IKB: C or D?

And God's Wonderful Railroad... sigh.

He was quite short.

I love this pic

But then again, I love really really thick rope even more, since we went to a ropemakers museum as a small child, where they made ships rope, which was THICKER THAN MY WHOLE BODY. (Note: Kate may have been smaller than she appears now.)

How can you dress up as Brunel in a kinky way???

I will expand on my initial post in a bit, once I've eaten my sandwiches.

If nobody can identify this programme, my life has no meaning.

Brunel was a great civil engineer - see the Maidenhead bridge - and his rate at building things that fell down was probably better than his contemporaries (the only one I can think of was that bridge on the Wye at Chepstow). However, as a mechanical engineer he really wasn't much cop. His ships, for example, were wonderful beasts apart from the original engines. His locomotives for the GWR were all utterly terrible; at opening, the GWR only managed to run trains by hurriedly buying engines from Robert Stephenson & Company, and soon hired a Stephenson & Co engineer to build their own fleet.

His railway track - supposedly wonderful, used by the GWR for many years - was only successful by accident. The original fashion in railway engineering was to build stiff, rigid track. In line with this, Brunel set out to build as rigid a track as he could come up with, so designed track with rails continually supported on large wooden beams, firmly anchored into the ground with 8 foot piles every few metres.

Unfortunately - as people quickly realised - making your track as rigid as possible is the worst thing you can do for a line designed for steam engines. Steam engines have always had barely-adequate suspension, and on very rigid track they will shake themselves, and the track, to pieces. Moreover, Brunel's track developed dips between each pair of piles, making it even bumpier. When the piles were removed, the track was fine - and was used up until the 1920s in some places - but its design principles, although fashionable at the time, were completely wrong.

(I think there might be some Brunel-style track still in the Paddington platform roads, albeit with modern FB rail. I'm not sure why, unless it's a foundation problem. Similar continuously-supported track is often used on bridges - indeed, the rail cross-section Brunel invented for his track rapidly acquired the name "bridge rail")

they were Fran and Anya doing jaunts through history and using any old excuse to dress up. channel 5, early one weekend morning, can't remember name of the show and it's no longer on. search for fran and anya turns up nothing. ah, maybe if you spell ania correctly: http://www.aniaandfran.co.uk/ and it's 'Heroes Of History')

Fran has written a book called "The Pineapple: King of fruits". It will be published in December 2005 and is a whopping 512 pages long.

(xpost)

I saw the Henry VIII one the other week, and it was far too exciting for it's own good.

("get a big top hat if you want to get ahead! You're sure to be treated as a big success!")