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Datasmurf
Jan 19, 2009

Carpe Noctem

Damnit! I used it only some months ago, just for the kicks of it. I liked AltaVista back in the days, before Google. Oh, and Lycos. Is whoever running Lycos shutting that down too?

e:

JediTalentAgent posted:

They've also announced that in another few weeks they're going to start deleting Yahoo e-mail accounts that have been inactive for a year and recycle them, letting new people claim them.

Seems it's time to log in to my old Yahoo account, then.

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tacodaemon
Nov 27, 2006



Datasmurf posted:

Damnit! I used it only some months ago, just for the kicks of it. I liked AltaVista back in the days, before Google. Oh, and Lycos. Is whoever running Lycos shutting that down too?

I'm a little concerned about them because their Twitter account was pretty active until mysteriously stopping in December https://twitter.com/lycos

0dB
Jan 3, 2009

blugu64 posted:

Does anyone know where to find split flap displays?

Entire displays no, but I bought a split flap wall clock just recently at Freedom Furniture of all places.

Axeman Jim
Nov 21, 2010

The Canadians replied that they would rather ride a moose.
More mental trains!

In the 1940's it was very clear that diesel locomotives had some big advantages over steam - it was cleaner, cheaper (if you had oil), easier on the crew, more reliable, easier to produce very high power from, and operationally much more flexible.

Absolutely none of these problems were solved by O.V.S. Bulleid's insane "Leader" class of 1949. Apparently, what steam locomotives really needed to compete with diesels was to look like a diesel. And so, three years of development by the old Southern Railway, and for some mad reason by British Rail after nationalisation, BR's Brighton works produced this:



Well it certainly looked like a diesel. But underneath it was a surprisingly old-fashioned steam locomotive. Basically, all the new and innovative features of the "Leader" were unnecessary or didn't work, and all the things that needed modernising about steam locomotives were left in place. A good example of this faulty thinking was the position of the fireman. The "Leader" had a cab at each end, meaning that the fireman couldn't be in the cab, because the firebox would be at the other end of the locomotive half the time. There were two ways this problem could be solved:

1 - Using a mechanical coal stoker which had been been successfully employed in more modern steam designs in North America and Africa for a couple of decades.
2 - Install the boiler back-to-front, trapping the fireman in a hellbox between the firebox and the bunker in the middle of the locomotive, causing him to get roasted alive as he worked and have to communicate with the driver via a bell on a string.

Guess which they chose? Better still, the fireman only had a door on one side of the locomotive, so in the event of an accident in which the locomotive ended up on its side (and given how top-heavy the "Leader" was that was more than likely), he would be trapped in his fume cabin and get either incinerated or scalded to death depending on whether the steam or the fire got to him first.

They did install a corridor down the side of the locomotive to enable the driver to change ends. This required the boiler to be mounted to one side, which not only restricted its size (lack of steam was one of the "Leader's" many problems but, more seriously, made it lean severely to one side (the side within which the fireman was sweating), making the ride terrifying and destroying any track and points the "Leader" happened to pass over. This problem was solved by the kind of no-nonsense engineering that won World War II - they filled the corridor with scrap metal, trapping the fireman more completely in his roasting-hot coffin-to-be, making it impossible for the crew to move around the locomotive (a big point of the design in the first place) and adding loads of weight without increasing its pitiful steam production.

So, with the wobble cured (and the rest of the crew given earmuffs to cut out the sound of the fireman's screams of fear and pain), they tried to move the train. This did not go well.

You will notice in the picture that the wheels of the "Leader" are very unusual for a steam locomotive, sitting in bogies like a diesel rather than the conventional rigid centrally-mounted wheels of a normal steam locomotive. This aping of diesel design required two sets of cylinders, one on each of the pivoting bogies. This required an insanely complicated system of getting the steam to the wheels in the first place (which leaked steam and lubricating oil all over the place), and a design of cylinder valve that hadn't been put in a locomotive for 40 years (and for very good reasons) to get sufficient power to six wheels in a very restricted space. Having two completely unconnected sets of wheels caused a unique problem whereby they would "centre", with the forces on each bogie balancing out, preventing the wheels from moving at all if they happened to be in a certain configuration. It's not quite each set of wheels moving in opposite directions, but it's a similar principle. The upshot was that every now and again, the "Leader" wouldn't physically move unless it got a shove-start from a more sensible locomotive.

