Jeremy Cumberland

Far be it from me to quibble with the author of The Newcomer's Guide to Model Railways and owner of this immeasurably useful web site, but if you mean wired from the CDU (via the switch) to the first solenoid, then from the first solenoid to the second, then back to the CDU, then surely that's in series, not parallel? Or is my aged brain becoming even more addled than I realised? Connect them in parallel, but don't wire the second motor to the first, wire it back to the switch and to the same return point. If you wire the second motor to the first, the first will steal all the power, because electricity to the second motor will have to pass through extra lengths of wire and additional soldered joints.

Are they actually locked? @LNER4479, did you check?

So the Mk1s are there to provide retention tank toilets, it would seem.

There are no absolute requirements, but it isn't entirely irrelevent. GTR were fined £1 million under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 section 3(1) in 2019 when a passenger was killed by putting their head out of a window. This clause is a general duty of care by employers towards third parties. A statement by ORR in 2019 (https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/safety-first-droplight-windows-heritage-and-charter-trains) says: I don't think ORR has issued any specific guidance, and as you say, there is no specific legislative bar to opening windows, but if anyone is injured by sticking their head out of the window of a moving train, the operator can expect to be prosecuted.

That's a conventional relay. How would you use it with a solenoid point motor, CDU and pulse contact switch? The GM500 contains a dual coil latching relay and I imagine it has been designed specifically to work with Gaugemaster point motors. The instructions say 9V-24V, which ought to cover pretty much all CDU configurations.

An alternative would be Electrofrog "out of the box" style wiring, where you rely on stock rail to switch blade contact to provide the electrical supply to the crossing. This presumably is something you had intended doing anyway if you wanted to replicate Insulfrog, but I can't say it is anything I would choose to do myself, and I have no idea how reliable it can be made. I suppose you'd solder a pickup strip to the underside of the switch blade that has a wiping contact with the stock rail (or vice versa, soldering to the stock rail and wiping the switch) when the switch is closed. With Electrofrog out-of-the-box, the two switch blades are electricaly bonded via the frog, so you'll need to take care that the opposite side electrical wiper breaks before the near side electrical wiper makes. You will also need to make sure that the switch blade to closure rail electrical contacts are absolutely reliable on each side. You will probably need to add insulating joints and track feeds at the diverging end of the point, but these depend on the track plan. There is a potential problem with "out of the box" Electrofrog, which you don't get with Insulfrogs or live frogs with switched frog polarity, and that is that the open switch blade will be at the opposite polarity to the adjacent stock rail, which could cause a short if you have narrow open switch gaps, thick flanges or undersized wheel back to backs. This is unlikely to be a problem if you keep the same overly-wide open switch gaps as the Settrack points, but I expect you want to make them narrower.

I'd be inclined to build them with live frogs and switch the crossing polarity. The problem with any sort of insulfrog arrangement is that you end up with a very small, vulnerable crossing nose. Peco insulfrogs make the crossing nose part of the plastic base moulding. Peco Unifrogs use the moulded plastic base to support the crossing nose over its entire length. You will struggle to get this level of support with hand built track, not without having a very long insulated section.

Unfortunately the Scottish CalMac ferry saga has rather torpedoed the Buy British (at any cost) mantra for national infrastructure projects. A Labour government might well try and get trains built in Britain, but I doubt it will be very high up their list of priorities, and they will expect value for money. Don't expect to see BREL resurrected.

There has been no suggestion that I've seen that competition will be outlawed (unlike some post-war nationalisation schemes), and Labour have specifically said that they expect open access operators such as Grand Central, Hull Trains, Lumo and Heathrow Express to continue operating much as they do currently. The shame, to my mind, is that the roscos won't be touched, for reasons @Ron Ron Ron has described better than I could. I will be very interested to see what a Labour government envisages for new rolling stock procurement, whether they will continue to use roscos, or whether new stock will be purchased by the nationalised operator.

