Pete the Elaner

I have not seen taper boilers mentioned. The whole purpose of these was to distribute weight differently; move some away from the leading bogie & over the driving wheels where it could be used for adhesion. GWR had been using taper boilers for years but the higher cost of them created some opposition within the LMS when Stanier introduced them. They never really caught on with SR or LNER. The tapering of Brittania boilers was quite mild (presumably due to cost-saving which became more of a priority) & these were known for slipping too.

Another recommendation for Coastal. I have found Kevin to be helpful. A visit to the shop sounds like an ideal excuse for some class 90 + Mk3A travel before they disappear. If you do decide to go with a PowerCab, make use of the ammeter feature mentioned earlier. A clock occupies the top right of the display by you can change this on a PowerCab to an ammeter, which I found much more useful. I usually used less current than I thought, but it will show you if you need to add a booster.

The pre-cut rails are a newer idea. I think they added them when they needed to renew the tooling. I assume the Y's don't sell as well as the LH & RH so the old tooling has not worn out yet & has therefore not been replaced with the updated & improved design. As for your jumper links; they look tidy but instead of just linking the 2 rails together, why not use these as a connection directly to the bus? It will provide a better connection that from wherever though 1 or more rail joiners.

Good choice. I would definitely recommend starting small. You will inevitably learn from each layout & don't want to be stuck with poor decisions/methods on a project which is going to take years to complete. It would always be dissatisfying.

That doesn't sound like a very welcoming club. I can understand you being put off by it. My first club was in a station building & as part of the rent, the club were tasked with keeping the station tidy, so all they ever seemed to do was gardening. I didn't stay there very long. & we wonder why the hobby seems to be full of ageing people with fewer younger modellers being encouraged. Thankfully not all clubs are like that.

You shared the same hobby. That sounds like something quite significant in common. How would you know what they were really like if you only went once or twice? The second statement makes you sound like you have a low opinion of yourself.

After about 20 clubless years, I was encouraged to join one about 18 months ago. In that time, we have changed venue, got some new members (younger members too:- the entire hobby is crying out for these) & those working on the large OO all wanted to rebuild it so we drew up some proposals & the club agreed we should do this (this was originally planned, started & abandoned largely by members who have now left & ran very poorly, which I was unable to fix. I seem to be on my own with marking out the boards but I desperately want to get others involved at this stage because I don't want to be going off on a tangent like Crompton describes. Those who work on the layout chat about it all the time on a FB chat & several of us go to the pub after club night, so this helps to create a good vibe at the club.

You have mentioned diesels, so I assume the list is for them. There are some you have missed which others may find desirable: 19 Compressor 20 Sander 21 Exhauster 22 Roof fan 23 Spirax valves 24 Air release 25 Fuel primer 26 Detonators Some other features require functions too: 27 Rear lights on/off 28 Day/night light select 29 RETB token request 30 Remote uncouple for no1 end 31 Remote uncouple for no2 end The last 2 are features not currently offered but would it be useful to uncouple with a press of a button rather than using a hook/stick? As manufacturers offer an increasing amount of features in order to beat competition & tempt modellers to upgrade to newer models, the ability to add even more functions may become desirable. Your argument of having 'more than enough' reminds me of when I first started in IT & my manager bought a 13GB hard drive, which at the time was the largest available. Many remarked that 'he will never fill that'.

That reminds me of a (DC) layout I built when I was about 15. I knew no better back then. It was fine to start with but after a couple of years, the boards sagged & as the trains ran round the back of the layout they slowed to about 1/3 of the speed of what they were near the feed. I try to learn something from each layout & I never want to be caught out by this again. I am currently starting a new club layout. I would use a feed for each piece of track purely to not rely on rail joiners but we are also going to isolate them at board level in order to keep open the possibility of using block detection at a later date.

I fail to see why this is such a commonly held view. History has proven that Ferrari usually finish the year in 2nd. They start each year with lots of promise & things consistently go wrong. Only Kimi & Schumacher have won the title there since 1980 & Kimi's title was handed to him by controversy at McLaren. So Ferrari has consistently been the wrong place to be for anyone who wants to be world champion. They still allegedly seem to get 'special' payments which means they can pay their drivers more. This will probably mean less to Hamilton now than the prospect of another championship.

Surely maintenance costs were a bit of a mystery back then with both types of transmission being relatively new to the railways? If you are going to try 2 different technologies, it would make sense to concentrate the less common type into a particular region so the fitters can specialise in 1 type, hence the hydraulics being concentrated on the WR.

Going back to the original post There is no need to mirror your track diagram with the wiring bus. The idea of the bus is to get a nice, clean supply to every piece of track. Nickel silver has a relatively high resistance (compared to copper - NS's advantage is that it stays quite clean) & that rail joints can build up resistance over time, especially once weathered & ballasted. Using a bus reduces the volt drop caused by these 2 & although I have not seen it, I suspect a bad connection may have an effect on a high frequency square wave. Quite how big your layout needs to be before you see any issue is not something any of us wish to find out. You would think that DC would also suffer from volt drop. It does. It is harder to work around & a layout has to get quite big before you see any severe degradation in performance as you move further from the power supply.

