AndrueC

Because I can.. I helped represent my club at the recent TINGS exhibition and while there was able to find a red/white wave EMR HST Mk3 coach. The sidings on Wallarium are slightly longer than those Circularium and I've been wanting one of these to complete my HST for over a year. So to celebrate here is my Class 43 HST, Miss Behaviour, having a quick trot through the scenery.

Things change. Life is about change. Either adapt or die.

Guess what I found on the Annorak's Anonymous stand at TINGS today? So now I'm considering cancelling the GWR HST pre-order and coaches order. I'll see how I feel once I've added the new coach to the old rake. I'm not sure what message that sends suppliers. On the one hand if they do limited runs they can push us into buying more stuff to compensate (a different HST rake in my case). On the other hand because they produced one more coach than was needed and because I found it the retailers and suppliers have almost certainly lost a few hundred quid in sales.

I'd be happier if/when Dapol release the forthcoming GWR HST and RevolutioN finally ship my TPE. But I've resigned myself to never getting an N scale APT-E or Princess Elizabeth. Generally though I buy on the basis of 'If it looks nice I'll 'ave it.' :) Edit: Although I'd also like to find a red/white wave EMR Mk2 coach in N to complete my first HST but no-one seems to have any in stock. I'm at TINGS for my club tomorrow so will bend the ears of someone on the Dapol stand :)

Your horse has lost a shoe.

Working on something concrete. I've been laying the hard standing for the North Yard so thought I'd do a bit of a step by step guide. As I've mentioned before it's made more difficult by me laying the track in a somewhat haphazard way. Consequently the 'concrete' between the tracks varies in width. Step 1: Using a graphite stick and a sheet of paper get an impression of the tracks. This is easy - just put some paper over the track then run the stick along. It's the same principal as used by people who do 'brass rubbing'. Step 2: Cut out the piece. When cutting try and stay on the outside of the tracks (bearing in mind that the above lines mark two rails). Put another way you want the filler to sit between the tracks so you need to cut something slightly thinner than the two lines indicate. Now put that paper onto some card and trace the outline of it in pencil. Cut it out again cutting on the inside of the marks. Additional note for the inner sections: You need to leave space for the flange way I found that 1mm each side is sufficient for N scale but it might also be advisable to chamfer the inner surface at the ends to help guide the wheels. Step 3: Offer the piece to the track and adjust as needed. I sometimes have to cut out notches for droppers. If you solder on the underside of the track this won't be needed. The really important thing is that the card should sit on top of the chairs, as snugly against the outside of the rails as possible. The top of the surface should be as close as possible to the top of the rails. If the rail heads are proud of the surface it won't look right. Step 4: Painting. I've gone with Rustoleum Concrete Effect spray and a mix of Carbon Black and Old Rust weathering powders. In the image below some of the central sections of surface were done before Christmas so don't quite match but it looks okay. Bear in mind that I will have trains parked on top so the surface isn't normally as obvious. I've not glued the card down yet and the lower piece has shifted out of position which demonstrates how critical is it to get the card against the rail edge. And finally an overview:

If reading on a smartphone I'd agree. But if you get a dedicated eReader the screens are much more natural and easy on the eyes. Mine does have a backlight but it's only active if I'm reading in a dark room. I've recently found that to be very useful because I was struggling a bit with getting to sleep. I now read for half an hour in my lounge with the lights off before going up to bed and it's helped me. But in typical lighting the backlight is off or very dim which is why the battery lasts so well. "Yesterday a book fell on my head. I only have my shelf to blame."

Lol, well I don't need hundreds of books but I'm a fast reader so can easily get through two or three novels in a week just by reading in the evenings. If I'm not going by road I can also typically read one book on the way out and another on the way back. And if something goes wrong (as did a week ago for a lot of people) I can just continue reading until it's sorted. https://ecobravo.co.uk/blogs/blog/paper-books-vs-e-readers-which-is-best-for-the-environment I used to collect books and ended up with several hundred but really they just became a waste of space. I rarely read any of them more than once. I seem to be averaging two novels a week at the moment and will likely increase that over winter now that I'm retired so I'm also doing the planet a favour. Probably ;) "I was in court the other day for a traffic violation and the judge downloaded the book at me."

