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Tuesday 28 February 2017

New trains for the U.K.

Class 700/707 and the Virgin Azuma.

A new fleet is underway for delivery in the Class 700 for Thames-Link and the 707 for South-West trains from their initial first batch trials from 2015.

Both of these classes belong to the German Seimans Desiro City mobility design. Thames-Link has received fifty-five, 12 car and 60, eight car units, while SW-Trains has 30, five car units. It is estimated that these trains in peak hour traffic will move 18,000 people.

The trains have some of the London Underground features such as walk-through. This new concept has proved to be very effective in cutting down crime, the train is also level for wheel chair access.

Meanwhile Virgin Trains have invested 140 million pounds in their new Japanese Hitachi Azuma high-speed stock, for east-coast operations. Azuma is Japanese for east, in 1964 Hitachi built the first Bullet train.

Virgin claims that the Azuma has a top speed of 140 mph, but o-to 60 is much faster than it current fleet, meaning that Kings Cross London to Scotland will knock off 30-minutes on the existing times?


Tuesday 14 February 2017

Mikoyan-Gurevich. MIG-15. Part-Two.

Extensive Training Aircraft.

Many of the worlds air forces can boast today that it was the Midget (NATO-Codename) that got them where they are. This aircraft saw some twenty years as a front line fighter, before being moved on the roles of counter attack and advanced trainer.

Over eighty-seven countries received the type and it became the basis for Jet aviation production in the Peoples Republic of China, North-Korea, and a few other countries around the globe. The Soviet Union quickly revealed to the west the next generation the MIG-17/19, for a time it was not known if they were the same aircraft?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

N-Korea, Cuba and one or two other countries still may be flying the Midget in both counter attack and advanced training, since there are so many sanctions placed on them?              

Tuesday 7 February 2017

Farm Machinery. One.

Not getting any Smaller.

The concept in farm machinery is to cut out the need for farm labour, apart from a few cases of specialist vegetable crops that have to be picked by hand? But even here the days of needing a human picker are fading too, to be replaced by the gentle hand robotics?

The other reason is the size of fields today are far much bigger than they were seventy years ago, this is because of the removing of the traditional ditches. Machines today can do eighteen drill ploughing over that of the conventional four on most small tractors.

Most of the new farming machines have nearly everything in their cabs, but not yet a bed? Computerised and heated they can work both day and night to sow and to reap, depending on the time of the year. Costs are astronomical for these new beats going into the millions in some cases, one has to wonder that there must be still money in farming?