KingEdwardII

Yes - telegraph poles are a thankless task for nothing more than window dressing. Far better to spend energy and money on the stuff that's needed to actually run the railway and then the near-at-hand stuff that can give stations and working buildings the authentic look. Yours, Mike.

King Edward II in preservation has alternative set of lower chimney and safety valve casing which are fitted to permit running on the mainline - something that has never happened in practice due to width restrictions. Yours, Mike

Not all aspects of the past are faithfully rendered on Heritage lines, despite the great efforts of the volunteers. One of the more obvious examples are the telegraph poles and strands of wires between them, which were a ubiquitous element of the railways in steam days. Seldom do the poles ever appear, while the wires are today buried underground following modern practice. Yours, Mike.

That would be dangerously close to coordinated thinking. To be fair, they are making the HS2 link part of an extension on the East side to Deritend, which I think is a good idea. Combined with the revived Camp Hill line, that helps with public transport in the south and east of the city centre. Yours, Mike.

It's not quite as simple as that, however. Even on the "1904" Broadway station on the GWSR, there are things like CCTV installed (to the annoyance of some purists) but even items designed to match original, such as the big lanterns, inevitably have modern technology inside such as LED lights. So in reality there is already a blending of modern and heritage items - the trick is finding an acceptable balance. Some heritage lines are already capable of accepting trains from connected main line routes. It is here on the ELR where it may be possible to look at acceptable ways of combining regular commuter style services with heritage operation. Tricky, for sure, but not impossible. How much it might all cost and what compromises may be required needs careful investigation. Yours, Mike.

Use a garage to store a car!?! What a quaint idea. Garages are for almost anything but storing cars - storage for many other things, for sure, and maybe to hold the occasional model railway. Converting garages into habitable rooms seems like a very small step to me - and it makes them far more suitable for model railways... Yours, Mike.

I dont know what the local council has in mind, but they are in a bit of a bind. Trams are great for short distance journeys, but they are pretty slow for longer distances. Bury's connection with Manchester is entirely tram these days and the journey time to Piccadilly is 38 mins, Victoria 29 mins. A nearby town on the Rochdale - Manchester railway line, Castleton, has a journey time as short as 17 mins to Victoria. For towns north of Bury, the tram does not look a great option, with journey times to Manchester likely nearing 1 hour. So perhaps the more appropriate scheme would be to link Bury back to the rail system by reconnecting the line through Heywood to the Rochdale line, south of Castleton. How to square this with continuing the heritage operations on the ELR is the key question - very difficult to see how to do this without spending a lot of money. Yours, Mike

I think that one of the striking changes since the 1930s is the demise of the hat. In the video, almost everyone seems to be wearing one. Today, you'd see very few. I still wear a hat regularly - to keep the sun off in summer and deal with the rain in winter. I'm surprised more folk don't use them. Yours, Mike.

Usually, picking up the lead results in the dog frisking around you expecting to be taken for walkies - not so easy to forget that...

Ah - that's a connection for me! It's the name of the pub in a Northumberland village called Christon Bank, a few miles north of Alnwick and pretty well right next to the level crossing over the ECML. We were staying about a mile from there last week, a bit nearer the sea. The pub name is so unusual that it gave me the incentive to find out its origin. Two of the horse's hooves are on display in the pub... As you say, Blink Bonny was in her prime in the late 1850s! Yours, Mike.

I think that Loconet in particular is both a bus and a protocol - Digitrax define both the physical electrical connections and also a message protocol that travels over the connections. Digitrax compares the physical connections with Ethernet in their documentation. It is the case that the Loconet message protocol can travel over other types of physical connection, e.g. Ethernet or WiFi. Yours, Mike.

No, unfortunately not - same message as before. SORRY - that was for the link given above. The photos do show up in the posts above now. Doh....

Our trips to the North of England and to Scotland from the south are generally by car and have an overnight stop somewhere to break up the journey and avoid over-tiredness. With two travelling, the cost of car + hotel room is way less that the sleeper service. Even the regular train fares struggle to compete. We've considered using the sleeper service from London to Fort William, but this would be an indulgence. It is certainly not any kind of practical travel. Yours, Mike.

I write down all kinds of things about my model railway in documents, just to be able to remember what I did and why at a later point. I simply can't keep all the information in my head. I include pictures and diagrams. Anything that can help at some later point. I know that if I don't do this, then I will have a painful relearning process eventually. Yours, Mike.

Classic quotes from various NIMBY groups along the proposed route in that report.

It is noticeable how large the tunnels are on the high speed lines in Korea - and there are a lot of them, since Korea is a mountainous country and they simply sliced through the mountains rather than curve around them. There is no noticeable pressure effect within the trains as you enter and emerge from the tunnels. Yours, Mike.

Those services are now operated with Class 165/166 DMUs - typically either 3 car or 5 car configurations. The 5 car sets are a real boost compared with the previous 3 car trains, which used to get ridiculously overcrowded on some journeys. Frankly, this is a route that ought to be considered for Cross-Country type of services with proper long distance stock. As you rightly point out, it connects a lot of cities with substantial populations - and with a lot of university and college students along the way too. Yours, Mike.

They have obviously been paying too much attention to the model train industry....

West Somerset Railway has two Winterlights trains runing on those days - after dark, of course. First is 17:00. Yours, Mike.

I think that this is the general story for anywhere within about 1 hour's journey of London. This is prime commuter territory. The astronomic prices in London are the pressure that forces folk to look ever further afield. Looked at from a railway perspective, these commuters are the dependable customers of the future. It's why London has such an extensive railway network still. Yours, Mike.

For a regular crossover, you don't reverse the wires. The reason is that you want both turnouts to be in the same position at the same time - i.e. both "open" or both "closed". So the motion is identical for both point motors, assuming they are fitted the same way round relative to the turnout they operate. If one motor is flipped around compared with the other then you would need reversed connections. For other combinations of turnout pairs, the situation could be different - it all depends on the relative orientation of the motors relative to the turnouts. Yours, Mike.

Borth has one of the most wonderful sandy beaches on the whole west coast of Britain! Miles long, stretching from the built-up bit next the village at the south end to the wilds of the dunes at the north end at Ynyslas. Yours, Mike.

That actually depends on the license concerned. The Apache 2.0 license isn't like that and permits commercial products (closed source) to be based on the open source code. The MIT license is similar in nature. The bigger point relating to your previous post is that under open source licenses they can't unlicense the software or force a change on you. Unlike commercial software. Yours, Mike.

One thought: you might like to try out JMRI connecting the DR5000 from your machine. It's pretty straightforward and it will at least verify that you can communicate properly between the computer and the DR5000. Yours, Mike

While not denying that poor design and lack of testing does occur, the need for upgrades has little to do with that. Even carefully designed and well tested code will have bugs and there are always requests for extra functionality. There is also the need to fit in with hardware changes and changes in other software that your code depends on or connects to. Yours, Mike.