PatB

Thank you everyone for the enormously helpful replies. I've actually ended up leaving out the Arduino entirely,and going to an electromechanical system. Reversing is via a 4PDT relay, wired as a latching DPDT (with a spare pole which I might use to activate some LED colour light signals), opened and closed with cheapo delayed action SPST relay modules from Ebay, activated from my track sensors. This is now working reliably. Now I just need to tweak my track power feed and loco characteristics to get reliable starting and consistent running speed. Which, of course, may not be possible with~80yo toys, but the challenge interests me.

I suspect it's less about the juice being AC as such, and more about its unsmoothed nature acting as a low(ish) frequency pulsed supply. Hence my thoughts on trying a "rougher" power source. I also seem to remember that a rising or falling current in a coil creates a stronger magnetic field than a steady one, so that may also be a factor. As I said, my locos seem much smoother and quieter on DC than what I've seen on YouTube running on AC, but I've not had means of directly comparing pulling power and starting reliability between the two. Now that I've got a couple of beefy transformers (as well as the original Marx Death-o-Matic) I can have a bit of a play with alternative means of feed. I'm a bit set on DC though, for the simple reversing. If I can make it work it's simple anyway.

Well, I've got 4 cats and 2 dogs. If I'm happy to identify a suitable number of people with an equivalent eco-footprint and, as a bonus, without whom the world would be a bit nicer (I've got a little list you know) and dispose of them responsibly, by composting or via a methane digester, can I keep my fur family? Alternatively, I could offer to fund the sterilisation of an appropriate number of humans (chosen at random to eliminate any perceived class/race/gender bias) to offset their detrimental effects. Wins all round. More seriously, I recognise the increasingly urgent need for fairly drastic action to reduce our theoretically infinite demands on a finite system. I applaud those genuinely attempting to make a difference. As I get older and (even) more cynical, though, I find myself increasingly irritated by those whose primary motivation appears to be not saving the world as they claim, but to render everyone else's existence as miserable, joyless and guilt-ridden as their own. I'm not necessarily talking here about some nebulous group of "other" either. I'd bet we all know at least one individual who hates the world for not being as upset about their own particular bete noir as they think it should be

Thanks for the reply Kevin. As with all things, I suspect there is no perfect solution. Fortunately the Marx motor is both very simple and large enough for me to actually see what I'm doing, so having to have a couple of goes isn't a disaster. I'll probably do the armature first as it can be removed and replaced without doing more than taking the brush plate off. Proper access to the field may require the side plates separating (it's basically a pancake motor), which will require me to sort out a wheel puller of some kind. Again, not particularly hard, but an additional step. Of course, if the field's done medium rare as well, I'll need to do that anyway. I'm not sure how good the fundamental motor design and construction is. Although old King Louis was quite fanatical about cutting costs, this seems to have been achieved by leaving stuff off (reversers, headlamps, smoke units, front couplers (or rears on cabeese), con rods, detail etc). What remained seems to have been quite well engineered. That said, it's still a toy, designed in the mid-1930s, when the design of small motors was still not a fully mature technology, even if the designer cared about efficiency. You may be right about the effect of a rectifier. If nothing else, it's going to result in some diode drop (2x I think), which won't help, and which I hadn't thought of. A switch would help with that, but my ultimate goal is reliable reversing without Hand of God intervention, as far as possible. This may, of course, be an impossibility with 80 yo toys, but I find the challenge interesting. I also suspect that I may not be helping my locos' starting by feeding them nice, clean DC from a laptop brick. Maybe I need to slap a rectifier onto a big AC transformer, and use the output without further smoothing, to nudge the armature round. Shame though, as they're so lovely and smooth on DC. As an experiment, I may (very carefully) try my working engines on an original Marx variable transformer controller, fed via a suitable step down adapter (which I already have for another purpose) to drop Oz mains voltage down to the appropriate 110V, to see if they have more grunt when fed as originally intended.

