Bloodnok

3 hours ago, BMacdermott said:

You are welcome to try that one yourself, but I would be grateful if you could hold it until my series finishes - comments may arise that could usefully 'feed into' what you do.

I am not proposing to run my own poll. And even if I did, I wouldn't assume I could just decide to start one in Gilbert's thread...

3 hours ago, BMacdermott said:

Personally, I wont take the job on...I know from experience of running The 00 Wishlist Poll that it's a difficult subject!

As much as I disagree with the choice (because most of what I personally want has been done before but to poor standards of accuracy), I absolutely understand how it is both entirely subjective and creates debate, and why both of these things are utter cancer in the context of something like The 00 Wishlist Poll.

1 hour ago, BMacdermott said:

concerning rolling stock not yet (or not fully yet) available in RTR form

What about not accurately enough yet available in RTR form? That's why I currently don't own any RTR Gresley coaches at the moment. Not that manufacturers haven't made them, but that they haven't captured the shape well enough...

On 11/05/2021 at 09:38, adb968008 said:

I suspect with APTs, it will be the centre coaches get left on the shelves.

 

But if APT is successful, the temptation for Hornby to make more will be there.

Yes. There are plenty of shops that still have pre-orders up for the various centre coaches, but it's harder to find retailers with the base sets listed.

The way it looks at the moment, I suspect the base sets may sell out, possibly even to pre-order leaving a number of additional coaches on the shelves. If that does happen, I can see another base pack being produced with different numbered vehicles, perhaps even with a minor livery variation. That would create more demand for the existing additional centre coaches.

All of the fleet are now tuned to have an appropriate maximum speed, a linear throttle response, and an accurate and reliable ABC stop within a 1 yard braking zone from a range of different speeds.

I really do like Zimo decoders. Their ABC braking looks very natural. From low speed, it runs at the entry speed until braking is necessary, then brakes to a stand. I'm not so happy with some other decoders, which will slow to a crawl and then crawl up to the stopping point. However, only my 08 actually has one of these in it (because a Zimo wouldn't fit), and I don't plan to run the 08 on the mainline all that much, so it shouldn't be an issue.

I turned down most of the momentum settings to make top speed tuning easier -- I'll re-tune these when I get more layout built and get a feel for how I want the trains to behave on scene.

12 hours ago, great northern said:

Which brings us to the search for the overall best locomotive design of the LMS. Qualifying CMEs are Hughes, Fowler,Lemon,Stanier, Fairburn and H G Ivatt. I don't know if any of those did any designs for overseas railways, but if they did, they don't qualify. Now try to wriggle your way out of that one. Some of you will, I just know you will.

Okay. This one has to be the  Stanier 0F 7080–7119. While the earlier LMS 7069-7079 are closer in pattern to the eventual thousand plus future copies on which the railway still depends, they are not attributed to a qualifying CME...

I am now half-way through tuning the speed and ABC braking distance of my chipped fleet. The clearance at the first overhang point is about 20mm more than that below a Dapol catenary mast, and at maximum height all three of my AC electrics clear without issue. I'm concerned about the Hornby 87 though, as it's pantograph appears very fragile and difficult to pose at a consistent height.

BTW, does anyone have any experience with Bachmann Mk1 Pullmans? I have had one sitting on the layout while testing locos, and I noticed today it had got warm, which I wasn't expecting.

I wanted to nominate a South African 25 class, but a) NBR only built a part of that class, and b) there is a South African designer credited with the design. The 24 class gets closer with NBR building the entire fleet, but there is still a South African designer credited with it. I can't with clear conscience say these are "designed in Scotland".

However, looking for locomotives where the NBR built either all of the class or the entire first batch, and a separate designer is not listed, the VR R class 4-6-4 looks like it counts (I'll take that as my 1st choice), and the NZR J class 4-8-2 also looks like it counts (2nd choice).

For my third choice I'll leave the NBR export catalogue behind, and nominate the Highland 'Jones Goods'.

1 hour ago, great northern said:

Today, we need to find the very best class of locomotive designed in Scotland. Steam only, please.

