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Sunday 10 March 2024

Peppercorns

 Ready-meals have come on a great deal in quality and presentation of recent years.   The other day I had a memorable ready meal from our local excellent supermarket, Booths.  Here's the package image.  The real thing looked just as good but for one (or 60+) thing/s - peppercorns!

I could, perhaps would, have died if I had eaten all these.  I all conscience and concern for other victims I have written to Booths thus:

"I have just had the pleasure of one of your Peppercorn Chicken & Parmentier Potatoes ready meals for one - Sell by date 11/03/24 06124 (possibly the batch number).  The picture shows the peppercorns I fished out of this single meal after I had eaten three which nearly blew my socks off.  I have not counted them but there are sixty or so.  Looking online fifteen seem to be the safe and palatable maximum number of peppercorns in one serving.  I wonder if there is a problem with that batch?"





















Watch this space.

Sunday 3 March 2024

Camera Doorbell

 Just installed a new front doorbell, its predecessor having failed.   This time its one of those fancy jobs with camera and two-way sound via the house wi-fi and VHF.  Annke brand, like our other security cameras













The low sun is spoiling things a bit but that's a pretty useful picture.   From my i-phone I can view and listen live anytime - and have a conversation with the caller.   £29.99 direct from Annke.   That's about the price of an ordinary ding-dong doorbell.  I might get one apiece for our four other outside doors.

Update:  The doorbell showed its real use yesterday while I was sitting in the sun in the roof room.   My iPhone sounded and it was my very first call from the front door bell.   I pressed one of the several icons on the iPhone screen, more in hope than expectation.   Bingo.   There was a clear-as-you-like picture of a man and a woman at our front door.  "Hello" I said - and the lady replied, loud and clear.  The system was working fine!  "We've come to give you a leaflet" said the lady.  A distant bell rang.  I told her I was at the top of the tower but our letter box was in the gate so they could deliver the leaflet.  I told her that their visit was the camera doorbell's first test for real, we all agreed how good they were and they left.  On emptying our letter box later I found the leaflet, inviting us to attend a meeting at Settle's Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses.   A close call.

Lift Shaft Clock Modified

 


Back in 2017 in an effort to somehow disguise the lift shaft we mounted a very large clock face onto it.  It worked and looked fine BUT twice a year somebody had to climb a ladder and change the time.  Similarly if the battery needed to be changed.  Now that climbing ladders incurs severe local disapproval something needed to change.  I wondered how it might be if I mounted the clock mechanism inside the thickness of the lift shaft wall and created access from inside with the lift platform halted at just the right level.





The job is now done and the clock can be serviced from within.   Here is all you can see from inside - a steel cover, held in place with magnets:



I am modestly chuffed with this.


Thursday 15 February 2024

Some Railway Water Towers

 Courtesy of Ferrers Young of the British Water Towers Appreciation Society here are some pictures of railway water towers in or near Norfolk.  From the top they are Norwich City, The Cow Tower (supplied the livestock pens at Norwich City station),Melton Constable, Holt Railway (a 2005 replica of the Norwich City tower), Bungay, Bungay demolition, Cromer, Mundesley and Weybourne.  All different.















Tuesday 30 January 2024

Garsdale Water Tower

 A new (to me) picture of Garsdale water tower.  This is a postcard dated sometime before 1909 and one of a series, printed in Germany.

The water tower and the then Hawes Junction South signal box are in the background,  The water tower was identical to ours and the tank panels are reassuringly contrasty.














The Hawes Junction tank, like ours, was in a prominent location as a landmark along the Midland's proud new extension to Scotland, so like ours, it was painted for showiness.


Friday 19 January 2024

Was our Water Tank Older than 1876?

 There is no doubt that our water tower was built during 1876, as was Settle station.  The line itself was opened for freight in 1875.  Only then was it possible to transport by rail to sites along the line to build the stations and associated buildings.  By far the heaviest and bulkiest components required were the massive CAST IRON beams to support the water tanks.  Two of the line's water tanks - ours and the identical one at Hawes Junction (now Garsdale) - were far bigger than all of the others.  Maybe Carlisle Durran Hill was a big one too.

