Pete the Elaner

After weeks of inactivity on the layout, a couple of days work has somehow made it important to me to glue & clamp a component on my new rail bridge at 6am today before heading off for work (via the WCML ). Pendolino was late today so I caught a slower, but more comfortable 350/1.

I agree that this makes a great difference to the appearance of trackwork which is why I am re-spacing the sleepers as I lay the track on m current layout. It sounds like a good excuse to go out & observe the real thing to me...B) If you can find a station where you will see something you have a model of (eg. Mk 3 at Chelmsford) then count the number of sleepers beneath it. I did this from a pic of a Mk3 in a book, then worked out spacing & made 2 templates from plasticard. The PH product looks great though. I wish I had seen it before! The spacing I have used requires 21 sleepers to be removed from each length of streamline. I am very pleased with the initial results. I have not weatheres & ballasted the trackwork yet, but I have done a short length of track first & I think it looks good. I did not worry about pointwork. My points have wooden bearers as I feel concrete ones were not too common for my layout's era. Bearers are often closer on pointwork than sleepers are on standard track, so I feel I can get away with this.

But height of wire will vary when the line passes under a low bridge, or across a road crossing.

Doing this would prevent the prototypical effect of the pan moving up & down slightly, or being very compressed to pass under a low bridge. Depending on your point of view, this may be a necessary compromise.

It was a while ago too. Warley '08 I believe, but it seems to have all gone quiet since. Having built my own, I can understand they that they may be having problems with it: You have 2 choices with OLE, build it robust or build it to look good. 1. Build a product which looked good. RTR pantograhs are generally sprung far too stiffly & the OLE would break almost instantly. If you selll a product, you have to expect customers to use unmodified RTR with it. 2. Build it robust. Hornby did this & the product never lasted long because it looked to chunky. The modellers who have built their own OLE which looks good will have gone to great lengths to reduce the upward force of their pantographs. You cannot expect the average customer to do this. Option 1 is just asking for trouble. Option 2 will never work financially. I don't se how it could work.

& 58001 emerged from Doncaster works in late '82, but I don't think it got as far as the main line unti early '83.

Global cooling is a more accurate term. It ain't getting any warmer at all.

& the GWR ditched their broad gauge in favour of standard a few years before that. Doesn't mean it was better. We appear to be drifting a little here...I thought this thread was about Peco's forthcoming product.

I completely agree with all of that. The wire arrangement in the Peco mock-up loks nothing like anything I have seen on the prototype. I think it is a stop in the right direction for someone to be making catenary which looks close to british. All previous RTR systems are based on european systems & look nothing like anything in the UK. Having built my own catenary (poorly), I know how difficult it is to get it to look right without falling apart when the wind blows!

Thanks. I wasn't trying to be argumentative; I was just trying to understand how it works. Explains why I got a nasty kick once or twice from my friend's relco-equipped DC layout causing me to shout loud expletives at an expo. I am convinced he did not wire them properly , so that probably didn't help. So the previously mentioned method of mixing them 'safely' effectively reduces the voltage? Isn't that defeating the object of having the HF cleaner in the first place?

Are you sure? Why does applying a high-frequency clean the track? The only reason I could think of is that a varying current would create a varying magnetic field which scrambles some of the dirt. It shouldn't actually even have to be AC, although that would be better because it reverses the field. DCC produces an alternating voltage: (virtually) a square wave. Square waves make the current change very rapidly albeit slightly out of phase due to the inductance & capacitance of the load (decoders).

Good reason for that: HF cleaners use a high-frequency signal to keep the track clean. DCC systems use a high-frequency signal to talk to decoders. Anyone see a similarity here? DCC also uses full voltage all of the time, so the age old DC problem of trying to make a small voltage push current across a poor connection (rail to wheel) is eliminated completely since this is always max voltage. I therefore question the need for an HF track cleaner with DCC.