ejstubbs

Just to be clear, it's not my layout. I merely posted the picture (and a link to the layout owner's description of it) in response to the OP's assertion that an 11ft x 11ft room "would make a OO gauge continuous run layout difficult to build". Note again that Crewlisle only has 8ft6" x 7ft6". Whether or not trainset curves are actually a problem depends on what it is the OP wants to achieve. As I said in my post, the OP would be well advised to sit down and think about that before ruling any options in or out. It's fairly clear that the OP likes to watch the trains go by, which suggests that a compromise might be needed between that and having more realistic-looking curves. Or else switch to 2mm. Ultimately, you can't fight geometry (which is largely why the Greeks invented it in the first place).

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/133688-cm-models-carlisle/&do=findComment&comment=3257986

Some might disagree. Have a look at this layout, which crops up quite regularly in threads of this nature on RMWeb. It fits in an 8ft6"x7ft6" bedroom: Plenty of people would be very grateful for 11ftx11ft for a 4mm layout. You can fit a lot in to such a space if that's what you want. A useful first step is to decide what it is you want to get out of the layout. Some people want somewhere they can exercise their extensive collection of locos & stock, others prioritise realistic operations over numbers of trains, others again enjoy making a convincing scenic location with a railway running through it. Ultimately, unless you are one of the super-rich then space & money will always be constraints - and unless you're retired, time is likely to place even greater limits on what you can do. It's a good idea, when embarking on a new project of this (or indeed any) kind to have a clear of idea of what you definitely want to achieve vs what you are prepared to do without, or at least treat as a lower priority. These requirements always need to be tempered by what is realistically achievable in terms of time & money. It's also useful to set yourself some early objectives so that you can feel that you are making progress - and maybe also use the milestone as an opportunity to take time to review and reflect on what you've achieved so far and what you plan to do next; you may find that your priorities have changed during the time spent working towards your initial objectives. In summary: better to make a considered plan at the outset than to launch in to something that's not realistically achievable or that you won't actually find very satisfying when it's finished. (But don't fall in to the trap of incessant planning with no action!)

Or yellow? For example: extruded (*not* expanded) foam insulation board from Jewsons. Thinnest they do is 20mm, though, so too thick for the OP. (Is it just me or does half an inch sound rather deep for a track bed - unless we're talking about a larger scale than OO, or something other than normal running lines? I'm planning to use 3mm thick trackbed on my next layout which I'm expecting should give a fairly prototypical ballast profile. For 7mm that would be 5-6mm, more like ¼" than ½".)

It wasn't only apparent on printing, it was changed in the pdf.

Having recently completed the process of obtaining probate on my late father's estate, I would say my experience of that part of the process was that it can be mind-numbingly frustrating. In my case, I opted to fill in the IHT forms on my computer, rather than by hand which is always an error-prone exercise for me. I discovered that the HMRC's pdf forms have some utterly bizarre bugs in them, such as changing the contents of the deceased's date of death field (including changing the day of the month to the 77th!) after you'd filled it in - only spotted when I printed it out to post it to HMRC - or blanking out the contents of fields I'd already filled in when I entered data in another wholly unrelated field. I ended up having to resort to leaving the affected fields blank and "inserting" the data as comment text. What got me about this was that there must be highly-paid professionals doing this sort of thing every day: do none of them ever get as fed up as I did, and report such idiocies to HMRC so that they get fixed? I just wanted to get it over and done with the once, but for people whose job it is to do this stuff, surely it must drive them up the wall? Or do they all do it by hand?

Tax avoidance is, as you say, legal (though it sometimes pushes at the boundaries of what was intended when the relevant law was passed). Anyone who has an ISA is taking advantage of a form of tax avoidance. Tax evasion is illegal, and basically involves dishonest declarations of the financial status of the individual or corporation - or, in other words, fraud (OED: "Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain").

