Vaughan

The length limit on hire boats in Europe is 15 metres - about 45ft. Beyond that, it becomes a hotel barge, which needs a different licence and a skipper.

When the reputation and professionalism of traditional Broads businesses is repeatedly impugned, on a Broads forum, then explanations must be given to refute the suggestions and allegations. Even if the person making them, doesn't seem to listen to the answers. You may call that going round in circles but it has come to feel like deliberate trolling.

St Luke 4 : 23. King James version.

I have taken a great deal of trouble, yet again, in answering your "genuine questions" without, I hope, getting too frustrated in the process. And yet I end up just getting lectured by you in this manner. Your remark about entertaining and interesting tales is an insult to those of us who take the trouble to share them, as well as an insult to the forum itself. Your comment that I have quoted is probably worth reporting but I don't wish to bother the moderators with it. My God, twenty-one pages later, you are never going to give up on this, are you?

I thought you said you didn't know about trains! I quite agree. I have never had a DCC layout but have seen them being operated and was not impressed. If you have DC, then you have to "set up the road" by switching the points correctly, before a train will run. With DCC you can start any engine, regardless of where it is or where it is going, and simply crash it into things! That is what I meant by running it more like a real railway. DC has to be wired up with a bit of thought, so that the current feed is always going towards a "facing" point but once you have done it, I think it its much the best way.

Thanks, I did realise that but I didn't want to make my post any longer than it already was! Do you mean that Gas Safe is a joke, or GORGI? I turned out to be the only CORGI gas fitter looking after more than 400 hire boats in France, as there is no equivalent qualification in French law. So I got my own documentation together (in two languages) and gave courses on the bases to the mechanics. Which of course, is against the rules of CORGI but it was a lot better than nothing. You have to do the best you can!

Yes they do. They sell brass tube or brass rod in various sizes. They are on the Plumstead Rd just across from the Heartsease Pub and they have their own parking down the side of the shop.

Talking of machinery, I am lucky enough to have come away with all 10 fingers after a career on boatbuilding yards. A lot of people haven't. I well remember Billy Grapes, who was foreman boatbuilder at Percivals, back in the 60s. He had been injured by a bandsaw when he was an apprentice and was always known as "Five Pints". This was because when he wanted to buy a round of drinks in the New Inn at Horning, he would come up to the bar, hold up the thumb and forefinger of his left hand (which was all he had left) and call "Five pints please, Gilly!"

Just to point out that the personal and public liability insurance involved in that would be totally prohibitive. It might also require a training licence from the local authority. After all, boatyards have licences.

Funnily enough I have been thinking about this overnight and I was going to talk a bit about trial runs this morning. I will start with two absolutely true statements : 1/. In 40 odd years I don't think I have ever given a run without forgetting to tell them something or another. And that's with or without a check tick list. More often than not, I forgot to tell them how to stop the engine! 2/. I am certain that I have never given the same trial run twice. All trial runs are different as all customers are different. It is a personal and hands-on interaction between the instructor and his clients. This is what a video or a manual can never make up for. And now as to staff training. I know some seem to imagine us as local yokels having a good time on the river making money out of innocent tourists but there are a lot of risks around a boatyard and yes, a lot of staff training is involved. Can you imagine the risks involved in hauling a 12 ton cruiser up a slipway into a shed, using a winch wire running through pulleys at different angles and strains? Or lifting one out of the water on webbing straps, under a crane and then positioning it on a trailer? Have you seen what happens when a boat falls off its chocks in a gale in winter? We know all these risks and we train our staff for them. Of course we do! Then there are all the factory regulations (it is a factory) for the woodworking machines, pillar drills, lathes and power tools. Anyone who touches gas is CORGI qualified. If you have a table saw or (worse) a planer in your garage, have you had formal professional training in its safe use? Our staff have. So training staff to do a trial run is equally important and yes, we do a lot of it actually. If you have invested over a quarter of a million Pounds in a new boat that you want to last for 20 years, you don't want to see it wrapped round a bridge pier in Reedham just because one of the lads didn't do the trial run properly. My job involved training staff on 15 different bases in France and I did it by getting all the mechanics on a boat and giving them a trial run, as though they were novice hirers. They could then ask questions, discuss and make suggestions, since every cruising area is different, so its trial run is also different. A run on the River Lot, or in Alsace, is a very different thing from the Canal du Midi, or the Charente. The instructor also needs to be able to tell his own story. He knows what he has to cover but he must develop his own personal "performance" with a few little jokes thrown in, to keep people's attention! Reading things off a risk assessment tick list is nowhere near good enough. During this training we established that a basic trial run to novices on a modern cruiser with all the electrics, takes 45 minutes minimum. If the hirer doesn't pick up the boat handling part first time, then it can easily take an hour and a half. So you have to have enough staff to get all the boats out on a busy turnaround day. My staff were always told that once you are giving a trial run, then it takes as long as it takes, until the customer is happy. No-one ever got criticised by me for taking too long over it! Finally on the matter of day boats. Just imagine if Broads Tours in Wroxham had to spend 40 minutes instructing each one of all those day boats that they let out on a Sunday morning in August. Some of them for only a couple of hours anyway. They wouldn't still be in business.

