Pete the Elaner

Surely you know how project budgets work? Whole project from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds & Glasgow is branded HS2 & costs £200bn. That is too expensive, so it gets split. Birmingham is kept as HS2, Manchester is HS2a, Sheffield-Leeds is HS3 & Glasgow is HS4. HS3 & HS4 get shoved into a 'filing cabinet' somewhere, which in the modern world is just archived off to some cheap storage which can be accessed at a later date. HS2 no longer contains the bits which have been re-classified, so has become much cheaper. It is a neat trick. The either 1 of 2 options occur: HS2 fails so HS3 & HS4 do not get reviewed. or HS2 works well & others want similar upgrades. HS3 & HS4 get pulled out of storage & re-branded. A committee gets paid a huge sum to review the plans & make minor changes then new budgets are created to build them.

How has the fence not collapsed? If the car was thrown clear over the top, that also indicates speed.

You do indeed get a sense of security from more protection, but this can indeed be mis-placed. SUVs may look big & safe, but don't ever try to steer around anything while braking because it will topple over. A lower car will skid or spin.

Also in the Austriaosphere? 😁

Are they shorting out at particular locations? What track are you using?

The van was doing a merge in turn in a location clearly designed to allow it. It did nothing unexpected or sudden. There was plenty of time for the lorry to back off just a little to create space to merge. That is not unreasonable at any merge in turn, but they just drove straight into a collision they could see was going to occur. The notion that he needed to emergency stop to avoid the incident is ridiculous. From the van's point of view, there are some drivers who stubbornly refuse to allow others to merge in turn. It is poor of them to do so, but they exist so you just have to accept it. When the van approached the centre island, they could have chosen to stop completely. By this time they could see the lorry driver was going to stubbornly refuse to merge. It was the lorry driver who caused this. Both could have prevented it, but it was again the lorry driver who could have prevented it with the least action.

Anyone with a gap behind them can pit for new tyres to set the fastest lap. It does not really mean a lot.

Not considering the future is a selfish attitude. I am one of the few who do not have children but I still care for those who will still be around when I am gone. I will again use our motorways as a comparison: Many who planned & built them could well have argued the same "They may not be needed in my lifetime so why bother?" The first section of M1 was very lightly used when it opened in 1959 so it could be argued that it was unnecessary at the time. That was 64 years ago. Look at it now. The same section has been widened & it still badly overloaded. Where would we be today without the motorway network? Where will we be in 50 years time if we condemn those of the future to cope with the same transport system we have today? You cannot build a new railway in 5 minutes so work needs to start well ahead of when it will be needed. The only people who will argue that the WCML is not over capacity are those who do not use it regularly.

Motorways changed the landscape a lot more than HS2 will. There are a lot more of them too.

6th, not 5th. But I am sure he will not take long to get to the front. The RB takes a couple of laps to get going properly & once available, DRS should provide a big advantage there.

Media is still a major issue. I have seen in written very recently that staff are "on strike over pay" & try to hide other issues, like DOO, ticket offices & the proposed reduction in track maintenance. I've heard people remark that strikers are just "being greedy as always". Although pay is a part of it, this is typical media spin. They also quote the "average drivers salary" as £69k. Where did this come from? Very few people openly disclose their wages. What is wrong with striking over pay anyway? People in all industries get robbed with pay rises which are below inflation (which effectively makes them pay cuts) so we should all want a union to fight for us, not despise one which actually does.

I have got into the habit of isolating & re-feeding after every point. I picked up the habit after getting into DCC, but I found it works just as well for DC. Having small sections makes it easy to understand & troubleshoot, but there are just a lot of small sections, so more wires. I still agree with you that small, simple layouts are the best way to start. Another advantage is that seeing it work for the first time gives your modelling motivation a huge boost. You get to this a lot more quickly with a small, simple layout.

That was crazy. I have seen something nearly as bad, a car weaving on the M40 at about 90mph, even using the hard shoulder to pass. You simply don't expect to see a car approaching at speed on your left. The video which started at 0.21 puzzled me too: The driver was ambling past then pulled back into the path of the lorry before completing the pass. Then the caption acknowledged the truck's blind spot but then mentioned 'not being let into the 3rd lane' (which didn't look to be an issue) & the truck driver was found to be 100% at fault. Surely not? The truck driver stayed in his lane & maintained his speed. If I turned left into a truck, I would expect to be spun around too.