One difference being that I can take that entire volume of books with me on holiday along with hundreds more. I can even keep them in my hip pocket. Yes my reader needs charging. About once a month when used for a couple of hours a day.

Yes. I suggested that for Toyota to use on their cars. Sadly they just went for a whine/moan. My Corolla escaped having to have sound fitted because it was designed prior to July 2019.

I've just found a problem with one of my turnouts. It's a Y turnout and stock is jumping at the switch blade hinge at anything above slow speed. To be fair it's on the approach to one of my yards so nothing should be travelling at high speed anyway but you know how it is - you get a bit sloppy and the train comes in just a bit too fast and crash. From investigating it appears that the switch blades are slightly out of alignment at the hinge: You can ignore what appears to be a piece of dust/ballast because I removed that after the photo was taken and the problem was still there. If I run a spare bogey across the turnout I can feel it catching at that point and I have a video that when slowed down confirms that to be where the issue occurs. The turnout is operated by a Cobalt-SS motor and I've noticed that the problem significantly reduces if I force the switch blades to be a bit more closed with my finger. Without that there is quite a bit of give in the rails and the gauge at the point is already pretty extreme so it doesn't take much finger pressure to force the bogey wheels between the rails. All in all it seems like that blade is just a bit too loose. I've not had this problem at any other turnout so I'd appreciate the views of other modellers. I can likely adjust the motor to pull the blades more tightly but is that the fix or just a bodge? Is there anything else I can/should do? Anyone else encountered this issue and have some advice?

It's summer so we should have shorts..but not that kind! I'm not doing a right lot at the moment on the layout. I have completed the last of my platform canopies though and have installed some digital signage: The signs are a simple construction. I printed out some very small images: Then using a glue stick attached them to a tee shaped piece of thin card. Then glued that card to the horizontal strut. Seems to work well enough but at two signs per canopy and sixteen canopies in total it was a bit tedious. So as a reward I decided to run the three trains I have on shed at the moment. So I switched on the layout and B E E E P! Oh for the love of... Hmmm. First time I've run it in a while and it's a warm humid day. Nah. Double check track is clear. Yup. Are any of the turnouts set wrongly. Nope. Ah but what about the three unfortunate frog connections where the isolation is questionable. All good. So now I'm pondering how to go about diagnosing the short on a rather large layout. But hang on. I haven't changed anything and it was all fine before so it can't be track or wiring related. Now what was I doing most recently. Hmmm. Ah. I borrowed a coach from one of the trains to check the clearance of a signal. So I manually pull that train off and bingo! No short. I carefully put it back and still no short. So then I spend half an hour running trains. Yay! The moral of this story (as has been the case previously) is to always power the layout up when you're finished what you're doing. That way you can at least narrow down the possibilities. Here endeth the lesson :)

I used to date an archaeologist. She was a lovely girl but her career was in ruins.

Me too. I also got one in Music. I had a very successful career as a computer programmer. Retired this week. I never did set much store in career advice at school. A good job since 'computer programmer' was probably unknown to most of them at the time. My Dad wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become an electrical engineer. Is it too late d'ya think?

Agree on use of droppers. I've attached them to every section of track on my layout except for some curves where I soldered the joiners to keep the shape.

Do you have to use insulated joiners on the point rails? Is it a Hornby thing? Peco N scale Insulfrog turnouts don't need insulating joiners on the point rails unless you have none-standard wheels on your rolling stock (such wheels can short at the frog due to the very small gap). Peco wire the point rails through to the corresponding switch blade so poor switch blade contact doesn't matter.

