Bloodnok

The first line of the lyrics for "White Freightliner Blues" is: "I'm going out on the highway, listen to them big trucks whine" "White Freightliner" being one of the major manufacturers of the big trucks found on highways in the USA is not a random coincidence. It's clearly an intentional reference. It's definitely not a reference to the (unconnected) UK Freightliner company, which most Americans have never heard of. Note that I'm not ruling out other layered references using slang meanings of the words -- good songs work on several levels, and I'm sure this is no exception.

She's an American, so it'll be a reference to the truck manufacturer currently known as Freightliner, but formerly known as White Freightliner.

It turns out model trains confuse the people at the airport doing bag scanning -- they aren't used to seeing a model loco in hand luggage.

A bit of a closer look at what I've bought. More when I get them home...

I'm 16,800km away from home at the moment, exercising 'Rule 1' about as hard as I can. I have no track here though, so I can't run it.

Dongits is 3 today! To mark the occasion, let's have a tour of the layout as it stands today, and a review of what it can do, and where you can follow the layout as it develops. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DongitsModelRailway Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/DongitsModelRailway Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DongitsModelRailway:b Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/100089622502754/ RMWeb (Workbench Blog): https://www.rmweb.co.uk/blogs/blog/2460-bloodnoks-workbench/ Railway Modellers Club: https://community.railwaymodellers.com/groups/DongitsModelRailway

A tidy-up revealed the small station and yard -- and I couldn't resist setting up a little scene to show what it will end up laid out like:

I don't know about that. I love seeing your epic signals, and the A4 + BSK waiting at another one in the background seems fine to me. :D

Track is now laid to here: This marks the last hidden track laid, and also the last tight corner.

Definitely agreed when changes are concerned. I need to travel a point-to-point distance of 45 miles this weekend. I have a variety of ways to do it including using a train that can travel at up to 140mph. But no realistic option gives me a travel time of less than 2 hours -- because there is always a minimum of three changes.

It's on a gradient. Provided the gradient is consistent throughout (entire bridge and both sides), that's fine. I wouldn't want to include a vertical curve (change of gradient) on a lift-out section though. The lift-out pins have to be aligned with each other for the lifting out to work. I've got the lift-out pins perpendicular to the gradient, which works well with this kind of bridge. It could also be done with everything vertical. I'd go that way if I was making a full scenic section containing a bridge as well as the scene underneath it, rather than making the bridge deck itself the lift-out section.

There are three places with a tight radius -- both ends of the storage yard and the place where the tracks appear onto the visible section near the filing cabinet. The inside curve of all of these is 438mm (radius 2). I've arranged the tightest gradient to always be on the downhill side when there is a gradient on the curve to help with running. On the visible area, the tightest curves are around 650mm -- the curve where the APT is sitting in the video thumbnail is around that radius.

The bridge is now wired. The per-track train detection and ABC braking continues across it, plus the wiring is done so that the approach side tracks go dead if it's not fully installed. I've also tested the bridge for pantograph clearance:

Naturally. The point though was that they were outselling all other Hornby spares by orders of magnitude.

And yet the salesman I spoke to at New Modellers Shop said the Hornby spares for the APT have been consistent rapid sellers -- lots of people are obviously trying to motorise the dummy NDM in their 7 car set, and don't seem scared of doing it. That does require some quite precise soldering, attaching the pickup wires inside the bogies.

That's how I bought mine. £50 a coach. Unboxed -- the guy had bought a load, split them, was selling the coaches at £50 each, and the box for £20 separately... Of course, by the time I'd got around to motorising the NDM so it could run, I'd seen the coach packs at £50 each on deep discount at some retailers, so I felt like a complete idiot for getting them that way. Never mind.

Yep, there is not a right-angle in that room anywhere -- no two walls are perpendicular, and not even between a wall and the adjacent floor. Nor is anything properly parallel to anything else. The opposite sides of a room are never the same length...

Also worth remembering Hornby strongly encouraged that by packaging the coaches in pairs. If you wanted a realistic half-length set (2+2+6, a not uncommon formation IRL) you needed one coach from all four coach packs.

This. People obsess over what the gradient number is, where a smooth, steady gradient with a slow entrance and exit (vertical curves) at each end is far more important. If it ends up as 1:150 or 1:120 is far less important than keeping it consistent. Hah, the joy of working in old buildings. One of the layout projects I'm working on is housed on the third floor of a building built in the 1700s. There's 80mm of height difference in the floor across the area the layout is in (roughly 5m x 8m). Given the low point is roughly in the middle of one side, the floor is already steeper than 1 in 50 in places.

It lives! Well, mostly. The ABC braking control and block detection boards are in and the power is fed correctly, but there's nothing controlling them yet. Those boards still need to be made. (And yes, that APT does now have the dummy NDM motorised, and with two motors it drives up my gradients -- something it was completely incapable of doing with a single motor).

They genuinely seemed to be under the impression that people would build long trains with the yellow fronted set. The fact world+dog wanted the black fronted set as the base for longer trains seemed to surprise them. I guess they were looking at their own product history, and not what the real railway did... Personally, if I had have been specifying the liveries, I'd have done a 5 car yellow front pack aimed primarily at the nostalgia market (think reproduction 1980s artwork and box style), a 5 car black fronted set as the 'main feature', and the 7 car set would have had the red line across the nose as is appropriate for the 'research' set. This will be poor contact somewhere -- either pickups to wheels or wheels to track. Check the wipers are contacting the wheels properly, and that the tilt mechanism is working properly, and not picking one side of the axles up off the track at any point.

Turnouts on consistent inclines isn't a problem. Turnouts on vertical curves (places where the gradient changes) *is* a problem.

I hit a slight snag when wiring up the bridge: I didn't have enough electronics in stock. I have enough ABC generators, but I'd run out of train detectors. If I'm making more, why not a) fix some niggling problems with them and b) explore something new I've not done before. These are partially surface mount, ordered with the surface mount components pre-assembled from PCBWay.

The other way to handle that would be to wire the entire track to the centre terminals on a DPDT switch, with the DC on one end of the switch and the programming on the other. That way the entire track can be set as either DC or programming depending on what's going on, and there's zero risk of issues if an errant piece of stock bridges the gap.

I took my motor coach apart today to identify the missing part, and how it works. Here it is: You can see the way it engages with the motor. The good news is, you can re-create this piece. The bad news is the way you do it -- take the spare UJ end from the worm in the driveshaft bag, remove it from the worm shaft, drill a ~1.3mm hole right through it, ensuring you are aligned perfectly in the centre. Then interference fit push (or glue if you didn't achieve that) a piece of rod through it so it sticks out both sides and engages with the motor. This is unbelievably fiddly. But, I've achieved it. Twice. I can confirm that the removed leg of a 1n5401 diode is perfect for this, although other sources of scrap to go in that slot in the flywheel are obviously also available. But ... then I noticed I have only three screws in my motor bracket bag, and only three UJ centres between the two bogies and the two driveshafts. I will need to order a third driveshaft to get another UJ centre, and (unless I can find out what screw I need) an entire second motor cradle purely to get enough screws to mount the motor securely.