Also, on the rare occasions that the "Leader" got some steam up, it was found that the cab at the smokebox end of the loco got as hot as the fireman's sweatbox, so in trials the "Leader" was only run in reverse - completely eliminating the one remaining advantage of the locomotive (and the main reason for its pants-on-head retarded design): its ability to run equally well in either direction without needing a turntable. The tests were "notable for their absence of praise" for the "Leader"'s capabilities.

It was quietly scrapped in 1951 and British Rail instead ordered a whole bunch of locos that were diesels inside and out - but some of them were almost as terrible as the "Leader", and I'll get on to those in another post.

einTier
Sep 25, 2003

Charming, friendly, and possessed by demons.
Approach with caution.

Space Gopher posted:

Not quite. They're basically low-power neon lamps with funny-shaped electrodes. So they're a lot warmer than LEDs but nowhere near as warm as an incandescent lamp or vacuum tube that needs to get red-hot to work.

I have a Nixie clock I built from old Russian tubes. I just went to feel the tubes, and though they're warmer than room temperature, it's barely noticeable. My infrared temperature gauge says they're about eight degrees warmer than the shelf they're on.

Shugojin posted:

Well that would make the reading meaningful, but I don't know how well those do seconds.

They do seconds just fine. When it rolls through the numbers quickly to avoid cathode tube poisoning it's impossible to read, so you couldn't use it to display tenths of seconds.

Farecoal
Oct 15, 2011

There he go

Axeman Jim posted:

In the 1940's it was very clear that diesel locomotives had some big advantages over steam - it was cleaner, cheaper (if you had oil), easier on the crew, more reliable, easier to produce very high power from, and operationally much more flexible.

Yeah but steam is cooler :colbert:

Ron Burgundy
Dec 24, 2005
This burrito is delicious, but it is filling.

efcso posted:

It looks like something straight out of a Thunderbirds episode...

You were saying...


The cars were essentially bus bodies on bogies. The loco looks like an Edsel on steroids. Gotta love the 50s.

semiavrage
Apr 28, 2007

I'll show them... I'll show ALL of them...

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Split-flap displays. Did you ever watch Groundhog Day and wonder what was with that weird clock? Well, before LEDs came down in price, digital clocks rotated cards against a ratchet: each time a minute passed, the card slipped in front of the ratchet and a new card was displayed. Since minutes move in an ascending sequence, this worked just fine.

However, sometimes you need a bigass display that's alphabetic -- say, for instance, you're a train station and you need to show the next ten trains leaving and where they're leaving for.


Every single letter there is one flap on a 26-flap wheel. (Note that there are also specialized flaps for things like train lines.) Now imagine that the train at the top of the list departs. That means that the list needs to move up and a new train has to be displayed at the bottom. That, in turn, means that every single one of those wheels has to rotate from its current position to the new letter. When you're sitting next to one of these boards, it sounds like a thousand pigeons took off next to a chain-link fence with playing cards clipped to their wings.

Mechanical stuff is awesome.

There is one of these in 30th street station in Philadelphia and I love it. It is so very loud. When I was a kid (I'm 22,) I also had one on my night stand. I don't remember the number change being annoying, but I do remember it made a constant mechanical wherring noise.

kastein
Aug 31, 2011

Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.
As of approx. 2009 there is still one in south station (I think? I can't really remember) in Boston.

Lazlo Nibble
Jan 9, 2004

It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Ron Burgundy posted:

You were saying...


Designed by GM—and given that blatantly car-like cab profile, there was probably at least one heated argument about whether or not it should have tail fins.

b0nes
Sep 11, 2001

Code Jockey posted:

That's so cool. :allears: I love old Sun boxes. Solaris would work right? I've got a pair of Sun 1U rackmounts [I forget what model] that I keep meaning to throw Solaris on.

