rogerzilla

My understanding is that he buys them all with his own money. After the way he's laid into Hornby, Bachmann and (especially) Heljan, none of those would be likely to give him the steam off their, well, you know.

Yes, the magazines usually put the RRP in very small text somewhere and don't talk about value for money. The real scandal is when very old tooling is used to crank out another batch of models but the price goes up to the same as a freshly-tooled model. The Bachmann Ivatt 2MT tank is a case in point.

The reviews by the most notorious YouTuber do appear to be independent, although limited in scope and with little interest in, or knowledge of, the prototype. He certainly slags off the bad models mercilessly.

I've been on the Pinzgauer Lokalbahn from Zell am See to Krimml but sadly have always missed the steam service (Dampfzugfahrt). It was quite a ramshackle setup in 2000 but in 2013 it had more modern stock and you could arrive not stinking of diesel.

Since one-off prototypes are all the rage, I wonder if they'll do the one with outside Stephenson gear?

They look SO ANGRY with yellow panels. "Get orf moi railway!"

Oil doesn't create lumps of char but it does create a lot of soot in the tubes, generally removed at intervals by throwing sand into the firebox (the results at the chimney are spectacularly horrible, worse than coal smoke) There's normally still stuff to be removed from the front end, even if it's just filthy sand.

According to Nock, they used double blocking for the Silver Jubilee, except on the sections of line with newer automatic signalling where it could go no faster than other trains as the automation couldn't do double blocking.

Not on Readly yet - I just checked.

All the new steam locos have "First Class Open Return" prices!

Air resistance increases with the square of speed and the other resistances only increase linearly with speed, so at some point air resistance becomes the most significant component.

The A4 streamlining did save power at 90mph+. The B17 streamlining (which didn't involve any reshaping of the loco underneath) was purely for show, as they never got up to those speeds. It did look good, though. I would guess the same applies to the W1 and P2 streamlining, since they were also done as an afterthought. The Coronation "bathtub" streamlining was also wind tunnel tested and found to be of marginal benefit, but didn't lift smoke very well at all. An A4 had unseen improvements over an A3, notably the boiler with its combustion chamber and more internal streamlining of the steam circuit.

Has 4930's arsonist tendency been cured now? Not that it really matters in the current weather; you'd be lucky to get anything burning with a flamethrower.

As long as you're not a speed freak, being a freight driver sounds much more interesting than passenger work. Even if the locos are a bit agricultural at times.

I'd normally suggest trying it on DC with a blanking plug but not in this case, since it came DCC-fitted. Things are more complex if it was just DCC ready, as the loco manufacturer will blame the decoder and vice-versa, then they'll both blame your fitting!

Thanks - the HF2 is really to improve slow running as I clean the track before every session.

Were they trying to abandon the Combe Down tunnels after the accident, or just because they were single line? The accident was actually on a northbound train, where the rising gradient isn't as bad; I think southbound trains were usually banked, as the climb out of Bath was very stiff but mostly in the open air.

The River Avon also swings NW where the chord would need to run, meaning quite a tricky bit of skew bridge building. The existing bridge (which now gets you into Sainsbury's car park) crosses at a perfect 90 degrees. Bath, England https://maps.app.goo.gl/bjE5ZoxcVWH99ERU8 The civil engineers probably looked at it and realised the cost would be huge, with either a very long bridge or a lot of extra meandering about. Edit: joining the GWML would have been easier but I doubt the GWR would have thought much of it.

You can use wired fishplates to save on the soldering but the mechanical connection can still get oxidised and fail (although it would take two fishplates to fail for a teain to stop). The layout I built (literally) in 24 hours in 2015 is still ok, and that uses setrack joined with ordinary fishplates and one soldered power feed per track. It's all DC. Any failures of continuity will depend on humidity, temperature and possibly DC vs DCC (I would expect DC to be worse for corrosion, as one rail is always the anode and the other the cathode). It's probably something to worry about for layouts in sheds, in lofts or those that are going to be kept for a decade or more.

You'd think a real "Easterner" would have had one of the streamlined B17s used on the "East Anglian", rather than an A4. Now that would be a USP for TT.

That's a really badly worn two-tone green. Most of them were like that before BR got around to painting them blue.

If you have a brake feature on your decoder, it may be better to set CV4 to a high value (try 150 for a Zimo decoder) and use the brake instead. Less guesswork about where the train will stop, and arguably more realistic.

Some purists would argue that the GWR's best days were over by 1923, as Churchward had already retired. I think Collett gets a bit of a rough ride, personally - the Castles and Halls were outstandingly successful and the Kings did what they were meant to. The main failure was to recognise the benefits of higher superheat (something Churchward hadn't accepted either) but you can argue it wasn't necessary - the GWR engines ran perfectly economically on Welsh coal and the high boiler pressures helped make up the difference anyway.

To add to the above, my Hornby J50 did the same thing until I lubed and freed up the sprung brass plungers that carry the power. These are good for disassembly but can get stuck over time, meaning contact is lost as soon as there is a bit of sideways movement in the chassis.

Are the 69s any quieter than the 66s? Received wisdom is that 66 drivers end up with hearing loss.