Vistisen

Not sure it is so silly. Cars have lights. People/ animals don't.

A very well written and useful page, I would like to add one additional factor that I have only really become aware of as a result of conversations with a very good friend. A man who’s views and outlook on life I respect deeply. He happens to be a stateless Palestinian. Who, throughout the most of his life has experienced chaos, corrupt authorities and misinformation from ‘official’ sources. This otherwise clever and clear-thinking person seems to have a blind spot when things like climate change, or indeed corona vaccinations are the subject. He simply does not trust the information BECAUSE of the source. He has no experience other than that the people at the top only look out for themselves. I suspect that a large number of the climate sceptics are in the same boat. There seems to be a large number of Americans who believe that ‘the man’ is out to get them, and they are constantly fed with messages not to trust their own government. In the UK… Borris… enough said.

I would have thought it was easy to check: If you have an 100kW battery and it is empty and it stops charging before you have used 75kW of power because it claims to be 100 % charged, then the battery is a dud

I realise that this page is in the wrong language https://ing.dk/artikel/proev-bil-beregneren-billigst-at-lade-eller-tanke-255744 But is does answer an interesting question for those of us who have hybrids. How expensive does electricity have to get before it is cheaper to buy fuel than to charge the car at home? I'm sorry to say that the boundary where electricity is more expensive was smashed to smithereens today in Denmark. One hour ago, it was 49% more than buying petrol.

Not to mention Tom and Jerry, that has got the full spectrum: random violence, racial sterotyping, mistreating animals, sexual stereotyping...

I thought I would add to your experiences. I have now driven a Volvo V60T6 recharge for 13 months. In that time, I have covered 30,000 miles. My model is a 2021 version, so it has the 10 kw battery with a range of about 25 miles. During the whole year, about 45% of my mileage has been driven on pure electricity. And the total mpg figure is now 58.8 mpg. That is not bad for a 2.2 ton car with 340 bhp! My daily commute is a 30-mile journey each way. of which about 18 miles is motorway with an 85-mph speed limit. Unfortunately, it is not possible to charge the car at work (I’v been moaning about it for the entire year). I have developed a pattern of doing non motorway on the battery and using the petrol engine with the adaptive cruise control set to 85 mph on the motorways. As for the engine recharging… it does that very well actually even on long highspeed trips. I drove back from the Hook of Holland to mid Jutland last weekend. Including where the autobahn speed limits allows, cruising at just over 110 mph. I had one stop during the 500 mile trip. I started the trip with an empty battery as I had no chance to charge the car on the ferry. Some figures for that trip taken from the VOLVO app's driving log. First leg was from Hook of Holland to Holdorf in Germany. speed limit on Dutch motorways is a lowish 62mph. Distance 204.5 miles duration 4 hours, average speed 51 mph. I regenerated 7.5 kW of power, the car used 6.9 kw and 5.1 gallons of petrol of this which resulted in 41mpg The second leg took 5 and 5 minutes (including 15 minute stop in a queue because of the tour de France stage in Denmark. It was 326 miles , this gives an average speed of about 85 mph. What is impressive here is the car regenerated, and used 13.1 kW. The higher speed gave a petrol consumption of 9 gallons or 36 mpg. Which is not too bad bearing in mind the 100+ mph cruises. So, on the whole journey, I regenerated 20.6 kW which is twice the battery size. If I had the 2022/3 model with a 20Kw battery I would expect at least ¾ of my total mileage to be pure electricity powered, Hybrids do make sense for some drivers.

