Bloodnok

I've gone back and fixed (most of) the images in this thread. One or two I don't seem to have a copy of. I might go back later on and try to work out what they were of. For now though ... more building.

Things are happening. I started by clearing out some space. No more noisy old server, now replaced by a newer, quieter version on the other side of the room. What to do with the open space though? Horatio decided it looked comfortable. That wasn't my plan though. I built some more baseboard instead. Here I am checking for a consistent gradient across the bridge: Next job is to cut a ply panel for that lower shelf, which is to be the permanent home of the layout power supplies, command station and booster.

I respectfully disagree -- that's a very atmospheric shot.

Perhaps Hornby shouldn't have been using them to promote the new APT then. It rather suggests that Hornby's Marketing and Sales departments aren't talking to each other...

Did the cantrail stripe change colour at the same time the black window surrounds were applied in real life? Or were these separately applied changes?

Can you confirm what type of layout it's struggling with 7 cars on? I have a couple of places with a 2.2% climb on a radius 3 curve, and my plan was to run a 10 car formation with one powered NDM. Sounds like I'm going to need to do some serious surgery to make this thing run to an acceptable level :'(

My pre-order (with a retailer) was originally for £436.49 (7 car set) and £80.99 (coach twin packs). I did pay a deposit at the time. I will find out soon what the actual price will be. I didn't order a separate NDM, and my retailer no longer list it. So I don't know how much that would have been.

So the 5 car sets were in stock and dispatching from the Hornby website on the 10th, but weren't in stock to dispatch to the retailers before a price change on the 15th? And because of this timewarp, Hornby stand to extract more money out of retailers? That is ... very interesting. You'd have thought that whoever was running the Hornby online shop could have been persuaded to cool their heels for a few days to make it a bit less obvious to everyone.

Hornby managed a coupler with through electrical connections (4 pin) in the original 4-VEP. Having done that, adding more pins is less of a challenge than designing the initial concept...

... with the notable exception of Every. Single. One. of their post-nationalisation designs ... up until apparently this latest Mk3 redesign, which appears to have body-mounted couplers, so might have them fitted.

Hmmm. Nice to get a proper confirmation from Hornby that a 12 or greater car APT needs a second powered NDM. Also nice of them to produce one with the correct cantrail colour to go with the black-fronted set this time, so that people don't have to crossbreed the shell of the (still presumed unpowered) NDM from the 7 car set with the innards of the 5 car set. I will first confirm they didn't sneak a motor into 2020's 7 car black fronted set, then place the apparently necessary add-on order to complete the rake and make it work properly. I wonder if the 2022 yellow fronted 7 car set (representing a completely impossible set, with a coach that didn't exist until well after everything had received black fronts, in a livery it never covered) still has the same problem of having an unpowered NDM (which will need powering if someone stretches the set to 14 cars)? Anyway, outside of APT stuff ... I should really have a black 5 on my layout, as they were running for the first two years of my modelling period. But I want one to represent 1966-1968 condition (i.e. plain black and filthy), and there's no way I'm parting with that much money for one. I will keep an eye out and see if people upgrade from their current "super-detail" black 5s to the new ones though. The smoke thing is hilarious -- they've managed to sync the smoke with the chuffing sound from the sound chip, but they are the only manufacturer of sound decoders who haven't managed to sync that with the wheel rotation yet. That's a facepalm moment if ever there was one. I really could kinda use that banger blue 31 ... but not at that price. That'll go into the list of stuff from last year's announcements (which already has 87s and 56s in it, which I note have not arrived yet) that I might get, but only if they get sufficiently discounted. At the price they are now, even less a standard dealer discount, there are far too many locos from other manufacturers ahead of them in the queue which are both better and cheaper. The VEP is interesting. It doesn't fit my current layout, but I spent a lot of time riding these - first to School, then to University, and also to my first job. Network SouthEast, Network SouthCentral, Ghost white, Connex white and yellow, De-branded Connex (white and all the blue trim, but the yellow bit removed), I'd have all those liveries. Oh, and there was one oddball in Southern Green too. Guess which one Hornby have picked to model? The unique one. Oh well. I will watch for further news of said green one with interest. I can see they've fixed the corridor (which, to be fair, is something a "proper modeller" can do to the old model relatively easily), but the decision point on buying it will be the all-important face of the unit, which requires much more careful surgery to the old one to get right, as many things are "slightly off" meaning it's a lot of work to put right, plus a lot of risk of making it worse too. Hornby never showed that in the video. If the face of the unit looks sufficiently right, I might pull the trigger on this one, despite the exorbitant cost of it. If finances allow, of course...

