AdamsRadial

Is that a Manning-Wardle on the second to last photo?

I suspect the softness of the metal causes it to clog up the disks, much as aluminium melts into full-size angle-grinder disks. You could try diamond coated disks, they don't have pores that can clog, but reducing the speed of the tool might be necessary to try and keep the temperature down.

Is that beast of the Dodds menagerie? I couldn't get the OP's link to open so I googled and found it here https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-your-own-Metal-Pulse-Magnetizer/ The article rather casually says this device could kill you. For those thinking of playing around I'll just expand a little - yes, it's potentially lethal, not just because 240v AV is being rectified and used to charge the capacitor, but the discharge, of up to 50A at 240V DC even for a fraction of a second is extremely dangerous, far more so than a few milliamps at 240V AC. Google why AC won the battle over DC for household supplies to discover more on this. A few microamps of HV DC might make your hair stand up and your muscles twitch (grab hold of a spark plug lead on an old coil and points car ignition system to get an idea of it) , but 50A is going to cause intense muscle seizures and possible skin burns at the very best. Death at the worst. The circuit could be used at a much lower voltage, 15V AC would be capable of charging the capacitor, albeit more slowly. Putting two windings in series with steel cores in them would create a suitable magnetic path through a complete motor. Increasing the capacitor value would increase the energy discharged through the coils and hence the strength of the remagetising effect.

With only a single coil you would have to dismantle the motor to fit the magnet inside the coil. An improvement would be to have two coils in series, and with iron cores to that the complete motor could be slid between the coils (after using a compass to check the N-S orientation). I suspect if you aren't set up for a lot of experimentation you would be better off finding somebody offering a remagnetizing service.

You need to examine the voltage waveform with an oscilloscope to get a proper understanding of why a motor reacts to different controllers in different ways. A pure DC output from one controller will have a different effect to a chopped output from another controller, (the chopped output types often put out higher voltages at the top of the waveforms). It would be nice to state that the total areas beneath each type of waveform would be similar and therefore the motor speeds would also be similar, but the motors themselves would react differently. An old heavy three-pole armature type would probably not react to the higher voltage spikes in the same way as a much lighter armature.

There is another much older system that was used in analogue systems, dating back to the 1960s and early 1970s, the free-motor idea. It consisted of a second motor with a flywheel but no other mechanical connections to the drive train, simply wired in parallel with the driving motor. When power was applied the mechanical resistance of the motor and flywheel was less than that of the motor and wheels, and so that motor ran up first, the other motor following more slowly. At a steady speed both motors ran. When power was momentarily interrupted the flywheel kept the free-motor spinning so that it acted momentarily as a generator and supplied some voltage to the propulsion motor. The two obvious drawbacks are the increased current draw that two motors would require and the problems in smaller locomotives of space for a second motor and flywheel. I suspect the idea died a death also because of other improvements (changes in metals used for rail and wheels) which went some way towards eliminating the need to prod recalcitrant runners. In this instance, it does offer some advantages over the idea of a big non-polarised capacitor in that tiny can motors with a flywheel would give more of an output for longer than a capacitor of the same volume.

Tow-roping was an old trick. Position the loco and a wagon with a rope or chain going from the loco to the wagon buffer. The loco moves slowly ahead, and as it's wheels clear the point blades the points are changed. The rope pulls the wagon along the diverging track. The rope length (and strength) needs to be chosen with some thought as to distances and necessary force. Junction Road halt, near where I grew up, had a single siding that was tow-roped to drop off vans of shoddy for the nearby hop-fields. Fly shunting was something else again, usually it was one of the tricks Harold Eliot performed at his flea-circus model railway show.

Even into the fifties rural stations still had a shunting horse, but that isn't much help to you in the smaller scales.

