PMW

To my mind Hamilton is the most complete driver we have ever seen. I try not to say the best as comparing drivers from different eras is so difficult, but it's getting increasingly difficult to argue against that title too. Modern day formula 1 requires so many different disciplines, it is a far cry from days gone by when drivers would head straight from the pub to the track, jump in the car, nail the throttle and go as fast as they could. Before you get anywhere near the car it's about fitness, about politics, about making sure you are in the right place at the right time. You need to be as much a mechanic as a driver, many a fast driver under achieved in F1 because they couldn't understand the car. Then you have to be able to drive the wheels off it on a saturday. In days of yore you might have got away without being able to get onto the front row regularly. Previous incarnations of f1 cars with greater dependence on mechanical grip and gadgets like ground effect meant you could overtake if you and the car were good enough. No longer, few cars are capable of following close in line, and even with DRS you still need a clear car advantage to get by, or the bloke in front to make an error. If Verstappen could get onto the front row I have no doubt he would give the Mercs a fair fight. Then comes the race. Rightly or wrongly the race is no longer about who can go the fastest. It's about who can complete the race distance in the shortest time and that is something totally different, it's about tyre management, fuel management, strategy, deltas, etc and nobody in the history of the sport gets anywhere near Hamilton in that respect. Barring a major catastrophe he will match Schumacher's seven world titles this year, he will also go past his 91 wins which he equaled at the 'ring. And he has done it all in a period where we have or have had plenty of decent opponents.

I will not say I have completed the layout plan for the upcoming "Wavenham" layout, but I offer it up here with for your perusal. I am sure somebody will suggest a failing in my design, that's OK. I am not, nor do I claim to be an expert. I shall not be offended if anyone would like to suggest that a particular crossover is pointless (sorry about the pun, I would like to say it was not intended but I'll take all the credit i can get). Likewise somebody might like to suggest an operational shortcoming that should be fixed. The layout will be a bit of a mish-mash as it will be based on the sum of the bits and pieces I have gathered over the years, and a few pieces that we have bough and put away for our first born until he reached a suitable age, which at ten we guess he just about has. I make no apology for that mish-mash, the aim is for Jamie to be able to play with his trains without having to get them out on the barely big enough dining table then put it all away again. So here it is. It will be based on the mid 1970's era which suits the "youngest" of the locos, with an unidentified reservation railway using platform four on the inner loop. The total dimension is 96 x 70 inches, the yellow arc is the opening door, carefully measured so as you can see literally every square inch of available space is being used. Access to the central operating area is via hands and knees with the door way providing a second operator space or viewing gallery. Sadly the location of the door does not favour reversing the opening, we have considered that, and we are keen to retain the door to be able to lock it when younger playmates, or our three year old take an unwanted interest. The basic design is a double mainline loop with a partial inner loop and additional holding platform spurred from the inner and outer main lines respectively. The north of the board is dominated by a four platform mainline station of typical 1960s design capable of handling a full rake of five bogie coaches on either of the mainline platforms 2 and 3. The south features a turntable for additional animation. This was to be a swing bridge, however we have had to concede that the space available just doesn't lend itself to that project. Maybe we'll put that one aside for a future adventure. The east side features locomotive storage whilst to the west and north are a pair of extended coach sidings. There are some shortcomings, firstly and most obviously to me there are no wagon sidings. We have about half a dozen mixed wagons so a siding would be useful but to my mind the layout is busy enough as it is. The other failing is that it is flat, but in 96 x 70 space is very limited for a reasonable incline to lift, or lower a train the 100 or so millimeters or so that would be necessary. So flat it remains, though we will look to add some "rolling" contours with scenery and perhaps raise the mainline loops at the very bottom of the layout by an inch or two to allow some very slight embankment to detach them from the turntable. It will inevitable be built in stages, though as far as I can estimate without a stock update which must wait until after the holidays next week we should have all of the track sections needed. I fell upon a nice deal on facebook where I acquired about sixty straight tracks of varying lengths, mostly Hornby double straits or longer, fourteen electrified points plus about a dozen non electrified points, some straight and some curved for £100, a deal I couldn't pass by, especially as most if it is unused. I also picked up a BR Blue Class 08 to handle shunting duties, filling a gap in the rolling stock list so we should have just about everything we need to get going, barring control. How to control the layout has been the single biggest issue of late. As the layout has become more and more complex with each redesign and moved further and further from a simple double loop with some sidings the decision has swung firmly towards DCC, or more realistically DCC++. Building a DCC++ system based around an arduino holds no fear, it's actually quite straight forward to get it to the level where it will run trains, operate sound chips, turnouts and even the turntable. Initially it can be controlled by an android throttle running from a tablet, though later I will look to ad a Raspberry Pi to control the adruino and connect a wired or blue tooth analogue throttle. The ultimate aim is to code programs to set specific routes, run trains on different routes in order, lift and return carriages to the sidings etc and then allow the layout to run randomly within a list of preset parameters. This is serious coding, but something to keep me busy during the long winter nights. It will require block sensors across the whole layout so I will build an IO shield into the command center to allow this at a later date.

