Confessions of a Stobart sinner

As a new year is almost upon us and it's a time for making resolutions and fresh starts, I have a terrible sin to confess. Well okay, it really isn't at all bad in the grand scheme of things, but to a certain small sector of society I have committed a series of heinous crimes. So, what am I doing that is so awful? It's quite simple really - I've upset the Stobart Spotters with an intentional programme of destroying Stobart models by repainting and converting them into other forms.

Nice models, shame about the livery. That can be corrected though!

Calling All Stations

Retro Record Review: Calling All Stations by Genesis (1997)

 

Think of Genesis as a band and, depending which camp you fall into, you will either think of the vocals of Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins, so an album featuring neither of them seems unthinkable. Such a thing does however exist: the band's final studio album Calling All Stations was released in 1997 by the triumvirate of Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and Ray Wilson, and it is the 2007 remastered version of this album I have recently purchased and review here as an antidote to all those Christmas songs currently being played to death on the radio.

"Who's Ray Wilson?" I can hear you asking. He is the forgotten man of Genesis, who had the unenviable task of replacing Phil Collins after his departure in 1996 to concentrate on his solo career, and was only a member for little over a year so his brief contribution seems to be largely ignored. I feel this is a shame really as Calling All Stations is a fine album in its own right but was not a massive commercial success and is so overshadowed by the fame of Gabriel and Collins as to be virtually invisible.

More disappointment from Corgi

Today was the day that Corgi revealed details of their new model release programme for the first six months of next year. Once upon a time this would have been an exciting and keenly awaited event, but those days are long gone and as has been the case for several years I once again greeted the announcement with disappointment, proving how far they have been left behind by the competition. As a collector of 1/76 scale models, Corgi now have very little to offer me: the Trackside and Roadscene ranges showed promise but are both long dead, leaving just the Original Omnibus Company in this scale, and recent releases in this series have lacked sparkle.

How many red Routemaster models do we need?

Mental Health matters

From some of my previous blogs I may have given the impression of being a happy and successful man, but in reality that is far from the truth. It's Mental Health Awareness Week so I want to do something very serious for once and explain the daily challenges I face, having suffered from serious anxiety and stress for several years as a result of a combination of unfortunate circumstances in early adulthood. While I have a satisfying job, a loving family and no money worries, which on the face of it seems to be a fairly good life, there are many other aspects of my life that are much less satisfactory and peace of mind can be very hard to find. I seem to live in a constant state of being on edge and find it almost impossible to relax, even when there is nothing to worry about, so writing this piece is very therapeutic for me as I try to understand myself. I really hope I don't come across as egotistical or self-centred as that isn't the intention and I am simply trying to draw attention to the hidden difficulties anxiety sufferers such as myself have to cope with.  

Model fleet focus: United Counties

The United Counties Omnibus Company is one of those fleets that although significant in terms of size and area covered doesn't have the same cult following as certain others, such as Southdown or London Transport for instance. UCOC is one of the main themes of my collection and is an operator of great personal interest for three reasons: my home town of Buckingham is served by the company's successors, my father was brought up in Northampton, where the head office was located, and my maternal grandmother spent a short period as a conductress at Stony Stratford garage. Over the years I have collected all known factory releases by the diecast manufacturers, plus a handful of code 3 repaints and kit builds that will feature in a future article, so this piece provides a hopefully definitive guide to what is available. There have been a dozen 1/76 OO models to date, mostly by Exclusive First Editions and in Corgi's Original Omnibus Company range, plus one in N gauge. With one exception they should be fairly easy to obtain and don't command premium prices like some of the cult fleets.

The man in the silver Rover

A strange encounter at the fair

 

The bonfire fair at Campbell Park in Milton Keynes came to a close on Sunday, and as is traditional I paid a visit yesterday to watch the showmen pull down their equipment and depart from the ground. There is a culture of mutual respect between showmen and funfair enthusiasts so the latter are to be expected and are generally welcomed as long as they don't cause trouble. The enthusiast community is very small and tight-knit so we are often known to each other and to many showmen, but I had a rather strange encounter yesterday with someone I had never seen before who didn't really seem to have a genuine reason to be there and was basically being a nuisance: the mysterious man in the silver Rover. Who was he and what was he doing there?

The fairground arcade - a thing of the past?

Go to the funfair and along with all the rides, stalls and catering units, what other form of entertainment are you likely to find? The amusement arcade of course, offering a range of video games, slot machines, prize grabbers and so on to test your skill and luck. However, it has become apparent in recent years that arcades are now in decline and becoming an increasingly rare sight on the fairgrounds of Britain - no longer are they an essential feature guaranteed to appear at pretty much any fair, and they are becoming conspicuous by their absence in some places.

On its way out, both figuratively and literally. Billy Gumble's arcade leaves Cambridge a few years ago; for now, this one is still travelling.

Changing the clocks - a complete waste of time

Damn you, Mr Willett!

It's that time of year again when British Summer Time has just ended and everyone in the UK has had to set all their clocks back an hour to revert to Greenwich Mean Time. Every time this happens, I wonder at the point of it all as it takes an enormous amount of effort to give no apparent benefit. It is a procedure that could so easily be done away with, and it only takes one person forgetting to throw things into disarray, yet it has existed for almost a century and seems to be accepted as a fact of life and rarely questioned. The arguments against the practice clearly outweigh those in favour of it, and as a means of saving money its abolition is much less controversial than many of the government's other proposals, so I can't understand why we continue to abide by this antiquated and irrelevant tradition without questioning its real purpose.

Showbus part 2

Rather later than anticipated due to other commitments, here is the promised second part of my review of this year's Showbus rally at Woburn Abbey. Having already described the serious organisational problems in the first part, this one is rather more positive and concentrates on the exhibits themselves. At an event of this size, it isn't realistically possible to photograph everything, and I had seen several of the vehicles before at smaller local events so these were overlooked in favour of those I hadn't previously encountered. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, the big groups and their low-floor buses aren't of great interest, and nor are London buses, so I make no apologies for largely ignoring these too, and this review focuses on the vehicles that caught my eye.

