Dungrange

Thanks both. I agree that the boxes at Poppleton and Cattal both look reasonably similar to the Wills kit and it's interesting to know that similar buildings have survived into the 21st Century. However, their survival seems to be due to the line being predominantly single track (presumably with an infrequent service) and therefore the semaphore signalling has not been replaced with colour lights and the level crossings remain manually operated. I can see why a traditional signal box has been retained in this instance. Unfortunately, my working track plan is a double track line, without a level crossing that would require a crossing keeper, and I was assuming would have colour light signalling. The installation of colour light signals and electric point motors would presumably have resulted in the removal of all historic signalling equipment, with the signalman being in a power box several miles away. As such, the only way I could envisage using the box (I already have an unbuilt kit) would be to control what would more likely be yard points - ie once the signalman has a train locked in a yard, the points can be operated locally. I guess the option of retaining the building (perhaps not in a well maintained state) for use by the driver / shunter is the more plausible use of the kit.

Tony, Yes, my order arrived safe and sound on Monday morning. I didn't need anything urgently, but the closure of the mail order service prompted me to place a final order so that I don't run out of track panels when I get to laying track.

I think the coupling looks like a 36-061 which I think also comes with the pocket that it fits into. See https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/Bachmann-36-061-Short-Straight-Nem-Coupling-X10-OO-Gauge/2256012505?iid=322906915230 as an example. I'm not so sure about the wagon mounting, but I'll suggest the Parkside Dundas PA34 mounting blocks, but they may need a little bit of packing to get the pocket mounting at the right height. These would have to be glued to the wagon floor rather than screwed.

Just looking back at my e-mails, I received and paid my invoice from Tim on the morning of Thursday 2nd May, and I have an earlier e-mail that stated he hoped my boards would be ready for collection by the courier company on Friday 3rd May and that delivery to me would therefore most likely be Tuesday 7th May or shortly thereafter. I can't actually remember whether my boards were delivered on the Tuesday or the Wednesday of that week, but ultimately the day that TNT chose to deliver the consignment was obviously outwith his control. All I can confirm is that they were received within a week of me paying, which is pretty good service. I'd therefore assume that you should receive your boards soon - probably on Monday.

Not that long. I ordered several custom boards earlier in the year and although it took a couple of months to find a slot for production, I wasn't invoiced until they were effectively ready for shipping. I think I had them within a week of receiving and paying the invoice.

The description of this kit (https://peco-uk.com/products/ground-level-signal-box-2) states that this is, "A small signal box as would be seen at a small country station, or controlling the exit from a yard or industrial area." I'm wondering if it would be plausible to incorporate one of these boxes in a modern post-privatisation setting and in any case how common these would be in an 'industrial' setting. It appears that it's effectively just a building to protect a four lever ground frame. I'm assuming that there are still plenty of ground frames that survive in various yards / exchange sidings, so do buildings like this still exist?

The basic engine sounds will operate on DC and I don't think that there is a way to turn it off. When driving on DC, the locomotive will also drive like a DCC Sound locomotive. That is, when you turn up the voltage on the DC controller it will take a while for the locomotive to respond. You'll need to crank the power up to something like 7 Volts to power up the chip and then the engine sounds will kick in before it starts to accelerate at the end of the startup cycle at whatever acceleration settings have been set up on the chip when it's running on a DCC layout. Therefore, if you simply turn the DC controller to full, the locomotive won't accelerate as it would do without a chip fitted.

Power should always be fed to the toe end of the turnout, so you are correct that your primary feeds should be to the tracks at the right hand side of your track plan. However, you have one point that forms part of your crossover at the platform that faces the opposite way. You will need to feed power to this also from the toe end, which means you need another feed to the track that is parallel to the station platform to the left of that turnout. This means that you will then also need to fit insulated rail joiner in both rails in the middle of your crossover to prevent a short when the points are thrown in opposite directions - eg if one is straight and the other curved. To isolate a locomotive at the locations that you want to, you just need an on/off or Single Pole Single Throw (SPST) switch. It doesn't matter whether you put the break in the positive or negative rail. All it is doing is stopping current flowing to/from the end of the siding. It is however worth highlighting that your turnouts will be self isolating, which means that if you throw the point blades to the other direction, any locomotive downstream of that point will automatically be isolated. That therefore may mean that you don't need an isolating switch unless you want to isolate a locomotive near the buffers and then drive a second locomotive into the same siding. With regards lights in buildings, any power supply with the correct voltage output should be okay. Welcome to RMWeb and I hope your project goes well.

