Pete the Elaner

Sorry to be late on it, but I have just seen this. London is good for a compact main line layout because some stations are closed in by their surroundings: Maryland / Manor Park/ Forest Gate on the GE. South Hampstead / Kilburn High Road / Kensal Green on the WCML Kentish Town on the Midland. Ealing Broadway / West Ealing on the WR Willesden Junction has been mentioned. Quite interesting if you included the WCML's 4 lines, NLL & eastern freight lines but this would be big. Cut it down to just the DC lines & you would be running just 1 class of BR DC unit & Bakerloo service, none of which are available RTR. Take some buildings from several close locations & use them together, for example, the footbridge from K Olympia with the station building from Ealing Broadway. London also seems to use a lot of engineer's blue brick in place of the more standard red brick, giving many of the stations a dark & dirty feel. I have never scratchbuilt a building before either, but I have to for my current layout (a 4mm scale copy of an actual London station). I am finding that copying is actually the easiest way to create a 'general feel'. If you have not been to London for a while then spend a day there with your camera. Now you have decided to model it, you will notice a lot more about the place which will be of use. I am sure you will come back with all sorts of new ideas. If you take lots of photos, you will in print (or on a screen) exactly what you want to achieve, even if you don't notice it for several months. Youtube is a good way to see different locations from a driver's point of view too. I have a couple of tunnel mouths on my layout which you can only see from a cab so this has helped me out. I have enjoyed researching my layout as much as building it. I still have a long way to go & I may well have to spend more time there taking photos of the surrounding buildings.

I agree with that. I was careful not to say it was a poor material because I don't think it is. I find poor connections are much more of an issue than the conductivity of NS.

DCC is a high frequency AC signal & to the average piece of dirt/dust, it is not dissimilar to a high frequency track cleaner on DC, so it should attract less dirt than DC. but Dirt causes the DCC instructions to become unclear so the decoder will then ignore them, which makes DCC more sensitive to dirty track. A track cleaning vehicle will help to keep the track clean but, once it has got so dirty that trains will not run, you will be unable to propel it.

Try some things on short pieces of test track. 6" is enough to tell what you like & don't. You can compare different rust painting, ballast, 75 v 100, weathering, sleeper spacing, 6' spacing, different brands of track, just about everything. It does not take very long & you get to brush up your technique for doing what you need without making a mess of anything important. I don't understand the general opinion that PVA is good for either fixing track or ballasting. I disagree completely. It sets too slowly for fixing track & as a resin, it holds ballast far too rigidly. I have found Copydex much better for both & I am also experimenting with wallpaper paste flakes for ballasting. The advantage of this is that you mix it into the dry ballast then spray water mist over the top which does not disturb ballast like dropping glue/water mix can sometimes do.

Maybe it is correct but the prototype fades quickly & is more sensitive than most to lighting conditions? There are variations in differing brands of 'accurate' colours: would you expect Phoenix rail grey to blend seamlessly into Railmatch rail grey touch a panel up? Ideally they would, but I doubt they do. Thankfully there are also variations on the real thing even before the sun has faded the paintwork.

Technically the identity should remain with the frames but this rule has been bent many times for accountancy purposes. If a loco receives a new boiler, tender, cab, wheels & cylinders during an overhaul, there will not be much left of the original. On the other hand, if you have a class of 70 & after swapping bits about you still have 70, what extra have you really built? Then you have oddities like LMS Fury & Turbomotive. Both of these were rebuilt into almost stand locos & everything which made them different was removed. Calling their conversions to standard steam locos rebuilds rather than a conversions is stretching things a little.

Hornby have a history of not returning to a particular product & re-releasing it with an alternative running number in the way Lima used to do. I would do exactly as you have described: buy & renumber while the models are available, because the TS may sell out & never be available again.

