Suzie

Seeing all the old stuff going to scrap just makes you pine for comfortable seating and a proper restaurant car that made you want to go by train! Now I just go by train if I really have to. The new stock reflects that enough people really have to.

If that were the case only U+ and GND would need to be duplicated and not the track left and track right.

The 17:32 to Clacton is usually a stopper so would normally be a Dusty when I used to travel. Electric all the way so need need for a Basil.

Zimo MX638D is the £20 offering with the 21-pin plug, and MX600p12 with the PluX plug (for 12-pin, 16-pin and 22-pin sockets).

It is probably easiest to buy Zimo from CoastalDCC:-

https://www.coastaldcc.co.uk/products/zimo/all

2 hours ago, pharrc20 said:

Are those the ones close to the M6 or further away the big bulky looking ones the L6s? I believe they are finishing off the refurbishment of the L6 4ZWW line to Hams Hall.

 

Cheers Paul

It must be the 4ZWW line. Very distinctive with double insulators on one circuit with single on the other, and the twin top conductor on the single insulator side with the quads on the other two conductors.

This document refers to 4ZWW:-

https://www.nationalgridet.com/document/132516/download

Page 29 mentions work stopping for two years due to nesting birds and a few other problems! Now we know.

Went down the M6 today and the odd pylon run north of Coventry is having the lower two wires changed to twins from quads to match the top wire. Just wondering why it was not all done at the same time? Did they run out of wire? or was it an evaluation to see how the new twin on the top phase compared to the old quads on the lower two phases? There must be a story here somewhere.

Presumably the GG1s were taken out of service before the new sections of 60Hz electrification went in, else the transformers might be OK. I guess the voltage should not be a problem - there is not much difference between 22KV and 25KV, I suspect they were suitable for dual voltage 11KV and 22KV?

Would an 86 or 87 not do a good job on an electrified railway? If the wires were down nothing is moving anyway so a diesel is not really at an advantage. Might be a few 91s spare now.

How about this one if you want to go back to NX. Just press an alphabetic button for entry, and a numeric button for exit (or vice versa).

B-1, B-2, 1-B and 2-B are obviously invalid routes that will always route to A by default. It can be tweaked a bit such as for example paralleling V2 with V3ab and removing the V2 diodes to provide flank protection, but it might be a bit counter intuitive. The starred diodes could be replaced with links too if you want to economise on diodes.

Two buttons per route will work for NX rather than the single button.

The Mk2 aircons used to have a stack of water in the luggage area since a lot of the time they were not aircon. I guess the new inter-city units don't have luggage space or a van like a  DVT, DBSO etc...

You just need to look at this as being a group of (relatively) simple things.

1. The right hand motor of the double slip can just be paralleled with the 'top' motor on the 3-way point to form an effective crossover. This way the double slip will always be set to accept trains from the 3-way when the top route is set through the 3-way point - at all other times the spur siding will be selected instead allowing parallel operations if required.
2. The left hand motor of the double slip should be treated as if you have just added a point to the top loop to add and extra 4th loop.
3. You just need to add the two buttons that provide routes from the spur to the two top loops, these buttons will just set the two motors of the slip (and will provide flank protection because they will operate the parallel motor on the 3-way that is set up as a crossover).

Just be aware that some American decoders are not compatible with Railcom, before you buy any American decoders from the likes of NCE it will be worth checking that they are fully compatible with the latest DCC standards.

You might like to look at the DCC Concepts AD-8FX as well.

You could dim the LED further by running the Dapol signal on something like 6V AC via inverse parallel diodes. Just add more diodes in one side to dim the lamp. It will take a bit of experimentation to get the appropriate brightness. The mechanism inside is regulated and rectified, but the LED is not. 

Alternatively if you don't mind taking the signal apart you could replace the internal 820R resistor with a higher value to suit.

The pins on a trailer plug should be good for twenty amps, in the olden days you would often have had a 10A fridge running as well as the lighting (using what is now the reversing light pin). It is still far too big to be practical for layout use. The new 13-pin versions are a similar size so too big, but a much better connector than the two varieties of 7-pin.

Just use a cheap robust connector designed to do the job:-

• Speakon - a modern connector with screw terminals good for at least 40A which will take suitable 4-way cable.
• XLR - good for typical layout requirements (more pins means less current, but the 4-way should be OK for 10A, and the 3-way for 15A). Available in good quality from reputable manufacturers, and cheap and shoddy from others! Different numbers of pins as well as male and female allows the use of multiple connectors for a single baseboard join. Needs to be soldered.
• 'D' connector - lots of pins and should be good for 5A, but can only fit 16/02 wire or smaller so will usually need parallel wires for power and track bus circuits. Again can be variable in quality so go with a known good manufacturer.

There is really no need to go: giant (trailer plug), inadequate (SCART), short operational life (Molex), Dangerous (any mains connector of any type at all), unreliable (jack plug), loose (banana plug), ancient and falling apart (GPO or similar connectors from ye olden days).

More expensive options like the Anderson Powerpole and military round connectors can be useful - but can be hard to justify the cost over the three main options listed above that are both good and cheap.

Just have to take a cushion with me next time I take the train.

Last time I saw the Great Yarmouth installation there appeared to be only one of the three circuits connected to anything at the Great Yarmouth end. I was quite surprised to find it gone when I went there recently, I suspect replacement with something else was required with the new South Denes power station that must be a bit bigger than the old oil fired one.

5 hours ago, Right Away said:

These could do the job

 

NO THEY COULDN'T

These are mains connectors that could be plugged into the mains.

Looks like this post is in the wrong section!

An excellent robust and cheap 4-way connector is the Neutrik Speakon connector. It is designed for industrial speaker connections so is roady-proof, and good enough for 40 Amps so you can put nice fat 2.5mm2 4-core flexible speaker wire in the plugs.

https://www.rapidonline.com/neutrik-nl4mp-speakon-l-speaker-socket-20-0860

https://www.rapidonline.com/neutrik-speakon-nl4fx-loudspeaker-plug-20-0856

https://www.rapidonline.com/evolution-xpc-prof-425-speaker-cable-black-20m-02-0640

Make sure that anything that might move or come loose is very rigidly attached. The layout will be shaken to extreme.

As guide think 'If I drop the layout on the floor what might come loose?' and that will be a good guide as to what will drop of when in the trailer.

They are bi-modes. They should be using electric for part of the time and therefore require less diesel.

Saw a Sibil on the Clacton branch today running on Diesel. Not quite sure why it was there!

The one I saw north of Stansted had the pantograph up. Presumably on purpose!

Is that not why axle counters were invented?