I think the issues is that Royal Mail won't accept parcels more than a certain size (something like 700 mm in length), which means that rail in 1 m lengths cannot be dispatched by regular post. That therefore means that if ordering by mail order, you would need to either accept rail in shorter lengths or pay extra for a courier company that will accept larger parcel sizes. If ordering 100 metres of rail, I think C&L dispatch this by Courier in 1 m lengths (https://www.clfinescale.co.uk/online-store/CODE-75-BULL-HEAD-RAIL-STEEL-Rail-100-x-1-M-p128178134), but if ordering a smaller quantity, such as 10 m (https://www.clfinescale.co.uk/online-store/CODE-75-BULL-HEAD-RAIL-STEEL-pack-10-X-1-M-p128178186), I think they cut the rail so that it can go by Royal Mail. Presumably the rational is that anyone who only wants a small quantity of rail is less likely to want to pay the higher costs of using a Courier, wheres if you can spread the additional cost over a large order the increase in cost through using a courier company would be less noticeable (in percentage terms).

I think the problem is going to be that the function mapping procedures are decoder specific. The step by step instructions for a Zimo decoder would be no use if you use ESU decoders, so that leads back to reading the manual that comes with the decoder. PS - I've never tried it because I don't have enough DCC fitted locomotives yet.

I think that's the issue - you mentioned RP25, but didn't state the width of the wheel and therefore the flange depth either. RP25 is the contour profile and the flange depth is related to the wheel width. Reference to RP25 doesn't define a flange depth on it's own. If you look at https://www.nmra.org/sites/default/files/standards/sandrp/pdf/RP-25 2009.07.pdf RP25.88 has a flange depth of 0.023", whereas RP25.110 has a flange depth of 0.025". That said, I'd have thought that the issue with flanges hitting the infill piece in the common crossing would have been if the wheels had a flange depth greater than the RP25.110 standard.

I had exactly the same scenario today with screens just like these screenshots and it's not the first time that I've encountered similar issues. It's something I've never understood, but yes, blog posts, as above, look like they could be the source of the issues I've had. Unfortunately, I've never known how to fix the issue (and still don't) because I've never known what causes it (but I do now).

My take on this is that I don't worry about it too much. Google is working with the device that is connected to the internet. The user of that device (ie me) has just logged into RMWeb, which Google knows is a railway modelling site. Most railway modellers are male, so the Google algorithms will assume that I am male (unless it has other data to the contrary). The user of that device (ie me) also watches or listens to a lot of music videos on Youtube (often whilst reading RMWeb), so Google will, by extension, assume that I am a male who likes music. Over time a profile is built up based on the websites that users of this device visit most frequently. The adverts that Google pushes my way are simply based on algorithms that categorise this data to put the user of my device in a particular category and show adverts accordingly. I'm not personally interested in taking out a gym membership, but perhaps lots of males who like music are. The more data Google collects, the more relevant adverts should be. Yes, some people try to thwart Google, by continually trying to erase search histories and the like, but I can't be bothered. Why does everyone have to be cynical about the collection of data? As I see it, Google is trying, perhaps unsuccessfully, to show me adverts that I may be interested in. I see relevant advertising as a benefit to me, but of course the driver for Google is that if it can show highly relevant adds then the click through rate will be higher and they will get more advertising revenue. They have selfish reasons for trying to show me relevant adverts, but I don't particularly care about their motives, because I get a benefit or at least don't see myself as being disadvantaged. In my field of employment as a transport planner, I frequently use data that some people may regard as having been obtained by 'spying on people'. However, I don't care about the individuals, simply the fact that the data is useful to me. For example, what is the average traffic speed along a road between point A and point B? If I install a Bluetooth detector at point A and a second Bluetooth detector at point B and record details of each device passing close to each detector, I can then match the data from the two sites and answer my original question. I know that a device with MAC address ABCD-1234 passed my first detector at 09:07:30 and a device with the same MAC address passed my second detector at 09:37:00, so that particular device made the journey along the road that I am interested in, in exactly 29 minutes and 30 seconds. Knowing the distance between my two detectors, I can then work out the speed of that device. Once I have data from several hundred devices with Bluetooth turned on, I can calculate an average. It's not a perfect methodology because I'm determining the average speed of Bluetooth devices rather than the average speed of vehicles, but in general, the two figures should be fairly close. As I said, I don't care about the owner of the device with MAC address ABCD-1234. I don't want to know anything about them beyond the fact that whoever they are, they took 30 minutes to get from A to B on the day that the survey was undertaken and that single observation forms one of the many observations used to calculate an average speed, standard deviation etc. Perhaps it's simply a consequence of using lots of data of this type that I simply am not paranoid about the type of data that Google collects.

Scott, Could you not make the upper turnout of the crossing connecting platforms 5 and 6 into a 3-way turnout, to provide a second crossing connecting the approach to platform 6 with platform 3? Sadly I can't help with the signalling, but it's an interesting discussion.