For a steam loco, the locos identity is based on its frames, but this was not always strictly true. 6220 Coronation swapped identities with 6229 Duchess of Hamilton for the US tour, so there was a streamlined 6229 in blue running in the UK from 1939 to 1941. The real 6229 never carried this livery & the real 6220 never carried LMS red 6100 Royal Scot & 6152 The Kings Dragoon Guardsman swapped identities for a 1933 visit to the US. Unlike the Coronations, these were never swapped back again, so the preserved 6100 was in fact the original 6152. 46242 City of Glasgow was wrecked in the Harrow accident. It was later rebuilt..or was it? When it re-emerged, it had a curved footplate in front of the cylinders. It also had a different record card, which was never done. This implies that it was built on a new set of frames, which makes it a new build & not a repair. For accountancy purposes, rebuilds were treated differently to new builds so a replacement was sometimes termed as a rebuild to fiddle the books. This has been restrospectively termed as a paper rebuild.

Remember than after servicing, a loco will run differently (hopefully faster & smoother). It only takes a little variation in lubrication, wear or a rough gear to vary the speed a little. I expect this is 1 of the reasons why Hornby & Lima sold their HST power cars as a power & dummy pair. I have run my 2 class 350s in multiple before. I bought them at the same time & have run them both fairly equally. I use DCC & usually control each with a separate throttle. They have identical decoders too. When run on the same speed setting, 1 of them is slightly faster than the other, only by about 3-4 steps, but this is enough to cause them to separate while running.

Each HST only has 1 TGS, 1 buffet, 2 TF & 4 TS. Both Hornby & Bachmann have been known to produce equal amounts of TF, TS & buffets/ This leaves a surplus of buffets after the TS have all gone & who knows if & when they may be re-produced? If I wanted a rake, I would buy all 8 now & renumber what I needed to.

White was only on locos. Swallow HST power cars had both. White was along the cab side & engine bay, up to the radiator grill. Light grey was from the other end of the radiator grill to the end which connected to the coach.

Do you have a good model shop nearby? If you offer to pay them, they may do it for you? Running trains in multiple, splitting & dispatching them separately is good fun.

It has been an ongoing gripe for many that Hornby's InterCity light grey looks too yellow. I never noticed a difference between the light grey on Executive & Swallow liveried coaches & I don't remember seeing the paint manufacturers acknowledging it. The dark grey is a bit darker on the later livery. Paint faded on the real thing anyway so seeing coaches with different level of fade within a rake was quite normal. That is not so normal now that most rakes seem to be in fixed sets & units are more common than they were. What is worth noting is that HST Mk3s had silver window frames but Mk3As had painted ones. I don't why this was. 3As also have buffers but 3's don't (apart from the TGS's which worked with class 89 & 91s). There are other details differences too. I don't have a clue what they are though.

Connectivity & resistance are opposites. If the switch is not making contact, it will have no connection which is infinite resistance. If the switch was not making contact, you would have no connectivity. This should be a very high resistance & should show on a multimeter as infinity. A good connection should show very low, probably zero. I would consider anything higher than 0.1 ohms as significant although if you check each connection, you will see a noticeable difference where the issue is.

That's another debate entirely. Decoders are a personal choice & when mass-producing, it is normal to stuff a cheap component inside it. I have 2 older Bachmann decoders, neither of which work properly (both ignore CV3 even though you can read it back to confirm it is there). Sound fitted locos now have LokSound Select decoders, so if you don't like it & want a re-blow, you're stuffed.

You seem to have reverted to measuring voltage again. This is not the best thing to do. It will be more revealing if you measure the resistance across the switch & rails. Remove the power & any locos which may be in the section. Test for where you want good conductivity. You should ideally get 0 ohms (or close to it as described earlier). Anything above this indicates a fault. You can start by measuring stock rail to frog, then rail to wire & frog to wire, then wire to switch on each side then across the switch. You should locate the fault much more quickly than by measuring voltage. If you are searching for a short circuit, testing voltage will prevent damage to any equipment.

