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justin1985

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  1. Several retailers have been selling Dapol N gauge Maunsells really quite cheaply, and I got tempted ... I've always had a soft spot for this design of coach, especially in olive green. But I've always felt there was something a little 'off' about the Dapol model. When they were so cheap, I bought a set of 3 to try and see if I could get them looking in a state I'd be happy with. Seems like the main problems, to my eye, are: - Highly prismatic glazing - Ultra matte bodyside finish, which always seemed glossy on the prototype. - Glossy self-coloured black underframe - (white roof - may be prototypical - but weathered incredibly quickly) So I tried the following: - Painting the edges of the flush glazing moulding - I found Tamiya flat dark brown worked best - Covering the glazing moulding with Klear - I initially tried the aircraft modellers technique of dipping it in, but the 'punched through' design of the moulding trapped far too much on the inside! So on the other side I just painted the outside with it, and got a good result) - Varnished the body sides with two coats of Klear for a semi-gloss finish - Painted the underframe with Tamiya rubber black - Weathered the roof first with a dark enamel wash, then a light airbrushing of Vallejo German Grey, and finally plenty of AK Ultra Matte varnish. I'm pretty pleased with the results! Before and after Implausibly posed on my work in progress 2mm distillery layout. It now feels to me like a model that feels plausible, and can stand up against the Farish birdcage stock! Justin
  2. I'm not sure how many people might have noticed, but the first of the final production J50s made an appearance on Copenhagen Fields for a few hours at the Bristol Thornbury Show at the weekend. This was brought from China personally by Mr Sonic himself, who explained the production batch are on the boat as we speak, and should be on their way to customers late June / July! The CF team agreed it looks exquisite, and it ran beautifully. We're also confident that the bearing design is consistent with e.g. Farish Jinty, so 2mmFS conversions should be quite simple.
  3. I'm not sure how many people might have noticed, but the first of the final production J50s made an appearance on Copenhagen Fields for a few hours at the Bristol Thornbury Show at the weekend. This was brought from China personally by Mr Sonic himself, who explained the production batch are on the boat as we speak, and should be on their way to customers late June / July! The CF team agreed it looks exquisite, and it ran beautifully. We're also confident that the bearing design is consistent with e.g. Farish Jinty, so 2mmFS conversions should be quite simple.
  4. Did you hear anything back from them? Or has anyone had any luck ordering (presumably paying via PayPal)? I'd bought several of their products years ago and concluded they were far and away the best short fibres, fine foams, and fine ballasts I'd ever seen - and want to buy more!
  5. Ballasting and track weathering done, and the first of many, many trees ... I'm trying to go for a mix of generic fir trees and autumnal beeches towards the back of the layout. These are (mainly) Busch bog brush firs, thinned out a bit, but then static grassed with very short dark green fibres to give some texture. The background beeches are sea foam with a dusting of foam flock, ground extra fine in a sacrificial coffee grinder. The foreground will get some finer brass armature trees - eventually. Small (330ml) beer can for scale. The container wagon pair is the very nice Rokuhan JR KoKi type, which I'm experimenting with "Europeanising" by removing the raised brake lights and walkways, and printed Japanese text, and adding buffers. They'll then get an extensive weathering. The Rokuhan containers are WAY better than any of Märklin's offerings, not least in that they're actually modelled on recognisable modern types, rather than modern liveries on very early toolings of very early container types!
  6. This was described as having been announced by Dapol at Ally Pally, but despite spending quite a bit of time looking in their display cases, it certainly passed me by at the show! It seems a bit odd that the press release type announcement just has livery diagrams and this description of the new features. There’s not even a hint of what the improvements to the body moulding will be? You’d think they would have at least released some CAD renders of the new design … Probably fair that the reaction to the announcement has been a bit of a metaphorical shrug when Dapol haven’t really given us any detail to get excited about …
  7. I might not have used RMWeb much recently, but I have been making some progress on this layout ... Some first pass scenics added, including kind of 3D backscene, with an RGBW LED strip behind it as an uplighter - in a kind of sunset colour here. Pretty pleased with the effect. Painting the track has transformed the look of the thing too! Lots of bedding in and scenics to do, and many, many trees to come ... Also a rather fun, if not strictly appropriate, new arrival:
  8. Possibly a silly question, but am I right in understanding the 3-car "add-on" set is also motored, and therefore could be run on its own? The wording on the shop pages is a little ambiguous. I understand they might be prototypically only run as 4 car, or 4+3 sets, but in the interests of a train that takes up less space, 3 car sets are appealing on their own ...
