Bloodnok

And the track has now arrived at this point. These are the first Code 75 points on the layout. I chose to make the jump to Code 75 here as Peco don't make an Electrofrog Code 100 diamond and I didn't want to have to rescue stuck trains right at the back here. didn't go to Bullhead (yet) as this is still in tunnel and not visible track. But I'm getting real close to visible track now, and I have some complex decisions to make.

Track is now laid around the corner, and up to the start of the triangle.

Now with added roadbed: A wider view of what went in yesterday/today:

Shapes like this are complicated when nothing is flat or square. The trackbed against the back wall is rising at circa 1 in 50 here, and the trackbed towards the camera is rising too. This is a triangular junction, so the right hand tracks have to bottom out and start rising up again as they turn...

0.22F isn't 220uF, it's 220mF. That's 220 times the capacity of Hornby's chosen 1000uF electrolytic. I haven't heard from my retailer yet, but when my order arrives, I will definitely be looking into moving these capacitors to a less visible location.

I run it on Windows (desktop and laptop) and Android (tablet and phone). Both my Android devices are around 3-4 years old hardware wise. The tablet runs Android 8.1, but the phone is running a Lineage build of Android 11.

Time for a new browser? Brave seems to have been able to edit all of those out. I never saw a single one.

This is Bo. We got him from the Cats Protection League in 1987. He was a giant softie. The only domestic cat I have ever seen who could lie on a three seat sofa and own all three seats at once. This is 'Phantom', more commonly known as Piddle. She was half the size of Bo, but used to boss him about no end. She came to us from an unexpected litter - a family across the street got a pair of ginger females, took both to the vet to get spayed, but too late. Both were full already. Moving along to the next batch. This is Fudge. She was the most talkative cat I've ever known. She would happily have a conversation with you. My wife adopted her as a stray from a university campus. We lost her in 2016. This is Ione. A student turned up at a school my wife was teaching at with some very young kittens. The student was told in no uncertain terms to take them home to mum -- but not until she'd had a look and a cuddle. A few weeks later, and we have another cat... My wife received a panicked phone-call from a friend, a stray cat had just given birth at the back of her shed. Her new puppy was going nuts, and they were about to go away on holiday. Did she know someone who could help? Well, half an hour later, mum and four kittens were loaded into a carrier, into our car, and on the way home. When she got home, mum and now five kittens were decanted into our bedroom, picked because it was the easiest door to use to cordon the house off into two separate cat-zones. We found homes with friends for the mum and three of the five kittens. This is Horatio. He is one of the two remaining kittens. He is a proficient catcher -- and his favourite quarry is rabbits, of which there are an approximately infinite number living in the fields behind where we live. He's also a fan of sitting on things. He's become quite the desk ornament while I'm working from home, but he's partial to the layout too: ... And this is Tilly. She was the fifth kitten -- the runt of the litter. Always smaller than the others. She's a bit of a skitty kitty at times.

I've revised this part of the plan further: I wasn't happy with how the yard connected in before. I spent some time looking at Google Earth, and decided this would be a better arrangement.

This bridge is a ... vexing problem. To progress with building the layout, I need to build the structure that will support the end of the bridge / lift-out section. This means it needs to be finalised. However, I want the bridge to look right. I don't want to settle for something I'm not going to be happy with long term purely to hurry up construction now. And I'm zero for two in trying to get a bridge that looks right so far, so I clearly need to do something different. So ... I've been trying to work out what I actually need to make it look right. I started by trying to find some prototype photos of something similar to what I'm trying to achieve. This is proving *very* difficult, which is cluing me in that I'm asking for something wrong, and it probably won't ever look right unless I modify something on my side to fit with how a real bridge works. Hungerford bridge used to have four tracks (now reduced to three and the end of a platform) including junctions within it's northernmost section. But this is a fairly unique case, as it forms the station throat for Charing Cross station. There are many four-track truss bridges of a similar span length to what I'm trying to achieve over the Mersey and over the Manchester Ship Canal. But none of them have all four tracks inside a single pair of trusses. All of them have at least one central truss. That ... breaks my track plan. Having concluded that I can't really make something that looks right without a centre truss, I started doodling track. What would it take to move the junction north of the bridge? Answer: Get some Tillig curved points (tighter radius than Peco streamline). Build three custom curved diamonds. And then hide all of it in tunnels. That doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I am going to the effort to build three custom curved diamonds, I ... kinda want to show them off. I think this one is a non-starter. What about a single lead junction? That fits with the initial crossover on the bridge, the actual single lead just north of the bridge, and a second crossover either from Tillig curved points or using a single slip in the tunnel. The major disadvantage here is I lose the double junction, which was an intentional feature of the original plan, something I wanted to include. I'm not a fan of this option. A third option is to replace the four track bridge with a two track bridge, and have a double junction at either end. I could pull this off with peco diamonds, but that requires a really sharp (second radius) track with no transitions between both diamonds. Okay, the tight curve is in a tunnel, but ... it's still mainline, and I'd like to at least have transitions on such a tight track in mainline use. It would fit a lot better with a couple of curved diamonds. On the plus side though, one of those would be visible this time. The fourth option is to move the double junction south of the bridge and around the corner. This demolishes one end of the engineers yard, and I lose my yard lead as that area is replaced with junction. However, it actually fits reasonably well both horizontally and vertically, with the gradients still sane. And there are no junctions on the bridge, leaving me free to have a much more conventional bridge. Now I need to ruminate on the yard a bit to see if what I've drawn there is insane or workable, as I've been primarily concentrating on the mainlines, and not really on the yard...