Please don't feel that way. You have not asked anything silly & by asking now, you may have saved yourself a lot of time. I can't really add any more advice because you have got accurate & helpful answers already. Extra droppers can become desirable with larger layouts. Nickel silver is good at staying clean but not the best of conductors & you can create bad joints when rust painting & ballasting track. If your layout is 6'x6', then you will probably be fine with no extra droppers. I would only worry about them if you find your trains are going slow at a particular point around the layout.

Setting a full speed curve would involve several CVs. I don't know what they are by number though. This is fiddly from the throttle because you need to know each one & adjust it individually. Nigel mentions that this is one of the things simplified with a computer interface. I understand Nigel has helped develop JMRI itself is free but you would need NCE's USB interface to connect to it. I have just checked & this is available for £35-£40. From your questions, I believe you will find this a valuable addition to your system. Setting a speed curve with JMRI is easy. You have a page with about 15-20 sliders so you can actually see the curve you are setting. Once you are happy, it takes just 1 click to send the lot to the loco. I may sound like a salesman for JMRI but I have found its DecoderPro module really useful & easy to use. It can do other things too but I have not really made use of them. Using CV3 & 4 is just as much a personal choice as the other settings you have mentioned. I do not use 0 for any loco, but that is my preference. I usually set these to values which give me realistic acceleration but setting them on low values such as 2 or 3 should give you more direct control but remove the jerk you may see when the loco steps from one speed setting to the next. You may not see this anyway if you have already set a speed curve to severely limit top speed.

I think it was an effort to make the Pendos seem even quicker than they are. I remember them being introduced. A class 87 or 90 seemed to consistently get signal checked several times between Euston & Milton Keynes, always arriving 5 minutes late. A Pendo on the same route never hung around like that.

Only 3-4 years ago on a Sunday, a Nottingham-St Pancras HST. After I got off at Leicester, it headed back towards Loughborough. I have no idea what route it took to London from there.

I took 1 look at the switch on PM-1's (a washer which passes over a PCB & stays connected by sheer luck) & suspected they would be unreliable. I wired up 5 PM1's & 2 of the switches did not work properly. A 60% success rate is poor in my opinion. Fortunately my initial assessment prompted me to think about an alternative. I bought some microswitches from Rapid Electronics. About 70p each & after a little adjustment, I have found them reliable.

I agree with that. I have 1 fitted DCC loco. It was a Hornby tank with one of their original chips (R8215 I think) which gave them a bad reputation. It was a new model several years after the chip itself was discontinued. It only ran in 1 direction with my PowerCab so I have replaced this with a better decoder. I have 2 older Bachmann decoders. Neither of them take any notice of CV3 & shot off at full speed. I understand Bachmann have always rebadged others' decoders...but what are you really getting? These are now function-only decoders in my DVTs. Bachmann are also now fitting ESU Select decoders in their sound-fitted locos. These cost almost as much as 'proper' sound decoders but you can't re-blow them with standard projects. At least Hornby's TTS decoders are relatively inexpensive. I now only use decent quality decoders & avoid anything factory fitted.

It seems the advice was well received because you're doing a bloody good job! As for the wiring, it is a quite a painful process, but I have grown to enjoy it. It can take weeks & you get to see nothing of it at all when you flip the boards back the right way up. It felt worthwhile when I ran a train under its own power though. I am sure you will get a good feeling when you run something too.

I have a few R8249s. They don't have many configuration options but they all seem to respond correctly & I have never had any of them do something unexpected. I can definitely change some CV29 settings as well as address them with 2 or 4 digits & CV3 &4 for acceleration/deceleration. They do not support advanced consisting. I think they accepted CV8 value 8 for reset.

You have already done a lot more tuning than I have so my experience with speed curves is limited. I remember seeing a comment recently about a Zimo chip having a non-linear response though. What I have seen with my Zimo 600's is that there are many more CVs adjustable than with some of my other chips. I saw this with JMRI, where I have set the option to only show me CVs which I can adjust. There were not just a few more than some of my others, the difference was quite alarming.