The UK road network feels like one continuous building site. We were going to Amberley Museum in West Sussex it's near Arundel way a typical 2 hour run across country from us normally. We were within a few miles when the traffic stopped and we spent an hour moving around 2 miles! Yet it wasn't the only set of roadworks we encountered and around our way they've really had a brain melt and a major resurfacing job is going on but if you try and avoid the area you are hit with, yet more roadworks.
It's a bloody mess frankly and some spotty planning clerk has completely screwed this up. A bit like yesterday, there's the Goodwood Festival of Speed going on and the A27 was paralised and just to add insult to injury it was closed later as they found some old munitions (possibly WW2) and had to get the bomb squad over to dispose of them with a controlled explosion!
Getting home was slightly quicker but the M23 and M25 were almost at walking pace. Again roadworks, miles of them and how many workmen did we see in the snails pace progress. Not one.
We saw some pretty awful driving though and the one car that I wanted my dash-cam to pickup was the moment the dash-cam decided to go to sleep for 10 minutes!
Anyway, it's a nice place and lovely people there. There's a museum of electrical stuff - I was in my element as was this chap who volunteers there. Gosh we must have been chatting for about an hour - such great things to see and reminisce about - stuff that was going out of use when I was a lad were there and my word, they had some Tesla Coils there and a whole load of electrical things going back to the earliest vacuum cleaners, TVs and Radios, plugs, lamps, even carbon element ones, valves,, switching gear, generating gear and so on. Amazing. They even had a Mercury Arc rectifier which changed AC to DC using a huge glass vessel with mercury in it. Seeing these working when I was a lad was absolutely amazing.
I worked at a certain large Palace in London and back in the day they had 6 of these (much larger than the one on display) in a special room. I can only imagine they were removed and given to a museum somewhere. The Mercury inside them would weigh a hell of a lot, a couple of bucket loads in each I'd say and would be pretty valuable.
There were displays of the various meters we used to use. Gosh what a nostalgia trip for me. My dad would have loved it as he would have been just that little bit older and have actually worked with these amazing pieces of engineering.
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