Wright writes.....

[CF MRC]

Continuing with the Claughtons, this link shows an S gauge Claughton made by Paul Holth in the early 80’s:

http://www.s-scale.org.uk/gallery14.htm

Image copied from the link

Paul scratch built the whole engine (excepting the Portescap motor gearbox) and painted & lined it.  The wheels were turned up on my lathe at the time, an ML10, which is now in Jerry’s care.   The amazing thing is that Paul was in his late teens when he made the engine.   He contributed buildings to the MRC 2mm scale layouts in the early days. 

 

Tim

 

 

[St Enodoc]

2 hours ago, Tony Wright said:

Free from any DCC encumbrances, all of these ran very well.

Ouch.

[Clive Mortimore]

3 hours ago, Tony Wright said:

Good friend, Eric Kidd came down from Edinburgh today, bringing with him some real goodies he's made/modified. 

 

Free from any DCC encumbrances, all of these ran very well. Everything is his own work.

 

 

A GEM Glen.

 

 

A Judith Edge wee diesel (with twirling buffers!) and a Norrie Blackburn 0-6-0T.

 

 

A modified Bachmann A1.

 

 

And a modified Bachmann A2. Neither this nor the A1 would pull a rake of 13 kit-built cars. 

 

 

A modified Bachmann Scottish Director.

 

 

And a modified Hornby J36.

 

 

A Norrie Blackburn 0-6-2T (with 'hello sailor' front numberplate!). 

 

 

A PDK Shire.

 

 

A quite lovely Pro-Scale A4.

 

 

And a Sutherland 4-4-2T. 

 

Thanks for bringing these along, Eric. Perhaps you'd like to expand on what I've written. 

 

Thanks, too, for your generous gifts and your noble donation to CRUK. 

 

Days like today give me real joy. Two other friends turned up as well, we ran trains (amazingly, perfectly, apart from one sticky SEEP - to be replaced), had great fun and decided it's what Little Bytham is all about! 

Hello Tony

 

Seeing Eric Kidd's North British shunter I thought I would share this little fella. It was built a long time ago, and still awaits glazing. I made it in the days when I wanted one of every type of diesel, then changed my mind and decided to concentrate on locos that would be seen in the North East of London, Essex and Hertfordshire. This loco never got that far south, most of its time was in Hartlepool, later in moved to Goole. It is one of the three early North British 0-4-0s so it is slightly different to Eric's body wise but they were the same mechanically. The model is good old plastic card mounted on a scratch built brass chassis with a DJH gearbox and some open framed motor which I cannot remember who the manufacturer was. It hadn't run for 20 or more years and every thing had become very corroded, lack of understanding about cleaning flux off back in the day. I oiled up and got things working freely this evening. It still sticks sometimes when I try to start it. It has a fairy good low speed. Only damage to the body is a missing lower step on the front.

 

Edited September 17, 2019 by Clive Mortimore

[Barry O]

3 hours ago, Tony Wright said:

What's wrong with the underframe on mine, Baz? 

 

I followed Comet's instructions in making it. It's far too much in shadow in your picture to make out what's what, but shouldn't it have a dynamo?

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

 

The donor vehicle has the queen posrs etc on the wrong side of the solebar (or rather they are fastened flush to the outside edge of the solebar). This means the regulator (which is the wrong one for that period of coach) and battery box are also in the wrong place. 

 

Mine does have a dynamo fitted (247 developments) but iit s more visible from the other side of the coach as these were offset to one side on the real coach.

Baz

[Tony Wright]

8 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Ouch.

Natural prejudice, John,

 

Seriously (if I can ever be accused of that), without reopening this 'can of worms' topic, because Little Bytham is analogue (apart from when promotional videos for RTR manufacturers' DCC products are made), both systems can happily run on it. Granted, without DCC, a DCC loco cannot perform all the functions, but it can run.

 

Am I prejudiced, though? Some recent examples why I find DCC anathema to me - names have been excluded for obvious reasons.