Your layout reminds me somewhat of Kyle of Lochalsh. A number of features strike a chord: Long, narrow layout (admittedly at KoL this was because the station was built partly on the pier); Single island platform accessed from one end (at KoL this is via a ramp from the overbridge on the landward end of the site); Goods/wharf facilities on both sides of the passenger facilities. KoL did have a loco shed, and a 60ft turntable, but they were back up the line a bit, beyond two road overbridges. The turntable is now at Aviemore on the Strathspey Railway.

Why do you need a Deed of Variation? Once you have inherited the money, isn't it up to you to do with as you choose?

Following the last update, my Windows 10 virtual machine decided that its copy of Windows wasn't activated. Not that it made much of a fuss about it, mind: just a subtle watermark in the bottom right corner of the desktop. Since I normally run the application that I use Windows for full screen, I didn't notice it for a few days. Dug out my Windows 7 DVD and re-entered the product code from that and Windows was happy again. Not sure what would have happened if I had failed to notice it for a longer time. Just another of the flaky little annoyances that Microsoft manages to inject into our lives I guess...

That's the service sheet. It's even catalogued on the Hornby web site under "Service Sheets". Mr Henderson has already made it clear that it's the maintenance sheet that he needs. This kind of thing (catalogued separately on the main downloads page under "Hornby Locomotive Maintenance Sheets"), but for DoG rather than a Duchess. It looks like what Mr Henderson needs is for someone who has one to scan the maintenance sheet and PM it him.

Always up for a challenge, I thought I'd see if I can find it. I can't. It would be most helpful if those who claim to be able to locate it could post the link to the actual document on the Hornby web site. (In most browsers you can copy the URL for the linked document from the context menu ie by right-clicking on the link.)

IMO once you're well beyond the stop line, as you would be in the case you describe, then the traffic light no longer applies. This page from the Highway Code states: "RED means ‘Stop’. Wait behind the stop line on the carriageway" (my emphasis). I believe that this means that if you have passed the stop line when the light was green you are therefore free to proceed in a manner that is safe in the circumstances. (Which might, in this case, include giving way to traffic approaching from your right*, since it is a roundabout.) Better that than sit around going nowhere for no reason, which is potentially both confusing for other drivers and could create an obstruction. I was one blocked at a crossroads by a driver who stopped at the repeater light on the far side of the junction. There was no white line in front of them - it was thirty feet behind them - and the road in front of them was completely clear. They had entered the junction legally as there was no yellow box, but by misinterpreting the traffic light they completely blocked the junction for crossing traffic when their lights turned green. They sat there looking confused, apologetic and making "what can I do?" gestures for the whole of our green phase. It apparently never occurred to them that what they could do was get the heck out of everyone's way... I freely admit that I will very occasionally carefully pull out in to the opposite lane to pass a queue of traffic in order to access a road on the right. But only ever from a main road where I want to turn in to a side road, and only ever where I can see far enough ahead to be sure that there is no traffic approaching in the other direction (and checking behind before pulling out, of course). The driver in that video took a punt with absolutely no way of knowing what might be coming the other way. No different to overtaking on a blind bend, just slower. There is a T-junction near where I live which has a ~100m two-lane section on the approach. The left hand lane has a left turn filter at the lights, drivers in the right hand lane can turn right when the main phase is green. Fairly obviously, the left-turn lane runs faster then the right-turn one. One morning the traffic was, unusually, backed up a good distance past the start of the two-lane section. Drivers waiting to turn right (including me) queued as far over towards the white centre line as we could but there wasn't really anything we could do to allow people who wanted to turn left to get past. Which must have been frustrating for them, but did not in any way justify driving along the footway to get past. Of course it was illegal in itself, but in this case it was also on a blind left-hand bend, and they had no way of knowing whether any pedestrians might be coming the other way.

