Bloodnok

1 minute ago, RedgateModels said:

 

This struck me as odd at the outset. Just about anyone even in the 80's wanted the black fronted set - the plain yellow did not last that long in service and Hornby's first effort was only all yellow for the first year - even the 1981 full set was black fronted as well as the then newer train pack.

 

Three options would have been better - 5 car as built, 5 car black fronted and then maybe the "collector" 7 car set.

Or at the very least, put two full power cars in the "collector" set. The requirement to make two variants of the NDMs probably added enough to costs to negate the saving of not fitting a motor and DCC socket.

4 minutes ago, andyman7 said:

I think this is the key issue - the full 14 coach train is a behemoth (and a formation that ran on just a few occasions) and even 10 coaches practically joins at the ends on a 6 x 4 layout - the average set user is unlikely to get near that number.

If Hornby were aiming everything at a 6' by 4' train set, there'd be no need for AWD locos, a pancake drive bogie would be fine. Or APT centre cars for that matter -- which is why there aren't any for the 1980s set.

4 minutes ago, andyman7 said:

Indeed the man drawback of Hornby's marketing is I think the use of 'paired' coach packs given that the half sets were rarely complete and utilised odd coaches from each set.

Yep, and if you scroll back a few dozen pages you'll probably find me ranting about that too -- I needed one half of each of the four packs to make the prototypical train I wanted to run.

2 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

I am sure Hornby's response would be that running a 10 coach train on such a layout is unusual.

Fixed it for you.

They were indeed surprised that people would attempt to extend the black fronted 7 car pack at all -- Hornby clearly expected that to be used primarily as a display model / collectors piece. They instead expected people to only extend the yellow fronted set. The only issue with that is IRL the black front was ubiquitous pretty fast -- the full yellow front disappeared very early on.

2 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

I can understand a normal loco being heavier though. The clearance for the tilting parts causes the chassis to be smaller than for a non-tilting loco with a larger tumblehome.

Yeah, figuring out where to add weight is certainly a challenge, hence why a second motored NDM is my most likely solution.

12 hours ago, scumcat said:

My power car will happily cope with 10 coaches at scale speed🤔

On flat ground and without encountering a set-track style curve radius it may well cope with 10 coaches with a single power car.

I have an S curve (135 degrees followed by 225 degrees the other way) laid at 2nd and 3rd radius which is also up a 2.5% gradient. With a running start out of my fiddleyard, it got about 4 cars onto the gradient and then just sat there and spun. It could barely push half the train up the hill.

Compare this to any other AC Bo-Bo (Bachmann 85, Heljan 86, Hornby 87, Bachmann 90, all of which I have), and they will all pull or push a similar length train of lit coaches up the same gradient without difficulty.

I have not had the APT out of the box since. Disappointed is a massive understatement.

I am determined to see it work though. I will at some point work out what the correct kit of parts to get from Hornby Spares is so I can motorise the second NDM in the pack.

11 hours ago, AY Mod said:

I've not had anyone else flag the issue up and all seems OK here.

 

Worth trying a different browser?

Seems to be working again this morning with no changes my end. Most odd.

Today I am not seeing any RMWeb hosted images in any threads.

Not just in new posts, but in old posts too. Including ones I posted myself that definitely used to have images in them.

Are we having another "image problem", or is this something wrong on my end? I have already tried clearing cookies and other site data.

On 21/11/2022 at 23:24, Bloodnok said:

But for the Digitrains ad ... at no point today have I had any less than three of those videos start playing simultaneously when loading a thread. There's a minimum of two (one over the top of the other) which spawn in the bottom right corner of the window (overlapped with a post or the text entry box, depending on what is at the bottom of the page). I can close one of them, but the other cannot be closed. Sometimes I can pause it, but sometimes not even that "feature" works, and all I can do is mute it and leave it playing.
And there's one that appears full width about two to three posts down in a thread. Assuming I've jumped in to a thread with a notification or via the 'scroll to new content' feature, that automatic scroll will take me past that point, so it's also effectively an "on startup" thing.

If I were to browse the site like I normally do (opening a tab per thread I'm interested in) I will get a cacophony of noise of dozens of these videos all playing in an unsynchronised manner. I can "fix" that by muting the tabs, but that doesn't stop the data being streamed to me endlessly from ... somewhere.

