KingEdwardII

I think the Spanish have a good word for that: "mañana" ;-) Yours, Mike.

What type of turnouts are you using? IF these are Peco electrofrog, then you MUST use insulating fishplates on both rails leading away from the frog on all your turnouts. If you don't do this, you will get shorting. Looking at your diagram, you will need that additional isolation at the place in red. I note that you also don't seem to have isolation around the double slip, which might cause problems. For reliability, you may also consider adding additional track feeds, especially either side of turnout B Yours, Mike.

Thats a sharp looking curve to the left beyond the crane in that photo, which surprises me since I thought that much of the line between Bicester and Bletchley was pretty straight. Yours, Mike.

Hmm, that may be a decision that will be regretted in years to come. Commuter traffic to/from Portishead is likely to be heavy. A 3 car limit will mean sardine conditions in the rush hours. I remember 3 car trains during the morning rush hour on the Portsmouth-Bristol route having people hanging out of the windows after the Bath stop. A shame, since I think that the commuter traffic must be one of the major targets for the Portishead line - Bristol has truly awful road traffic and the rail route is likely to be a success because of that. If I was in charge, 6 car would be my minimum for the platforms. Yours, Mike.

Yup, the preservation boys love a bit of pristine!! Look at the rake of coaches too - shiny & clean - they try to wash them down every week or two. Yours, Mike.

National Rail's own app/website does the same - typically allows far too much time for Tube connections across London. I suppose that there is an element of allowing for late arrival of a train into London, particularly for tickets tied to specific train departures. Last time I checked a Winchester to Newcastle journey, I could easily have caught a train from Kings Cross 15 mins earlier than the one recommended by the NR system and probably have made one 30 mins earlier. Yours, Mike.

You clearly don't seem to have been involved in business involving people who are spread in different locations. Dictatorship is the best policy, as far as you are concerned. What the consequences are you neither know nor care. Sure, we all like to waste our time travelling to meetings. Just because we "feel" like it. You clearly don't have a clue about this. Strangely enough, all my business flights have been in economy. I've travelled in business and first class on my own dollar - because the comfort mattered to me for the long journeys I was undertaking. It was worth it. Even my last personal train journey was in first class - because that is what suited me best for that journey. There you are, dictating to people again. I don't want to force you to buy a particular food, a particular car. Leave the rest of us to make our choices how we spend our hard earned cash. These constraints are yet another form of dictatorship... Yours, Mike.

They are still struggling to cope with the success of Cambridge. The Science Park went ahead and boomed without any other kind of planning to support the inevitable growth that followed. They have been scrambling to catch up ever since. At least the railway line to Kings Cross is now pretty decent - which only makes things worse since it puts Cambridge firmly into the London commuter area... But how dare these places outside of London get a life of their own?? Yours, Mike.

Relatively few of them in the Midlands area - many of the smaller lines there were connected at both ends. e.g. Line via Much Wenlock, line via Tenbury Wells, Severn Valley railway... Yours, Mike.

I use MTB MP1 motors, which are slow action stall motors, but these use 3 wire connections. These are DC operated, to switch them with DCC as I do requires using an accessory decoder with a 3 wire output - I use Digikeijs DR4018. I think the message is that you have to know which point motors you intend to use - there is no universal wiring arrangement. Yours, Mike.

The on screen diagram does not have to be a faithful map of the layout, but can be done diagrammatically to give enough separation. The same principle is typically used for traditional style control panel, where there needs to be enough space for the switches or studs. My touchscreen is a 22" - I would not want one much larger or it would start to get in the way. Yours, Mike.

I suppose a problem for Cardiff are all the suburbs that are not served by any kind of rail connection. Places along the line to Coryton are reasonably well served, but all the suburbs to the East have nothing - and these include some of the newer suburbs and the ones still growing. The new planned major development to the north west is another case - I've seen some discussion of re-opening some long since closed rail lines to serve this area, but a tram might be a much better option. There is also the issue of poor links to important locations - the Heath Hospital is a classic case, being outside the city centre. It is fairly close to the rail line north to Caerphilly, but there is no station or other link. Yours, Mike.

Queen Street is now again 5 platforms, as it was from Victorian times when it was the hub of the services via Pontypridd & Caerphilly. If they really needed more services, they could consider making Queen Street the hub once more. But they have already added a Platform 8 to Cardiff Central to provide more capacity there - and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility to add a Platform 9 there too, since the land to the south of the station is still railway land (it once used to have a pair of curving platforms with tracks going down to the docks area, going under the name "Cardiff Riverside"). Yours, Mike.

