Barry Ten

It was seeing big blue locos in the Wrenn catalogue that made me like BR Express Passenger blue. At least at the time I owned any, there were no big blue ones in the contemporaneous Triang-Hornby catalogues (there may have been a Nellie or a Polly, though, I suppose).

I mentioned a while back that I'd found decoder installations to be one of my less favorite aspects of modelling US N, which is why I've tried to avoid it where possible. This GP7 was a particular source of frustration. It needs a hard-wired set-up using a TCS CN-GP decoder. I'd done a few of them but this one bit me. In fact I think the whole thing going wrong was part of my dip in enthusiasm for the layout a year or two back. I revisited it last night with a clear head and an optimistic frame of mind, and after many hours of perplexity, and a general sense of going round in circles, managed to find a tiny area where the motor contacts weren't (as I'd thought) properly insulated from the frames. Once I'd addressed this issue, I reassembled the loco, redid the necessary soldering, and found that it was at least responding to programming inputs (which it had never done before). I even got it to move, but not very well, but after further travails it turned out the wheels were far grubbier than I'd realised, and once that was cured, the loco settled down nicely. I programmed it to Number 107, then ran into a snag! Perhaps the pic below will explain: Yes, in my stupidity, I'd forgotten that I already have another loco allocated to 107, and a GP7 as well. It makes me wonder if, in reality, it was the same loco (traded between ACL and CofG/Southern) or is it just an annoying coincidence? Either way, since the CofG one has first dibs on the number, I'll have to come up with something else for the ACL unit - and make sure I don't forget the new address! A bit of ACL running was always the plan right at the start of the layout, but the rationale for such a thing (along with SAL/SCL) has got a bit lost over the years. I just couldn't resist that purple and silver livery. The model, by the way, came from Allied Model Trains, the big train store that used to be on Sepulveda Blvd in Los Angeles - now long gone.

That's not the Flying Spaghetti Monster coming down from the sky to invade Georgia, by the way - it's some loose wiring from the 00 layout overhead. I've been on a slow tidying-up program over the week, but I haven't got to this bit.

A few more pics showing progress around the revised area of the branch: Basic ground cover on and a first coat of grey primer on the revised road. The flat areas to the right of the hills (previously occupied by town buildings) are being reserved for possible locations for a couple of Walthers domestic house kits which I've got in the stash, and which didn't find a place until now. One of these Lifelike SD7/9s was the first loco I bought, when I first considered dabbling in US N. I bought a second one a bit later, then renumbered one of them and added stripe decals, weathering and painted yellow ends to the handrails (not sure if the latter is right for an SD7/9, but a lot of the other diesels have them so they look in keeping). They've also had their couplings changed to Micro-Trains ones. These models have an unusual mostly-plastic mechanism, not at all like the usual split-frame arrangement, and they're not DCC-ready, so I sent mine off for decoder fitting. They run superbly nonetheless, with the Lifelike chassis allowing room for a really big central motor. There's only a light in the hood at the short end, which is why they're coupled the way they are. I know the Southern liked to run long-hood forward as a loose rule but in this case (Rule 1) they didn't!

My only experience with EPM is via the Turbotrain, but that at least is a very nice, high-spec model. My REE Moyse shunter came with a built-in sound decoder and stay-alive and it runs very nicely.

Suspect that may be an issue with your model, rather than a general one, as mine is fine over Code 75 points. I've a short clip of it running here, but you'll have to take my word that it goes around the layout without derailments:

Just a word that I have managed to recover some of the images from the first 5 pages or so of the thread. It's a slow process and some/all of the later ones may be gone for good, but I'll keep at it as and when time allows.

