Pete the Elaner

I was about to recommend that. Try it out on some small lengths of track on some off-cuts of board until you get the effect you want. Most weathering looks heavier once it has dried. You don't want to over-do it on your layout. It will not feel like a waste if time once you get it right.

No, there is no need to modify points because you want to use DCC. I have modified all the insulfrog points on the club layout to feed the exit rails (by the frogs) via switches, hard wired the stock rails to the switch rails, then cut a small gap between the switch rails & frog. This is for reliability not compatibility.

Grasscrete will stop the lawn rutting up as this will take the weight of the car & stop it sinking. Gardening feels like torture to me. I hate it more than anything else I can think of. Anything which lessens my time tidying it is a good thing. It also depends what car you have. If you have something which looks nice, why hide it?

The tooling no longer exists, so another run of the old model is not possible.

I have not had a pin fall out from a Seep, but it is something I shall now be aware of. Thank you. I have heard (on here) that there is nothing wrong with Seep motors, but I have not been impressed with those I have, or at the club or on my friend's layout. It has made me wonder if their quality control has been a bit suspect at times. Maybe a blob of Araldite or superglue would be useful to hold the pin in place? This would be a bit tricky to apply once mounted so would be easier done before the motor is fitted.

The 'power storer' is almost certainly a Capacitor Discharge Unit (CDU). It provides several benefits for operating solenoid motors by sending a short, sharp pulse of current. I had some slow action motors on my last layout (all tortoises). They need wiring differently, requiring a lower, constant direct current which needs to be reversed in order to throw the point. Tortoises also have 2 included switches. I used 1 for switching the frogs & the other for sending back route indication to the control panel. Other slow action motors may also have switches. I went back to solenoids for my latest layout because of cost: I have 36 points on it & have fitted microswitches for frog switching. I intend to use the frog polarity for route indication. 1 reason for using slow action motors is for the slow action of the point throw. A friend has convinced me that this is not prototypical for a point operated from a lever frame because the signaller would grab the lever & put all his effort into it, which would throw it quite quickly. It is ok for a more modern point operated which would be operated by a motor. Because they do not throw with a thump, they are more gentle on the pointwork. This may be a consideration especially if you have hand-built finescale points. The throwing speed & force can be adjusted mechanically or by changing the power supply for one of a different voltage. Included switches may mean you do not have to buy & mount external ones. I found Peco's PL-13 & the internal Seep switch unreliable. Others may argue against this comment but this was my own experience, not hear say. I now use solenoid motors with microswitches. A drawback with a tortoise for me was its size. Most of my motors were mounted on a high level section, which was fine. The one on the low level stuck out below the baseboard & as a result it was easily damaged. I thought my baseboard frames were quite deep too. I would happily use slow action motors again but I would not mix them with solenoids if they are operated from a traditional DC control panel. If you use DCC to throw your points, then depending on your accessory decoder, it may be possible to configure each output for whatever type of device is connected.

That is a very good point which I had not considered. The additional tests should be appropriately priced to pay for additional testers & centres. The issue is that implementing such a scheme would potentially lose more votes than it wins, so it is not in anyone's interest to introduce it.

I agree in part. Why every 2 years for under 25s? Their driving tuition will be fresher in their minds, so less unknown bad habits will have crept in. If they are doing things badly, chances are they know & can't be bothered so a re-test would not achieve anything. I think a 5 year test for everyone could be enforced. If you fail, then you have 6 months to get re-trained & pass. If you can't sort your driving out in 6 months, then you are clearly not safe to drive anyway. The roads should be a better place & it will provide more employment for driving instructors & examiners.

