The Night Mail

[iL Dottore]

21 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Just a word to Flavio about overweight Bentleys. Ettore Bugatti, who had a Chapman-esque penchant for speed through light weight, called Bentley - with whom he was competing regularly, not least at Le Mans - the manufacturer of the World's fastest lorries..... 

Love that quote!

[New Haven Neil]

There is another aspect to the DCC or not debate that jumps into mind - the real things, unless you're into very recent stuff, are very analogue.  Hands on hot regulators or shovels (done a fair bit of that myself), or pulling big clunky metal levers back and forth.  So the models are too. Not dialled in by a computer.

 

Having said that, I'm a long time (25 years+) DCC user with walk-around control, as I like to drive the loco not the layout via a Wurlitzer control panel, but my points (what signals? oops....one day) are servo but via a lever frame of sorts.  Not quite clunky levers, but representative of.  DCC for points, unless using route setting for a complex layout, is simply a waste of time IMHO.  Takes ages to call them up on the handset.

 

So all very much horses for courses, for a multitude of reasons, thankfully we have choice!

[iL Dottore]

A further thought about Model Railway Technology. You can now get very tiny, high quality video cameras which you could easily fit into a 7mm locomotive (if not a 4mm locomotive), you now have battery packs which are incredibly small and can run energy hungry devices (like an iPad or an iPhone) for quite awhile, you also have - through Bluetooth - the ability to control devices.

Put this all together and you could have a locomotive that provides you with a driver's eye view of the route, that powers itself (like the prototype) with no input from the track and controls - independent from anything else on the track (and as prototypical as you wish) for driving the locomotive. Pretty much a locomotive driving simulator writ small.

 

I don't expect any major railway model manufacturer going down that route any time soon, but I wonder how long it would be before some hobbyist does so?

[DaveF]

Flavio effectlively asks why not go DCC?  In my case the cost and difficulty of converting old locos in n gauge which require parts of the chassis to be removed to accomodate a chip.

 

If I waa starting now I would use DCC.

 

David

[Darlington_Shed]

2 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Within 24 hours of such authority being granted... easy conversion back to domestic habitation was no longer possible

 

A grand plan! Sadly, a condition of the planning permission was that easy conversion back to a Christmas guest room was a high priority. Since I had long ago converted the "summerhouse" into a woodwork shop for my exclusive personal use, I was on a sticky wicket in demanding further concessions.

 

I spent almost all of my career as a journalist in the IT/personal computer industry so am very much a technologist but my own layout will be DC controlled for the reasons so clearly explained by previous posters. For obvious reasons the PC hobbyists were very early adopters of the Internet, web and email so I was somewhat taken aback by their slow penetration in another "technical" hobby. But to give credit where it's due, railway modellers were early adopters of much other tech - RM was publishing computer-aided artwork back in the 90s, and all kinds of mysterious electronics projects as far back as the 60s and earlier.

 

I had a particular blast of nostalgia from an article about using a Sinclair ZX81 to generate target wagons for a shunting puzzle, complete with the program listing on that weird, silver heat-sensitive paper that was the low-cost entry to PC printing back then.

[Darlington_Shed]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

a driver's eye view of the route

 

Not sure about cameras in the cab, but there are plenty of "driver's view" videos on Youtube from cameras mounted on a wagon.

[PhilJ W]

2 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

Just a word to Flavio about overweight Bentleys. Ettore Bugatti, who had a Chapman-esque penchant for speed through light weight, called Bentley - with whom he was competing regularly, not least at Le Mans - the manufacturer of the World's fastest lorries..... 

W O Bentley did not approve of the supercharged Bentleys, in fact he withdrew the warranties on any car that was supercharged. In fact Bentley's were competitors in the luxury car market against Daimler and Rolls Royce. When Bentleys went bust c. 1931 Rolls-Royce snapped up the company with the intention of getting rid of a competitor but then decided to make it a more 'sporty version of the Rolls Royce.

[jamie92208]

3 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Purely on the grounds of cost.

 

It would be interesting for someone like Jamie, to put a rough cost on equipping his 7 mm fleet to go fully DCC sound.

 

My  7 mm Hymek's DCC sound decoder and speakers etc cost over £200.  and although I can bear the brunt of such 'investment' because I opted to go DCC sound from the outset when I started in 7 mm scale, but the conversion, even to a simple DCC non sound system, for an established model railway is astronomical in terms of hobby expenditure.

 

Does a simple shunting plank operated on the one engine in steam principle really benefit from an all singing all dancing DCC system when you only have the one loco, no signals and about four turnouts which are operated by hand.

 

£50 for a Gaugemaster hand held controller and a wallwart power supply: and £10 for all the wiring and microswitches to operate the crossing nose polarity.

 

Add that to your loco wagons and track and you are off.

 

Cost of a simple NCE Powercab £225!  Plus then you have to get all the motors and decoders for the pointwork.  No doubt opting for a frog juicer system (personally they are an expensive and un neccessary luxury).

