Pete the Elaner

I don't think the track side of things is the issue. I have seen layouts wired so their Gaugemaster controllers oppose each other when the points are set wrong The overload protection worked well & they suffered no permanent damage.

Yep. The 2 in Milton Keynes. I believe they only pair of single loop events in the country close enough to do both on foot on NYD. I also live close enough to run to/from them, so I did the entire thing on foot.

Get the decoder read before throwing it. It may be worth selling. They should all tell you their make & model if you put them on a programming track.

I wasn't aware of that. I didn't know when Hornby discontinued them. It may still have a DCC socket fitted, but I think this is unlikely. I have fitted a socket in some of my older locos, but if the person who converted it couldn't be bothered to get the connections the correct way around, they would be unlikely to have bothered fitting a socket.

You would need to replace the chip with a blanking plate to bridge to relevant connections. I suspect orange & grey are actually wrong but swapping these or red & black should correct your direction issue.

I find mine useful as a mini drill, especially when I replaced the collett with a chuck. It is a lot more powerful than the Minicraft drills I also have.

As above, the device needs to be powered. Your controller should also have a 16v AC output. This needs to be connected to the 16v AC terminals on the HF2 in addition to those which you have already connected.

A card mock-up is a great idea. I did that for the station building on my layout. It was really quick to put together and helped to get the dimensions correct when building the proper plastic version. I don't know why I forgot to mention it. I must finish it one day....

The Wills kit is a nice product but the sections look too short for that bridge. I would happily accept this compromise because the alternatives are to scratch build them from plastikard or 3d print. If you plate both inside & outside, then a little filing on the inside plates should be enough to help it bend, but the riveted top may require a different approach. Why not just get on & try it? You will probably think of a solution as you build it. Try to visualise the columns in relation to the track gauge, which as we know is 4'8½". It may be worth making 1 up & deciding if it looks right. If you can't get the right size of wood dowels, you could try brass or plastruct tubes. Good luck with building it. It will make a nice feature on the layout.

I did indeed follow the manual. It was a while ago so I can't remember all the adjustment settings. Spirax volume did not respond to any adjustment, remaining as loud as the tickover, even when set to 1. I am not complaining & I am not unhappy with it. My 60 is not typical of what I will run so I thought it was ideal to try out a TTS decoder. Having seen its limitations, I have decided whether or not I want to buy more.

I have found the volume impossible inflexible on my TTS 60. Its Spirax valves are almost as loud as the engine sound. I believe there are only about 4 volume levels, but adjusting makes no difference at all. I guess you get what you pay for?

As far as I understand, it would just be to cover for a short term shortage & not a term solution. If it can be hired out for 4-6 months then sent back broken, the TOC would probably be happy with that. I am not sure if it is a rumour or a serious suggestion.

I tried tuning my Hornby HST with this some time ago. It gave it a scale top speed of about 25mph! Fortunately I had backed up the settings with JMRI so was able to restore them. I would now only tune with CV54 if I felt the performance was poor. If it looks reasonable to start with, then I don't bother.

& the odd stand-in loco. I caught a XC from Oxford to Reading around this period expecting a 47 on the front. 31464 showed up instead.

Counting 86101 as an 87, these are the only 2 of the class left running in the country, so no spares are available. 89001 contains a lot of bespoke components. There are 49 class 90s plus whatever if left inside 90050 so far more spares for Anglia's 15 once they are off-lease, especially if several are held back as donors. Potential use of 89001 seems to be a short-term solution: use it until something fails, by which time a more permanent replacement will hopefully be available.

No, it is a relatively poor coolant compared to water. This is why we mix the 2 in cars.

They don't look parallel to me. The bottom one looks slightly bent. I am not sure it can be straightened very easily. Higher speed running may cause the cross head to pop out. This happened with one of my older ones & I just popped it back in (which was not as easy as it sounds) without inspecting the motion. I suspect it will slop up & down like yours.

How big are your boards? I used 12mm ply with 3'x18" boards with a softwood frame & longitudinal brace, again made from softwood. They stayed nice & flat but I felt these were over-engineered & therefore heavier than they needed to be. I used 9mm ply with 6mm ply frames on the following layout, but the boards were a lot bigger: 3'6"x 2'6" with a diagonal brace. I felt the tops were ok but I think I went too much for lightness with the frames. I also varnished the boards to help keep any dampness out. Even though both of these 2 were intended to stay in the spare room, water is still used for ballasting & scenery.

You can never get away from the fact that OO is too narrow but there are tricks you can use to disguise it. I have read that code 75 is actually underscale. This is great because it will be consistent with the gauge being underscale. Fiddle with sleeper spacings to get the ratio between gauge & sleeper space similar. Experiment with this until you find something which looks more pleasing. Don't use scale length sleepers. When you should only have 4-5mm each side of the rail, the extra 1mm makes a lot more difference than the 2mm lost between the rails.

Maybe the quality has varied & yours were from a good batch? The contact washers on mine were visibly loose. Too many people find them bad to be making it up as 'tosh'.

Me too. After seeing how a SEEP worked, I was very sceptical about their reliability. I think Stewart was being accurate earlier: a solder-tinned pcb is one of the worst designs to incorporate in a switch. The tinned surface rapidly oxidises - gets dirty - leading to poor electrical contact. On the ones I had, the connector washers were also loose. It would not matter how well they had been mounted. The fact they were underneath meant they needed to defy gravity in order to work. 2 of the 5 switches did not work from new. Having seen them, I had already bought some microswitches. Fitting these took 2 of us less than 30 minutes & they have behaved faultlessly for several years. Cheaper to do this with microswitches but easier to do it with frog juicers. I had heard 'Frog Juicer' mentioned a lot, so I looked it up. They detect for a short circuit at the frog. As soon as this is detected, the frog polarity is changed, but so quickly that neither the loco or command station has time to react. a 'hex frog juicer', as its name suggests, copes with 6 points at once. So a hex frog juicer needs 8 wires for 6 points: 1 for each point & 2 for the track feed. That compares with 18 needed for switching 6 points with accessory switches. Because they work on the layout side of the booster, there is no issue with system compatibility. The system is not aware the device is there. Gaugemaster's DCC80 is a similar product, but only available as a single unit.

I think that's a pretty good range once you add classes 56, 60 & any others which we've both forgotten. Edit: beaten to it by the previous post

Why? They would be competing directly with Bachmann, whose models are current & more accurate. Bachmann usually produce more liveries too. I really think Hornby miss a trick here. A while ago, they produced 31110 in dutch. 2 years later, they still produced 31110 in dutch. They probably had around 20-30 others in dutch to choose from (which would also have also been more suitable for multiple purchases in a headcode box version). Last year they produced 46256 in BR red which sold very quickly. The tooling is also good for 6256 in LMS black, 46256 in BR black or green, 46257 in BR black or green....so instead of producing one of these, they do a re-run of 46257 in red & will probably have unsold stock left over this time around, putting them off from releasing more variations.

L49 on this forum modelled Uxbridge Vine Street in OO about 20-25 years ago but he may still have some photos.

At least we didn't get nasty about it! 1 thing which has not been mentioned which Captainalbino illustrated probably without realising... It is useful to test something new on a scrap piece of board & track. If you don't get the effect you want, you've not ruined the layout finding out.