Michael Hodgson

All blue is used for a FPL, also a clearance bar (if you can find any these days) Blue over black is used where one lever combines the function of throwing the point and locking it - this woud be a power-worked point (point motors have point locking built-in) or an "economic FPL" (common MR mechanical practice, not much used elsewhere) Blue over brown is the standard colour for a Release, a Bolt locking lever, a Direction lever or an Annets Key lever. On the Banbury GF photo I can actually read the lever plate - it says "Release" Lever 2 reads Down Relief Down Siding As Jeremy says, there's no need for an FPL as it's only a trailijng connection on a Down Line. The SB Diagram has a note that (GF)1 released by 10 lever in the box. The horizontal bars secured to levers lock them such that you can't pull 3 without first pulling 2, which you can't pull until you pulled 1, although this is not shown on the lever pull plates.

That's a very interesting approach to effectively double heading with an engine and powered tender, I've not heard of anybody doing that before. I wonder whether you have lower maximum tractive effort with a differential than without though. Modern diesels have good hauling power and adhesion because they've got all or most of the weight on driving wheels whereas steamers often don't. That results in some RTR lacking the hauling capability (especially on gradients) that I'd like them to have. Our gradients are of course often unprototypically steep because of space constraints. Getting as much weight as possible onto the drivers is the obvious answer, but may not be enough. So double heading is the next answer to the problem. Banking is another, although it can have problems if speeds aren't matched well enough, especially if there are issues about coupling/buffers. I've always worked on the principle that both units should run at the same speed, or at least very similar. I'm with you on traction tyes; they may help adhesion but not very much in my experience, and they certainly aren't worth the downside of dirt. On the subject of dirt, one option for track cleaning however is coupled locos deliberately running at different speeds, so that one slipping polishes the rails as the other drags it slowly along (like some of these cleaning wagons). DCC makes this possible, whereas it was difficult under DC. I have experienced it as quite effective on old 3-rail DC in O gauge though - three identical 0-6-0s coupled, two chimney first the other tender first. The two going forwards are suffficent to drag the other protesting with vigorous wheel spin does help clean the rails. The extra weight of O gauge seems to make this method more effectively than it does in OO.

So are you advocating the modelling of wheelslip? Presumably could be achieved by intentionally mismatching the speed of a powered loco to the speed of a powered tender under DCC. Is there a way of dynamically adjusting the characteristics of separate mechanisms in a consist, so that they run in sync at speed but not on starting?

Well we were never too sure but the GN in WAGN was previously the Great Northern Suburban lines, so presumably the WA was the GER routes - people living on the Hertford East line rather than Hertford North, or Cambridge to Liverpool Street rather than Kings Cross?

The Far East!

That's probably because half the letters were addressed to some place called Luik

Things the average DC user may not appreciate about DCC are you can use DCC for traction, or to control accessories like point motors and yard lights, but you don't have to put both onto DCC - which can mean a cost saving on equipment the direction forward/reverse is relative to the orientation of the loco rather than to the track, which means forward=chimney first and you need to know which is the front and back of a diesel loco if you want to set it going the right way first time you need an autoreverser if you have a reverse loop if it's a big layout all running on the one supply, a short caused by derailment will stop the lot, not just the affected line - so zoning the supply into districts with separate cutouts may be advisable if you're taking locos along to a club layout intending to run them together with other people's, your numbers need not to conflict with theirs, or you will have some unexpected movements traction feed wiring should use heavier gauge wire than you may be used to on DC when selecting equipment, there are some optional facilities which are not supported by all decoders, such ABC braking for automatically braking the same applies to Railcom, which allows a controller to identify a loco - both controller and decoder have to support the feature

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Some of us round here don't recognise West Anglia either. At least they've stopped putting that nonsense on our trains. I mean to say, a WAGN train was something that used to get attacked by Geronimo. And we still recognise Huntingdon as the capital of Huntingdonshire.

Perhaps the Leader class of locomotive should have been named after famous political party leaders. It could feature such people as Nicola Sturgeon, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, ... oh yes, pity they gave up building them after starting the third. Coming back to the original loco, should 70013 get a new boiler certificate before it is driven off the end of the rails on the Bristol Harbour Railway?

I suppose that depends on one's budget.

It would be on the same lever - effectively two points aranged as a crossover, with one etrack just leading to the dirt. My initial reaction to this thread was that the layout sounded imporbable, but there's a prototype for most things if you look hard enough! I also thought it more likely to be worked by the box - the reason for GFs on engine run round loops is that there's often too far from the box for the permitted length of point rodding run. Agreed it needs an FPL, could presumaby be worked by release lever if there's a GF, separate lever in box otherwise - it would only need to lock the point when it's normal, not into the siding.

There would obviously have to be a trap.

I've always found wagon turntable attractive but you can't attach wagons to a loco for movements to the buildings. So how are you moving wagons there - Hand of God or motorised wagons? I suppose some form of under-board magnetic system might be feasible, but I wouldn't fancy trying it. In practice I assume they used pinch bars, or perhaps horses or capstans in some cases.

Not that rapidly - they've been doing it for decades!

It looks as though its been kept in a chicken shed!

Pooh!

That is a cat with real character !

Also happens in 12":1ft scale, and they don't usually paint the rail sides with acrylic paint. The moral is clear - run trains regularly - it's not your paint job that's causing your diffculties.

There's one on Ebay - item no 285813409764. It's not one of the ones I'm trying to flog though!

Don't give me AI. Yesterday I wanted to hang out the washing if the weather was going to hold. Alexa told me it would start raining at 12pm. I've always understood there was no such time, there's 12 noon and 12 midnight, given the meaning of the Latin abbreviations. And I'm wary of those times having had to fix Cobol programs that had been specified for a clock running from 0101 to 2460 hours. So I asked Alexa "What is pm?" and it told me that was currently Rishi. OK, fair enough I suppose, so I rephrased it "When is pm?" It told me that 8pm started on 12th March 2023 at 4am !!

Basic is a convenient if old-fashioned programming language for this sort of thing. The first thing I did with my BBC Micro was to modify the Clock program that came with it (written in Basic) to a fast clock (8 times normal speed) for running a model railway to a timetable. I also wrote my own spreadsheet system for maintaining an inventory of rolling stock. Microsoft used to come with a version called qBasic. This was extremely useful and I wrote a number of program using this for various purposes. One was to operate a full size block instrument by offering train using the standard bell codes, and operating the dials. It could also generate random emergency codes. The more difficult part was getting it to interpret bell codes sent to it using a tapper. It can still be used with Windows running a DOS box. It can of course be written using other programming languages, it's really a question of what you have readily available and what you have familiarity with as there is a learning curve with all progamming languages. This could be done if you develop an interface to software like iTrain - which is a better piece of software than any AI system I've yet seen..

Yes, but thanks to the latest achievement of our glorious political leaders, more bandwidth will become gradually available as nobody born after 2009 will be allowed to produce smoke signals.

If he's got a lorryload of spare tarmac he's probably the chap being paid by the council to mend the potholes.