  9. Here's a direct "before and after" comparison of the Colman's mineral wagon (old wagon weathered and loaded): The differences in proportions are really striking! And with a (rubbed down for weathering) Mathieson wagon: The sides of the new PECO wagon are definitely thinner than the Mathieson, but I still feel the (prototypically slightly smaller as a 1907 wagon) Mathieson has detail that feels a little more refined, or 'balanced' overall. Definitely shows how far away the old PECO "minerals" were from the real look and proportions though! I'm sure we'll see the prodigious range of liveries, and retailer specials etc, appearing on the new moulding wagons - which has got to be a great thing!
  10. I remembered this excellent post and tracked it back down, but alas the images still seem to be missing. Is there any chance @bluebottle or (as it doesn't look like they've visited the forum in quite some time) someone else who might have a copy, could re-post? cheers Justin
  11. Apologies - these were taken soon after the original post, but I've been incredibly busy with other parts of life recently, and only just remembered to login and update this.
  12. I've seen quite a few videos reviewing Anycubic's new Photon D2 DLP printer (i.e. resin with mirror projected 'laser' rather than masked screen). The results as shown on wargaming / fantasy miniatures look amazing, and the technology itself seems intuitively more efficient than the masked types. e.g. Has anyone tried railway type models with printers using this technology? All the demos I've seen have been printing fantasy type models, with intricate patterns and organic shapes etc (which can help obscure layering etc). So I'd be interested to see what results look like with the more flat sided type shapes we tend to print for wagons etc. I haven't actually used my original Anycubic Photon for about a year, mainly just because I've been distracted onto other things, but now feeling technology might have moved on enough for it to be time for an update? J
  13. Thanks so much for posting these Mike! I'm tempted to try printing them scaled down for Z - any thoughts? (did you work to a particular minimum wall thickness etc?) Justin
  14. I really think you'd be surprised. @Stefan88 has posted several times in this thread relating how much interest there has been in this announcement from German language forums. You'll also find that Railway Modeller, and sometimes also BRM etc, are stocked in a surprising number of Presse & Buch shops at German stations. DM-Toys, the N gauge box shifter to the continent, stocks all new releases from Farish and Dapol, regularly making them the main focus for their weekly newsletter. They've even commissioned special editions of Dapol A4s (BR experimental purple blue, if I remember). More broadly, just take a look at broader rail enthusiast social media in German and French, or broader European rail enthusiast social media in English. Views are often more nuanced and positive than you might expect, e.g.: I've even stumbled across an interesting Japanese YouTube channel reviewing British N! The fog in the channel might not be as thick as you imagine...
  15. If you're tooling up a whole new system, that's surely the time to spend that small fraction more for a better design! And the extra plastic involved in moulding ballasted track compared to sleepers is going to be fractions of a penny. Surely the whole point is to appeal to people who AREN'T established train set buyers! Fiddliness is surely a bad thing! I'd love to watch a focus group type session where kids and adults who haven't previously owned a train set are given one with "normal UK track", and one with Unitrack, and see how they get on (without help or intervention). That's surely the kind of product testing that Hornby did when designing a whole new range? Isn't it? Is it ... ...
  16. I really can't get my head around why Hornby DIDN'T choose to tool (or buy-in/re-brand) a Unitrack-esque track system like this! It seems such an own goal to develop a "trainset focused" system, which really seems targeted at families and casual interest beginners in a very effective way in most respects, but then spend presumably serious amounts of money tooling up a new track system that perpetuates all of the frustrations and disadvantages of traditional model railway track for those kinds of users. Lining up fishplates, and dealing with them when they get bent or loose seem to me the single most common causes of frustration, and reasons why the train set doesn't get played with anymore ... (For that matter, it seems remarkable Hornby haven't tooled a OO ballasted track system for train sets either ...) I have an 8 year old relative who always wants to get the N Unitrack out on the dining table when he comes to visit - and he's totally fine at putting it together, railing stock using the railing ramp, and taking it apart - connecting the power cable is the only thing he finds tricky. Unitrack is such a game changer for this kind of thing - I just can't understand why its not more common! The Tillig system here looks like its got the full KATO style "Uni-joiner", where the fishplate is totally supported by the plastic (and can be easily replaced by replacing the plastic part). But even the halfway house ballasted track systems like Bachmann USA EZ-Track in HO, and Rokuhan in Z, which have a traditional fishplate, do at least give an inexperienced or young modeller a much better chance of getting it connected first time, and not mangling it when taking apart.
