Engine Punk

The Undertones played in The White Rabbit at Plymouth Bus Station on 9th April and it was a great gig in a very intimate venue. I was there with my little gang of south west punk rock enthusiasts and this was just the kind of show we enjoy. The crowd were a great bunch, too, and produced the oldest crowd surfer that I have seen to date. I hope that record only stands to be broken. Er, it wasn't me, although I did fall over in the mosh pit and lost a shoe for a couple of numbers. Good job I had the indestructible socks on. Doyle and The Fourfathers. For once I think the music press might know what they're talking about Support was provided by Doyle and The Fourfathers who are widely tipped for greater things. It's difficult to give a band like this a proper appreciation when you don't know their songs, don't listen to the radio because it only plays crap and the main acts tunes have become hard wired into your brain after so many years but I liked these guys ...

The ship that launched a thousand faces. And many more great steamships Following the Stiff Little Fingers gig in Bristol, I stayed over night in Bristol with the intention of having a quick look around the SS Great Britain. I'd been round this as a student when it was little more than an empty hulk in the mid-eighties when it was included as a visit to support our history of design lectures. The reconstruction of the interior is stunning compare to the empty and broken shell I saw back the 80s. This is the Promenade deck and it must have been a fantastic feeling to walk here while at sea in any kind of weather. The natural light has been used to brilliant effect. The hull is still very holey. This view is from inside the forward hold and shows the light coming through what should be very thick iron plates. It's incredible how the SS Great Britain managed to float back into Bristol, a case of sheer determination over the laws of bouyancy The big shiny ducts are part o...

The best old school punk band still touring (Photo : Kevin Ruscoe) I've been seeing Stiff Little Fingers at least once every year over  the last ten years and my mate Gary has now seen them over 30 times. For me they are the best punk band to see at the moment and their songs are just as relevant as they ever were. In a way that's quite sad. The world has not improved much in the last 30 years. Tin Soldier and Wasted Life mean as much now as they ever did, even taking into account the success of the peace process in Northern Ireland. But really these are anthems about the human condition. Alternative Ulster could apply to any city, any community. Originally, the support was to have been Spear of Destiny but Kirk Brandon was ill. So a local band by the name of Los Conios stepped in. They were not received as well they deserved, despite being a local band. I liked their recent single, Split , which I've downloaded from Amazon, but felt their tempo changes were som...

At the National Railway Museum in York, to emphasize the importance of streamlining in pre-war industrial design, some inspired person had arranged for a Chrysler Airflow saloon to be parked next to the Duchess of Hamilton . The Duchess of Hamilton has been rebuilt with the eye catching fairings it had when new. Many streamlined engines lost them during WW2 when speeds were slow and access problems hampered maintenance. Mallard is probably the most iconic of Britain's wind-cheating locomotives but the LMS engines were their great rivals. And they had go-faster stripes. So what would the streamlining enthusiast have chosen for his motor car? From stepping off the Coronation Scot hauled by the Duchess of Hamilton to his Schneider Trophy winning Supermarine seaplane, our man would have travelled in a Chrysler Heston Airflow. The Chrysler Heston Airflow - Chrysler Charlton Heston Airflow sounds impossibly heroic - was the UK version, modified for use in Blighty by the importe...

The Bullet Train still looks fantastic almost fifty years after its introduction Another observation from my trip to York was about high speed rail travel. At the National Railway Museum was a Japanese Bullet train. Much as I like steam engines, I remember the first time I heard of the Bullet Train. It looked like a piece of space technology on rails and travelled at over 130mph. I liked it despite my loyalty to steam. This was a truly futuristic form of travel, a revolution based on first principles rather than one that had simply grown out of tradition.  So could we have a Bullet Train in Britain? At the museum, actors were putting on a small story telling play about the Bullet Train or Shinkansen - literally the new main line.  They put across the point that the Bullet Train rejected the standard gauge of 3'6" with which a British engineer had saddled the country from the outset. It adopted standard gauge but the train in the museum was conspiciously wider th...

Wrightbus have successfully won market share in the fiercely competitive bus market. I'd never heard of them until recently. Obviously I'm a lapsed industrial designer. Or they build buses too quietly. Some people refer to modes of public transport, particularly omnibuses, as loser cruisers. I think this originates from Margaret Thatcher who described "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure." From a snobbish Tory point of view, public transport is not aspirational. Despite my engine punk proclivities, I am an enthusiastic and regular user of public transport. Having adopted the train and walking as the means of my commute (apart from the short drive to the station) I have become a leisure driver. Apart from shopping trips, these days I drive purely for pleasure. From my latest environmental audit, I am greener than most. This always surprises me because engine punks like me are suppoosed to be public enemy number o...

The White Notation is a means of describing different types of engine but I've been exploring some more of A E Durrant's works on obscure steam railway engines and found a very curious pair that defy classification according to their wheel arrangement. Wheel arranging sounds suspiciously like flower arranging to me but is really a very serious business involving weight restrictions, chassis flexibility and maximising adhesion. Most engines can be classified very simply and the White system quickly allows an impression of the engine to be formed, whether it's a humble 0-4-0T or an express 4-6-2. The French, being the French, had to be different and used their own system that counted only the wheels you could see from one side, so a 4-6-2 became a 231 - perfectly logical but determinedly different. However, neither system copes perfectly with some engines. Look closely between the middle and trailing driving wheels and you'll see an extra pair of carrying wheels...