murphaph

Same here. Missed the mkIId IE stock completely. Would welcome the opportunity to buy them at RRP. I saw one on eBay starting at 80GBP last week. Too much for me.

Thanks chaps.

When was the very last one of these still in service? I am into the IR era so probably a no go for me but I would take any excuse to help another RTR supplier get established! The more the merrier.

Simply using MM's chips is undoubtedly the easiest thing to do but I would really hope that using a third party DCC chip would not void the warranty in a DCC ready loco.

Hmmm that would be bad for a number of reasons. For example, many people like to maintain a single decoder type so they have no variation in CVs. Others, like me, need Railcom+ for their planned layouts.

Thanks a lot Noel. Yeah I agree that a din of locos all emitting sound should be avoided. I have seen YouTube clips (I think it was Charlie Bishop and his Chadwick Model Railway channel) where he showed how he reduced the volume or muted it on all but locos in motion. One could do that automatically using rocrail (my preferred train control software) as a base measure and then look at finer automatic control (eg only full volume for the loco currently under manual control). I think I will stick with the Lokprogrammer route. I live in Germany so I can buy blank v5 chips from any of the vendors though the cheapest I've seen is around 90.

I'm looking to have in the region of 20 locomotives on my layout which will be in a reasonably large ca. 3 x 10 metre space so most of not all of my locos will get sound. I was leaning towards a Lokprogrammer and modifying free ESU sounds but it sounds like there are none for the baby GMs. What about the 121s? Can you shed some more light please @Noel?

Thx Ken. I guess you mean Connolly rather than Heuston but valuable info nonetheless.

Very useful!

Thanks George. Is it also possible to illuminate the ssm round post signals do you know? I was also looking at ratio round post (to be honest I think the vast majority of signals around the area I want to model were round post by the 1990s, which is my era) kits. Have you any experience of them re: servo control and illumination?

Are the ssm signals capable of function or purely for decoration? They are beautiful in either case but I need (well, want) servo control for any of my signals (possibly excluding shunt signals) that aren't supposed to be fixed at danger.

Seems crazy to convert two snack cars back to standard while converting two standards to snack cars but I suppose if the two original cars needed major work and would have been unavailable for a prolonged period then it would have made sense to take one of the spare standards and convert that and if only 2 snack cars were deemed necessary then the logical thing would be to convert the originals back to standards. Thank you very much for the details.

How many Cravens snack cars were there when they got their tippex stripes?

Could the change to a large yellow panel have coincided with the renumbering from 113 to 8113 I wonder.

I've already really decided how I'm going to do it to be honest. It'll be using http://www.bidib.org/index_e.html The electronics and computer control are the aspects I feel most comfortable with to be honest. The real modelling is where I have virtually no experience and have many years of learning ahead of me.

I think that's something else. There are things called braking modules I believe to bring trains to a gradual halt at a signal on a standalone basis. Track occupancy is really only required if you have full or partial computer control of a layout. It's a much bigger undertaking. The entire layout needs to be wired into blocks like the prototype (at least as long as the longest train you expect to run usually). The usual way is that the current drawn by the train is detected by some circuity and reported back to a computer control system.

I'm pretty sure the logo was changed with the respray into dark blue though, right? One other possibility is that the panels were originally red but the first attempt at respraying the panels failed with the red bleeding through somehow to give that mottled orange colour. Just a thought. I am no expert on paint.

Did this layout get off the ground at all? I'm also considering something (more) loosely based on LJ. The interesting shunting and varied stock are more important to me than recreating every last detail of the station however.

Yes that's an interesting question about when each loco went from light to dark blue. Anybody able to narrow it down?

I think the red has just faded indeed. It's mottled looking. If it had been resprayed orange even immediately after the first picture I doubt it would be so bleached already by the time the second had been taken.

Most peoples' layouts are no where near prototypical so I'd say it wouldn't bother them if their trains weren't either.

Oh so ONLY 111 had the red ends? It would be really great to know when she lost those red ends to the yellow ones. Did she lose the red ends before the whole loco was painted in the darker livery with updated (more rounded) NIR logo? As for (8)113 I am thinking way down south around Limerick Junction. I know it helped out on beet trains much later for sure (2003 pictures). My 1999 picture shows a Maynooth-Connolly passenger working. Do you know when (8)113 got the large yellow panels? Appreciate if you, or anybody else can shed some light on these questions for me.

Thanks very much for trying so hard

The latter would be good enough for me and modelling purposes but that's an interesting question I hadn't thought of so I'd be delighted to get an answer to both!

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on which MM models are the most desirable (I'm thinking money is often useless and the only way to get people to part with certain models is to offer them something more desirable to them in return). I'd like to know which MM models I should be keeping my eyes open for in this regard. For me the interest lies in tippex liveried stuff from the 90s above all else. Or is it a more even spread simply determined by what we remember mostly from our childhoods?