Bad luck for LeClerc. Was this a sign of Ferrari pushing too hard? I actually think it was simply bad luck because their reliability has generally been good. I think Vettel can learn from LeClerc. Dropped to 3rd after a bad start but did not panic & accepted he would get passed, then when the grip came to him, he carefully but quickly made his way past both Hamilton & Vettel. Maybe Vettel could learn from that; when pushed by Hamilton, it seemed that yet again he pushed too hard to keep in touch & lost a few extra places as a result.

Because I didn't know about it Thanks. I'll give it a try.

I have spent most of the evening trying to get a PI configured as a DHCP server & WAP so I can connect it to our club's PowerCab to provide access to WiThrottle. That has taken me most of the evening, admittedly hampered by a bottle of red & some drams of single malt. I have not got the wifi network visible yet. I am troubleshooting this bit. It just goes to show how much effort is required to achieve your goal. If you can make use of someone else's work then I would do this.

I think... Websites like this query your cookies/history. It would be interesting to flush history after each browsing session & see if it still happens. Setting this up to flush automatically is an option on most, if not all, browsers but about 3 options deep on Opera, so not the easiest to find.

I think we both did it so long ago that we have forgotten all about it. I have no memory of doing it on my PowerCab either, but I have bought a PowerPro more recently & I had to do it on those. I have had my PowerCab for around 10 years now. Maybe it was set up as a function key back then & the default has changed? I think this is unlikely. It was a post on this forum somewhere from Paul Chetter who explained that the button was by default configured to act as a brake key. I have no memory of using it for this so I do not know what, if anything, I am missing. I have since set this up for a couple of friends who have bought their PowerCabs more recently.

It seems that the OP's question has been answered but for anyone else reading, what you describe is not the default action on the Option button. The Option button is programmable & by default is is a 'Brake' button, so if anyone uses this, they will lose this feature by enabling extended functions. To enable access to functions 10-28 via the Option button, do the following: Hold down 'Select Loco' while you plug in the Powercab/Procab. This gives you access to several features such as cab address. If you only want to change the behaviour of the Option key, then enter through the different features until it reads OPTION, setting this value to 122.

As buyers, we are spoiled by many sellers who absorb postage costs. So when people charge this back to sellers, they seem to get annoyed about it.

E-communications often cause friction. I know of couple of extreme examples in the Elan community. One buyer (who is now a close friend of mine) lives in W Yorkshire & went to see a car in Kent which was advertised as being a very tidy example. W Yorks to Kent is about an 8 hour round trip. He got there to find a complete wreck. When my fiend turned his nose up, the seller complained about his time being wasted. About 15 minutes for him to get the car out of the garage for the buyer to take a look at. The buyer had just driven for 4 hours & was facing the same return journey! Another one (this time a well known & respected dealer) put a car up for sale. He stated quite clearly that the photos did not do it justice: he could not get the photos to show up all the cosmetic faults; lacquer peel etc. but he described it as cosmetically scruffy & anyone expecting something which looked neat & tidy would be disappointed. I was surprised by the next bit...a post from someone who went to see it, moaning about the cosmetic faults & how he expected a good example but got there to see one which had scruffy paintwork. He went on to describe it exactly the way the dealer described it in the first place.

Seen it but I had not thought of confirming with CV8. Useful to know though.

I could quite possibly improve it with some adjustments & thank you for the link, but this is not really the point. The decoder simply does not work as it should. It does not respond properly to CV3 which is a fault it shares with my other Bachmann decoders. I bought it for someone who wants to try DCC & has acquired an old Lenz which has no display so will not have the ability to adjust CVs. Many modellers try DCC by purchasing or borrowing older, used equipment & a couple of factory fitted locos. A loco which runs poorly out of the box due to a rubbish decoder is a bad example for anyone new to DCC.

Yes, you are quite right. It was the R8215. It only worked 1 way on my NCE & was factory fitted in a Stanier tank quite some time after the R8249 had replaced it. It gave me the impression that manufacturers were willing to use old stocks of inferior decoders to sell as "DCC fitted" models & I have avoided them like the plague since... Until this S/H purchase which has re-inforced my belief.

I have just bought an older Bachmann loco marked by a factory label as DCC fitted. JMRI read the decoder as an ESU LokPilot, but did not seem to be sure about exactly which type. I have read that Bachmann used to fit ESUs so this seems to confirm it was an ESU re-badged to Bachmann. Running is noisy & jerky. I factory reset the decoder & read in all CV settings. CV3 was set to 8 & CV4 set to 6. As with other Bachmann chips I had seen, acceleration was just about non-existant no matter what I set CV3 to. Max value for this seemed to be 64 (I understand ESU do not use the same acceleration values as all other brands). Even at this value, it did not bother with getting there gradually. Deceleration seemed to be ok though. This is the 3rd of 3 "Bachmann" chips I have had which seem to ignore CV3. This has to be one of the worst decoders I have used (second only to a Hornby R8245) & has has confirmed my usual principle of steering clear from factory-fitted decoders if possible.

Nice to see you & the layout yesterday. I think the above comment is a bit hard on Dave. He was running your layout every time I passed it & I only saw you once. I think he earned a few free cuppas!