The UK prices quoted are interesting. 3 years ago we had an 8.8 kW system installed (basically the whole NW facing roof of the house) for an out of pocket cost of, IIRC, AUD4800 once state and federal government subsidies were factored in. A rough, back of an envelope calculation says it will have paid for itself by next June (ie 4 years from installation). We are a net exporter of electricity to the grid. We aren't necessarily representative on this thread though. Obvious differences are our location 3/4 of a mile from the surface of the sun ((c) Dylan Moran), our large and intensively used electric kiln, and a continuing obsession with checking the inverter output before switching anything on to try to take maximum advantage of our own generation vs selling it back to the power company for a pittance vs having to buy it back for 4x what we got for it. I've been very impressed with the output of the system. In spite of not being optimally orientated I've seen 8+kW on the inverter display on particularly sunny days. Total generation has averaged about 25 kWh/day over the time it's been running. If it wasn't for the kiln, Western Power would be paying us every month.

At least the "rusting" tends to be done better than some stuff that appears, depicted as "burnt out" by having a blowtorch waved (presumably briefly) at it. I may not know much about weathering, but I'm pretty certain that wooden brake vans and steel coaches don't go blobby in a fire.

I have an old Marx 3-rail loco with a nicely cooked wound-field universal motor. The armature windings are definitely shot, and the field windings may be. As I need to rewind it anyway, I would like, if possible, to improve its torque output, in particular its starting torque. I don't need its factory supplied ability to hit 15 squillion rpm at 9V. I will be running this on DC, with the field coil connected via a bridge rectifier to allow simple reversing. If I remember my rather rudimentary motor theory correctly, a greater number of turns of thinner wire on the armature poles of a permanent magnet motor gives greater torque but lower speed. Is this correct? In this case, being a universal motor, should I also adjust the field winding to suit? If so, would it require more or fewer turns? More would seem to make sense. I realise that this is going to be a bit of an experiment, and I've never rewound a motor before. However, the Marx mech is so simple and chunky and of such low value it seems an ideal candidate to learn on.

Just shy of 4 feet is probably not enough for a real fiddle yard, but might allow the use of some sort of combined cassettes/stock storage boxes to move stock on and off the layout. Possibly useful given that it will be fairly easy for a stock and loco collection to outstrip the available on-layout storage.

Short doors on a van make sense, as the object of the exercise is to maximise useable load space. They make less sense (except maybe financially) when you're trying to design an elegant coupe profile and provide reasonable access to rear seats.

Problem with the 2 door Marina is the doors are too short and the roof too high. Presumably the latter was to retain reasonable headroom for rear seat passengers but I'm not sure about the doors. Are they common to the 4 door? It seems unlikely, but I wouldn't put it past BL.

At one stage Ratio offered signal levers that were individually mounted in a cylindrical base that was supposed to plug into a hole in the edge of your baseboard. Linkage, IIRC, was by string. The levers were styled to look like proper signal levers, which always struck me as being a little pointless as they couldn't, as supplied, be made to resemble a proper lever frame.

If one is worried about (I assume) emergency access from outside the room with a lifting flap/removable section in place, there's always the option of a farmhouse door arrangement of upper and lower sections. If the lower section is made to open below baseboard level, if you keel over in there, there is access for help.

Looks like they might be gantleted/interlaced tracks, possibly both with continuous check rails.

Down to £150 now. Just needs the decimal point moving over a couple of places and it'll be merely overpriced. On the plus side, it's a while since I've seen quite so many of Lima's UK liveried continental items in one spot. Makes chucking as many of them as possible in the bin so much easier.

And was also a year or two later than the saloon in being Italicised.