If you are making a railway for a boy it will need to be something with a lot of activity. Lots of points and sidings for plenty of interest, but it doesn't matter too much if it is not accurately prototypical, so long as it runs well. Peco make very good simple track work. It will also need to very robust, as young boys can be a bit rough on things. Hornby are famous for making trains that young children can throw at each other across a bedroom, but might still work afterwards! You will also need to decide from the start whether you want DCC control, or traditional DC analogue. I prefer DC as the points can insulate trains on the sidings and it tends to lend itself to the realistic running of a railway model. It would be far too late now, for me to put DCC chips in all my models. I have found also that all the "realistic" running that you get with DCC is not a lot of good if you don't have perfect current contact with the track. I find DC a lot more reliable. At my age, I get far more fun out of trying to make the layout look like a real railway and don't care much whether I actually run trains or not but I started with a layout that my father built me as a boy. On a boat! If you buy a locomotive for your son and the first thing he wants to do is pull it apart to see how it works and then put it back together again, you may have a young railway modeller on your hands! Have fun!

AND NEVER HAVE.

I am not a railway forum person either and have always preferred the railway magazines. I have stopped bothering with Model Railway Journal as I find they get a bit too far up their own vacuum pipes. British Railway Modelling is good for beginners but I find the best is, and always has been, Railway Modeller, which also has the most comprehensive amount of advertisers for parts and materials. If you subscribe to them, you also get access to all their archive on line.

Thank you for that and I have just read it through carefully. In the job that I did in France before retirement, as technical director, I had to be very aware and conversant with all the rules and regs applying to boat hiring. Navigation authority as well as local authority and sometimes different rules for different countries. So I can tell you seriously, that the proposed hire boat code above would not make any difference whatever to the trial run that I have been giving to hirers for the last 20 years. Nor would it alter the paperwork and documentation in any way. Nor would it alter the installation standards, safety equipment or standard of maintenance, on any hire boat that I have operated. In fact I could suggest there are areas where our own standards are better than those laid down in this document. I would like to emphasise these paragraphs : 2.1. Shared responsibilities. The licensing and/or navigation authority, the hire boat operator and the hirer all have responsibilities for safety in hire boating. 2.3. Adequate hirer ability. (3). Hirers are responsible for taking heed of instruction in the safe use of the craft, given by the hire boat operator and the licensing/navigation authority. 2.7. Hirers are responsible for the consequences of their actions. This should be made clear during the handover. All the risk assessment stuff in the annexes is the usual guff which has a lot more to do with "risk averse" than "risk aware". I was once sent a risk assessment form by my wonderful and far distanced employers in America, which included the questions "Have you advised your staff of the risks of driving company vehicles in snow and ice" and "Have you lubricated your ski lift?" When I pointed out that I was running a hire fleet base in the Rhone Delta at the time, I just "got wrong" for it! Maybe I should just have ticked those boxes as "yes"? As Marshman has already suggested, this appears to me as just another layer of window dressing.

In view of all I have tried to explain about boat hiring in this thread, I shall treat that remark with the contempt that it deserves. Meantime, Oh, excuse me - a Freudian slip . .

And before that?

Thank you very much. Who are you, by the way? Have we been introduced?

Oh, but it has. I don't know how to quote things off different pages, so have a good read of Realwindmill, on page 8 of this thread. If you read back to the beginning of the discussion you can also see that it was only after page 8 that the thread was turned into such a contentious argument.

I also think a Broad needs a bit of flow through it. If you close it off from the river it will become stagnant. Vis : the green algae in the Whitlingham gravel pits, which seems to have come as a surprise. No surprise to me, after a very sunny summer! The main thing though, must be the state of the bottom, where too much silt means the weeds can't grow. I remember the spectacular and rapid difference on Cockshoot, after they had done the mud pumping. Cleaner water also means the sun can get through to the bottom, and grow the weeds. Meantime, Wroxham Broad has somehow maintained the colour of old squit, in all the years I have known it!

By who? You, maybe? Expand OK I will assume that is an honest straight forward question and will answer it as such. Put simply no. I do not live in Broadland yet, that may well happen in the near future. My career is not in auditing and I would not be interested in auditing hire yards. This proves that at least two of my posts in the last three hours have been hidden, when none of them broke the TOS in any way and the posts to which I was replying are still there. This shows a preferential bias which I do not accept. Please explain to me why I am being censored, in such an important debate.

They were answered, by me, with one word yes, but you reported that, so my answer was removed. Again the answer is Yes. All this has been in place for donkeys' years. By who? You, maybe?

You keep coming back to this theme of yours but you don't substantiate it. What campaign, exactly, are you referring to, other than that which has always been the responsibility of those involved in the management of the Broads? What are suggesting that is new, about this?

So why have the mods sat back, as they often do and allowed this very important discussion to continue virtually un-restrained for 2 or 3 days? I call that excellent moderation.

Excuse me but some of that forum rubbish has helped you with the restoration of your boat, before now.

So here we are again, in the cold light of another morning after two days of this discussion, and I have to say that, looking back, yesterday was an unpleasant experience for me. I had not realised that there are members here who, despite our mutual love for Broads boating, have such a deep mis-understanding of the workings of the industry upon which it depends. I notice Andy seems to have stopped contributing and I don't blame him. Luckily, I think it is Motorboater who has restored my sanity and I thank him for that. To ECIPA I would suggest that if he insists on posting in the aggressive way that he sometimes does, then he is surely going to wind people up into an aggressive reply. I am sorry if he didn't like my reference to Fred Carno's Army but that is what he was trying to make our industry sound like. To Realwindmill I would say that, for the third thread running, I have given you long, considered, factual and detailed answers to your "genuine questions" based on my own experience in the particular fields you wanted to discuss (such as skippered motor cruisers) but in the end and yet again, you don't seem to have listened to a blasted word of it. In a long thread 2 days ago, I even opened my heart to the forum, about how I feel so passionately for customer service, in a way that I never have before, but seemingly to no avail. So today, I'm going to have a better day. Today I am going back into my garage to play trains. Full many a gem, of purest ray supreme; the darkest depths of ocean bear : Full many a flower, was born to blush unseen; and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Gray's elegy.