Update: I still get many videos playing in parallel, but they are now all starting muted. Still deleterious to bandwidth, but no longer headache-inducing. Definitely an improvement -- thanks to whoever made that change 👍

1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

@AY Mod- Telling me I must turn off my adblocker (doing will greatly slow down PC performance while it runs all the animated ads for things I won't be buying) is like telling me I must leave my house unlocked because otherwise door-to-door salesmen can't let themselves into my house.

Almost, but not quite. What Andy actually needs is not for you to let every salesman in -- just for you to let his salesmen in ... and he's going to send you at least one every time you use the service. When the salesman Andy sends doesn't get in to your house, he doesn't get paid his kick-back from the salesman, and he's using that money to cover the cost of running the service. As he says, the service is not cheap and the money has to come from somewhere.

Now a nice, friendly, respectful salesman telling you about something you might be interested in every now and then sounds fine, particularly as you also get a service you like for nothing.

Unfortunately there are plenty of salesmen out there that are not any of those things, and as usual, the worst have ruined what was a functioning (if exploitable) system. A long time ago, rather than just giving their pitch and leaving, some salesmen figured out that if you daub something on the wall of each house you go to, you can look for that on a later visit and match up where you've already been (and more interestingly, when and why). Two things you can do with that; look for patterns to see if you can predict what someone might do in future based on what you've seen other people do, and use live data to live-choose what to advertise right as the salesman's visit begins. Every salesman, without fail, does that marking now because you can't really be a competitive salesman without doing it.

When they realised they got away with that they started getting greedy for more data, and are now happy to leave bugs that actively track you (rather than just the more passive tracking of leaving markers for themselves to look at later). And some of the particularly brazen ones are only pretending to be salesmen in the first place, but are instead thieves -- either stealing your stuff directly or using your power and tools to make things for free that they then sell elsewhere.

Andy does a good job avoiding the bad ones, and most people will say to themselves "I'll only keep the door locked for the bad ones", so it should still work OK, right?

If only. The arms race continues, and the bad ones keep getting more and more sneaky, and at some point you've spent enough time cleaning up after the bad ones that "I'll only keep the bad ones out" morphs into "I will keep the bad ones out, whatever it takes" and all of a sudden many of the nice(r) ones are getting blocked too. Andy, through no fault of his own, is now looking at a future where he may not be able to cover his costs via advertising.

This is very much a problem across the modern web, and it is far from unique to RMWeb.

The simple problem we all have to face is that if you aren't paying for something, you aren't the customer. RMWeb's customers are the ones spending money -- Intermediaries like Google and Connatix, and advertisers like Digitrains. They are RMWeb's customers, and you are the product being sold to them. If you'd like to be the customer instead of the advertisers, good news -- Andy has a subscription service you can buy which will do exactly this.

There's a more complex problem though -- not enough people will subscribe in that way. You might visit thousands of websites in total, Intentionally re-visit hundreds of them, post regularly on tens of them, but you'll be down to single figures for how many you'll be willing to pay money for. Cross-product that across the entire audience, and the vast majority of website visitors, if forced to either pay or leave, will probably leave.

For something with a traditional publisher outlook like BRM, as long as the paying readers who do stick around pay enough to cover the bills, that's fine, the content will not suffer. But RMWeb is not like BRM. RMWeb is 100% user generated content. It is entirely dependent on the network effects generated by the size of the active userbase. A reduction in the amount or quality of users posting is a risk to the value proposition of a site membership.

15 minutes ago, Clive Mortimore said:

I don't want a Xmas jumper or see what members look like, I bet she doesn't post on here.

I doubt the "Wide range of DCC systems" is particularly appealing to you either...

I got the ad-blocker screen today too. I don't have a separate ad-blocker, just a privacy focused browser. I don't have a Gold subscription.

I did mess with the settings of the browser to see what affected the appearance of the site-blocking popup at the start, and did eventually find a setting for which it did not appear.

But ... that is all that setting changed. Regardless of what I set in the web browser, I never see any other ads than the Digitrains video. All that changes is occasionally the amount of whitespace where they might have been -- and I don't know if what I changed changes that, because ads are not static.

But for the Digitrains ad ... at no point today have I had any less than three of those videos start playing simultaneously when loading a thread. There's a minimum of two (one over the top of the other) which spawn in the bottom right corner of the window (overlapped with a post or the text entry box, depending on what is at the bottom of the page). I can close one of them, but the other cannot be closed. Sometimes I can pause it, but sometimes not even that "feature" works, and all I can do is mute it and leave it playing.
And there's one that appears full width about two to three posts down in a thread. Assuming I've jumped in to a thread with a notification or via the 'scroll to new content' feature, that automatic scroll will take me past that point, so it's also effectively an "on startup" thing.

