Harlequin

I meant unconvincing in comparison to other similar steam sounds, for instance YouChoos’ Prairie project. When I was assessing the YouChoos Mogul sound I tried connecting a much larger Visaton speaker, which has a much better frequency range, to be sure the speaker wasn’t affecting the chuff sound. But it sounded just the same. You’re right that bass is lacking from the small speakers (and I do wonder if low frequencies might have been filtered out of some sound projects). I think it’s just a question of making the best of it until someone comes up with a clever idea. Such as using the whole tender body as a sealed sound-box or implementing Psycho-Acoustics in a DCC decoder...

Sound fitting this model is very easy. Fitting it yourself allows you to combine the decoder brand, speakers, and sound project exactly how you prefer. (Speakers plural, note.) There are just two wires to solder in the tender and you have to be careful to seal the sugarcube speaker in the smokebox to prevent buzzing. (I did my own sound installation and went a bit further than the basic setup by cutting a hole in the tender coal space to improve the sound. There's a post here: https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/129125-oo-gauge-gwr-mogul-and-prairie/&do=findComment&comment=4201823 In my opinion the chuff sound of the YouChoos Mogul project is unconvincing. The MrSoundGuy chuff sound seems to be better to me but I'm only judging that from his YouTube videos at the moment. (I think the MrSoundGuy project is what Dapol supply for factory fitted sound in a Zimo decoder.)

Hi John, Here's a Code 75 Electrofrog Small that I've recently attacked: You can see the the small link wires have been cut in their pockets. (I made a bit of a mess of the plastic doing that but no problem - it won't show) and then four dropper wires have been soldered to the exposed rails. My convention for wiring colour is "Black at the Back" and I will stick to that whatever orientation the turnouts are on the plan. I can't answer for the 3-way turnout - that's a complex beastie that I'm not familiar with. (It would help if we could see a photo of the other side to see where the insulating gaps in the rails are.) As far as the general wiring for your trackplan goes, the normal conventions apply: Isolate frog rails where the changing polarity could conflict with the rail beyond and ideally supply power feeds to every rail so that you aren't relying on feeding power (and signal for DCC) through the metal fishplates. You have shown insulating joiners in the right places to allow all rails to have their own power feed and for DCC they could all simply be wired together but for DC you might need to feed some of the sidings through switches.

There were lots of ways of shunting that didn't require a loco... Pinch bars and shoulders, horses, cables and capstans and, of course, gravity for some of the moves if the yard allowed it.

Have you turned the loco around again and tried it in the direction that it originally seemed to work? Or by "swapping the direction" do you mean you changed the value of CV29? If so, are you sure you got the binary maths right?

The 18in boards were just to illustrate that corner curves aren't necessarily a problem. In reality of course, you'd vary the width to suit the room and its other functions. You're right that min radius 12in curves in 2mm scale would give you more width for the scenic sections than I had imagined - I was looking at the Size 1 and Size 2 layout elements in your drawing. But you'd get even more length by not dividing the layout up and using the space around the corner curves for scenics. I'm sure the feeling of oppression of a high-level, wall-mounted layout can be designed out by matching layout width to the functions of the room below and the use of under unit lighting.

I don't think the idea of separate scenic elements linked by plain track stacks up in this size of room. Even in 2mm the size of the scenic sections will make it very difficult to fit interesting track plans into them, requiring the sort of compression that drives people crazy in 4mm scale! Furthermore, it results in awkward internal and external corners in the baseboards that waste space and are difficult to disguise scenically. Edit: Dividing the layout up into different sized sections with joining pieces also flies in the face of trying to make a neat domestic setup. For that you want clean, consistent runs of similar looking fittings. And I don't think corner curves necessarily intrude much into the central space, even at decent OO radii. Here's a 2ft radius curve joining tracks placed centrally on modest-width 18in boards: A tiny diagonal fillet would help to move the front of the scene away from the curve without significantly affecting the room space and, of course, it's often possible to move the track further back.

On iPad, using Safari, I was getting the consent prompt even when simply refreshing the page. Cleared cookies and browsing data as suggested. After logging back in, I noted that there were two prompts - the simple “accept cookies” bar along the bottom and the new full screen consent prompt. Once accepted, browsing the site was back to normal and even refreshing the page simply did that without any further prompting. But a few hours later and the consent prompt is back again... No problem using Chrome.

Hi Richard, Since the design seems settled and is being implemented perhaps you'd like to create a topic in the Layout Topics area where people with more general interests can follow your build?

Windows 10 is beautiful and a vast improvement on earlier versions, IF it's setup with a normal desktop (task bar, icons, start menu, etc.) and not that stupid tiled touch-screen interface...

