Pete the Elaner

That is how I have laid my fiddle yard. It shortens the longest sidings a little but it makes every train available for up & down. Trains usually come back from where they have gone to. I feel that many go with the traditional dedicated up & down lines in the fiddle yard because they have not really given it a great deal of thought. For the layout in general, I cannot see any definite view on whether it is to be above or below ground level. Oxford Road is above & I get the impression the OP has chosen to go the same way, but many city stations are in cuttings. This provides an excellent opportunity to squash the station in between retaining walls, tunnels & bridges without actually making it look squashed. Whether you enjoy the challenge of making suitable buildings necessary to work with this is a matter of personal preference.

I am sure more parts of what we knew as HS2a/HS3 etc will get built, but will not have HS in their name. This was a major publicity error. It was a bit like the class 91s & Mk4s being very similar to the designs of the APT-S.

Am I allowed to say that as an exhibitor, I did not like this show too much, but it was an obligation to be there? I liked it as a visitor though. Organising it must have taken a huge effort & been stressful at times so I would like to show my gratitude to the organisers. The hobby has lost its biggest UK show though. I find that thought rather sad.

Extending 3rd rail from Reading to Oxford? That would struggle on the grounds of safety. Bi-mode trains seem to be the modern (half baked) solution.

When a worked with a friend to wire up his DC layout, I future proofed it by isolating & re-feeding after all points. It must have been exhibited 10-15 times without an issue (not an electrical one anyway). He then donated it to the club & we wanted to use DCC. It was a small layout so the wiring was sufficient for the required current. We just close all the section switches & the whole layout is live. Modifying electrofrog points 'for DCC' is a misnomer. Powering the frog via a switch instead of the point blade is instead a reliability issue. We have never cleaned the point of contact between any stock rail & point blade, not have we ever had a loco stall on a point frog. A track cleaning block over all the rails is the only cleaning we have ever required.

Switching frog polarity does not require anything outside of the board to which the point is mounted. It would be 3 extra wires per point though. Whether you need to connect a Unifrog depends on what you intend to run. If you have small tank locos, then it may reduce stalling. If you run bogie diesel/electric locos then they should cope without, assuming of course your wheels & pickups are not filthy. Regarding the amount of wiring required for point control, solenoids would usually require 1 switched supply per coil plus 1 common return. Stall or servo types need 2 per motor, the polarity of which gets reversed when the point is thrown. This is 1 less wire (big deal) but it can be taken further: How about a 0v common to all motors with the other one switched between -12 & +12v (assuming the motors are 12v)? You would then halve the number of switched connections required for solenoid motors. The DC power supplies would need to be isolated from each other, maybe even fed from separate transformer windings, but it would make wiring less complex.

Take a look at the real railway. You may see all sorts of unusual oddities & exceptions. I have been told numerous times that the pots are every 4th sleeper, but I have seen for myself on the Watford DC lines that they are often 5 or 6 sleepers apart.

Agreed. The media do a good job of twisting things in order to sell a story. When you actually watch the interviews, you can see how they edit their quotes to deliberately make it sound like something different was intended. Many critics also ignore the fact that these guys are driving wheel to wheel at over 150mph, often while also making adjustments & trying to work out how best to get past or defend their position. Is it any wonder they sound stressed out when we hear their radio messages? They do not seem to take many collisions personally either. It may sound like it over the radio but once they have a chance to look at things after the race, most accept that misjudgements happen.

I find Apple much more intrusive than Microsoft. The latest Mac OS is much more obstructive when it comes to updates. Does anyone remember the earlier iPods? Uploading music as media files was a new thing back then, but you could not just copy your MP3s onto it, you were forced to install iTunes. I do not know if iPhones are different because I have never owned one, but copying files (including music) onto my Android has never required any software. I just plug it in then drag & drop.

One of my former IT colleagues used to insist Windows NT (NT4.0 as it was then) was 'just DOS'. (For those unfamiliar, NT was never a DOS system. Its earliest version was I believe 3.5, which looked like Windows 3.11. Windows 3.11, 95, 98 & Millennium were all DOS-based). When he asked someone for a 'DOS boot disk', I created an NT boot (floppy) disk & handed it to him. He was not impressed at all, especially when I reminded him that he always insisted it was 'just DOS'. The systems boot in different ways, so an NT disk will not boot a blank PC like a DOS one.

I can understand where Microsoft is coming from in general. They used to have a reputation of an insecure system. It was not particularly bad, but some users would be very slack with their security, so MS included & activated it. MS provided updates for it. These became more regular, but many refused to apply them. Virus writers became good at reverse engineering these updates to create programs which exploited the weaknesses the updates were blocking. MS was effectively telling them how to attack machines which were not quickly protected. MS therefore needed to ensure their updates were applied more quickly. So how do they ensure machines are protected? By forcing them to update of course. Users then complain that they were not able to defer the updates. The problem was not just with Windows though. Linux & Mac systems were equally affected but Linux users were typically self-supporting so more clued up about keeping their systems locked down. Mac earned an old wives tale of being more secure but this was only because it was less of a target at the time so there was less disruption to be gained from attacking it. This has changed a lot now but the old wives' tale remains. A had a Mac laptop in my last job & the updates for that were more of a nuisance than on Windows.

Are you taking the P? The 317s were 100mph units. That is 30% faster than 75. Energy is square of speed, so a 30% speed increase is nearly 80% more energy for the suspension to dissipate. Drivers really pushed the trains back then too, so it is hardly a like for like comparison. Being from the GE, I was more familiar with 312s than 310s, which were pretty similar & draughty as hell, both with passengers boarding/alighting but also with the wind howling in between the doors & their frames when running at speed. They were horrible things to travel in. The 317s were a lot more air tight, but I would criticise them for their seats being too low. (We got 310s for a short time on the Clacton line & from a passenger's perspective, they were the same as 312s).