My dream is to acquire some SGI gear. I used to play around on that, a friend of mine's dad was head of the CS department at the local big private college [read: money out the yin yang] and they had some awesome stuff. Playing Doom on an SGI screaming fast, when my home PC could barely do it, was cool.

Same here. I would love to get an O2 or an Octane to play around with.

b0nes
Sep 11, 2001
Anyone remember hard cards? If you didn't have the expansion bay you would plug in an ISA card with a hard drive strapped to it.

Axeman Jim
Nov 21, 2010

The Canadians replied that they would rather ride a moose.
Crap British Trains of the 1950s

British Rail 10100

Inspired by the lunacy of the "Leader", British Rail decided that their diesel designs could easily reach equal levels of bugfuck insanity, and proved it with 10100. Whilst the US designs of the period were amazing art-deco masterpieces, 10100 looked like this:


:britain:

Still, the ugly outside succeeded in only drawing attention away from the sheer madness of what was inside.

Why have one engine when you can have five? Yes, 10100 had five separate diesel engines, four for traction and one to power the auxiliaries. For many designs, just having five engines jammed into the chassis would be eccentric enough, but no, the madness was only just beginning - for that, we need to examine 10100's truly deranged transmission.

Most large diesels use electric transmission - the engine drives a generator or alternator connected to electric motors in the wheels. A few use hydraulic transmission. 10100 was designed for mechanical transmission - physically connecting the engines to the wheels via clutches, shafts and gearboxes. Hence the need for four traction engines - if you put more than about 500Hp through the clutches of the time they'd disintegrate, so to get 2000Hp you needed four.

Each of 10100's engines was connected via a hydraulic clutch to a gearbox. Changing "gear" consisted of switching in more engines, 1 in first gear to 4 in top gear. So yes, you read that right, 10100 produced 1/4 of the power when starting as it did at top speed - despite the fact that you clearly need more power to overcome inertia at low speeds or when climbing hills. So to counteract this, the engines were turbocharged, with the auxiliary engine blowing the engines that were engaged, producing 4 times the turbocharging when running on one engine.

The astonishing thing is that this Heath Robinson transmission sort of worked, and once 10100 got up to speed it had serious haulage power, though hills were a problem and failure of any of its five engines would cause the locomotive to stop working completely. In 1958 it caught fire, possibly out of shame, and was scrapped.

British Rail Class 16

One of the big advantages of diesel traction is that you can easily put a cab at either end and clearly see the line ahead of you instead of having to peer down the side of a massive, smoke-belching boiler. That means you can reverse the locomotive simply by driving it from the other cab rather than using a turntable. This is especially important in a country like the UK (less so in North America) where journeys are shorts and reversing is frequent.

But to keep the cost down, and to enable shunting without having to swap cabs every minute, some smaller diesels were built with only one cab. This provided good visibility in only one direction, which was a compromise but saved weight and cost and made maneuvering in yards faster and less hassle.

Or you could place the cab like this, giving an equally bad view of the track in either direction:



This magnificent piece of design is the BR class 16. Ten of these monuments to uselessness were built.

As it happened, the visibility problems weren't so big of a deal, because they were only a problem if the locomotive was moving, which was not often. By the time they were scrapped (not very much time at all), they had spent more time under repair than actually available for servce. Bad design (particularly inadequate engine ventilation) combined with bad manufacturing tolerances on almost every moving part combined to make them the most unreliable diesel ever to run in Britain, and they had fierce competition for that honour (see below). The only reason they lasted as long as they did was that they were under warranty, and the manufacturers, NBL, had to spend so much time and money repairing them (and various other defective diesels that they built for BR) all the time that they went bankrupt. With no more warranty spares, they were withdrawn and scrapped.

British Rail Class 17

What's worse than buying a locomotive that doesn't work properly? Buying a locomotive that serves no useful purpose even when it does work. What's worse than buying a defective locomotive that you don't need? Buying 200 of them, that's what.



Thus is the disaster story of the class 17. Designed for the kind of light, pick-up freight work that had been lost to road transort a decade before they were even built, British Rail were so pleased with the design that they ordered 200 of them without bothering with a prototype or a pilot scheme (as with the class 16) - despite the fact that the "Clayton", as they were known, was powered by a very similar engine to that in the class 16.