My N scale layout caters for trains up to a metre in length (so a 7 car Class 43 HST or a 4-6-2 with 7 coaches). It has eight sidings and a two track station that can accommodate any train. It also have four loops all connected. To me it feels comfortably sized. Trains can get far enough away from the sidings to feel like they've reached the country and with the exception of the inner loop (which I don't run long trains on) they can clear the curves even on the narrow sides. Run at sensible speeds it can be half a minute before a train reappears at the same location. One thing I learnt from my first roundy-roundy is that elevation changes and tunnels help break up the tail-chasing aspect of it. Being able to run more than one train at once also helps. It's all about distracting the observer so they don't just follow the train in a pointless circle. My layout runs around the walls of a room that is 3.4m by 2.4m. However that's a layout where everything is visible. At my club we have a layout where only half of the loop is visible. That allows for tight curves and a large fiddle yard. It works surprisingly well. The observer watches trains passing through a town/station area and the large fiddle yard allows a wide variety of trains to appear over time. Sadly it's DC so requires manual operation but if converted to DCC you could get a computer to do the running and then have a tail chaser with variety.

Thanks for that, @RobinofLoxley. I only did a few of the rails so suggestions are still useful.

Signalling my intent! So right from the off I'll state that I'm not trying to be prototypical here. My layout is about building something that looks good, challenges me and keeps me interested. To that end I've always wanted signals on it but the placement and use is personal. My intention here is that they look good and serve a purpose - in this case they help the operator determine which way a turnout is set. Most turnouts will have signals on the frog end - two for each leaving rail. Most of them will point away from the frog and in essence indicate if it's safe for a train on that track to approach the frog. Wilf's junction and the Doorway Interchange will have hand-built gantries but I'm leaving that for a real winter project. It took me a while to find some good looking N Scale signal lights but I eventually found these: https://www.modelitltd.co.uk/n-scale-c102x3323537 Nicely priced and they look good in situ: The plug-it cabling system is also quite good although I've had to bodge it a bit to suit my purposes. What I particularly liked about this signals from that perspective is that they come with a resister already soldered in place. I'm going to be controlling the signals from my DCC Concepts Cobalt-SS controllers since they have a spare SPDT switch. The signals are tri-wired (Common, Red, Green) so it's just a matter of connecting the common to the centre of the SPDT then red and green to each of the outputs. Except that I want my signals to work in pairs (one for each track). So I have to connect the commons of both signals and connect the red/greens of different signals together. To do this I made use of Plug-it extension cables. Two wires go into the socket end and the plug end is removed and the wires tied together. You can get extension cables that don't have the plug on the end but sadly when I ordered there were only a few left. Anyway after the above minor wiring you end up with three leads: Common, Left red+Right Green, Left green+Right red. So far so good. But the signals around my yard work in pairs because they are through sidings. So now the above wiring needs to be repeated for the signals at the other end. The two Common wires that result can be connected to the Common lighting bus. The four signal wires need to be connected together to form two signal wires following the same signal and colour pairing. A wire from the Common bus is then connected to the centre of the SPDT switch. Then each of the two signal wires connected to the outputs. Some faff might be required here because it's possible to get the wires mixed up and have the signals not showing the correct colour(*). But as luck would have it my first attempt was correct: (*)To say nothing of the usual faff involved in inserting wires into screw terminals.

What scale?

Well I live in hope so the orders remain open but two years is a long time to wait :(

I've all but given up on Dapol now. I've got two trains (HST and Voyager) on pre-order. One has been pre-order for two years, the other for a year. I was even told by a representative at Warley that the Voyager was going into production having agreed on the livery. I don't understand what their game is. If they can't make production runs why bother to announce anything? Why do they continue to pretend that they want to service the N scale market? They clearly aren't serious about it any more.

Budgies are funny. I taught mine to say "ploppy bottom" to save me the bother.

Is there a church of the happy?