AdamsRadial

I get most of my parts for them from Expo, very good service. I've had my Unimat Classic for nearly 15 years, it's a wonderful item, and more than just the lathe/mill/drill. you can use it as an assembly jig when kit-building to get things square, slide a part into position and adjust it, slide it back and add the glue or flux, slide it together again and glue/solder. If you get some small diamond or carborundum slitting disks it will cut steel, just don't expect to turn or mill steel or hardened brass. The jigsaw when used very carefully will slice up tinplate from old cans of pilchards or tuna. An absolute must-have if you're planning to machine plastics is a variable speed controller to slow the motor down so you actually cut the plastic instead of just melting it.

Make up a small jig with a piece of dowel on a screw to act as a bearing to run around the inside of the existing hole, ideally use a piece of wood slightly longer than the diameter of the hole and put a similar piece of dowel on the other side, so you have a bar that runs around inside the existing hole, and on one side extends just beyond where the new hole perimeter will be. Make a hole in this piece of wood outside the roller bearing to take your Dremel at the appropriate new diameter. This way you don't have to keep struggling to control the Dremel for precise position, you just have to control it against the forces that the cutters that look like twist drills with weird flutes will be introducing. Depending on their type they may either wish to burrow down into the plywood or else try to thrust upwards. Be warned, those cutters might be solid carbide and therefore will snap like a carrot if you put too much sideways force on them. I bought a Parkside mini-router a couple of years back that was absolutely perfect for doing things like this, cutting out parts of ply baseboards in-situ, but I broke the cutters before learning to always used an outline or location jig and go very very gently. Annoyingly, they are unobtainable and I ended up getting a range of carbide cutters for Dremels and making a collet reducer to fit them to the Parkside.

Actually, I was alluding to some of my dirty tricks

The Rother Valley Railway did something similar with their Hurst Nelson 4-wheelers, they joined them together in pairs on a new underframe and created bogie carriages. So there's plenty of precedence for what Annie's doing to the locomotives. It's not so different from getting a whitemetal body kit and stuffing it over a Triang Lord of the Isles chassis, come to think of it.

Rocket is what the Science Museum were given by Stephensons, what was what they managed to sort out from what Thompsons gave them, which was what they made of it after buying it and turning it into a coal-hauler. And it's still not certain if it's cylinders were lowered to the same position seen on the Northumbrian before or after Thomsons bought it. Cut-n-shut isn't anything unique to the car trade, they were up to it way back then...

Very impressed. You might want to have a look at one of the locomotives on the Weston Clevedon & Portishead in that case. Sharp 2-2-2WT

It's fine by me, I've got a memory of some layout in an old Railway Modeller that also had stations named after contributors but can't put a name or even year to it right now. Just so long as you don't start putting faces on the locos, there are limits, you know

I would suggest then you double-check the polarity of all the items (+ to + and - to -) paying particular attention to the diodes and capacitors before you supply power to it. Capacitors in particular can pop and spray oil if they are reverse-polarized. Diodes wi;; survive but becuase they are one-way devices wrong-wiring them will stop things working.

Minories looks superb, especially the views under the overall roof. I've started putting some of C J Freezer's plans into TS2009 in the past just to try and see what they would actually look like, but trying to cramp standard gauge track to scaled up baseboard areas just doesn't work, really what is needed is some sectional track. What is the blue tank engine?

Usually most CDUs work on quite few number of points provided you don't need to change too many too quickly, as the CDU needs a short time to recharge after bashing the point motor across. I am guessing the reasoning behind the use of several small capacitors in parallel is that they will recharge faster than a single large capacitor of the equivalent value, the charge curve is an inverse exponential, meaning that something like 60-75% of the charge gets in very quickly, but to finish off the remaining percentage can take almost as long again, However, the CDU's can typically kick a point motor at that 60-75% level, so the wait time is acceptable. It looks to be a very good kit, I hope making it was an enjoyable experience. The soldering looks very neat and tidy.

I'm just applauding you in the Ferrero-Roche advert style, it looks quite normal for a layout with just a few points I can't read the value of the capacitors so I can't estimate what the combined value is in microfarads, but as they aren't larger in diameter than a finger they're not going to be able to give the dangerous belt that my home-made remagnetiser does, but that's using a capacitor the same size as a can of beans.

