Phil Himsworth

I recently converted an old Hornby class 47 and it worked so well I did a couple of others too. The motor in the first was a bit ropey, had a quite high minimum speed and seemed to spend more energy buzzing while going nowhere than actually moving. The 6v CD motor is noticeably less powerful; it slows down around tighter corners where it didn't before. It is a lot smoother, quieter, has a much better minimum speed, and the motor seems to act as a flywheel more then the old one did so I think it's a bit more tolerant of bad electrical contact. You can push the loco along the track and the motor will turn, whereas the old ringfield it was very difficult to turn the motor from the wheels. Mine were done using the similar kit from Horns and Whistles on eBay. I don't know if the Strathpeffer one is the same but it did require drilling the bearing from the old motor housing, so it is not a reversible process. Still worth doing in my opinion. I've got one more ringfield loco and one more conversion kit for it; this one runs better so I'm not doing it just yet but it will probably get done in the future.

It depends what you are trying to achieve. The simplest way of having a layout like this with insulfrog points is just to have a single power supply on the line entering the station, and a jumper wire connecting the upper rail of the headshunt to the upper rail of the line entering the station; this rail is otherwise not connected to the supply if the turnout is set to the headshunt. This means you can isolate various bits of the station using turnouts alone, and you only need a single incoming power supply connection. I've just been working out how to do basically the same thing with electrofrog turnouts (the far crossover is the other way round, but this makes no difference to how it works). If I've worked it out properly this would need three polarity switched sections but still just one supply connection; Red section: black supply if 1 straight, white supply if 1 curved Blue section: as red loop if 3+4 are straight, otherwise white supply Green section: as red loop if 2 straight, black supply if 2 curved

The way i did it if I recall correctly was nothing more than downloading the .tgz file and extracting it into a folder called /opt/jmri. Then just run DecoderPro from there.

Out of the box the middle frog is connected to one of the other frogs, so as long as you don't break this connection - there is no reason to - you can ignore it. It doesn't matter to which frog it is connected.

There is a gap between the end of their line and the freight line of about a mile or so. I think it's all still technically clear, but there would be at least one level crossing to reinstate (one bit of road still has rails in from when it was a level crossing originally) and there's the A4169 to cross; apparently they have bought a bridge from Network Rail to do this, but given the levels involved and the fact that there are already some fairly hefty gradients round there anyway I'm not really sure how this would work. It must be possible given they bought the bridge though! The freight line was last used in 2019 (I think) for a couple of steam specials down to Coalbrookdale. They stopped before the river, though; the bridge had a 5mph limit when it was in use, now it is apparently not fit for use at all, but it is listed and enormous so whether repair is feasible I don't know. It keeps getting mentioned that the line will be reinstated for use as part of the demolition of the power station and construction of the new development, but nothing has happened and most of the power station has gone already... Parking in the gorge is pretty rubbish, Ironbridge would be a lot nicer without as much traffic, seeing steam trains over Coalbrookdale viaduct would be very impressive and having Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale as destinations for visitors to the steam railway would seem to make this a plan more worthy and likely of success than many others, especially Ironbridge to Bridgnorth. I don't know what their plan involves for the rest of the line up to the main line; I can see Ironbridge a worthy destination for them, an anonymous industrial estate at the other end of the line less so. I hope they succeed.

Is there any weight transferred between tender and loco in normal use? By lifting the tender up, are you removing weight from the loco so it can turn the wheels more easily?

I have no experience with modern tender locos but I'm surprised they would be wired like this, and not just have the pickups wired in parallel with those in the loco so the tender is beneficial but not required. Unless the decoder is meant to be in the tender, I suppose. Could you measure the resistance between left and right wheels in the tenders alone? I wonder whether there is a high resistance path between the two sides somehow that is not enough to short out but enough to slightly lower the current through the motor to give the effect described...?

I would try gluing some scraps together to see how strong the joins might be; I think you might be surprised. I've just screwed and wood glued some 12mm wide supports to some 6mm ply but then wanted to move some of them; on removing the screws there was no way I was going to break the join without breaking the wood itself. I ended up sawing the supports (almost) flush because the glue joint was rock solid.

I love my Lima 60; I hear lots of complaints about the Lima pancake motors but it was always by far my best runner, and even after 30 years in a box it is still perfect. Noisy, but a fantastic runner compared to the other slightly flakey 80s / 90s equivalents. I must sort out the dodgy axle, though. Has it always been like that? I've never noticed it until recently. If I fix it, will it curse it?

Thanks for that; coincidentally I was just looking at whether 60002 was still around, having just had a lunchtime play with a Lima "Capability Brown" that still seems to work perfectly well despite spending nearly 30 years in a box...

I was thinking more "Welcome to the Wheel... Of... Trains!" <spins train storage device to see which train runs next> ticktickticktickticktick..tick...tick.......tick.........tick.........

