Michael Hodgson

What I loved about the Science Museum in the old days was its railway signalling exhibits. No longer of interest to youngsters it seems, but fortunately John Jolly rescued them for the Mangapps Farm museum. Well worth a visit although it closed because of Covid, reopened for a couple of months but is closed again at present. Afraid today's Science Museum doesn't interest me, but I have been told it's me that belongs in a museum ... and I do have a photo of myself at Didcot Railway Centre standing by an entrance door above which is a sign reading "Display of Relics".

In practice a lot of model railway stuff (and especially layouts) often dies with the modeller, as it is usually of no use or interest to the next of kin personally and has value to them only in as much as it is worth what they are able to sell it for. As they don't know what they are looking at, they can't sell it on ebay as they can't give a decent description. When I was a lad many museums had beautifully engineered scale models of locos and ships in display cases. I have not seen anything like as many in more recent years - so what has happened to them? I don't doubt that a lot of good models get scrapped - but then so did the prototype.

Something like this ?

Yes, good way of doing it. If it's not all on one common return, use the bolt to operate a relay, and use as many sets of contacts as necessary, wiring it via Normally Open contacts for fail-safe.

It was the cylinders I noticed first. Clearances for platforms presumably being a problem for the RTR market

I thought those cow bells on strings were never very common and used on private rather than public level crossings? I don't see that the permitted size in the road vehicle regulations would apply to trailers hauled by agricultural tractors over private crossings, so no reason why you couldn't stack the stuff as high as you like, until the railway starts stick up OHLE.

The other day I got an email from Rails of Sheffield announcing their new range of "DCC Connect Decoders" (4 variants) Says they are "crafted for Rails" by DCC Concepts, and are exclusive to Rails. These are cheaper than the decoders on DCC Concepts own site, so it's evidently not a simple case of badge engineering. Apart from the price, can anybody see a reason for favouring this new brand over others?

...gloss for the top of their heads if their hairstyle is anything like mine.

Wot! No anorak? Cant be a trainspotter

The best way to model a bus. Much better than sticking a "Rail Replacement Service" label on the front, though that does save you the bother of wiring your layout.

Ebay do say these offers are only to those people they've sent the offer to. For historical reasons I have two accounts, and I have sometimes had one of these cheap listing weekends one one account and not the other - I dont know what basis they use for this decision.

Yes, it's hardware dependent. You should consider your controller voltage as well as the choice of detectors. Or to put it another way, if you want to put x volts to your track, and you are using RS-8s your controller/booster would needs to output x+1.4 volts to get x at the track, and you should add the two diodes to any undetected sections. If you use a mixture of detectors some incurring a one diode drop and others losing two diodes worth, you ought still run your booster x x+1.2 volts, and add single diodes to sections monitored by the detectors that only lose one voltage drop. I don't know what principle the 4088 uses, I haven't seen the case opened on one, and their site doesn't say anything about its voltage drops if any.

I didn't know it was a level crossing. The satnav just said "now turn right..."

I have a copy of the accident report. It wasn't the usual type by the Railway Inspectorate. It was court of inquiry under the Merchant Shipping Acts conducted by judges seeking to ascertain whether either of the skippers of the vessels were negligent.

I should add the BY251 diodes they recommend are rated as 3A, which I assume is the same as the booster. I would translate Spannungsgleichheit as Voltage equivalence rather than Current equivalence.

Surely the reason for the advice to fit these diodes is to do with the design of the particular detector? I infer from the LDT paper that their product incurs a small voltage drop as some current sensing circuits certainly do. You want the same voltage to reach all of your track regardless of whether there is a detector in the circuit. So if you have 2 diodes worth of voltage loss internally to each detector you ought ideally to introduce a similar voltage loss to unmonitored sections, so that the whole layout is fed with the same voltage. Yes, of course it should still work without these extra diodes, but you would have a slightly higher voltage on your unmonitored tracks than on those that are detected. If you were using detectors which do not incur such a voltage loss (eg those which use a current transformer like the MERG DTC-02), such diodes would be inappropriate.

A perfectly reasonable assumption if you don't know. "not if use" does sound like "out of order" as seen on everything from telephone boxes to public toilets.

They removed the arms at one or two boxes elsewhere that were only used on race days. It doesn't need an X as it hasn't got an arm. Maybe somebody thought the somersault pivot might be mistaken for a signal arm? Even so they would have thought it at Danger.

Yes, I can confirm it's an excellent kit, but the possibilty of a good quality RTR version would make it difficult for them to justify producing another batch whilst it is unclear whether the Hattons product is cancelled or merely postponed.

They are still showing on the Hattons web site as due into stock between January and March 2021. I have some versions on my "wishlist". I don't know whether wishlists are used in any way as a way of measuring potential demand over and above firm orders. Given they have invested so much effort into the research & CAD, they must have had a very disappointing pre-order book to justify their decision. Or perhaps the Genesis range was looking so much more promising that they saw that as a more profitable way of using their resources for now - maybe it is just suspension as they have called it, rather than cancellation?

This sort of thing happened when lines closed under Beeching etc. Contracts were let with demolition/salvage firms to have the line lifted and signals etc were typically part of the deal. Of course to the bloke driving a crane or bulldozer, if it wasn't a rail it wasn't what his boss had told him to do, so the rails were mostly recovered but the odd bit here and there was easily overlooked and the foreman wasn't really interested in chasing up a few bits of relatively little scrap value. and some fixtures such as boundary markers were planted so deeply that the effort required wasn't cost-justified.

If it does, then your car may be infected and will have to self-isolate. So if it won't start when you come back you will know what has happened! Of course if it's one of those fancy new self-driving cars, perhaps it should go off by itself to one of those drive-through Covid test centres.

No idea, but I can't help noticing a considerable height difference between loco and wagon buffers, enough to be a risk of buffer locking. My guess would be the wagon wouldn't be the one that's wrong. I suppose it wouldn't look as bad if the leading axle were to carry its fair share, perhaps when the other bits are put back on it.

They're only called droppers if they go down - looks like you've got more than enough aerials for your radio control :)