Why so?  Perhaps it was thought that those places would be busier than those elsewhere so bigger supplies of water would be needed.  Maybe so but not that much busier.   Maybe Settle and Hawes Junction had better or more plentiful water supplies locally.   'Better' may seem to be a strange term for water.  Well as far as steam boilers are concerned the quality of water matters greatly.  Neither too acid (as would drain from peat moorlands) nor too hard as might be expected from limestone areas.  Furring of locomotive boilers was a serious and expensive problem.  Costly and huge water softening equipment was installed at key sites across the nation's railways, at locomotives works especially.   At the Midland Railway's Derby works there were several water softening tanks with cast iron panels identical to ours, at ground level without need of beams:











During the months I was working on the outside of the tank I got to know each component panel very well indeed,  A few things puzzled me.

1. The painted letters on the painted panels.  Only five or so panels bore letters, They were L., R.(inverted), E (inverted), Q (right way up but off-centre) and C (or perhaps another Q whose right side had worn off).   If you enlarge the screen shot below from Restoration Man Best Builds you can see them.  They make no sense.  They had been applied to the outsides of already painted panels - perhaps to identify assembled panels on an existing but redundant tanks elsewhere.  They appear random and incomplete:






















2. The tops of the top row of panels have empty square holes at 6 inch centres.  An unnecessary complication in the castings.  Had those panels once had another layer on top of them?

Had our tank's cast iron components come from a dismantled tank or tanks elsewhere?  How about the cast iron beams supporting the tank?  Might they too have been re-used from elsewhere?  By 1876 the Midland Railway might have been keen to economise and surplus items like water tanks may have become available from recent vast alterations to their massive railway arrangements in London.  Midland trains used to terminate at King's Cross when St Pancras opened in 1869.

1879 saw a disaster which shook Victorian confidence to its core,   On  Sunday 28 December of that year at night and in appalling weather the high girders of the then recently built (started in 1871) Tay bridge in Scotland collapsed under the weight of a passenger train, killing all on board.   Those girders were made of cast iron - a hitherto reliable and strong building material which was cheap and much used in industrial buildings and bridges especially.   Very soon the drawbacks of cast iron were identified and called into question.  Cast iron is brittle.  It is fine for columns in compression but can fail when in tension.  Cast  iron water tank side panels and the supporting cast iron beams act in tension.  The 1870s marked the end of cast iron for tension applications, especially on the railways.   It was quickly replaced by wrought iron and later steel for tension applications.   Yet our water tank was built with cast iron plates and beams in tension just six years before the Tay bridge collapse.

But hang on.   Beams, though supported at each end, are indeed in tension by their very nature yet in a water tower they form an enormous platform SUPPORTING an evenly spread massive load at four foot centres.  In tension they may be to some extent but by far the bigger part of their mass is in COMPRESSION.  Wrought iron or steel girders would be better of course but for now the cast iron beams would do in this application where lives were not at risk in the highly unlikely event of failure.  The tie bars which criss-crossed the tank side plates most certainly needed to be in wrought iron - and they were.  Even so their anchorages to the side plates were to drilled cast iron lugs, cast as parts of the side plates.  This is now known to be a point of weakness.  Of all the dozens of such anchorages in our tank just one had failed.  The evidence is still there today - a broken cast iron anchorage and a large vertical crack on the associated plate from which it springs:




















This fracture, near the north east corner of the top tier of tank plates is of no structural consequence for the empty tank but it could and probably would have been disastrous for a full tank.  Tanks of this very type have failed.  An example was this one at Witney in Oxfordshire in 1904:




Did the (by 1876) cash strapped Midland Railway take a chance and re-use expensive surplus tank components for their horribly expensive new line between Settle and Carlisle?  Perhaps.

Thursday 18 January 2024

A Wind Pump Supplied Water Tower

 This appeared on Facebook from Hornsea Civic Society:


What a good idea.  The supply was a local spring from which the water was pumped, powered by wind.  What a fascinating spectacle it must have been.  Hornsea is in the Lincolnshire flatlands with plenty of free wind.