  17. I think these were a present from an American family friend on the "oh you like trains" logic ... But never used them, and they surfaced when having a bit of a clear out. This is a pack of 14 baubles, all with a vintage catalogue type image of a kid with a Lionel model of a Pennsylvania RR electric! Half red, half blue. Free to anyone who'd appreciate them, if you can cover the postage (or collect in Croydon or central London). They're bulky but not heavy, and not delicate (Papier mache or something) J
  18. Excellent news! While it doesn’t fit any of my modelling projects, I’ll have to get one in Southern and maybe also FCC - having suffered the real things on an almost daily basis for so long! I wonder if it’s worth modelling them with the hopper windows open, for the signature Derby unit broken / ineffectual air con effect? ;) And no need for interior lighting, as the real thing is so dingy as to be barely perceptible … More seriously, I imagine Southern livery will be most popular, but perhaps worth going for the subclass with pantographs, for WCML and West London Line operation? I know the announcement page says liveries still to be confirmed, but I’m surprised Heathrow Express is being mooted - limited sphere of operation in the extreme! (or intended to appeal to aviation collectors?) Earlier version of South Eastern (white/yellow/grey) might be worth including though?
  19. All of the continental layout cliches - castle jammed too close to everything else, oversized station building, all a bit too clean and not enough weathering ... DB two car class 426 EMU leaving Ehrenbreitstein station on the west bank of the Rhine, seen from the Koblenz cablecar, Sat 20th August 2022.
  20. It still sounds like you're misunderstanding - the only way for a non-UK seller to collect UK VAT, is via an HMRC-registered international marketplace (eBay, Amazon, AliExpress etc.) and on an order worth less than £135 (OR they register with HMRC themselves - very unlikely). If this was applying to your order, you'd see it explicitly broken down in detail as part of the eBay checkout. Any other mention of VAT in an eBay listing, whatever language it is in, or whatever local eBay searches it shows up in (.co.uk, .com, .fr - whatever) will simply be referring to the fact they are a business seller, and the price they are advertising is including the VAT that THEY are liable to pay - i.e. in this case, the price advertised includes French VAT. Pre-Brexit, under the common market, paying VAT in one member state meant it wasn't necessary to pay it again when importing it into another member state. So now, an Irish eBay buyer, for example, would have paid the French VAT that the French seller was obliged to charge as part of their price (as a French business), but no new VAT when their order arrived in Ireland. But as the UK is now a 'third country', any VAT you pay in any other country is irrelevant to the fact HMRC will charge you UK VAT when you import anything. If a French (or whatever) business exports to outside the EU, they could theoretically take off the French VAT, but unless they export a lot, and are used to doing it, they probably won't bother because it is just too complex in terms of accounting to be worthwhile. Big European box shifters like Modellbahn Shop Lippe and Modellbahn Union will take off German VAT before exporting to the UK now, but smaller shops won't. This is the same way that our American and Australian friends are used to big box shifters like Hattons taking off UK VAT when exporting, but smaller UK model shops not doing that.
  21. Normal track rubbers can be pretty harsh and abrasive on rails in any scale - something that gets debated a lot - but probably more concern in Z than in larger scales. The best track cleaning method I've had recommended to me for the fine rails used in Z or 2mmFS is a bit of lint free cloth wrapped over a scrap of wood, and sprayed with "WD-40 Specialist Contact Cleaner" (available from Screwfix etc). This gets the gunk off without scratching the rail surface at all. Kibri do some very nice rectangles of plastic brick, stone, slate, etc material in Z as well as N. Very similar to the Wills ones in OO. ModellbahnUnion and Modellbahn Shop Lippe, and plenty of others, supply online with the German VAT deducted, which would certainly be quicker than waiting for Gaugemaster to back order... Justin
  22. The spare parts search on the Märklin website is super specific to particular catalogue numbers, so often seems to say no part is available, even if parts that fit are available for an otherwise identical later release (that might use slightly different part numbers). Especially true with old three pole motors (clear plastic surrounds, unblackened wheels) which aren't available - but the equivalent 5 pole motor will always fit. (the very most recent coreless motor types probably won't be a direct fit for old models though). Try looking up spares for a more recent catalogue number of the same loco type. Worth a look, I would have thought :)
  23. The "Do it Yourself in Z Scale" website ( http://www.zscale.org/articles/revival.html ) has been absolutely invaluable to me when I first started collecting some Z, including several old "non-runner" locos. This is all about Märklin, and the troubleshooting guide is crystal clear. There are definitely some inherent problems with older production models - "hardened oil syndrome" seems to be Märklin's equivalent of old Graham Farish's split gears - BUT I would say that practically every Märklin Z loco I've had apart has actually been beautifully, and logically, engineered, which made stripping it down and fixing it actually quite a joy. With the exception of the 0-6-0 locos, the mechanisms really feel designed to be taken apart and reassembled (robust contact strips, screws or robust clips, ingenious arrangements of all metal gears etc.) - a total contrast to e.g. modern Dapol in N, where it often feels like assembly was intended to be a one way process (flimsy wires and connectors, glued in parts etc.). Hardened oil is undoubtedly common on older Märklin Z (i.e. anything with non-blackened wheels). So if I do buy anything of that era, especially if it looks like it hasn't been actively used for a while, I'll just routinely pop it apart and soak the metal gears in IPA to clean off all the old oil. The only gotcha is the fact the driven wheels of a steam loco are fully geared, so if you take them out, you'll need to make sure they're quartered when they go back in (so easier to leave the keeper plate on and leave them be, unless they're clearly gummed up). My limited experience of taking apart Microtrains Z locos has been a little more fiddly (tiny springs as electrical contacts etc.), but in general I think there is a bit less need to take them apart ...