This Plaxton Viewmaster was superb and one of my favourites.

Welcome to Cass County

Record Review: Cass County by Don Henley

The release of new material by Don Henley is an all-too-rare occurrence so September 25 2015 was a momentous day for fans as his much-anticipated fifth solo album Cass County finally went on sale. Henley fans have been waiting a very long time for this as it has been fifteen years since his last solo release Inside Job and eight years since the Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden, and in those eight years all three of Henley's bandmates have released new albums: Timothy B. Schmit's Expando, Glenn Frey's After Hours and Joe Walsh's Analog Man, leaving Henley as the last Eagle to commit to a new release. So what is this long-awaited album like and does it live up to the weight of expectation? Read on to find out what I think...

Making better use of the news feed

As a software developer myself, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing IT companies, especially the large ones with user numbers in the thousands or even millions, is effectively communicating product changes to these users. Many companies fail dismally at this, resulting in much of their user base remaining quite simply unaware that these changes have been made unless they stumble across them accidentally. Putting news in a support forum or on a webpage is ineffective as the majority of users don't visit these sites and won't see these posts, and emails are fraught with problems of delivery failures and spam filtering with no guarantee of receipt. What is needed is a way to communicate information on software changes directly to the user through a medium they are already using to receive other types of news, and it suddenly occurred to me that Facebook already have the perfect platform for achieving this, yet are not exploiting the full power of it.

Shambolic Showbus

A tale of woe from Woburn...

Showbus has firmly established itself on bus enthusiasts' calendars and claims to be Britain's biggest and best bus rally, but that claim must be in doubt after the experience of the 2015 event yesterday. In recent years it had settled at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, a well suited if expensive venue, but with the museum no longer willing to host the event an alternative had to be found and this year it returned to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where it had last been held in 1992. It had been nine years since I last attended a Showbus rally, but with Woburn being a simple 20 mile journey from home I felt it was worth a visit this time. Little did I know of the controversy that was about to unfold and ruin what had once been a premier event. Showbus has thrown off its old nickname of 'Showerbus' and taken on various new ones including 'Slowbus' and 'Shamblesbus'...

Unsung heroes: the Invacar

Today's unsung hero was a common (if not universally popular) sight but has been gone from Britain's roads for over a decade: the Invacar Model 70 invalid carriage that was once the government's preferred option for the provision of motoring to the disabled and seemed to be a fixture pretty much everywhere. While most older vehicles have disappeared gradually due to natural attrition, the Invacar's demise was much more sudden and literally a case of "here today, gone tomorrow", having been outlawed overnight and quickly scrapped almost to the point of extinction. It arguably outlived its usefulness and was no longer appropriate, and was killed off in favour of much better options, but the country's roads just aren't the same without its distinctive presence.

Any colour you like as long as it's blue. Who remembers these buzzing around?
(By Charles01 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Unsung heroes: Nissan Bluebird

The unsung heroes series today turns its attention to another car from a Japanese manufacturer, although in reality it was actually a product of home-grown British industry. This was the car with which Nissan established themselves as a major player in Europe and that laid the foundations for the Japanese marques' dominance of UK car production. Cars from Japan may have started to gain a substantial foothold in the 1970s, but it was in the eighties with models like the T12/T72 Nissan Bluebird that they really became a mainstream choice. It may have had a Japanese badge but the Bluebird was essentially a British car, more so than many of the contemporary Fords and Vauxhalls that despite being thought of as British were actually built elsewhere in mainland Europe. The earliest Bluebirds are now thirty years old but survival rates are higher than many of their contemporaries, a testament to their durability and the large quantities in which they were sold.

An early Washington-built Bluebird, still giving good service to its ninth owner.

Further Facebook friend frustration

Following up on a previous post written a few months ago, I have started to notice a new form of irritating behaviour becoming increasingly common on Facebook recently. Many friend requests are never being accepted or rejected by the recipient and are simply being left pending indefinitely, and in some cases this appears to be deliberate and intentional. It only takes a second to click the 'Accept' or 'Not now' buttons so at first I thought this was simply laziness, and to some extent it probably is but I've started to realise Facebook themselves may also be partly responsible.

To support my argument I have been regularly monitoring someone I sent a request to and have confirmed that she has accepted friend requests from other people since receiving mine that is still pending, and thus has definitely been online and seen my request. I find that extremely annoying: when accepting those requests there is no good reason why she couldn't have dealt with mine at the same time, so I just don't understand why it has been ignored and others accepted. Please people, if you don't want to be friends with someone, at least make the effort to let them know by rejecting their request and don't just leave them in suspense forever.

Buses Festival at Gaydon

A couple of months since my last visit to Gaydon for the truck show, I was back again on Sunday, this time for the Buses Festival. Organised by Buses magazine, this was a new event on the rally calendar for 2014 in response to dissatisfaction with the 2013 Showbus venue at Long Marston, and returned bigger and better this year, with almost a hundred vehicles in attendance. This was the first bus rally I had attended for a couple of years so these are my impressions, both as a first-time visitor to this particular event and as a returnee to bus rallies in general.

The M50 - a drive into the past

A trip to South Wales with a friend at the weekend saw part of the journey undertaken on the M50 motorway, or Ross Spur as it is sometimes known, and as a passenger I was able to appreciate the unique character of this odd little road. While many readers would probably consider roads in general to be boring and motorways especially so, the M50 is actually rather interesting, despite being a mere 21 miles long with only four junctions. Being one of Britain's oldest motorways but lightly used and little modified since it was built, it is probably as close as it is possible to get to an authentic 1960s motorway travel experience, and one of those four junctions is also rather remarkable.