Someone wouldn't allow the Virgin class 57 Thunderbird models, though, as I recall. This may well have been down to Gerry Anderson / ITV side of things rather than Virgin.

48 was double-heading the down express with 140. 121 was on the up troop train. 907 was on the down local. There was a down goods train in the down loop, and an up special of empty wagons (presumably a "Jellicoe") which was admitted into the up loop after the passenger train was crossed over to the up main, but I don't know the loco of either. The driver of the down goods said their engine was six-coupled with steam brake on loco and tender, but the driver of the up empties didn't say anything about their engine.

Yes. Refusal or inability to come to terms is one of the main reasons for some liveries never appearing.

Have you not been paying attention to the conversation? There was some discussion about what it's like on the Mk2s at the moment, with no heating or ventilation. This led to looking at reviews of the Jacobite on various sites - all very much on topic. This led to To which @ruggedpeak responded Rather a good post, I thought (I did like "fall out to your heart's content"), and no further off topic than many other posts in this thread. There then followed some discussion on comparative conditions between Scotland and Switzerland, which @ruggedpeak responded to, again in a pleasant and informative manner with the pictures of a Swiss metre-gauge line. Then you jump in with bold text, underling and exclamation marks saying that U.K. railways are judged in U.K. courts and to U.K. laws, and then having a rant about...well, to be honest I am not quite sure what. It doesn't seem to have any connection with the conversation up to that point.

The up empty wagon train in the loop at the time of Quintinshill accident was almost certainly a "Jellicoe" (the nine wagons mentioned in the accident report are all from Cardiff, and the train was called a "special"), but I haven't found any mention of the locomotive type.

Ah, sorry, I've just looked again at theSwitchPilot Servo instructions and I see that the push buttons are used to short across pairs of terminals, not to give a short pulse (which is what a dual coil latching relay would require).

No, they were bogie wagons. These are four-wheelers. The wagons are TOPS KDV, converted from SPV 22.5 ton plate wagons. They are only periphary to my interest and I have only come across them in passing. I don't think I've seen the built-in cradles before. I see from Paul Bartlett that they (or some of them at any rate) were originally LNER Diag 196: https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/lnerplate Pictures of Coil D wagons after conversion seem to be rather elusive.

Apart from having no idea what (a) "really strong beard game" might be, and even knowing that John Venn had a beard does not help, I am a little surprised that people who thought it worth using a Venn diagram for the sign didn't seem to know what a Venn Diagram is/does. The things inside each circle form a set, so usually they are all the same type of thing. The labels, if needed, go on the outside. Here is a Venn Diagram:

G for Police. I particularly liked M for Sis N for More Sis

I didn't spot that when looking at the Switch Pilot Servo documentation. Each Extension has four auxiliary switches, so if you're controlling eight servos you'll need two of them, one on each side (they simply plug in to the Switch Pilot Servo). They're about £30 each, so microswitches or latching relays would be cheaper.

If a majority of people really wanted level crossing barriers and lights to be removed, I dare say that a government would be pressurised into enacting legislation to that effect. But people don't want this. I am very confident that the vast majority of people support existing safety measures, and I suspect that a majority might be found for increasing them, particularly at foot crossings.

Thank you both. At present there are only 7 responses from people who have actually travelled on the train this year. Four of them are either 4 or 5, with no text (one has a photograph), and there are 3 written reviews, that are largely critical, and only one of those, by Ivan Marinkovic, includes comments about the stock. "Expensive and long" in one of the other reviews would apply just as much to Mk1s). There are a number of other reviews from people whose trains were cancelled. From the reviews, it seems that some people on the Jacobite want compartment stock, based on Harry Potter. I suspect they are a minority. I doubt they could tell the difference between a Mk1 and a Mk2 BSK, though.

