BroadLeaves

And if you put all this in one box and add a basic DC controller, you end up with an O scale trainset that probably takes up no more space than an OO one. I think it's a brilliant announcement.

Similar to @ikcdab 's solution, assuming you can mount the servo so that the servo axle is pointing up and you can mount it directly under the brass rod, you can cut the plastic away from a mains screw terminal connector block leaving just the brass insert and glue one end of that insert either to the servo's horn or to the axle itself, so that the "tube" of the insert is vertical, and then feed the brass rod from the gate down into the tube, (i.e. where the wire would go if you were using the connector as an electrical connector) and secure it with the screw that would secure the wire. That means you can slacken off the screw, reposition the gate slightly and tighten the screw again, which will be much easier than repositioning the servo mount or messing around programming limit angles on the servo controller.

I can't point to anything you can download, but I can tell you how I'm planning to tackle it. My progress has been... well, if it speeded up a bit, it could be described as glacial! So far, everything is off the sprues and painted, but not yet assembled. I've taken a photo of the parts laid out on one of my "bits" trays. It's come out a bit dark, but hopefully it will show which parts I'm referring to. My approach is going to be: Fit pully C between plates B Fit this assembled piece onto the end of the jib at A Glue the reinforcing plates G to the sides of the main post at I, level with the top of the jib (make sure the one with the pulley mounting hole is the side you want the main pulley, with the mounting hole towards the top) Push pin D all the way through pulley E and then through pulley F Trim the remainder of the pin so that only about 0.5mm is protruding from the rear of the smaller pulley F Glue the two pulleys to the mounting plate. The instructions say to drill into the plate - my plan is to not do this, but just glue it to the plate, setting the small pin into the mounting hole in the plate (this is why the pin was trimmed in step 5) Wrap some cotton around pulley F and thread it over pully C and down to the hook (not shown) Use fine chain from Scale Model Scenery ( CX006 ) instead of the supplied chain, which is far too coarse and make a loop, placing it over pulley E Finally, mount the hoist to its base H

There's a very simple solution to this and the root cause of all the problems is a complete lack of proper priorities. You live in the Dunster cabin. The railway fills the house... I'm looking forward to seeing the pictures of the OO scale funicular going up the stairs!

I suspect that building an e-commerce web site is the easy part. There's plenty of ways to do that for a relatively small outlay. The bigger issues may be getting traffic to come to the site (major search engines can take months to index a new site) and for a lot of people, if you're not in the top three pages of a search for e.g. "white metal loco kit" you don't exist given the transaction volumes, the merchant service charge for processing card payments takes a significant amount of the net margin integrating it with whatever "back office" setup the trader has now, so that stock levels are near real-time and so on.

When six words of a 62 word post are your company name, for me, that is publishing an advert.

Well, I'd re-phrase that as "Does it make sense to ask customers to pay for something they may not need?" I'd see at least five types of customer: A: Uses DC only B: DCC user, but happy with the £10 built-in thing C: Has an existing decoder they are going to re-purpose in their new locomotive D: Wants the full DCC-based son et lumière experience using a factory-fitted decoder E: Has their own preferred brand of decoder they want to purchase and install Why would those who are A, C, or E want to pay the extra for something they're never going to use? Going back to the opening point, for me, it doesn't need lots of different DCC-<something> labels (and it doesn't need built-in decoders either). The labelling and models stay just as they are. For the very simple models (something like a Hornby Terrier - no built-in speaker, no lights), the manufacturer could say that it needs a decoder that complies with NEM standard <whatever it is> so the prospective purchasers know what they're getting into. That's pretty much what the current DCC-Ready labelling scheme does, but it only really works for the simple models. For the "advanced" models, the manufacturer tests the model with their all-singing, all-dancing fancy specially -programmed-for-that-model decoder (if they have one) and also test it with a few comparable decoders from other manufacturers. They then publish which features of the model work with the other decoders. If no testing is done with any other decoder (or indeed any decoder at all!), that's fine too. They simply say that as part of the model's description, so that, again, the prospective purchasers know what they're getting into. All of that is information that the manufacturer will already have, but haven't (usually) made public. It's a publishing & web site update exercise, nothing more. I'm not singling out Accurascale here. This would apply just as much to Kernow with their new steam rail motor and its interior and exterior lighting, Hornby's front and rear lamps on their Turbomotive, the firebox flicker on Rapido's 15xx and so on.

I seem to recall some folk having a lot of trouble getting the stay-alive to work on their Manor ( Next 18 socket ) with a Zimo decoder. Can't remember all the details - something to do with the PCB being designed specifically for the ESU LokSound and using three wires, not two? As I said above, I have no problem with a manufacturer going off-piste, specification-wise, and implementing non-standard or extra features, possibly requiring their own custom-programmed decoder to be fitted, provided they tell people what will and won't work with a "standards-compliant" decoder. I don't want to find out something doesn't work after I've made the purchase. Maybe because you're spending £200+ on the loco. Not everyone has unlimited funds. So why are the ones that Accurascale sell priced at £29.50, £100 and £110, if there's little real difference between yours and the £10 ones? Even for the non-sound £29.50 one, is that no better than the one you can build in for £10?

