deepfat

I have gone for Harder & Steenbeck Infinty CR 2 with a Sparmax 520X compressor, even though I am completely new to airbrushing. However if this was just for my layout it might be overkill, but my plan is to use it for illustration too. To get my skills up I have bough t a load of el cheapo Bachmann LMS coaches to convert to an ambulance train so they are going green

Just to refresh this a Lord Nelson with smoke deflectors pulling a Night Ferry. Why they can' make these instead of stealing of invading Hatton's turf so we have more choice is beyond me

Loving your work but sl-43 Peco lifts are impossible to get hold of, Not sure why Peco can't make things anymore even in lockdown

woodenhead I was just wondering that, so thank for making me think it was not such a crazy idea. Also I am out of pec lifts so hopefully our friends in Bere Regis can make some more soon

Not treally related but what is the second front bogey truck for? I want t try and experiment with removing the front nem pocket on it

Genius, waiting for the City of London to arrive so I can follow suit

Friends my first train set had the ubiquitous Hymek 1A20 with full yellow ends with containers. My question is how realistic was this scheme was as I was thinking of getting a more realistic DCC enabled Heljan model and going back to my childhood, but with a more prototypical feel

Apollo 13 suffered from a main B Bus undervolt resulting from an explosion. my layout used to just have a single bus but now I do have two one for Track power and on for accessories. However I did get a couple of shorts after some redesign work and that took a long time to find so here’s the sorry saga of how not to wire up your layout and what I did to fix it, which I hope you'll find useful As I say, I now have a dual bus setup and if there is a short on the track it trips the Z21 booster, not the z21 controller which mean I can still through points etc. Also unlike the tired old RailMaster controller the Z21 resets itself as soon as the trip is fixed so I spend less time crawling around the layout to test fixes. I should add just have the one bus as my layout only has 70m of track 40 points, and I'll never run more then 4-5 locos simultaneously as I have no automatic control. However I and others who adopt this approach get a lot of flak, partly because it can be hard to diagnose shorts (you can't make this up can you), etc. Originally I when I just had the one bus I used the bus wiring connectors from DCC Concepts to attach dropper wires and wiring to my points to the bus: Frankly I always found these connectors a pain to use - I am rubbish at soldering and I found it hard to get a good joint from these to the bus which occasionally meant something didn't work I need to add a lot of these to the bus and that means breaking into the bus again and again. What really got me thinking about this was that I needed to add my equivalent of a fiddle yard (which isn't really as it's on show) and the trackwork to go around my awesome new ADM Turntable (the subject of another post). I wondered if there was a better way to wire up the new track points and turntable to my bus which looked tidier and was easy to understand. On the DCC Concepts forum I noticed my good friend Bunkerbarge using a different sort of connector (from CM3 models) to attach lots of droppers to his track. These gizmos allow up to 9 feeds to be connected via one of these blocks which in turn is connected to the bus and it has screw in terminals which meant less soldering👍 So I ordered a load of them and proceeded to rewire my whole bus using these new CM3 connectors and here's that some part of the layout again with just the one bus Having done all of this when I turned on my Z21 I got a short, but how to find it? With these new connector blocks all I needed to do was disconnect the feed wires from each these connector blocks to the bus in turn until there was no short. It did not take me too long to realise that I hadn't used insulating joiners for the middle route on a three way point. The second was much harder. Something weird was going on around a particular point in another siding and whenever I connected track to it. My senior moment was that I forgot to properly reconfigure this Peco Electrofrog point - I hadn't removed the bridging wires connecting the frog to the point blades under the point though I had electrically connected the point blades to the outer rails. This all took me longer than it should have because I did not do what I would do at work when making changes to designs. I mention this because I work in software engineering at Microsoft and despite what you may think 😃, we spend much more time testing our work than we do writing new code. So if I had done proper testing when re-wiring I would have gotten my answers much more quickly. Specifically Regression Test - is everything OK before a change is made? Not doing this means that you have no idea if a change you make is the problem or if it was there already. Unit Test - Test what you have changed - Does the change you just made work? For example is that siding you just added working OK? Integration Test - Test the whole system again. It might be that you have introduced a problem somewhere else and not realised. However you wire up your layout, add decoders to trains, put in signalling and lighting these principles should help you particular if you are collaborating on a large layout. Footnote: since writing this I have moved on to loco detection (and here's how my layout is now wired up) and now my track is isolated into 5 zones each powered by a separate Digikiejs DC5088RC detection module and so I can quickly establish where a fault is and then dig into the specific section

is that the Broadside of that pub

You should get a job with Hattons to help with their new carriages, this is lovely work

@Oldddudders @RAF96, DPDT switch working, thanks both, now I need to figure out some programming issues but that's a topic for another post

Brian they'll want to know which precise version of Windows 10 you are running - Go to setting (the gear shaped thing ). In that go to System and select about to display this the OS build is what I was referring to under Windows specifications. Ping me if you get stuck. I haven't ever heard of a problem like this so actually I'd be interested in what's going on but it's sounds like we are a long way apart!

@Brian77799 I apologise unreservedly as it was not my intention to be aggressive at all. I was just concerned like you are that well meaning amateurs using things group policy will make things worse. So I won't be changing anything if help is needed, just getting diagnostics and feeding back to smarter folks than me as windows is not my field anymore

@brian777999 OK I'll take this as I work for Microsoft in the UK (I am afryer@microsoft.com) so what build number are you on and have you actually asked us for help

We might have them. Lots of activity in darkest Surrey we have jays 3 x kinds of tits , green and lesser spotted woodpeckers, kites soaring on the thermals and a nuthatch

My challenge here is which ones? I have mostly newer Hornby stock with NEM pockets. I only really worry about uncoupling a rake from a loco so what's best for Southern region pre- nationalisation in the UK?

For me the composition is great and the execution is excellent.I can draw but I have never really thought to draw locomotives before () (except from a model) and my landscape skills are not up to it, so feeling a bit inadequate seeing this, but do keep them coming. Also is this your day job?

DPDT Switch ordered- let's see if |I can avoid frying my Hornby Elite Also hello @RAF96 nice to see you here and how's lockdown in the sun?

I have a simple wiring problem I want to solve to enable my rolling road testbed to function both to run engines and to program them rather than have two track one to program and one to test like I have now. The Hornby Elite like many controllers has both track and programming inputs and I want to be able to switch the wiring to either track or programming with a simple switch. Has anyone does this and what sort of switch would I need in order not to fry the DCC Controller

Friends 1. use different passwords for different sites - I know it's a pain, but then only one part of your world is affected when things go wrong 2. Expert advice from us (my day job is at Microsoft) is here and actually hasn't changed for a while. Andrew

tickets bought even though there's nothing I really want to win, but that's not really the point, plus I never win anyway, oh and and Happy St Georges day

OK so now I am really impresses you have your own laser cutter :-) please tell us more

My annoyance with laser etched mdf like the kits you are using is a good finish on the corners where there is brickwork like on your platform, so what is experience with that?