Hmm, those tremors were so minor that they are smaller than the ones experienced in coal mining areas on a reasonably frequent basis.

It was the mouse that I really didn't want in the railway room - at least when operating the layout. That's why I went for the fancy large touchscreen. They are about double the price of the same size standard screen. Using a Mark 1 finger to do all the work is just simple and easy ;-) Yours, Mike.

Ahem - they made a total dogs dinner of the GWML scheme, so I would not start there, personally. Attaching the Metro scheme to that would probably mean that it would not get done until after 2050... At least the Wales government is nominally in charge, which I think makes cancellation less likely - too many of their voters would be affected. Yours, Mike.

I assume you have seen the stuff hanging off the TfW site: https://tfw.wales/projects/metro/south-wales-metro As is so usual, the "News" portion is months out of date. There are some South Wales Metro videos on YouTube - one of the more recent is this: All strange and exciting for me, since I was born in Aberdare and lived my teenage years in Coryton in the northern suburbs of Cardiff, not far from Taffs Well. The new Metro maintenance depot is on a site previously occupied by South Wales Forgemasters - I used to cycle past that on my way to a summer job in a bakery in Taffs Well. Yours, Mike.

The big problem with the cross country routes is their basic slowness - the lines are simply not laid out for speed. The number of stops is not so much of an issue - although it is much better with electrification than without due to the better acceleration of electric trains & cross country trains are typically non-electric. PLUS, when you look at the Cross Country services, you find long waits at some stations for no obvious reason. Yours, Mike.

Yes, I can agree with that. I'm OK with tolled motorways too - M6 toll is just great. Perhaps one idea that's been missed is the idea of building combined Motorway/Railway routes as a way of minimising impact of major routes. The other idea is that ALL new lines should be built to express standards (140mph say) to permit effective long distance transport. This applies in spades to EWR - envisage routes like Norwich to Bristol/Cardiff by express. Today, people would have to go through London, which is still a pain even with the Elizabeth line. Why not services like Norwich - Cambridge - Bedford - Bletchley/MK - Oxford - Swindon - Bath - Bristol? Yours, Mike.

Yes. A control panel with a diagram of the layout is the "natural" way to do this, so that you simply select the turnout from its place on the layout. Several folks here have advocated using a physical panel with switches or studs. I do it using a computer and a touch screen - Raspberry Pi, so not expensive. It's the touch screen that's expensive. To go this route, you do need DCC to drive the point motors - and a computer connection to your controller. In my case I use MTB MP1 slow action point motors and Digikeijs DR4018 accessory decoders. This ain't cheap, but I get good control. I can control the turnouts via the large touchscreen - but I can also control them via my Android smartphone, since the Pi provides an interface for remote connections over WiFi. Yours, Mike.

Thinking about it further - other signs of success on the railways. The station at University in Birmingham. Didn't even exist until 1978. Has grown & grown since, helped by the electrification of the cross city line. Now so important that a percentage of the long distance trains along that route now stop there as well (e.g. Cardiff - Nottingham). Now so busy (~ 4M passengers per year) that it is undergoing a major upgrade to deal with the volume of traffic. Loud applause from me. We need more of this kind of vision. Yours, Mike.

The ultimate sign of failure. A landmark of a junction that should never have been a roundabout in the first place.

Yes, 17 hours a day we were cut off in my part of Cardiff in summer 1976. But fortunately for me, that summer I worked in the water treatment works at Treforest Trading Estate. I could have a shower at work whenever I liked... Yours, Mike.

I think that some railways have done this - for example the improvements of services on the GWR main line have made commuting from places like Didcot practical and have encouraged the development of a major new town there. The electrification of the line to Cambridge did much the same for the Cambridge area. Something similar has happened on the Borders Railway in Scotland, with ridership way ahead of forecast. East West rail will do the same if it gets completed. Journeys any way along that route by train are slow and poor today. Make them fast and frequent and people will use them. Its all about convenience. Yours, Mike.

Well, I think that road engineers in the UK have an unhealthy obsession with roundabouts. Roundabouts are just about the worst way to build a junction between major roads and yet that is what we get, time and again. It is almost the equivalent of a railway junction "on the level" - fine when traffic is light, but once the traffic level increases, every route interferes with every other route. I suspect that cost is a factor in choosing roundabouts, but it is almost always a bad choice that then requires heaps more money to fix. My own experience with the A34 / M40 and journeys between south coast and the Midlands is that it is way better today than it used to be - I've being doing that route for over 40 years now.