AndrueC

I was there helping run the LWMRS club's 30 year old layout, Meacham. Despite a few incidents in the fiddle yard(*) it went well and seemed to be popular with the visitors. I had a wander round the show and saw several other great layouts. Unlike a lot of shows it never felt crowded but there were plenty of people there. You also get access to the motor museum so that's another reason to go. Tomorrow is the last day folks! (*)Tail chasing is all great fun until it goes wrong :)

It's enough to make you weep..or climb up a pole :) I've redone my willow using a technique I found on YouTube. The result (my third attempt using different techniques) finally meets my standards. I used this technique to make the branches. As a diversion I've also installed some telegraph poles on the Western Cutting. In case anyone's wondering they are a scale 15m apart.

I'm not keen on Royal Mail anyway. I prefer to use a shell company.

Gives a whole new meaning to 'snail mail'. 🙂

That would be an ecumenical matter.

I don't think any Cobalt model consumes much when idle. The IP versions apparently consume around 4mA depending on the voltage but that will include power for the integral controller electronics on their digital versions at least. The -SS variant (the ones I use) are separate motors/controller and the motor is a stepper so presumably consumes nothing when idle. -SS controllers by their nature (a couple of small indicator LEDs and DCC decoder) will be consuming some power all the time. All models have built in CDU so shouldn't cause any spiking.

On my layout I used suitcase connectors to attach droppers to the bus. They are pretty easy to use but do require a little care. In particular making sure that the dropper is fully home before pushing the cutter down and then ensuring that the cutter is all the way down (the flap won't clip shut unless it is). Unfortunately their ease of use is also their downside. It encourages you to just slap 'em on where you want leading to a bit of an untidy mess. You also can't just unclip them because they cut the insulation of the through wire (the bus in this case). I have a couple of empty ones under my layout where the dropper wasn't fully home and fell out. I can't remove them or at least if I did I'd then have to wrap insulation around the bus wire so no point. That's actually an issue with DCC Concepts kit which I've used heavily. Not requiring soldering or wire prep is great but it means you're relying on standard wire lengths and a lot of the time that leaves slack wires hanging around. It also means you tend not to care about routing - you just want the wire to go from socket A to socket B so stuff it in whichever way achieves that.

Static grass ahoy (and the last of the army sand). Just a short update. Once I had more space between the inner track and the interchange I was able to create some proper scenery. No more naff card painted orange. This is the result: It needs a little more work around the turnout motor cover but it's a big improvement. I now have to decide what I'm going to put on that empty section of board. It's supposed to be a lift-out section (currently duck-under) so I could just remove it to reduce weight but that seems like a wasted opportunity. Having completed the above track work I could also add in some scenery to the right of the above image. Wallarium tries to be consistent in its track laying. Grey ballast sat on a sand base. This was the last section of track to be made good. It means that I have finally reached the point where I no longer have a need for army sand. This has been a running personal joke for a while. For some reason I over ordered it and several times while digging through my scenery for something else I'd find yet another container of army sand. Consequently whenever I needed some I'd joke to myself about being careful with it so as not to waste it. Naturally I've been left with quite a lot of army sand and no longer any use for it. I can't believe it's not...army sand.

I bought mine three years ago but it couldn't handle the 2nd radius curves on my previous layout and wasn't happy with one of the ones on my current layout which I know to be no worse than 3rd radius. Then one of the wires and the tender coupling broke. I repaired them but my other 4-6-2 (Graham Farish Queen Elizabeth) has never had any issues and has been handled a lot more often. So my Hall is in its box at the bottom of a drawer and will likely never be allowed to see daylight again.

I always liked the story of the old, empty barn.

The important thing is to keep it tidy. But yeah consistency is key. Dropper from outer fixed rails. Dropper from frog power source depends turnout controller should provide. Insulated joiners on frog rails. Job's a good 'un.

