DY444

Mine was the late 70s. He had a very quirky and self-deprecating sense of humour which greatly appealed to me.

The voice of my late teenage year mornings on BRMB radio. My recollection of him from that time is that he was a sort of West Midlands version of Kenny Everett.

As others have said almost certainly a short on the PCB. It won't necessarily be in the area of the socket though - it could be anywhere a component (or wire) is soldered to the PCB. I had exactly this on a Bachmann peak years ago with solder shorting out two tracks somewhere on the board. I sent them an enlarged picture of the offending area of the PCB so they couldn't deny it was the PCB at fault but they refused to accept any liability for the blown decoder. However the shop where I bought it supplied me with a free replacement which was very good service. Talking of which you should take it up with the retailer as the item is clearly faulty and it is their responsibility in such circumstances to sort it out not the manufacturer's (unless you bought it direct from Hornby). If you paid by credit card then giving them a call might be worthwhile as they are jointly liable with the retailer. Oh and Hornby's attitude to your problem is exactly what I've come to expect from them so doesn't surprise me at all.

Indeed although iirc there was one summer when at least one pair of /6 (/7) had a weekend turn or two between Victoria and Brighton (which I appreciate isn't the Sussex coast in the East/West Coastway sense).

Surely 3 of the 6 Southern 377 subclasses? 377/1, 377/2, 377/3, 377/4, 377/6, 377/7

Well that's up to you but if you don't want to set out the use case then it's difficult to give appropriate advice. All I've gleaned is that a cheap controller doesn't have a sufficiently high current rating for whatever it is you want to do and are not prepared to disclose but a controller with a higher current rating "isn't desirable". Paradox City, Arizona here we come. 😕

.. and if you rectify 12V AC then you'll get about 15V DC. Just buy a cheap train set controller.

There was also a fairly substantial rebuild in between when the SE platforms were extended to 12 cars and P7 on the Central side was sacrificed to make room.

Nah, NR well and truly established the blueprint for that with the GW electrification. That project had 3 ultimate objectives (electrification to Swansea, Bristol TM and Oxford) and failed to deliver any of them. As Churchill didn't say "never before has so little been achieved for so long at such great cost". By comparison HS2 are rank amateurs.

I don't agree because I see it as no different to say, for example, passing a single yellow in a 3 aspect area and "losing situational awareness" by not braking adequately for the expected red 2000 odd yards ahead and then finding a failed train 100 yards beyond the overlap of that signal. Nobody would consider blaming the distance between the warning and the hazard in that scenario and so I don't accept it as a justification here. Unless there is evidence the JI wasn't lit there is, imo, no excuse (and as you will be aware the JI has to be proved lit before the signal will clear). Also in a broader context, there should be no excuse for losing situational awareness anyway because not losing it is a fundamental part of the job.

Translation: Urgent Safety Message - Drivers need appropriate route knowledge before driving trains through a given location and to pay attention to signals when they drive through that location. When has it ever been anything other than totally understood by everyone that you regulate your speed to that of the divergence irrespective of how far out the signal is? The only times you don't are if you're not paying proper attention or you don't know the road. The end. All this waffle about how far out the signal is etc looks like smoke and mirrors. It seems to me that the drivers concerned in these incidents didn't know the road properly and shouldn't have been driving over it. I suspect both being OAO may not be a complete co-incidence.

It's Streatham Common

A number of exceptions as you say. I used to work near Euston in 1999/2000 and tended to wander onto the west side of the station at lunchtime. There was a Liverpool train (1303 I think) which was Mk2s headed by an 86 every time I saw it.

Iirc the lack of 12 car trains is down to the RMT. The 360s operated in 12 car formations on GE with just a driver but (again iirc) on EMT the RMT wanted a guard in each unit. The joys of the current obsession for long distance units with no end gangways and a union taking the mickey. In a more sensible world the 379s would have gone to EMT for the Corbys and perhaps eventually for semi-fasts to Leicester. The latter when NR finally does what literally every railway company in history would have done and finds a sensible engineering solution to the electrification of the London Road bridge instead of pretending it's impossible.

