New Railway Modellers Forums

Lalla Rookh was the title of an 'oriental romance' by Thomas Moore, published in 1817. The GWR must have liked the name, because they used it again on one of the early Saints, one of the batch originally built as Atlantics. Most of the other Atlantics re-used names from that BG class too - the othe...

Well, here's another one. I'm a firm believer in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and if I had an established DC layout that worked well and met all my needs I'm sure I wouldn't want to change. As it is, I got my foot in the door of this hobby via a DCC trainset bought for my son. I have...

End2end, thank you. I tried your "tin everything first / blob of solder on the iron" technique, and it worked a treat. Up until now, when soldering I've always wished I'd been blessed with an extra hand, but now I just need the two I've got: one hand for the work, one hand for the iron. So...

And if you do screw up your courage and abandon the trackmat, and if you do carry on and progress with this hobby, in a year or two's time you'll look back and say to yourself "Why on earth did I ever want to keep that wretched trackmat?" I'd lay money on it. There are all sorts of things ...

Pardon me if I have misunderstood the question, but the only way you can fit in more straight track within a fixed area, i.e. a trackmat, is to use sharper curves, and even then it wouldn't be much. And the curves on a trackmat layout are already as sharp as they need to be (or sharper). Sounds like...

Like so much else in this hobby, there seems to be no consensus on the "right" way of soldering, only what works for the person concerned. I don't use flux either, and I never succeeded in soldering anything at all until I gave up trying to use lead-free solder.

I'm delighted to announce that I've sorted it. Confidence is coming back, and I don't feel quite so embarrassed, because I'm not quite sure, but I don't think it was even my fault. And Shaunster was nearest the mark. Well, I hied me to my "local" Maplin's (Swansea, about 15 miles away) and...

Hear, hear, End2end. My 'personal take' on it too, almost word for word.

But (and I can't repeat this too often) anyone is free to disagree. I'm not preaching.

I agree that the full DCC monty is most unlike running a real railway (and that's why I don't want it), but you don't have to go that far. I'm using it in its most basic form, just to drive the trains. I'm still getting to grips with my NCE Powercab and I haven't even changed any CVs, so it's still ...

Tricky Dicky (BTW I am also Richard, I sometimes used to get called that, and I loathed it. I put a stop to it...): Wot, undo all that soldering? (Shudders) Well, if I have to, I have to. I guess I would only have to disconnect the switches from the bus, one by one. I am actually using multi-strand ...

I have a feeling I'm going to look back at this post at some future time and cringe with embarrassment. It's like this. I've started wiring up the control panel for my point motors. As reported on my layout thread, I did the first six, tested them, and found with some satisfaction that they all work...

Some interesting points here. First of all, I agree with Bigmet that sound is never going to be realistic enough to justify its high cost. I'd rather carry on doing what we've always done before: using my imagination. I like to use a bit of imagination: it adds to the fun. (That's also why I'm not d...

Not a lot of progress since my last post, because I had arrived at the point where I had to face up to the electrics. Now I know there are those among us who find the electrical side of things the most fun part of the hobby, but I am not one of them. In fact I found the thought of wiring a layout of...

American houses traditionally have big basements, where they have the boiler, washing machine and stuff. That's where many of them have their layouts. A space 7 or 8 metres square is nothing unusual for them. Mind you, I've seen videos on YouTube of the sort of operations Bigmet mentions, so there's...

I saw the pilot of Oh, Doctor Beeching when it was first shown, and the moment I remember best was the sight of two hippies (complete with beads and bells, just the way real hippies almost never were) in the booking office queue. Whoever was responsible for this little touch was obviously too young ...