Suzie

It is getting so hard to work out what is best. I used to have Economy 7 to heat my greenhouse, but the saving in cheap rate electricity was fully eaten up by the extra standing charge which made it a complete waste of time - most of the heating was done in the evening rather than the early hours. Now I have an electric car I suspect that the small amount of electricity used for charging the car will not justify going over to a similar tariff, even though a 4-hour window is adequate for a full charge at 7kW. Having a Leaf with a small battery often requires a mid-day top up for a couple of hours at day rate anyway. Current annual night usage appears to be about 1100kWh - is the extra standing charge more than £150 per year? Things might change soon though if I move house and get a better car, the new place has acres of suitable roof so will take a lot of panels, and will probably justify getting 3-phase so the new (100kWh) car will be 75% charged in the 4-hour window. Might still be worth charging the car at night though and exporting from solar and battery storage at peak times at ~100A (3x32A). It is well complicated. I am not convinced that any supplier is likely to be on top of all the pros and cons...

It looks like you don't have enough current available for the momentary short when the train enters the the reversing section. I am not familiar with the particular hardware you are using, but it may be that the DR5013 is taking too long to switch which may be due to a high impedance somewhere in the wiring either feeding the DR5013 or in the track feeds. Yes, different sound locos will draw different amounts of current so you have one loco that just draws a few milliamps extra that is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Simple answer:- There will generally be four wires going to the Next-18 socket, and you can just splice these on to your decoder wires or solder directly to the next-18 decoder (many small decoders are just the Next-18 decoder with wires attached instead of the plug). Issues that will occur:- Next-18 (and PluX) sockets include a defined space that the decoder will fit in to. Using a non-standard sized decoder will most likely mean that you will have to clear some space somewhere in the loco for the decoder and wires, especially for a sound decoder with a speaker and stay alive. Next-18s socket has room for a sound decoder. Next-18 (and PluX, and MTC-21) use very reliable connectors that are likely to make a connection when plugged in that will outlast most amateur soldered connections (especially if lead is involved). It is an awful lot of work to no advantage, especially when Next-18 (and PluX) decoders of the finest quality can be had for £25. The Next-18 socket is nothing like the somewhat less reliable NEM651 6-pin or NEM652 8-pin connectors which you might consider replacing with a hard wired connection for a good reason.

MX600R is the decoder you need for a NEM652 8-pin socket and it will have all three functions that this socket supports (usually front lights and rear lights on F0, and possibly some interior or cab lighting on F1). £25 last time I bought one. https://www.coastaldcc.co.uk/products/zimo/8-pin-budget-decoder

Clearly a layout of this type will have some compromises to be able to accommodate both DC and DCC. The big question is which way the compromises go - and how much of an I.T. project you want to make it. It sounds like you already have a good system to manage queuing in the fiddle yard, so why not just enable DC running on the DCC stock to facilitate using the DC queuing system where DCC trains are stopped by the driver when they enter the fiddle yard, the points are changed to the next clear road and relays switch over to DC - the reverse happens when leaving. I suspect it might be a lot easier and cheaper for the club to pay for DCC fitting of DC members' stock (£25 per loco - you can probably fit forty or so locos for what the DC wiring is going to cost) to just make the layout full DCC and a lot easier to wire - but you have the brief you are given!

You will need a CDU with exactly the right size of capacitor fed with a regulated DC supply and very well matched and maintained solenoid installations - especially maintaining the PL13 switches. I would say it will not in any way simplify things - it will just end up being a maintenance headache!

I have a Commodore 9190 somewhere which is a higher spec model, and I think it is worth about three times what it cost new - or perhaps not since it cost about a week's wages!

If it has cylindrical cells then the chance is that the battery will not be the first to fail, most likely the broadcast services will be withdrawn first. I am still very sad that my newest radio - a nice internet one with a fancy colour display that shows the weather - has had to be put away on a shelf because the BBC has withdrawn its internet streams and Times never bothered to start one so there is nothing left I want to listen to on it. My car is now ten years old and still operating on its original battery, so rechargeable lithium batteries are a lot better than they used to be. When I got my Pure Evoke 2 DAB radio I got NiMh batteries for it - they lasted considerably longer than the on/off switch which is nigh on impossible to replace because it is inaccessible. If it worked I would be able to listen to Times and Radio 4 though...

If the last train could not use both tramcars, then I guess it is most unlikely that they were used together. 92 passengers is a lot (two tramcars and a brake) - that would take three Osborne buses to replace the service! I guess I will just have to invoke rule-1. I have a couple of Hattons brakes on order for modification (new wheels, move the guard's ducket and sort the end windows) so I can eventually make up a rake of Brake-Tram-Tram-Brake for a Treacle Mines special excursion to Tudwick for 116 passengers...

I have my BR tramcar pair now, and I was looking at pictures to see what a likely complete train would look like, but I have not seen a train with both tramcars in it in BR days. I have seen:- Two Stoke Ferry 6-wheel brakes. One Stoke Ferry Brake and a tramcar. Two stoke Ferry brakes around a tramcar. Surely they must have run together at some point!

The formulas are different for different manufacturers. Typically the decoder will have a regular polling time where it will add or subtract a an amount from the current speed until it reaches the target speed each time it polls. There are better ways to do it so some might adjust the amount added to create a smoother transition to the target speed. Storage on a decoder is not a big issue nowadays, and there is plenty of processing power to do what is quite a simple task in the scheme of things. Have a look at the source code for some of the DIY decoders that you can make such as the MERG or DIY Decoder Project to see how it is done.