Steam only, designed in Scotland.

No specification of location of operation though, only design.

1 hour ago, great northern said:

A lot to choose from

Indeed, because this includes North British and all their predecessor companies, and their products got to lots of places.

The only difficulty is they both built their own designs, and built to designs provided by the customer. Working out what they actually designed versus what they built to external designs will require some research...

One step forwards, one step ... sideways.

There I was tuning loco speeds and ABC stopping distances.

A Bachmann 25 didn't seem to be able to get to it's scale 90mph at all -- it topped out at ~75mph ish. I'm not sure if there's a mechanical issue here or if that's all it is geared to do.

A re-motored Lima class 73 with a CD drive motor was previously capable of well north of 200mph, and has been tamed to run at a more appropriate 90mph.

A Bachmann 108 was previously capable of about 140mph, and will now barely crack 70mph.

One Heljan 47 was tamed from a top speed significantly in excess of 150mph to a shade below 100mph.

Then came the other Heljan 47. I'll confirm the same original top speed, then put the same values in -- hopefully it'll be close enough that's fine.

However, it didn't want to do that. It repeatedly had issues at one specific location on the track. There would be a grinding noise along with a slowdown in progress. Maybe wheelslip or flange squeal? When run slowly over that particular location, it would even stall. Run faster, it often popped a wheel off the track. Once when running rapidly against the normal flow of traffic, it jumped off the track entirely, left the baseboard, and dropped 6" onto a pile of stock boxes. (Thankfully no deadly 3' drop onto carpet though).

So ... off we go to troubleshoot. What's different between the two locos? The problem one has the old, narrower bogie sideframes (which I wish I'd noticed before I bought it, as now I need to figure out how to get hold of a replacement wider set -- the narrow ones really do make the loco look far too fat). I wondered if these were causing a lack of horizontal movement in the floating centre axle, so I pulled them off. No improvement.

However, crawling over that location really slowly, I did see a brief blue flash and heard a peep from the booster. Definitely a short.

The location was an insulating rail joint, and it was naturally right round the back of the yard behind six rows of stock. So I moved everything out of the way and had a closer look at it. The joint was proud -- standing a mm or two above the rest of the track where the thick insulating rail joiners were sitting on top of the sleepers. The bogies were tipping inwards slightly as the loco high-centred, and the short was happening where the innermost wheels of the bogie touched the underside of the chassis block. There was a few marks in the paint where the wheels had made contact, and if both wheels got to a bit that had no paint, that'd be why there was a short.

Figuring the sleepers plus the insulating rail joiner was pushing the rail up, I cut the two closest away and tried it again. No improvement.

Looking at the other 47, there were less marks, but they were still there in the same location.

Looking at how much angle the bogie needs to high-centre like that though made me realise that something bigger must be wrong. Not just the joint.

Then I noticed that the joint just so happened to be right over a where the baseboard frame ran under the board. Looking along the track, it did seem that perhaps there was more at play than just the joint. Out came the spirit level. Sure enough, the track was rising and falling some 3-5mm in a wave pattern, with this joint being a centre high-point. A clamp was used to lift the baseboard and make the approach side flat. And the loco ran fine, no longer having any issues with this joint.

Out came the 2x1, and a bit of new bracing was made for these two bays. Screwed in place, the board no longer sags by a few mm, and the locos run through again smoothly.

1 hour ago, 5BarVT said:

If you’re using JMRI, you should be able to get timings off that.  Using loconet monitor you can track occupancy to a much better accuracy.  It’s a couple of years since I have done it, but if it’s not obvious, squawk, and I’ll try and remind myself on my set up.

Yes, I'm using JMRI. I'm using MERG CBus rather than Loconet as the bus, but it still ends up in JMRI once it gets to the PC.

I will look into speed monitoring via the PC, it would be interesting to show the speed of each train. But what I've described above works, and will also work for anyone, even if they aren't using layout feedback.

I've started tuning the ABC stopping distance and scale top speed of my locos.