  24. A few thoughts ... I think this is definitely possible - but perhaps not often seen - because the temptation is too often (understandably) to use the small scale to make a small layout. But if you keep the layout size you had in mind for a larger scale, and model a more generous landscape in Z, you can definitely get presence. @Kiwibonds 's Wassen in Z project really seems to achieve this for me - http://zwassen.blogspot.com/2020/03/model-modeling.html Also, very different approach, but I enjoy the "presence" that YouTuber "smoulderz" gives to Z models (with fancy camera work and editing). The original Märklin Z locos with 3 pole motors usually seemed to have pretty awful slow speed running, and I suspect the Märklin controllers were designed around this. Therefore you do tend to see layouts operating with fast running, which doesn't really best show off the scale. Especially so when modellers are using the signal based automation using the original Märklin parts - which can be very stop-zoom - if you want to be sure it will start again successfully when the signal changes. There is no need to stick to the official Märklin controllers - you can get great control with battery controllers from Medvend in Hungary (also sold by Z-Track in the US, and the 2mm Scale Association) and also from just pairing a generic eBay voltage regulator/"motor controller" with a 9v power supply. If you stick to more recent Märklin models, with 5 pole or coreless motors, you'll get MUCH better slow running. As a rule of thumb, if a Märklin model has factory blackened wheels, it will have a 5-pole (or coreless) motor. So just avoid the original ones with shiny wheels - unless you're willing to fit them with 5 pole or coreless upgrade kits (not always easy). Sometimes you do get lucky with a good low speed runner with a 3 pole motor though ... With the latest generation coreless motor models, you can expect absolutely exemplary crawling slow running, pretty well as good as in any other scale. The V100 diesels, as far as I know, always had coreless motors, and I'm very happy with the running of mine: Worth saying that Rokuhan's Japanese (and one German) locos have beautifully smooth and slow running, as do basically all of the American prototype models from Microtrains and American Z Line. Only the Microtrains F7 (their earliest model) sounds like it has a reputation as a dud - their other older models like the GP-9 and GP-40 tended to have genuine Maxon coreless motors, and I think all AZL locos have amazing mechanisms. Some nice showcasing of them here:
  25. Only just discovered this thread - I'm very much bought in to Z myself these days! @DenysW if you're buying into the Märklin miniClub system as the holistic system, in terms of electronics (and some of the automation can be very impressive - especially when you remember most of it is 1970s tech!) - then you'd probably find answers to most questions in the Märklin Track Plan Book (0296) which is now available as a free PDF: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.maerklin.de/fileadmin/media/produkte/SpurZ/0296_Gleisanlagen-Buch_Spur_Z_komplett.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjJ6Pe49Oz4AhVzm1wKHVyuC4UQFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3-EXjjd2NrMrR1OIU1d9_w As well as some fun track plans, there are full (tri-lingual) explanations of all of the electrical accessories, and how they're intended to be combined. Much more of a manual to the entire system than just a track plan book! That said, in this day and age, I'd heartily recommend using Rokuhan track and accessories (with Märklin rolling stock). The Rokuhan track is ready ballasted, like KATO Unitrack in N or HO, has integrated point motors nearly hidden in the track bases, AND is much cheaper than new stock Märklin track! You can get Rokuhan turnouts from PlazaJapan for less than £15 each (plus import taxes, alas), or buy a bit more expensively from importers (Noch in the EU or Gaugemaster in the UK). Seems like no contest now, really! Rokuhan also make nice controllers and accessory switches etc, but not anything like the whole classic 1970s Märklin system. But then there's no reason to feel constrained to a "system". Viessmann make nice signals you can control independently, and frankly the Rokuhan cosmetic plastic catenary masts look better than the functional Märklin metal system - in 1:220 the actual wires really would be next to invisible - better represented with EZ-line, if anything at all. Don't be afraid to mix and match, and adapt!
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