Pete the Elaner

I can imagine. People who make comments like that think they are being original & funny but he has probably heard it hundreds or even thousands of times. Certainly enough to get bored of it. He probably has a response for it though. It is probably like when I'm washing the car, I frequently get the ever so stale joke of "you can wash my one afterwards if you like". People actually seem to think I've never heard it before & actually get upset when I fake laugh & suggest they try something more original.

Shows, especially on this scale need to be planned months, possible over a year in advance. Football fixtures cannot be published before they are calculated & which teams form each league are not known until the end of the previous season when any promotion & relegation have been decided. It could be late May or early June before this is known. Most football stadiums have other facilities, used for conferences or other events. These are kept booked as much as possible to make money from them, some of which supports the football clubs. It will be completely impossible to honour any type of request to avoid matches on certain days.

That sounds very plausible but I saw a poster at the MK show today advertising a show at the NEC I think in March next year.

GETS is not 'blighted by the venue'. You are just looking for an excuse to complain. I would not be surprised if you've never even been there. The Bowl is really not very far away & the bus ride is short. Football traffic escapes fairly quickly. I've mistakenly been shopping in Asda at football time & dreaded getting out, but have never had a problem so 'getting caught up in stationary traffic' is not an issue. You know what time the match is too, so get there earlier & either leave before it finishes or stay until the end of the show. Or maybe go on Sunday? GETS outgrew its previous venue at the Motor museum in Gaydon. Where exactly should it go? Ally Pally? We have one there & it is a bit of a pain to drive to once you get inside the north circular. Peterborough? Sorry, the showground has been sold to developers. NEC? Huge venue with high costs which the show is not big enough to justify.

Shoppers have never caused me any issues with getting in, out or parked. Unless you mean Ikea, which is at the far side of Asda? NEC events always draw complaints of cost too. You need a bus to get to the venue itself from most of its car parks anyway. That is not very different from parking at the Bowl & getting a bus in from there.

Not possible to guarantee because the teams in each division differ between seasons. I would be surprised if the FA even tried to do this. There was speculation a few years ago that the team requested an away match for the GETS weekend. I said at the time that this was not possible (because many teams have multi purpose facilities & they cannot all get their requests). There is probably something going on at this venue more than half the weeks of the year anyway. MK can cope with such a fixture clash better than most places, partly because the team is less well supported than somebody in a higher division & also because the city was designed to cope with plenty of traffic movement. The Bowl is not many minutes away by bus. I have known a home match to be taking place while the PDC Masters darts event is in the Arena, so it should not be a major problem. Good venues are hard to find. There is always a downside with them, whether it is parking, cost or accessibility.

The speaker configuration can overload the decoder. The decoder is rated for a 4ohm speaker. The model comes with 8&4 in parallel, which gives 2.67ohms & therefore draws more current than what the decoder is designed to supply. After doing some maths, 180 may still be too loud. 156 would provide the same current (& therefore volume) of a 2ohm speaker at volume 192. It shouldn't be quiet though. You are only compensating for having too low an impedance in the first place. I turned my volume down before I turned the sound on & I never had a problem with it. The project could always have been written with low volumes to compensate for this in the first place, but I believe this is unlikely.

I saw earlier in another thread that braking is on F27. My system is a Powercab so I can't change my functions & I've just seen your comment about function mapping on the Turbomotive thread 😒

F27 - TXS supports dynamic brake? That's interesting. Can you re-map functions with this? Surely it would be better to shove it on the same function as the braking sound & allow it to be varied by CV. Is that a little too much to ask from what is still a much cheaper decoder than a Zimo or ESU?

Handy to know. There is a lot which analogue chips won't do that DCC will: proper coasting, controllable acceleration/deceleration/braking, consisting. TXS will not do the lot & that is what keeps the cost lower than an ESU or Zimo.

Isolate the 2 inside rails after the frog (vee). Re-feed after each point. By making each section as small as possible, you eliminate feeds coming from the wrong direction. There are lots of advantages: If you need to join 2 small sections, you can easily do it below the board. If you need to separate a section into 2 smaller ones you need to rip up some track, which is a problem if you have ballasted it. Copper wire is a better conductor than Nickel Silver rail (NS is used because it stays relatively clean). Fishplates are a weakness, especially when the rails have been painted & the track has been ballasted with watered down glue. Lots of small sections is very scaleable: Apart from more sections, bigger layouts are no more complicated. The disadvantage: You have lots of rail feeds & lots of sections, which take longer to connect. I always dread it when somebody at the club (or contacting us) when somebody asks someone to troubleshoot their electrics because everyone leaves muggins to respond out of courtesy & you can guarantee they have used the minimum number of insulating joiners possible (sometimes none), leaving the track fed from a weird place.

Sort of. It's another 36bn that the PM can boast about saving in a few weeks' time.

