Pete the Elaner

The problem is that comments like this have often been mis-interpreted into "I am now using DCC so need to do something extra to my pointwork which was never required with DC", which is incorrect. Modifying your points "for DCC" is a bit like saying that you must wear a cycling hat to ride a bike in the UK. The benefits are not as obvious but most who understand them agree that it is a good idea, but you can usually get away without it & some may argue that they have never needed one before, so why should they need now?

A circuit breaker costs a lot less than a command station, although this has its own overload protection anyway. I would much rather have installed a circuit breaker & never need it than omit it & have an issue.

Because then they could not be sold as ready to run. Any modellers who currently choose not to modify them would be likely to choose to buy pointwork from another manufacturer.

The LokSound Select is only limited for UK use because there are no suitable projects available. It can be re-blown but with what? Having established decoders with their own specific methods of programming makes it difficult for newcomers to enter the market. If the sounds & controllability is already good on this then great. Chances are they will not be though. How can a Russian suddenly be producing sound chips/projects which are comparable to the likes of Paul & Bif who have been steadily refining theirs for several years? That is not an argument against this decoder/project, it is a question which should be asked before buying it.

I'm sure you didn't mean that the airbrush was primarily for weathering, but for anyone who has not used one before, it may read that way. I do find mine good for some (but not all) weathering but also for getting a thin, even coat of paint on flat surfaces like loco or wagon bodies. I chose the airbrush to paint my platform tops, getting a far more consistent finish than I could have done with a traditional brush.

The thought of cleaning it usually puts me off from starting. I really don't know why because it only takes 5 minutes to clean from start to finish. I don't ever feel tempted to skip this though.

But to reblow a decoder, you also need a compatible sound project. Not many of us can create our own (I can't) & UK developers have only made them for LokSound & Zimo. So if is sounds poor, you're stuck with it.

Buying that would be a big gamble. I can't find any reference to what decoder it actually is. I find this suspicious. Going from what the chip looks like is a bit risky & £60.00 is too cheap for either a LokSound v4 or a Zimo MX645. You could easily end up with something which sounds nothing like a 66 & no way to re-blow it. At least with Bachmann Select & Hornby TTS, we have feedback & videos on here to tell us what they are like, so we know what we are buying.

I found East Lancs disappointing when I visited. Midland Railway Centre is indeed good if you want to wander around plenty of locos on shed. Great Central in Loughborough is also good. Lots of static diesel & steam stock to see & being the only preserved line with mainly double tracks, has the best service too.

The 350s may sway a little but are a lot more civilised than the 321. It was quite normal on the 321 to be bounced until you felt a sudden jolt & a loud thud to go with it. I assume was the suspension hitting its bump stop? I was standing for the entire journey on a 350 from Euston to MK recently without having to reach for something to hold on to at any time.

If you are not confident at weathering, then why not build something very simple, maybe from card & weather that first? It won't matter if you get it wrong.

It seems to be the way many businesses are run these days. Saving £100k shows up in the accounts. Losing £200k in the process is difficult to prove.

I need to justify buying one of these by building a layout which needs one...

As mentioned a few posts above, you have had issues consistent across different systems which all have a good reputation, so it would be worthwhile investigating something else. There is a thread on here (which is currently quite active so you should find it in "View New Content") mocking the old sales pitch that "DCC only needs 2 wires". It has since been proven that if you wire a layout up this way, it will run very poorly. DCC needs a nice clean electrical connection between command station & decoder. Many of us learnt this before we started wiring our layouts & have ensured we have always had a clean low-resistance connection between command station & track. I don't trust point blades or rail joiners for electrical connection...ever. Many others on here are the same but some have got away with being less scrupulous. Here is a test you can perform: Remove your controller/command station. Replace it with a piece of wire. Remove all locos from the track & with a multimeter, measure the resistance across the rails at various places. It should be as low as possible. Zero would be nice but in reality, this is impossible to achieve. I can be low enough for the meter to register zero & that is the target. I do not know when you would start to see problems, but would expect it to be somewhere around 0.1-0.25 ohms.

I did a comparison once with just the centre car running then the whole 5 car formation. I found that the trailer cars created a huge amount of drag, reducing the top speed to a little over half of what it was when running light. I have not investigated what I can do about it because my unit is currently off the layout & will remain so for quite some time.

Scratch building buildings seems to take forever. It is often worth it to get exactly the building you want. I have a problem with windows. I find them tedious & would much rather wire the layout! How long did it take?

Possibly a case of wanting to be a No1 in a smaller team rather than No2 in a larger one. That may also be Kimi's thinking too.

I am not familiar with the venues in question, but as a potential paying visitor, your description of the Lincoln venue is the type of place I would not want to visit for an exhibition. An exhibition needs to be in a nice, comfortable venue or else visitors & exhibitors will not return. Dressing 'sensibly' for an exhibitor does not include wearing a coat & layouts run less reliably in colder, damper conditions..

I think PVA is poorly suited for ballast adhesive. It soaks into any soft cork & sets rock hard, transmitting noise too readily & often allowing chunks to break away leaving unweathered sections exposed. It also turns some ballast slightly green, which is not good if you want to model freshly laid or lightly weathered track. It is widely used because it is cheap. I have not used Ballast Magic. Does it have any flexibility once set & what is its noise transmission like?

Me too. From a practical perspective, its biggest flaw is the entrance at Euston Square being the wrong end of the platforms. It seems that the Metropolitan Railway & LNWR did not like each other. It would have been nice is this had been re-designed in the 1960s too.

I think is can be a mixture of both. Our railways were among the earliest, so we did the learning for everyone else. Most of our lines were built when trains did not run anywhere near as quickly, so aero shudder was not an issue. Stock with plug doors copes with this much better than anything with sliding doors or windows. It is usually the premium services which get the newer technology (like plug doors) first. The HST's opening windows are in the vestibules, not the seating area anyway. If you want a more fair comparison, look at Chiltern's rebuilt Mk3s. Any Mk3s remaining on the network will be going through a similar conversion pretty soon. For comfort, the air suspension & soft seating of a well maintained mark 3 beats anything built since.

Using a train is different to a car. When leaving your car, you are probably the only one using the door, or on the rare occasion when you do leave it for someone else, you will know them otherwise you would not be sharing the same car. When you get on a train (assuming those who are getting off have done so first), you will probably be boarding with people you don't know, so will have been less likely to have check the queue behind. Even you have checked, you may have got on & be unaware that someone is running along the side of the coach trying to board just before it

Some interesting photos there. It looked nice before its rebuild, but I can't imagine it could have half the number of passengers using the place today. I can see why the Doric Arch had to be moved: it is halfway down where platforms 8-11 are today, but surely rebuilding it at the entrance may have been possible, but I guess there was less building protection back then.

Sounds like a useful overtaking aid then? If it wasn't used for that, it would be if it went unpenalised.

I expect you believe the penalty was mad. The teams were careless for not ensuring they stayed within the regulations & earned their punishment. Why have rules if you don't enforce them? When you have set limits, allowing a tolerance is unfair to the teams who conform.