murphaph

I like it

Who buys Irish models in Japan and then decides Oh no I don't want it I'll sell it for 4 times the price? Is there business model I'm missing here?

Fantastic that this layout lives on.

Yeah it's the real cost of landing the goods in the EU, including postage. If the item was "free post" then customs can even assign a reasonable amount for postage and slap it on top. I never quite understood that as the real cost of landing the goods is the total paid. That a seller chooses to hide the postage cost in the total should not change this. I've been challenging every error the German customs makes by the way. I hope that if enough people do this, pressure will come on to bring back a sensible duty and vat free allowance. I've had books taxed at 19% for example. That's wrong. Books have 7% VAT here. The rules aren't just for you and me. The state must follow them too The last appeal I put in resulted in an automated response informing me that they are swamped with appeals and my case will take time to process. That's exactly what I wanted to hear.

Oh man, you'd think whoever put the 'out of service sticker' on it could have removed the big collection time one at the same time. Half arsedness at its finest.

With a bit of luck GB will rejoin the customs union if not the single market. Probably packaged as something else akin to Norway or Switzerland but in practice eliminating customs controls at least, and thereby the handling charges also. Without rejoining the single market though, parcel motel is not making a comeback unfortunately but under a new government I wouldn't rule it out in the next decade. Brexit just isn't delivering any tangible positives, certainly none that outweigh the negatives caused by leaving the SM and CU.

It would require a very small bit of circuitry to output a nice clean 5vdc from track voltage. I had always assumed this would be required to be honest. I wasn't all that optimistic that a usable supply would present itself that easily lol. So close though. I read on the Stummi forum (RMWeb for German) that the guy actually contacted ESU about his software and they said ok let us know how you get on. They clearly don't expect too many people to do this, which is probably true. Great posts Sean. Edit: The power supply will probably need some form of keep alive in the form of a capacitor, the more capacitance the better. Otherwise the board is likely to cut out at every bit of bad track it encounters and that would be annoying. The sound wouldn't restart like with a decoder obviously but it could be very "clicky".

Yeah that's correct. He has three blog entries about them. I intend adding corridor connections to one end of them at some stage also.

So I wanted to perform an experiment and put one in the window and leave the other one as a control. I think it's clear how well your suggestion worked George: It should be noted I placed the truck in its case and put it in the kitchen window. Our house is triple glazed so that's 4 layers between the sun and the transfers. I suspect placing it in direct sunlight would be even more effective. It's hard to tell it's working until you compare it to a control by the way. I wasn't certain anything was changing. I will now place both trucks out on the patio in just their display cases for a couple of days. It's relatively warm and dry here at the moment. I have the rest of those transfers (for a pair of containers) stuck to the inside of the kitchen window and they are slowly bleaching too. Cheers George!

Yes: https://www.precimodels.com/en/shop/product/1-dcc-uncoupling-conversion-kit

I'm not sure if they are really required to be honest but I have a vague recollection of needing them when summing stereo to mono. Maybe I'm wrong but in any case it should be trivial. It may even be trivial to just stream everything to one channel as the ESU files are mono anyway, and then just connect one of the channels to the speaker. I think these boards are like twice as powerful as a Loksound 5 anyway so sacrificing half the power would see no dis-improvement.

I doubt it will finish at that though . A 111 (I think 8113) was buy it now at 300GBP and it was gone yesterday. That was actually "cheap" compared to what some of them sold for recently. This one will probably hit 300 at least I would imagine. I can only recommend the use of eBay bid snipers where you set your genuine max bid and walk away from the auction. You don't get sucked into the bidding fever that way and nobody pays more than they really wanted to. The only losers are sellers and eBay really. If everyone used a bid sniper, prices would be significantly lower on eBay.

Even if I had three pots to piss in I wouldn't pay the money being asked for these 071s. Just buy what is available from IRM and MM and be patient. Good things come to those that wait.

Sean, I'll take a look at the board in the morning. Mine arrived from China the other day. I was going to desolder the speaker connector completely as it's some proprietary one I think and I will just sum the stereo output to mono and solder directly to the board. I'm sure there are through holes to solder to, but I only looked quickly at the board before chucking it in the drawer so can't be certain. I think you just need a couple of 1k resistors to do that and job done.

That's gonna be so awesome.

I would have assumed a combination of powered track and RC would make the most sense: 12V or whatever permanent track voltage (don't need to worry about reversing loops being powered or point frogs being correctly polarised, just leave those "complicated bits" completely unpowered. The track can be dirty with unreliable pickup, as long as there's enough power being supplied to keep the on board batteries fully charged, there should be no limitation to run time. The track is just being used as a charging cable basically.

Excellent use of the blowtorch. I've seen that truck used on US gondola cars with dents put in them from the inside to simulate where the scrap iron crashed into the car over the years. It's definitely a technique I want to try out some day.

That is actually not a bad idea if nobody has a better suggestion! I had just assumed buying wheels individually would be cheaper but of course that's often not the case.

The ones on the Tara's would be grand. That sort of thing.

Hi all. I'm building up a pair of Dutch vans. I've assembled 21mm brass bogies from John and I have the Werkspoor bogies from SF to use decoratively. I have the 28mm pinpoint axles from the S4 society. Now all I'm missing is some wheels! This is not finescale. I have no intention of binning all my IRM wheels. They will all be simply regauged by pulling the wheels out. So I don't need to start adding finescale wheels to other stock. The IRM wheels are NMRA RP 110 are they not? Any suppliers for these wheels that are recommended? Should be simple but some of the suppliers have very long lists that I find hard to understand. Could someone point me at a wheel with the same profile as the IRM ones?

My nearest and dearest would be my furthest and angriest if she knew what it was all worth

Transfers applied. A mix of SSM and Railtec.

The upcoming 201 re-release should indicate what sort of price point MM is operating at I would have thought. That run can't be too big really as it's only covering missing more modern liveries. If the 201s cost €300 there won't be too many sold I reckon.

They're both hi-cubes, right?

Oh that's interesting. I never knew that!