A few bits of further progress on the reworked branch: I've begun adding some hills where the town buildings used to go. As the hills sit on removable scenic boards (to allow access to the storage yard) I've built them in two halves, with the first one already covered in plaster bandage. The basic form of the hill is defined by rough contours of foamcore, with wet newspaper wadded into the gaps before the plaster sheets go on. Any ridges or lumpiness in the terrain pretty much disappear once you start adding ground foam etc. With the scenic board lifted, the storage yard tracks can be seen underneath: I don't call it a fiddle yard as there's b***er-all scope for fiddling! You can't make up trains in this area, but you can retrieve derailed vehicles, although thankfully such incidents are rare. Clearance between the tops of box cars and the boards is deliberately tight. The curving branch actually juts out over the nearest of the six storage roads, for part of its length. There are LED strips at either end of the yard to illuminate trains, and (as mentioned way back) a couple of wireless cameras aimed at either throat. The following two shots were taken hand-held rather than with aperture priority, but hopefully give an idea of the way the different terrain levels fit together. Ta and thanks for reading.

I bought a very handy set of 00 rolling road pieces from a firm called Mustard Models, but they seem not to be trading now. A pity as it was inexpensive and well engineered.

I have a complete JLTRT pannier kit with wheels and motor/gearbox that I bought more than 15 years ago, but which I've never felt man enough to start building. Maybe this (or next) year will be the one.

Mustangs in various scales, starting with a 1/160th laser-cut wooden kit: Then a few 1/48s: Meng Assorted Airfix/Tamiya/Italeri 1/8th scale Cambrian

The areas that have caused me most frustration are, as you say, couplings, and also DIY decoder installations. I now try to avoid the latter, but coupling issues just come with the territory. For instance, last night I had to remove a bit of grit from the gears of one of my F units. Because I was clumsy in extracting the engine from the rest of the lash-up, I caused the coupler assembly to come apart in small pieces. Putting it back together again - minus a tiny spring which I couldn't find - probably took three times as long as sorting out the grit that was the original problem. And with this particular coupling/coupler, it's not readily available as a spare - the whole unit/mounting as unique to the Micro-Trains FT design which has been out of production for a while - so I didn't want to risk further damage reassembling it. I wouldn't want to overstate the negatives, though. The pleasures of seeing a long, slow freight winding its way through finished or nearly-finished scenery are big compensations for the occasional half hour of hassle!

I'm not sure if the following will be helpful to anyone, but when I found that my light-fitted Kato coaches were starting to flicker annoyingly, I didn't find a really easy solution anywhere on the internet. The drop-in light units work really well, but over time they start playing up. I've seen people trying soldering various connections inside the bodies of the coaches, even adding capacitor circuits, but the root of the problem seems to be that the bogie pickups no longer make reliable contact with the strips under the cars. No amount of wheel cleaning makes much difference, and even when I tried to clean the strips with alcohol and cotton pads, it wasn't that helpful. I guess you could try hardwiring the bogies to the light-boards, but that would be extremely fiddly in N, and you'd need really fine wire. Because I've had a lot of success with various forms of graphite on my Code 40 N layout, which makes a huge difference to electrical reliability, i thought I'd give it a go: First of all the track and wheels do need to be clean, or else the lights definitely won't work well, but once that was done as best I could, I addressed the pickup issue in two ways. First, I scraped a graphite pencil across the tops of the pickup prongs sticking out of the bogies, but then the main thing was to puff or dribble some powdered graphite onto the strips under the cars. In the picture above, the strips are inside those crescent-shaped holes in the plastic underframe. In theory this shouldn't work, as once the bogies are put back on and the car is tipped the right way up, the powder should drop off! But in practise it seems to stick around well enough to resist gravity and still have some beneficial effect. It doesn't eliminate flickering entirely, but with my train of eight passenger cars, the annoyance level was greatly reduced and I have a feeling that with some additional wheel cleaning, and perhaps another go with the powder, the residual flicker in one or two cars could be reduced still further. After a few days running I've not noticed any drop-off in the improvement, so it seems to be a reasonably good short-term good fix. Looking ahead, though, it might be worth experimenting with some conductive paste, instead of the powder, as perhaps that will adhere even better.

The top one's showing upside down for me. Nice modelling nonetheless.