I wanted to get the tunnel portals as close as possible. I searched around at shows for different ones but nothing really came close to what I wanted: all were too fat. This made me observe tunnels on the real railway & they generally seemed to be taller & thinner than the available model ones. I had also narrowed the 6' distances on my layout so I wanted tunnels to match. I felt the portals for the DC lines were particularly important. If you stand on the real station (or Kensal Green, which has similar tunnels at its western end), the tunnels look too small for the trains to get through. I really wanted to replicate this on the layout. I was also unhappy with the available brickwork around arches for the DC lines. Most model tunnels have stones here, but those which do have bricks seem to have them lined up concentrically. This is not how real arches look because the larger radius requires more bricks, meaning they don't line up. I did consider cutting the brickwork but I knew I would have lost patience doing this & I also wanted to replicate the portals when re-building the layout as a 1990 version, so I decided to take a chance that a laser cutter would be suitable. I looked around on the net for a while & it seemed that the cheaper lasers were Chinese & based on an engine known as K40. The next level of cutter was about 3-4 times the cost, so I thought I would go with the cheaper option & maybe learn from it what features or qualities I needed to look for if & when I wanted to change it. The cutting bed for the one I ordered is 300*200mm, roughly A4 so I figured the device would not be too big. I got a shock when it arrived. The box was huge & the device itself is 820mm wide & 650mm deep. The laser also gets hot, so the cutter comes with a circulation pump & needs a water supply for which I use a bucket, sometimes filled with ice if I want to use it for longer periods. It also has a big hose for extracting fumes. This meant I ideally needed to place it in the kitchen by a window. Happily, I live alone so I was free to place it on the kitchen table.... It takes up half of it! It comes with its own cutting software (LaserDRW) & a copy of Corel Draw (a cut down one I expect; I had never used this before). I can comfortably find my way around a spreadsheet but am a bit useless with art & design software. Happily, a friend of mine is good with artwork for buildings & this transferred nicely to the required artwork for laser cutting. I loaded the cutting software onto my laptop (which required a dongle - something I had not seen for years). A wall which should have been about 10cm * 10cm came out at about 1/5 of the size with the brickwork itself little more than a squiggle in the corner, so I had some learning to do. After 2-3 weeks of getting nowhere with this, I really thought I had wasted my money on something useless. I just couldn't work out how to adjust anything with LaserDRW. I found some freeware called K40 whisperer. This changed things completely. It was designed to work with another piece of freeware called Inkscape. Once I got the hang of these, I could finally cut things as I wanted. I did not need the dongle either. The first item which cut as intended was very satisfying & a huge relief. I was then able to cut sides for the bridge over the DC lines & also the DC line tunnel portals. Each piece took about 3 hours to do; most of it the raster engraving of the brickwork. I feel the brickwork has too much relief, so I will turn this down when I do the 1990s version. The fast & slow line tunnels have stonework around the portals. I was a bit concerned about how these could be replicated but the photos I took of these were superimposed under the drawing so they could be traced. This helped to get the stone the correct size & portal the correct shape. The archways alongside the fast lines were then drawn up. After a few months of use, the power supply failed. This was quite an expensive component, costing about 1/4 the price of the cutter. There also seem to be several different connectors so I had to be careful of buying the right one. After a few months more work, the cutter stopped being recognised by the laptop. I suspected the controller card had failed. After considering an upgrade controller board which claimed to have finer control over shading (something I had never needed), I decided to replace it with a similar board, which cost about 1/3 that of the upgraded controller. If you have managed to read through that, you have probably noticed my mind is more technical than artisitic!

Thank you. I have not done much to it lately so recent photos would look more or less the same as what is already there. Recent purchases (Hornby 87, Bachmann 90 & freightliners) have made me want to do the 1990 version but I still have loads to do to the 1940 version before even considering this.

Some older decoders work poorly on DC. Since you are asking this question in the first place, I doubt you know what decoder is fitted. Assuming the loco has a decoder which works ok on DC:- DC running is enabled by default on most decoders, but the seller could have disabled it & forgot to reset the decoder. Assuming it is enabled, it should run on DC fine. It may have a higher starting voltage than an ordinary DC loco, but this may be an advantage because the higher voltage will be able to bypass small pieces of dirt more easily. Feedback controllers can damage decoders.

I don't usually think of winter as the end of the year. The media bombards us with all this stuff about snow at Christmas but it rarely happens. Jan & Feb are usually the coldest months, so hopefully this is what Hornby meant by Winter 2020. It seems to be common within the hobby that release dates slide & Hornby have done this as far back as I can remember, so I would not be surprised if it is Q4 before we actually see it. I agree with your view that I am happy to wait for a really good model than have one rushed out with errors they are aware of.

If Max's comments about his seat were heard on commentary, then officials would have heard it too. Since the car has been through scrutineering and there has been no post-race penalty, I assume it has been inspected & not considered dangerous?

I agree that it seems that way, but it seems that Verstappen made rash decisions, Hamilton seemed to need the summer break to get himself into top gear & Bottas really had no answer for Hamilton. They all seemed to have turned around these issues this year, so maybe Vettel can surprise us too? They appear to be put under more extreme media & management pressure than any other team. I believe this does not help them attract & keep the best engineers & strategists.