I have been using one of the 6-in-1 Unimat Classics as a reconfigurable jig assembly to mount things on. It allows for moving things around in very small amounts, which I often found difficult with my rather impulsive hands. It's useful when glueing things together because you can position the two parts precisely so thay are in the right position, wind one of them out a couple of millimetres, apply the glue, then wind back by the same amount and just leave it to set. No having to hold bits together for five minutes with a nose that suddenly has to be scratched.

ebay offer two types of nickel-plating kits, the standard (Gator) large tub with chemicals, and one described as a "brush", which I haven't actually bought, I got the tank kit., and dodged up a lump of cotton wool to make a swab for dabbing onto point blades where I didn't dare risk immersing the whole point in the bath (one old Hornby point I tried had the pop-rivets disintegrate in the bath).

I loved those Australian locos you've both posted. I have mostly MSTS Australian stock, nit very much Trainz stuff, but in OpenRails I do have the Lithgow ZigZag with some 1890s locos, and several books on the NSWGR locomotive stock, which was a strange mixture of Beyer-Peacock and Baldwin for a time.

I don't know if IPA can be used in an ultrasonic bath. The industry method is for trichlorethylene, which is extremely nasty stuff to either inhale or get on the hands. I haven't put IPA or meths into the baths in my cleaner because of the temperature involved. If the wheel flange or tread has suffered surface degradation, I would suggest re-plating it using one of the nickel plating brush kits (actually is is either a sponge or ball of cotton wool) which will allow you to apply a coating without having to immerse the wheel fully.

Pevsoft is a range of small utilities for Auran Trainz to make missing shadows, convert PM to IM (early trainz), add attachment points to meshes, and for the TGA files, handle alpha layers and the texture text file.The utilities are mostly useful if you are trying to upgrade earlier stock to run in the later Trainz versions. If you're happy with paint.net that is quite capable of doing the proper 32-bit TGA files anyway. Most of the pre-grouping or early grouping stock I have collected is SECR, LBSCR or LSWR for the Kentish area, but I do have a couple of nice NBR coaches and a tank engine. I can see a case for developing Sem34090's idea of lists of stock, and in the case of trainz, noting which version(s) of Trainz they work on. I've got various versions, but I too have stabilised on TS2009 and TS2010, and have had to convert some stock which was TS2012 backwards (quite easy), and some TRS2004/TRS2006 stock forwards (can be a right pain). My current interest though is actually pre-steam, I want to model Lord Carlisle's horse-worked colliery lines as they were up to the opening of the Newcastle and Carlisle railway. Fortunately both MSTS and Trainz have working horses, which so far none of the common modelling scales have.

I haven't bought payware for my system so I don't know the score, but in the license for use you get with your stock, does it permit you to reskin for personal use? If so, you will only need freeware such as Gimp, Paint.net and Irfanview plus PevSoft's TGA converter to put whatever livery you choose on your models.

ngaugenut, Yes, the wheels are left on. I give the part being cleaned four runs, turning it through ninety degrees between each time. The cleaner I use was bought at Aldis a few years back and will take an 0-6-0 chassis (just), it has a plastic basket capable of taking a CD or DVD. After cleaning I blow the remaining water off with air before further cleaning with IPA on the wheels and pickups. I haven't yet had the nerve to try a motor in a cleaning bath, so those get worked over by hand with meths or IPA.

You could cheat and reskin the tender to replace LNER with NER, possibly?

I restored quite a few old Triang and Hornby locos over the past couple of years. I used IPA and meths extensively and had no problems. For really bad cases the technique I used was to dismantle the motor and pickup plates and then put the chassis in an ultrasonic cleaner with warm water and a small amount of washing-up liquid, and it did an excellent job of getting the really hard crud off, after which I cleaned wheels and motors with IPA. I then cleaned up a few of the plastic loco bodies, but found here that the heat or the ultra-sound (still not sure which) dislodged some of the lining and numerals from the body shell. The worst stuff to remove from either the chassis or body is dried hard plasticene. The ultra-sonic bath did work to some extent here to soften it but as mentioned, took the lining off as well.