So the class 17 flopped around the rail network for a few years, breaking down a lot and failing to serve any useful purpose. Attempts to assign them to heavier freight trains in pairs failed miserably, the hard work causing them to fail and break down even more than usual. BR tried to flog them off to industrial operators, who, being privately owned, actually wanted locomotives that worked. So they were all withdrawn, and aside from one preserved example, scrapped. Some had been in service for less than five years, 10% of their anticipated lifespan.

British Rail Class 31/4

Now the class 31, despite being a noisy, underpowered, overweight and sinfully ugly bucket of rivets was actually very successful. It was fast, easy to maintain, and, (once they'd replaced the original engines with ones that actually worked) very reliable.



Well British Rail weren't going to let that kind of poo poo go on for long, so they set about ruining one of their better diesels in ingenious fashion.

With the demise of steam on BR in the late 1960's it was increasingly pointless to have passenger carriages heated by steam. Most 1950's diesel designs had boilers for this purpose, which were a maintenance headache and increasingly unnecessary. So both coaches and locos were converted to electric heating, usually by tapping some amps from the loco's main generator to feed batteries in the coaches. To offset the loss of traction power this caused, some designs (like the very successful class 47) allowed the driver to temporarily interrupt the train supply when full power was needed, such as when starting or climbing hills. Not so with the class 31.

First up, the genuises who planned the conversion decided that the class 31 needed to be able to generate a massive amount of electrical power, despite being a pathetically underpowered rustbucket to start with. The idea was that Class 31s would be attached to crack expresses before they set off to heat the coaches while the bigger, express locos, hung around the green room snorting coke or whatever it is big express locos do instead of pre-heating their own drat carriages. In the event, this almost never happened. Worse, unlike all the other types, there was no way to turn the ETS system off, so the class 31 lost 500 of its meager 1500Hp permanently, whether it was hauling passenger cars, freight, or just crying in the toilets about the loss of a third of its manhood. The 31/4 was so underpowered that in the 1990s, several unconverted examples were re-built with through ETS wiring (as 31/6), to allow one class 31 to heat the train whilst the other actually pulled it. Embarrassing.

Coffee And Pie
Nov 4, 2010

"Blah-sum"?
More like "Blawesome"

kastein posted:

As of approx. 2009 there is still one in south station (I think? I can't really remember) in Boston.

I was there last year, it's been replaced with a big, boring, digital display.

peter gabriel
Nov 8, 2011

Hello Commandos
Axeman Jim, never stop posting, please!

Ron Burgundy
Dec 24, 2005
This burrito is delicious, but it is filling.

Axeman Jim posted:

Crap British Trains

:allears:

Keem 'em coming.

sleepy gary
Jan 11, 2006

Excellent posts, Axeman Jim, thanks!

Brother Jonathan
Jun 23, 2008
Here's a crap American train, the Camel:



That's the B&O No. 199, built in 1860, designed by eccentric engineer Ross Winans. It was built to solve the problem of how to burn poor anthracite coal. Winans's solutions was to build a huge firebox on the thing. It was so big that the engineer's controls were moved to the top of the boiler. It had a number of problems:
  1. The engineer roasted on top of the hot boiler.
  2. The fireman tending the firebox could not communicate easily with the engineer.
  3. To fire the front of the grate, the fireman had to shovel coal to the firing platform, then into a high hopper, and then pull a lever to dump the coal. It is believed that few bothered to do this, and that they only fired half the grate.
  4. The weight of the firebox was not supported by the frame but rather by a cantilevered joint on the back of the boiler.
  5. It could only go 15 m.p.h.
  6. There was no cladding on the cylinders, which caused the steam to condense so rapidly that it could only be run on cold days with the cylinder cocks open.
  7. The water pump is bizarrely mounted on the side of the firebox, requiring a long rod the length of the engine to pump it.
  8. The drawbar connecting the engine and tender goes directly under the firebox, causing it to heat up so much that it would often glow red and sometimes melt.