What is true equality?

My recent post "Is DDA killing the bus industry?" has proved to be by far the most popular and controversial piece on this blog and has provoked a heated debate, but has been misconstrued in some quarters and I have been branded anti-disabled as a result. That is not the point of the article at all and these detractors have missed my fundamental argument, so I feel this follow-up is necessary to clarify my position and the true nature of the issues under discussion.

Re-read the article and you will realise the real issue is that the government is using the Disability Discrimination Act as a 'one-size-fits-all' solution to many subtly different problems with a complete lack of any flexibility to allow exemptions or alternatives where it isn't appropriate. The word 'equality' seems to be widely misunderstood these days and has taken on a new meaning of applying the same rules to everyone. In fact, true equality is subtly but importantly different: it means providing appropriate adjustments for those who need them, but (and this is the critical part that is usually overlooked) without unduly interfering with conditions for those who don't require such adjustments.

Is DDA killing the bus industry?

This may be my most controversial bus-related piece yet but I firmly believe the Disability Discrimination Act, for all its good intentions, is actually doing a great deal of damage to the bus industry and discriminating against the able-bodied majority of passengers for the sake of a handful of disabled users. DDA has gone too far and rather than promoting fair and justified equality, in some cases is actually now giving the disabled greater rights than the able-bodied and forcing the latter to accept unfair compromises to avoid being labelled discriminatory. To me, the government's attitude of trying to create an all-inclusive service to accommodate everyone is fundamentally wrong and ultimately benefits no one as each group's needs are so different, and bus users would be far better served by separating the disabled and able-bodied and allowing attention to be focused on each group's specific needs individually. 

Unsung heroes: Mitsubishi Space Wagon

For the next instalment in the unsung heroes series, I pay tribute to an arguably significant car that was eclipsed by another and never received the recognition it deserved. Renault's 1985 Espace is widely credited with creating the MPV market sector, but as a purpose-built seven-seat family car it was actually beaten to the market by the Mitsubishi Space Wagon launched the previous year. While the Espace still gets all the glory, the Space Wagon has largely faded into obscurity and is now a very rare sight. This piece is also something of a personal indulgence as my dad owned three first-generation Space Wagons while I was growing up and they played a vital role in my childhood, so I remember them with great fondness.

B252 YGN was said to be the very first Space Wagon in the UK. Here it is outside my parents' house in May 1990.

The big booking fee scam

Booking fee. Two simple little words that make my blood boil when buying tickets for an event. What is a booking fee really paying for? Booking is a compulsory part of the process that can't be avoided and isn't a special extra service so why should you be charged an additional fee for it? Any genuine extra costs involved in the booking process are marginal so basically these fees give the event organisers a legal way to make their customers pay more than the advertised price and maximise their profits from ticket sales, which seems highly unethical to me. 

An Unexceptional day? Far from it

Hagerty's Festival of the Unexceptional

Saturday 25th July saw the second running of the Festival of the Unexceptional at Whittlebury Park golf club, following the success of the inaugural event last year. You may not have heard of it but this was a highlight of the show season for me so I was delighted to hear it would be returning and was very much looking forward to attending. The organisers were very lucky to be blessed with fine weather: the rain poured down throughout Friday and Sunday, but Saturday fortunately stayed dry and bright apart from a bit of drizzle during the prize giving, which no doubt helped make the event such a success.

Unexceptional, eh? That doesn't sound very interesting

Quite the opposite actually. These cars may have been unexceptional in their day but have now become exceptional simply by surviving when so many of their contemporaries have bitten the dust. Organised by Hagerty Insurance, based in nearby Towcester, and dubbed a 'Concours de l'Ordinaire', this is a car show with a difference: the usual classic fodder such as MGBs, E-types and vintage sports cars are not welcome and instead it celebrates everyday family cars between thirty and fifty years old, although the age limit wasn't strictly enforced as both a 1950s Hillman Minx and a 1989 Volvo were accepted for display. These are the sort of cars that used to be common street furniture, could be seen everywhere and were taken for granted, but have now become rare thanks to attention being focused on preserving more exotic vehicles. This show was right up my street as I can't get nostalgic about the majority of traditional classics but things like Montegos, Cavaliers and Fiestas were the cars of my childhood.

I remember when most car parks looked like this. Yes that is an Isuzu Piazza in the foreground.

Beware of Ctrl-Z!

This is not the post I was intending to publish today as that one fell victim to an infuriating feature of Blogger behaviour so I was moved to write about this instead as a warning to others. I have a first-class honours degree in computer science and am currently studying for an MSc in the same subject so I am by no means the average novice user and I feel I am suitably qualified to comment on how stupid and dangerous this feature is, particularly as Blogger is intended to be a simple tool that can be used by people without high levels of computer literacy.

I'm sure everyone knows what Ctrl-Z does: it is a pretty much universal shortcut to undo your most recent change. That's all fine and very useful but Blogger's implementation of Ctrl-Z has another nasty little trick up its sleeve: if you press it again when there are no previous edits in the history, it deletes the entire content of the post to leave you with a blank page. This isn't documented anywhere and the one relevant post I could find dates back to 2011 so it's not a new problem. That's not what an undo function is for so why they have decided to implement this feature and what benefit it has is unclear, but combine it with the automatic saving that is turned on by default and you have a recipe for disaster. For novice users this can doubtless cause blind panic and extreme anger as they think "Oh my God, where did all my work go?!", and possibly drive them to stop blogging as a result.

Unsung heroes: the rise and fall of Proton

In the second of what I hope to be an occasional series on the unsung heroes of the motoring world (the first of which is here), I turn my attention to a car manufacturer that may never have produced anything remotely exciting or technologically advanced and is now virtually invisible in this country, but once filled an important niche among those wanting cheap reliable no-frills transport and appealed particularly to the retired generation.

