Pete the Elaner

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.

If that is annoying, you could renumber it to 6221, the only 1 of the first 5 to carry red. It got its double chimney before going red though. I got the numbers off from my 6220 quite easily but I can't remember how. It seems like they had a standard size for nameplates.

There seems to be talk of Peco motors here. The OP said Seep motor but tried to follow instructions for Peco points. Some of my club colleagues found that Seep motors are more demanding than Peco ones. A Peco CDU struggled with Seep motors but I have known a Gaugemaster one to work fine although I had some home-made ones available & one of these was able to cope nicely. The easiest way may well be to change the accessory decoder & sell the Bachmann one on. It will quite possibly be fine with a less demanding motor.

I am sure they do too. I can only assume they therefore intended this to represent it as it was in late 1938. Maybe this is to allow a future NRM special of it as preserved?

Someone at Railmatch must have realised that a glass jar with a lid more suitable for peanut butter gets stuck on & this is why other paint manufacturers use a different design. Refusing to refine or abandon it is arrogance. What is with the calm down comment? I am just stating a fact, not getting upset about it.

Treat them "properly"? You mean fiddle around because the manufacturer has arrogantly ignored a tried & tested design (a tinlet) which has been used by many because it does not suffer this problem.

A friend had a last minute invite for his layout so I helped out all day Saturday then again Sunday afternoon. Sunday was less busy than Saturday but still by no means quiet. Having spoken to some of the club members, the 2nd day seemed very much a success, maybe partly because it allowed people to go to Biggleswade on Saturday then MK on Sunday? There was a good selection of both layouts & traders. Plenty to see,

Relying on points to power sidings gets complicated & becomes difficult to troubleshoot more quickly than you can imagine. It can easily test your patience to the point when you just give up. The trouble is that you will end up having to run another feed somewhere, then this will cause a short until a seemingly unrelated point is thrown the wrong way.

Sounds very complicated. DCC provides a simple solution to that, Is there any particular reason you wish to avoid it?

The decoder will only draw the current it needs, mainly for the motor. The fault you described will have been caused by a fault within the loco itself. Layout wiring can be overloaded if you have too many locos running at once & this is 1 reason for using power districts, not for restricting the current available for any decoder to use.

I have described them as coping stones before, but sometimes it is easier to follow the language already being used.

If there is, it seems that neither of us have found it yet

I am working on my platforms right now. I have also decided to build my own flagstones because I cannot find anything commercially available which looks right. I tried cutting flagstones from 40 thou plastikard with a previous layout. Their size varied, which left me very dissatisfied with the appearance. I n ow have a laser cutter & had found the 2mm acrylic was acceptable. 3mm was just too thick & the cutter's heat causes anything thinner to warp too easily. Even when cut with a laser, the stones are not as consistent as I expected. They are an improvement on hand-cut plastikard though. Even laser cut, each slab needs to be tidied with a file then painted. Not the most interesting of tasks!

Hamilton is in York's Great Hall, which is basically dark with a bright skylight. It is therefore difficult to compare its colour with a model. As for chimneys, 6220-6234 had a single chimney from new. 6234 Duchess of Abercorn soon got a double for some testing when it was a few months old. This was such a success that every following member of the class, starting with 6235 City of Birmingham (the first 'City'), was built with a double chimney. 6220-6233 were then fitted with a double when they received works attention, 6220 being the last of the class to receive the modification. 6225-6229 got their double chimneys while painted red. 6221-6224 got their double chimneys while painted blue. 6221 was the only one of the blue 5 to receive red livery. It got its double chimney first. 6220 was painted in plain black livery before getting its double chimney. I find this odd because double chimneys seemed to be so successful they added them as quickly as possible, yet they painted it black a few months earlier. It is therefore the only streamliner which ran in wartime black with a single chimney. The above is what I have found from various sources. These changes were 70-80 years ago so records may not have been 100% accurate.

I have been advised to use a brass pin instead of plastic pot because it should be stronger. This should allow the conductor rail to be mounted a little lower too. 3rd rail should prototypically sit quite a bit higher than the rail, but unlike the real railway, we have to clean the rail tops. Dropping the conductor rail to the same level as the running rail is a compromise. It is up to the modeller to decide if it is acceptable or not.

Can you run it in compatibilty mode? Right-click on the shortcut or .exe , choose Compatibility & fiddle with a few options on this tab. In theory, it creates an environment which simulates older versions of Windows. I am not sure it always works though

While reading the OP, I noticed that the payment machine mentioned was card only & wondered how a younger person could have paid the fare? The station's machine is card only. I used to take the train to London at 15 & to my closest town from younger that that. Are payment cards of any kind available to under 16's? If not, how are they supposed to pay? I assume child fares are actually available for the route?

I have given it a mention on Kempston MRS' facebook page & will mention it at the club tonight.

You make some good points there. It is nice to be well paid, but by complaining about high charges, are we effectively saying we don't like anyone else to be well paid too? I often meet friends at exhibitions I don't often see elsewhere. It is nice to go for a coffee with them & the premium price seems acceptable in this situation.