I very rapidly learned that you tune for speed *first*, and then tune for stopping distance afterwards. Because tuning the top speed will dramatically affect the braking distance, and you'll need to retune that from scratch afterwards.

I measured out a distance to time locos over (in my case it's a 3m straight run) and worked out some timings over this distance:
 

Real speed:	Scale speed:	Time to cover 3m:
155mph		0.909m/s	 3.30s
140mph		0.821m/s	 3.65s
125mph		0.733m/s	 4.09s
110mph		0.645m/s	 4.65s
100mph		0.587m/s	 5.11s
95mph		0.557m/s	 5.38s
90mph		0.528m/s	 5.68s
87mph		0.510m/s	 5.88s
80mph		0.469m/s	 6.39s
75mph		0.440m/s	 6.82s
70mph		0.411m/s	 7.31s
60mph		0.352m/s	 8.52s
40mph		0.235m/s	12.79s
27.5mph		0.161m/s	18.60s
20mph		0.117m/s	25.57s
15mph		0.088m/s	34.10s

How are these worked out?

* Convert mph to m/s -- multiply by 1609 and divide by 3600 (that's "metres per mile" and "seconds per hour").
* Divide that by the scale (76.2 for 4mm/ft)
* Divide the distance between your markers (in metres) by the scale speed you just worked out.

A human's ability to start and stop a stopwatch accurately at each end of a run is probably around +-0.3s. The resulting tuned speed error can be up to 20% at the fastest end of the above chart, around 10% in the middle where most of my locos should be, and about 2% at the bottom. This can be reduced by using longer distances and averaging multiple runs.

I'm not looking for perfect accuracy here so if I'm off by 10%, it doesn't matter. Untuned, I have several locos that will rocket off at a scale Mach 1 and happily tip themselves off at the next tight curve, and this needs fixing. But given they need tweaking anyway, I may as well try to get it reasonably "right".
I also want to show up the distinction between locos in freight and passenger service, where a freight loco is not capable of the same top speed as a passenger loco.

I'm also attempting to tune for linear speed -- to try to get 50% on the controller to be 50% of the max service speed. This will help getting mixed traffic locos running at about the right speed when hauling slower services.

5 minutes ago, Henners84 said:

I see, that's a little annoying. If you purchase the add on coach packs, do they allow 2 people to build a 10 car rake (ie 2 people go halves on the packs).

Yes, two base sets plus one of each add-on pack will make two ten car trains.
 

5 minutes ago, Henners84 said:

If you decide to stick to the 10 cars and not keep all 14, would you want to want to halves (share the cost)? That's assuming we both get our orders filled... 

As to what I do with the remaining vehicles, there are too many questions (like whether I even get my pre-order filled) to answer before I get to that stage...

7 hours ago, Henners84 said:

14 cars is just a little too long for me (and I think would look disproportionately large on my layout). Now I just need to figure out what additional coaches I need...

Unfortunately, due to the way the coach addon sets have been made, you need one coach from each of the four add-on coach pairs to make a correctly formed 10 car (6+2+2) train. Meaning you'll either need to buy fifteen total cars to get the correct vehicles for a 10 car train, or pick up spares second-hand from people who did that and are looking to pass them on.

I have pre-ordered a complete rake, and I'm also intending to run a 10 car train on my layout (which is right at the limit of what my layout can handle).
When they arrive, I will have to decide if I keep the extras so I can make up the full set for any outings (e.g. to a club layout) or whether I sell them on.

That's assuming my pre-order is fulfilled, of course. Knowing my luck, I'll get the add-on cars, but the base 7 car set will get cancelled...

15 hours ago, Metropolitan H said:

I have thought long and hard - resulting in my vote going to the LNWR's 3 car electric trains for the Euston - Watford and North London Lines.

Another vote for the LNWR 3-car Siemens/Oerlikon sets please...

25 minutes ago, great northern said:

Let's look for the very best of the LSWR.

I'm going to nominate LSWR's E1-E84 electrics of 1913, later referred to as 3-Sub.

A revolutionary introduction which led to an explosion in passenger numbers. They set the pattern for passenger services on the Southern that we still see today.

