Rough road ahead for Hornby?

Most certainly in the mid 90's as the company I worked for used to call there and do business with them.

But all that changed in the late 1990's, here is a BBC news article from 1999;

I think the French book of Famous Naval Victories is probably nearly as thin as the Italian Book of War Heroes.

David Costigan

I think the French book of Famous Naval Victories is probably nearly as thin as the Italian Book of War Heroes.

David Costigan

quoted text -

Is that Chinese $ or US $ ? I think a US Billion is less ! ?

Chris

Wildly OT, but //please// don't feel that you have to prove you're an ignorant bugger. You've done it adequately already.

If you feel that you have nerve to match those who drove MAS-boats into fortified harbours, or the swimmers who sank battleships, or if you even pause to consider what the Carso front was like, then please feel that you might have cause to respond. Otherwise don't.

Same goes for the French. There's a reason the Union Flag doesn't fly over Washington, y'know. It's called a French naval victory, and a good 'un. as they go. Only silly, ignorant fools forget such things.

HTH. HAND. Now go and read a book with more words and fewer colour-in pictures.

That is the end of this public service announcement. We now return you to your normal programming.

Surely even if it did, it wouldn't, as Washington wouldn't have been invented?

And New York was still New Amsterdam

You're right, of course, and I thought of that shortly after. The empire had many, many flaws and failings, but building cities in swamps wasn't one of them.

Not even in Norfolk?

The empire wasn't responsible for stuff the natives got up to (well, not unless it /decided/ to be...)

;)

It does, IIRC. From the village hall. Certainly was flown from Makro back in the day.

Oh, you might not have meant Washington in England? ;-Þ

In message , Andrew Robert Breen writes

What's the difference between a swamp and a flood-plain? Although the empire didn't build in swamps, the mother-country has certainly built in flood-plains, as we have seen to our cost (in increased insurance premiums, or difficulty in getting insurance at all) lately.

Not sure about Norfolk, but a lot of the English cities in swamps were put there by the Romans: London, Salibury, Bath, Chichester, and so on.

Maybe there is something in the colonising mindset which makes a swamp look like a good place for a city, considering the locations of New Orleans, Melbourne[0], Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Petersburg[1], parts of San Francisco, and so on.

[0] I'm not sure if this really is built in a swamp, or if that is just a South Austrlaian myth. [1] built on recently conquered territory, so it possibly counts as a colony.

Present-day Salisbury dates from 1220, and the site before that (Old Sarum) was on a hill - where was the Roman version?

Melbourne was not built in a swamp, though it may have expanded into one or two.

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:10:37 +0000, Jane Sullivan said in :

Summer 2008?

Guy

Seattle was so poorly drained they had to raise the level of the streets by 10 feet or more. An underground tour of the original streets and shopfronts is a popular tourist attraction.

What summer? ;-)

Melbourne is surrounded by deep valleys, quite a nice village, not sure where you got the swamp idea from. To bring back on topic, anyone know of any books describing the Melbourne military railway ?

Cheers, Simon

Ummm, Melbourne Australia (which the OP was referring to based on his footnote) is surrounded by large hills to the north and east. In fact, said hills extend up much of the eastern seaboard of Australia (see Great Dividing Range) including the infamous Blue Mountains west of Sydney and the Toowoomba Range west of Brisbane. Never been to the Toowoomba Range but the scenery in the Blue Mountains and from much of the Great Dividing Rnage is nothing short of spectacular.

Here endeth the geography lesson.

As for military railways in Melbourne, apart from a few sidings off the main railways, I wasn't aware we had any! Perhaps there's a Str***g*c R****v* of R class locos somewhere in a hidden tunnel in the City Loop I wasn't aware of...[0]

[0] Not as silly as it sounds, from a reliable source I was told that during the 2006 Commonwealth Games here, some of the army was stationed in the Loop after the last train and before the first the next day to ensure nobody untoward left any surprise packages there, as well as sweeping the loop for anything that might be cause for alarm. So there is at least a military link however tentative...