How many of us are looking at this announcement in the hope the "old" ones appear in a sudden glut and get down to affordable prices?

Well, if the customers spend all night in the bar the night before it arrives, I'm sure at least some of them are going to be sick...

Dare I suggest, for the type of company that likes to commission interesting prototypes, that the NER's EE1 4-6-4 No.13 would probably sell a lot better than it's service record would have you believe? I have absolutely no prototype justification for it. But it looks awesome, like nothing else we ever saw in this country, and I'd definitely have one. I think this is the closest poll to mention it in. It is clearly a passenger loco, and it's clearly not a tender loco, even though it was built to haul top-link ECML passenger trains. The trains would run through PN, even though the loco would have been attached to them slightly further north...

From the ten items listed, 1, 2, 3, and 4 please. I'd like to see a Dogfish. This could be done as a variation on the catfish in the poll, or as another production run of the Heljan model (which I'm happy with the quality of, but is not currently available).

Yup, if you are going to do civil engineering work, straightening the track is a better use of money than widening existing bridges.

I'm definitely a sucker for engineers wagons -- 6 and 7 too please.

At 1:42, someone goes past his stopped car, and someone overtaking that vehicle ends up right at the far right hand side of the road. It looks like fresh tarmac with no markings there, but it also looks very much like the same standard as the three-lane parts either side of that clip, too, so I'm assuming there could have been oncoming traffic at any moment...

Rats. The container wagon I want is the one that's not in your list - the Conflat ISO. These were converted Lowmacs, fitted with a frame to support a single 20ft ISO container when these were still a tiny minority of container traffic, that "surely won't catch on".

Time to make some of this hidden storage ... hidden. This is "plonked" at the moment, looking for where it doesn't line up. Job one -- take the nice straight edge of the ply, deliberately lined up on the edge of the sheet because I wanted it nice and straight, and put a really subtle but significant curve in it, because even in a new-build house the wall isn't precisely dead straight.

I have not voted for anything in this poll. I have intentionally chosen not to, as I don't believe I would genuinely buy any of the options listed. I don't have too many wagons, and I do like them -- but I already have a vast list of wagons I should buy but mostly don't. I can't afford most of them, and a lot of stuff sells out before it gets far enough up my list to be purchased. (Or what was planned as a rake turns out to be a single sample wagon).

That's very much the kind of appearance I wanted -- albeit I have four parallel tracks here rather than two. I suspect it's not designed for any scale -- the creator got a file and just uniform scaled it to a given length. Do they make one four tracks wide? (I'm wondering if I should have got this one: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/122492762700 ... although I'd have to replace the laser cut two-part floor in that one to use it as an actual lift-out section).

NPCCS vehicles have definitely been lacking in recent ranges, and parcels trains often feature a wide range of vehicles. Lots of the same type (even if it's a good model) looks wrong. My votes here are for: 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12. Unrelated manufacturer plea: Bachmann, pretty please, I want a Mk1 GUV in plain blue, that I don't have to repaint / strip off decals.

The plan was always to dress up the lift-out section as a bridge. I wanted a truss for the visual spectacle of the train going through a bridge (rather than merely over a bridge). I bought these laser cut bridge sides as they are the same length as the planned lift-out section. However, now they have arrived, I'm a little concerned about how tall they are compared to trains. Even sat here level with the bottom of the lift-out board, the train is well below half the height of the truss. Even with clearance for catenary and assuming there will be a roof connecting the sides together, it still feels like the sides are significantly too tall. This span scales up to a 61m real-life distance -- not a massive span requiring such a tall truss, surely?

Yes, but they are mounted on the underside of the body, not up inside the body like the APT-P.

The APT-U retains motors inside the bodyshell in the power car, dropping the frontmost motor to accomodate a driving cab (hence the second axle of each power car being undriven). But it has non-articulated coaches. The APT-S moves the motors to be mounted on the underneath of the shell (still body mounted, but below the floor), keeps the coach articulation, and has a DVT at the other end of the rake. Marry the updated APT-S power car and DVT design to the updated APT-U coaches, and now you have the final specification, with body-mounted underfloor motors, a non-articulated coach rake and a DVT. In this process, the target speed has dropped from 155 to 140. And the tilt requirement has dropped from 9 degrees to 6, plus tilt is now optional so that batches built for routes that don't benefit from tilt won't have to sustain the maintenance cost for it when there is little to no in-service benefit. Six degree tilt max allows a different body profile with a wider roof, half-way between the APT and the Mk3. No articulation implies a return to 23m carriages, and those together allow a general styling update. You will indeed find this version in the Hornby catalogue. It's just listed under a different name. The Class 91 loco and Mk4 coaches