Pete the Elaner

Nice try for getting the thread back on topic. It seems to have immediately drifted back to irrelevant drivel again though.

You do have a choice with switching the frogs. The dead part of the frogs are so small that many do not have to bother providing power to them at all. This requires no modification either. As long as you feed that wire to below the board, you can leave the switch for if & when it is required. Using points for isolation can quickly get out of hand, especially when loops are involved. Isolating & re-feeding keeps things simple as layout design grows & eliminates the reliance on rail joiners for good electrical contact.

What you would do & what you feel is right to recommend publicly are not always the same. You may ride a bike on short trips without a helmet but would you recommend doing this to others who you may not have met? Wiring is no different. Some may get away with using point blades & rail joiners for electrical continuity but with larger, older layouts, point blades become unreliable & resistance builds up in rail joints. If you want sounds, then you will want your sidings live all the time. You will therefore need to isolate & re-feed every siding, which I would recommend doing anyway whether the layout is powered by DC or DCC. By isolating & re-feeding, you effectively break the layout up into small sections & will make it easier to understand than feeding a siding from 3 points away, like you could get away with on the bottom siding on your layout. You can expand this method to a larger layout simply by using more sections & it does not get a lot more complicated. I wish people would stop recommending modifying an Electrofrog point "For DCC". It is for better reliability & to help prevent shorts from wheels with poor clearance. DCC is simply less tolerant of a short circuit but I would also recommend modifying points in this way for a DC layout. Apart from that small technicality, I would agree that everything John has recommended is good practice.

I saw them at Glasgow. It was the first time I had seen them with a pan, albeit in the lowered position. This is a very fragile prototype to model. I will be intrigued to see how well this works but the model does look very good.

It is your layout. Set your own standards & document them. If you ever have to trace a fault, documentation make this much easier. I would disagree that track wires should be re & black. That sounds more like a limitation than a help. When starting to wire a layout, I usually look to see how much wire I have of each colour then use what I have most of for what I think I will need most of. Document what you use. I know I said that already but it helps when doing further work or troubleshooting.

According to the synopsis on the website, DOGA are involved, preparing & presenting a layout at GETS last October.

I think many modellers could benefit from getting back into this way of thinking. We all started out with something simple. Some of us may be happy to stay with these but others have moved to something a little finer. Who is to say which is right or wrong? It doesn't matter how much we pay for models or how long we spend making them look or run better, they are still toys..even if they are P4, S7 or Gauge 3 live steam. As for the programme itself, It clashes with club night so I will set my timer for it.

This suggests you may have instructions for DCC. Switching a point is exactly the same.

Regarding the grille nearest to the driver's door which sits entirely inside the red swoosh: On the model it looks like a parallelogram. The real one looks slightly wider at the top than the bottom & the red swoosh follows this, also being wider at the top. I wonder is this was deemed an error & 'corrected' when turning the 3D scan into artwork, or maybe how the grille has been painted to show it in the proof print?

This is true for older points but Peco changed the design some time ago. I think they may still use the older design for 1 point because the tooling has not worn out yet. More modern Electrofrog points have a cut-out in the webbing allowing the user to solder a wire between stock & switched rails. If you do this, you need to snip 2 small links from the switched rails to the crossing then power this by a switch. They are supplied this way for those who want to buy a point & use it straight away. It would not be RTR is you had to fit a switch before it works.

Why have you used a speaker more suited to the limitations of 4mm scale? The double cube speakers are good for their size, but with 7mm, you have more space than 4mm, so surely a bigger speaker would have sounded better.

Cramming too much in makes the layout look compressed, which is something I find unsatisfying.

This may help, it may not... It sounds like you are trying to put a little too much of everything you want on the layout & are having problems because it simply won't fit? Maybe you could stop for a while & go back to planning something from scratch. Make a list of the items which are important to you, like having a station which can accommodate 4 coach trains, the ability to run expresses, a yard. Here is an example.. 1 Express trains 2 Stations serving 4 coach trains 3 yard 4 level crossing 5 Working signals Then work out a way to fit them in. 1 No problem. These can run anywhere. 2. Not enough space, so an access road/building across the tracks is used as a scenic break. Only part of the platforms is then visible, which is all you need to model. This would place the layout in a cutting. 3 Yard will fit. You could make it a high level one if the station is in a cutting. 4 If the main layout is in a cutting, a level crossing would not work with it, so you cannot use it. 5 No problem. You do not need to use the same aspects. This is just an example of the thought process I would use. Would this be better? If it will, then take lots of photos before re-starting a new layout from scratch. It it will not be better, you will be happier with your current layout.

That's in Ipswich isn't it?

Surely you would need to if you wanted to run locos together in a consist? I assumed that locos running at different speeds was why I have always been advised against double heading on DC & this is one of the advantages of DCC.

I am also interested to know how you have done this. I have found lots of unusual settings & commands in the manual, but not this one.

Modelling an urban cutting requires a lot more work than open countryside. Have patience. It is rewarding when it starts to take shape.

Looks like it will be mainly in cutting? I am also modelling the WCML, but in London & c1940 & c1990. I also felt that the only way to model the line was to choose a cutting location 'framed' by tunnels, bridges or both.

Moving to DCC will not save you money. It may save your sanity though. 60 points + 30 isolating sections & 15 signals is well over 100 connections back to the panel. That is a lot of wiring to go wrong & a lot of work when it does. If you use DCC to control these, you will need a fraction of that. You could choose to throw points with a handset, but with that many, I would not. I would prefer to use a control panel to send commands to the system. There is a very good range of products to do this. You can forget about isolating sections, so that will take some of the clutter away from the panel. If you later decide that you need to add an extra signal or 2, then you don't need much extra wiring for this, you just connect it to the nearest accessory decoder & control it form the system. This passes over the biggest advantage DCC has to offer: it allows you to drive trains instead of the track. This may sound minor but I found it made a big difference. I can see your location says Bedfordshire. If you are anywhere near Kempston, our club night is tonight. We have just stripped a DC layout & are about to start re-building it as DCC. We have various levels of knowledge & experience. You will be more than welcome to say hello & ask any questions you like.

I would rather them delay it a little than see a fault & let it go anyway. Nice to have an update too.

That is a trap which many people fall into. It is not silly at all. Insulfrog points do self isolate, but once you introduce a loop, you can run into problems because power is being fed from the wrong direction. It is easier to isolate & re-feed than to use too few insulated rail joiners then later have to rip up trackwork to install them. Using small sections is very scaleable: You can move on to larger layouts & the sections themselves do not get any more complex. You simply have more of them. Keeping small sections makes troubleshooting a lot easier too. It also allows knowledge gained from wiring up a DC layout to be transferred easily to DCC.

Unifrogs make this nice & simple:

6'x2' is not necessarily that restrictive, depending on what you want from it. You can model quite a convincing urban cutting, maybe with road bridges as scenic breaks. You may need a fairly generous fiddle yard though. This is great if you like making buildings & structures, but not if you want any type of yard or goods facilities. Minories always gets a mention as a small layout. It is nice & compact but the generally accepted standard design for this has a reverse curve in the station throat which I think looks weird. I have just tried straightening it out in AnyRail & I think this looks way better.

I would hope they did. Setting 1 to reverse is extremely quick & easy. A Hornby Select can even do it.

There can't be many city centre model shops left now. I visited GeeDees when I lived up that way, which was over 20 years ago now. It was a good shop. Sad to see it close.