I do not understand the relevance of the line marked as C. The section marked in green needs to be isolated at each end. Otherwise I would isolate & re-feed after any pointwork because you want all sidings live & it makes for better reliability but also easier troubleshooting.

Sorry to bring politics into it, but this is the price of democracy which China does not need to deal with. If the Chinese government wanted a railway, it would get built. There would be no consultation, no cut & cover tunnels to replace any of the landscape & no consideration for those living along the chosen route, Any houses along the route would be forced purchased at a non-negotiable cost set by the government (the cheapest they could justify). That would lower the cost somewhat.

Other than when Todt was running them, Ferrari have been pretty consistent as a no2/3 team for the last 40 years. Alonso & Vettel were deluded if they believed they were the team to deliver them further world titles. I wonder how much money any team were able to plunder into their 2023 car. The cap must have forced them to put on the brakes at some point. Merc effectively ran the 2nd half of the season with a hybrid design because they could not get shot of all their bad features.

Spend some time with Google maps to find somewhere which inspires you. Do you want a prototype? Doing it well would requires some scratchbuilding. This can be very hard work but rewarding if it interests you. Railways take up more space than most of us have room for, so you may want to get creative. Evan a small branch line terminus with an old fashioned goods yard will take up more room than you have if you are using OO. I am not very familiar with the SR but I can think of locations on the GE (Maryland), WCML (South Hampstead) & GW (Immediately W of Ealing Broadway) which are in cutting sandwiched by bridges/tunnels. Kentish Town on the MML is a little bigger. I do not think any of these have any pointwork though. That would be a put-off for some. Another put-off is that they are all urban settings so need a lot of buildings. Appealing for some, but not for others. A lot of the SR is in cuttings so you should be able to find something. From what I have seen & what you have mentioned, Elmstead Woods appeals to me. It needs some compression & creativity with the SE end (which is open & passes over a road) but the NW end with the tunnels & forest around & even on the island platform looks an interesting subject.

Latest steam models from Hornby are better but their D&E still lags behind. My (2020) APT looks nice but it has been let down in some areas, like the oversize capacitors which looks like a beer barrell squeezed on top of the seats & doesn't help the lighting at all anyway, small space for decoders in the DTS vehicles & I had to pull my NDMs apart to fit DCC & sound. 1 motor vehicle potentially for a 14 coach train was never likely to be sufficient. I was fortunate enough to read about the dodgy NDM capacitors & removed both of mine during DCC fitting to stop them burning holes in the roofs. The pantographs are dreadful though. They look flimsy & will partially raise, but drop down again. I have not thought of how I can build better pans yet, but I first need to re-paint the interiors & deal with the capacitors, both to hide them & made them useful like they should have been in the first place. I don't think we have had any new tooled D&E models from Hornby since, but Bachmann's 90 was 2 years earlier & did not have any "sod it, they are just toys & the customers will never know the difference" aspects like this.

I don't think Red Bull will be as dominant. There must be a theoretical maximum within any regulations & the closer to it you get, the more difficult it is to get a little more. Anyone copying their design may get closer but has little chance of beating them I am hoping for some rule changes though. The stewards made some improvements to their application of track limits in 2023, but I do not think they have quite got there yet. We saw some hastily applied & poorly thought out rules to prevent blocking during practise & qualy. These need to be refined. We had a few qualy sessions ruined with yellow or red flags with some drivers benefitting from the timing of these. The opportunity to deliberately benefit from these is still there & I am suspicious every time it happens, so it needs to be blocked. I also dislike safety car procedures. They were introduced to have a minimum impact on racing, not to allow teams to gain a strategic advantage, so every effort should be made to minimise their impact. Pitting behind them was not an option until cars started running out of fuel. Changing tyres during a red flag period is plain wrong too. Apart from being more stringent on track limits and the rules for blocking in qualy, I doubt they have the balls to make any other changes though.

I have read the same, but this is pretty normal. When pushing for performance & lightness, you really do not want to be making your structure too heavy.

This would need to be measured with the loco running at full speed. The 'open' voltage will be more.

Can you see why manufacturers don't like to be too specific with release dates for their models?

So it seems you cannot justify your earlier claim that a high speed line costs a lot more than a freight line (otherwise you would have done so). If you have an outspoken point of view, you really need to justify it, otherwise you make yourself look rather silly.

What do you want to make? If you are looking to print complete wagons or locos, then you may be disappointed. Designing these is not easy so most of those who have taken weeks to learn it are unlikely to give away their hard work for free. I felt that getting into 3d printing 'because it looks useful' was the wrong approach for me. It was when I wanted to make window frames for buildings a particular way that I looked at 3d printing as being a way to achieve it. It allowed me to get my design on screen & print it repeatedly. I have since found that it provides a solution to make certain other things: lamp posts, coach seats, doors, stairways, detailing parts.

As somebody in MK, I can offer me view on this. Many services speed through MK without stopping. Some stop, but those which do not can just as effectively serve their purpose by using a different route entirely: HS2. This frees up space for more to connect at Crewe. Using Glasgow as an example, there is 1 service a day which takes the Trent Valley route. The others all pass through Birmingham & Wolverhampton. It is quicker for me to get a different train to Crewe & change there than to use one of these straight through.

I still have mine somewhere under the layout. I remember using it to build baseboards with a friend. He was using his drill as a driver at the same time. I think there were 14 screws to go in, so after drilling the holes, we had a race. He has to change his bit first, then back again after & we agreed to do 7 screws each. The result was a tie. Cordless drills & particularly their batteries have improved a lot over the last 20 years or so. Most DIY ones used to be gutless but they are now useful tools.