Not saying it was confusing, just that Ford had a lot of similar models covering the same market segment over a short period of time. OK, I'll concede that the Consul was long in the tooth and due for withdrawal and replacement, and, as such, the Classic made some sense, but it ended up an orphan that didn't really tie to anything else, apart from a bit of common DNA with the 105E Anglia. Then the Cortina turned up in very short order, suggesting that Ford realised the Classic was a turkey with no long term future quite early in its production, given that you don't create and tool a new design overnight. And then, only a year later, the Corsair arrived ; a car which, sharp styling aside, had fairly limited point in a world which already contained the Cortina and the Zephyr 4. Were the few extra sales to people who really wouldn't have bought one or the other worth the cost of tooling up and running a separate production line? Given that, in the 70s, Ford managed very nicely with the Escort-Cortina-Granada trifecta, supplemented with the Fiesta when the supermini boom got going, I would suggest that their 60s line up was over-complicated. At least BMC and Rootes tended to create internal competition for themselves by badge engineering basically the same car, rather than multiple different platforms aimed at the same market. If we gloss over the simultaneous availability of the Austin A40, Morris Minor and 1100/1300 range, or the same situation with the 1800 and the Farinas, anyway .

I had a 1996 VS Scumliner, sorry, Executive, as a company car 25 years ago. It was very quick, even with the cooking 3.8 V6, but always felt very light and nervous, and on the point of becoming airborne some way below its (considerable) top speed. The 99 VT that (briefly) succeeded it felt much more solid and planted, though not as quick. Being the bottom of the range model, my VS had a live rear axle. My boss's posher version had IRS and felt a bit better, but I never had the opportunity to really hoof it out of town so I don't know if it worked at speed.

I wish. Nearest I've come to such desirability was a former colleague who, thanks to astute buying before prices went stratospheric, owned both an XA (I think) Coupe and a lovely, original Holden HR, on a fairly modest salary. I suspect he could now retire quite comfortably on the proceeds if he sold them now.

Probably why Australia was first in the English speaking world to attempt to legislate fun off the motoring agenda.

I think what really killed the V8 Supercar series is that it's about as exciting as watching paint dry. The cars bear no resemblance to anything you can buy (they're basically space-framed single-seaters clad in plastic that vaguely resembles the road car), and the whole thing's so fundamentally tedious that it has to be surrounded by a circus so everyone doesn't fall asleep. For exciting saloon racing, something like the BTCC would be better, but that concept was abandoned in the 80s because it showed up how primitive and uncompetitive the Aussie cars were becoming. Or, if you want big, grunty specialist racers, maybe we should revive the Can-Am concept. Now that I would watch. Maybe the V8 Ute series should be given a bit more prestige. Quintessentially Australian, with cars that do resemble what you can (well, could) buy, grumbly V8s in barely adequate chassis on relatively skinny tyres. Far more exciting and fun to watch. Yes, I know, after that little rant the Department of Home Affairs will be round shortly to have a little word about my citizenship .

I can think of few things more pointless than a muscle car without the muscle.

Does Wiki have a mechanism for dealing with vexatious editors? I'd have thought such a mechanism would be fairly fundamental to making the concept work (which, to be fair, and contrary to reputation, it does surprisingly well).

I've always thought Ford's middleweight family saloon policy in the early 1960s was a bit of a dog's breakfast. Given time taken to shift old stock, it wouldn't especially surprise me to find that there was a short period during which you could buy, new, four different models (Consul, Classic, Cortina and Corsair), all roughly the same size, all intended to do much the same job. Whilst Ford clearly eventually settled on the Cortina as their staple saloon offering, there seems to have been a period when they lacked focus. Or, I suppose, were big and successful enough to try out a few large scale market research exercises to see what would work in the longer term.

If it's the David Brown tractor I'm thinking of, our then neighbour was still using one on a daily basis in the mid-1980s, having pulled it out of a local scrapyard to replace an early Massey Ferguson he'd worn out.

From memory, my last journey in a compartment was in January, or possibly February 1985, heading for Bridgwater from Bangor. I cannot now remember if I joined the train at Bristol TM or Birmingham NS, but I do remember it was a very cold, snowy period and there were major disruptions to services. I suspect that trains were being cobbled together from anything that could be moved in order to get passengers off freezing platforms and to their destinations in any sort of timely manner.