If I were to browse the site like I normally do (opening a tab per thread I'm interested in) I will get a cacophony of noise of dozens of these videos all playing in an unsynchronised manner. I can "fix" that by muting the tabs, but that doesn't stop the data being streamed to me endlessly from ... somewhere. I'm not sure if "Connatix" is just the playback tech or actually the file host for the video, but someone is going to be down a fairly large bandwidth bill given how many times this video has played in parallel today. If the purpose of this was to cover bandwidth costs, I really hope this video wasn't self-hosted, as otherwise that will have been just a little bit counter-productive.

I assume from this discussion so far though that this isn't a common symptom, so this might be more a browser problem than a website problem. The web browser does have a "report sites that don't work properly" feature which I can try too.

23 hours ago, Harlequin said:

loops are inconvenient space-hogs and bi-directional ones doubly-so!

Yes, they are ... but you can get sneaky with them too and hide them in unexpected places.

I have a double track triangular junction, which if built as you might think it should be, would have needed lots of reversing sections.
I also have a balloon loop storage yard, which would also need one.

But because the two are connected together via a double track ramp it worked out that by introducing a reversible third track in the centre of the ramp, all the required reversing moves could go through the one reversible centre line, and it became my only reversing section. Yes, the length of it does make a hard length limit on what can run, but a train long enough not to fit here also won't fit in my fiddleyard, and certainly won't fit in my terminus station, which is almost a metre shorter than the reversing section.

I have a computer running an NX signalling panel already, so adding in a DPDT relay and driving it from signalling and block occupancy data I'm already collecting wasn't hard. If you aren't starting at "NX panel with full block detection" doing what I did just for a DCC polarity reverser may be rather overkill.

The block detectors I use come in sets of 8, but I can wire each detector in the set individually -- it's not also a power splitting bus bar as it sounds like the ones discussed in this thread are. So I can have five detectors inside the reverser, and still use the other three for other things.  I needed five detectors in the reversing section to give the computer enough data to do the NX properly - it needs to know when the junctions are blocked, and when the train is in the berth track at each end, plus something for the centre of the section.

The reverser changes over in two circumstances. One is when a new route is set into the reversing section (which can't be done until it is clear).
The other is when the rear of the train (which yes, is to be detected electrically -- and I have a lot of resistors to fit to wagons to make this true...) is clear of the arrival junction and there is a path set away from the departure side.

The logic is just about dumb enough that I can stop and reverse a train in it too. A departing route can only be set once the junction is free (that ensures you have arrived properly), and it then just checks for when you stop hanging over the far end (which you shouldn't ever have been -- that would require passing a red signal to do that!)

Just now, jpendle said:

On you journey from Preston to Carlisle in 66730 why did the bright headlight (sorry, I don't know the correct terminology) switch from right to left? 

Day and night settings. The day headlight is on one side, the night one is on the other.

On 08/11/2022 at 17:01, ITG said:

Thanks a lot. My new “train room” has not yet had a spade into the ground, and will be about 5.5m x 2.5m when built, I suspect slightly narrower than your allotted space.

My layout is 4m long on the lower levels, 4.45m long at the max extent of the terminus station. Total width is 2.9m.

On 08/11/2022 at 17:01, ITG said:

Have you seen the DCC Concepts wheels/axles with resistors built in? Quicker than lights, though of course you don’t get the effect.

I have. They do look very useful, but they are also plain disc wheels. No problem in a decent range of freight wagons, but on current wagons, the wheels are often spoked, drilled, shaped, or have cosmetic brake discs on the wheels or axles. These may be a step backwards in appearance on some wagons.

I'm also looking at their spring axle pickups, which look like an interesting way to add pickups to vehicles not designed to have them.

On 07/11/2022 at 08:52, ITG said:

It’s back a while that you kindly responded to a poster to explain your thinking re reversing loop wiring.

I’m quite taken by some the principles in your track layout, particularly the combination of terminus, continuous run and reversing loop. So much so that a forthcoming layout of mine may try to adopt some similarities. But I wonder if you could elaborate a little as to the way in which your reversing loops work.