 

A friend showing his DCC system to another friend and me. Nothing - not even a twitch! So, switch everything off, pull out the plugs and reboot. Then it worked! How daft is that? He couldn't give an explanation.

 

At a recent show, operators staring blankly at their 'tablets'. 'Not responding' was the call. 'Ah, it's lost its address; you'll have to re-programme it'. That didn't seem to work, either.

 

On one layout, a short appeared, shutting everything down. Nothing running, lots of fiddling and blank looks. Next morning, short had gone. 'How did you cure it?' I asked. 'Don't know, it just went away'. Now, this had nothing to do with overnight temperature changes (the climate was diurnal), and, even as the day went on (and the temperature rose a little), the short didn't reappear. If I get a short on LB (thankfully rarely, and almost always due to a wheel bridging a gap), I investigate, and isolate the cause. As far as I know, the operators never found the cause, but carried on regardless.

 

As for fixing DCC-fitted locos at shows................ well! Wires going backwards and forwards betwixt loco and tender, swarming around the motor and just getting in the way of investigating a fault. Why accept this tyranny? There is only ONE wire in any of my locos - that going between the pick-up pad and the isolated motor brush. How easy is that? It's a doddle to identify an electrical fault. Because DCC insists now that (on tender locos) the chip is in the tender, the wire runs are doubled. And, this is complicated by tender pick-ups on RTR locos. If the track is good, everything is square and a chassis run smoothly, why employ tender pick-ups? Granted, this has nothing to do with DCC, or does it? Any interruption to the supply affects DCC more, doesn't it? 'Ah!' some folk say, 'I've got dead-frog points'. Why? 

 

No thank you. I'll never use DCC, my Luddism insists on that. My locos run fine (if not better!) without it.

 

In fairness, I have seen DCC systems working well - yours, for instance. However, when it goes wrong, DCC, in my experience, shuts a layout down completely! And, most of the operators don't know why.  

 

That's not to say analogue doesn't go wrong, of course. I'll describe some of those duds at a future time. 

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

[Tony Wright]

7 hours ago, Barry O said:

 

The donor vehicle has the queen posrs etc on the wrong side of the solebar (or rather they are fastened flush to the outside edge of the solebar). This means the regulator (which is the wrong one for that period of coach) and battery box are also in the wrong place. 

 

Mine does have a dynamo fitted (247 developments) but iit s more visible from the other side of the coach as these were offset to one side on the real coach.

Baz

Thanks Baz,

 

Though I still can't see a dynamo. Mine is visible from both sides, even though it's (correctly) offset.

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

[jrg1]

8 hours ago, Clive Mortimore said:

Hello Tony

 

Seeing Eric Kidd's North British shunter I thought I would share this little fella. It was built a long time ago, and still awaits glazing. I made it in the days when I wanted one of every type of diesel, then changed my mind and decided to concentrate on locos that would be seen in the North East of London, Essex and Hertfordshire. This loco never got that far south, most of its time was in Hartlepool, later in moved to Goole. It is one of the three early North British 0-4-0s so it is slightly different to Eric's body wise but they were the same mechanically. The model is good old plastic card mounted on a scratch built brass chassis with a DJH gearbox and some open framed motor which I cannot remember who the manufacturer was. It hadn't run for 20 or more years and every thing had become very corroded, lack of understanding about cleaning flux off back in the day. I oiled up and got things working freely this evening. It still sticks sometimes when I try to start it. It has a fairy good low speed. Only damage to the body is a missing lower step on the front.

 

Nice model-how did you apply the chevrons, they look very neat. 

D2700 had the distinction of being the first Modernisation Plan diesel to be scrapped in Spring 1963.

[Chamby]

7 minutes ago, Tony Wright said:

....However, when it goes wrong, DCC, in my experience, shuts a layout down completely! And, most of the operators don't know why....  

 

There should be no excuse for that, especially on an exhibition layout.  Circuit breakers should be used with DCC on layouts of any size, isolating faults to just a part of the layout, enabling trains still to run elsewhere and entertain the public whilst the fault is resolved.