BlueRailways' web site says that their DC controller uses PWM, but at "inaudible frequencies". It doesn't say what the frequency actually is, not does it say whether it uses PWM at fixed voltage (varying the pulse width but not the pulse voltage) which is reported elsewhere as being one of the things that can cause problems with coreless motors. However, in the FAQ it does say: "This is EXACTLY the same method used to drive the motor that a DCC decoder uses. There is plenty of information on the internet about PWM and DCC," which sounds positive since - as reported elsewhere on this thread, coreless motors work OK with DCC. It also says: "The controllers has been widely tested with locomotives from all manufacturers and the only problem was with one loco which had a large value motor suppression capacitor. This worked perfectly after replacing it with a lower value capacitor." One interesting feature of the BlueRailways controllers is that you can set the start voltage, acceleration, deceleration and maximum speed like you can with DCC CVs (although the settings apply to the controller, not to each loco).

There is rather more to it than that. The guts of the controller is the the stuff on the circuit board inside the enclosure. The potentiometer is the thing on the other end of the knob that you use to tell the controller what to do: in simple terms it translates the mechanical position of the knob in to an electronic signal to the controller circuitry telling it how much electricity to send to the track. The Gaugemaster hand-held controllers have the control circuitry within the hand-held enclosure. The Morley hand-helds just have another potentiometer, identical to the one on the main unit, which tells the circuitry in the main unit what to do (there's actually a switch on the main unit to select between the potentiometer on the main unit or the one on the hand-held). That's why it's so easy to make your own hand-held for the Morley, or panel-mount a potentiometer, as David says he's done. It's also why the Morley hand-held doesn't get hot: it's handling very small electrical signals (in the order of a tiny fraction of Watt) compared to the power output circuit which, in the Morley, is all in the main unit (the main unit's metal front panel actually acts as the heat sink for the power transistors).

AIUI the original Morley controlllers did not have the positive click between forward and reverse. ISTR that the feature was introduced a few years ago, so any Morley controller bought new will have it (mine, bought two years ago, does).

According to this Wiki article, up to and including the 1959 season one championship point was awarded for the fastest lap in the race. This seems to have been instead of the single point for sixth place. (I could have sworn that the point for fastest lap was reinstated for a short while sometime in the 1970s or 1980s but the article says not. Might have been a different formula/championship/race series though I'm blowed if I can remember which one.) Edited to say that Formula E apparently does award a point for the fastest race lap, but they've had to tweak the rules to stop drivers with no chance of a points-scoring place going for fastest lap and getting in the way of the actual racing. https://www.motorsport.com/formula-e/news/formula-e-set-to-change-fastest-lap-points-rule-946972/

Which probably explains why I'm more familiar with the term "desert cooler" being used for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler#Disadvantages

That's a job for a technician. I'm only partly joking: the use of the term "engineer" for anyone who can manage to hold a screwdriver the right way round is a perpetual source of annoyance for [some] professionally qualified engineers. However, it cannot be denied that a degree of practical experience, if not necessarily proficiency, is useful in many professional engineering disciplines. OTOH it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if, for example, there were at least a few automotive engineers who can't actually drive. A good many engineers these days probably have more practical expertise in using a computer than they do in wielding physical tools. You also need to take in to account the specialisation and segmentation of disciplines. One of my previous employers was a microelectronics design company. Few if any of the ferociously clever electronic engineers who worked there designing digital audio processing microchips would have had a clue how to run the machines that actually made the things. Contrariwise, the equally smart folks who design and build silicon foundry equipment would likely not get very far with the CAD software that our chip designers used to design and simulation test their microscopically tiny circuits. And why should they? So long as there are people able to facilitate the communication between the two, chips can be designed, simulated, made and tested without any one person needing to be able to understand or execute the end-to-end process at the finest level of detail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technician https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer

