Dave John

A couple of highlights of 2019. I finished the mainly scratchbuild of a D1 and made a signal box. A photo of both. I have also improved my lack of photography skills by reading what you lot do and taking notes. If I ever get lining right then you will never hear the last of it.... On a serious note, I do enjoy all of the threads in which folk make things and record their progress. That is how I learn and improve. So many thanks to all that post progress, thats the part of rmweb I really enjoy.

Cheers Mikkel and asa, have a good one.

I wish everyone a good Christmas with a chance to drive a few trains and enjoy some modelling time. So here we are, a Christmas special. Many thanks for all the encouragement, discussion, hints and tips you have all contributed. I enjoy reading and learning from RMweb, keeps my enthusiasm going. All the best, Dave.

They have built up rather well, you can never have too many wagons.

Hang on. The "transformers" used for halogen lighting are very often PWM switched mode power supples and that rating of 11.6 V at 4.9 A assumes that it is connected to a 50 W resistive load. Even then it is usually a PWM output equivalent to 11. 6 V , not true DC. There is usually a bit that says Load "20 W to 50W" on them. If you connect them to a load of less than 20 W they don't generate any output at all, or worse they put out a string of higher voltage spikes until a resistive load is connected to the output. Very nasty if the load is inductive , such as a point motor. My advice, bin them before you damage the model railway stuff. Yes there are loads about, I have removed and scrapped hundreds of them. If you are replacing the lamps with leds then use 240 V Gu10 lamps or MR 11 12V Leds through a proper led driver.

Well observed and finely detailed modelling. The tilt has come out so realistically, it really does look like canvas. I do like the last picture of the collection, quite a fleet there.

There is a clip of a paternoster style storage unit at about 8 minutes in this video; There must be a locking system at the ends to accurately align and switch power to the chosen track, all 30 of them. Clearly a project for a whole weekend rather than just up to tea time.

Depending on your scale and period Severnmodels, Langley and Scalelink are worth a look.

Heh , well, the problem is that strictly speaking anything from the Edwardian era would be silent. I suppose what might be about would be film about traditional manufacturing methods or transport which reflects the era.

I'd agree, the nature of urban sound has changed, traffic particularly busses and lorries do seem to be the predominant sound these days. It is a valid point about manufacture, all the local factories have gone so that is no longer part of the soundscape. There was a foundry and a boiler works close to Partick Central, and two shipyards within half a mile. My guess would be that the sound that travelled furthest from them would have been hot rivetting. Add to that all the sounds from the Clyde itself, hundreds of ship movements daily. Further research needed I think, depends on what turns up in film archives.

Well, there it is. I made up a circuit that plays one of nine tracks at random, with selectable intervals. Two sounds can be triggered by the IR detectors which will go out of sight beyond the end of the layout. A whistle as a train enters the station and a different one as a train approaches the traverser. The whole lot is sat neatly in an old pa amplifier case with its own mains power supplier. This seems to make it immune from transients on the railway itself triggering sounds. The speaker is an old hi fi bookshelf type tucked away under the layout, gives a distant feel to the ambience. A couple of pics. I could post circuit diagrams if anyone wants them, but as with the IR board you probably wouldn’t do it this way unless you happened to have the bits lying about. Sadly I am the sort of person that does. Mair chips than a chip shop. One sound every 3 minutes or so seems ok for a start. There are various sounds of railway activity, whistles, shunting, a genuine Caley westinghouse pump and some of a townscape, horses and carts clattering by, some church bells. They do sound as I would imagine them to across a distance. Sourcing the sounds and processing them was actually the most time consuming part of the whole project. If I come across a bit of sound I like I will borrow it, the good thing about the sound module is that the mp3s are on a micro sd so changing them is simple. The big question is do I like it? The honest answer is that I haven’t made my mind up yet. Ask me this time next year how much of the time I have had it switched on while running trains. As I said in the last post this was something I wanted to try cheaply and the whole thing has only cost about a tenner so if I don’t like it its no big deal. Photos of nice blue trains will resume now I have got that itch scratched...........

I also found that a few soldered copperclad sleepers helped a lot to hold points more rigidly than all plastic sleeper construction. A bit of brass shim between the rail and the sleeper and you can't tell the difference with a cosmetic chair and a bit of paint.

Oddly I have recently been having a mess about with ambient sound. I wanted a relatively cheap solution since it might just annoy me and I would end up not using it. Anyway, a first play about.

Another vote for ipa. Cloths do snag, something like this which can be knocked up with bits from the junk box and uses cheap roll up filters as the pads reduces the risk of hitting anything in tight areas might help.

Heh , I saw the Who live way back, high energy gig . Er, when I still had some energy. Mind you, I now have a silhouette and a stack of 10 thou slaters best. Politicians, me , I could cut them out by the sheetload and in all honesty they would when laminated to 20 thou be better than any of the idiots on the ballot paper today .. Stuff it , time to pour a last large dram, turn all the layout lights on and drive the last train of the day .

First class workmanship and an excellent explanatory video. The worked examples of the interlocking are clear and easy to understand, I'd recommend that to anyone who wanted to learn the basics of signalling. Building a lever frame is one of the things on my list for Kelvinbank and when I get round to it I will borrowing a few ideas, many thanks. Definitely needs some signalmans cloths though. Just think, something useful to make from all those superfluous hankies you get for Christmas ?