The law for the person walking wasn't enacted until 1865. Perhaps this engine was an attempt, while the exact nature of the new law was still being debated, to show that there were other ways of warning road users, less restrictive than having a man walking out the front (the 1865 Act specified "on foot" and they had to be at least 60 yards in front, which is of course absurd for something travelling at walking pace).

It started with the sixth post on the first page. This is not intended to cast any aspersions on that particular poster, because it was always bound to happen, and quite rightly so, in my opinion. WCRC are obliged to follow certain rules to be able to operate trains, and I think everyone accepts this as a general principle. Many of the rules are of a purely operational nature that the public generally aren't interested in. This applies to most of the rule book. Then there are rules that have a more political aspect to them, and this is often the case with rules applied by statute rather than via the rule book. Central Door Locking is one of these. We don't know what went on behind the scenes, but it is easy to imagine HMRI lobbying the Secretary of State for Transport to enact legislation to prohibit Mk1 coaches and slam doors without central door locking. In 1999, the Secretary of State for Transport, John Prescott, agreed, and introduced the Railway Safety Regulations 1999 to Parliament, which passed it. Statutes are always open to change, and a new administration has the power to revoke or amend those made by a previous government. A political party might include promises to revoke certain legislation in their manifesto, if they think it does not match their ideology or they think they will win votes by it. Individual citizens can lobby their MP to get RSR99 Regulation 5 revoked, if they wish. Perhaps if Boris Johnson - that lover of open platform buses - had still been Prime Minister when the current issue first arose, he might have been persuaded to change the regulation. He might also have leant on ORR to modify their approach to granting exemptions, but the ORR are nominally independent and could have resisted; they would not have been able to resist a change in the law, though. But on the whole, I don't think there is either public enthusiasm or political will for relaxing the current rules. Not everyone is happy with them, that is sure, and over the past months, WCRC have focused on winning public opinion over to their side. I am not sure what they then hoped to do with this public opinion. Put pressure on the ORR, I suppose, since there is no sign that I can see that they are trying to get the regulation overturned or amended, but as I said earlier, ORR are not easy to put pressure on. For myself, I am more interested in knowing exactly how the Mk1s in the set are being managed to comply with the regulations, and I'd love to hear a first hand account of what it is like riding in an unheated, unvented and more-or-less sealed Mk2 in both the cold and damp we've had recently, and in the bright sunshine we've got today. I'd also like to know what WCRC tell passengers about why they have to sit in this carriage, but aren't allowed into that one (if that is, indeed, what they are told).

You will probably recall from the Ais Gill accident report that the first train was over the weight limit specified for the locomotive. The locomotive was 993, a Deeley 990 class, and the carriages weighed 243 tons, 13 tons over the specified maximum. The driver of 993 applied for pilot assistance, but this was declined and the driver did not insist upon it. It is made fairly clear in the report that the driver didn't really expect to be given a pilot, even though there was a locomotive available, because he knew, as did the platform inspector who refused his request, that coupling on a pilot would delay the train more than the expected late running caused by not having a pilot. However, the driver still had to ask for assistance even though he knew he wouldn't get it, because this then absolved him from any blame for subesequent late running.

I wouldn't look to electronics for such a simple function, not unless it was already built into the controller, but the SwitchPilot Servo doesn't have auxiliary outputs. You need an SPDT switch of some description to operate either one LED or the other. There are two basic options. One is to use the servo to operate a microswitch as well as the points. Perhaps someone offers a mount for your servos that can incorporate a microswitch, this being such a common requirement with model railways, usually for frog switching. The other option is to use the two pushbuttons to power a dual coil latching relay. Someone recently was looking to use these: https://www.rapidonline.com/hongfa-hfd2-012-s-l2-d-pcb-signal-relay-12vdc-dpdt-2a-71-4712 but with solenoid point motors rather than servos, and things did not go quite as they had wished. Your set up will be less demanding, since you won't be using a CDU nor will you have a solenoid trying to steal all the power.