New Railway Modellers Forums

It's been a while! Track shortages, and going back to work, mean progress has been slower. Nevertheless, I've now reached the site of my river bridge, which is made from two Hornby 3-arch brick bridges narrowed for 50mm spacing and sandwiched together. This means a departure from the usual "tra...

Access to coal is probably the main deciding factor in how long things would have lasted. And at some point there would be a tipping point where there weren't enough steam locos in an area to justify the facilities, then the rest would suddenly go. But given the continued use of small steam locos by...

I stumbled across a 9F project on RMWeb last week, where the builder decided to paint the finished model in Rail Blue as an interloper to a fictitious 1970s . I thought it looked quite good which got me thinking. So what might the 1970s have looked like if steam had lingered on? The 9Fs are an obvio...

The neatest method for making a terminal block is to use DIN rail terminals which can be electrically joined with a bus bar. Probably overkill but it does make for a reliable installation. An alternative is to use the common screw terminal blocks, and join all the terminals on one side with loops of...

I tend to find that a small amount of solder on the tip of the iron helps to get things started. Maybe it's something to do with the puddle of solder conducting the heat better than the point contact of the iron. Once the initial solder has started to flow, additional solder is then added to the wor...

Looks good! A nice strong bit of carpentry there. One thing I'm not so keen on is the 230v sockets on the underside of the board. Mains voltage should really be kept well away from the board, with only the low-voltage supplies going up to that level. I'd move the power supplies and mount them to the...

We should probably be thankful that no one ever attempted an 'unslip' technique for the return journey. Surely someone must have seen a Congreve rocket and thought, we could use this. I'm sure it could technically be done with a banking engine and an automatic coupling of some sort. Wait in a loop ...

I like to see the old stuff taken seriously, and as Dublo mentioned, a bit of good scenery makes all the difference. Converting the Triang chassis to 3-rail strikes me as just what would have been done back then too. Purists (and collectors who like to hide things away, never use them and make money...

Some adjustment to the recently laid track at the station throat has been required. The Bachmann curved point was causing very rough riding resulting in several derailments and frequently causing locos to stall. Although these points are described as the same as the Hornby ones, measurements by the...

The 'nailed on'strip of what is basically springy copper is just a crude 'push to make' switch to supply power to the coil. Another good method is a brass screw in the control panel and a 1/4" jack plug on a length of cable, which has the advantage of only being on when you physically touch th...

As to any standard, there is none, just approximations ! Hornby have longer hooks, that also have a deeper return under the hook. Their pockets/couplings fit also differ. Dapol have their own mounting ideas and even Oxford Rail have their own length of NEM plug in tails. This has always been a prob...

I wish they would make a live frog medium Y based on the setrack tooling. The geometry of the setrack Y works well where a small Y is really a bit tight. I might try to convert mine.

You can use them as they are. For the reasons above, if you want to use a switch to remove reliance on blade contact it's best to convert fully and cut through the rails between the blades and frog. I've done several older Code100 points this way and it's quite easy to do. A junior hacksaw blade is ...

The ramps were solid and not sprung and as mentioned above, there were two and they were placed off-centre in the track - one operated the 'collect' sequence and the other operated the 'drop off' sequence. Mine is the later version. Do the solid ramps not interfere with the couplings then? It looks...

That would work nicely actually. Put the device in line with the DC controller only as they don't play nicely with DCC or live steam. Don't use any DCC fitted locos as the decoders will be confused at best or destroyed at worst.