DK123GWR

38 minutes ago, jcredfer said:

roll on

Must've been Oxford then. Traditionally, women would be kept away from Parson's Pleasure by sending them on a path around the back, with the excuse that the men needed to drag the punt up the rollers located on the nearby weir.

1 hour ago, big jim said:

^ Just needs the word ‘bater’ adding if it is him 

 

 

Looks like the listing has been amended with your message!

 

 

Indeed, and I had a very polite message back saying that they had come to the seller in a shop clearance and that they weren't entirely sure of the history. An honest mistake I think.

They seem to be trying to pass them off as a product of the pre-nationalisation company. I have written to them as though they didn't know this ('the listing could be seen as unintentionally misleading...', to point out that the logo ('original GWR railway insignia') belongs to the modern TOC and that the CE mark present on the packaging was introduced in the 1990s. I'll let you know if they bother to respond.

5 hours ago, jcredfer said:

Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to be posted to an RAF Station close by Cambridge.  One of the delights was to take a Punt and point it to a delightful Pub upstream, whereby Champagne and strawberries might be obtained, to fortify the Punters for the return journey {life as a pilot was hard work, back then, but someone had to do it...}...

 

...  Anyway, back to the Punt, between Cambridge and the pub, was a platform reserved for Cambridge dignitaries, to enjoy the river and swimming.  Way back then, there was less river punting, than our, more decadent, and wealthy times.

 

"Apparently"...   back then, the, aforesaid, dignitaries were enjoying a party and the sun having access to all the areas of their bodies...   upon seeing people passing in a punt, they covered their private parts.... with the exception of the Bishop, who held his hands over his face.  Once the punt had passed, he was asked why he had held his hands over his face, rather than his genitals.  He replied, "It's simple, more people recognise my face, than recognise my genitals."

 

 

Nonsense! That happened in Oxford!

It was at Parson's Pleasure bathing place and the punters were stood at the right end of the boat. The version of the line that I've heard was also rather better: "I can't speak for you gentlemen, but my students know me by my face rather than my genitals."

I am (or at least, will be) trying to fit a (very crude) smoke system to a TTS fitted ViTrains class 47. I have managed to get a rough proof-of-concept system working, but in order to fit anything into the chassis I will need to remove part of the circuit board. This will mean cutting it just behind the solder tabs for the pickups (outermost black and green wires). The lighting wires will be desoldered, extended, and connected to the corresponding solder tags at the opposite end of the loco. However, there are three small components in this section of the circuit board, and I am unsure of what they are and whether they are necessary (or are just for smooting current flow to the lights, or similar) - I would be grateful if somebody could confirm this as it will affect whether they need to be included as well when it is rewired.

I plan to switch the smoke unit on and off using the auxilliary function on the TTS decoder. This has a 100mA limit, while the smoke unit operates on 5V at 2W (so 400mA), meaning that a relay will be needed to operate the smoke. Can anyone reccomend a suitable relay for this use? Also, what would be the best way to reduce the track voltage to the required 5V? Given how far below track voltage this is, quite a few diodes would be needed and I am wondering whether there is another option.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

2 hours ago, MrWolf said:

 

I get the impression that the new sets aren't up to much?

 

That still doesn't convince me that a 1980s train set (which has been modernized, so originality lost) is worth the thick end of £500.

He does say:

'500 POUND FOR A SECOND RATE ITEM THAT INVESTMENT WISE A WASTE OF MONEY'

I'll trust him and stay away from this. 

My other favourite part is:

'BITS FALLING OFF RECOMMEND  BUY A TUBE OF GLUE'

I thought that half the old APTs sold on ebay were missing the pantograph.

Have I been misundertanding the word 'rare' for the past two decades?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265689933356?hash=item3ddc5aa62c%3Ag%3Ai6sAAOSww3Zidmvi&LH_BIN=1

Are you sure that the buzzing is from the speaker and not the motor? I have a Hornby class 66 (not sound fitted) which makes a sound best described as 'buzzing' when crawling.