Sure :-)

On 07/11/2022 at 08:52, ITG said:

1. I can see that the centre rail on the left is the reversing link to the storage yard reversing loop ballon . So does that mean that the two right hand points giving access to the centre turnout/rail, are completely isolated from that centre turnout? And where is the insulated break at the other end of that centre rail? Is there a break halfway round the balloon?

The reversing section is the entire third road down the middle of the ramp. It includes one turnout each end, but no more.

There is no (*reversing) break in the balloon loop. If you were running around the continuous run, took a left after the small station, and went across the left-most track of the large bridge, you can go all the way down to the storage yard, through it, and up the far side of the ramp back onto the continuous run onto the same track you just left from (and running in the same direction as you were) without ever putting a wheel onto a reversing section.

It is when you need to rise up from the storage yard, go into the middle line, and then turn right to cross the large bridge across the room that you need to go across the reversing module. Same when entering the storage yard from the right hand end of the layout, down the middle line, and then into the storage yard.

That centre road has five (!!) detected sections -- each turnout, and three in the middle (the approach sections in front of the signal at each end, and the centre of the ramp). I switch the polarity when a route is set into the section, and again on the way out when a) there is a route set, and b) the train is within the centre three sections.

It's working fine so far driving a train in from the yard, and reversing it back to the yard the other way. The track at the top is not working yet (one way is laid but not wired, the other way is not even laid).

On 07/11/2022 at 08:52, ITG said:

2. what about the double track triangle which is created north of the bridge? Isn’t that another reversing loop, even though in absolute terms, you probably would never use it to reverse a train Where are the breaks, and polarity changing feeds?

The upper left junction of that triangle is one end of the reversing section. The other end is the other end of the three-track section up the hill.

On 07/11/2022 at 08:52, ITG said:

i’m planning on using iTrain to automate my layout, using current sensors to determine train position.

I'm also using current sensors. Biggest thing with current sensors is to make sure the back of the trains all have something on them that pulls current so it can be detected. I have a lot of lights to fit to things like brake vans.

On 07/11/2022 at 08:52, ITG said:

Hence I will most likely opt for an automated polarity switch, rather than a DPDT which you mentioned.

Mine is a DPDT relay, driven from the signalling system. It's automated in the sense that while operating I never have to worry about it, but it's not "turn-key automatic" in the way that the short-detecting ones are. I still had to write the logic to drive it.

HTH :-)

... And that's why and how I moved lots of electronics about.

11 minutes ago, 5BarVT said:

That’s the beauty and the pain of software.  You can do it in either place but you need to record where or it becomes a right pain later!

Paul.

Yup.

I can test the servos easily -- I tell one to move, and I watch what moves. If it's the right one, great. If the wrong one moves, then that's pretty obvious.

Same with the black wires. I put a train on the track, and a block lights up red on the PC. I can easily see if it's the wrong one.

It's a bit harder with the red wires, as there's no visual indication of what's going on.

I drove a loco straight through storage road 1, without stopping and without setting a route out the end. It should have stopped at the end under ABC. I heard a relay clicking at the right time, but if the wrong relay was driven, I would expect it not to stop. I had the exit points lined up just in case (but no route active).

So ... I started going through the software config. Road 1 is driving the right relay. Road 2 is also fine. I'm sure if I tested 3 and 4, those would be fine too.

So I tested a different loco. It stopped as expected.

So ... a loco / chip problem? Perhaps, but it had stopped at the entrance to the storage yard as intended, and it has just done that again. Thoroughly confused now...

New electronics mounting location is now fully cat approved. I just need to fix the red wires -- the software doesn't know they are connected in different locations yet so it's controlling the wrong things. Amazingly, the black wires and the servos all ended up back in exactly the same place. Not sure if it's going to be easier to re-connect the pink control wires, or actually tell the software where the red wires moved to.

On 13/10/2022 at 10:10, APT Fan said:

Hi,

 

Has anyone successfully fitted a Train-O-Matic decoder to the driving coaches as believe space is quite tight?

 

Its described as - Train-O-Matic Mini 9 wires + 8 pin NEM 652 (W8P)

 

Thanks

I have Train-O-Matic Lokommander II (W8P) decoders in my DTS cars. They are retired normal decoders, not dedicated function decoders. I don't recall any problems fitting them, install went smoothly.