I don't think the difference in height is a particular issue, although you would need to put some form of packing under the Code 75 track, but we're only talking about the thickness of a sheet of paper or maybe two. Perhaps more important to highlight is that the sleeper spacing is different, with the sleepers on the Code 83 track closer together than the equivalent Code 75 / Code 100 product. The photograph below shows a right hand Code 83 #7 beside a right hand Code 100 Curved Point as well as a left hand Code 100 Curved Point sitting on top of a left hand Code 83 #7, just to show the difference in the geometry. I'm planning to use both types in my fiddle yard.

I note that the Hattons website states that the models are "DCC compatible but no socket", so presumably that means that you need to hard wire your preferred brand of decoder. Hattons do offer a decoder fitting service (https://www.hattons.co.uk/stocklist/dccfitting.aspx) but I note that the Class 20 isn't listed and their pricing structure only mentions N and 00. However, if they can hard wire a decoder to an N gauge locomotive, I don't see why they can't do the same for 0 gauge. It might be worth asking them if that's where you intend to purchase from.

I've placed my order, paid for it and now just hoping that it gets posted on Monday. Given that 30th November is next Saturday, I thought I'd left it as late as was possible for an operation that only processes orders once a week (usually on a Monday). However, I note that the last posting date is actually 5th December, so I had a week longer than I thought.

I'll second that. I've fancied doing something similar myself, but never got around to it. Too many other things to do. If I ever do get around to doing one, I hope it looks as good as yours.

I'm not sure what sort of comments you are expecting. It's your train set: have fun playing with it. Through use, you'll find things that you don't like and wish you had done differently and you can take that on board if you ever have the space for a more ambitious layout.

I notice that the Revolution press announcement states "Nowadays when loaded they are always accompanied by DRS courier coaches carrying elite protection teams – often Royal Marines or similarly trained Army units - and frequently double headed to allow for the failure of a locomotive." However, the above photograph clearly shows a KUA without courier or escort coaches. My question is therefore, are the escort coaches only required when the wagons are loaded or is the reference to "nowadays" after a specific date? I'm just wondering how often these wagons are moved without the escort coaches.

I agree that it is possible to construct a dual DC / DCC layout, but I would dispute the words highlighted in bold. You can't have your DC and DCC system sharing a common return. If you really want to have dual DC and DCC cab control with both systems live at the same time, then I think you need switched feeds and switched returns for each section, not a common return. I agree that it is then possible to run DC and DCC locomotives simultaneously provided you have a rigorous operating procedure that ensures that the two separate control systems will never come into contact. However, it is so easy to inadvertently throw the wrong switch or for something to derail and cause a short with the possible consequence of writing off hundreds of pounds worth of electronics that I and most people don't think its worth taking the chance. Therefore if anyone new to the hobby asks for advice, I would advise against mixing DC and DCC unless you really know what you are doing, understand the risks and are prepared to take these risks.

Yes, KR Models. But they have subsequently announced that the project is cancelled.

Yes, that would seem to be the best way forward. Effectively you wire for DC Cab control and then when you are ready to switch, set all section switches to one position and plug your DCC command station in instead of the previous DC controller (making sure that you then remove the other DC controller positions so that you can't inadvertently mix DC and DCC). I think that the only thing you need to do specifically is use wires with a cross section that are suitable for carrying DCC currents (> 5 Amp) with minimal voltage drop, rather than trying to get away with small cross section wires that are used on many DC layouts on the basis that most DC controllers can't put out more than 1 Amp. As for the points and point motors, that's up to you. There is no such thing as 'wiring for DCC', there is just good wiring practise and less good wiring practise. DCC effectively requires that you adopt good practise because the short circuit breakers in a DCC system shut down much faster than a DC controller. Therefore wire each section with its own feed.

Agreed. Two wagons for that price makes them £80 each and given that these are longer than any coach on the rail network and with the cost of coaches now, they don't seem too bad for a niche model. Of course you need to save your money for KR Models Fell locomotive.

I have to agree. I'm not a fan of the Argos format either, although I can't accuse my local model shop of that style of display. They have floor to ceiling display cabinets around half of the shop that contain all of the locomotives, coaches and wagons produced by Hornby, Bachmann, Heljan etc. However, that means if you wish to purchase a particular model locomotive, they have to fetch a boxed version from 'through the back', which is apparently actually in the basement. The only things that you can pick up off the shelf and take to the counter are generally the lower value products like tins of paint, sheets of plasticard, brass rod and a range of plastic kits from Airfix, Dapol, Wills and Cambrian. The shop always looks full and if there is anything that they don't have, then they are usually happy to order it. I guess that the style of operation of any business has to be governed by the layout of the premises that they are able to secure. My local shop must be doing something right, since they've been in business for decades and I hope that continues.