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

There is a danger in this of course, that small items mount up.  If you put an arbitrary cap on the project, say another £50, what happens when you've spent £45 and need to order a set of buffers and a Modelu crew that comes to about £20 to finish off.  I'm at the point that I don't want to abandon the project, not just because it would be admitting defeat and having to cope with the impact on my mental health of 'yet another predictable failure', but have spent too much already to write off without any result, and my current attempt at budgeting is really only trying to limit the extent to which good money chases bad.  I should consider this projece when I criticise NR for the GW electrification overspend! 

 

It's not often that I advocate first year economics textbooks as a source of practical life advice, but I it might help here. According to economic theory, you should decide whether you're going to spend more money on the project based purely on:

1) How much closer to finishing the project to a standard that will please you that spending will bring you

2) Whether there is anything else that you can do with the money which would bring a greater benefit

There is no point in considering what has been spent already when making an investment decision (whether that's about parts to build a model locomotive* or work to electrify a full-size railway). These sunk costs are beyond your control, and do not affect the value of future spending. To try and illustrate the point: suppose that I am in the middle of developing a machine which I expect will earn me £1 per day once complete. Now, I realise that if I build a different machine, it will earn £1.05 per day. I should be able to finish the first machine or build the second by spending £50. Obviously, I should (at least temporarily) abandon the first machine and build the second. The fact that I have spent £200 on it already is irrelevant - I can get the best return to the money that I have available to spend now by building the second machine. Of course, it might be that once I have done this, and have more money available to spend again, it makes sense to return to the first machine (if this is now the most profitable use for the money).

The first machine is like your 31xx - so long as you think spending on the 31xx is the best value you can get from your modelling budget, this is what you should do. If that changes, because you find a better use for the money (as you did with the colliery) then spend money on that. Suppose that tomorrow an RTR manufacturer announces a 31xx. So long as the expected cost to finish your model is less than the price of the RTR model, plus the value that you place on the 'I built that' feeling, less the value that you place on the amount by which the expected quality of the RTR model exceeds the expected quality of your model, then your should continue with your model. If the anticipated cost of finishing your model becomes greater than this, it would be irrational to do anything except buy the RTR model, despite the money you have spent already. You could apply parallel reasoning to any other competing demand on your budget.

Lecture over. Feel free to ignore it - most people won't have read past the first line anyway. Apologies if we have any experienced economists on the thread who feel that I've gotten it terriby wrong. (Whether you are or not, some experienced economist will always tell you you're wrong - unless you're stating the principle of comparative advantage, which is one of the very few things that they all seem to agree on**).

*Yes, I know that spending on model railways will be counted as consumption, but I am modelling it as an investment one, where a working locomotive will provide a certain amount of utility (pleasure, to normal people) each day, which has an approximate financial value

**This is not an invitation to prove otherwise - we are supposed to be discussing toy trains after all. This is still as close as you'll come to finding something uncontroversial

I never understand how people get the tender the wrong way round when the couplings should make it fairly obvious which end goes next to the loco. I think there's a bigger giveaway here though...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234519476370?hash=item369a733892:g:TzMAAOSwUbFiYW96

26 minutes ago, SteveyDee68 said:

Rails (eBay Shop) are at it again…

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/133984966970?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=7NGT9XstTyC&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=e--l92_9TXi&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

 

£99.50 for a loco with rather obvious (even to non-hobbyist observers) damage seems steep, but it is the description that tickles me…

“FRONT CHIMNEY MISSING”

 

Which kind of suggests that the back one is still present…

 

Steve S

What's the difference between this and the price of a good one? Can you buy a chimney for that money? I would ask a cheeky question about where the rear chimney is, but I've had the occaisional good deal from the Rails ebay store in the past and I don't want to annoy them.

Another issue not directly answering the question, but which might be worth considering:

The (lack of) electrical continuity of Lima locomotives is a known fault which is especially problematic on DCC. As delivered, the pickup wires are connected to a plate which forms part of the bogie pivot mechanism, which carries the current from the pickups. I have found that the performance of some locos improves significantly when the pickup wires are soldered directly to the pickups. The downside is that this requires dissasembling (and, far worse, reassembling) the bogie, and that the bogie will now be tethered to the loco. As long as there is plenty of extra length in the wires, the second issue is fairly minor. Don't get rid of the plate as you will still need it to hold the bogie on! 47401 has been so treated and with a DCC Concepts brownout fitted decoder it hardly ever cuts out (despite the awful track I make it run on).

