SRman

I doubt it has a socket. I bought a similar second-hand one and hacked the PCB to allow a hard-wired decoder to be fitted. My biggest problem was finding sufficient room for the decoder. Sorry the pic is a bit fuzzy. The PCB is single layer, so easy to follow and cut tracks to isolate the brushes from the track, and also separate the lights.

The weathering really brings out the bogie detail. Excellent job, Paul. I will have to do mine ... soon.

Are yours earlier releases with the brass wheels that collect dirt and tarnish while you look at them (rather like Lima's old wheels did)? Later releases all have shinier silver wheels (possibly plated, or nickel silver, but I don't know for sure) which don't require constant cleaning and actually work very well. If yours are those earlier ones, the real solution is to replace the wheels. Somewhere in the forums there is a guide to using Hornby coach wheels to replace the Heljan ones. There used to be ready to drop in sets but those have long been out of stock.

It's more a case of they don't have a section for specific LokPilot files. They either shove them in with the LokSound files (which is what they have done) or create a whole new section in the website (which would have been more logical and easier to follow).

To be clear, these are not sound files, and are for LokPilot decoders, not LokSound.

Going back to the first post and the comments on ride quality, I found it interesting that they were considered as riding badly. Compared to the trains (and tracks) we have here in Melbourne, I found the 350s I rode in in 2018 to be like a magic carpet! Plus they go a lot faster than our local suburban trains. It's all relative, of course, but if you wish to be thrown around and hammered by sudden lateral movements as well as vertical ones, come over here and ride one of Melbourne's X'trapolis trains. 🙃

The Bachmann Mk 2s tend to ride a little low. Some time back someone suggested adding shims above the bogies to raise the ride height. I added some crudely cut plastic sheet shaped as an open 'U' to add 1mm to the ride height of a couple of Bachmann Mk 2s and they now match the Mk 1s and a much older Hornby Mk 2 which I tarted up and flush-glazed. I haven't received my Accurascale Mk 2B yet but I fully expect it to match the height of the Bachmann Mk 1s and the newly raised Mk 2s.

Me too. I only recently completed two Parkside examples, but a few more would be welcome here.

I run mine on DCC, where BEMF can be a problem, although in my case, none of my CEP, MLV, EPB or HAP units "fight" each other in multiple. One thing that might help though would be to use more rigid couplings between units. I use Kadee #20s at the cab ends of all my Bachmann units.

My six post 1961 vans arrived a few days ago, and I finally got around to posing them on the layout. I have one query, which may have been answered somewhere back in this topic, but I can't find it if it has: What are the little black "boxes" in the accessories pack? I haven't been able to identify them in the exploded diagrams, although I may be being thick. They are in the packs for both D.1478 and D.1479.

I have both Tam Valley (electronic) and Gaugemaster (relay) types in use currently on Newton Broadway, and neither type causes any problems with any if my sound locos in OO. The only problems I have encountered with both types really involved faulty pickups on a couple of non-sound, short wheelbase locos (so not the frog juicers at fault). They simply weren't triggering the switchover of polarity because they weren't shorting the points out in the first place - the effective wheelbase was confined to being one axle due to the other one or two not picking up, and therefore unable to short out.

If there is a list included in the box (or if anyone here has one and has explored the settings), could someone post here which aux outputs are linked to which lights or other non-sound functions. Decoder Pro is good but may not read which outputs are actually active.

OK, then possibly we could try turning all four off and see what happens. The decoder shouldn't require remapping of the functions.

What settings did you use for the dip switches with the decoder fitted, John? I found with a Cavalex 56 belonging to a friend that when we fitted a LokPilot, the dip switches had to be left in the DC analogue positions to get all the lights working.

Interesting, as the old Heljan class 57s top lights did work.

If he said it's green, then it's green! 😉😂

The overall volume can be adjusted to personal tastes. None of my sound-fitted locos and units are at full volume. ESU and ZImo also allow individual sound volumes to be adjusted (several other brands also allow this). Some sound projects can be a bit hissy but for steam projects that's not necessarily such a bad thing. Even so, it is difficult to get enough bass into the steam sounds for that chest-heaving "woof" sound. ESU have addressed this to a degree with the recent update allowing one to adjust bass and treble settings. The ultimate output still depends on the speaker and its size and quality. Having said all that, sound is not everyone's taste, and if you don't like it, that's fine too. I seem to be lucky on the hearing front: I had a full hearing test last week and the practitioner pronounced my hearing "excellent". Considering that I am approaching 70, it should be dropping off a bit at the top end and the bottom end as well, taking the norms of ageing into account. Incidentally, I had a friend drop in last week with his Kernow steam railmotor in GWR livery and sound. The sound was actually very good (in my opinion), straight out of the box, although we did turn the volume down a bit almost straight away (I had to look up the CV for Zimo's master volume so I could program it on the fly as it chuffed around - it's CV266!).

