davepallant

Looks like only 390005 got the black window bands. They make a simple respray of either OO or N gauge Pendos more difficult compared to a blank white canvas. Of course I am ignoring the unavailability of red silk vinyls for the driving cars!

A bit off topic but here is a great picture of Virgin Pride at Blackpool North taken by Anthony Roberts on the Preston Area Railway group on Facebook. Interesting that it appears that only one end gets the colourful treatment. Dave Pallant

Forgot about these and so didn't remember to ask Arran how things were going at DEMU. How are they going? Ta Dave

Just had an email inviting me to pre-order 92s and CargoWaggon Twin Sets from Rails of Sheffield. I'm already (well) in but it might interest customers who are not into crowdfunding but are happy to pre-order via a shop like Rails. Also builds on the trust Revolution have already built up for themselves. Looking forward to mine! Dave

I'm currently building an N gauge modern layout called Coketown. I live in Preston and when it came to choosing a name for the layout I thought Coketown was a great name because some would realise the literary significance but a few might also jump to the wrong conclusion and think there was some drugs based reference involved! The station on the layout is about the same size as Preston station but laid out in a different shape. This is a Preston that has evolved quite differently and at some point the station has been knocked down and a modern building put in its place! The background of the town will probably have some recognisable Preston buildings but the main thought was simply to make a Lancashire mill town - light stone and red brick - that can have West Coast Main Line traffic along with some of the more local Pennine trains. Aiming at its first outing at Preston show next March 2019. Some photos in the link below. Wondering whether I should be doing a layout thread for it....

Ooooooooh! Go on then. Another train ordered! Thanks to Ben and Mike for the hard work they put into getting these projects off of the ground.

Coketown has had its first train at the city's newly rebuilt station. Too many unconnected lighting wires around to power the track so nothing moving but Revolution's Pendolino looking great in platform 2! Some other pictures of the station in the signature link to the gallery.

"We have no fewer than 29..." would have been better as well!

Here's a couple of pictures of a Pendolinos roofs. The Pendolinos generally run with only the rear pantograph up so that if it trashes the wire or gets damaged the front pantograph might still be used to move the train around. This means that the creamy spray on the roof extends from each pantograph to the nearest driving car but not inwards toward the centre of the train. The coaches between the pantographs have got the generally dirty dark filth in the roof area. The first photo shows the end of the train with the light coloured dust/spray up to the pantograph and the second is just turning around and showing the middle of the same train with none of the light coloured filth. The far end of the train out of view has the same light coloured spray from the pantograph to the end of the driving car. Dave

Just seen the tweet for this. I'm surprised there is no mention of the Royal British Legion anywhere since I assumed the remembrance poppy is a trademark of theirs. For a similar example we have the Revolution Trains 'Poppy' Pendolino on the way and a donation from each sale of that particular model will go to the Royal British Legion. Dave

A member of our club is currently building an N gauge layout which is circular and folds in half so that it can go, one piece, into a large estate car. As a test track, which was where I think you started, it gives a maximum radius in the space so that if it is later fitted with scenery it looks natural avoiding small fixed radius curves and the transition curves that often get left out. I'm thinking it would make a nice WCML layout for the Pendolinos coming along soon! Dave

Thanks Ben! Having asked about grey doors a while ago and then tweeted Rapido about how easy it might be to remove the lines on the doors this was great news! I ordered the 'grey door' the moment I saw it knowing that I can sell one of my 'liney door' Pendolinos to pay for it once they arrive. Need to get on with my WCML layout since it is booked to appear in 2019 and I'll post some photos on here with the Pendolinos. Dave

New flow of aviation fuel from the Isle of Grain. Looks like all new TEAs in a slightly different grey VTG scheme from the previous Revolution run. Slightly different tank design but... close enough! https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=74&v=f7I-DM87628

The Dapol NCAT1 masts are almost identical to those but have more scale size insulators. They are plastci though so might not be so good if you want to string up wires. Dapol sell them through their website and I'm sure shops will still have stock. https://www.en.dm-toys.de/produktdetails/items/Dapol-NCAT1.html I only post the DM link because they have bothered to take them out of the box for the photo!

Which will then beg the question of who might do Mark 5As and Driving Trailers to go with the TPE 68!