I did a bit of research into the subject for my own layout, though the focus was on pre grouping Caledonian. I came to the conclusion that the yard I was modelling would be at least 60 - 80 wagons a week based on 10 rather than 16 tons average. Handleing would be wagons into bags or straight into carts, storage would be piles. from which it ended up looking like;

Excellent modelling. The firebox has come out really well for such an awkward shape.

Thats a cracking bit of film 7tunnel, thanks for posting. ( I know its a bit off pre grouping Mikkel, but I'm sure the practices shown in the film go way back before the grouping)

Agreed Hayfield, that is a serious design / manufacturing issue. The outer glass has clearly not been sufficient to provide adequate containment. An issue worth taking further for sure.

When you say that the bulb "exploded" do you mean that something inside went bang with sufficient force to destroy the outer casing of the bulb and spread debris over a distance? If so then that is a serious design or manufacturing issue which I would certainly report back to the shop so that the matter could be relayed back up the supply chain to the actual manufacturers of the components that went into it, wherever they may be. I have had a number of LED lamps fail over the years with what was reported as an audible bang. On examination it was found that this was invariably due to failure of capacitors, dielectric failure leading to rapid localised heating and the resultant pop, though none ruptured the outer casing of the lamp. I suspect that mass manufacture in prc with lower quality control is the issue, though difficult to prove. I estimate that I have fitted well in excess in of 5000 LED lamps and LED light fittings over the last few years and when examined after failure it is nearly always the driver electronics ( particularly capacitors ) that fail rather than the LEDs themselves.

Sound on model railways tends to be a bit of a contentious issue. Some folk love it, others hate it. I’m not sure. Many would advocate the dcc and on board sound route, when done well I’d agree it can be very impressive. Well, it could be if anyone starts doing sound chips for CR locos. A decade or so back I had a go with dcc. No technical issues, I got it all to work but I really didn’t like it. My mistake was probably to use a Bachmann dynamis controller. I just didn’t get on with peering at a tiny lcd screen instead of watching the trains. My preference is for a simple hand held controller with a rotary knob and a proper direction switch which I can use without having to look at it or keep the controller pointing at the base station. ( I dug it out earlier this year to see if it was worth bothering with and discovered it has now packed up. Oh well. ) But what do I want from sound? Most of the time I am observing trains from a scale 100 yards or more. I would hear whistles, perhaps the heavier exhaust beats and some rail squeal, perhaps buffers clanking during shunting. These would be in the background of all the sound generated in the urban environment, a horse and cart on a cobbled road close to me would be much louder than a train in the distance. The highly detailed sound files for dcc now available might be right if you are very close to a model, but they don’t seem to scale well over a normal viewing distance. At least thats the impression I get from seeing them at exhibitions. Anyway, a while back I came across this; http://www.icstation.com/voice-playback-module-sound-module-music-player-voice-broadcast-device-development-board-arduino-p-6148.html It’s the price of a fish supper, so I bought a couple on spec. Tests show that it works exactly as it should, put 10 sounds on a micro sd, switch a pin down to 0v and the chosen sound plays. Here is a pic of it on the bench with a twin infra red detector board. ( I could post the circuit diagram of the board, but there are probably simpler solutions. I just happened to have the bits to do it that way) So, what about the sounds. Ah, my record. Well, this record; I have recorded the whole thing into a computer file then split it up into identifiable bits using a program called audacity. Still messing about a bit with the files to get a good clean sound. The idea works, I could have two types of whistle triggered by the IR gates then the rest called at random intervals. something like that. I do know that there are a lot of fancy things out there, sound cards that are dcc addressed and so on. My thinking behind this is that it is a very cheap project, if I decide I really don’t like ambient sound at all then I haven’t wasted a lot of money.

I have often wondered why LOCO COAL wagons were so marked by all the pre grouping companies and your guess that money was involved seems correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-tax_post From which; "The railway companies were initially allowed some coal free of duty for their engines." The wiki concentrates on London and suggests that the taxes were stopped in 1890 but I'm wondering whether some general tax exemptions for locomotive coal succeeded them. Anyway, I had never heard of Coal Tax Posts, so I have learned something today.

I have used Scale link diamond etches for a variety of projects over the years. I have always found them to be a good clean etch and they do a useful selection of sizes.

Hmm, all this modern image stuff with lamps just above the buffer beam. Spare a thought for us trying to model the Caledonian. Lamps were on the cabsides, smokebox top and rear bunker or tender, with a lens to both the front and rear and had a rotating filter so that either lens could show a white, green or red lamp. For example an ordinary passenger train would show a green to the right and a white to the left in the direction of travel, reds to the rear and a red on the end of the train. Add to that a route indicator with 64 theoretically possibly positions centrally on the smokebox top or bunker/tender lamp iron. ( read Operating the Caledonian by Jim Summers , there are pages of diagrams ) Knowing this and being able to model it are two entirely different worlds. I have had a go. I messed about with hooks and magnets. The hook bit sort of works, but I have to take the loco off the layout and put it on the bench with a good light, the right specs and a pair or tweezers to swap them round. Then they fall off as you try and put the loco back on the track. And vanish . harumpff...... Problem is I have an end to end layout not a roundy one. So I just have to accept that my lamp codes are right for an official train movement, but incorrect for getting a train back to the other end kind of movement. I did try and make a lamp with a pair of rgbw leds back to back. Hmm, thats 7 wires out of each lamp. If I ever move up to gauge 1 it might be a solution. So I am left with a compromise. I'd agree, correct lamps do add to a layout. Getting it right half the time is better than none of the time, but until one of us cracks the problem and finds a really neat and tidy solution to swapping correctly coloured lamps round I'm just going to have to live with being wrong half the time.