The descent of Curiosity was known as "eight minutes of terror" because it took eight minutes for the signals to get from Mars to Earth to indicate whether it had worked or not; if I give Smokey Joe a blast of full power it feels like that's how long it takes for the little blighter to stop without crashing into anything... I'm going to make a new set of caps for Smokey Joe that fits in the loco so I moved the caps into an old Hornby diesel instead. This raises a new problem; running is super smooth when it's going, much smoother than without, but starting is not so good. I think it's because it's just a primitive three pole ringfield; it stops slowly enough that I think it nearly always stops with the motor stalled, so it won't start again either without a shove or, occasionally, a quick blip of high power, but that's no good for small movements. This motor was pretty ropey anyway, it is prone to stalling or just buzzing away to itself at low power even after new bushes and a clean, so I'm tempted to try one of these cd motor conversions to see if that improves matters. I love watching it going though. Seeing an 80s model with inadequate pickups crawl smoothly over complicated pointwork as if it wasn't there is amazing. Flickering fireboxes for DC as well as DCC? :-)

I've just been having a play with Smokey Joe and was wondering the opposite... It runs so much better with the caps attached; temporarily unplugging them returns it to the jerky heap of junk it used to be, and reminds me why we never used to run it all those years ago. So I'd like to make it permanent. Instead of an attached wagon, three caps would easily fit in the loco. Four might, but with more of a faff. The thing with it is that it's so fast the voltage for the practical top speed is only about 4 to 5 volts; any higher and it's rocket propelled and in great danger of flying off at the bends. So under normal circumstances three caps would do fine, as you would never want to apply 12v anyway. Hell, two would be fine. Except, of course, if 12v was accidentally applied, then there would be a strong possibility of the magic smoke being released. I'm not enough of an electronics person to know if there's any way to limit the maximum voltage inside the loco to prevent this. A voltage divider with low value resistors across the motor and capacitors, perhaps? Two opposing zener diodes in series? I'm going to try some more in an old diesel next. Plenty of room in there for all the capacitors in the world; turn off the power and it'll keep going for hours...

I got around to having a quick play; after a false start involving some capacitors with a very high ESR, which maintained the voltage but put out about 300mA maximum so were hardly going to be much use here, I made a 30 year old Smokey Joe run the best he has ever done! What puzzled me the most is how it makes starting more reliable; I assume the difference is that when the loco is stopped it's because the capacitor has run out, not because the loco has reached a spot with poorer power pickup while moving very slowly and gets stuck. The biggest problem with Smokey Joe is that, unloaded at least, 4 1F capacitors is far too much - if you accidentally give him a burst of high power he will travel well over a metre. Or rather he would, but he will probably crash into something before getting that far. It is quite a challenge to drive! I might try some smaller caps to see if that will achieve the positives without being quite so overkill. This "caps plonked in a wagon" approach may be replaced with something resembling a shunter's wagon if I get round to it.

Presumably there are two problems we are trying to avoid; the easy bit, what a DPDT switch would fix, is accidentally connecting the DC and DCC supplies together. The hard bit would be avoiding a DC train being supplied with DCC or vice versa. What happens in that scenario? I assume a DCC train just won't do anything given straight DC as there's no carrier, and a DC train will hopefully just buzz a bit given DCC, as long as you don't leave it too long?

Presumably on the dual gauge sections you will have to switch between standard and narrow gauge running as they share one common rail throughout and both at junctions. If you used something like a DPDT switch, so the dual gauge bits are either entirely DC or DCC but cannot be both, this would eliminate any risk of cross contamination. Depending on the arrangement you could switch it by a two coil latching DPDT relay driven from a point motor circuit so the track would be energised based on whether SG or NG routes were selected.

Could you mount some microswitches on the door lock and handle mechanism somewhere? Use them as input to a raspberry pi or something running JMRI and control a train that way. Lock the door to go forwards, unlock it for backwards; pull the lever to make a train go... Was sewage ever transported by train? An 08 pulling a very smelly, weathered (no, it wasn't just the weather that left those stains) tank wagon back and forth?

I've just built an incline that climbs 70mm in 2100mm, so 3.3%, including a slightly larger than 3rd radius 110 degree bend; I wasn't sure whether it would work with all my trains but was pleasantly surprised when they all did, generally three coaches or a similar length of wagons. A couple of locos are quite close to their limit with this; during testing if the gradient wasn't even all the way up they would struggle at the steeper bits. I've put powerbase plates under the track just in case of issues in the future. I mocked it up by holding the track up on cardboard formers every 21cm; I definitely recommend doing this before committing to anything.

Despite living absolutely nowhere near I've been following this fascinating thread for ages and I still can't get over the size of the thing that they're going to move. It's absolutely enormous, must weigh many, many tonnes but it moves! I do a different kind of engineering but I am in awe of those who come up with seemingly ridiculous ideas like this and then can make it work.

Curiously I saw a crane being used to install some trusses on a new build the other day and they had an extra horizontal timber across the centre section of the truss a short distance above the bottom timber; about the distance that would be required to lay boards down above a foot or so of insulation. It struck me as a good idea; if people are going to want to board out some of their loft it would make sense if the supporting structure was already part of the truss rather than something added afterwards.

That is really interesting, thank you. I ordered a load of capacitors yesterday for another application but because of the batch size I have far more than I need so I'm tempted to try your idea; that video of the Black 5 is very impressive.

We've got a few of the BT WholeHome WiFi mesh disc thingies around the house; they instantly transformed the wi-fi reception in the further corners of our house. They were very easy to set up, and totally invisible after doing so - I set them to the same network name then turned the wifi on the router off so all the devices didn't notice the change (other than the fact that they now get signal in the extension, the garage and the garden!). They are a fair bit cheaper than mesh WiFi things used to be (and still are for some makes). You can connect up the repeater discs with cable if one of them is particularly far away, but we've found just having three around the house that are close enough to talk to each other has solved all our wifi problems.

From the interesting Twitter thread linked above:

Is that wooden crate just next to the new track like the little bag of bits you get in flat-pack furniture? Does it all go together with a little allen key, and there will be a few bits left over that nobody really knows if they were meant to be used somewhere?

It's always the way isn't it, there's always some odds and ends left over that you've no idea what they do but it seems to work anyway so what the hell... :-)