Lemmy282

Might work on the Ratty, but wouldn't want to try splitting a mainline steam loco from its tender, major operation!

They are air pipes. Vacuum pipes are thicker and sort of corrugated to look at, air pipes are thinner and smooth. On the attached picture, the pipes with the yellow and red valves are air pipes, and the pipe between the yellow one and the coupling is the vac pipe.

I did a lot of research into class 13's years ago when I was making up models for a local model shop and never came across this.

I was at the ELR today, the tender is a slightly different shade of green, (like it has been out In the sun for a while), but not as pronounced as on the video above.

Have a look on thr 2mm Association website. From the main menu look under ARTICLES, then got to 2mm FINESCALE MANUAL, and under COUPLINGS there is a PDF that gives chapter and verse on DG couplings. It also recommends 4.5mm from top of rail to bottom of buffing plate

Absolutely, if that's what he wanted that was okay with the shop owner.

I think that is true of all DCC wheel cleaning. I have one of the old Trix wheel cleaners which sit on the rails and have the two rows of brass brushes, and even with all wheels picking up can still have issues with DCC acceleration. I think Gaugemaster make a similar model now.

"I was even more surprised about folk buying and just leaving in the box" I used to do some work for a local model shop, and one of their customers would always buy the latest Bachmann locomotives. All the loco boxes were wrapped in tissue, and he insisted on opening the packing case they came in and selecting the one with the least damaged tissue wrapping. So he never actually saw what the loco, or even the box looked like! Oh, and he wore cotton gloves while doing this. Apparently he had bought many many locos this way, and just stored them away, never looking or running them!

PECO do a couple of wheel cleaning brushes, PL-40 or PL-42

A look online for the standard 21pin connections shows Pin 16 as being +ve and Pin 20 being "ground after rectifier " (-ve). I have used these connection to add a Lais stay alive to a Rails Connect decoder and it worked a treat. Assuming Bachmann have followed this convention all should be okay.

So as the system is DCC, the next question has to be what decoder are you using? Some are not so good with coreless motors.

This evening I have fitted a Nigel Lawson coreless motor and dropper resistor into a 2mm finescale 0-6-0 chassis. I added a hardwired Zimo MX617 decoder and home made 660uf stay alive and it runs smoothly and down to a VERY slow call. No adjustment of any CV''s.

I try to use Zimo where possible, never had a problem with them in N or OO. For N gauge the CT Elecktoniks were brilliant, but sadly now seem to have disappeared, although I picked up a few on Ebay recently. The newer Bachmann 6 pin chips are made by Zimo and have the same features.

Yes, I should have qualified that I was taking about their diesel and electric locos, I don't have any steam.

I have quite a few Lima locos and when detailed look very good, except the Deltic which is wrong in so many areas I gave up, probably the worst model they made!