Suzie

A special compartment in the front coach labelled "MPs only"

Since with hydrogen holding about 40KWh per kg it takes about 200Kg of hydrogen to produce the same energy as a tonne of coal it should not be too hard to power a steam locomotive with hydrogen even if the hydrogen tanks are a bit heavy and new emissions law requires you to carry around a tank of oxygen too. Perhaps it will be the advent of the 'Techno-Tender' consisting of hydrogen tank, oxygen tank, condenser to make water from the exhaust steam, and perhaps a 25KV electrolysis plant to fill the tanks overnight by raising the pantograph discreetly in the shed...

Surely the answer to NOX combustion products when burning hydrogen is to burn it in a nitrogen free atmosphere. If you are making hydrogen from electricity then exactly the correct amount of oxygen is free as a by-product, just bottle it at the same time. Now, how to store the gasses on a preserved steam train? How far would you get if you used a MkI GUV with 30t of oxygen and hydrogen tanks in it? Shouldn't look too out of place and a bit of through piping should not be too hard to avoid having to remarshal the GUV next to the loco, or perhaps just replace the GUV with a newly refilled one at each end of the line when running round if 15t of gas won't get you very far.

That is the big difference between nationalisation, and a merger, they have very different aims led by the politics compared to the balance sheet.

Might be a good excuse for a Faller road system layout. Could work quite well with an underground station, saving all that modelling the railway nonsense...

Heads of the valleys, over the Crumlin viaduct. That is one I would pay to ride on.

I just cannot imagine what a BR steam loco would look like in corporate blue in the 1970s https://photos.smugmug.com/Narrow-Gauge-Railways/Rheidol/i-B8cHrp2/0/21f9d76a/XL/vr7-XL.jpg

The 'F' suffix on MX617f means that it has a 6-pin plug on the end of the wires, wires only versions do not have a suffix (a wires only one would be MX617)

Has no one done a BR standard 4-10-2 express freight tank yet?

I saw what looked like a vehicle from a 5-WES on the back of a lorry, so it looks like some areas are planning for service reduction rather than expansion.

It is in the NMRA spec for decoders that they should turn all the functions off when they get a reset packet, and command stations should send a reset packet when you power them up and after a stop event. Now, some command stations will do this, and some decoders will do this, generally European ones, and some don't generally American ones. Generally command stations will be default refresh the speed and group 1 functions F0 to F4, but you will usually have to configure your command station to refresh group 2 functions F5 to F12, and group 3 functions F13 to F28. You might be able to reconfigure your Zimo decoder to behave like an American decoder, but it is usually best to deal with the problem in the command station.

Will there be a 360 farewell tour?

You can put a neon indicator across the output terminals and mount it remotely so you can see if it is working. They usually either work or don't work. The most likely cause of a problem is something causing a load across the track, perhaps some damp or similar.

Wrong direction signals on the right of the track are a good way to find a use for those 2x yellow + green distants. The wrong direction blocks can be much longer.

Good that nothing untoward happened.

Good excuse to not add any third rail...

Saw an unrefurbed dusty being towed by a a 57 south from Marks Tey a while ago, I guess it was not just being rescued. Still seeing 360s and unrefurbed dustys being used, I would have thought that the new trains would have been displacing some of these, or is someone trying to squeeze the maximum mileage out of the old stuff and saving the refurbed dustys...

Interesting weathering on the motor unit, presumably because it is only half filled with engines being a 3-car.

Enough to light a neon testing screwdriver.

Working AC has been around since a long time ago (LBSC 25Hz in 1909 for example), I am sure that I read that 25Hz AC was in the frame for the Great Western electrification - long before the 1500V DC stipulation was made. When using AC the branches are not expensive to do if they can be fed from a substation on the main line (like the Braintree branch) where all you need to supply is some poles and wire.

The virginian become 1-way after the merger, meaning that all the electric locos would end up at one end with no way to get back via the non-electric parallel route. The locos went to the Pennsylvania and became class E33. It was the piecemeal nature of the electrification that killed the American use of electrification for freight. When trains changed locos frequently in the steam era it was no big deal to change for an electric loco just to go over the mountains, but when a single set of Diesels could go all the way changing locos became a chore. If the Milwaukee Road had filled in the middle 216 miles with electrification it would have worked (they already had 645 miles in the two electrified sections), 3KV DC was not the end of the world, but the accountants in the most short term outlook in history saw selling all the electrification equipment for scrap as a more profitable exercise than running a railway efficiently.

PP3 battery might not be able to provide sufficient current unless it is a new alkaline type. You have to get the polarity the correct way round to get the light to work, but polarity is not important to get the mechanism to work. I would recommend that you monitor the voltage while the signal is operating. The mechanism should run OK on as little as 6V if there is sufficient current available (the internal electronics runs at 3.3V), but the lamp will require 8VDC or 16VAC to achieve full brightness (you might prefer less brightness!)

I thought that Pershore was where the archers was supposed to be.

The normal way to get lighting to be constant brightness on DC is to modify the wiring in the loco. Some American locos use a 1.5V regulator and 1.5V incandescent bulbs (you can buy a PCB that replaces the existing PCB and has a decoder socket to achieve this). I am just a bit worried that you might plug in a decoder one day that has not been pre-programmed for reduced brightness.

What we need is for a watchmaker to get on on the market and make a doll with motorised arm unit that can be planted on to a mast/gantry/bracket. Cannot be beyond the realms of technological possibility, but might be a bit expensive at first. A tiny stepper motor should be able to move a well balanced arm and be quite small.