New Railway Modellers Forums

No problem working out which wire goes where Geoff. I bought a packet of these little fellas from Squires at one of the exhibitions.

The might have been air smoothed Schools looks great, it is an example of the generation of steam locos we never got to see. The American streamlined 4-4-0s of the thirties and fourties were great looking locos that set a style statement that the first generation diesels had to live up to.

You get a great feeling of achievement, when you restore an elderly model to front line use. That's a good looking loco to add to your fleet. I got twenty years service out of a non-runner, but spotless, Collet goods that I picked up for a tenner, eventually it succumbed, all the plating was gone fr...

Gangway/Gangwayed - having a corridor connection between coaches Open - having one or two large open saloons with a central isle between the seats Sometimes referred to as "aircraft style" Corridor - having a side corridor with closed compartments Push-Pull fitted - a driving compartment i...

If the tracks won't lay flat unaided you have two options, pin them down or replace them. Over the years the plastic bases will have changed their nature, they'll have lost some plasticiser to the air, which prevents them counteracting the stresses within the rails, so they end up curling. If the ra...

Hi Flashbang, you seem to share my feeling that relying on a fault to start an operation isn't good practise. Frog juicers and reverse loop modules rely on being able to detect a short circuit before the main supply does. My reaction to the first one I saw was that if that unit can spot a short circ...

It depends how far you want to go with the effects. Background ambient effects need to be more or less continuous, and background . For spot effects some of the small recordable devices which can be triggered by passing trains or other events would allow the sounds to be pin pointed around the layou...

We have a small number of people who offer stuff at exaggerated prices, the one I referred to is somewhere not far from me, but it's almost impossible to find out what the stuff goes for in the end. Some of it doesn't sell and comes around a few weeks later still at the same sort of price. There's a...

If you intend to leave food outside, find a metal box for it. The wildlife around here will have anything wrapped or not. We have a cat who prefers living outside to sharing a house with our other cat. Last night something cleaned up every scrap of food from his bowls two feet away from where he was...

I doubt there's much profit in splitting up and cataloguing the parts on a sprue but it does mean (in theory) there's more chance of them having the part you want. Murphy's law says though that it's the same one or two items that everybody wants.

Terminators are something that has come from communication systems. When you send a pulse down a cable you get reflections coming back from any significant joints or changes in the conductor, and you get one heck of a reflection back from the open end, so they put across it a resistor of the same va...

I always refer to the rails and the wires connected to them as feed and return, works for DCC and DC as even on analogue the rails aren't dedicate pos and neg. Analogue supply is just an irregular alternating wave of extremely low frequency. At this stage I'd go with anything that works. Solving wha...

Geoff I can see where the switch rails are cut before the crossing on the second point, are they similarly cut on the first one. It looks as though the two juicers are interacting the multiple IRJs should hopefully do it. I'd have given up on them by now and searched my parts boxes for a couple of m...

He must be the Aussie cousin of that bloke G*****e who keeps popping up on the bay with things at exaggerated prices.

Ah, I typed my last response at the same time as you were typing. Bit more to go on. I think this may be a case of needing a bit of load to absorb the spike caused by reversing the load at the frog, there's a well established name for it a "quench". Your extra loco sitting there awaiting a...