Back in the 1980s I took a good many photos of my travels in England and Scotland, and had most of the films developed and printed in a shop in Leeds (Cross Gates). The last two films had to come back to Australia with me and were put into a local shop for printing. The colour renditions were quite different on the locally printed ones. So, we can add the inks sued in the printing process to the potential variations. Then again, when looking online, we can have different monitors with different colour renditions, and we can personalise them with different colour temperatures, brightnesses and contrasts. I found that my top quality Dell Ultrasharp monitors at my work were much better for colour matching than my good quality Asus home monitor, and that was still better than the laptop screen. At one time I was assisting a local model manufacturer with getting colours right on an Australian bus model they were producing, and the only monitor I could use was my work one: matching yellows and creams was particularly difficult on all the other screens. In short, the only real source for accurate colour matches for our models is the prototype, assuming they haven't faded or darkened. There were also various livery books available that had colour swatches matched to paint flakes from prototypes - samples that are sometimes buried under layers of paint from subsequent liveries. Is near enough good enough. Being so far from Britain as I am, near enough often has to suffice for my own modelling attempts.

The construction phase is complete. Now for the painting ... once the weather cools off a bit (currently 33.3 degrees and climbing, which makes it too hot in the garage where I do any spray painting). I've drawn a silver Sharpie line on the home-made span to show where it will have to be cut. Note the jig I made from some of the spare material I had, to stop the walls from spreading. I might still be tempted to buy the extra span for the new viaduct as that would be just about the same length as the bit of scratchbuilt bridge that remains after cutting. On the other hand, having that thick end support continuing the brickwork from the overbridge might create too much of a blind spot there, on the left.

I can't answer the question about pushing the antenna out from inside the body, but getting the body off is quite easy. It is only clipped in four places, near the cab doors. Just make sure you unplug any ETH cables if you have fitted them in the first place.

I had that happen with an old, much abused but much-loved Triang DMU from my teenage years. It still ran, without too much grinding noise (they were noisy anyway!), but it gained a sort of automatic clutch effect. I could sit it in a station with a load behind it, turn the power on a little and one axle would start to turn but the other remained disengaged, so it would sit there idling, as it were, until I revved it up a bit more, the second gear would engage and it would move off. I eventually replaced the bogie frame, transferring the works into the new one, and it is still going to this day. The old bogie frame around the axles was paper-thin from the wear.

Progress. It's around three-quarters finished now. There is a lot of brickwork left over from all the shortening of the support piers, some of which can go into repairing any damage I have done in the cutting process, as well as filling any accidental gaps. Thankfully I haven't made too many mistakes in the cutting and hacking, and all those I have made have been minor. You can see how much I'll have to trim from the home-made span. It will make the lighter girders on that look more appropriate, though. I think this gives some indication of how much more "daylight" will be visible beneath the viaduct compared to the Wills arches.

Still showing 30.7 here in Blackburn - time 23:15.

Without wishing to start a long argument on here, I would dispute the statement about Bachmann's history of accurate colours, at least when referring to the various shades of Southern Region green they have tried over the years. Many of their other colour renditions seem good to me, but the greens were out by a long shot, especially on the first release BR mark 1 coaches. Then there was the over-dark shade on the next batch. Maroon is, as you have said, a somewhat unstable and translucent colour. Way back in the 1970s, there were long discussions in the model railway press about whether the LMS maroon and BR maroon were the same. I think the upshot was it was the undercoat colours that most influenced the final colour (as it came fresh out of the paint shops - fading and weathering certainly add a whole heap of extra dimensions!).

A much larger job has been set in train: I bought the laser-cut wood viaduct kit from Key Publishing, with a view to rearranging the viaduct along the front of the layout. I have had some difficulties with the fragility of the girder overlays, but have hidden the worst parts in the centres of the spans. I have laid out the two main spans upside down on the existing Wills stone viaduct too illustrate where it will go, allowing just a little more of a view of the Underground platforms and trains from the front. While I really wanted brick viaducts along the side, the Vollmer ones I have used look great but the narrow arches are really limiting the views from that angle, so the Wills viaduct will have to be cut down a little in length and number of arches to fit that stretch. The completely cobbled-together span between the girder bridge over the Underground lines and the new spans will also have to be reduced in length. That might be the hardest bit of the exercise because that's the only bit involved where the track has been ballasted and glued down. Also, what will slow progress down a lot is the fact I have to reduce the height of the piers on the new bridge to suit the existing location. One side of the central pier is posed in front. At least they will increase the clearances on the nearest Underground track as the piers and viaduct are slightly narrower overall than the Wills one. The last complication is that I am hosting a meeting here in April, so any uprooting and rearranging of the bridges and viaducts has to be completed and operational by then.