Pete the Elaner

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.

No. I never said anything like that & neither did I mean it, so please don't try to deliberately twist my meaning. Something along those lines. It is a lot more efficient to generate power in larger quantities, partly because the eqiupment involved is carefully designed to work very well at a particular speed & is held at that speed. A power station generates thousands of MW. A loco diesel engine generates 3MW, which by comparison is an inefficient process. An internal combustion engine is also heavily compromised by the requirement to run it across a comparatively wide speed range. Transmitting it at 132kV then at 25kV uses some of the power but is still more efficient than generating it on a smaller scale such as in a 12cylinder engine. It also provides the option to use any form of generation. It is not necessarily stuck with fossil fuels. But the bottom line is the government is trying to push car owners to switch to EVs & pretends to be making the country as clean as possible. The only control they have over cars is taxation. They have much more regulation over rail companies, so it is hypocritical to do nothing to promote the use of electric traction.

I understand DB have now stored the entire fleet of 90s & switched to diesel-only operation because the electrics are too costly to run. Is this true? I was told this by a reliable source. If so, it is disgusting; not from the operator but from the energy regulators, who should be keeping the greener methods of energy generation cheaper than the alternatives.

Empty promises as usual from the red team. They'll provide a car capable of the occasional win & also a very good wage. Since Todt was squeezed out, they promised Alonso then Vettel that they would provide a title-winning car. Alonso challenged for the title without winning then Vettel seemed to be affected by the pressure from the team & Italian media but ultimately, neither got their title. Ferrari is not the right team for anyone with title aspirations & this will not change until their upper management stop interfering with the team. Raikkonen only re-signed for them because Lotus were unable to pay his wages.

It was one of the last things they announced before moving to their new policy of only announcing items which they expect to appear in the next 3 months. I suspected they planned to follow it with a 56 (because it is a logical progression & a fairly large class) but who knows? The Cavalex 56 looks very promising & I am looking forward to getting mine.

Many of us (myself included) find that Electrofrog points are worth the extra effort required to wire them up.

The term I frequently use is 'compression' & I try to minimise it as much as possible. The trouble is that this takes many interesting features away.

The difference with Ferrari was that they were more honest about what they were doing. Remember when they broke the seal on Massa's gearbox in order to switch Alonso to the better side of the grid? Domencali openly explaining the reason for doing it. Even the "Fernando is faster than you" call was a blatant 2 fingers to the FIA about their ban on team orders. Compare that to RB with Perez on Saturday. They sent him out early for his last run in Q3 knowing how fast the track was drying & that others would set laps to push him a long way back. Their strategists have pulled off more good calls than anyone else over the last 2-3 years so there is no way they were stupid enough to get this wrong by accident. They stitched their own driver up then pretended to be angry with him to avoid the negativity of issuing a racing team order.

Having your loco fixed is great news. I am not at all surprised by the attitude of one of the vendors though: My previous job was to look after a company's corporate IP based phone system. This relied on the company's data network. It doesn't take much working out to realise that the voice & data teams needed to work closely when there was a fault affecting the voice services. The 2 were employed by different companies. Every network issue which caused a voice symptom was a nightmare for us & end users. Many faults had to go to management before the network team would even look at an issue which our experience told us was a network one. The 2 teams then got tupe'd to inside the company & things didn't improve a lot. Until all this bickering was sorted out, the phone issue remained. Before then, I was in a smaller company where I looked after all IT services. There was no passing of calls to any sub-department. I was in a team who dealt with everything from user to router so we just worked each issue through. We got things done a lot faster & end users got a better service.

I saw it as a URL, not a link

I'm not keen on any tyre stops behind the SC, or during a red flag. If they need to pit for safety reasons, impose a 20 second stop/go penalty. If it really was a safety issue, teams would accept it.

I despise that because I feel it is so artificial. It should not be necessary for somebody to have some sort of mishap to 'spice up' a race. Dealing with rain is different because it is something which all teams have an equal opportunity to predict & nobody can deliberately invoke. I still don't like pitting behind the SC either. It cost McLaren a 2-3 which they deserved. I'm not really a McLaren fan (neither am I a hater) but I feel that teams should be rewarded for good work & the team really deserved a 2-3 finish today. I accept that safety car luck usually evens out over a season but that is no excuse for not bothering to try making it as fair as possible.

I have a Lokprogrammer & Zimo MXULF. The Lokprogrammer is really good. It allows functions to easily be re-mapped & create new ones (Like red at rear only for Hatton 66 for tailing in top & tailing, which is not available on the provided project). This can also be done with JMRI though. Lokprogrammer is great for re-blowing a sound project yourself & I have re-blown a newer project onto an older model before. The accompanying software is Windows only, so unless you are a skilled programmer, it is of no use for Linux or Mac. The MXULF? - I have had it for about 2 years & not found it useful yet. In USB stick-driven mode, it just doesn't recognise the file on the USB stick & indicate if the decoder's firmware is out of date. It has an otherwise obsolete USB connection (USB-A?) & after eventually finding a lead which will work, I discovered that the PC software was in German only so it was meaningless to me.

I live about halfway between London & Birmingham. It doesn't matter which way or when I choose to drive, there is often some sort of delay on one of the motorways. Any government's prime objective is to get voted in an the next election.

That would work but the safety concern is that the DC power supplies must themselves be fed from separate supplies (transformer windings). The outputs therefore become 2x 12v supplies where the 2 outputs can be considered as 'something' & 'something + 12v'. The 2 'something' connections will not be the same.

Having looked at the location on a map, I am concerned how someone could have lost control with enough speed to go through a fence & kill somebody.

That says R70150, not R7150. These would be 2 distinctly separate products but ... I heard Hornby had started to use 5 digit product codes now but cannot find R70150 listed anywhere. As mentioned earlier, R7150 is a 6 pin decoder with no sound. Hornby TTS decoders provide the same functionality as their R8249, but with the addition of sound. The R8249 is not a very well featured decoder compared to similarly priced & very superior alternatives like the MX600R from Zimo. TTS also has a few limitations compared to Zimo & ESU products, but at around 2/5 of the cost, I think it is fair to accept their limitations.

A few of these points have already been made: This is one of the proposals which has caused the current series of strikes. Buying tickets may be ok for those of us who are more familiar with railways but for others, they are a complete minefield. Ticket machines seem to make that even harder. A station attendant who knows a little more about it is very helpful. It sounds like the proposal is to close ticket offices & move the member of staff to be some kind of platform attendant? I pity anybody who believes this lie. That will never happen & it is not the intention. Without someone supervising them, barriers cannot be used because they often stick or refuse to open & have to be manually opened by said member of staff, so remove the staff & remove or open the barriers. Another factor causing the strikes is the intention to make more services driver only. So with barriers not active at either end of the journey, or someone on the train to potentially catch those who have not bought a ticket before travel, when are these people going to pay? More will try to get away without paying after they see others do it.

Penalties are supposed to be a deterrent. If track limit penalties were tough enough to act as a deterrent, drivers wouldn't push their luck & the finishing order would be just that, with no post-race penalties. A 5 second penalty at the end of the race is not the same as one served in the race either. I like the idea of a penalty loop which should be driven round within 1 or 2 laps of the penalty being served. We would then see a true finish & cars/drivers would no longer be falsely clear of any mid-field battles. The RD & stewards would have to be faster in serving them though.