The Malaysian firm of Proton has had a presence in the UK for over 25 years now but you would easily be forgiven for not realising the brand is still active here as 2014 sales totalled a pathetic eleven cars! Yes, you read that right: less than a dozen cars sold in an entire year, and all but one of those were in December after a ten-month drought with no sales at all, so cynics might suggest they were actually dealer-registered in desperation to avoid the acute embarrassment of selling only one car all year. The range may be cheap but is now distinctly on the elderly side, the newest model dating back to 2006, and although there have been promises of all-new products for several years these have yet to materialise, leaving Proton as a tiny and forgotten bit-player in the UK market. It wasn't always that way though...

Copyright or copywrong?

Copyright law made simple

I was moved to write this piece because total ignorance of how copyright law works with regards to photography seems worryingly widespread and has recently reared its head once more as someone has yet again made the all-too-common mistake of trying to claim they hold the copyright to a photo because they are the owner of the subject matter. The person in question seemed absolutely convinced his understanding is correct, to the ridiculous extent of claiming a government document explaining the law was wrong! He was most put out by the photographer rightfully asserting his copyright, with a rather peeved attitude of "how dare he try to claim copyright to a photo of my property?", so a simple explanation of the law appears to be called for.

Visiting the Van Nats

Belgians, sideways caravans, supercharged V8s and much more...

Today I paid a visit to the 'Van Nats' event, a classic and custom van show billed as "the original hippy happy van festival" and held in the village of Akeley, just a few miles down the road from home. The long-established Van Nats is a three-day 'extra-van-ganza' featuring a lot more than just vans, including live music, a barbecue and a vintage fair, and culminating in the 'show and shine' competition on Sunday. Apparently the reason for the location is that a senior member of the Transit van club lives in the village, and although it has been held here for a few years this was the first time I was able to attend. Given the hippy-themed branding I was expecting a load of trendy 'new age' types in air-cooled Volkswagens, but the reality was pleasingly different and more akin to street van shows of the 1980s.

This day van had come all the way from Belgium for the event!

A shrine to Swedish supremacy

Gaydon Truck Show report

Thanks to waning interest in the bus and coach scene, as previously discussed on this blog, I am finding myself increasingly drawn towards trucks. As part of this conversion, I paid a visit to the Classic Truck Show at the Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon on Sunday and found it a very interesting event, with over 200 real vehicles and countless fine models on display, so here I recount my experiences as a first-time visitor.

Stondon sale results

Following its closure at Easter, yesterday (Wednesday 10th June) marked the final end for the Stondon Motor Museum as the car and commercial vehicle collection was auctioned by Brightwells at Leominster, the motorcycles having already been sold in April. No-reserve auctions are usually interesting and unpredictable, with the possibility of a bargain but also potential for much competition between determined bidders, and that was certainly the case here. I didn't actually attend the auction for three reasons: it was on a weekday so I was at work, Leominster is a long way from here, and perhaps more importantly I would have probably ended up buying some piece of junk I have neither use nor space for! With the results now published on the auction house's website, I have crunched the numbers and present my analysis here.

Unsung heroes: Ford R-series

Today I pay tribute to a type of coach that was a familiar part of my childhood but seems to have been overlooked by many enthusiasts: the humble Ford R-series. While the heavyweight chassis built by AEC and Leyland, and later the flashy products of continental coachbuilders, got all the attention from enthusiasts, the R-series was the bread and butter, always there in the background quietly and reliably working away on less glamorous duties and no doubt earning its operator a decent income. These coaches were the mainstays of many independent operators until fairly recently, but having been discontinued in 1985, even the newest examples are now approaching thirty years old and survivors have become very rare.

One of the R-series chassis shortened to 8 metres by Tricentrol, this one still exists but hasn't been used for many years.

Best. Kit. Ever.

Having previously described the worst model kit I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, here to redress the balance is a fine example from the other end of the quality spectrum, illustrating just how high the standards can be when things are done right, but something equally obscure and unusual.

What might have been if the Minix bus was 1/76 scale.

N for 'no point'

The sad and pointless life of the Windows N versions

Browsing the operating systems available through the university’s Dreamspark account, I came across something I had never heard of before: a load of Windows versions with an N suffix in their name. I was intrigued but Dreamspark failed to explain how these differ from the normal versions, so off to Google I went, to discover a story of yet another cack-handed response to a legal challenge that eclipses even the infamous 'browser choice' app for sheer stupidity.

Kit review: BW Models RB44

BW Models kit BW324, Reynolds Boughton RB44 fire appliance in 1/76 scale (now Mid Devon Models MDM026)

The model vehicle industry in the UK is full of small cottage industry manufacturers whose products are relatively little-known but cover a wide range of interesting subjects. One such example was BW Models, who sadly closed down on the proprietor's retirement last year, having built up a vast range of over 300 different kits of civilian emergency and post-war 'softskin' military vehicles. Some of the moulds have been sold in batches to various other cottage industry firms and this particular kit is one of those recently reintroduced by a new entrant to the market, Mid Devon Models. Although many kit producers have now turned to resin casting, BW Models continued to favour the traditional white metal approach, and this is the first metal kit I have built for a while.

The trouble with Facebook groups

Facebook groups are great. They bring together people with common interests, no matter how obscure, and are a fantastic way to share things with like-minded individuals, and if there isn't a group for your interest you can easily set one up. That's the theory anyway, but unfortunately there are a few problems with the way Facebook have decided to implement the group system that make it a rather less pleasant experience than it should be.

Databases and Digital Democracy

Modernising the voting system

Thursday's General Election highlighted to me just how antiquated and inefficient the voting system is in this country, requiring huge amounts of manpower and paperwork to administer with so much potential for mistakes. It's the 21st century so why are our election results still being determined by people counting marks on pieces of paper? As a computer scientist with a particular interest in databases, this seems an ideal use of such a system to me and having given it some thought, from a technical viewpoint this is actually a very simple problem that can easily be solved with current technology.