 

DCC can be more fickle than analogue, but there are many other advantages.  In some ways, DCC is to the electrics, like locomotive building is to RTR.  It is more complex, requires different knowledge and skills, can be very easy to get wrong, but when done properly it can be so much more satisfying.  You have declared that you will never take on someone else’s part-built locomotive kit:  I often have similar reservations regarding ‘fixing up’ a layout wired up by someone else who probably used a different approach to my own.

 

It is also not unknown for analogue exhibition layouts to grind completely to a halt for a protracted period of time, the entertainment being provided by operators cussing and swearing under the baseboards rather than trains running around.  As with DCC, the problem can lie with the operator/builder doing something incorrectly, rather than the system/product itself being inherently naff.

[dibateg]

I like that -'only ONE  wire in my loco's'! You can't beat simplicity! 

 

All of mine apart from 2 have electrically dead chassis, have DCC and most have sound.... which basically is a feature to annoy people....

 

Coming from an IT background I'm at home in the world of DCC and it's unexplained faults and problems. The first step in fault finding:- turn it off and back on again.. If it works, carry on and don't worry about it!

 

Regards

Tony

 

 

 

 

[Clive Mortimore]

23 minutes ago, jrg1 said:

Nice model-how did you apply the chevrons, they look very neat. 

D2700 had the distinction of being the first Modernisation Plan diesel to be scrapped in Spring 1963.

Hi

 

Thank you. The chevrons are hand painted.

 

Where 11700-2 (later D2700-2) modernisation diesels? They pre-date the plan by 2 years. Having said that I think I am right in saying that BR had already decided that they would not build anymore steam locos for shunting but replace them with diesel locos.

 

There use to be a lovely 5 inch gauge ( I think) model of one of this type of North British shunter above the bar in the Paxman social club at Colchester.

[Tony Wright]

22 minutes ago, Chamby said:

 

There should be no excuse for that, especially on an exhibition layout.  Circuit breakers should be used with DCC on layouts of any size, isolating faults to just a part of the layout, enabling trains still to run elsewhere and entertain the public whilst the fault is resolved.

 

DCC can be more fickle than analogue, but there are many other advantages.  In some ways, DCC is to the electrics, like locomotive building is to RTR.  It is more complex, requires different knowledge and skills, can be very easy to get wrong, but when done properly it can be so much more satisfying.  You have declared that you will never take on someone else’s part-built locomotive kit:  I often have similar reservations regarding ‘fixing up’ a layout wired up by someone else who probably used a different approach to my own.

 

It is also not unknown for analogue exhibition layouts to grind completely to a halt for a protracted period of time, the entertainment being provided by operators cussing and swearing under the baseboards rather than trains running around.  As with DCC, the problem can lie with the operator/builder doing something incorrectly, rather than the system/product itself being inherently naff.

Well put Phil,

 

And I agree.

 

'It is also not unknown for analogue exhibition layouts to grind completely to a halt for a protracted period of time, the entertainment being provided by operators cussing and swearing under the baseboards rather than trains running around.  As with DCC, the problem can lie with the operator/builder doing something incorrectly, rather than the system/product itself being inherently naff.'

 

One well-known layout on the exhibition circuit, never, ever seems to work properly. The solution? Go DCC instead! It still doesn't work, but this time its non-working is more sophisticated! So much so, that the last time I saw it, it had a computer-printed sign (rather than hand-written) apologising for its not working. One hopes next time, the apology will be displayed on a computer screen!

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

 

 

 

 

[Tony Wright]

23 minutes ago, dibateg said:

I like that -'only ONE  wire in my loco's'! You can't beat simplicity! 

 

All of mine apart from 2 have electrically dead chassis, have DCC and most have sound.... which basically is a feature to annoy people....

 

Coming from an IT background I'm at home in the world of DCC and it's unexplained faults and problems. The first step in fault finding:- turn it off and back on again.. If it works, carry on and don't worry about it!