 

Your simple and 'cheap' model railway no longer is.

 

Going outside, one can marvel at the radio control systems and gizmos such as 'slo mo' that seems to have infected the garden railway world, but I have never been a real fan of this and am totally old school 'burnt finger brigade'.  

 

 

At a conservative estimate the cost would be north of £4k Including control gear.  The layout is wired 2wire so that does make it easier.  Converting some 60 plus point motors to DCC would cost a lot,.  However they work quickly with a modratec lever frame for some and simple toggle switches for the rest.  I am planning g tuse DCC for the coal yard shunting after being impressed by @bbishoplayoutbbishop layout when I helped at Warley.  The biggest problem would be trying to eliminate stray shorts on all my kit built brass locos.  I am building g my own DCC equipment from. MERG kits.  However I derive a lot of pleasure from hearing and seeing the relay based Signalling system that I designed and built, working. It's down to personal choice. 

 

Jamie

[Happy Hippo]

1 minute ago, jamie92208 said:

 It's down to personal choice. 

 

 

Which is something we have touched on earlier.

 

It's your hobby and harmless fun (table saws excluded).  It's also what you are capable, and more importantly, what gives you the most pleasure.

[polybear]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

I didn't say that! I was just ruminating on why British Railway Modellers tend to be so conservative.

 

 

Possibly because it tends (though not entirely) to be an "older generation" hobby so there's a limit to just how far the pension will stretch to.  Also older people may well adopt a "HOW MUCH??" attitude far more readily that the younger generation.

 

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

A further thought about Model Railway Technology. You can now get very tiny, high quality video cameras which you could easily fit into a 7mm locomotive (if not a 4mm locomotive), you now have battery packs which are incredibly small and can run energy hungry devices (like an iPad or an iPhone) for quite awhile, you also have - through Bluetooth - the ability to control devices.

Put this all together and you could have a locomotive that provides you with a driver's eye view of the route, that powers itself (like the prototype) with no input from the track and controls - independent from anything else on the track (and as prototypical as you wish) for driving the locomotive. Pretty much a locomotive driving simulator writ small.

 

I don't expect any major railway model manufacturer going down that route any time soon, but I wonder how long it would be before some hobbyist does so?

 

Radio Control in 4mm using on-board battery packs is already available.

[Tony_S]

3 hours ago, Darlington_Shed said:

 

Not sure about cameras in the cab, but there are plenty of "driver's view" videos on Youtube from cameras mounted on a wagon.

I don’t have a ROCO Z21 system but I do use the ROCO Z21 phone app with my “other brand” DCC system. Camera locos are definitely an option in HO with the signal being fed back to the handset which is a mobile phone or tablet.

 

Edited July 3, 2023 by Tony_S

[Tony_S]

Although Benfleet is on the Thames Estuary it isn’t really a seaside resort but a local pillar box decorator thinks we are. 

Edited July 3, 2023 by Tony_S

[AndyID]

I prefer good old DC for the reason that I prefer that the layout control the trains and I'm more of a signalman than a driver. The exception to that is shunting and to make that as reliable as possible I prefer batteries with radio control.

 

BTW, mind how you go with servos. They can be extremely susceptible to interference and that can unexpectedly launch them into full travel in either direction. The problem is exacerbated by lengthening the cable attaching them to the controller.

 

Make sure the mechanical connection won't break something if the servo suddenly goes full swing on you. The problem can be solved by front-ending the servo with an inexpensive opto-isolator adjacent to the servo and connecting it to the controller with a twisted pair. (That cancels out the voltage the induced in the cable by the interference.)

[polybear]

1 hour ago, Tony_S said:

Although Benfleet is on the Thames Estuary it isn’t really a seaside resort but a local pillar box decorator thinks we are. 

 

Rather clever - I wonder how many such works get nicked or trashed by kids etc?

[polybear]

55 minutes ago, AndyID said:

I prefer good old DC for the reason that I prefer that the layout control the trains and I'm more of a signalman than a driver. The exception to that is shunting and to make that as reliable as possible I prefer batteries with radio control.

 

BTW, mind how you go with servos. They can be extremely susceptible to interference and that can unexpectedly launch them into full travel in either direction. The problem is exacerbated by lengthening the cable attaching them to the controller.

 

Make sure the mechanical connection won't break something if the servo suddenly goes full swing on you. The problem can be solved by front-ending the servo with an inexpensive opto-isolator adjacent to the servo and connecting it to the controller with a twisted pair. (That cancels out the voltage the induced in the cable by the interference.)

 

There's a recent article in MRJ 296 where the author hacks cheapo servos by removing the electronics and fitting mechanical stops to avoid naughty behaviour, he then controls the servo using simple switches - in effect it becomes a motor & gearbox.  I've not read it in any detail but if it made it into MRJ presumably it has some merit.