An unusual election

No votes for the big three here...

Politics is one of those controversial subjects, along with religion, that I normally refuse to discuss, partly because I have little interest and partly because there are so many strong and opposing views that it invariably ends in an argument. I'm making a rare exception however, having just been through the General Election in a rather unusual constituency: my home town of Buckingham is the seat of John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons. An established convention dictates that the three major parties don't stand against the Speaker, so the complete absence of Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem candidates means the people of Buckingham realistically have little influence on the national government and tend to focus more on local issues. This post is therefore written from a purely local and somewhat personal perspective; I am perhaps unusual in having no allegiance to any particular party but I consider each of the local candidates on their own merit as individuals and their ability to serve the community, regardless of their affiliation.

Time, gentlemen, please

...stop trying to sort my news by 'interestingness'

A new trend seems to be spreading through the world of computing and I have to say it is one I deplore as it is technology for the sake of it and actually makes the user experience worse in my view. Not so long ago, your news feeds would be organised in a simple chronological order with the newest stories at the top, so you could scroll down until you saw a post you had seen before and instantly know you had seen all the new content and everything below was older. All nice and simple and everyone understands the concept of time, but that isn't good enough for many technology giants as sorting by time is basic stuff that doesn't show off their talents. Nowadays, there is an increasing trend to implement algorithms that deliver content organised by relevance or 'interestingness', which while technically clever do nothing to enhance usability and are a solution to a problem that doesn't appear to exist.

On a Wing and a Prayer

Retro Record Review: On a Wing and a Prayer by Gerry Rafferty (1992)

Although I have a large music collection, one album in particular stands out as a favourite that I keep coming back to for another listen. The late great Gerry Rafferty may be best known for his 1978 hit 'Baker Street' and his earlier work with Stealers Wheel, but he wrote and sang much more great material right up until his death in 2011. I enjoy listening to most of Gerry's work and there are very few tracks I dislike, but his seventh solo album On a Wing and a Prayer, released in 1992, is a particular favourite of mine.

So long Stondon

Think of car museums in Britain and what comes to mind will probably be the large national collections such as Beaulieu, Gaydon and Coventry, but the country is also home to a variety of fascinating and lesser-known privately-owned museums. Sadly, this number is about to be reduced as tomorrow (Easter Monday) is the final day of opening for the Stondon Motor Museum before it closes for good and the collection goes to auction. It was a remarkable place, one man's personal passion taken to the extreme, and claimed to be the largest private museum in the country with over 400 exhibits. Many car enthusiasts have probably never heard of it though, and therein no doubt lies one of the main reasons for its demise. Read on for my own tribute to this extraordinary museum.

This rusty old Lada seems to sum up the unique charm of Stondon.

Unlucky 13 - the M1 junction's weirdness explained

As a frequent traveller to Bedford via Milton Keynes and the A421, I have often wondered why this road suddenly and inconveniently veers south-east and travels alongside the M1 motorway for a couple of miles before meeting it at junction 13, and then goes north again on the other side, adding several unnecessary miles to the journey. Having discovered that junction 13 itself in its original form featured in road enthusiasts' website CBRD's list of bad junctions, piecing together the various reader comments solved the mystery of the bigger picture and why the entire road layout in that area is a bit strange, so here is the explanation.

Why does the A421 go down to the motorway junction and back up the other side? Read on to find out...

The scourge of corporate liveries

Having previously bemoaned the dominance of Routemasters on the classic bus scene, here I explain why my interest in modern-day operations is also at a very low ebb. The 'big three' of Stagecoach, Arriva and First between them now seem to operate the vast majority of buses in the UK and with their corporate liveries and relentless standardisation, wherever you go these days the buses all seem to look the same. Ever more difficult operating conditions are causing more and more independent operators to either close down or sell out, and the big groups seem determined to wipe out all of the tradition and local identities they inherited in the pursuit of a nationwide corporate brand to satisfy their shareholders. The variety that once characterised the industry is long gone and I think the country is much poorer for it, not just for enthusiasts but also from the passenger's point of view.

My thoughts on the Clarkson saga

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few weeks you can't have failed to realise that Jeremy Clarkson has effectively been sacked from BBC Top Gear and the media is awash with stories of a 'fracas' in which he is alleged to have punched a producer in a row over catering. As a consequence, the remaining episodes of the current series were immediately pulled from the schedule and Clarkson has been suspended until his contract expires and will not have it renewed. However, I believe there is more to this story than meets the eye so here I present my thoughts on the matter.

The death of Mondeo Man

It recently came to my attention that Ford have quietly launched a brand new Mondeo for 2015. This must have been a low-key event as the new model completely passed me and several other car enthusiasts by and I have seen little advertising, but not so long ago the debut of a new Mondeo would have been a cause of major excitement among company car drivers and fleet managers eager to get their hands on something new to show off to their colleagues. That just shows how marginal this once-universal model has become - the ubiquity of Mondeos was such that they even entered popular culture by spawning a nickname for the type of people who typically drove them, sales reps in the 1990s being almost universally characterised as 'Mondeo Man'. Nowadays though, it seems Mondeo Man is becoming an endangered species and has been usurped by 'German Saloon Man' as the traditional Mondeo users are turning en masse to 'prestige' brands such as Audi, BMW and Mercedes.  

Facebook friend frustration

I hope I'm not alone in my feelings towards Facebook friends - the sense of satisfaction when a friend request is accepted but also, more pertinently to this post, that feeling of disappointment and self-doubt when you realise a request you were confident would be accepted has been either rejected or worse still simply ignored and left hanging as a pending request. These feelings are even worse when you see these same people becoming friends with many of your friends and making you feel left out.