Working on a dream, Bruce Springstein

Heroes, David Bowie

River of dreams, Billy Joel.

Another town, another train, ABBA

Ain't no pleasing you, Chaz & Dave

Walking on sunshine, Katrina and the Waves

My plan has always been to make it as automated as possible and I like the idea of using an arduino controlled stepper motor to allow push button control. Since reading melmerby's suggestion yesterday I have been doing "arduino for dummies". It is not something which should be beyond me. From a software and programming basis it is not that dissimilar to things I have done in the past, in fact it seems very similar to modding a 3d model on something like farming simulator. I had thought of building a dedicated controller using 4 pwm motor controllers to power the 4 main track sections and adding the bridge control to that, but my voyages into the world of arduino have me dreaming of DCC++ via raspberry pi, arduino, motor shield and one of the commonly available interfaces such as JMRI. I have lots of videos on my you tube list still to get through!

Homeward Bound, Simon & Garfunkle

I did think about using a belt, or band drive on the basis if it were to over rotate it would not strip gears but melmerby has got my interest peaked in steppers and arduinos, that might be the way to go.

It seems that layouts nowadays need animation, and mine will be a reasonable facsimile of a swing bridge which carries the Bittern Line over the river Waveney near the village and estate of Somerleyton, on the Norfolk - Suffolk border. Scratch building the model doesn't bother me too much, I may well make the basic mechanism from meccano and then attach it to a piece of board and add the girder work from commercially available plastic beams. The construction of the bridge means that when closed the weight of the bridge and it's load is carried by three beams under the track bed and when swung the bridge mass is supported by a pair of overhead truss girders. in 1:76 I think the board which forms he track bed should be self supporting when swung, and will sit on three piers when closed so the weight of any load will go through those. My issue is with motorising. Getting the bridge to swing isn't difficult, and there will be definite stops on each pier to locate the bridge in the closed position. The issues are getting the motor to stop once the bridge hits the closed position, and keeping it locked so that it doesn't "drift" open with the obvious consequences. I have one or two ideas. A non latching push to break switch on the stop would isolate the motor but would need to be wired in parallel with a push to make switch to provide power to open the bridge. I could perhaps use magnetic latches to keep it closed. Any other suggestions are welcome.

I see red, Clannad

Fade to grey, Visage

Don't worry, my Alexa is getting used to some choice words.

Blue Savannah - Erasure

I very rapidly lost interest.

For me the obvious advantage would be the ability to tun a train round part of a loop occupied by another train into sidings etc. It can be done with DC but you would need to isolate a section of track, usually in the station via a switch. The idle trains sits their whilst the train heading into, or out of sidings can then cross that loop and run on it if needed.