 

Regards

Tony

 

 

 

 

Thanks Tony,

 

But, as you know, I don't come from an IT background (unless 'IT' stands for 'ignorant twerp', which, in my case is apposite). 

 

'The first step in fault finding:- turn it off and back on again.. If it works, carry on and don't worry about it!'

 

Why is this so? 

 

Last week, my emails from the recent past 'disappeared'. I hadn't done anything differently, but, after switching off the 'spawn of Satan' device, they're back. Similarly, this demonic offspring suddenly decided it wouldn't download any documents. So, switch off, swear, switch on, swear some more, and now I can download. Why, after switching my computer back on after the Woking Show, had the photo-programme toolbars disappeared? It took me ages to find out which icon switched them back on. I must be careful; there are two adjacent windows through which the bl00dy thing can be chucked!

 

I wish that fault-finding/solutions were as easy with the locos I've built or am building. If a loco doesn't run sweetly, shorts-out or derails, I can assure you, it does no good at all just switching the power off completely, then switching it back on. Afterwards, it's still the same! 

 

I think that's why I'm happy to live in the past, model railway-wise. I know how to fix (if necessary) the things I make, and how to make sure they're reliable and long-lasting. Simple, I suppose. 

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

[Lecorbusier]

22 minutes ago, Tony Wright said:

Well put Phil,

 

And I agree.

 

'It is also not unknown for analogue exhibition layouts to grind completely to a halt for a protracted period of time, the entertainment being provided by operators cussing and swearing under the baseboards rather than trains running around.  As with DCC, the problem can lie with the operator/builder doing something incorrectly, rather than the system/product itself being inherently naff.'

 

One well-known layout on the exhibition circuit, never, ever seems to work properly. The solution? Go DCC instead! It still doesn't work, but this time its non-working is more sophisticated! So much so, that the last time I saw it, it had a computer-printed sign (rather than hand-written) apologising for its not working. One hopes next time, the apology will be displayed on a computer screen!

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

 

 

 

 

Then again ... one could always go for this  ... even power cut proof

 

Edited September 18, 2019 by Lecorbusier

[Tony Wright]

Going back to Claughtons,

 

I think this is the finest model of a Claughton I've ever seen (other than the large-scale one, nicked from Sir Gilbert Claughton's School in the West Midlands, after an exhibition was held there)................

 

 

Scratch-built by the late Geoff Holt in O Gauge and running on the late David Jenkinson's Kendal Branch. Larry Goddard painted it. 

 

I don't think it got anywhere near its real value at auction. 

[Tony Wright]

2 minutes ago, Lecorbusier said:

Then again ... one could always go for this  ... even power cut proof

 

Thanks Tim,

 

Beautiful work. 

 

The ultimate future?

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

[grahame]

7 minutes ago, Lecorbusier said:

Then again ... one could always go for this  ... even power cut proof

 

 

Very nice and very interesting. But I was worried while watching it that there would be some DCC like control failure and it would run off the edge of the table and crash on the floor.

[31A]

1 hour ago, Tony Wright said:

Natural prejudice, John,

 

Seriously (if I can ever be accused of that), without reopening this 'can of worms' topic, because Little Bytham is analogue (apart from when promotional videos for RTR manufacturers' DCC products are made), both systems can happily run on it. Granted, without DCC, a DCC loco cannot perform all the functions, but it can run.

 

Am I prejudiced, though? Some recent examples why I find DCC anathema to me - names have been excluded for obvious reasons.

 

A friend showing his DCC system to another friend and me. Nothing - not even a twitch! So, switch everything off, pull out the plugs and reboot. Then it worked! How daft is that? He couldn't give an explanation.

 

At a recent show, operators staring blankly at their 'tablets'. 'Not responding' was the call. 'Ah, it's lost its address; you'll have to re-programme it'. That didn't seem to work, either.