I want to run a 10 car asymmetric set (6+2+2) at home, and a full length 14 car set at the club (a layout which also has curves and gradients). It seems Hornby have assumed that no-one would try to make a working, full length set from the black fronted set. I don't know why, given they sell the coaches for it? This definitely seems to have taken them by surprise. I wonder if it will be possible to order enough spares from the usual suspects to motorise the dummy NDM, without having to source one from the wrong set to cannibalise?

That's a bit more than "struggles". That's an outright fail-to-operate-properly. Slipping to a stand with the full complement of axles in the train, on a flat layout that doesn't look to have particularly tight curves. (Edit: He says 22" in the video, that's 554mm, which is closer to "4th radius" (572mm) than "3rd radius" (505mm) in Hornby terms). My layout has more curves than that, tighter curves than that, and also gradients (which that layout doesn't have). My problems with a single powered NDM will be significantly worse than in that video. Do we definitely know that the second NDM in the black front set has been made as an unpowered version? Someone said a in this thread that Hornby were considering both options and would make it with two powered NDMs if one was deemed insufficient for the full train once the new motor had been tested. The evidence here is that a single powered NDM is not sufficient, but admittedly the primary limitation looks to be traction rather than motor -- but even when not slipping, it was significantly slower than with two NDMs, indicating there is still a motor issue. Given that they must have been manufactured now, someone from Hornby must be able to confirm what has been made, before I panic and try to find a powered NDM in stock somewhere to cannibalise for parts...

It's all underneath. Aside from eliminating one pointless dogleg curve, the storage area has been built exactly as the original plan.

Yes, it's OO gauge. Some of the curves are down to 2nd radius, although I've kept that to only the (mostly) hidden balloon loops, and anything with a rising gradient is minimum 3rd radius. My room is a bit bigger lengthwise -- it's around 5.3m long, but I need to fit my desk in at the other end. I can't have the whole thing for trains!

It's 4.05m long (x axis), and 2.93m wide (y axis). It's designed around a train length of about 3m max to and from storage, a bit shorter (more like 2.5m) to terminate in the terminus station. These are not full length trains, but they are long enough that they don't obviously look too short either. Beware that there's a lot of track and not a lot of scenery in this plan. That's the way I do things, concentrating on operations and things inside the railway boundary. I'm aware that's not everyone's preference :-)

Third track up the hill is now working. This is bi-directional, with ABC in both directions (and needing to pick which direction, because if you try to apply ABC to both rails at once, it's just low-voltage DCC and the decoders don't pick it up properly). This is also a DCC reversing section. I'm driving the reverser from the NX routing data, not using short detection.

It gets better than that -- part way through the production run, EE offered BR a revised engine, with IIRC about 2300hp. Would have made later production 40s approximately match the 44s (D1-10) for power. At no extra cost. BR ... turned that offer down.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be in the nearly-four-metres range. Plan for 4m of space to fit the full set. 3m should comfortably fit the shorter 2+2+6 formation. That rule of thumb works perfectly for Mk3s or Mk4s, which are absolutely that long. This, being articulated, is a little shorter in each coach.

Web reference says a real half-train (7 cars) was 482ft (and that sanity checks as completely believable). With this measurement, a complete 14 car set would thus be 964ft long. At 4mm/ft that's 3.856m. The model will be a bit longer due to overscale gaps between cars, but I don't recall the gaps between the centre trailers being more than 1cm, which would be what is required to get it to break 4m. If it genuinely is "4 and a bit", then either some of the cars are significantly over-long, or there's a *lot* of unexpected daylight between the vehicles in this model...

Have we heard any more about whether the 7 car pack has two motorised NDMs or one motor and one dummy yet?

IMX the finance people have forgotten the word "viable" in there. They would ship an empty box if they could get away with it...

Editing videos does indeed take ages. This covers how I configure the hardware in FLiMConfig, and how I control the layout with JMRI. Plus a demonstration of it in action at the end.

Editing videos takes longer than anticipated. Part 2 to follow soon ... when I finish editing it.

Grrr. I did some wiring today. I wired the two outer lines up the hill. One was wired to the concentration point under the corner in the middle of the ramp, where a spare channel on an ABC-4 and two spare DTC-8 channels were available. The other runs to the DTC-8 inside the bottom-of-the-grade loop. There was no ABC modules there, so I built a new CANVOUT, and installed it (and an ABC-4) in that concentration point. I then went to configure the layout. I hit the power button on the layout PC and ... nothing happened. I think the PSU has died. Naturally, I don't have a spare at the moment. So it's a case of either raiding one from another machine, or ordering a new one. At approximately the price of a Bachmann Mk2f TSO. Ouch.