£211.60 for a Hornby County? What am I missing?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334400698773

6 hours ago, Coombe Vale said:

Strange?! Newbryford posted the joke 28 minutes before CameronL quoted it, but I can't see the original anywhere.

I can't possibly imagine why...

If you have a large modern diesel, check that as well. They tend to have underframe detailing right on the ends which could be taken off if you have a tight curve next to a platform. Older diesels (with less underframe detailing) are less likely to suffer in this regard. Also remember that the underframe detailing on some coaches (e.g. Hornby Mk2As) and the overhang on steam locomotives (especially 4-6-0s) will be assymmetric - so check them as they run in both directions.

Will it be possible to buy tickets on (or very close to) the day? I'd like to go since it's only a 20 minute walk away, but probably won't know if I have enough time to make it worthwhile until the week leading up to it at the earliest.

4 minutes ago, ejstubbs said:

Except that Grantchester never had a station so that would have been historically inaccurate as well!  (There was Lord's Bridge station where the Varsity Line crossed the A603 - where the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, which of course uses part of the route of the Varsity Line, is now - but Cambridge station is actually marginally closer by road from Grantchester than that.)

Many highly regarded layouts here and elsewhere are innacurate in that sense - believability is what really matters.

On 16/04/2022 at 18:08, Colin_McLeod said:

Is this joke political?

Are political jokes allowed?

Asking for a friend.

Not all jokes which at first appear to be political need to be seen as commenting on politics at all, even when the joke may be intended as a commentary on politics and the political nature of the comments is likely to be understood by all but the most politically ignorant readers, for many apparently political jokes may instead be making some other non-political commentary and, if so, may not actually be political, but the possible non-political commentary of jokes which may be misinterpreted as being political commentary may of course be non-political commentary on the lives of politicians, but since it is not directly related to their political work it remains non-political (although it may be the case that the non-political commentary is of such a nature that it undermines the target, and if the target is political, this may have political consequences, which is not to say that such political consequences were the intention of the non-political commentary, for this non-political commentary may have been politicised by the political opponents of the politician about whom the non-political commentary was made, though of course in the event that non-political commentary is politicised in this way the politician about whom the non-political commentary was made may seek to politicise the issue further by imputing political motives to the individual who made the non-political commentary, and hence undermine the non-political commentary as a crude political attack - while at the same time condemning them for attempting to politicise a non-political issue).

For example, one might tell a joke about a politician who keeps ****ing other people and abandoning children, without being in any way explicit about the nature of the ****ing or how many children there are or who there parents may be (alleged to) be - ambiguities which could make the non-political commentary more humourous but which also mean that the recipient of the joke cannot necessarily rule out the possibility that the commentary is political in nature, since it may not in fact be about all of the children alleged to have been born as a result of the politician's alleged ****ing, but all those who have been abaondoned by his government's policies and persistent inaction on certain critical issues and hence have been royally ****ed by him (though of course, if the non-political commentary about the children born as a result of the politician's ****ing is seen to undermine his character, it may become politicised and political motives may be imputed, even where there were none, or where whatever political commentary was contained within the joke must have been on a different political issue, since this newly politicised issue was, at the time of the joke's creation, non-political).

I hope this clears matters up considerably, though in case I have failed in this objective I should point out that at no point have I set out to make any political or non-political commentary about any politician or group of politicians (though of course if my comments could be interpreted as making such commentary, political or non-political, about any political figure, I have no doubt that political motives will be imputed to me, and I have at no point ruled out that I would not wish to prevent political motives from being imputed to me - though of course if the result of political motives being imputed to me were that I end up as ****ed as the young people about whom a hypothetical person may have consructed some political commentary, then I would prefer that political motives are not imputed to me, even though I would still not explicitly rule out not wishing to prevent this, since to do so may be to inadvertently commit to a political position with which I may not agree).

21 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

Did you know?

 

The BBC is going to produce a shocking new series about what happens to people who mistreat products made from exotic wool-producing animals. But they always get what's coming to them.