Getting the track back on track.. So I posted back in April that I wasn't happy with The Doorway Interchange. I also posted that fixing it would be one of my winter jobs. Well with the golf course shut (or at least recovering from the last day's rain) I decided now was the time to tackle it. The task was essentially simple. I just wanted to tighten the overall radius so that there was more of a gap between the inner track and the interchange. But this was to be my first attempt at lifting track that had been laid using underlay and Copydex. It was more difficult lifting it than it had been for track on my previous layout. For that layout I'd just plonked the track on top of the baseboard and dribbled PVA along the sleepers followed by ballast. Lifting that was easy as you just had to spray wet water on it and wait ten minutes. Lifting foam+Copydex is not so easy. It's not difficult but my idea of just sliding a pallet knife underneath and wiggling it a bit almost didn't work. If the foam had been completely glued down it would have been more of a struggle but as it happened it seemed I'd missed a bit when laying it so was able slide the pallet knife underneath that part of it and wiggle from there. Eventually the track came free albeit at the expense of a lot of the underlay. Luckily as I had previously acquired the last remaining Gaugemaster foam underlay in the country it wasn't a big deal. I just had to choose the right area to snip and join the track back up then I used a bit of the spare underlay to repair the damage. You'll be glad to know that I still have most of the five metre roll left. Waste not want not. All in all it took about an hour and a half to move the track. It's not moved a huge distance but now I have enough space to build some proper scenery around the turnout motors. In the picture below you can see the motor cover near the top of the picture and the extra space to the right of it. Looking at the underlay I'm reminded of a wise saying from Mr Eric Morcambe. "You can't see the join" 😁

So the golf course is closed today (lordy it's been getting wet and soft and it's only October 😢) so more time spent on t' railway. I dropped a bit more static grass around Wilf's Junction but I also went ferreting around in my scenery box. In the process I found some seats (I knew they were there) and some flower boxes (I'd forgotten about them). So I decided to add some furniture to my platforms. I need to add some more stuff so will probably knock up some vending machines and maybe a clock or two. I also removed that errant ballast after taking the above photo, lol.

As the weather worsens I get time to do a bit on the layout. I've been gradually putting down static grass and bushes everywhere. I've also laid most of the ballast at Wilf's Junction and confirmed that the frog juicer does what it should - I can run trains through the crossing quite happily. You might notice that I've added some grass to the right of the junction. It's supposed to look a bit scrubby and I think it's worked well. The biggest project so far has been building a mound for my castle ruins to sit on. I'd been wondering what do put there and realised that a ruined castle gives a good reason for building a tunnel instead of just blasting the whole hillside away. So I present the view of Bluff Corner on the left with the south entrance to Castle Tunnels on the right. Away from my layout I took a couple of locos and my bullet wagons to the club for some exercise and to practice controlling the layout (it's DC) for the upcoming Gaydon exhibition. We've done some work on the old layout to spruce her up a bit so wanted to make sure everything ran. The layout was mostly fine apart from one turnout on a yard that everything picks at the blade pivot but it did throw up a few quirks for me: My bullet wagons caught on some of the droppers and a couple of fiddle yard turnout solenoid extension levers. My Sonic GWR 56xx 0-6-2 refused to move. It's fine back on my DCC layout so maybe it's shipped with DC support disabled. My BR class 53 ran beautifully but think the DCC chip is in the wrong way round because it drives as if the nameplate is on the rear of the loco which seems wrong. My Pacer ran fine but the direction of travel was opposite to the lights - it always showed red lights to front and white to rear. When I got it back home it turned out that the decoder in the power unit was no longer able to move the loco - curiously it gave a high pitched buzz as if it was a DC loco on a DCC track. The decoder in the unpowered unit was fine so I swapped the decoders and it now runs fine (direction lights 'n all). But if you want to see the venerable Meacham layout it's on exhibition at the Gaydon Motor Museum over the weekend of October 28/9th. I will also be there on Saturday helping (or hindering, lol) the operation of the layout 🙂

What scale? The bodies of the HST MK3s I have in N scale are 150mm. The space occupied including coupler spacing is ~154mm. The coupler spacing might not be prototypical in order to accommodate the tighter radii of a model layout. 150mm in N equates to 22.2m. Interestingly the real thing is supposed to be 23m. That red/white coach shown in the article is exactly what I'm supposed to have on my layout. I wonder if the 23m length includes coupler spacing? It seems like it does since 23,000mm/148 is 155.4mm which is very close to what I'm getting holding a ruler against a parked train.

