Trolley 628

Trolley 628 was captured, for once in a while, on return from London yesterday, that is to say on Thursday evening, outside Epsom station. In light rain as it happened. A trolley from Waitrose, which made a change from my usual diet of M&S trolleys. It seems a long time ago that the trolley scene was dominated by trolleys from Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane.

Returned the trolley to the shop exit near the back of the Ashley Centre, where the small trolley stack is to be found, which involves waiting for someone to leave. But, again, for once in a while, I scored a £1 coin for my trouble.

As I made my way out, I passed a young man emerging from the lift with a string of trolleys recovered from the car park above. Clearly one of the duties of junior staff - given which, trolleys in this car park do not count for present purposes. And given that the lifts are not very big, the junior staff must have to make a lot of trips: not like at Kiln Lane, where the trolley jockeys push strings of dozens of trolleys about.

PS 1: I am still the proud possessor of a trolley jockey's strap, abandoned in the car park there, probably some years ago now.

PS 2: a fragment of good news in the form of another step on the road to useful fusion. A step taken at the JET facility at Culham, near Oxford. Now back in the early 1980s, I had a jolly to this facility and have had a soft spot for it ever since. Two snippets still lodged in memory. First, the inch square section copper bars used to supply electricity to the various parts of the contraption. Bars with holes bored down the middle for the cooling water. Second, the steel flywheel, maybe 5 metres in diameter and 1 metre deep, cranked up to a revolution every second and which was used to supply power for pulses. The story being that cranking this flywheel up to speed made the lights go dim in the houses round about. For some real information see reference 2.

PS 3: worried that I had confused two such facilities, the real one at Culham and another one at the nearby Didcot power station - having got to Culham via Didcot - I asked Google's Bard. Who seemed to have become Gemini overnight, losing my Bard history in the process. Gemini alleges that I might be able to recover that history through my Google account but that has not, so far anyway, worked. Annoying. While Gemini's answer to the substantive question was that there was no connection of interest between Culham and Didcot, although my belief remains that the former at least used to draw its power from the latter. Its answer to my follow-up, snipped above, seems to rather miss the point: the power has to come from somewhere. And things did not get much better when I asked about flywheels - although, to its credit, it did know about flywheels being used in this context. Sadly, no idea how I might check this one. But at least I have found where Gemini keeps its history.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/trolley-627.html.

Reference 2: European scientists set nuclear fusion energy record: Experiment was ‘fitting swansong’ for UK’s JET facility outside Oxford - Tom Wilson, Financial Times - 2024.