murphaph

The long awaited €49 or "Deutschland Ticket" goes live on Monday. As expected it's a subscription model but it can be subscribed to and more importantly cancelled digitally from many of the numerous tariff area apps and websites. If you plan a couple of weeks in Germany then even as a tourist it makes sense to subscribe and cancel before the 10th of the month. I can see myself occasionally buying one if there's a series of trips planned in a month. The clear winners are medium and longer distance commuters though. A person in the next town out from here is no longer in the Berlin ABC zonal area and pays about 1400 a year for their ticket. That will now be a lot less. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-new-49-monthly-travel-pass-explained/a-65421776

Much appreciated. It's a great pic but I really mean in revenue service Did they leave the works at all?

I have never seen pics of yellow bogies under any mainline Irish coaches before. Anyone got any pics?? Would be cool to model. I always assumed the bogies were just from a pool and there were a few extras so when a coach or wagon needs a new bogie it just gets a pool set and the old set are taken off and reconditioned to go back into the pool. I didn't realise specific bogies belonged to specific vehicles.

Wow that's cool. Where did the bogies come from I wonder?

Good question. I guess once the full amount has been paid off we should get the reward points but not with each installment as managing that would be a nightmare?

Ah those are nice!

I did not remove the axle cover plate as far as I remember. I was working the other way, putting a loco back together that had smashed to bits. If you want to remove the bogies from the chassis you need to unclip the lids where the drive shaft engages the worm gears and then the bogies should drop out but I was doing it in reverse so don't hold me to that. If you wand to inspect the axle gears then yeah that cover plate muct come off somehow. This is as far as I took them apart:

Technically it was a cat that removed them wasn't it ? IIRC the caps that snap over the worm gears should also be resonsible for holding the bogies in place. I would suggest taking a look at my workbench thread (not too far back) and see if the pics can help. I ended up needing to remove the PCB to gain access as there was no slack in the droppers to the bogies. It looks like there is just enough slack sometimes to ease the PCB out of the way (according to the IRM instructions for reaseating the popped out driveshafts). @DJ Dangerous maybe you could attach that file. I can't seem to find it now?

I think the seller is a business, no? Maybe they just bought a job lot from an estate. Sometimes people also just decide to leave the hobby or change scale/era whatever.

Much higher if this recent grey is anything to go by: https://www.ebay.ie/itm/155474183409

Just for comparison, the German post/customs messes this stuff up with alarming regularity too. My two most recent cases, both from this year: 1) Gift parcel from outside the EU VAT area but declared under €45 value stopped and VAT + €6 handling charge applied anyway. Appeal in progress. 2) Printed book from UK assigned the HS code for foolscap and taxed at 19% VAT. Books are subject to 7% VAT. €6 handling charge also applied of course. This appeal has been won and because the VAT collected should have been below €5, the entire amount will be refunded as VAT amounts below €5 are not collected. The refund will issue in a few weeks for some reason. I think it's because DHL hasn't actually forwarded the VAT to customs yet. This means the €6 handling charge can also be reclaimed and DHL has already accepted that and will issue a refund shortly. These aren't the first gifts or books to be taxed incorrectly. It's an ongoing problem.

This was all before my time around here. Did these two chaps just vanish into thin air? I mean the modelling community in Ireland is small. Are they never seen at shows or anything? I'm not suggesting a lynch mob before anyone gets any ideas!

So we'd be a few years into the black n' tan era before any of these would have been repainted most probably or is there any evidence that any of these were repainted soon after the livery change?

I think that's the only one I don't have on pre-order as it's too late for my "alternate" era. I am collecting a few odds n' ends from the grey n' green now but drew the line there or else "era creep" sets in and before I know it I will be looking for original livery B141s!

You can get a far superior Murphy Models one for that money, even given today's high prices.

If it's an ESU one it would be worth sending to them as faulty if it turns out to be (I am assuming the decoder worked previously but now does not work and no changes were made?) I had a LokPilot replaced for free by them a couple of years ago.

Thanks folks. The crack is in the front. It 's not visible in that pic. It is just about visible in these ones:

048 making a recovery of sorts lol: A few oils have to dry and then it just needs a coat of varnish to seal it and it's done. I wasn't able to completely hide the crack without essentially painting it black and that would have been more noticeable.

Didn't the An Post CEO write an open letter in the FT about this, openly blaming Royal Mail for not implementing some required software solution that shipments to the EU as a whole will require quite soon, but which Ireland is already implementing as a sort of guinea pig to give RM a bit of a chance to get things sorted without millions of parcels from the whole EU being returned to it? https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/an-post-boss-criticises-royal-mail-amid-parcel-issues-from-the-uk-1405001.html The FT letter was more detailed but I can't find it right now.

Cheers Mark. I will let DJ make enquiries if he wants to. I never got a response from Shawplan when I tried to order window etches in the past.

The wipers are filigrane so taking a cast is a no go really. They are so filigrane as to be difficult to see to be honest! We'll probably just live with the missing wiper and say it was lost in real life.

I suspect one version is based on an earlier non-HiFi generic ESU recording and the other one is a later HiFi one as ESU is the manufacturer for these chips for MM and ESU has been continually updating its sound file library. I don't believe either prime mover was actually recorded off an Irish loco, likely just the horn sounds.

DJ has been trying to get in touch with Des about 071 wipers without much success AFAIK. @DJ Dangerous ?

The crack to the body is going to have to be hidden under weathering. The missing wiper can't be hidden unfortunately and as DJ says IRM don't have any spares like that or none available to the public at least so she shall remain wiperless on that side. I am sure some wipers broke off on the prototype. The main thing is she is back together and running again. I had to completely remove the main PCB to get in at the worm gears etc. There wasn't enough slack in the pickup wires to push the PCB to one side in this case so I had to desolder the pickups as well as the motor leads and lift the PCB + cab interiors out and off the chassis. The cab interiors sit firmly but will release with a bit of wiggling. They are an awful lot easier to strip down than the MM locos it has to be said. The missing horn has since been located and glued back on by the way Next job will be to weather it "extensively" at the wish of its owner so don't blame me

The Chinese see BEVs as a way to not only eliminate their dependence on foreign energy (China does not have much oil or gas) but they also see the huge global market for vehicles. The legacy carmakers in Europe and the US need to react quickly. Companies like BYD are producing exceptional cars at prices that hardly seem possible. Our next vehicle will be a BEV, no doubt. The tech is mature enough now. The Lithium was never really the problem, it was more the nickel and cobalt but the newer LFP batteries don't use nickel or cobalt. Tesla is moving to LFP batteries. They are safer too, you can stick a screwdriver through the blade batteries in the latest BYD blade batteries and they won't react. A Li-Ion battery will virtually explode if you do that. And LFP batteries are probably just another phase in the journey. Ireland has enormous capacity to produce green electricity and be entirely self sufficient in it and there is no reason the country cannot be a major electricity exporter, both via interconnectors and through green hydrogen production. Who would have ever imagined that Ireland would be an energy exporter? It is entirely realistic now. Putin has massively accelerated the demand for such energy. Irish customers are in pole position to benefit from cheap electricity to run their BEVs. The batteries in such vehicles act as a gigantic distributed energy store and the cascaded batteries from BEVs can be used in stationary applications (like mains power storage, either in the home or as part of the grid itself). The future is largely going to be battery powered. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will be much rarer than people once thought they might be IMO.