Speak English please, you're in the UK now

While I very much enjoy my work as a software developer and postgraduate research student at a university, the working conditions I have to endure are starting to get to me: an attic room that is always hot and full of fellow students who speak only Arabic, giving it the nickname of the Middle East. I have the greatest of respect for other cultures and this university is a particularly multicultural place, but I'm sure I can't be the only one who finds it rude to come to another country and carry on speaking your native language in the presence of those who don't understand it.

An architectural marvel? Surely not...

Following neatly on from the sad story of The Point, I have recently discovered that not only is the Milton Keynes shopping centre a listed building but the same honour has more recently been bestowed upon another site of even more dubious merit, which has left me quite frankly flabbergasted. Who would believe the city centre's old bus station has Grade II Listed status?

What's The Point?

A requiem for Britain's first multiplex cinema

 

An iconic local landmark that played an important role in my childhood has just closed after less than 30 years and is scheduled for demolition, so as yet another part of our heritage bites the dust I take a fond look back at The Point, the UK's first multiplex cinema. I'm sure I am not alone in having so many fond memories of that place: countless cinema trips, often to see the latest Roald Dahl or Disney animation, were part of the routine when I was young, sometimes with a group of friends as a birthday treat, sometimes just as a family outing, and the sight of that big red neon pyramid glowing against the night sky always filled me with excitement. Although I haven't set foot inside for years I can still vividly recall it: the wide staircase leading down from the entrance to the foyer with its central box office, the smell of popcorn, the illuminated signs above the auditorium doors spelling out the names of what seemed like exotic films I was far too young to watch, and the red tip-up seats.

The Point opened a couple of months after I was born so it has always been there on my many trips to Milton Keynes, a reassuring presence in this ever-changing city and one of the last links with a childhood long gone. It is such an unmistakable icon and one of the first things to be seen when getting off a bus in the city centre that it has become a familiar and accepted part of the landscape and things just won't be the same without it, although it has been very sad to watch its decline in recent years.

Cloud computing is the future for universities

This article began life in late 2013 as an answer to a question in an assignment for the Cloud Computing module of my undergraduate degree programme, in which each student was given a cloud technology and asked to explain how it could benefit the university, mine being Rackspace hosted services. My response was well received by the lecturer and I feel it has genuine real-world merit as a solution to the challenges of academic IT provision so it is deserving of a wider audience, hence my decision to share it here. It is reproduced largely as submitted but with minor edits to remove references to the specific institution that would be inappropriate to reveal in public, and the mention of Rackspace by name is not showing favouritism but simply because that is the specific technology I was given by the lecturer; other similar cloud services are available and equally valid in this scenario. Although this text is now over a year old, the situation has not changed greatly and most of the problems discussed remain contentious issues, so it is still just as valid as when it was written.

Facebook groups and the curse of the unavailable attachment

Something that has been annoying me for ages and shows no sign of being fixed gives me cause to have another dig at Facebook I'm afraid. I'm sure you've all experienced this - someone shares something to a group but all you see is this message:

Utterly pointless really - why bother telling you someone has made a post you're not allowed to see, especially as the comments then just fill up with people saying they can't see it. I know why it happens - the person whose post has been shared has set its privacy settings to something other than 'public' so those group members who are not their friends don't have permission to view it. As the person who shared it is likely to be friends with the person who originally posted it, they probably won't even know some people can't see it.

The anti-scrappage scheme

After yesterday's angry post about the damage caused by the scrappage scheme, I started thinking about a way to make amends so here I present my anti-scrappage scheme that rewards drivers for keeping their old cars on the road. After all, continuing to run an older car that was built over a decade ago and has long since had the environmental damage caused by its manufacture offset has got to be greener than scrapping it and buying a new one.

The scrappage scam and why it still makes me angry

The Labour government's vehicle scrappage scheme was certainly one of the most controversial recent developments affecting the British motor industry and rightfully provoked a massive outcry. Basically, between May 2009 and March 2010, anyone could trade in any car over 10 years old that had a valid MoT and had been owned for at least 12 months against a new one, and the government and the manufacturer of the new car would each contribute £1000 off the list price in return for scrapping the old one. This was very cynically justified on environmental grounds as removing old and polluting cars from the road, but in reality that was an obvious smokescreen and the real aim was to stimulate the car sales industry that had suffered a massive decline. It may be almost five years since the scheme ended but even now the sheer amount of unnecessary waste and destruction it caused and the fact those responsible were allowed to get away with it still enrages me. In fact I would go as far as to say the scrappage scheme was nothing short of a crime against the environment and the British public, and the people responsible for its creation should be punished with criminal charges.

CityRover - what if things were different?

One aspect of the car industry that fascinates me is the 'what ifs'. So many difficult decisions have to be made and it is interesting to ponder how things may have turned out had circumstances been even slightly different. A potentially fascinating case was recently raised almost as a throwaway comment on the excellent AROnline website so I decided to give this a little more thought. The conjecture was this: had the CityRover been successful, could we now see a partially recreated form of Rover Group in the ownership of Tata?

Too many Routemasters

Here I explain one of the reasons why my interest in buses is waning - this may be a controversial one, particularly to London bus fans, but I firmly believe there are far too many Routemasters in preservation. Living in the Home Counties means London buses have always tended to dominate local events, but since the Routemaster was retired from London service and the remaining fleet sold off in large quantities, the number of the type on the rally scene has increased massively in recent years. They are to classic buses what the MGB is to classic cars, so common that sometimes it seems more are preserved than were ever built.

Why are links from Facebook crashing my browser?

