AndrueC

Yes, from running my coal train the wobble is quite subtle and I only notice it when actually following an individual wagon with my eyes. Like others though I went for N in order to run long trains through the 'countryside'. So I watch the train not individual wagons. I've never thought N was a good choice for shunting anyway. You can get automatic decouplers and I know it's been done but I've always thought it too fiddly and pernickety. For shunting I'd go with OO or O.

Sorry, no. I just meant wagons that don't have bogeys. So coaches and modern freight wagons don't wobble. Even my troublesome spine wagons were fine over turnouts.

I'll take a look at my coal train (13 21t hoppers) tomorrow but I don't think they wobble very much. That may be because they are evenly balanced front to back so are pretty happy to balance on three wheels for a fraction of a second as one wheel crosses the frog. It's also worth noting that when testing my track by rolling a single wagon or a disconnected bogey across a turnout derailments are common. So whilst that confirms there is a problem it also (in my experience) says that it might be irrelevant. Group a collection of troublesome wagons into a rake and they run fine. It's also worth reiterating that in my experience this only effects single axle rolling stock. Most of my stock is modern era and thus has bogeys and is immune to the problem. You can even see on my video that the tender is the only thing that wobbles - the coaches and loco don't.

Here's a video from my first layout. About half way through after the train has gone round a 180 degree bend you will see it crossing a diamond. The tender wobbles quite alarmingly but the train keeps going.

Okay some pictures I've just taken. They use two wagons that I built from Peco kits. In all cases the frog is under the left, far wheel. Sitting on an installed code 80 turnout: You can see a bit of the cardboard that the turnout is mounted to. lol. A slightly longer wheelbase: The same again, this time parked on a Code 55 turnout that I bought as a future replacement but not currently being used: And: Both wagons can be made to fall into the frog by pressing on the corresponding corner (enough to grossly unbalance them) but left to their own device and/or when part of a rake them seem fair happy to roll across on three wheels.

Something wrong there then. All my turnouts are flat. I'll add that I'm no perfectionist track layer either so I wouldn't say that N scale with code 80 is pernickety but I suppose code 55 would be more so by its nature. I have always had diamond crossings on my layouts and aside from one of them causing shorts everything runs through them just fine.

For most of my rolling stock hardly ever. If/when they do it's because of debris left on the track or me running them into incorrectly set turnouts. However I do have experience of some rolling stock being more sensitive than others. Troublesome stock I've found so far: Dapol JNA Falcon Wagon - Refused to run on my first layout as they apparently didn't like 2nd radius curves. I blamed the couplers for not returning to neutral position as the curve ended. Dapol Spine Wagons - Unable to negotiate a slightly dodgy part of one of the inclines on my current layout. Not enough vertical travel in the bogeys. Also the fixed connecting rods between pairs of wagons which prevent horizontal rotation of one wagon with respect to another. Dapol 21t Hopper Wagons - These are okay but are a little bit sensitive to rough track. Just a bit too light and easily cured by adding some weight to them. My layout uses code 80 track laid on Gaugemaster underlay apart from the turnouts which are laid on corrugated cardboard salvaged from parcels. My club's N scale layout is code 55 and it has no problems. Nor for the record do I for the vast majority of my stock. I agree about the frog wobble - it's quite poor for short wheelbase stock. My 4-6-2's tender suffers it a bit and my 21t Hopper wagons also do. It's not enough to cause a derailment but doesn't look nice. Bogeyed stock doesn't suffer the problem.

Well it could be worse. We could be arguing over bracket placement or indentation. 😁

Glad to see it being retooled but I have to agree with the poster who said it was slow. And I don't believe that cleaning it is the answer because mine was slow from the day I got it. I think I once worked out that its top speed was the scale equivalent of 50mph. To be fair it is a very good low speed runner but the gear ratio appears to be too high. It's far and away the slowest loco in my fleet. Mind you my class 121 seems to have a top speed of 150mph so I suppose it averages out :)

They do if you have ageing eyes. We had a limit of 150 characters set. This was very recent (ie;this year). We picked that because some of the team had ageing eyes and once you're into your 40s even with today's wide screens 150 is about all you have to play with. But I'd also argue that it's not easy to type an underscore. If I want a capital letter all I need to do is reach over with one of my little fingers and hold down shift. But for an underscore I have to also reach across on this keyboard to the top right. That's moving my other hand's fingers away from the letters where they normally hover. But I think that familiarity and standardisation also has to be considered. CamelCase is far, far more widely accepted than underscores. I think you're on a hiding to nothing trying to suggest that as a standard for identifier names ;)

