New Railway Modellers Forums

The silver paint does work and can be the easy solution if the point has already been laid or a live frog version is not available. A little bottle does last a while because you don't need much of it, but you will need to touch it up from time to time. Link the frog rails together to make your live ...

I think that this will be the simplest way to do it. It will be quite intuitive to operate and simple to wire:- settrack loop feeds - annotated.jpg It will allow you to use the inner controller to run trains all the way around the outside via cossover 'B' to sidings 'X' and 'Y', and via crossover '...

I think that this will be the simplest way to do it. It will be quite intuitive to operate and simple to wire:- settrack loop feeds - annotated.jpg It will allow you to use the inner controller to run trains all the way around the outside via cossover 'B' to sidings 'X' and 'Y', and via crossover 'A...

The catch point was a key feature that was pretty much ignored. No real attempt to ascertain what the teams intended to build and then compare the result either. I liked the idea of the vertically integrated lava lamp plant, but found it hard to decide which layout was actually the best one from the...

The break where shown serves no purpose, and the points should direct power as required.

D connectors are quite easy to solder. 1. Slide a rubber or heatshrink sleeve over the wire (rubber is easiest to work with if you can get the right size but heatshrink is more readily available). 2. Strip the wire end (just enough). 3. Hold the D connector firmly in a vice or similar. 4. Put the wi...

It would be fine for point motors (Peco type), especially if you use a CDU. I would double up conductors for track power and return, I'm assuming this is for conventionally wired DC. You may have to look in computer junk fairs to get these cables as USB and ethernet are making them redundant. It's ...

The connectors you have shown from eBay are suitable, the female will clip in to a rectangular cutout to be retained in place. 'D' connectors are not that fiddly, and since you only need ten circuits you could just use every other pin on a 25-way 'D' (7 one side and 6 the other gives you a few spare...

That's simply not necessarily true. (I suspect that's information from an incorrectly wired system.) On the rare occasions I have a system all stop, I can change any point without trouble. Do please list any further shortcomings. Wires break in the handsets with frequent use - a bit of a pain on th...

Just don't try and operate a point while the Lenz is in stop mode - it will crash and you have to power it off and on. It depends what you do as to whether you see its shortcomings - there are a few others as well.

I think that the big issues to watch out for with the ZTC apart from the reliability (which may be improved now) are:- 1. If you are going in reverse and stop (at a station or signal for example) the headlight will come on until you pull away. 2. While the ZTC uses Xbus for its control interface it ...

The problem you are seeing is due to poor pickups or dirty track or wheels generally. The cheap decoders show it up while the better decoders like Zimo and modern Lenz will mask it, but for best results you do need to resolve the underlying problem by making sure that the track, wheels and pickups a...

I think that the best bet is to use the Ratio semaphores. Get the newer kits with the metal cranks since they are easier to assemble an a bit more robust. You should be able to customise them to do what you need, and as long as you don't need more than two arms per post you should be able to manage ...

I suspect that they built the prototype and then realised that the (white) LED would not work on 3.3V since its forward voltage is higher than that. They should of course have used a yellow LED to get proper oil lamp colour which could run from 3.3V with a resistor.

Dapol are quite insistent that their signal is perfect in every way and is just what the customer wants. You should be able to operate the signal on a voltage as low as 6V DC if required to reduce the brightness to sensible levels. While the LED is run from the supply voltage via a 820R resistor, so...