I have used 8mm plywood for frames with 5mm ply top and 5 cm thick extruded foam. I experimented with glues and found that good quality wood pva glue was fine for foam to wood joints. Cheap pva was not strong enough, The good quality glue made joints so strong the when using a crowbar to separate them I ended up splitting the plywood rather than the wood from the foam. For foam-to-foam joints I used 'Gorilla' glue which is again very strong. I have a picture of me sitting on a 1.2-meter board supported at each end. It can bare my 80+ kg, but it only weights 2 Kg. I decided to use above board points motors. But I have since regretted this decision. What I would do now is lay a plan of the coming track on the top of the foam and cut 5cm round holes with a hole saw attached to a drill at the right locations. After gluing the plywood on top, you can then attach underboard motors as you would normally do. As for wiring what I have done is as follows: · Leave a 5-10 cm section at each end of each baseboard free of foam. This makes it easier to install whatever you want to use to fasten baseboards together. · In this section I have also fitted a four pin XLR socket, (I use one bus for track power and one for dcc accessories) so between each board there is a short XLR cable connecting the two busses to the neighbouring board(s) · I use a twisted pair of cables for the track bus and bought a 7cm long 2mm drill bit to bore holes through the foam to attach dropper wires to the track bus and all wires for points, signals etc · On open-frame boards, I have cut a strip of extruded foam with a jigsaw to glue on the underside of the track beds. This allows me to have a much larger distance between supporting frames. To fasten wires to the underside of the frame · I use wire staples which the foam is solid enough to hold wires in place, but easy to remove/move. · One design feature I am pleased with is the method of attaching trestles I make a strip of Ply across the underside of the board this consists of 5 cm wide strip of 5mm plywood with two 2 cm wide strips glues to each side of the 5 cm strip leaving a 1 cm channel in the middle. The top of the trestle sits in this channel. AS you can see from the photo, there is no string to hold the trestle’s legs at the right angle. I discovered it was not necessary when the legs are on a carpet.

@hayfield I was wondering where you are getting your figures for consuption and production. The reason why I'm asking is because I can see that if I compare the production/consumption/sale and buy in figures from the website where my Huawei Solar system shows its data, with the data shown on the Danish national electriciity datahub, there is a large difference. I’m happy to say that generally the Huawei figures are more pessimistic than the datahub figures. This is good because it is the datahub figures that are used for bills and invoices. The difference is large, According to my Huawei figures, since the system was connected ( the 9th may), I have sold 390kW, but datahub says that I have sold 1,7mW, that is over four times more. The figures for buy in are a bit closer, Huawei says I have bought 434kW, and the datahub says 474kW. As I am a data nerd (my day job is as an Oracle database administrator), I have made an Excel spreadsheet to track all the figures, and especially to see whether it is worth my while in expanding my 10kW data battery storage to a 15 or 20 kW unit. In about a yearts time, I will decide whether to extend the battery. I can also see that another bottleneck is the size of the inverter. When charging cars, we use more 8,8 kW/t which is the maximun the inverter can provide. So we have to buy the last kWs. If and when we change to fully electric cars rather than the hybrids we have now, It might be worth having a larger inverter.

I wonder whether MotorRail could make a comeback. One of the drawbacks of electric cars is their ability to do long journeys. I would have thought that a MotorRail service from one end of the country to the other where your car is charged up on route could be a financial success. You arrive fresh and rested and so does your car.

Mine only work half the time anyway.

https://www.visitdenmark.com/denmark/explore/11-stars-skive-round-abouts-gdk807213 they are actually quite interesting. Tim Jensen, a famous designer created them, and he was the guide. There are themes and stories behind them. This is great for interesting yet dull conversations. A sort of 'stealth' dullness.

I have just been on a bus trip to see the 11 roundabouts in the Danish town of Skive. I could post the pictures I took here.

