RFS

Is one of the rails a point frog for an Electrofrog point with the board gap doing the job of an IRJ?

There's no need to do anything to these points as the new design makes this unneccessary. If you want full conductivity through the whole point, you just need to connect the frog wire to an accessory switch to provide the right polarity. But if you are not using short wheelbase locos, you may not need to do so. If you are unsure, just feed the frog wire through the baseboard when you lay the point, so you can add a switch later if needed.

For an extra £2.50 you can increase the insurance from £50 to £250 which is what I have done in the past when sending abroad. Thankfully not lost anything yet!

With Tracked 24/48, you get proof of delivery in the form of a photo of the postie handing it over which is good enough for Ebay.

I agree. Best use Tracked 48 (£3.29) of Tracked 24 (£3.99). Buy the postage online and print off the label. Postie will collect it for free next working day (and will bring a printed label for free if you can't print), or you can drop off at the post office which will incur a 16p surcharge. Both are cheaper than first-class signed for, and both have insurance up to £150.

Where you have gapped flexi-track to provide electrical isolation, I would recommend filling the gap with epoxy or araldite. Otherwise as the temperature fluctuates you could find the gap closes and causes an unexpected short. Had that a couple of times after a hot day! Points are less susceptible as the track is more firmly held in place.

I'm hoping that if this first batch does sell well, EFE might then be tempted to tweak the tooling and produce 20003.

Yes it does have tender pickups like almost all of Hornby's tender locomotives. It also has the DCC socket in the tender as well as a place for a speaker so fitting sound should be fairly easy. I have this model myself but am not using sound. See the attached service sheet which shows the layout of the tender. MN-2nd.pdf

MK1 coaches were coupled using buck-eye couplings, and the buffers were retracted to allow this. This is how Bachmann have modelled the buffers which is just what you need for close-coupling. The Hornby Roco-style couplings work well, as do the Hunt magnetic couplings. For the latter, the stepped close coupling is best, as the stepping both lowers the coupling to right height for coupling to other vehicles, and also avoids the coupling rubbing against the solebar which I found was causing problems. Hornby's Maunsell coaches do have sprung buffers but they are set back so that when the corridor connections touch on straight track the buffers don't. So close coupling works fine as the buffers are in reality retracted.

It's the same guy who has a Hornby purple West Country for sale at £1497.95. He has 1055 items for sale, yet in the last 3 months has only made 7 sales.

Or how about this Maunsell coach? "in excellent condition, only 2 grab rails missing". Then proceeds to add photos of two different coaches, one with handles missing and one not. He has several others like this too, all with varying numbers of grab handles missing. One wonders what sort of mishandling has caused all this. And £26 each? I've just bought a pair of similar Maunsell brakes which are brand-new and cost around £21 each.

But not as optimistic as this one ! Bet both were picked up at an auction for a couple of hundred quid..... And he has another one too.

18mm MDF is extremely heavy, and can easily warp. Best baseboard is 9mm birch plywood, suitably braced. Yes there will be additional cost, but should be only a fraction of the cost of the layout in total. Birch ply will be one third the weight of your MDF sheets. The baseboard is the foundation of any layout. If it turns out wrong after you're well into building it, you could end up starting again from the beginning. My first layout was based on 18mm MDF boards in a dry converted loft. They did indeed start to warp and I started again with 9mm birch ply. That was about 15 years ago now, and the ply is still true.

On a road in Alaska ....

Graham - have posted this picture before, but it's a still from a film that was shot in 1966. As you can see, the first coach (and the one before it) is clearly still in varnished malachite at this late stage when you compare to the following coaches.

If you have a lot of wires to connect, there are now 8-way ones - see here on Amazon.

The loose 3rd coach - 34-775 with running number 1935 - has been produced in exactly this way as it was actually built in early 1948. My thinking is that if the "Southern" were removed from the 3-set, the coaches would then match. Close enough to BR days to meet my rule 1 requirements!

Do you mean selecting a different channel and then switching back? You can use the right navigation button to switch back to the previously selected channel.

The Q box is not free with any deal. It's always the property of Sky and if you cancel your contract with Sky then the Q box has to be returned. It's still satellite-based, not streaming-based - that's Sky Glass. We upgraded to Sky Q from HD+ about 18 months ago and it's brilliant. Actually got a deal that worked out less than we had been paying previously. Have a couple of mini-boxes for the kitchen and bedroom as part of the deal. The Q box manages all the smart features (iPlayer etc) and feeds the main TV and miniboxes with the output, so you no longer need a smart TV. Our main TV stopped streaming iPlayer after about 9 months due to a software glitch of some sort, but Panasonic were not interested in fixing that as they'd moved on to the next year's model. Plus all the new apps are missing too from this TV. Now no problem with Q. And we can record up to 5 programs simultaneously!

Once you factor insurance for £11k goods into the delivery charge, then it's almost certainly going to be well in excess of £20 I would have thought.

Has anyone bought the malachite green 3-set coaches and moved them forward slightly into the BR era by just removing the "Southern" lettering on the coach sides? If so is it easy to do?

Complete Thomas set anyone for £11k?

I believe a date of January 2024 has been quoted. EDIT: Bachmann/EFE website says Dec/Jan.

System build for the latest 23H2 version is 22631.2506. That's what I have on all my systems, including a laptop that is not using Windows Insider builds.