And also expecting the Dapol Pacer. Very good to be a WCML modeller in 2018! Dave

Thanks for the message Ben, Interesting that the Tilling TT may have used the N gauge NEM standard. I'll give the Shapeways options a go on some other rakes - I was assuming that the fine prints might not be up to pressing into a pocket but strong and flexible might do it! I hadn't seen either of those couplers on Shapeways before but I think that's down to their search options being pants! Dave

Exactly that. Just gone looking for Tillig but they don't go down to N gauge. However, while looking on DM-Toys for Tillig I found some own brand couplers for NEM pockets in two types; one a plain bar and the other with a hose hanging underneath. They are very expensive though. Would be nice if Revolution had something in mind based on the intermediate coupler. Dave

Hi Mike and Ben, Seeing the underneath of the pair in the photos above and the drawings on your website it looks as if the expanding coupling pockets are the same at both ends of each wagon. Would it be possible to make a coupling like the mid coupling to permanently couple pairs into longer fixed rakes? Presumably the mid coupling would be too short as there are no buffers but a slightly longer one could be made at the right length to go between pairs? Dave

Looked fantastic at Warley. Thanks to Ben and Mike and the Rapido team getting it to here. As an aside do I remember Kinlet Wharf's last trip out at York a few years ago? Is it still taking bookings and/or under new management? Ta Dave

NIK's solution with two keypads and two displays was where we started from a year or so ago. Someone started on that but it ran out of steam. I didn't chase it up because it is quite an imposition on a busy layout to type the address in twice, once on the controller and once on the display system. Thats where the idea above sparked me off again. RFID would be a great idea and could be very reliable but we would need at least two detectors coming in and two or three going out so not so cheap. Also when I was looking up the injectable RFID tags the other day on AliExpress they were looking around 1$ each and we would probably need to get a hundred to ensure we had enough to fit to many different people's stock and they might not all want to do it. Its looking like the combination of control bus snuffling and DCC snuffling might give me the information needed. I am lucky that the fiddle yard has two dedicated controllers sending trains toward the station and the station has two dedicated controllers back the other way. That will allow some filtering of trains based on controller number as to source/destination and can rule out the problem of loco direction which has rightly been pointed out to not be reliable. If I am allowed make some simple rules about which controller is used for which movements on the layout I might be able to narrow down the source/destination even further so that I merely end up with a remote display for each controller as to which loco it is controlling. That might give us all we need. Controller 1 is trains entering on the 'electric' line, Controller 2 is trains entering on the 'diesel' line, Controller 5 trains leaving the station for the fiddle yard, Controller 6 locos leaving the platforms for the loco shed. Alternatively a single pushbutton for each controller to confirm sending the snuffled address to the other end will reduce distraction from the addresses of shunting. Thank you everyone. Dave

This is really interesting and has sparked an idea for use on one of our club member's layouts - Alderford by Carl Bowden. Its around 40feet long and feeds trains in from two lines at the fiddle yard into a 5 platform terminus. The big problem is the huge amount of stock used which means the trains come in with locos that are effectively random as far as the station operators are concerned. The trains then go out with replacement locos leaving the inbound locos to go off for dieselling. That means that if you don't recognise the loco from the other end of the layout you need to ask for and be told the address of the moving train. All it turns out we need is to filter the DCC feed by speed and controller number and then put the inbound addresses up on a screen or some other display on the end they are coming from that can be seen at the other end. Simples! I have a board with a DCC interface feeding an Arduino using the OpenDCC software. It might be that I can use that system as DCC sniffer and maybe some pre filtering and then pass interesting data out on the RS232/USB link to a PC. Its quite possible that the Arduino has enough computing power to decode the messages, filter then by direction and speed and display the operating addresses on a couple of (very) large seven segment displays. The question is - are all of our locos going to be going in the same direction DCC message wise when coming into the station or is the system going to have to be taught the direction of each loco? If I were to sniff the Lenz bus presumably I might be able to get the controller number as well which would tell me which position on the layout was controlling the train and hence where it was coming from? Dave

The website might not have been updated (although the copyright years seem to be showing 2017) but the cooper-craft.co.uk domain was renewed in January this year for two years so whatever is going on could be going on until January 2019. https://www.whois.com/whois/cooper-craft.co.uk

I've booked my train tickets to visit the show on the Saturday because I'm not staying locally with friends this year. I have bought the tickets from Virgin and only then thought of checking Split Ticketing and found I could have saved £14 on the same trains.... Looking forward to seeing the show though!

All three of the current Preston club layouts use The Lenz system. We generally use enormous numbers of different locos over a show weekend and the Lenz system copes really well with keeping track of large numbers of addresses in its stack, which functions are enabled, lights etc. Every now and again we reach the 255 stack limit and have to have a clearout but not on a regular basis. For moving lots of trains around quickly they do everything we need considering their age. Alderford commonly uses 6 Lenz controllers simultaneously.