Don't forget that the coupling will only attach to other Icoaches

Opps what comes from living overseas

Denmark has historically had very high taxes on new cars. A few years ago, they were about 180% of the new car price, and then there was 25% VAT on top of that. This meant that the average age of cars was very high, old cars pollute more and are unsafe. When I say “old cars”, I mean old. I remember buying a 17 year old Golf Mk2 diesel that had done 150,000 miles (240000 km !) and still cost me £3000, no ABS, no airbags, next to no lights, it was a deathtrap. To try and get the population over in electric cars and or more modern vehicles, they started changing the tax rates by making extremely complicated rules so that small petrol cars like the C1 or Aygo became cheaper, and big cars like Jaguars, more expensive. Then they noticed that when everyone drives these small cars, they use the accelerator in binary mode. Which means that they pollute more than the jaguar does. Electric cars were tax free. But if more people buy taxfree electric cars, then the traditional milking of the motorist to raise taxes fails. To solve this problem, plus city congestion, and the desire to get commuters over onto bicycles or public transport systems (which are excellent in the bigger towns). they are now taking a new look at going over to road pricing rather than taxes new cars. But this has raised a few interesting issues. · How to make the change? people who have just paid 180% tax on their new car won’t want to pay to use the road as well. · How to make the system fair. so that people who live 1 mile from work, but take the car, pay more than people who live in the country and have an hour’s commute. How can this be done without having a Big Brother control system. But where it gets relevant to this topic. Is that the feasibility study that has just been published shows that Electric cars ought to pay more per mile than conventional cars. This is because they take up the same space as a ICE car, so in terms of congestion, they are just as bad. In fact, they tend to be bigger than many cars, AND they cause more congestion when parking as they need charging points and tend to clump are them, not only that, car parks need more space to have chargers. But the real killer is air pollution! In towns it is not diesel particles that are the biggest health risk. It is rubber particle from tires https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show Electric cars are much heavier than ICE cars and they produce much larger number of rubber particles. When this is considered, a ‘Fair’ Road pricing system will mean that rather than being taxfree, electric cars will cost more to run than ICE cars. This is giving our ‘green’ government a bit of a headache. My bet is that road pricing will get kicked further down the road again.

The problem seems to me to be that everyone’s ‘facts’ are either taken from a sound scientific document written at the behest of an interested party, or some dummed down soundbite on social media that leads to a one-pager written by an intern. I would like to present what I believe to be a credible neutral source: Volvo, who have looked at cradle to grave footprints for three roughly identical cars that they themselves make. Petrol, hybrid, and fully electric version of the C40. https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/Market-Assets/INTL/Applications/DotCom/PDF/C40/Volvo-C40-Recharge-LCA-report.pdf There are 50 odd pages that seem to me to strike the balance between too technical and too simple. I do recommend reading it all but for those who do not wish to, here comes the spoiler from their conclusion: ”The carbon footprints of a C40 Recharge (fully electric), XC40 Recharge (Hybrid), both charged with EU-28 electricity mix, and XC40 ICE fuelled with E5 petrol are 42, 44 and 59 tonnes CO2-equivalents respectively for a total driving distance of 200,000km”. In other words, there is surprisingly little difference over 200,000 km (they are Volvos 😊) between the fully electric and the hybrid. IF, and it is a big IF, you do actually charge your hybrid up! But both are much less polluting than the petrol version of the same car.

Here is an update on my energy production after just over a month of pretty dismal weather for what are supposed to be the sunny months. I have generated 1,54mW, of which I have sold 950kW. In the same period, I have bought 575kW either because the sun just wasn't shining when we needed power or because. when charging cars we use more than the maximum the inverter can provide and the last kW is provided by the net.

I would like to think you are correct but... https://www.zerofox.com/blog/innocuous-facebook-quizzes-attacker-intel-goldmines/ as for it being an overreaction that, is for the moderators to decide.

I choose to report this post as it is Exactly the sort that is used to identify people passwords by web robots. Do not ever tell people the names of your pets , first girfriends, childhood adresses and mothers maiden names. all of which are often used as security questions. I strongly suggest that those who have answered this post remove their answers

and illegal if they did.

I’m not sure about this nostalgia thing. I’m closer to 60 than 50. I got my first trainset when I was 11. Built a layout in my early teens, dropped it as a late teen, before emigrating to Denmark. Started a new modelling project as a thing to do together with my three boys in my late 40’s, and now I am very slowly building a model of a real location with hand built points and scratch built buildings. Probably quite a typical modelling ‘career’, apart from the emigration. I simply cannot remember ever seeing TT and feel no nostalgia for it. I might (for once) be too young. But if that is true, then the nostalgia market is shrinking and will within a decade probably disappear.

Quite realistic, but i can see the joins in the Willis brick sheets. And they need weathering.

I could very quickly start an online fight and probably be banned within a page if I gave a quick answer, but if you are interested in a (hopefully) nuanced discussion they please send me a PM.

Then why is it called 'the boat train' when it is a train taking passengers to the ports

I can not believe I get to be the one who asks if the smoke came from the capactitors in the power car first