 

On one layout, a short appeared, shutting everything down. Nothing running, lots of fiddling and blank looks. Next morning, short had gone. 'How did you cure it?' I asked. 'Don't know, it just went away'. Now, this had nothing to do with overnight temperature changes (the climate was diurnal), and, even as the day went on (and the temperature rose a little), the short didn't reappear. If I get a short on LB (thankfully rarely, and almost always due to a wheel bridging a gap), I investigate, and isolate the cause. As far as I know, the operators never found the cause, but carried on regardless.

 

As for fixing DCC-fitted locos at shows................ well! Wires going backwards and forwards betwixt loco and tender, swarming around the motor and just getting in the way of investigating a fault. Why accept this tyranny? There is only ONE wire in any of my locos - that going between the pick-up pad and the isolated motor brush. How easy is that? It's a doddle to identify an electrical fault. Because DCC insists now that (on tender locos) the chip is in the tender, the wire runs are doubled. And, this is complicated by tender pick-ups on RTR locos. If the track is good, everything is square and a chassis run smoothly, why employ tender pick-ups? Granted, this has nothing to do with DCC, or does it? Any interruption to the supply affects DCC more, doesn't it? 'Ah!' some folk say, 'I've got dead-frog points'. Why? 

 

No thank you. I'll never use DCC, my Luddism insists on that. My locos run fine (if not better!) without it.

 

In fairness, I have seen DCC systems working well - yours, for instance. However, when it goes wrong, DCC, in my experience, shuts a layout down completely! And, most of the operators don't know why.  

 

That's not to say analogue doesn't go wrong, of course. I'll describe some of those duds at a future time. 

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

 

Morning Tony!

 

I was going to tick 'agree' to all of that until I got to the bit about tender pickups, of which I am greatly in favour, from experience of layouts where locos spend a lot of their time moving quite slowly.  I think the more points of contact the better, and a reason why diesel loco models with pick ups shared between two bogies often seem to work better than steam ones, regardless whether there are frogs dead or alive on the layout.  When I used to build locos from kits (pre Chinese RTR) I even used to short out the Jackson / Romford carrying wheels with a pin forced into a hole through the insulated bush to make the bogies and pony trucks earthed to the mechanism.

 

On a couple of my Chinese RTR locos, I have stripped out all the electronic gubbins in the tender except the pick ups - Hornby J15 where I mangled the loco / tender wiring through ham fistedness, and Heljan O2 which had some untraceable electronic fault until I discarded the circuit board etc. in the tender - which brings us back to one of your points above.

[gr.king]

I think the key point is one that does not just apply to model railways, but to the whole of life. In youth, I was keen in all sorts of situations on the idea of all-encompassing, automatic, self-adjusting, self compensating, multi-feature systems that aim to deliver a perfect result no matter how complex they have to be. I thought such things were very clever. Years of observation and experience have now completely changed my view. Given a complicated problem (such as a complex model railway layout with all sorts of added features - if you really must create a rod for your own back) the very last thing that you want as an attempted solution to the problem is a "fancy gadget" that is itself complicated, probably incomprehensible, and almost certainly vulnerable unless it is of very high quality indeed (and probably at a matching price in that case). Everything goes wrong at some stage, and the more complex the system is the harder the cause of the fault is to diagnose and rectify. It is much better to persuade yourself to live with a less clever, less perfect system that is simple to understand and simple to fix with readily available low-tech parts and tools.

Use simple DC, and don't try to get clever by electrically controlling everything when manual, or very simple mechanical control will do just as well. If something doesn't really need to operate, why try to make it operate anyway if it may not be reliable?

[stewartingram]

51 minutes ago, Lecorbusier said:

Then again ... one could always go for this  ... even power cut proof

 

Is that the ultimate table-top layout?  I love the way it reverses, the points are changed (un-noticeably) and it heads off on another siding!

 

Stewart

[Lecorbusier]

1 hour ago, Tony Wright said:

Thanks Tim,

 

Beautiful work. 

 

The ultimate future?

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

Maybe .... but it does come with a raft of its own limitations ..... each to their own as they say!