I'm afraid in my mind if it controls the train, then it's a controller. A controller contains a throttle, but other things too, such as direction selector, perhaps even light and sound control. Hornby and Bachmann both seem to use this phraseology so trying to change it, at least at the level I am contemplating seems counter productive. It might become important in more complex systems, but that is not what I'm considering. The DCC routes I was looking at were either entry level Bachmann or Hornby units versus a ready built Arduino based system controlled via an android bluetooth device. The Hornby or Bachmann systems have the benefit of being off the shelf ready to go systems, the arduino route needs wiring and an enclosure but is preprogrammed and offers much greater functionality. Wiring this kind of system would be fairly straightforward though the more I think about it the more I am convinced for now at least to stick with DC most probably with a purpose built 4 channel controller, one channel each for outer loop, inner loop, sidings yard and the partial third loop and engine depot.

Script For A Jester's Tear, Marillion.

As in the river it is taken from the Anglo Saxon waney meaning meandering. I would like to get the river into the layout, but no so sure about the quivering tree

Sorry you are correct, they were part of the temporary chicanes which stopped people straight lining the track chicane. I think the difference is that there were still enough markers remaining in Monza to indicate the route through the chicanes, whilst at Sochi there were only the two boards which both got demolished, so they had to be replaced to indicate the race director's approved exit route.

We have literally just this minute agreed on a name for our new layout, so world exclusive folks ..... WAVENHAM. How did we come to it? I really don't know, perhaps some kind of amalgum of Waverley in Edinburgh made famous to us by the Fish song "Waverley Steps", The River Waveney in Suffolk which we love, and some kind of settlement suffix, hence "ham" the saxon word for village. So our new layout will be based around the fictional village and station of Wavenham.

Our new layout will, I think need to be DCC. Otherwise it will need 4 DC controllers. I'm not totally new to the concept, I used to run Zero 1, so you wired the chip into the loco, shorted the chosen terminals to assign the chip an address and if you were lucky when you selected the correct address on the controller the selected train would run. In many ways it was the first edition DCC. It was not very reliable, train running was very inconsistent. Trains would respond to the controller if they felt like it. They would respond one minute but not the next, then two minutes later would go again. The hardware was very unreliable, I went through several slave controllers and gave up trying to use the hand held. It was all rather unsatisfactory. So is modern day DCC more reliable? When choosing a DCC controller is it better to use hardware controllers, or are software controllers reliable. I like the idea of controlling my layout from an android tablet but are such systems reliable? If so which is best. Are the self built controllers on ebay any good, has anyone tried them? They seem to cost about the same as Bachmann and Hornby basic controllers sell for second hand but you need to add power supply and software to them, plus some kind of enclosure and panel connectors. Is there a massively convincing reason to run your turnouts through DCC, my plan was always to etch the layout onto a brass plate and use non latching push to make switches to activate the turnout to a particular track, perhaps even with lights to indicate the selected track. Is there a reason why I should control them with DCC and deny myself my signal box project? What do i actually need to run DCC? A controller and power supply obviously. Hornby's basic kit comes with a 1amp power supply, what will that power, it seems a bit puny. There is a 4a option but much more expensive. connection to the track of course, I would plan to hard wire each of the three loops / part loops, plus the end of each siding to ensure the whole track remains constantly live. If I go for the ebay arduino route then I need to provide a power supply but that doesn't seem too difficult. Then I need decoders for the locos. Most of my locos are older and have no lighting etc, so I'm guessing the most basic decoders will suffice to control just the speed and direction of the train? having tried to research the subject there seem to be loads of items that I have no idea what they do, DCC sniffers, stay alive devices. Some of the videos on ebay the system seems to have more boxes than my 80s hifi, bus controllers, boosters etc. Do I need anything more than controller, of whatever type I choose, and decoder? If I do want to control turnouts, possible points and maybe switchable uncoupling tracks, how do I do that?

Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, Arms of Mary