Another tech post detailing a problem that's really starting to annoy me but I haven't managed to find a solution to. Whenever I try to follow a link to an external website from the Facebook app for Android, it crashes the browser with that patronising and unhelpful 'Unfortunately, Internet has stopped' message. Having read that Android's built-in 'Internet' browser is not the best, I downloaded Chrome from the app store, only for the exact same thing to happen. The browser starts to load, but before the URL even appears in the address bar, it shuts down and generates the error message so I can't even see the URL it's trying to load.

This behaviour is consistent with any external link from Facebook, regardless of the external site's address, and is getting so frustrating as it seems something very simple has been overlooked somewhere. I don't know if the cause is the Facebook app formatting URLs in a way that common browsers can't understand, or something missing from the browsers' URL handling, but I suspect the former as the problem occurs in multiple browsers. If anyone has any further information, or even better a solution, please leave a comment as this problem is starting to drive me mad.

Worst. Kit. Ever.

Nowadays modellers really are spoiled by the choice and quality of the kits available to them. Professional resin casting is reaching ever-higher standards and when done right even DIY casting can produce high-quality results. Here however I present an interesting example from the other end of the scale...

My eBay saved search for bus kits mostly seems to return either ancient whitemetal kits that sellers believe to automatically be valuable because of their age or fairly recent resins going for utterly ridiculous amounts that far exceed their new prices, but something interesting suddenly popped up one day - not only was I not aware of the model's existence, it was made by a manufacturer I had never heard of either. A surprising lack of interest allowed me to secure it for the starting bid, so here it is for your delectation.

Don't be fooled by the attractive packaging - this is definitely the model's best feature!

Are Facebook missing a trick?

A tech-related post this time - there's no vehicular content here. What started out as an idle 'I wish they would do that' thought developed into a realisation that Facebook may be missing out on a vast untapped stream of data, which given their insatiable appetite for knowing everything about everyone surprises me.

What happens when a friend request is rejected or declined? In short, nothing - the requester is not notified and the request is even removed from their activity log leaving no evidence that it ever happened, which inevitably causes confusion as they think maybe they didn't send the request after all and send it again so the other person gets annoyed by having to reject it again. Anyway, that's not really my point. I don't know about others but I only send friend requests to people I have actually met and I think have a high likelihood of accepting. The majority do but on the odd occasions when someone decides not to I would quite like to receive some feedback on why they did so - is it because they don't like the content of my profile, they just don't feel they know me well enough, or something else? If I don't know what's wrong, there's nothing I can do that might make them more likely to accept, but it feels quite rude messaging someone who has just rejected my friend request asking why they did it.

Having thought about this from a purely personal point of view, I then realised that collecting this information would surely give Facebook themselves a massively valuable insight into the psychology of their users and the type of people they might want to be friends with. As a simple example, let's say person X tends to reject requests from users with certain characteristics because he doesn't like the content of their timelines, but accepts requests from users with other characteristics. Knowing this would allow Facebook to provide much better focusing in person X's 'people you may know' list with a consequently greater chance that he will become friends with them and Facebook can do their 'your friends like this so you might too' marketing wizardry. Maybe they could even use this information to help build up statistical data on the probability of any given friend request being rejected and the likely reason why!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something like this exist a few years ago? After declining a friend request I'm sure you had to select an option, which I think may have been along the lines of 'do you know this person?' and selecting 'no' may have had certain consequences for the requester. Like so many Facebook features, this quietly disappeared just as suddenly as it appeared with no explanation, but expanding it into a list of reasons for declining would have provided useful feedback, both for the requester and more importantly for Facebook themselves.

Any thoughts, or is it just me who wants to know why my friend requests get rejected?

A fairground favourite

My home town's annual Charter Fair is always a highlight of the year for me - two consecutive weekends when, by ancient Royal Charter, the town centre is taken over by funfair rides and attractions, together with the lorries that transport them of course. Think of British fairground transport and you'll almost certainly think of ERF.

In 1999 the B-series ERF was still fairly common on the fairs.

Ever since I started photographing the fair way back in 1998, one particular lorry has attended every single year and has become a firm favourite that I am always delighted to see. Registered JKY 452W, she is a B-series ERF built in 1980 and fitted with the fantastic-sounding 240bhp Gardner 8LXB straight-eight engine, and has been owned for many years by the Forest family, who I believe are based in Oxfordshire; having belonged to the late Malcolm Forest, she is now in the hands of his sons Mark and Gary. A classic showman's drawbar unit with a box body and generator, the double-drive rear bogie apparently predates the lorry itself, having been transplanted from an even older A-series.

At the most recent fair I was told by her proud owners that they have a repaint planned for the winter months and there is no intention whatsoever to retire her from service. As the once-common B-series gets ever rarer on the fairs, here's hoping this fine survivor continues for many more reliable years!

Same lorry, same place, 15 years on and still looking just as smart.

Just listen to that sweet straight-eight Gardner...

Bigger Borismaster

...or 'Two Wrights definitely make a wrong'

Model bus collectors can't have failed to notice that the recently-introduced Borismaster (or New Bus for London, or New Routemaster, or Wrightbus NBFL, or whatever you prefer to call these things) in Corgi Toys' 'Best of British' series has proved something of a revelation and is flying off the shelves, especially into the hands of fleet operators who are often buying large batches. Even I, a staunch non-London fan with a dislike of the real thing, succumbed to the temptation of my usual supplier offering one for just £8.

A fairly pleasant looking little model of a rather ugly bus.

However, I must admit that the very existence of this model confuses me so the point of this post is to express my puzzlement. No one can blame Corgi for wanting a piece of the lucrative London tourist market, but the way they have gone about it seems rather peculiar. An exact 1/76 scale model of the Borismaster already exists in the Original Omnibus Company range, sold as a highly-detailed collectors' model at prices around £30 to £40. Logically, producing a simplified version of this, lacking the fine details such as etched mirrors and wipers, would have been a golden opportunity to generate more sales from an existing casting, given that tooling up a diecast model can reputedly cost a five- or six-figure sum and is not a decision made lightly, and this was the assumption made when it was first announced in 2013.