This could be interesting, since previous electrification schemes in Mexico have not gone well with an electrified freight line having the electrification scrapped in order to increase to loading gauge - some of the E60 locos were eventually scrapped with the 'as new' protective coverings still on the interior.

I guess a key question is how are you operating your points. If you are operating the points and signals from your throttle then you might like to power the accessory bus direct from your Z21, and using a booster to power the track. If you are using a computer or similar with software like JMRI to operate your points and signals then it might be worth investing in a Sprog3 to run your accessory bus as a seperate command station.

I would recommend that you try a Bachmann E-Z Command which are available from eBay or similar:- https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/204472640662 For £50 it gives you a nice DCC controller to test your new purchases, and if you grow out of it you should be able to move it on with little loss (if you don't find it too useful and want to keep it!) It only has limited addressing, limited access to functions (so not ideal for fancy sound), and very limited CV programming capability, but is very, very easy to use. You would be surprised at how often these are used at exhibitions (I use one on one of my exhibition layouts).

Even with just ten roads of staging it is not hard to create a train sequence that takes two hours to run through, meaning that the sequence (and each train) gets run about three times during a normal show day. This makes for an orderly packing away of stock over the final two hours of running as each train completes its final visit to the staging. Running freight trains at prototypical speed does sometimes have its advantages.

The only advantage using low voltage DC overhead has nowadays is that you don't need the transformer/rectifier on the train. This is an adavantage on a closed tram system where you have a lot of trams and can save a lot of space/weight/money not fitting all those rectifiers and transformers to the trams and just provide a few at substations, but no advantage on a proper railway with just a few trains where the 25KV feed can be taken directly from the main line feed and standard AC trains can be used with no need to provide any substations (the Braintree branch is a good example of how to get an electrified branch line on the cheap!)

When you compare the new NEC Pulse offering to the Braintree electric forecourt it looks a bit meagre. I can never rely on using Pulse chargers as with just two at Colchester and one at Boreham there is always a long queue at weekends. I guess BP don't really care as there is only one other fast charger in Chelmsford so not much competition. It would be nice to just drive straight to Chelmsford and charge there rather than have to go via Braintree and charge at the Electric Forecourt both on the way there and on the way back adding about an hour and a half to the journey!

Grouping should have put the Midland with South Eastern to give a route from Scotland via Settle and Carlisle, all the way through Snow Hill tunnel to Dover. Might it have encouraged the Midland to build bigger engines? or would there be lots of double heading?

Looks like a handy little unit. I suspect there would have been a lot less old Leaf batteries if they had put enough batteries in the Leaf in the first place. Surely the only reason you would get rid of a Leaf is because the range was inadequate - the cars are built well enough for a life considerably longer than ten years - mine is ten years old and you would not know that it was not brand new apart from only having about 80% battery capacity.

I think I might acheive similar by cutting 8mm off of point 1

I would recommend CoastalDCC. You might not want to get all the parts from one manufacturer, but Coastal do stock a few different makes of equipment. You will need:- Servo Servo mount Servo controller/(decoder)/(frog switch) Extension cables There are two types of servo - digital (eg SG92R) and analogue (eg SG90) and some controllers work better with one type rather than the other. Servo mounts come in a variety of styles from a simple bracket to bolt the servo to all the way to a complete servo motor that is a drop in replacement for a Peco Solenoid. Servo controllers can be just the simple Megapoints that just operates the servo right up to the Signalist SC2 with integrated frog switching and DCC decoder. There are others in between like the Peco which has a basic controller with a range of add-ons to perform the other functions. You should mount the servo controller near the servos, you don't want long runs of servo wire, but sometimes you will need a short extension cable.

Price, servos are very cheap. Especially when you want DCC control the servo control can be built in to the DCC decoder combining two functions (such as when you use the ESU Switchpilot servo decoder or the Signalist SC2). Tortoise and Cobalt are not servos and cost a lot more - not specifically worse or better than servos, just different.

There are still a few Chain Home masts about. Here is one still in situ at Little Bromley. The three little arms used to hold 'flyswatter' reflectors for horns mounted lower down the mast from the days before dishes were used for microwave communications:- Marconi moved one from the coast to Great Baddow after the war and that is still around, although I am not sure that it is used for anything now (Picture from Flickr):-

Eckon signals are designed as 'common cathode' unlike all the other makes of signals and the resistor is intended to be wired in series with the negative connections of the LEDs. The four aspect and those with feathers will have extra 'common' connections that have their own resistor so that only one LED is using a resistor at a time to ensure even illumination. They don't draw much current, typically only 10mA or less per LED so a simple 12V 1A 'wall wart' type power supply will run a hundred signals. If you are just going to use switches connecting the common wires via the resistors to the negative terminal of the power supply, and connecting the positive terminal of the power supply to the switch common will be fine, but if you intend to have some automatic operation in the future you might like to adjust the wiring as most DCC decoders will expect you to have common anode signals.

The trick to making this work is to power the whole section below 'B' as a reversing section. The simple answer will be to power it via an auto-reversing booster, but if you don't have too much on that section you could possibly use a simple electronic auto-reverser. But, I would just use a double pole switch that works in conjunction with point B to change the polarity of the track below point B. Some motors have a double pole switch, like the Peco PL15. Wire point B so that it has insulated joiners in the outer rails at the frog end, and you do not need isolated joiners on the frog (both frog rails are always at the same potential). As long as point B is set correctly you will be able to drive straight through.