cliff park

I would like to reduce the asbestos hysteria. Don't get me wrong, it is nasty stuff. But it is possible to cope with it. If you want to open these controllers up do it outdoors, wear a mask ( you might already have one!!), and observe good hygiene practices, hand washing etc. My dad was a builder and worked with asbestos for about 65 years and suffered no consequences. A friend of mine spent 6 months as a young man insulating the pipes of a power station with it and died at 52. The trick is not to breathe it in. It is not poisonous.

The main reason to use a separate winding is so that you can't accidentally switch the two controllers to one section of track and effectively short-circuit the transformer. But you will never do this since the turntable power is being used to drive that motor, not track. They should never come together.

The 5.1kΩ is fine and is the nearest preferred value to 5k. Think of it in percentage terms and it is 0.2% out. The resistor probably has a tolerance of 5% or 10% anyway which swamps that.

I totally missed that, wondered what you were on about

Actually Lydia Eva was the name of the daughter of the guy who had her built. https://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/register/43/lydia-eva

You mentioned using the Lydia Eva as a model for parts of your boats, I was driving through Great Yarmouth this morning and drove past her moored up in the river. Thought you might like these pictures.

Brilliant, one small note of caution. Do not bend the LED wires too close to the body of the LED. This can cause them to fail. Even 1mm is better than right at the body.

Use a cored solder, not lead free, that is a real pain. Remember melt the solder at the joint, not on the iron away from the joint. If you do it away from the joint you have lost the flux, it comes off as smoke. Metal to be soldered, solder, and iron all must come together at once. If the metal to be soldered is large it may be worth preheating. Just spotted brossard's reply, agree

removed the diode which worked the lights according to direction of travel. but in the powered cars both sets of lights are appearing at the same time, regardless of direction um................

If you have enough 1K resistors simply wire two in series with each LED, or at least try that with one LED to see if 2K is about right

Can I just point out , a bit late, that putting a mains plug on the controller lead must be the craziest idea ever. The controller will now have two mains plugs, and inevitably, sooner or later, the wrong one will be plugged into the mains, with disastrous results.

Many people find the idea of using a multimeter quite daunting. But it shouldn't be really. Using it for the basics of DC voltage and Ohms should be very simple, and you can find out about other ranges as you grow in confidence. Plenty of people on here will help.

It works just as well with contacts. It is the suppression of the arc that matters. The diodes can, of course, be fitted at the switch if that is more convenient.

The standard arc reduction for this sort of situation is a diode wired in reverse across the solenoid coil, to catch the back emf induced by the collapsing field. The arc is when you take the probe off, or release the switch.

Obviously your existing arrangement will only work with the track voltage one way round. If you want it to work either way round, and almost essential if you are thinking about stay-alive electrolytic capacitors, is to wire a small bridge rectifier, or four diodes in a bridge, after the pickups.

I'm puzzled by the universal dislike of chocolate blocks, and the perceived problems. I have, I estimate, somewhere in the region of 400 screw connections in my house in mains sockets, lights, distribution boxes etc. If the screw terminal was such a problem why aren't these failing all the time, and should the electricity supply industry be using them?

Try to imagine that each controller's output is floating. It is not tied to ground, or the mains or any other controller. The transformer ensures that. Connecting one leg of its output to another controller via the common rail just means the whole lot is floating. But if you have a common transformer winding then the controllers are connected in two places:- before the electronics and after. Effectively a short circuit. If that doesn't help please feel free to ignore.

It is because they are bulbs. They get hot. LEDs run cold. Very often a bulb run at a lower voltage looks more authentically yellow than bright white. But if you run them at bright white they will get hot, it is the watts being dissipated. Nothing you can do will make them run bright and cold.

I have followed this topic from the first post. I would like to make an observation. Not a criticism, I have no grounds to criticise. But sometimes I look at one of your pictures and I am there, in the station, in the farmyard, on the dockside. And then I look at another one , and it's a model railway. I have tried to analyse the difference, and I have come to the conclusion it's the camera angle. Low level pictures look real, high levels makes it a model. I guess it's because we see real scenes from ground level, and invariably we see models from a high angle, looking down. And the mind associates those angles with those scenarios. I defy anyone to look at the goods shed pictures above and definitively state if they are real or model. That's not to say that I don't love the high level shots, they are invaluable for ideas and technique, but to my mind the low level ones are the best. Keep up the good work.

Many years ago now I built some kit for audio use where the mixing took place a long way from the stage. Basically op-amps (running in something like an emitter-follower mode) reduced the impedance from the 50KΩ of the mics to a few hundred ohms, down a long cable, mixed at low impedance then back up another cable, converted back to high impedance to match the input of the amplifier. Now this was all analogue audio, and a long time ago but it seems to me that something similar is needed for the servos. Thinking about the original applications for most of these servos they are physically close to the signal source, eg radio receiver, and a long way from other sources of interference. We put them at the end of a long cable with lots of stray transformer and motor noise and wonder why we have problems.

There is a tendency to think that electronics is a precision discipline. It definitely is not. Resistor values is a case in point. You pick the nearest preferred value to the one you have calculated, and that probably has a 10% tolerance. (By the way if you buy a bag of 1000 1KΩ resistors at 10% tolerance NONE of them will be close to 1KΩ because they will have been removed and put in the 5% or 1% bags). A lot of it is trial and error, don't get too bogged down in detail. Experiment and you may burn an LED or two, but you will learn from experience, the best way.

When measuring voltage you first set the range switch to an appropriate high range. Eg DC volts 200. Then place the probes across the circuit, ie one probe to each 'rail'. Then reduce the range until you have a sensible reading. Obviously most of the time you guess it's going to be say 12V so you set it to the next highest range, perhaps 20V or 25V. Much of this will be irrelevant if you have a self ranging meter. Measuring current is a whole different ball game. The meter has to be in series with the circuit. So disconnect a wire, connect one meter probe to the wire you just took off, and the other probe to the terminal you just took it off !! A good trick is to try all these moves out on a working circuit before you have a fault, so you become familiar with using the meter, and familiar with likely readings.

Connect the battery to the terminals marked 'ac input', it doesn't matter which way round. You will have a very smooth output, no ac ripple, but it should work.

Microswitches in particular are very robust and free from dirt problems as they are virtually sealed, and cheap

The point is the RF suppressor is directly across the motor, which to all intents and purposes is a short circuit. It will never be subjected to the output of the high frequency cleaner. If the motor is connected to the rails then the cleaner will not be operating.