Chris White

For me one of the major issues is there seem to be too many groups advocating too many standards. Flawed or not in the US you have the NMRA and as I understand it manufacturers aiming at that market fall into line with this. I don't know how much influence or adherence they have but in the rest of Europe you have MOROP and their published "Norms of the European Model railroads", NEM. For the UK scene there appear to be a plethora of specialist interest splinter groups all advocating their own published standards, albeit derived from EMGS, MOROP, NMRA, or some hybrid of these. Manufacturers for the UK market seem to freely pick and choose which standards they pay any attention to, or just put out their own. I often feel those of us looking for a RTR solution are pretty much lost until there's coherence and agreement on a single set of published standards that manufacturers can they be requested to follow. I'd suggest herding the cats might be a worthwhile first step before endeavouring to propose a better mousetrap. At the very least I'd appreciate a web site somewhere listing all the different UK standards, and ideally giving a tabular cross reference and comparison, such that every I can look there rather than picking through every different conversation I come across every few years, these do come around cyclically in order to try to come to terms with the latest fashion or flavour.

Immediately following the question there was an answer that showed a capacitor in parallel to the feed.

Stack Exchange: "Inserting Capacitor into CIrcuit causes LED to fade - Why?"

One of my personal favourites is the southern end of Wickwar tunnel in Gloucestershire. Whilst not unique I love the idea of forget fancy portals. Just hack a hole in the hillside and line the bore.

As John says most of us probably use the coloured gels available through MSE, more likely than not just because they're available in small quantities. If you want to go bulk I'd venture they're just some form of theatrical lighting gel which can easily be found by means of a quick search on the web.

Using green filter and a white LED will attract adverse commentary from the eagle eyed given the lens isn't blue when not illuminated :-)

As I understand it no. The Dapol signal requires an AC supply of not more than 14 volts or a DC supply of not more than 12 volts. You could derive a suitable DC supply from a DCC track bus but you'd need a special circuit to do so. DCC is a high speed pulsed waveform not normal AC and most standard rectifiers aren't fast enough to reliably convert it to DC.

C Parkstone's Railway and Dapol Signals DCC Concepts. Personally I'd have thought you'd only want to connect to one of the passing contacts rather than splitting one of the Dapol wires to go to both. The Dapol signal toggles on each momentary switch closure so one pulse should be enough. I guess if the signal is in motion it ignores a second pulse? Don't forget that because the Dapol signal simply toggles it could get out of correspondence with the lever position. This can of course be addressed by moving the lever part way just until the signal changes then returning it to its starting position.

If you've not already invested in a load of PM4s I'd point out the PM1 has the switch but without the built in latch. Also I'd add a small note of caution here as experience at our club is the SEEP motor is very fussy about precise installation to get the built in switch to operate reliably. Also the switch is just a washer riding on PCB traces such that it can be compromised by dirt and wear on the PCB tracks. A while back we standardised on the SEEP PM1 as it seemed an easier solution than the Peco motor and PL15 however we have now reverted to the Peco motor and PL15 as whilst harder to setup it gives a more robust switch. All that said for future projects we're investigating adopting R/C servos in combination with relays for frog switching and controllers which both drive the servo and operate the relay. This will allow mounting the servos with a simple piece of aluminium U channel and with some judicious shopping around the cost per turnout should come in well below any commercially available solenoid or slow motion switch machines.

I've not used the self latching SEEPs myself but my experience is that compared to the power of solenoid motors the load of the Peco locking spring is trivial such that I would leave the turnout unmolested.

If you go with counting the number of braces then you simply need to get an MSE, or other, mast with the same number thus alleviating the need to know the actual height.

My question is as per the topic description, "Can one signal box employ different bell codes for distinct routes?". I'm thinking of two possible situations: A route where some non standard bell codes are employed for special situations; An interchange between two different companies which employ different bell codes (I'm assuming that once BR came into existence bell codes were standardised across the network).

I have just acquired a Liliput model of an OBB overhead electric locomotive that needs a replacement brush for the open frame motor. Searching the web has failed to reveal any source for such an item to me. Does anyone here know where I might get one, at a reasonable price?

I've just been constructing some signals using the MSE S002 lattice post fret. Looking at yours how on earth do you keep the darn thing straight. No matter what I tried mine keep warping slightly when I solder them up.