 

Wait for it...

It's called the Llama Farmer Pyjama-Harmer Kharma Drama.

You horrible person. Now I have a Horrible Histories jingle stuck in my head:

31 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 Fewer than! (They're countable.)

We need less prescriptivist grammarians! 😛

1 hour ago, MrWolf said:

 

I don't know about model railway items, but a lot of returns to manufacturers are destroyed on a contract basis to stop them re-entering the market, thereby damaging profits and reputation.

That sort of wastefulness that really should be criminalised (along with large online retailers throwing away vast amounts of unsold stock). Given the difficulties in sourcing computer chips (and the environmental costs associated with both producing and disposing of many goods, especially electricals) why not prohibit firms from disposing of saleable stock without safety issues*? I recognise of course that such regulations may increase firms' costs, but this isn't really a good counter-argument providing that the increase is not disproportionate or unfair. The whole point of the law is (or should be) to make people do things that they wouldn't want to do from a rational egoist perspective but that lead to the socially optimal outcome in the end. In this case the problem is of the firm's own making since they used resources innefficiently (either by insufficient quality control leading to many good components being 'wasted' due to one faulty one rendering the product inoperable, or in the other case alluded to by simply producing or procuring too many units).

*Specifically, obligate them to offer the goods for sale at vastly reduced prices, and ultimately for free (to charities if appropriate), before disposing of them.

2 hours ago, WIMorrison said:

Not quite correct, the correct action is;

 

read cv29 and if it is EVEN add 1 to the value and write it, if it is ODD then subtract 1 from the value and write the value to the decoder.

True, but every decoder I've used has taken an even value by default, and I was operating on the assumption that this one would be too. I suppose that if the loco is pre-owned a previous owner might have wired the decoder in reverse and already changed CV29 to correct the error.

12 minutes ago, TEAMYAKIMA said:

OK, I guess that topic title is a bit odd - let me explain.

 

I have a tender loco which I want to run as tender-first when in forward. How can I change that please?

Add 1 to the value of CV29.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-60999800

I hope this is a joke! The (much derided) student newspapers at my university would have done a better job than this.

Here are the highlights:

"Colchester: Scrapped Intercity 125 to join rail heritage collection"

Why have they bought a scrapped one when there are plenty of fully serviceable ones around? I'm guessing that they haven't.

"A heritage group has bought three Intercity 125 high speed diesel trains for a railway collection."

The rest of the article suggests that it has one (short) train and a spare power car (referred to as an 'engine', but this is reasonable for a mass-media article)

"According to Mr Bunt, the 125 holds the speed record for the fastest diesel train carrying passengers; of 148 miles per hour (approx 240km/ph), achieved in November 1987."

No criticism of Mr Bunt is intended, but was he really the most authoratative source they could find for this? Was it too much work to check anything more official? (Also, I'm not 100% sure that this run was carrying passengers.)

"Heritage 125 has bought three Intercity engines including three carriages complete with dining car and kitchen"

In other news, I have just bought three bananas including three apples. This sentence is unintelligible, but especially perplexing when the article also states that "Heritage 125 has bought three Intercity engines, along with three carriages complete with dining car and kitchen".

Yes, it's good that the BBC (which I'm normally supportive of) is trying to support heritage railways, especially when they're trying to tap into a potentially huge new market such as the HST nostalgia generation (which includes people younger than me and older than my parents). However, if this was written by a professional jounalist, it must be some kind of joke.

Our last image for the day is this. Firstly, note the rather intricate decoration (both official and otherwise) on the NCN signpost. Secondly, the tree behind it appears to have had some of it's branches trimmed. I would imagine that this could be quite hard to replicate on a model, but it would certainly stop your trees from looking the same as everyone else's. Finally, there is something in this photo which is less little than usual. The River Avon, like many rivers up and down the country, is managed in a way which causes certain areas to flood whenever there is heavy rainfall. In Chippenham, it is this section, just below the weir. There is a path which continues off to the right (follow the signpost) under the road bridge. I was stood as far down it as I could without being in the river. Perhaps it's because many models are set in summer, but flooding (even on a small scale like this) isn't something which is seen often on a model railway.