There are sort of two answers to that. The first answer is that some European speed based systems provide route indicators to assist the driver in knowing onto which line the train is being routed. For example SNCF signals sometimes have horizontal white dots above the main signal where one dot lit means you're taking the left-most route, 2 dots the second from the left etc. DB signals at diverging junctions sometimes have theatre indicators with a letter that gives route information (not numbers as an illuminated number above a DB signal indicates the permissible speed) . The second answer, and more relevant to your Paddington example, is that in many countries it doesn't matter which line you're going onto because reading your next signal is not that important until you are quite close to it. This is because train protection systems like KVB in France and PZB in Germany supervise the train speed and braking curves when approaching a red. Now this supervision can be relatively crude (especially PZB) compared with systems like ETRMS (or even the German LZB system used on higher speed lines) but nevertheless they make it pretty difficult to approach a red at high speed because you read the wrong signal so there's time for you to get your bearings. Plus in Germany certainly, there is a tendency to be very generous with the provision of repeaters on the approach to stop signals which can also help.

I'm not sure why you say it is unusual. It's not as common as single and double feather installations but you'll find plenty of examples of position "124" feathers like this one and its position "145" mirror (as well as the "123" and "456" configuration). In fact there is another signal with the identical "124" feather arrangement a few hundred yards away from this one, WK173, on the DS at Woking Jn, and, on the same gantry, DF signal WK375 has feathers "123".

It has 2 lenses but it is a 4 aspect signal

Yes. Empties between Salisbury and Eastleigh.

I seem to remember the solitary Paddington-Birmingham via High Wycombe was a 50 from time to time and there was a lengthy single line section back then on that route. Not lengthy and not WR 🥴 but: Leamington to Kenilworth Romsey to Eastleigh

I've posted before about NR being world class when it comes to wasting money and I'm far from being an electrification expert but .... ... in the middle distance there are two instances of structures across the two left hand lines and separate adjacent structures over the right hand line. Is it really beyond the wit of man to design it in such a way that the supports for the right hand line are carried by the structures for the two left hand lines and save the cost of erecting 2 wholly separate structures?

Not the case I'm afraid. Yes the partial electrification at Liverpool St. was only a feature during the DC days. The conversion to AC and the Enfield/Chingford/Hertford/Bishops Stortford scheme resulted in all platforms being wired.

The S stock has a DC bus line. 3 phase for traction purposes is not passed up and down a modern (d)emu. The 3 phase supply for the traction motors on a given vehicle is produced individually for each motor by the traction pack on that vehicle. The traction packs of all modern AC motored traction units are fed with DC irrespective of whether the traction supply is AC, DC or produced by an onboard diesel alternator set. If the supply is AC, either from ole or generated onboard, then it is rectified on the vehicle with the pan/transformer or diesel alternator set and fed into the DC bus line. If there is no inter-vehicle bus line (or the traction unit is a locomotive) then the architecture is still the same but the DC "bus line" is wholly within the single vehicle. Some trains are designed such that they are split into two or more portions for traction supply and traction control purposes. Class 700 is one example of this; each unit is technically 2 separate 4 car (700/0) or 6 car (700/1) emus working in multiple. Each half has its own DC bus but they are not interconnected.

.. and at least twice in the last year or so the price being charged for traction current has been such that diesel operation of freight was cheaper even on routes electrified end to end.

Not loco hauled stock in the normal sense but the SR 4TCs had triple valves and so when hauled by, or worked in push-pull formations with, locomotives other than 73s (which had EP brakes), there was no graduated release available.

It's not "major track work". The track work was done eons ago. The closure is to finish off and commission the signalling for Watford North Jn which, as a project, is another corker in the ever growing list of entries from NR in the "how not to do projects and spent vastly too much money" world championships. It's a bog standard fast to slow ladder junction but if there's another similar sized project in the entire history of UK railways that has taken longer and cost more then I'd be very surprised. The whole thing has been a chapter of accidents from the start and if it had taken the time a project like that should take then it would have been finished ages ago and the WCML would be open this weekend. Given its history then an overrun into Tuesday to top it off would be no surprise at all.