It's either a meaty CDU or a very small spot-welder PSU

I just realised, TaNE introduced a newer version of the graphics engine which (I think) supported improved texturing and it's possible that the textures on your recently purchased models are expecting to have all the extra channels that TS2012 won't have. You might find it worthwhile cloning the models and having versions just for TS2012 with simplified textures. The Content Creation sub-forum on N3V's site has quite a bit about the newer FBX standard. I've not been following in great detail because I have no hardware capable of running anything after TS2012.

Snap! I'm doing it in TC3, mind, but I've cloned the gated level crossings and changed the gates texture to fully transparent and removed the sounds so now the line has the proper ungated crossings. The other thing to remember is, she got Biddenden the wrong way round: the station should be to the north of the road, not the South, and rotated 180 degrees so the building and sidings are to the East. I finished that off yesterday. The broken tunnel north of St Michaels halt is next on the must-do list. TC3 allows me to run TRS2004-type routes but with far better steam locomotives. For some reason Auran/N3V back-pedalled when it came to TS2009 and threw away a lot of the steam improvements that made TC3 such a lovely simulator for kettles. And, with TS2009, the alpha problem of much of the earlier trees and foliage gets too bad to bear, but they all show up fine in TC3. There is still an alpha-sorting issue if you put too many things too close together that have transparency, but some clever placement usually gets around that. I do love the way she gardened her lines, I also have Hayling Island by her running in TC3, with a bodged up Terrier using a body from TS2009 on a bogie from TC3. No different to railway modelling, putting a WIlls kit body on a Jinty chassis The EKLR is not the KESR, by the way, much more fascinating. Collieries, abandoned collieries, smouldering embankments, next to the Bishops Castle it has to be the oddest standard-gauge railway that never got grouped.

This is the paradox of modelling, you make something more and more detailed, expecting it to look better and better, but then older models give that hidden kick of nostalgia like old toys in the cupboard whispering to you that they want to come out. Modelling, both actual and virtual, relies on the viewer/player entering into a shared illusion. Sometimes making things too lifelike can spoil the illusion by a strange reaction in the viewer, I think it's been called "the uncanny valley" effect. I stick to things that I can get immersed in now, such as a round and round 00 layout with a reverse loop, because it's able to kick in all the old imaginations I developed seeing C J Freezer's plans in the magazines. I've given up trying to replicate the East Kent Light Railway faithfully in Trainz because I realise I'll get obsessed over the blades of grass or the lack of tight cuttings. (The lack of wing/check rails on Auran track helps here because there weren't any on the prototype What I wanted to achieve I have, to a large extent. I wanted to see what some parts of the line that were never photographed might have looked like. I wanted to see the Adams Radial running, there are no photos I have been able to find showing it anywhere else than in the yard at Shepherswell. What was it like to be up by the water tower at Richborough Castle sidings when a train swept by on the SECR lines. I wanted to know what it was like ascending the old Guilford Colliery branch. I've managed all of those, and with old stuff. I don't feel the need to keep buying newer versions of Trainz to see if it makes things look better, they look well enough to me as they are.

Especially if you're going to use TransDEM to create a trainz map from it.

Oh for an Oast house... Although I can't remember seeing any that far North in Kent, the ones I remember were all further south and east. Are you going to have special trains to serve Leeds castle?

Don't forget the other old stalwart for point control - bicycle spokes. You have a nice 3/8" adustment range on one end with the thread.

I'm more worried about my card number being stored on a database than I am about giving the details over the phone in the good old-fashioned way. I've had a card cloned once before where the attempts to use it were in the States and luckily my bank recognised that I couldn't have crossed the Atlantic in two hours and stopped it. I never fully established how the numbers got into the hands of the fraudster but the only place I ever used that card online was ordering from the Big River, so it had to be a database hack.

From what I recall seeing, many model aircraft have the servos located at the centre of balance but use rods to transmit the servo motion to the rear elevators and rudder.

I had exactly that suspicion with a chassis I got off ebay recently, but after close examination I suspect the problem lies in the trailing axle moving up and down. It really requires a spring to force it down (or the body up, same difference). Other jobs have claimed priority so I won't be able to experiment for a while yet.

Best cure for this is a dirt-cheap USB keyboard, a lot less hassle then having to open them up.

And in Kent somewhere around the Maidstone district you'll find Prattsbottom. I love the humour in the Peak District where the high craggy up in the couds places are called Low, hence Hindlow and Hurdlow on the Cromford and High Peak.

It's a superb creation, and I for one think there's far too much attention being paid to being millimetre-perfect.

Why oh why couldn't he have based his chops on Triang Jinties or Princesses? I'm intrigued to see where you go with that T9 project, by the way.