AyJay

If you are using copper-clad strip that is double-sided, make sure you remove all the copper from the down-facing side before you secure it in place. I had short-circuits galore on an earlier layout. Discovered that where they had been cut into strips, it left whiskers of copper bridging the surfaces.

I am allowed to be very critical of my layout and ‘pick at details’ or ‘count rivets’ to my hearts content. But let all other ‘rivet counters’ and ‘unasked advisors’ be warned….. That model of fingers and cleaver on a butchers block……. Is no model. 😉

My manager, in response to a question, introduced me to ‘The Red Faced Rule’. This was a different context, but I think it applies here. It goes “If you cannot defend a position to others, without going ‘red faced’, then it is probably not a very good position”. I do what I like with my layout; which usually means watching passenger trains, composed of steam locos from each of the big-four, pulling carriages of assorted liveries, going round and round until I get bored of watching. The location is ‘Anywhere , UK’. But I like it, so there!

Just popping my head up to say that I have some vague recollection that my first train set was these carriages with a steam locomotive. That was about 60 years ago. They are very grand looking carriages, or is that “cars” though. That’s my pennysworth, I’ll go now.

The most frequently used tool in my railway room is a dyson. Use it every day, don’t let the dust or cobwebs build up.

I could see a possibility where mine eventually gets stripped back to bare boards. However, the two parts that I am proudest of are two corner pieces that comprise the card buildings that I made. Also, I made them as complete lift-out sections. So, if the layout goes, these two pieces will stay and could even form a novel table. Fast forward many years to after I’m long gone and perhaps a relative will be wheeling them into ‘The Repair Shed’.

Yes, I also thought that it was unlikely because it’s all railway property. But what about this second picture? The two lines to the front are the running lines just next to the station. The third line behind is for the goods yard, which is open to the street behind the perimeter wall. I have also added a third picture, to show what it looks like further along, gives a clearer picture of the set-up

Can anyone tell me if there would be a fence between the turntable and the running lines behind it? Thank you

An update on this. I have had to mail the owner and ‘ with regret’ decline her request for assistance for personal reasons. So replies on this subject are no longer required. Thank you for your suggestions all.

In this household, I think that it’s going to hit the regular expenditure harder than the one-offs. First on my hit list will be the Sky subscription, rapidly followed by BRM. With my other half telling me about the rising cost of the food bill, I could dig up the lawn to grow veggies. There’s also a lake nearby with lots of ducks on it and there’s a bit of a pidgin problem round here; anyone care to sell me an air-rifle? There’s an expression I heard “Tough life makes hard people” l don’t want to get ‘hard’.

This is a bit off the left field a bit and I'm hoping that someone here understands this subject and can give me some guidance. I got 'grabbed' at church this morning by one of our members who asked if I could fix up her dolls house for her, and of course, I said 'Yes'. Now I realise that this is nothing like scratch building 4mm buildings for a layout and I am totally out of my depth with zero experience of this sort of thing. She has sent me some pictures, the construction is sound but the paper on the outside needs to be completely stripped off and replaced. She only wants the outside done, fortunately. An initial search has shown me that there are suppliers of dolls house material, so I can obtain the brick paper, I now need to establish exactly what it is that she wants doing, although I gather from our conversation that the structure is sound, the paintwork needs redoing and the glazing in the windows is not fogged up. I would like to do a really good job on this and my initial thoughts are: Can I add texture to the brickwork? Is it worth it? The roofing needs to be textured and I would like to do something along the lines of layering rows ( as one would do with the Scale Model Scenery roof tiles). Details like guttering, downpipes and chimney pots? What do I use to glue the brickpaper in place? Wallpaper paste? Any recommendations on suppliers? Anything else I need to know? She is an adult and wants this done for a child relative, so yes, this is for playing with. Thank you in advance Alan (reduced to sheer panic)

Funny you should say that….. Not John Noakes, but when he was Chief Scout, Peter Duncan looked just like me. No, I don’t do dares.

