New Railway Modellers Forums

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...

Don't use DCC directly it will cause damage, and 16V AC will cause excessive heating. Regardless of what it says on the packaging you should use 9v DC for Dapol semaphores. Use of anything over 9V will just cause more heat to be dissipated, and the LED to be brighter (if the signal has one). LED sho...

That would work.

The Pi will run JMRI which is jolly handy. Anything you can do in JMRI can be done on a PC and then run on the Pi, but the Pi is a fully featured device so you can plug in a mouse and keyboard, or run a remote graphical terminal session. There is no need for a cross-compiler because JMRI is in Java ...

A chain of inverse parallel diodes would do it, but it might be easier to run the motor from 6V! Would they be linked between the two wires, and would the motor tap half way along the chain? Would it work with reverse voltage? I'm struggling to see how this would all wire up! Just wire pairs of dio...

A chain of inverse parallel diodes would do it, but it might be easier to run the motor from 6V!