My office is cleaner and more organised. My model trains have been catalogued and joy of joys the plans and field notes have been discovered on top of a considerable pile of material on Japanese Industrial History.

They were placed there as I recall just before everything went down to the Yass project. Phew!.

What is this?

The following are photos of some machinery located beside a railway track (between two inspection pits) at the former Clyde Wagon Workshops.

One one side is this object which seems to be operated by some sort of air cylinder (it looks quite a bit like the air brakes under a wagon).

On the other side (i.e. opposite) is this item

I thought that they might be some sort of retarders except they are on the wrong side of the track!

This area was used to do heavy repair of four wheel wagons so I am assuming it relates to this work.

All ideas welcome.