The problem vehicle was the NDM (motor car), which I used a Zimo MX600R in. If fitted as intended this caused problems with the tilt not working properly. I had to shove the decoder up the side of the model so it would sit on top of the chassis with the wires flat up the side of the chassis to avoid any catching/rubbing as the body tilted around the chassis block.

... And it still doesn't actually work as it can't climb a hill to save it's life. I either need to ballast it, re-work the rest of the train to reduce rolling resistance, or motorise the other NDM.

So ... what the hell happened?

All this rapid baseboard building progress up to August, then ... it all goes suspiciously quiet.

I had set myself a deadline. I was trying to get a loop around the room in place for when my parents in law were visiting from Australia.
It became clear fairly early on that that wasn't an achievable target, and that the junctions were going to be the sticking point. So the revised target was all the plain line up to the first junction in both directions -- which is about three quarters of a circuit.
When it became clear that even that wasn't an achievable target, the revised target was to clear the rest of the house of wood before they arrived.

An 8x4 sheet of ply will not fit inside my shed. Nor will a 3.6m long piece of PSE. It all needed cutting, and in the right places. That means building enough of the layout to know where to cut, and that realistically meant building all of the baseboard.

I did achieve this reduced target, building all the framing and cutting the surface to shape (current state as of two posts ago). The remaining small spare bits of ply all fit in the shed, and the few bits of PSE remaining could also be stored out of the way.

Then there was visitors, and trips, and the inevitable lack of money when you are trying to keep up with people who are on holiday and have budgeted for lots of visits to cafes and restaurants and things.

I could have picked right up after they left, laying that three quarters of a circuit which I had all the parts for. But I didn't, and since then there has been effectively zero progress.

Normally when there's a pause like this, I'm not quite happy with something. At some point what it is will surface, I'll revise the design to accommodate, and progress will resume.

In this case it's not track plan (that's basically fixed now as the boards are cut) nor baseboard construction (that's basically all done aside from screwing down three of the surfaces).

Nevertheless, something was wrong and I wasn't sure what.

It's taken a while, but I think I know what's wrong now. The electronics on the lower level is becoming increasingly more difficult to get at as further baseboard surface goes in. Now, it's all supposed to be hidden, but there's a difference between hidden and inaccessible, and some parts of it are heading more towards the latter than the former.

I know what I need to fix now. I need to re-mount some of the electronics in a more accessible location. Out of the four active concentration points, I really only need to revise one of them. Two more that haven't been used yet also need a revision, too.

I just need a bit more 2x1 PSE to get it done...

On 27/09/2022 at 10:18, RedgateModels said:

... spares are becoming available ...

Has anyone worked out what the kit of parts required to OEM convert the dummy power car to a full power car is yet, and if they are all available? I'm assuming two complete bogies with drivetrains, two driveshafts, a motor and a wiring harness would all be required (and seem available), but what about motor mounts and other chassis parts?

With the current unavailability of Zimo decoders (I haven't been able to buy an MX638D since February), and with a growing "pile of shame" of new locos which can't be run on the layout because they have no chips, I have decided to try out a few different DCC decoders to see if I can find more suitable options.

I tried out a DCC Concepts Zen Black decoder on the basis that several people have espoused how wonderful their ABC implementation is.
 

This turns out not to have been such a good idea, as it's completely incompatible with everyone else. Not only is there is no attempt at constant distance stopping, but they've dropped the 'right rail'/'left rail' distinction, so the loco didn't even react to the braking section when going in with the no.2 end leading.

This board is full of complex levels. Rising gradient through the middle on a curve towards the station throat. Flat on the left for a turntable (complete with pit already cut, as cutting that later would be an absolute pain). Flat (but higher) on the right for the carriage sidings.

Still haven't decided if the turntable will be installed and working, disused but present, or just a scenic pit. Whichever way round it'll be a compromise -- 
 

From the other direction. Yes, I took the opportunity before I cut the hole to draw centrelines on for tracks away from the pit, which are aligned on the centre. I'm sure I'll thank myself later.
 

And with the plan back in place on top of the board:
 

I still need to trim the upper level piece, split it where the flat bits for the carriage sidings and turntable are, and make a tiny little bridging piece up at the top left. But I'm nearly done making surface panels now too.

Now available in Ply.



One bit still needs sanding down because it's standing proud. Then there are four more bits of wood to add, and after that I'm all done with making frame pieces.

On to surface, making sure places to install electronics are available, and ... finally getting back to doing some tracklaying.

More CAD in progress.