Graham Radish

The Hornby sentinel is a great little loco for this kind of thing too.

Lol! Doesnt take much to get in trouble on this site fella, im by no means a rivet counter haha

For a bit of added realism you could leave the odd one or two wagons empty with coal stuck to the inside walls of the wagons, coal is a funny thing its so varied in size but on a model layout smaller pieces tend to look better, i think coal that was delivered to the coal merchants didnt arrive in huge pieces, only the huge pieces were coming directly from the ground. you could of course use a sieve to sort out coal sizes, or a pestle and mortar to grind them down to smaller pieces. I use a pestle and mortar for my n gauge track ballast as even the finest javis ballast is hugely overscaled for n scale, it was labelled as "ultra fine" great for OO but not much use for n scale as the chunks of ballast were the equivalent of stones that resemble about half a foot long lol, (2mm=1ft) in scale.

As long as its not overscaled (and a lot of them are) should be sound fella, i know a hell of a lot of the track ballasts are massively overscaled and look horrid, just found this video for you, hope you like it.

Doing this will enable you to run much less tight corners:

Yea i understand youre looking for the best realism, was just thinking about a "quick" way of making locos look better, i know exactly what youre saying, they were rarely full

I cut my teeth on steel rail back in 1986 with the Hornby flying scotsman set, you can make the sides of the rails rust naturally like in real life with oxidation, the colour is so much better just like the real thing, as it will only be a small end2end shunting layout keeping it clean will be very easy, servisol super10 ensures excellent electrical contact its only £6 a can and lasts ages. that old Hornby ran brilliant if i remember right.

Theres no need to cut out the fake coal, just add small pieces real coal on top of it with PVA undiluted

Does anyone know of anywhere where i can buy new steel track in OO gauge? Im doing a small 80s shunting yard with 2 gronks and various wagons, would much prefer the proper colour of steel over nickel for this project. Cheers.

Ive noticed that adding these extra pickups greatly improves running on corners, where the wheel flanges contact the rails more, theres no reason not to do it really, in my case its changed my train from a occasional jerky runner to perfect running for only £2

They are if you want accurate power readings Even this will do the job: RRampMeter https://www.digitrains.co.uk/rrampmeter-v2.html "The RRampMeter automatically detects and switches to the type of power it is measuring. Two LEDs indicate DCC or ac , no LED on indicates dc. RMS is an abbreviation for Root Mean Squared. It is a mathematical way of analyzing a distorted wave form"

A simple paperclip is enough to hold paper together, as others have mentioned here they are really useful tools for digital stuff

Nice, pick two of them up for me, ill drop the cash around later

Yea but people in the real world cant drop 20 grand on a scope thats just ridiculous lol, hantek are pretty good for their price tbh or a good second hand techtronix. i use mine for cassette deck/vhs/cd player allignment etc

I dont know how much simpler i can make it, both ac and dc are used, ac in dc out. (I/O) but that dc out depends on the ac in, its a very fast switching process going back to the controller to read the decoder its an ac/dc switching

Yea scopes are a lot of fun to play around with too, really give you insight in to whats going on

This is true of the very expensive flukes, but mainstreame DMM's are pretty useless for this kind of thing, but for the price of one of these expensive meters you may as well just buy an oscillosocpe, those dmms are anywhere upto £1,000 a decent scope is about 350 quid if you look around https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hantek-DSO5202P-Digital-Oscilloscope-200MHz-Bandwidth-2-Channels-1GSa-s-7inch/114257235641?epid=1544096641&hash=item1a9a430eb9:g:phAAAOSwozpe46c7

What i mean is the AC track power is the carrier of the dcc signal, the AC track power is always on, the dcc data stream doesnt have to be. thats why multimeters cant read it properly, the ac power is usually around 16v then the dcc power is deducted from the track power, basically a couple of volts. both ac and dc voltages are present in a dcc setup multimeters cannot do this job,its extremely high frequency, you need a scope. in my instance i never go above 15volts on my n gauge setup, theres absolutely no need to all it does is reduce the lifespan of the decoders and heats up the motors to 65c, 1 way around the motor heat up problem is to add a thermal pad between the motor and the metal chassis, this will drop it down to 25-35c multimeters only read upto 60hz, a mid priced scope measures to 100Mhz the switching speeds on dcc are unbelievably fast.

Because they dont just measure basic voltages like a multimeter, you can measure dcc pulses, the dcc part is embedded in the ac waveform.

Track power is AC dcc is DC thats what bipolar DC means, it uses both fella.

Grab yourself an oscilloscope on ebay, even a cheap one will be 150x more accurate than the best multimeter. dcc is a bipolar DC voltage

This i did not know thanks very much.

So knowledgeable here youre great! " fo3 fo4 Its an option, I suspect can be used directly with a suitable resistor to the LEDs (lower value than full function output resistor), plus a route back to decoder ground" Great so these could be used for cab lights? any idea what voltage they output?

Hello, Theres no PCB in the loco, the decoder is hard wired to the lights, i desoldered the pins on purchase as there wasnt enough room to fit otherwise. I originally tied the front and rear to one direction and the same for the other then pressing the controllers direction button swapped them around (pretty standard way) basically the stock setup, but then my (yellow wire) / rear function failed and now lights only work in one direction. So now im left with 3 functions, i originally used f01 and f02 (green and brown) for cab lights, but now i cannot do that because the directionals arent working, so really i need to use fo1 (green wire) to be directional in tandem with the white wire.

The REAR light output function "yellow wire" on my Zimo MX649N decoder is damaged it stays on and will not go off (shorted) i have checked this to confirm, it is shorted. Now as this is a 4 function sound decoder this leaves me with 3 lighting functions, WHITE - Front Lights GREEN - Function Output 1 BROWN - Function Output 2 Obviously using my Digikeijs DR5000 the lightbulb/lights button now only switches on the front lights as the rear is now dead, (actually the front and rear were tied together) therefore i would now like to map f01 and f02, (Green & Brown Wires) to the directional lights of the loco instead of the default setting, now i have no idea how to do this, basically i would like the "lights" button of my controller to select the lighting instead of pressing the f8 function button. I know how the wiring works but don't know how to remap, if anyone could help me out with this that would be great. Cheers.