8 pin is messy too. The functions you have listed would require 11 connections. That would be 8 pins & 3 loose wires, including the 2 for the speaker. Bachmann moved on from this a few years ago. The photo is of my Webb coal tank, dated June 2020, so the chassis design was older than that. The decoder is on the left & there is a box for the speaker under the small green pcb on the right, which also provides solder-free connections for it. No wires to tuck in anywhere, just plug in the decoder, remove & replace the pcb. I had to put a thin layer of card beneath the speaker to lift it slightly but I was impressed with the tidiness of the design. I doubt Bachmann will move backwards. They do not seem to do that.

Many find electrics an unwanted necessity. You are certainly not alone. Unless I am seeing things incorrectly, it looks like you have connected the frog section to the point motor coils. This is wrong. The unshielded wire from the point needs to connect to one of the side rails (depending on which way the point is thrown, so it needs to be via a switch). The brown block on the bottom of the motor is designed for this. The other 2 terminals on the switch need to go to the rails. The motor is a twin solenoid so needs a connection to 1 of the coils for a very short time in order to pull the pin across. The green wire needs to go to a terminal of a power supply (this can be AC or DC. A Capacitor Discharge Unit (CDU) is helpful but not essential). The 2 connections on the other side of the motor go to a switch of some sort, which needs to provide a very short burst of current. This can be as simple as touching the correct 2 wires together, often in the case of a control panel, touching a stud with a probe.

I agree, but in a previous query the OP said he uses code 75, which is only available in Electrofrog.

I would expect that. The system is looking for an acknowledgement, but it will not get one. It will not get one from anything when programming on the main. This is always write-only. A decoder needs a load to be able to send anything (value or a write acknowledgement). I cannot remember the reason for this, but the motor is the load & a coach does not have one. A resistor could be used but it is unlikely to have one of these either because its only function would be to allow the decoder to acknowledge a programming command. Unless you take the decoder out & place it in a loco or on a decoder tester, you will have to send CV values & just trust they got there.

I have some Hornby coaches with lighting, but none with a wire spring around the axle. Your description sounds like a DCC Concepts kit fitted by the previous owner.

I have met many who find electrics hard to understand, so please do not think you are alone.

A previous manager of mine once said "If you ask the same things, you get the same answers". Since the same thing was asked 6 years ago, maybe a different approach may be helpful. Instead of asking the same thing on a forum, maybe a local club would be able to provide help a different way?

I do not blame the operators at all. The government should either have a policy or not. By claiming to be working to reduce carbon emissions, they have made it a policy & have cited electricity as their choice of cleaner energy. They should therefore be working to make electric the preferred traction. It should not be difficult either. It is cheaper to generate in bulk & distribute than it is to generate on board a locomotive using a diesel engine.

It is hypocritical & I feel, criminal. It is cheaper to produce electricity in large quantities then distribute. It is also possible to switch sources where appropriate or possible (Coal/waste/nuclear/wind/wave). A government who claims to be encouraging people & businesses to go green should absolutely be getting involved with this....& the opposition should be calling them out on it. By disposing, DB are also looking to make this irreversible because there do not seem to have been any new orders placed. Are the 90s life expired? The 66s are only 10 years newer.

What change would I like to see? Going back to the attitude of providing a service instead of only when it suits the ToC. When there was a problem, BR did what it could to get the passengers to their destination. The current attitude seems to be that if the service will lose money, it just gets cancelled & passengers have to sort out their own journeys. An example of this was a few years ago when I had my bike with me in London. There was an incident blocking the line in Milton Keynes, so I got on a train to Tring with the intention of riding from there. MK is about 15 miles further than Tring, which has a reversing platform, so there was no reason to cancel that service, right? Wrong. It gave me the impression that if they encountered a problem, they just cut the services completely. The current lack of service between Bletchley & Bedford is another example. London Midland seem to view this as an unwanted part of their franchise. When the company providing maintenance for the new class 220 units ceased trading, they simply cancelled the service & replaced it with buses. ToCs running similar units in Wales & the Isle of Wight found a way to keep them in service, so if the will was there, they could have done it.

He has not been a good starter lately so may get tangled with Norris off the start. I didn't see qualy live, so when I saw the grid, I assumed it was a wet session. I was pleased to see it was a genuine result.

Maybe not. The totem was not introduced straight away. BRITISH RAILWAYS on tender sides preceded the earlier emblem. I read that City of Lancaster was given its 46243 number while still streamlined though.