Haven't they just signed a 10 year deal for this place? I understand the problem they had with the tyres but it was difficult to know who was racing who until 5 laps before the end. For that reason, it was not the most exciting of races.

I remember that. It was a pain and, as you point out, you won't be able to get there via the football stadium this year.

"I'm sorry the roads aren't wide enough for you. Some of the English cars have steering wheels"

There is a very good case for an EV being easier to drive: An electric motor gives its best performance from stationary & only needs 1 gear. This means that it pulls from a standstill instantly. There is no waiting for the torque converter to gradually engage; It gives you maximum performance immediately. There is also no waiting for kickdown & the chance it will briefly kick down before changing back up again before you get any useful response. I would argue that this makes it easier to drive than an auto, regardless of how quickly it can change gear. You place too much importance on range. EVs require a different mindset to ICE vehicles. Do you ever start a journey with half a tank? One of my cars has that right now & the other has a quarter, so I need to consider filling one of them up. With an EV, a home charger is a essential then you always start every journey with a full charge. You only need to get to your first stop or resting place & 200 miles is enough for 3 hours when for safety's sake, you should be giving yourself a rest. Being able to charge when you stop & the speed it can re-charge is definitely an issue. If these were good (which currently is not always the case) then a 400 mile range would be pointless. Being unable to install a home charger is a definite deal-breaker. It may well be unfeasible for you to have an EV at this time, but range is not the problem. Wasn't this thread about HS1 & HS2?

The tender is a bit on the light side & mine jumped off at one point, which I believe was due to its lack of weight. The decoder & speaker are in the loco though, so there should be room to add a balance weight or 2.

It depends what you are modelling: A depot layout can easily have several which look almost identical. It would look very obvious if you ran a named loco one way then it re-appeared in the other direction (unless of course there was a terminus very close off-scene). Would you notice a 9F the same way though, with its running number partially obscured with grime? Only one was named when running for BR & that was green anyway. Otherwise, it would be hard to tell from the previous one unless it was one of the few Crostis or single chimney locos, so you could just turn it & it would not look like it had just been turned. Multiple units are pretty anonymous too. a 321 in NSE looks almost the same as the last one unless you look very closely, so it can also depend on the viewing distance.

I remember Andy York mentioning EM when the E train was first released.

There will never be a need for an EV to manage 800 miles without recharging. How long does it take to drive 800 miles? With clear roads, about 12 hours. Could you really drive 12 hours non-stop? No chance. It would probably be a 2 day journey with at least 1 extra stop each day. The key to making EVs work is to make charging available wherever you stop & make it fast enough that even a quick toilet break gives you 90 minutes driving time. A stop for lunch will give it enough time to charge for double that. These are the targets it needs to achieve. 250 miles is plenty for this. The technology is there; Tesla have it right now. The infrastructure is not though; everyone needs access to it, but they don't yet. It won't be there by 2035 either. There is just too much to do & not enough being done. How did HS1 v HS2 drift to EVs?

HS2 is now just London-Birmingham. That removes the cost of Birmingham-Crewe & Manchester. Sheffield & Leeds having been removed some time ago. The plans for HS2a can now be archived because archive storage is cheaper than storage which can be accessed more regularly. It will be resurrected at a later date & renamed HS3, but the cost of that will probably be twice that of the saving on HS2. The point is that this trick has made HS2 cheaper. Had any physical work been started on HS2a beyond the connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML? I suspect not. If any of the route has already been purchased, that will probably be sold to offset the cost too.

You are missing nothing. Quite the reverse, you are considering the 'bigger picture'. Most companies & governments seem to break things down into sectors or departments & demand that they all economically justify their existence. Even those departments who provide a service to others have an internal charge. So if money is cut from HS2, the government (& every party is the same to a degree) will be able to claim they have 'saved money' when what they have done is moved some spending from HS2 to pay unemployment benefit for the very same people; not just those actually working on the project, but for the suppliers & suppliers of the suppliers. Why is it that railways are judged on their profits while roads are not? Apart from the small number of toll roads, all are paid from a central budget & people accept that we simply need them. We never hear about the M6 losing money each year.

Unfortunately there seem to be plenty out there who do fall for these cheap government tricks. You don't have to look very hard to read "100bn is a waste just to save 10 minutes" to see how easily the general population are fooled. My worry is this: Those of us on this forum have a little more knowledge about railways than the average person because it is an interest. There are many things which the government deals with which are of less interest to me, so I know little about them. Who do I believe about those?

The government have caused it. The constant start/re-assess/stop/re-assess/start circle has had a huge effect in escalating the cost. They are only cutting back on things now so they can claim they are saving money on the run up to the next election. Who do you think chairs these committees? Somebody who wants a peerage or some other kind of honour, then they are given strong hints with what conclusion the government want it to have.

Saturday evening is the best part of a weekend show. It gives you a chance to relax & socialise with other modellers. The only club I can remember who arranged a Saturday night buffet was Croydon. I really enjoyed it.