Hi Chris, I had that RMWeb consent warning too once recently - but only once. I'm not sure what changed. It's shown because of the cookies that RMWeb stores in your browser, or tries to store at least. A Cookie is just a little bit of info about you that the website can pick up whenever you visit it. In this case I think RMWeb is trying to store a cookie on your Safari browser, to remember that you've said it's OK to store cookies (and so not ask you again) but Safari is refusing to store the cookie... Confused? Whether Safari blocks cookies is a setting you can change and there's another related setting called "Do not track me", I think. I'll have a dig around and tell you more later. Later: In the IOS settings app scroll to Safari and then scroll to "Privacy and Security". If "Block All Cookies" is on you could try turning it off. If "Prevent Cross-Site Tracking" is on you could try turning that off too (but it's ON for me on my iPad and I'm not prompted every visit). If Block all cookies was already off then the problem is more complicated... Edit: Thinking about it, it might be more complicated - but it's still worth checking the "Block all cookies" setting first. Edit2: Andy has more info:

I think Gordon means an insulation layer somewhere between the warm habitable rooms and the outside. I think you can see rockwool between the "joists" in the OP's first photo - so the expected insulation layer is present. We can't really know why the OP has that level of condensation because we don't have all the info. He needs to get professional advice from someone who can perform a site visit. And talking of climate change: When I said above that heating or dehumidifying (or cooling) an uninsulated space is unsustainable I could have said, irresponsible...!

More photos (two sides of the same lamp) can be found here: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/gwr-illuminated-stop-board-limit-273548555 GWR Signalling Practice says Stop lamps were used for unmanned crossings (no mention of them being used in yards) and that the front face was 8in by 24in.

I like it! There is very much an implied backscene. Are you going actually build one in the traditional way? If so, remember to leave room to round the corners to avoid "corners in the sky". And maybe think about how the roads exit the scene at the back - you've nearly got them all covered already so it would only take a bit of tweaking to hide them, I think. (Assuming you don't want to try to paint perspective roads disappearing into the distance...)

https://www.dremel.com/gb/en/p/dremel-right-angle-attachment-575-v224

Do you know what the tooth pitch is and what the cut width is? (I looked but couldn't quickly find the info.) Those will be very important factors for cutting the small items us modellers use, like rails.

Hi Simon, Your loft was clearly not designed to be a habitable space, so if you want to use it as a railway room, I.e. inhabit it for more than an hour or so at a time, you need to do the work to make it habitable first. That needs professional input to do it correctly and safely. Heating and/or dehumidifying an uninsulated space is not sustainable. The forest of truss timbers is another problem for a model railway. Sorry. I hope you can find a better solution.

Thanks for the suggestions on transferring the plan everyone. I like the pin-based methods because if you're making a hole anyway it seems simpler to just use the hole-maker as the marker and avoid the extra process of making marks separately. So I will try pinning the track on top of the plan, using small headed nails around the outside of the parts, then I can lift the track off, lift/tear the paper plan off and put the track back down in exactly the same place (In theory). That's actually more or less how I positioned the track for my test oval but without the paper. Strange that the method didn't occur to me yesterday!

No, just the board ends. Part of the raison-d'etre for this layout is to make something close to what CJF imagined - so commercial track parts.

Yes... It was before I moved the plan south a bit. I think it's still OK but a little bit of shaving might be needed! Thanks. Actually I used a special "stick-to-anything" paint designed for kitchen units. Wierd gloopy stuff that had to be recoated between 6 and 12 hours after the previous coat. I ignored that instruction...

Argh! Should have been "Kate Aldridge", of course... But she has Archer genes.

There has been some more progress, at last! I was hoping to get some track laid over the Christmas holidays but I don't think that's going to happen now - not least because I haven't got one of the turnouts I need. I have painted the boxes to seal the timber, fixed 3mm cork over the entire scenic area, and printed out my design full size. (I moved the plan 5mm away from the back to allow the retaining wall to have some depth.) So far so good: Where the platform tracks will cross the board join I have glued in sections of solid board (from the back of an old bathroom cabinet) and super-glued sleeper-sized copper strips onto them. The copper strips lie just under rail bottom level of Streamline flexitrack and are the same spacing so once the flex sleepers are removed and the rails are soldered to the copper, painted and ballasted hopefully the change in sleeper construction won't be so visible! I had to position the copperclad sleepers quite carefully because there's not much room to adjust sleeper spacing between the baseboard joint and the nearby turnouts. I did that by laying some Streamline track onto my full-size plan and then punching through the plan with a scribe to mark the positions on the board below. That worked here but it doesn't work very well on the cork - it just heals up. So I'm pondering how to transfer the rest of the design onto the cork below. I don't want to glue the paper plan down because it won't stay flat and it might weaken the track fixing.

They are intertwined to some extent, of course, but the question is about layout design. So I think we should consider operation to be subservient to the layout design, for now at least. Joseph may find that his proposed operating method doesn't suit the layout he wants and that could cause one or both to change - but that's for later. To put it another way: If you want to model Kirkby Stephen, you're not going to seriously compromise the trackplan to accommodate the method of operation. You'll adapt the operating methods to make Kirkby Stephen work!

2: Kate Archer => Tracy Horobin (still on collision course with Oliver so maybe about to go up in the world again?) Edit: Although she has now lured Jazzer into a trap and snogged him, which complicates things.

Joseph clearly stated the answers to the first three points in the OP. All within one para, in fact. OO means RTR so stock creation/acquisition won’t be difficult - in terms of time, at least. Control method shouldn’t affect the basic layout design in a major way.