Art Dent

Thanks for the replies fellas. I am assuming that Ian Futers is on RM Web? I'll do a member search for him in the meantime. I was looking forward to seeing Bakewell Street at the cancelled show in 2020. Any plans to exhibit Bakewell Street in the near future Chris? Art

Hi folks, Can anyone point me in the direction of some track plans for a simple 7mm end-to-end shunting plank with a single (possibly double) straight-through track? Ideally a varied selection to give me some ideas. Possibly 2 x 5-foot boards plus fiddle yard at one or both ends (maybe a traverser arrangement). I'd like some variation in elevation, maybe a bridge over a canal/river or an embankment - possibly something like Bakewell Street I'd also like to include a timber yard for interest (lived next to a rail-based timber yard when I was a lad) Thanks in advance. Art

Thanks folks. Looking for something else, I found Slater's Plastikard 0437 7mm '0' Gauge White Corrugated Plastic Styrene Sheet on Amazon just now 🙄 Art

Hi folks, Looking to scratchbuild some low-relief buildings that have a corrugated sheet steel (galvanised?) exterior. Something like the upper part of the attached picture of a barn. Don't know of any suppliers or indeed if this is available. Also, suitable drainpipes, guttering and bargeboards. Can anyone help? If I've posted this in the in wrong part of forum, could a Mod move it to the appropriate place - thanks. Regards, Art

I don't have an issue with paying a reasonable amount for a service. For example, I pay a reasonable monthy figure to Google to give me 200Gb of storage. What I DO object to, is initially offering a free service then altering the T&Cs at some future point to make afore-mentioned free service, a chargeable one. I wasn't the one that offered free hosting of images. I signed up for, what was then, a free service. To suddenly charge for that makes the company, in my book anyway, greedy. Presumably the bean counters that oversaw the initial offering knew that free online storage of pictures (& video?) would be attractive to the public but come with a cost. If they didn't, how much confidence does that inspire in the company. If they did, why suddenly decide that they had to charge. If they decided that too many people were signing up for the service, they could have said that for new accounts, there would be a subscription cost and leave the original accounts alone. But no, everyone has to pay all of a sudden. Because they were taken over by another company that didn't want to stump up the cost themselves. To go from a free 3rd-party hosting site to $399 per year with no notice is simply not on. I note that they've now come to their senses somewhat and are currently charging $6/mth ($72/yr) for 25Gb storage or $8 ($96/yr) for 250Gb (with unlimited hosting). However, this compares poorly to Google's £2.49/mth (£29.88/yr)for 200Gb of data (all sorts) and for me is an absolute no-brainer. Even Photobucket's $13/mth ($156/yr) unlimited package looks poor. For a company that has moved the goal posts once, would I pay either $6/mth, $8/mth or $13/mth? NO What is to stop you going for, let's say the $6/mth option, uploading a bunch of photos and then Photobucket saying that from next month it will be $9.99/mth to store your photos? They will not be getting so much as a rusty washer from me. Of course, YMMV. And yes, I know that they offer a "free" acount of 250 images or 2.5Gb max, but you can't link to 3rd party sites with the free account making this account as much use as a wet paper parachute. Art

Yep They were all on Photobucket (and posted here on RM Web) until Photobucket got greedy and wanted paying for what they initially offered for free. I'll have to see if I can find them on my 'puter and I can post them directly. May take a day or two. Actually a quick search of RM Web turned up my earlier post complete with pictures. Here is a link: Bachmann Mk1 Coach lighting and switchable tail lamp (this has the floor-mounted slide switch) and this Adding a working tail lamp to a Lima BR Mk1 BSK Coach (Part 2) (again with pictures intact). This has Photobucket watermarks all over the shop, but at least you can still see the pictures: Adding coach lighting to a Bachmann SK Coach (39-026) Hope these help, Art My post (3 above this) actually mentioned latching magnetic reed switched (para 7) but they are hard to come by and quite expensive. Having said that, a quick Google 'Magnetic Reed Switch Latching' just turned up Latching Magnetic Reed Switch (Layouts4u.net) for £2.99 each! I may get a bundle! Also useful for turning building lighting or street lighting on or off. Art

Thanks for the speedy reply Tony. Just need to know what I need to do to an electrofrog point (turnout?) to appropriately supply the frog with the correct polarity of electrical feed (rather than relying on the point contact of the blades) and how to wire that up to a Tortoise/Smail/Digital iP motor for auto-switching. I also need to modify a double-slip. Thankfully these are O-gauge points and not N-gauge! Art