Whenever modifications were suggested to him by customers, Mr. Winans would angrily shift the blame to the engine crew, railroad maintenance, or anyone else, even going so far as to have two B&O chief mechanics fired for criticizing his engines. His orders quickly dried up.

dobbymoodge
Mar 8, 2005

Axeman Jim makes me think a new, awesome thread should be started.

Edit: and Brother Jonathan

dobbymoodge has a new favorite as of 00:01 on Jul 1, 2013

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

Coffee And Pie posted:

I was there last year, it's been replaced with a big, boring, digital display.

The New Haven Union station in Connecticut still has one, but apparently it's in the process of being scrapped in favor of LED.

peter gabriel
Nov 8, 2011

Hello Commandos
If I were to sit down and design the perfect device for slow cooking a human being it'd look a hell of a lot like the Camel, holy poo poo!

Pham Nuwen
Oct 30, 2010



dobbymoodge posted:

Axeman Jim makes me think a new, awesome thread should be started.

Edit: and Brother Jonathan

Anoraks United: The Trainspotting Megathread?

Zemyla
Aug 6, 2008

I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!

peter gabriel posted:

If I were to sit down and design the perfect device for slow cooking a human being it'd look a hell of a lot like the Camel, holy poo poo!
I assume the wheels are there so it can be delivered to you while it's still hot.

A Shitty Reporter
Oct 29, 2012
Dinosaur Gum

Axeman Jim posted:

Crap British Trains of the 1950s

You two need to get together with Nebakenezzer and write a book about poorly designed vehicles.

Farecoal
Oct 15, 2011

There he go

Axeman Jim posted:

(like the very successful class 47)

I just looked this class up and despite being built in the early-mid 1960s some are still used for mainline duties in Britain today :psyduck:

Brother Jonathan
Jun 23, 2008
Ross Winans was not only known for the Camel locomotive. He also build a cigar-shaped iron steamship in 1858, named Winans after himself. In addition to the new hull design, he put the propeller in the middle, but perpendicular to the length of the ship:





The problems with this design include:
  1. The ship had no keel, causing it to roll badly.
  2. When the water went over the bow, it would "catch" and pitch forward.
  3. The connection between the forward and aft hulls was weak because of the gap needed for the propeller.
  4. To go between the two hulls, a crewman had to go topside and walk across the propeller shroud.
  5. The propeller put out an extraordinary amount of spray, dousing anyone topside.

Winans tested the ship in Chesapeake Bay, but never on an ocean voyage. When the Civil War broke out, he tried to interest the Union in his ship, giving tours of it at its dock in Baltimore. They weren't interested.


Here is a contemporary photograph of the ship at dock:

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Axeman Jim posted:


Each of 10100's engines was connected via a hydraulic clutch to a gearbox. Changing "gear" consisted of switching in more engines, 1 in first gear to 4 in top gear. So yes, you read that right, 10100 produced 1/4 of the power when starting as it did at top speed - despite the fact that you clearly need more power to overcome inertia at low speeds or when climbing hills. So to counteract this, the engines were turbocharged, with the auxiliary engine blowing the engines that were engaged, producing 4 times the turbocharging when running on one engine.


What...what the? I don't even.

So when you have one engine going, you have no more torque per engine than you do when you have all four engines going. Your maximum torque being output from the transmission is the exact same, no matter whether you have one engine coupled to the output or all four coupled to the output.

This, right here, is peak British engineering. What the gibbering gently caress.

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell
Goddamn, that boat is like something out of H.G. Wells or a bad Steampunk film.

Sunshine89
Nov 22, 2009
Obsolete locomotives aren't necessarily bad locomotives. Check out the China Rail SY Class:



It's fairly unremarkable looking. It takes elements from the best contemporary Russian and American locomotives, and is designed to burn absolutely terrible coal and keep going with minimal maintenance. What's remarkable about it? Thousands have been built, and the type was in production from the 1950s to 1999.

Its larger sibling, the QJ 2-10-2, pulled the last regularly scheduled steam-hauled passenger trains, and ran the length of the newly-constructed Ji-Tong Railway in Inner Mongolia.