Warning! Slight digression coming up. On the ‘re-purposing’ front, it amuses me that when searching for something to be used in a modelling application, the bemused expression of sales assistants is priceless.: In the kitchen furniture store where I am looking at those odd hinges on cooker hoods - to be used as dampers in controlling the drop of a vertical entry flap on my layout “What make of kitchen have you got?” Then theres in the pet shop looking at tubs of grit, to be used as the rock interior of a broken castle wall “what cage pet have you got?” I have yet to be caught prowling around the make-up counter, looking for Trident missiles 😉 As for recycling, some of my wooden stirrers are now planks of wood on my lumberyard. If I ever go to a hotel, I have to keep those small glass pots that jam comes in; useful for putting small bits in. Lastly, the foil bags inside boxes of M&S Teabags, line the roof insides of my buildings, to reflect light.

Well I had a visit to B&Q today and came back with some white daylight roller blinds, two are now fitted and will finish the job tomorrow. Continuing on the controlling heat issue, when I had my man cave built, I chose not to have opening windows (big mistake) so now when it’s hot, I have to have the door open. I’m now wondering how I can add a couple of air vents in, double skinned wood walls with insulation in the gap. Any suggestion as to how many/ what size to give an effective airflow. If global warming is getting worse, then my last step will be a reflective sheet to pull over the roof, but that might be taking it a bit far. Can the rolling stock or buildings be damaged by the heat?

Copper strip laid along board edges. Cork sheeting glued in place. Point and motor on order from shop. Track, joiners and pins dug out. Time to put my feet up 😎

Yesterdays sweltering heat got me rather alarmed because it was like an oven in my man cave and I was worried for the track. Discovered that the track was in the sun at one place and the expansion gaps there were zero. So everything opened it the outside, fan running at full speed and some reflective material pinned up to keep the sun out. By the evening the chrisis had passed and this morning I was widening those expansion gaps with a slitting disc. Now I am considering a visit to the local diy store to buy some daylight blinds as a permanent solution for the windows. We are due hot weather in the coming week. Anyone else have a panic because of the hot weather?

What! No 12 inch to the foot’s? 😉

Mi’Lady and I came to an agreement. So long as the bills are paid, I can buy what I want. However I am careful not to abuse that licence. If anything is said about the cost, I just reply that I don’t smoke and I’m no fan of football. What does a premier league season ticket cost anyway? So how many engines do I have? Always one less than what I want!

I am trying to do a clear out of stuff not wanted and this includes a number of Metcalfe houses , assembled, that are just taking up space. is this something that would generate any interest, eg Facebook marketplace, or would there be no demand and I should just bin them and not waste my time?

I have to agree with a couple of others and say that I too do not feel that I should answer this one. In various guises, I regularly see these random questions on social media platforms: “How many cars have you got”, “How big is your house” and so on. It’s probably businesses touting for a lead, but being a suspicious g1t, I wonder if there is an element of someone harvesting data about you to sell on (remember, you are a product to be traded). There could also be more nefarious intent.

Well there's some interesting options. I am in favour of the alternative exit option, so have just done some measuring. I think that by slightly reworking the right end of the lowest existing 'road', I can put a 'large Y' point just right of the water tower, the opposite end to connect to the turntable. This will give me space for an additional 4 locomotives. Since I have already got some lengths of code 75 rail and a few spare cobalt levers, the only cost will be an additional point and cobalt point motor at £40, or £10 per loco. An additional line at the turntable's 2-o'clock position? Yes that should work, and its effectively for free :-) Thank you for that Stephen. As for the retaining wall, I have plenty of brick paper from scale model scenery and so can build a fairly rugged wall that I can fix into the board with some thick coffee stirrers I have, for support. Well now all I have to do is just wait until the next exhibition.

When I designed my layout, I allowed plenty of space for locomotives, but now I have more locomotives than I have space for in my engine yard and I am considering laying an additional siding, as shown by the bottom track in this photograph. The entrance to the engine yard is over points to the right (off picture). But the entrance to this new length will be via the turntable. This solution means that I don’t have the expense of a point and motor; it also means that I don’t lose a locomotive space for the point. This proposed solution will give me space for 4 or 5 locomotives; I will also have to put in a retaining wall on the edge to prevent accidents. But would this be prototypical / sensible? Thoughts please

Well I can certainly agree with everything that has been said here, although you're preaching to the converted folks. I just need to 'educate' The Wife. In a bizarre sort of way, it has done me a favour in that it prodded me to do something that I had been putting off. A lot of my passwords were far too short and I had a couple of duplicates. I have spent about a day going through them all and changing just about everything that matters. They are all very long now, and unique. So now I can relax, comfortable knowing that nobody's going to: submit postings on this website, shop at Eileens Emporium, mess about in the facebook account, play with my money, see my medical records, redirect my mail or order ABBA tickets at my expense. Phew! Incidentally. Just after we had this fiasco with the Driving Licence, my personal Computer started playing up and I was beginning to wonder if a virus had infected it. Well I checked out the symptoms and the response was that it was probably the video card on the blink, check for dust. So I took the computer down to the shed and opened it up. Absolutely full of dust! So it got a good cleanout and now it works just fine. No virus. I gave the Hi -Fi amp the same treatment too, the power transistors will thank me for it.