Hi, A bit late to the party but I did a search on ebay (May 2022) using the string "DIP rectifier" in the search box and it brought up several results - e.g. item No. 223486963087 (£3.25 for 5, free p&p). Use the 'through hole' option rather than the 'SMD' option in the drop-down box. I used the string "1000uF 25V radial electrolytic" in the search box to find the capacitors - e.g. item no. 274134709703 (£2.95 for 5, free p&p). Any SMD LED lighting strip will do - e.g. item no. 185015850582. £2.98 gets you 1m of tape with 60 LEDs, cuttable into sections of 3 LEDs at a time (so as many as 20 "lighting units" or 5 coaches) whilst £6.12 gets you 3m of tape with the potential for 60 3 LED "lighting units" or 15 coaches - free p&p with both. Go for 'Warm White' and use an appropriate (e.g. 3k3 ohm) resistor to reduce the current (and therefore the light output) to an appropriate level. As far as switching coach lighting and/or Brake Coach Tail lighting on or off, I used a push-button SPST (Single Pole, Single Throw) switch in the feed to the LEDs. I happened to use this on a Lima coach and mounted the switch so that it could be 'poked' through the 'porthole' in the gangway door. Serach string "12v push latching", e.g. item no 284180623282 (£.95 for 3, free p&p). For other coaches, you could use a miniature magnetic reed switch mounted in the roof - search string "miniature magnetic reed" but these turned up non-latching switches. You could probably use these in conjunction with a bistable to provide a latching function. Altenatively, a cheap "function only" DCC decoder would work - Laisdcc function-only decoders are around £12-14 inc p&p - so it is now getting quite expensive to set up switchable coach lighting and/or switchable tail lighting with decoders. An alternative may be to mount a SPST slide switch poking through the vehicle's underbody - such as item no.133945603517 (£2.79 / free p&p each) or 252829454863 (£2.95 for 2, free p&p) or you could use a DPDT slide switch (just using the centre pair of contacts and a pair at either end - leaving one pair unconnected) - such as item 154924317322 (£2.42 for 10, free p&p). Hope this helps, Art

Hi folks A bit of a 'noob' question here. I know that the Tortoise point motor (US: Switch Machine) is a slow-action stall motor and the Tortoise needs an additional interface to be used with DCC. I am correct in thinking that it can be used 'as is' with direct control (i.e. not using the DCC bus ) with a separate, switched 12V dc feed? The outputs from the Tortoise are able to switch the polarity of the frog in an electrofrog point? Lately there seems to have been a 'new & improved' Tortoise point motor - the Smail. This seems to be a Tortoise *with* the DCC decoder (previously an 'add-on') already incorporated - so good to go out of the box with a DCC bus supply. Again, are there outputs to switch the frog polarity? The Tortoise required wires soldering to the small circuit board that projects out of the bottom of the motor. You could get a terminal block to connect to this circuit board as far as I remember. Does the Smail also require this soldering or does it come fitted with a terminal block (screw connections)? Finally, am I correct in thinking that the Smail is more or less the same as a DCC Concepts iP Digital point motor?? From my reading, it seems to be so. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Any help/advice gratefully received. Art