For me the only genuine running problems I've seen are with a Y turnout that my 4-6-2 Queen Elizabeth sometimes picks. In that case it's not the frogs it's the switch blade pivots where one of them seems to be a little out of alignment. At prototypical speeds (it's on the entry to a yard) it's generally fine but appears to need my turnout motors to pull the blade a bit tighter. All the other dozen or so turnouts seem fine although the QE's tender bounces a bit on some of them. Most of my stock is modern era and doesn't exhibit any issues. But it is a bit disconcerting that if I drop my single bogey onto the track then finger push it towards a turnout it will almost always derail unless I'm gentle.

Or even at the moo. As the farmer said to the milkmaid. Pull the udder one.

I have a code 80 Streamline diamond crossing where one of the guard rails has no power. Thankfully it doesn't seem to be an issue. What I've noticed about Streamline in code 80 (don't think I ever noticed it on Settrack but maybe never really looked) is that there is a large gap at the frogs such that a wheel is unsupported as it crosses. It's quite shocking how much a small wagon can tip over if you press down on the corner as it crosses the frog. And a test bogey I use when laying track won't roll through a Streamline turnout of any kind at significant speed without derailing. To be fair to Peco none of this seems to be an issue when running 'real' rakes so perhaps it's of no importance 🤔

Sorry, I missed that bit in your reply. Just for clarity I work solely in N and have experience of Peco Settrack (insulated frog) and Peco Streamline (electrical frog). Sometimes you find advice on the web that talks about cutting links underneath or the frog rails then adding wires. None of that is necessary and for N scale at least probably weakens the turnout. The only physical alteration I would normally make to a turnout is to remove the centre spring so that my turnout motors (DCC Concepts Cobalt-SS) were able to move the blades. In the early days of laying my current layout (electrofrog) I did pull out one of the wires under the frog because I thought they were supposed to be pigtails but I soon realised that was a mistake. If I was laying an N scale Peco electrofrog turnout all I'd do is: Remove the centre spring so that the blades are free moving. Solder droppers onto the two outer fixed rails. Solder a dropper onto the wires on the underside (sighing at Peco for not giving us a proper pigtail). Attach the turnout to the rest of the track using insulated joiners at the frog end. I think now I'd probably go right ahead and connect the frog dropper to the turnout controller frog output because I trust the process but initially I just let the frog droppers sit unused for 'fear' of screwing something up 😳.

I've never had any power problems on my N scale layouts other than temporary ones caused by turnouts not making good switch blade contact or dirty track resulting from scenery work. My first layout used insulfrog (Peco Settrack) and my current layout is electrofrog with droppers. But I only actually 'juice up' frogs if/when they exhibit the need for it and most are still unconnected. My track is not laid with any particular precision and turnouts are mounted on cardboard in order to bring them approximately up to the height of the track which is mounted on foam underlay. I have however ensured on my current layout that every section of track has a dropper and is connected to the power bus and that includes the fixed rails of turnouts. I've also not cut any wires or rails on the turnouts. I use insulators on the frog rails, attach a dropper and remove the centre spring but otherwise the turnouts are left the way Peco made them. The only loco that exhibits issues is a new Farish 08 and that just seems to be the nature of the beast. That thing is pernickety when running on straight track.

Mary had a little lamb it used to jump so high. One day it jumped into a butcher's shop and now it's in a pie.

That reminds of an infamous website: Warning bad language ahead.

And He made humans out of clay in the plasticine era :)

..and they are no good at sums involving a right angle? I think that's what I was told at school anyway.

My favourite is Carry on Screaming.