You have probably all heard about this in the media. Well it happened to us this week and I would like to get past the embarrassment, come out and share what happened, so that I can save someone else from falling into this trap. As part of my work, I have regular training in identifying scams. I think I'm pretty good at spotting them, but I don't think that I would have spotted this one. On Monday, my wife went to renew her Driving Licence and she used her phone to do it. I was in another room, at work when I heard her anguished cry. Piecing together the exact events from what she said and what I reproduced on my computer, this is what happened. My Wife's usual way to access a website on her phone is to go to the search engine, Google, type in what she wants, then click on the option that it returns. She says that she DID click on the option that said 'RENEW YOUR DRIVING LICENCE - GOV.UK' and that this took her to the government website. Once on the Government website, she navigated the options to renewing driving licences and clicked the big green 'Start now' button, which took her to the DVLA website. Once there, she filled in all the questions, gave payment details and clicked the 'Submit' button. The next thing that happened was she received a notification saying that £95 was being debited from her account. The first thing we did was to contact our bank and try to stop the payment. They froze the account and said they would issue a new card. Then I questioned her closely about what happened and even reproduced her steps on my computer, up to the point that she was on the bogus site. At no point was there any text on the website saying that this was unofficial or a 3rd party. There was nothing saying what the charge would be. Then we went down the path of getting on the phone to 'ActionFraud', and a long, uncomfortable, sorry tale of how we had been scammed. I then decided to do an internet search on this scam; this led me to the website of 'Trustpilot', where I read the awful sorry saga of how countless other people have fallen for this very trick for the past couple of years. Further informed, I then decided to search for this third party trader under their own name. Well I easily found the website and I did some exploring. It looks a very well presented and professional website. On it, I found a link to a page that laid out their refund policy. "You must apply for a refund within 24 hours" it said. So I clicked the 'Apply for refund' button. This presented me with a page where there were boxes to enter name, address and telephone number. I filled in details and it looked odd that there were more address lines than would be needed and as I started typing, they all lit up with "This must be filled in" messages. Several times I tried to fill this in, and each time I pressed the 'Submit' button, I got back a message saying "There is a problem, try again later". Then I realised that this was not meant to work! I continued to look round the website, all sorts of comforting words like "We are with you for all your licencing needs" and "Our operators are happy to help, just send us a message". So I tried their 'Enquiries" option. Why did it not surprise me that this option also had a problem and that I should try later? So I looked on Companies House. Well that's interesting! This company has moved address six times in the past two years and has had a change of name. So this is what I could piece together. This is a genuine company and their website does say that they are a 3rd party and it does give their prices. But... I believe that they have managed to misdirect off the genuine site and onto theirs, where they have set up a clone i.e. they are deliberately misrepresenting. By being a genuine company, they are cleverly staying within the law and thus not coming within the definition of fraud. This is so that they cannot be touched by the Police and your Bank cannot uphold a request to dispute the transaction. Where this sorry tale started was with what many of you would no doubt do. Call it complacency, or laziness; with a computer and more so with a phone, the obvious way to find a website is to put your search term into your chosen search engine and then click the presented link. By all means find what you want on Google or Bing. But instead of clicking it, make a note of the web address, that's the 'www.rmweb.co.uk' bit and type that into your address line, or search box, in the case of a phone. Three days later. We have been onto the Bank again, money gone, nothing they can do. I have submitted a complaint to Trading Standards via the Citizens Advice Bureau. I have also sent a strongly worded letter to our MP, pointing out that this rogue has successfully hijacked countless people off the Government website, and since we all have to interact with the Government, this creates serious trust implications. Lastly, I have also submitted full accounts to BBC 'Rogue Traders' and 'Rip Off Britain'. Please don't fall foul of this nasty low life. If you need to renew your Driving Licence, then it would be best if you go and do it in the Post Office.