Continuing from Part 1 (link here) I used the pre-wired DCC Concepts lamps (such as DML-LLBRD - £20 for 6) Going back to the coach body, the hole for the wires was made by holding a pin in a pair of pliers and heating it up in a flame. The hot pin makes a nice neat hole which is just the right size for the thin enamelled wire to pass through. It seems there was no 'standard' placement of the tail lamp - hence the two lamp brackets. Sometimes they were on the platform side, othertimes not and it was placed nearest the Six Foot. I guess they didn't have a lamp on both sides to save on paraffin - even at the expense of safety. With two lamps, if one went out you'd still have the other lamp hpwever with one lamp ... The enamelled wires from the lamp were fed through the hole and the lamp super-glued into place. This is tricky as neither the coach body nor the lamp seem to like superglue but epoxy was deemed to be too messy as it doesn't 'grab' instantly ... A 30k-ohm resistor was then soldered onto one of the feed wires (so that I didn't forget later) and glued into place inside the coach body using some more epoxy ... A slot was cut in the floor of the coach using a 1/4-inch twist drill and a small half-round needle file ... Before going any further - a quick check that everything was working. A continuity-check quickly established that pick-up from the track was virtually non-existent. The problem - blackened wheels. A quick go with some 600-grade wet & dry paper sorted that out. Notice the difference between the wheels on the left (the pickup wheels) and those on the right. Don't forget to clean the oxide layer off the wheels and flanges where they contact the track ... A picture showing the wiper contacts in relation to the rear of the wheel. Notice that one wheel has been cleaned whilst the other is still blackened ... The lamp wiring was also checked and found to be fine ... Whilst it doesn't look pretty, I had decided (since this was essentially a 'test' project) to make everything re-wireable. Thus if anything didn't work as expected or later on something broke, it would be easy to fix. The two red wires are the feed wires to the tail lamp as seen in the previous picture and will untimately go into a 'chocolate block' connecto. The resistor and large diameter feed wires are epoxied in place ... The two 'chocolate block' connectors allow for the complete removal of the interior moulding ... I also took the opportunity to fit some passengers from Bachmann Scenecraft (article number 36-408). If anyone can suggest some further figures (OO scale not HO) and where to get them from I would appreciate it as the Bachmann figures are rather expensive. I could have also painted the seats and put some travel posters on the walls above the seas, but I may do that at a later stage as I have to take the coach apart again to fit the push-button on/off switch to the bulkhead at the end of the coach (on the left of the previous picture). On later 'conversions', I have added colured seat covers (I'd found a sheet of interiors from the old Kitmaster range) and partition detailing. Here's the sheet I found ... A view of the side of the coach where the lamp is fitted ... ... and a close up showing the wires passing between bogie and coach. The wires are barely visible. Finally, the completed coach with working tail lamp fitted to a short train on my test track (my son's old 6ft x 4ft layout) ... I thought I'd got a picture of the inside with the push-button on-off toggle switch (located in the vestibule) for this vehicle - but I haven't, so here is a second Lima BSK which has had the seats painted instead of the Kitmaster treatment. and The inside of the Luggage Compartment has been painted with matt black paint ... The end of the push-button switch can be seen in this shot (it disappears with the roof on) ... I hope you have enjoyed looking at my efforts. All I need to do now is apply some weathering to finish it off and maybe apply the printed Moquette from the Kitmaster sheet and a few passengers.. A later coach takes the track feed from the chocolate block inside the Luggage Compartment and feeds it to a stay-alive (home-fabricated - link here) and a LED lighting bar. The switch still controls the tail lamp so it can be switched off if this coach is next to the locomotive. Take care, Art

I thought I'd posted this on RMWeb - but apparently not! Hi everyone. Encouraged by my success at adding a working tail lamp to a Bachmann 20t brake van (see this thread), I engaged on my next project - adding a working tail lamp to a BR Mk1 Brake Corridor Second coach. As with the Bachmann brake van project, I set out to photo-document the whole process from start to finish to again encourage others to attempt this (relatively) simple procedure and highlight any problems I encountered on the way. First, a picture of the coach in question... Easing the roof off is a relatively simple matter. Located in the end corridors are two plastic clips, one each end which are easily released using a flat-blade screwdriver ... The roof and glazing then simply lift out ... Picture showing the main coach body, the interior moulding and the roof/glazing moulding ... View of the end of the coach showing the slot that accepts the roof/glazing clip. Below this is a 'porthole' window (which I plan to fit a push-switch behind so that the lighting can be easily turned off for daylight running). This picture also shows the position of the two lamp irons above each buffer. I chose to fit the lamp above the right hand buffer ... The bogies are retained by a simple split plastic clip which passes through the floor of the coach body ... Looking at the bogie my initial idea was to fit the pickups (DCC Concepts DCF-WP12) on the underside of the bogie like this ... ... however when I turned the bogie over there was an ideal recess in the upper part which is where I chose to locate the pickup ... I cut a couple of short lengths - about 3 inches/8cm - of the enamelled wire from the loco light (DCC Concepts DCP 002) as it is very fine and very flexible. This was to be used to connect the wiper to the coach passing upwards through the floor of the coach. These two lengths of wire were soldered onto the pickup wiper pcb ... A small 'blob' of Araldite epoxy was placed onto the bogie between the frames ... ... and the pickup pcb glued into place ... The feed wires were also epoxied to the bogie to prevent chafing ... Part 2 continues by looking at the coach body.

A bit late to the party, but I wonder if this might help... Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (link here) you have SIX YEARS (five years in Scotland) to make a claim against the retailer for the faulty goods (scroll down that link to the section "After 6 Months" and also the section "What if your warranty has run out?", however is is up you YOU to prove that the item was faulty (which may involve getting an expert to review the item and provide a written report - probably at some cost to you). Before 6 months after purchase the assumption is that the item was faulty from the start and you don't have to prove anything. Whether you judge the time/effort and possible cost worthwhile is up to the individual. Probably not for a loco costing say £150-200 but probably worthwhils if the loco was a weathered, sound-fitted item costing up to £1000-ish Other links which may be of interest: Faulty Goods and Consumer Rights At 2015 In all cases, your contract is with the retailer and not the manufacturer (unless you are claiming under the manufacturer's warranty). Further details are in the links posted above. Hope this helps, Art