I presume you've got the book "The Pensnett railway" ? It sounds a wonderful area to model, and some of the early Rastrick and Foster ? engines would look incredible, and be nicely compact

My layout is at mid-chest height because it had to fit over some items already present in the room that couldn't be positioned elsewhere at the time. I had to cut access holes in the baseboard to be able to reach the rear tracks, but I designed it such that all points are on the front 15" board. I find viewing layouts at this height more pleasant than having to look downwards, and the sight at eye-level much better. I have wondered about the wheelchair-bound and child issue before. One high-tech solution to this might be to install a TV screen low down, with a web-cam and periscope controls so that the user can swing the camera to and from.

Go for it! A few years ago I was chatting with Chris Peacock at a model railway exhibition about how to make a horse to shunt the yards in 0 (00 seemed to be impossibly small). We were pondering using things like memory wire for the legs to try and get a bend-straighten effect with pulses of current. In fact the biggest problem we both ended up with was how to make the horse wheel around within or across the tracks when one wagon had been positioned and it had to go back for the next, because it obviously couldn't go backwards, not without looking silly anyway. Brunton's folly does art least rely on the rails.

The conversion of models between different simulator formats has been the subject of short forum posts on UKTrainSIm, Trainsim.com and the Auran/N3V boards, the TL:DR for all of them is you have to have the source model to do the conversion, and few creators will hand those out for free. There are also things to be addressed with the assignation of hierarchy to wheels, motion, animations, texture mapping etc. Regarding the wrong landscape (Looe), in addition to many routes not being made from DEM data, there are projection differences between the MSTS/Kuju and Auran simulators that can result in screenshots from two identical routes at identical positions differing between MSTS and Auran routes. My profile picture is looking out of a coach in Shepherdswell platform towards the Adams Radial on the siding it always seemed to be photographed on, taken from the MSTS version of the route I started over twelve years ago. Positioning the coach and engine in the more recent TS2010 route results in a different skyline because of a subtle shift in alignment of the high embankment, the dip beneath it where the dump siding runs, and the trees on the knees. Both routes were built using DEM data and the 1924 OS map. (Of the two, I believe the Auran projection is the more accurate). Even having DEM data doesn't ensure a perfect route. I puzzled for ages over the impossibility of getting a steady falling grade between Elvington Halt and Knowlton, having to carve cuttings thirty feet deep. When I made a field trip to the area I found the spoil waste from Tilmanstone had been dumped over that area, and of course the satellite/Shuttle missions had dutifully recorded the resultant upwards movement in the landscape.

I am building that very kit (Dapol turntable) and have had to straighten the girders for it using the boiling water trick. The curved pieces do also show some warping, and my current plan is to assemble them on a large steel sheet, warming them first, holding them tightly down to the sheet with strong magnets, and once I am certain all water has evaporated from the parts, adding liquid poly with a small pipette. I did have a go at trying to straighten two of the curves individually, and saw that the lugs with the holes and fasteners were causing as much of the distortion as the remainder of the part, hence the plan with the magnets.

I have used Molasses very successfully, but after washing it off you have to dry and then treat the rail at once, it will rust within the hour if there's the slightest moisture in the air. The same goes for vinegar, and another excellent de-ruster : Oxalic acid. (The stuff which when you pick Daffodils on the farms forms nasty painful crystals in your fingertips and you pay the gang-leaders to dip your hands in a bucket of mild alkaline solution to ease the pain). If you don't mind the chemicals, you could try electroplating the rail after the chelation stage. I've done some with nickel-plating, and I have a zinc electroplate kit I haven't tried yet. Another de-rust method is electrolytic, which also removes the paint from painted tinplate in the blink of an eye. (Well, almost).

Yes, that's the very one, thank you for that. I must get searching and see if they developed the long-barrel mechanism further.

About eight years ago I remember finding a web-site devoted to an outdoor American railway with an interesting experiment: a spring-drive motor with the spring axis along the centreline of the boiler instead of at right-angles to it. I'm hoping I archived that site in my clippings collection, I'll dig it out. It does suggest that there is still some experimentation going on, though not at a manufacturing level.