The term for this is "unconscious competent": people like this usually make poor teachers because they don't understand/have forgotten how much stuff they themselves had to learn to get to the level of competence that they currently have. It's not a bad thing, just a thing. "Unconscious competents" are often among the very best at doing what they do, but are not terribly good at passing on their accumulated skills and experience to anyone a long way away from their level of competence. The best teachers are usually "conscious competents": they are good at doing what they do, though not necessarily among the very best, but they can remember what it was like starting from ground zero, and all the things they had to learn on the way to reaching the level of competence they now have. They can use that knowledge to inform their teaching so that they pitch each lesson at the right level for their students to be able to learn. An "unconscious competent" can transition towards becoming a "conscious competent" if, like you, they begin to recognise the gap between what they they didn't know that they knew, and what the students don't know. The most dangerous types to have in an organisation or team are the "unconscious incompetents": they're rubbish at the job, but are too stupid to realise it so take on stuff that they aren't actually competent to do, mess it up and waste everyone's time correcting their mistakes. These people can be amongst the first to volunteer to take on a task, which is why a sensible team leader/manager will avoid dumping work on the first person to put their hand up: you need to make sure that they are actually up to the job (or that they have appropriate support, if you want them to learn in the process) before leaving them to it. (See also the Dunning-Kruger effect.) The fourth type of person is the "conscious incompetent": they know the limits of their ability and won't offer or agree to take on work that's beyond their competence out of eagerness or a desire to impress. On the positive side, knowing their limits does mean that they can articulate what help and support they might need to take on a task which stretches their capabilities, if the team requires that eg because no-one else is available - assuming that the bandwidth exists to provide said help and support.

Sorry, it doesn't really make sense - it's the way the world is going. However, as mentioned once already on this thread, XTrackCAD runs on MacOS and is free. Personally I don't get on with it but it does exist as a possible solution to your problem if it's the paying money element of buying apps online that is forbidden. (And it does appear to include Atlas track in the downloadable package: http://www.xtrkcad.org/Wikka/ParameterFiles.)

Now if one saw that location modelled one would be grumbling about the unlikelihood of such a cliched scene: tunnel mouth, level crossing, bridge... Now thinking about how to replicate the steam and smoke billowing out of the tunnel mouth! Here it is on Google Streetview. Just under 2km along the SP456 towards Ovada the line emerges from the north end of the same tunnel as in the video, goes over a level crossing, then over a masonry bridge over the same river, then back in to another tunnel - all in the space of about 200m*. In fact, looking at the line from Acqui Terme to Genova on the map, it almost seems to spend more time in tunnels than in the open! For the sake of those on board the train, I'd hope that most of the other tunnels are rather better ventilated than the one in the video (which is only about half a mile long) seems to have been. * So roughly 3m in OO (or 2.6m in HO).

They called him in, which was fine. As he was coming in he pointed out that Kimi was coming in ahead of him and their immediate response was to tell him to stay out. A fraction of a second later they changed their minds again, which was when the "in in in" screaming started. Lewis had already started to act on their advice to stay out and, quite sensibly IMO, made the decision to stick with the plan immediately in hand. It's almost impossible to do something properly if you're not sure whether or not you're actually supposed to be doing it. In a high-performance, close to the limit sport like F1 swithering and indecision are recipes for failure. Lewis took back control when the team seemed to be losing it. The ability to make decisive choices under pressure is one of the things F1 drivers get paid for. Most teams, AFAIAA, run the tyre strategy from the pit. Mercedes almost give the impression that they are so disorganised that the drivers have to do it themselves. A decently organised team would have a plan to deal with the risk that a close opponent might turn out to be pitting at the same time as your driver, not descend in to chaos as Mercedes gave every impression of doing. (I still reckon that the sooner that Liberty Media and the FIA together find a way to do away with strategic tyre stops the better it will be. Looking at the detail in the tyre specifications reported in this article, in particular the performance degradation rates, makes the game seem so artificial IMO. They might as well specify how often the cars have to break down, or how many times in a season each driver has to drive in to another car. It almost makes Bernie's idea of track sprinklers seem sensible...)

If I were him I'd be having some very serious conversations with the team management about their pit/tyre strategies and tactics. Changing their mind, twice, at the last minute when the track is wet and greasy is not clever. And as we all know, it's far from the first time they've made a mess of things in that department this year.

Harrow, not Eton. But it was the local grammar, not the public school, that he attended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrow_High_School