STH Have a look at this post. It gives the specifications (and Rapid Electronics part numbers) together with some pix so that you can see how it goes together. Regarding the cap, yes a 16V or better still a 25V in preference to a 12V. Regarding resistors, the bog-standard 1/4 watt metal metal-film resistors will do just fine - such as these from ebay (£0.99 for 20 / free p&p) Depite what Suzie said in reply to my post, the DI202 DIP Bridge Rectifier is fine for DCC use. [DIP means 'Dual In-line Pin' - a flat, rectangular package with legs sticking out of the sides] I use it and encounter no problems. Art

Thanks Dave. The only thing I can claim credit for is getting David (aka Jinty) to do the weathering for me. Inside is a Zimo MX644D and ZS08AD Sound Project (from Digitrains) with a big bass reflex speaker fitted vertically behind the radiator. There's also a large-capacity stay-alive in there too as there's plenty of room inside the body. If I can find the pix of the installation, I'll update this thread with them. Art

Here's my Heljan Class 25/3 - excellently weathered by David Magill. The pictures are his and are used with his kind permission. Figures are ModelU and painted by Claudia Everett. Art

Here's my Dapol 57xx - excellently weathered by David Magill. The pictures are his and are used with his kind permission. Figures are ModelU and painted by Claudia Everett. Art

Here's my Dapol 57xx - excellently weathered by David Magill. The pictures are his and are used with his kind permission. Figures are ModelU and painted by Claudia Everett. Art

Here's my Dapol 08 - excellently weathered by David Magill. The pictures are his and are used with his kind permission. Figures are ModelU and painted by Claudia Everett. ^ Front left ^ Front Right ^ Rear Left ^ Rear Right ^ Cabside Left Art

Thanks Chaps. Art

Thanks Michael. That's on 24th & 25th October this year at Leeds Grammar School, Harrogate Road, Leeds, LS17 9NA? Herculanium Dock doesn't appear on the list of 'Layouts attending to date' although it does say 'please ignore this list' (!) Cheers, Art

Hello folks, What a great layout. Back in March 2018, I asked where Herculaneum Dock was next being exhibited and I missed out on the Nottingham Show because of snow (missed York that year for exactly the same reason). Bristol was too far and of course this year we've had Covid-19. I have a DVD of the LOR (it was originally on VHS cassette) which is still available at Amazon and a book called "The Docker's Umbrella" as my mother used to use the LOR in the 50's (sadly it had closed and all but gone by the time I was born in mid-58). Any plans to exhibit in late 2020 or 2021 at all? Cheers. Art

Hi, Ordered from Olivia's in the past. This was back in June 2016 so I can't fully recall the details but it was an odd transaction. I couldn't pay on-line and had to phone them up and even then there was something odd about the order confirmation. Also, their T&Cs were in breach of the Consumer Protection Act 2015, Section 29 where they said that as soon as you'd paid for the goods, they were your responsibility and if they got 'lost in the post' it was your problem. I have these details stored but not the actual payment process. Of course, they may have changed their T&Cs now (my order being 4 years ago) but it is something to watch out for. To increase your level of protection if your order is over £100, pay by a credit card and then you have additional cover under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 (this makes the credit card company jointly liable if things go belly-up). Even worse was that I didn't get the item that I'd seen on the website and paid for! The loco in question was a lightly-weathered 92220 Evening Star. We live in Sheffield so went to the shop to collect the loco and were presented with a weathered 92220 that was so heavily weathered, the loco looked black. Luckily, the one that was shown on the website was still available, and that's the one we took home. My first (and last) purchase from Olivia's Trains. Over-inflated prices, purchasing problems, non-too friendly shop staff, and (at the time) non-compliance with the Consumer Protection Act - never again. Rails (also in Sheffield) far better in all respects (and no, I have no connection to Rails other than being a happy customer of theirs). Hope this helps, Art

Hi, I don't know if this is too late to the party to help but I found some printable waterslide transfer paper on ebay - link follows. A4 Waterslide Copier Paper This means you could make up your own sets of transfers for a wagon although you may have some trouple replicating the 'Flying Box' image if you needed it. Only suitable for colour laser printers (who would've guessed) so your only problem may be finding someone who has one you can use. Hope this helps, Art

Thanks to woodenhead and the link above, the TMC Heavily Weathered 4F TTS has been ordered from tri-angman. Thank you to all that have contributed - whether we have agreed or not. The above purchase closes this issue once and for all for me. Art

You know, I no longer care. I asked the question originally to see if other folks had had problems with Olivia's Trains (it appears that the answer is a resounding yes). The thread then went on to discuss whether their description and what they intended to supply was okay. Jury still seems to be out on that one. For my part, I have made the decision NOT to buy from Olivia's Trains, nor indeed to have anything further to do with them. They can sink or swim in future, I don't care! As far as further discussion you can carry on or let this thread come to an end. Again, I don't care either way. Art