[Tony_S]

18 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Rather clever - I wonder how many such works get nicked or trashed by kids etc?

They don’t get trashed round here. The postboxes at first only got decorated at Christmas but then Easter  or royal occasions seemed to produce them. I am always amazed how they survive weather, though I suppose Benfleet isn’t that hostile a climate. 

Edited July 3, 2023 by Tony_S

[TheQ]

37 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

There's a recent article in MRJ 296 where the author hacks cheapo servos by removing the electronics and fitting mechanical stops to avoid naughty behaviour, he then controls the servo using simple switches - in effect it becomes a motor & gearbox.  I've not read it in any detail but if it made it into MRJ presumably it has some merit.

There's one somewhere on this forum too.

[AndyID]

7 minutes ago, TheQ said:

There's one somewhere on this forum too.

 

I think that was me 😀.  I did post one about it a while ago.  If you gut the electronics and replace it with a cam and a microswitch you can make it change position with a single pole changeover switch. It's 100% immune to interference. The cable can be very, very long. The only snag is you need a low voltage power supply (the servo motors only want a couple of volts, less if you want slow-speed operation.  For intermittent operation a AA battery works very well.

 

I also posted here about the optoisolator method but the diagrams probably got lost in the server melt-down. I should be able to dig them out again if anyone is interested.

 

I gave up with MERG. Too many articles about stuff that might be correct from a strictly digital perspective that totally ignore the realities of engineering to meet the challenges of an electronically hostile environment like a model railway. Building stuff that nearly works most of the time is definitely not for me 😀

[polybear]

4 minutes ago, AndyID said:

I also posted here about the optoisolator method but the diagrams probably got lost in the server melt-down. I should be able to dig them out again if anyone is interested.

 

Yes please....

 

4 minutes ago, AndyID said:

I gave up with MERG. Too many articles about stuff that might be correct from a strictly digital perspective that totally ignore the realities of engineering to meet the challenges of an electronically hostile environment like a model railway. Building stuff that nearly works most of the time is definitely not for me 😀

 

It may have been someone on TNM or ER that asked a question at a MERG stand at an exhibition - possibly about how to solder SMT devices - and all they got from the guy was "go on a course";  the question was asked again in a different manner and the response was the same.  Not a way to encourage people....

[AndyID]

This was the mechanical hack. Cripes, that was 8 years ago! The pics have gone but I should be able find them again or else post new ones.

 

The optoisolator version will likely be in the same forum.

 

 

[AndyID]

This is the optoisolator/optocoupler version.

 

As you can see it ran into a bit of NIH 😀  What did surprise me a bit was that nobody seemed to understand the basics of sending signals down wires. Any wire collects electromagnetic interference from just about everything. It's basically an antenna and that induces a voltage between the sender and the receiver that can easily confuse the receiver.

 

One of the simplest and most effective ways to fix that is with a signal wire and a dedicated return wire that only passes the same current in the opposite direction. What happens is that any radiated energy is coupled into both wires which cancels out the effect of the radiated energy. It's even more effective if the wires are twisted together. An optocoupler is one, inexpensive, way to do that.

 

There's a tendency for people to think the problem is caused by noise/spikes on the power rails but that is seldom the problem, and its easy to fix that with filters when it is. The induced radio frequency coupling effect is very pervasive but difficult to see and is not well understood.

 

Anything that makes a spark couples a lot of energy over a wide range of frequencies into space (even in a complete vacuum!) A gent called Marconi took advantage of that to send transatlantic telegraph messages some time ago.

 

 

 

Edited July 3, 2023 by AndyID

[New Haven Neil]

I solved the problem of naughty servos in one fell swoop - a totally independent power supply. No glitching, no full deflection failures, not a single issue.  

[Dave Hunt]

12 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

One would've thought that by now, DCC would have become ubiquitous (and from what I understand DCC is already an antiquated computer technology), but analogue refuses to be pensioned off. Instead of the "white hot heat of cutting edge innovative technology" it's more like "the lukewarm tea of familiarity".

 

I wonder what's driving this innate conservatism; age? cost of "new technology? reluctance to reboot existing layouts?

 

1. Already having all the DC control equipment needed for the layout.

2. Having an existing loco stud running on DC.

3. Already having all the switches and other electrical gear needed.

 

Therefore, to incorporate DCC would have cost, at a conservative estimate, about £750 and many hours fitting DCC chips into locomotives, programming them etc. 

 

Enough?

 

Dave

[Northmoor]

2 hours ago, polybear said:

It may have been someone on TNM or ER that asked a question at a MERG stand at an exhibition - possibly about how to solder SMT devices - and all they got from the guy was "go on a course";  the question was asked again in a different manner and the response was the same.  Not a way to encourage people....

What do you mean?  He was the Chairman of the Membership Recruitment Committee.

[Dave Hunt]

Amendment to my last post, the cost of making my current (work in progress) layout DCC would be an extra £1,000 or much more for sound.

 

Dave