woodenhead

House buildings and contents renewal - 43% increase, still under £400 but ouch that is a big increase when nothing has changed in the past 12 months.

This is an article on a couple of recent deaths where the health care pendants had failed in the days leading up to their death. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/deaths-spark-concern-over-digital-phone-line-rollout/ I think it's a little difficult to attribute their death to the switch off, especially as in these cases the service that had switched over was not linked to the telecare provision.i.e no direct link to the performance of the pendant. It would also suggest in these cases the Virgin service was still operating and it was the pendant that failed. It's easy to use rumour to fuel concerns and whilst no doubt there is a lot of work for BT to do to mitigate much of the valid concerns for people who depend on a landline we cannot pin every incident on BT and other providers who are migrating away from copper wire. If anything throwing everything in muddies the water where real incidents might become buried under a storm of unrelated matters and get missed by the media.

Saw an interesting pair of ducks yesterday whilst on a walk along the canal from Spud Wood (just near Dunham Massey). Looked like a breeding pair, much bigger than the other ducks we typically see on the Bridgewater. We think it's a Swedish Blue which apparently is endangered so a very rare sight

The only people who know are Accurascale. I am not putting @McC in a difficult position as I expect at worst a very non committal answer because you are correct he cannot answer the question. I wouldn't call it unfair, he and everyone at Accurascale get bombarded with such requests all the time, at shows and on forums, it's part of the territory with running a successful product company. But if he cannot answer the question, and he cannot without giving the game away, then how can anyone else comment confidently for the OP that he should either buy Peco CDAs now or wait for a possible but not guaranteed Accurascale model in the future. That's the point I am making here. Or we might be in for a revelation 😄

There is an ongoing case about children in the 1970s being used for experiments without known consent and the blood was infected with HIV and Hepatitus. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63569463

Urban legend and as someone below remarked, why would a pilot risk his life just to make a point with a wooden bomb. In flying to deliver the wooden bomb the enemy flak certainly would not be confetti. https://www.forces.net/heritage/history/did-allied-pilots-really-drop-fake-wooden-bombs-fake-wooden-decoy-airfields

Let's ask the big boss @McC, would you care to comment?

What is missing are junction modules so this particular module set is restricted to a single circuit, but I guess if you add a junction you'd need a second table and it's no longer a table top layout.

I'm pleased this exhibition appears to have gone down well, after the shock of January things are rocking and rolling again in the world of modelling. I would have liked to have gone, but as I've probably mentioned I don't so much like crowds these days, Key seems to attract them (which is good) and after the last Milton Keynes I am a little more reticent about attending, though the comments here suggest that the extra room that the NEC can offer has meant it wasn't so crowded perhaps in the halls.

This is the person making the module bases, looks like special runs and one man band so not always available but the idea surely must be something someone in the UK using a laser cutter could make too. https://toypooom.thebase.in/

It's proper table top stuff isn't it, and I imagine a lot easier to store that a flat baseboard, then there is the ability to change it all about - a sort of model railway scalextric. I know you can do that with Kato unitrack, but the modules allow scenery into the fray which elevates it above basic track laying.

When I first became aware of model railways as a child my dad operated to a timetable, it was all written down and I learnt to follow it too. For me aimlessly operating trains soon leads to boredom, I feel the timetable/operating sequence offers a purpose to the scene being modelled i.e. when you design a layout somewhere in your head is a reason for the station or sidings and that needs to be fitted in to the rest of the world in some way to justfiy the trains, the services etc so a timetable is a natural development of that. I'm not playing trains at the moment and I think it's because I don't have a sequence, it's too random for me.

I agree Farish, Dapol and Peco make stock that can be handled - I've lost a couple of bits off my Co-Bo, it felt more fragile. It's really important as items get smaller that they can be picked up - there is less area to hold onto so it all needs to be more stable than you can get away with in OO or O. From what I can see Hornby get this as well, the TT120 stuff looks designed to be picked up. Obviously we cannot comment on how Accurascale will approach N gauge, but that robustness would mean less dangly add on bits which then reduces the fidelity a little and more in line with what Farish currently turn out.

It may well be, but the point I was making we just don't know and that makes it hard to make a decision in this case for the OP - It's no good us all going yep Accurascale must surely do a CDA and then the OP waits and waits and Accurascale do nothing or launch a loco, then some coaches, the minerals, HUOs, BYAs etc before getting to the one the OP wants. It's not a given that the first item out of the N gauge Accurascale box will be a HAA and all it's variants. Worse I don't think N scale can take the type of typical Accurascale launch, i.e. 19k of class 37s whilst also delivering Mk2 coaches and a whole load of other stuff on the horizon. Even RevolutioN branched into larger scales and they have found the N scale community not able to fulfil enough to make a class 21/29 viable despite all those class 26/27s sold by Dapol. The class 321 was also on restricted liveries because some did not cut the mustard with potential buyers. The one thing in favour of a CDA though is perhaps a lot of the stuff recently in N has been very much of a privatisation era so that would lend itself to a CDA. With retooled 56s coming some nice Accurascale HAAs would be nice for it to haul, though Farish has just done a load of them which might delay Accurascale doing them unless Farish were getting in before a big launch. Are N gauge modellers fickle, would we dump lots of Farish HAAs for Accurascale ones - would the difference be enough to do that. In OO the competition was the aging Hornby HAA with a massive jump in fidelity. But in N that massive jump is a little more difficult to achieve as there is less detail to show simply because of the size reduction, yes they can be better but can they be that much better.

This part of the forum is quite quiet but there is no specific areas for modular and it's not a layou topic per se. This chap appeared on my feed, he's using some interesting modules and Kato track to build stuff and it's a proper table top idea.