LeClerc has been out-performing Vettel over the past few races. It is possible for a driver to turn things around though: Bottas is a different driver from the one we saw last season. He was unlucky on Sunday, both with the safety car being deployed at the right time for his team mate & also that the team did not expect a 1 stop strategy to work. They were planning to pit Hamilton a 2nd time but this seemed unnecessary. Seeing Bottas out-qualify Hamilton is no longer the surprise it would have been last year. Verstappen seems to be a different driver this year, taking less risky manoeuvres & benefitting as a result. He seems a lot calmer over the radio too. It may be that he is the clear team number 1 this season & this has taken some pressure off him, but I get the feeling he is just benefitting from his experience. For the past 2 seasons, the contest has been quite tight until the summer break. After this, Hamilton has upped his game. Maybe tracks suit him, or car has had decent upgrades? I suspect he just seems to be in a different frame of mind, but it seems like he is already there this year. Maybe other things have been a factor in each case, but I believe all 3 have been a change of attitude, which has to start with the driver being honest with themselves. Vettel has to start by being self-critical & looking at how he could have coped with things differently.

I thought it was. The coverage did cut to the crowd around the time, which was rather annoying because there was plenty of track action. Hamilton attacked Bottas wide entering a left hander, which forced Bottas to brake late. This allowed Hamilton to cut back & pass on the left as they exited the corner. Bottas kept calm & stayed close, using Hamilton's slipstream to catch & pass 2 corners later.

This seems to have wandered a little. Wasn't it about celebrating a great achievement?

Hamilton did pass Bottas..then lost the lead on the next turn. They seem to both be making sure they finish rather than risk a collision. Toto will be happy with this so far. What I didn't understand was that Bottas' first pit stop was the same time as the cars with soft tyres. Surely the whole point of mediums would be to make a longer 1st stint? If they had then fitted hard tyres, these may possibly have then lasted until the end, negating the need for a 2nd stop. Tyre longevity was a bit of an unknown though.

There are different things to consider here: Conductors are also revenue protection officers. It should be quite reasonable to question a person's age in the same way that it has become normal for younger adults to prove age in order to buy alcohol. For most adults, driving licences also act as id. I assume that there is something suitable for an under-16? Ideally this should be carried. Without this, we rely on trust for a child to buy a child ticket & the world seems to be running short of trust. On the other hand: The guard sounded unjustly confrontational. Surly a polite enquiry as to why your daughter was not at school would have prompted a suitable reply. Braces/retainer are both quite visible. Is a 15 year old as confident as someone who is 30+? I don't think so. Some adults take advantage of this even if they don't realise they are doing so. When confronted, an older person may have some suitable retorts & more probably the confidence to use them, particularly "Haven't you heard of GDPR?". This also brings to another point that the recent increased awareness of GDPR makes it unreasonable to ask for a child to submit their home address to someone who is effectively a stranger.

In some matches, yes. I think it depends on tournament rules. If these are set at the beginning of a tournament, then they get applied. As usual, rules are defined by those who go out of their way to get on boards to decide/define them.

Completely agree with you on this. What is this stupid notion some people have that Ferrari are a winning team? History has proven this not to be the case. Apart from the only period they had a foreigner (Todt in 93-08), when was the last time Ferrari had a driver's champion? Scheckter in 1979, which was 40 years ago. In that time, Williams, McLaren, Benetton/Renault, Red Bull, Brawn (Honda when they designed the car) & now Mercedes have all taken at least 1 turn as the best team. It took Todt 7 years in charge to make Ferrari winners & now it seems he was always fighting against internal politics to do things his way. Now they have Italian team principals who tow the company line, they are consistently 2nd & 3rd best. Alonso left because he was disillusioned with the fantasy of being told 'next year will be your year', which never happened. Ferrari have historically paid great wages but Hamilton would be crazy to go there if he thinks they will help him win more world titles. I can't see Mercedes replacing Bottas either. He is pushing Hamilton a lot more this year & as long as he is beating the rest, what more can they ask of him?

& mixed traffic covers freight as well as passenger, so that's being a little picky. Some 'things' are designed for a certain purpose but are found to be useful for something else, which is why some 3F Jintys ended up being push-pull fitted.

Sorry to state the obvious but... They were designed for freight, which is why there were 4MTs, not 4Ps.

The difference is just as likely to be caused by a variation in scale calibration than a difference between the models themselves. Has anyone scaled this measurement up? 0.695kg * 76*76*76 = 305,088kg or 305 tons, which is about 3½ times the weight of a real one scaled down.

You've mentioned sound & upgradeability. I do not know much about Digikeijs so cannot comment about it. I strongly recommend you check it out though. I do know about the NCE though. One of its strong points is upgradeability: It is fine for a smaller layout & you can add extra if & when you need them. If you end up with the equivalent of the full system, you will not have paid much more to have got it through smaller purchases over a longer period. Choice if control system is a matter of taste so take you time in choosing what is right for you. There are some good shops around, but not many. They go to shows though. Many layout owners at shows will be pleased to show you their systems & let you get hands on experience with their layouts, so don't be afraid to ask.