I dropped into the local wood yard, picked up a piece of 2" by 1" prepared, and just like that we're back in baseboard building mode.

This marks the first place where there is something above a storage line. I now need to get all my AC electrics out and, errr, extensively test the clearance at this location...

20 minutes ago, 5BarVT said:

Nice.

Are the short sections of wooden sleepers significant in respect of the ends of the blocks?  If so, very clever.

Paul.

Yes. Initially by accident, but I liked the effect so I (mostly) stuck with it.

Why by accident? I had short bits of reclaimed wooden sleeper track from a yard, long bits of reclaimed concrete sleeper track from a mainline, and a fresh box of concrete track (which was all that was available once lockdown had started).

I initially used the shorter pieces where I needed shorter pieces -- to cover overlaps and places where the front or rear of a train should be detected as blocking an adjacent line.

I also needed a fresh, uncut length of track as the berth track, so these all came from the box of new concrete track. That way all the braking distances are the same, and if a loco stops in one of them, it will stop in all of them.

So for both yard throats and the junction at the bottom of the ramp, there is a track section break where the sleepers change colour.
For the yard approach line (that runs around the rear of the yard) that is not the case -- I was running out of track, and used whatever I had available to make it fit. One of the stretches of wooden sleepered track does line up just after the end of a berth track, but the other doesn't -- it's in the middle of a block. And I'm not tearing that area up now just to line up a particular colour of sleepers.

... And here's that video I promised.

It's ... alive.

I have successfully run two semi-autonomous trains. They followed each other down the approach road, queued up behind each other, and waited for a path. I pathed one into a storage road with the NX panel. It pulled away by itself, and parked at the correct location. The other shuffled itself up to the yard entrance to await another storage road. I assigned it a different storage road, and it drew forward and parked there too. I can set roads out of the yard too, and the correct train pulls away.

I say semi-autonomous, as with the notable exception that I cannot force a train to drive beyond it's authorised limit, I am still in full control.

Tomorrow I will attempt to beat the nearly 2GB of phone video into watchable shape and prove it.

On Tuesday, I got the first two switchable ABC sections live. Wednesday saw the first one programmed into JMRI as a "light". Once the hardware worked, this turned out to be relatively straightforward -- the biggest problem was figuring out exactly what type of device to call it.

Controlling it with JMRI Logix is a bit more of a mind-bender though.

JMRI Logix does not appear to allow a distinction between a "when" and an "if".

I had initially sketched out this logic:
When the berth track circuit becomes occupied, if the signal is at danger, turn on the ABC module.
When the signal clears, turn off the ABC module.

However, because "when" and "if" are the same operation to JMRI, I also got it turning the ABC back on when the signal returned to danger with the berth track circuit still occupied -- e.g. when the first wheel of the train goes past the signal into the next block.

Not really a problem if the loco is leading, as it will read normal DCC through the front axle with enough reliability it will keep going. But the moment you have a powered vehicle in any other position, it all goes very wrong and repeated re-stopping is common. 

An alternative solution was found - checking if any valid routes were set from the signal, rather than whether it was at danger. This required a lot more clicking, but should be a lot more reliable. I obviously can't use routes set from a signal when that signal is an automatic though -- that is a problem remaining to be solved.

But ... it works. I've only got one functioning section so far, but I can run a train into that section, have it switch on the ABC when the berth track circuit gets occupied, have the train stop (much tweaking of braking distances will be required to get them to reliably stop in time), then I give it a path into the storage yard and it starts to pull away again by itself once everything is ready.

This evening I modified the remaining ABC modules to have a common 12v, not a common 0v. And I finished testing the second CANVOUT, which has passed it's first power on test.

Tomorrow's job is to mount it in the concentration point and configure it. That would give two consecutive approach blocks and two yard tracks, plus the yard throat. That will make a much more thorough test setup...

42 minutes ago, Grimleygrid said:

Now the track plan is down this has raised a problem with the track, which to be honest I had been expecting, there is a point across a baseboard joint. I am actually quite surprised that it is only one point that is straddling a baseboard joint. 