..and takes up more space. No, I'm with the other 80% of the programming fraternity here. CamelCase is the way to go. Underscores if used at all should be a prefix to designate really low-level entities (eg; registers if referred to by high level code or perhaps OS structures). Mind you speaking of naming convention one that's always made me smile is the Windows Shell Item ID. Microsoft developers abbreviated that to 'SHITEMID' :)

Hah. Reminds me of my last job. I was also a computer programmer and we spent four years working on a new (large!) project. Millions of lines of code split across a dozen projects (client, server even mobile), hundreds of database tables. Then during the first pre-launch meeting the MD told us he didn't like some of our terminology (eg; 'document request' should be called 'job'). He had of course heard all these terms during previous meetings but apparently either didn't take it in or just failed to make the contextual connection. So for the last three years I worked there on our shiny new project as it made its way out into the bright world titles, captions, change and feature requests all referred to things that often had no direct equivalent in the source code.

People say that milk is more effective but I think they should pull the udder one 😜

'Bupgeps'. Is that what they call the morning after?

Found the manual for mine online and for AC it claims: Frequency range 40 to 400Hz. Response: Average, calibrated in rms of sine wave. But since starting to build layouts I've often wondered if it's actually showing double the voltage or just a particularly inaccurate DCC reading.

Someone should tell them to get rid of the popups on their website. Even with an ad blocker I didn't have the patience to click through to get to the catalogue..

I have one of these. It does everything needed to build a layout. It's a little odd in that it reports DCC voltage as being 23.5v which is roughly double what it really is but it's consistent. For DCC work that's all you can expect unless you spend a lot of money. I'd have thought anything for around £20 would suffice although at Amazon there are some on there for £10 that look good enough. One thing I'd want specifically is an audible continuity check. That's the function I use the most. This one for £10 seems to have everything a railway modeller would need.

I decided to bump the paint job up the to do list. I've not got it matched quite right but I think with some weathering on it and the other wagons it'll look fine. And yes, the loco probably isn't correct for that type of rake but I did say in the first post that I wasn't very prototypical 😉

A Wallarium maintenance crew head into Castle Tunnel to fix up ballast.

I think they are quite old tooling because they don't have NEM pockets. The couplers can be changed but it'd be a pig of a job because they are held in their brackets by a small spring. You'd have to further compress the spring while you swapped the coupler over. At that point the only thing keeping the spring in place is the modeller. I'm very pleased that my 13 wagon rake does not require me to replace the couplers with Hunts 🙂

I'd settle for an N Scale 'Lizzie' 😉 Closest we've got RTR is a Queen Elizabeth courtesy of Farish (thanks for that at least).

Thanks. So the message I think I'm getting here is that repainting the grey wagon has to go on my list of jobs to be done sooner rather than later. I don't have the skills to do anything about the chassis but if painted to match the other wagons it won't be so obvious. Painting I can manage - hopefully the body just unclips in some fashion. I'll have to investigate how to do the lettering. Perhaps just weather the wagon so the lettering appears to be hidden under rust or dirt, lol.

Reminds of the time in the early 00s when someone was tasked to PAT test stuff. They were new to the job and frankly they'd been picked because they often had time on their hands. Somewhere I still have a computer mouse with a PAT tested certificate on it.🙂

I'll declare right off that I'm not a prototypical modeller. However that doesn't mean that I want something glaringly wrong on my layout. Also I'm curious and willing to be educated so here goes. I currently have a rake of 'House Coal' 21 ton wagons on my layout: I've wanted to find just one more wagon for a long time now and finally found this: My question is: If I have just one of the above amongst a dozen of the brown wagons is it grossly un-prototypical or could I get away with just being lazy and not bothering to repaint it until I feel like it? Quite frankly I normally take the view that rule one applies and personally I'm not too bothered but I am curious as to how much 'offense' it might cause to the experts in the room. And..should I put it at the end as if it's the runt of the litter trying to hide or stick it in the middle of the rake and proudly display it as 'we wanted another wagon and this was available'? 🙂

I remember one hotel had a toaster that was a conveyer belt with a burner on top. You put your bread on the conveyer belt then waited for it to come out the other side. If you wanted it done both sides you had to put it back on the belt upside down. A triumph of marketing over function I feel.