Several QJs and SYs still exist. There are many ppreserved in China. Private operators in China still operate them- SYs are often found in steel mills and coal and ore mines, while QJs pull power plant coal delivery trains. 3 QJs are in the US, 2 have been heavily Americanized in appearance, and one still remains close to its original Chinese appearance. Also, if you're interested in buying one, Motive Power Industries in New Jersey will gladly sell you one.

NAPALM STICKS TO
Jun 22, 2005

Going back a few pages, but pull tabs are still used in much of the world. I just drank an orange soda today from a can with one.

Sunshine89
Nov 22, 2009

Lazlo Nibble posted:

Designed by GM—and given that blatantly car-like cab profile, there was probably at least one heated argument about whether or not it should have tail fins.

It did.

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose
I like how they got a stereotypical middle-aged midwesterner to stand by the locomotive.

Ron Burgundy
Dec 24, 2005
This burrito is delicious, but it is filling.
I'd say it's a holiday snap rather than a publicity photo.

Tsuru
May 12, 2008
It also looks about as aerodynamic as a pile of bricks.

The train, that is.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Tsuru posted:

It also looks about as aerodynamic as a pile of bricks.

The train, that is.

A pile of bricks is very aerodynamic once it gets a good running start.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
Meet the Schienenzeppelin! (Rail Zeppelin)


It's the answer to "What if you get a zeppelin builder to make a train?". And in the drive to keep up with the Jones (the Russian's Аэроваго́н) you throw massive amounts of money and resources resulting in it being built within a year.

You end up with a train that's made of aluminum, fitted out in Bauhaus and pushed forwards by a wooden propeller.


Despite the sheer lunacy of this experiment, such as having a massive propeller whirl around a station, it appears to have had worked as it's lightweight construction (20 tons) and a conjoined BMW VI aircraft engine shoved it down the rails at a still set record (for petrol fueled) of 230km/h
The biggest problem was that it was a single purpose vehicle. There was no way to link it up to anything. It also lacked the momentum to move up steep gradients as any change in angle would drop the power from the prop. Also it has no reverse.

It served a short life as safety concerns kept it out of action and despite a few retrofits it eventually was scrapped to provide materials for war. Many of the concepts (such as streamlining) ended up being used in other trains - such as the Fliegender Hamburger.

The concept of combining aircraft and train design had a resurgence in the jet age with turbojet trains.

TinTower
Apr 21, 2010

You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.
Did someone say crap British trains?



The British Rail Class 140 "Pacer", functionally obsolete for years. Under disability discrimination legislation passed in 1995, these trains must be out of service by 2019, but it's unlikely that will happen. It's a problem that many trains in the North of England are pretty much life expired but there aren't any replacements.

And they use two-car Pacers at 5:30pm to take people out of Leeds to the commuter belt stations. :negative:

Axeman Jim
Nov 21, 2010

The Canadians replied that they would rather ride a moose.

TinTower posted:

Did someone say crap British trains?



The British Rail Class 140 "Pacer", functionally obsolete for years. Under disability discrimination legislation passed in 1995, these trains must be out of service by 2019, but it's unlikely that will happen. It's a problem that many trains in the North of England are pretty much life expired but there aren't any replacements.

And they use two-car Pacers at 5:30pm to take people out of Leeds to the commuter belt stations. :negative:

drat, I'm working on a write-up of the Pacer, you are correct as to its serious penny-pinching shitness. First, though, I'll post some crap trains from the 1960s, there's some amazingly bone-headed engineering there that this thread needs to know about. Update this evening.

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.
This was the first commercially successful public electric tramway:


If you look closely you notice that there is no pantograph and no third rail.
It was simply supplied with those 160V DC current through the tracks themselves. The uninsulated tracks running through the middle of Berlin.

After too many incidents of people and horses getting electrocuted, they put up a fence and tried to turn off the current on the crossings if no train was nearby.

But there still were various incidents of people and horses getting shocked.
The city youth also found a new hobby of throwing wires between the tracks to watch them spark and melt as a nice cheap firework.

It operated like this for almost 10 Years. Then the pantograph got invented.

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Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free
I am absolutely loving trainchat, this is awesome. :allears:

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