[Tony Wright]

48 minutes ago, 31A said:

 

Morning Tony!

 

I was going to tick 'agree' to all of that until I got to the bit about tender pickups, of which I am greatly in favour, from experience of layouts where locos spend a lot of their time moving quite slowly.  I think the more points of contact the better, and a reason why diesel loco models with pick ups shared between two bogies often seem to work better than steam ones, regardless whether there are frogs dead or alive on the layout.  When I used to build locos from kits (pre Chinese RTR) I even used to short out the Jackson / Romford carrying wheels with a pin forced into a hole through the insulated bush to make the bogies and pony trucks earthed to the mechanism.

 

On a couple of my Chinese RTR locos, I have stripped out all the electronic gubbins in the tender except the pick ups - Hornby J15 where I mangled the loco / tender wiring through ham fistedness, and Heljan O2 which had some untraceable electronic fault until I discarded the circuit board etc. in the tender - which brings us back to one of your points above.

Good morning Steve,

 

Thanks for that.

 

In fairness, many of my locos have the 'live-side' bogie/pony/tender wheels 'shorted-out', not via a pin, but Markits sell them as such at source. It certainly does aid all-round pick-up. That said, I've never found tender pick-ups necessary on the locos I've built for Stoke Summit, Charwelton and Little Bytham, even though several of them have to run (very) slowly. 

 

The locos I've built for Grantham have either bogie or tender pick-ups, because there are several dead-frog points/crossings, and they do stall without them. In the case of the J69, I permanently attached it to a pick-up-fitted match truck. I have to say, I find this 'solving' a problem which (in my view) should not exist, but obviously dead-frog points/crossings are in use on many layouts. I agree, they can simplify wiring, but at the expense of poorer running. 

 

I can't remember whether those I built for Peterborough North had tender pick-ups. Perhaps they do have them. 

 

For locos built on general commission (like the A1 illustrated the other day), I only installed tender pick-ups if the customer requested them. This one doesn't have (nor need) them

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

[Lecorbusier]

1 hour ago, grahame said:

 

Very nice and very interesting. But I was worried while watching it that there would be some DCC like control failure and it would run off the edge of the table and crash on the floor.

 

Operator error is more likely I fear  .... to date I have had no failures of electronics - but these may be further down the pipeline.

 

21 minutes ago, stewartingram said:

Is that the ultimate table-top layout?  I love the way it reverses, the points are changed (un-noticeably) and it heads off on another siding!

 

Stewart

 

I might pretend that this was all part of the plan    ..... hopefully my next build will get the chassis running square so it goes straight even without tracks. 

[31A]

34 minutes ago, Tony Wright said:

I have to say, I find this 'solving' a problem which (in my view) should not exist, but obviously dead-frog points/crossings are in use on many layouts. I agree, they can simplify wiring, but at the expense of poorer running. 

 

 

 

Thanks Tony; perhaps a little disingenuous of me not to mention earlier that I do have dead-frog double slips on Finsbury Square which is certainly a factor; not because I wanted them but because when I started the layout they were the only kind Peco produced.  They do though, as you say, simplify the wiring....

[Chamby]

3 hours ago, Lecorbusier said:

 

Operator error is more likely I fear  .... to date I have had no failures of electronics - but these may be further down the pipeline.

 

 

If it works in a similar fashion to other wireless control systems, the ‘runaway train’ problem usually arises when the locomotive is happily proceeding along as instructed, but then the control handset’s battery level drops below critical;  with no further commands being received from the controller, the locomotive simply carries on doing what it was last told to do...

[Lecorbusier]

16 minutes ago, Chamby said:

 

If it works in a similar fashion to other wireless control systems, the ‘runaway train’ problem usually arises when the locomotive is happily proceeding along as instructed, but then the control handset’s battery level drops below critical;  with no further commands being received from the controller, the locomotive simply carries on doing what it was last told to do...

I shall have to ask that question .... I know that it uses the IP system to communicate.