We still have a CRT TV - for the amount that it gets used, and the quality of what's on anyway, it's not worth buying a new one.
I still use CRT monitors; I find the picture on good* ones much more pleasing on the eye (particularly for extended periods) than an LCD. I just picked up a couple more last week - one to use on the kids' PC, with the second being kept as a source of spares.
it's hard to find really good ones around here, though - most of it's Gateway junk and they never were up to much even when new. With them being so heavy, it's not viable to have them shipped from anywhere.
I really, really hate 'upgrading' things because someone declares what I have to be obsolete. It's only obsolete when it no longer does a useful job or I can no longer repair it when it breaks, and no sooner!
Reading this prompts another thought, regarding the development of locomotives in the earlies. I've not seen it listed before, but surely one of the major advantages of a separate firebox (as adopted by Stephenson's works from Rocket onwards, though not by some other builders until much later [1]) is that it would allow the fire to be dumped reasonably easily (as above), whereas with a flue-type grate the whole fire would have to be raked out through the back of the box across the footplate. Not idea, if the feed-pump has packed in, you're miles from help and the water level is dropping...
[1] The Albion locomotive in Nova Scotia, built (or at least purchased from) Raine and Burn in 1856, lacks a separate firebox.
I'm pretty sure the (main-line) use of flue-type fireboxes went out before fusible plugs were introduced (the only case of the two coming together on main-line locomotives that I can think of is that batch of L&Y 0-8-0s which had the corrugated marine-type "fireboxes"). They didn't last long like that.
What's a "flue type firebox" ? If you mean a flued boiler, then they went out very early on, as they had so little heating area. They were only practical for Lancashire boilers because they could be much longer and were followed by economiser chambers too. Even the Lancashire was usually a Galloway boiler in later years, with cross- tubes.
The later multi-tubular version is generally called a "launch-type" or gunboat boiler. These had some use for small ships, and for small narrow gauge locos - Arthur Heywood in particular used them. They have the same cylindrical furnace with only a small ashpan beneath the grate, but as they have firetubes similar to a conventional loco boiler, they also have plenty of convective heating area.
Wikipedia has articles on both of these types, neither of which are as bad as usual.
Launch boilers were never used on mainline locomotives, as they have too little radiative heating area (i.e. firebox surface) and so their power output is low, even if they're reasonably efficient overall. They were used in later years by both the LNWR for a class of small shunters and also by the L&Y for the 0-8-0s you mention. Neither of these were long-haul locomotives, but rather shunting within a yard and with pauses between moves to recover. The L&Y locos had reasonable tractive effort (cylinder size and pressure), but couldn't sustain this for any long period, owing to the lack of firebox evaporative capacity. There's also a suspicion that they were more the result of lobbying at Horwich by local makers of corrugated furnaces for the mill engine trade. Certainly not a sucessful or repeated experiment.
The biggest difference is that a furnace in a flue can burn coal, unlike Rocket, which had to burn the more expensive coke. It wasn't for a few decades after Rocket prompted the switch to Stephenson's more powerful firebox and thus a more compact locomotive, before the invention of the brick arch allowed a return to coal burning.
The S&D managed to burn coke for a few years (as a trial) in flue-type 'boxes, and coal in fireboxes. It produced rather a lot of smoke, but as most of the land around the railway was owned by shareholders in the company that wasn't an issue (the same, I think, could be said of the other companies which burned coal - both in flue-type furnaces and fireboxes - in the same era)
Coke was mandated for smoke reduction, and firebox engines seem to have been perfectly capable of burning coal (possibly with a different arrangement of air-holes and firebars), ablet at the cost of a lot of smoke.
Some railways were burning coal with (relatively) low smoke emission before the brick arch too. Even neglecting the complex fireboxes of McConnell, Cudworth and Beattie there was the arrangment of air-holes in the box developed by Cowan on the GNoS in the middle 1850s that worked so well that (IIRC) it was only under Pickersgill that they switched to the brick arch (about 1900, I think...).
Boilers with a single flue (straight through or return type) lasted in new-builds through to the early 1840s for main line use (Stockton and Darlington Railway, Clarence Railway, West Hartlepool Railway..). They were cheap - and in fact several batches of locomotives with flue-type boilers were built for the S&D after they'd had a period of building locomotives with tubular boilers (both straight-through multitube and return-flow multitube).
Or, in marine use, a "locomotive boiler".. :-)
This was what I meant - a cylindrical flue-type firebox, feeding into either straight-through multitubes (Dodds, Hackworth - both brothers, Adamson, Heywood..) or a return-flow arrangement (Hackworth). These were built for main-line use through to the later 1840s on the S&D (observe Derwent, built 1845 with a flue-type grate feeding a return-flow multitube arrangment..). Industrial locomotives with this arrangment continued to be built considerably later, and some of these ran for significant distances over main lines (the West Hartlepool railway outsourced much of its mineral traffic to colliery owners using their won engines, for example..).
Universal until the very end of the 1840s for mineral traffic on the S&D (and used for several fast passenger engines) - these engines lasted past the 1870s in main line use.. Also used on several other companies main lines (Llanelly Railway, West Cornwall Railway, West Hartlepool Railway, Clarence Railway..). So certainly not "never used"..
Agreed - though their building also followed a couple of very nasty firebox collapses traced to problems with staying. They were an attempt to do away with staying altogether.
This is proving an expensive thread: just ordered a reprint of Wood's "Practical treatise on railways" and a copy of Warren's centenary history of Stephenson's..
When the first main transformer to be built for the Class 357 stock was delivered, we noticed that, unlike previous UK practice, the oil level sight glass was plain, rather than prismatic, and the oil was almost clear, so the level was difficult to see.
I suggested diagonal stripes behind the tube, an idea that was initially regarded as, at best, strange. I persevered, and quickly produced a suitably marked piece of card. The result was as I had anticipated, much to the amazement of all around.
Just got my copy of the `825 edition of Wood's "Practical treatise..". I'll have a work through it and see if what he has to say about water levels in boilers and how they were judged.
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