If anyone has any suggestions for how best to deal with the point issue I would be very grateful. 

You can approach this in a number of ways.
Cut the point.
Move the point.
Move the baseboard joint.

And ... the answer is probably a combination of all of them.

Cut the point -- only the blades absolutely need to be kept intact on one board to work properly. It's best not to cut through the vee, too. That means you can split the point in the middle (between the vee and the start of the blades) without too much difficulty.

Move the point -- if the blades or vee do line up with the joint, massage the plan slightly to move the point so it doesn't line up like that. Remember you don't have to get the entire thing off the join, just move it enough to avoid the critical pieces.

Move the joint -- Make a small triangle recess in one board, and add a small triangle on the side of the other board that matches up. This makes a non-straight joint. With careful planning you can then cross the line at right-angles at a convenient place where there are no points. Have a look at the Liverpool Lime Street thread on this site to see this kind of baseboard joint in action.

HTH

I've just had first life out of the ABC controllers.

Like all good bugs, there were two issues sitting right next to each other. One was the prototype circuit board for the switchable ABC converters had a common 0v when the CANVOUT was expecting a common 12v. But they are only relays, so swapping the protection diodes around and connecting them backwards solved that. The second was that my CANVOUT node had forgotten everything I'd ever told it, including it's own hardware address.

Having fixed both of those issues, I can now switch on and off ABC braking using the configuration program.

Now I just need to teach JMRI when it's appropriate to switch it on and off.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ROCO-44787-Gepackwagen-grau-der-DB-TOP-OVP/114532981549?hash=item1aaab29b2d:g:JI4AAOSwpd9fuUIa

Description, he say:

Condition is "Used", but spotless!

Photos ... tell a different story. e.g. spot the giant, shiny, freshly installed self-tapper neatly framed through the window in picture 3...

Well, that went quiet.

What did you all miss in the five months since I last posted?
Nothing really.

Last thing I did was solder up an ABC4 module, and a CANVOUT to control it. The ABC4 was complete, but never made it as far as the layout. The CANVOUT was ready for initial testing, then fitting the chips to the sockets. I ... just never went back the next day to test it and put the chips in. It just sat there. It's still sitting there waiting.

I did continue to pick up a few bits of rolling stock, and I built up a backlog of things that had been chipped or re-chipped but never configured.

Four ish months later and things changed. I got a new work PC, and it dawned on me that the "temporary table for three weeks to flatten the curve" had been in place for a year. So instead of perpetuating that, I should use my main desk. That triggered a full desk rebuild, which triggered both a study reorganisation (as everything had to move off that desk), and a cable audit (as nothing needed the same length cable as it did before). A week after the desk rebuild was complete, and I had the perfect old PC in the right place to dedicate as a layout controller, and the correct USB cable to avoid unreliable extensions, dangling cables and blocking the doorway, all of which the previous solution suffered from.

During last week I got the PC running right, with all the software installed necessary to run the layout, and the old layout configuration ported across.

This weekend, I've moved everything off the layout, cleared the backlog of DCC chips waiting attention, fixed a cable that got pulled out from where it should be, then played with by a cat, and replaced a servo that wasn't responding properly.

And ... it works again. I still need to work out how to tell JMRI to turn on and off the ABC blocks, and that CANVOUT still needs looking at, but the NX panel works on the new PC, and I ran some trains today. I didn't lose connection to the layout once, which is refreshing. The lights on my Bachmann 108 and Hornby DVT are finally correct and controllable. And the top goes back on my Bachmann 08 without me worried I'm stressing the plastic to make it all fit.

And still have one more day off tomorrow. I wonder what I can get done?

10 minutes ago, 145 Squadron said:

I also fitted cams to move the couplings from the bogie to the coach underside at the same time to enable close coupling with my other stock.

Which cams did you use, and how much modification is required to complete this modification?

I've avoided Hornby's latest Mk1s (despite them doing several variants Bachmann don't do that I'd be interested in having) precisely because they don't have close coupling, and one non-close-coupled coach in a close-coupled rake stands out like a sore thumb.