Indications that all was not straightforward started to appear when Corgi refused to quote an exact scale, instead stating the Best of British series were all made to fit a standard box but quoting a box size that would be appropriate for a 1/76 bus and fuelling much speculation. After a long delay, the model was eventually released in late 2014 and at first glance looked like it was indeed a simplified OOC casting. However, a side-by-side comparison proves that it is indeed an entirely new casting that is fractionally larger; it is said to be 1/75 scale and around 2% oversize for 1/76 but a 2% difference is probably within manufacturing tolerance for most officially 1/76 models anyway. It certainly doesn't look out of place with 1/76 buses, nor even alongside the OOC Borismaster, as the size difference really isn't noticeable.

All this frankly has left me scratching my head and wondering just what the point of the whole exercise was as it basically wasted a large sum of money duplicating tooling that already existed - money that could have been better spent on models of other bus types. I suspect the reason is down to internal politics at Corgi that don't allow the Corgi Toys division to share tooling with OOC, a perceived devaluing of the OOC brand, or some such nonsense, but it would be very much appreciated if someone from Corgi could provide an official explanation of this strange development.

As it stands, I can now see no point whatsoever in buying the OOC model so I predict warehouses full of unsold examples being heavily discounted. The OOC is around four times the price of the almost identically-sized 'toy' but nowhere near four times as good, and it should easily be possible to purchase aftermarket details such as wipers and mirrors that will bring the cheap one up to the same standard for a fraction of the price. After all, if you went to the model shop with £40 and found that would get you one OOC or four of these outwardly identical models, which would you choose? The answer is obvious really...

If you don't believe me, look at the photos and judge for yourself. Thanks go to David Waterton for the loan of the OOC model.

No apparent size difference here.

The toy is a couple of millimetres longer but this is hidden by the curvature of the front and rear ends.

The roof looks a lot wider but this is an optical illusion as the white area is much bigger.

The shapes of the back window prove they are different castings.

Bringing the Albany out of obscurity

So you think you know about cars? Answer me this then...what is a Vauxhall Albany?


Never heard of it? I can't say I'm surprised as it seems to have been almost totally forgotten and by publishing this post I have doubled the amount of material about it available on the internet! The only other page I can find is on the excellent Vauxpedia, a first-stop resource for all things Vauxhall.

Vauxhall publicity photo of the elusive Albany. No one ever seems to have photographed one on the road!

So what was the Albany and why has it been consigned to the scrapyard of automotive history?

In short it was Vauxhall's first MPV, but also basically a Bedford Midi van with windows. Although the Midi was already well established in minibus form, these were utilitarian vehicles aimed squarely at the commercial market, and the success of the likes of the Renault Espace prompted Vauxhall to produce a far more upmarket car-like seven-seater.

The Bedford Midi. Fine as a van but did it ever stand a chance in the MPV market?

The Albany was launched at the 1990 British Motor Show and featured an impressive list of standard equipment that was certainly a cut above the basic Midi, including tinted glass, twin sunroofs, reclining seats, separate rear heating and power steering. Sadly, all of these luxuries couldn't disguise the fact it was very obviously based not only on a van, but a van that was starting to show its age against the competition. Only one brochure was ever issued for the Albany, which pictured the vehicle in various aspirational 'lifestyle' settings where it was horribly out of place but seemed to aim it primarily at business customers such as hotels and corporate shuttle services rather than private buyers.

The Albany brochure promoting its lifestyle credentials. The glider would probably be a more pleasant mode of transport.

The upshot of all this was that the Albany flopped. The range never expanded beyond a single model available in just two colours (the Bordeaux Red and Westminster Blue illustrated above) and propelled by a crude and underpowered 2-litre petrol engine. Perhaps more significantly than the vehicle's own failings though, the market for luxury van-derived MPVs we see today exemplified by the Ford Tourneo and Mercedes Viano just didn't exist 25 years ago and cars such as the Espace were aimed very much at the small niche of providing fairly basic transport for large families without portraying a prestige image, so the Albany's 'executive' credentials were somewhat misplaced. Only 300 were officially sold before it was quietly dropped just over a year after launch, and around half of those are said to have actually been registered either by dealers or by Vauxhall themselves in a desperate attempt to improve the dire sales figures. Vauxhall's next attempt at an MPV, the American-built Sintra, met with little more success but it was third time lucky with the innovative Zafira.


I actually have some recollection of seeing an Albany in real life. A large family in the village where I went to primary school had a red one - this was the early nineties so they probably bought it new. Even in my very young mind I knew it was basically a van and vastly inferior to the Mitsubishi Space Wagon my parents had at the time. Today there are apparently only two left on the road and the model has disappeared into almost total obscurity - has anyone actually seen one?

So there you have it, my own little tribute to a tiny, insignificant and forgotten part of automotive history.

Welcome

As you've probably guessed this is the first post on a brand new blog written by someone with no previous blogging experience. So who am I and what do I hope to achieve here?

Born, raised and still happily living in Buckinghamshire, England, I am an IT professional by trade with a particular interest in databases. My real passion however lies in transport, but I'm neither an anoraky trainspotter nor a Top Gear fanboy type (although I confess to a certain admiration for the work of Mr May). Trains, planes and boats leave me cold, as do the majority of dull generic modern cars, and what excites me are everyday cars of the seventies, eighties and nineties, buses and coaches (although interest here is waning thanks to legislation and corporate blandness gradually eliminating what little variety remains), and old lorries, especially those used by showmen and circuses with their own special charm.

I intend this blog to be somewhere I can express whatever random thoughts and recollections may be running through my head so who knows what may appear here, although the majority of content is likely to be transport or IT-related. I hope there is someone out there who will enjoy my ramblings!