I suspect it's a bit more nuanced than that in reality. Lots of modern locomotives come "DCC ready", with a DCC socket and blanking plate, but also with a speaker pre-installed. As soon as I put a non-sound capable decoder in there (which I may do because I just don't like sound, I can't find a suitable sound file, cost reasons etc), then I won't get sound, so given the strict definition above, a manufacturer couldn't mark it as "DCC Ready", since not every function will work with every decoder. However, I agree it's a problem. I don't have either, so can't comment directly, but reading some of the posts, it appears to me that the Accurascale Manor and class 37 "work best" with Accurascale's decoder and that some functions (interior lighting, stay alive) do not work with other quality decoders such as those from Zimo. If that's the case (and perhaps @McC or @Accurascale Fran can comment on whether I've got that right or not - happy to be corrected if I haven't ) then I don't have a problem with that at all, with one exception - I don't see any mention of "this loco works best with" on the web site, so that I can make a more informed purchasing decision. For example, if I buy an Accurascale Manor in DCC-Ready format ( https://www.accurascale.com/collections/gwr-7800-manor-class/products/7810-draycott-manor-br-manor-class ), which is listed as having a "PowerPack capacitor bank for uninterrupted power", with no caveat about requiring factory-fitted DCC, will that PowerPack work with any decoder I purchase, provided the decoder has stay-alive functionality? I suspect not, but the web page doesn't say either way. Staying with Accurascale, looking at, for example, their class 37 ( https://www.accurascale.com/collections/class-37/products/class-37-br-green-w-full-yellow-ends-d6956 ) the Lighting and DCC tab is, to my reading, not clear at all. Which lighting functions require the Accurascale decoder and which will work with another manufacturer's decoder? For these examples, what I would like to see before purchase is a list of the decoders that the locomotive has been tested with, and which functions work (or not) with each decoder. Now, I accept it's impractical to test with every single decoder on the market, but presumably the model has been tested with more than just the manufacturer's OEMd one, and presumably those results were recorded, so that's what gets published as part of the DCC specification for each model.

We'll know more in a few weeks:

It's on the PCB too, which is labelled OR76SRMR-PCB01R5 See the Sam's Trains review at 22:00 if you don't feel like taking the body off.

I'd add https://railmodel.co.uk/, https://www.lasercutrailwaymodels.co.uk/ and https://www.inthegreenwoodlaser.co.uk/ to the list. All of those have a good range, but most of the ones illustrated on their sites are just the kit put together, with no finishing applied.

I see no reason why not. I'd also add a couple of related activities to the list, both of which you've demonstrated a skill for and for which there is also a market: rolling stock weathering and kit building. By kit building I don't mean just taking it out of the packet, gluing it together and handing it to the customer. I'm thinking of using the kit as a base structure (which saves time and therefore drops the cost) but this base is then subject to mild kit bashing and/or custom detailing, such as painting in a certain railway's colours, weathering, adding lighting, an interior and so on. Most of the kit builder's web sites are very devoid of "fully-finished" images of their products, so one avenue may be to offer to build some for free for the manufacturer on the understanding that they then use images of it on their product pages and reference your services. See the first image on https://www.jsmodels.co.uk/home/Small-Industrial-Shed-w-Tank-Stone-p530053168 for an example. Accurascale used https://www.jsmodels.co.uk/home/7mm-Small-Shed-Internal-Detailing-Kit-p584764821 in promoting their Ruston ( https://www.rmweb.co.uk/forums/topic/182005-ruston-88ds-in-o-by-accurascale/page/2/#comment-5311960 ) and that attribution could have been "The new 88ds looks right at home in this single shed by JSModels and painted by Graham T from Great Train Models". On a different note, I'm very sad to see Chuffnel Regis being dismantled. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading about the build and I'm looking forward to seeing a new layout develop once you're settled back in Blighty.

I'd echo most of what has already been said, but I have a different view on one aspect. Rather than offering "bundles" of wagons, offer them singly but use eBay's facility to combine postage. If you sell single wagons at £10 each, with £3.50 postage, there's no reason why someone buying four wagons should be charged more than £43.50, if you choose to set it up that way. The problem you may have with grouping wagons together is that you reduce the potential buyer pool. If I only want two of the four, I'm not going to pay, effectively, twice the price for the two I do want. Sure, I can then sell the other two on, but that's quite a bit of hassle. If you sell them singly, then it's almost the reverse - I can buy two wagons and "save" £3.50 on postage costs. It's also worth making sure that, should you choose to offer it, the combined postage information is a prominent part of the listing for each item.

That's maybe possible for less than a pre-packaged train set, if you know what you're doing. A product bundle (which is really what a trainset is) can be retailed for much less than the sum of its parts at retail prices. However, even leaving aside the potential cost savings, for the classic "parents/grandparents buying for their child/grandchild" scenario, it's highly likely that the purchaser is not a model railway expert by any means and it would be very easy to make some entirely understandable mistakes, such as wagons with a mixture of old-style D and new slimline couplings which don't couple nicely and rolling stock not compatible with curve radii. It's also easy to imagine someone buying an Electrofrog point because, with their very limited knowledge, they'd heard they were "better" and then ending up with a short circuit and no trains running because no-one told them to use insulated rail joiners with the rest of the Settrack they bought, and having no idea how to fix it. Unless you know what you're doing, buying the equivalent of a packaged trainset piecemeal second hand is fraught with dangers and could well lead to a very disappointed child. As I see the UK market, it's only really Hornby that is addressing this first step into the hobby and the initial follow-on steps. Once you have your oval of track on a 6' x 4' baseboard, you still don't want that Class 37 or Lion. You want a few things that are robust and cheap - the Hornby Railroad range is ideal. Peco do some cheap wagons, but most other manufacturers aren't supporting those first few steps. I can understand why not. The margins are probably higher on the more expensive items (how much profit can Peco possibly make on a £10 wagon?), and most businesses are not looking to create (or if you like, invest in) a customer base that probably won't have any real spending power for the next 30 years.