LNERW1

Please expect a short break from progress on the layout. Personal reasons- far more serious than lack of concentration or dedication. I'm fine, don't worry, regular service will return around the New Year. I'll probably get a bit done over Christmas too.

IIRC it was with cat hair found lying around the house- plenty of course!

Static grass too expensive? One of the cat people on this forum posted a video (i think on the IRM Catzilla DCC thread) outlining the use of cat hair to make grass. @Broithe or @DJ Dangerous I think. Large “popsicle” sticks work as uncouplers for tension locks- stick them under the loops and push up the hooks.

Two questions- when and where?

Brilliant! Hopefully the first of many trains to come.

Loosely laying out a longer stretch of track so I can have a go at properly running Ardree Quay. A little trouble has been had with power tracks and clips- all a temporary arrangement so no soldering- but otherwise no real problems. I need to have a look at buying some track so I can get cracking with the fiddle yard but I’m quite hopeful I’ll get some proper work done by Christmas. Happy modelling, LNERW1. PS sorry for the shite photo, phone was dead so had to use an iPad with no camera flash, in the room with the worst lighting in the house.

Los Angeles and New York aren’t getting linked by a high-speed railway in the next century, but think of if the Midwest was treated like, say, Ukraine (disregarding the current war and different cities- and note I’ve just used that as a good comparison off the top of my head, and maybe I could be off by a bit or a lot), connectivity would be so much better and the area would grow a more dense population. The thing is most of America likes their cars, and simply don’t want passenger trains. Outside of (and even in) the northeast (Boston, NY, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC) and urban-eastern midwest (Detroit, Chicago), passenger rail is basically never used and so becomes less dense, but a rail line is rarely more than 50km away, and is often a lot closer. At the moment Amtrak operates over less than 10% of the US network, most of that being either long stretches with no stops between large cities, or dense services all east of the Mississippi, that are still very under-utilized and infrequent. Even the North-East Corridor is rubbish compared to even Irish railways. (Let’s face it, we have shite railways on a European scale.) But let’s be honest it’ll never happen- America is ruled by car companies. It’s like the German auto lobby stunting high-speed rail but far worse. Maybe let’s trim back the thread drift as suggested above, I’ll leave it there, thanks.

To be honest I don’t think that’s a great outlook. Out of sight, out of mind is not an effective way of dealing with things. This shouldn’t be a platform for arguments about anything unrelated to railways.

Ah jaysus… ye’re all making me feel inadequate- quantity and quality? Alien to me lol.

I’m not sure if the Invision Community forum software has built-in thread locking, but I know it’s a feature available to RMweb mods. Maybe it would be best to lock this if you can, mods. Anything added beyond this point will be opinions on the above quarrel/argument/spat/exchange of ideas/battle/fight/whatever terminology floats your boat, as Gibbo seems to have shut off the modelling avenue. @Warbonnet @Garfield @BosKonay Best regards, LNERW1.

A little odd maybe to have this before any other DARTs are available RTR- not counting @murrayec as he is still overwhelmed with back orders AFAIK- but as it’s in conjunction with Alstom I have no doubt it’ll all work out. Don’t know why, but surely a big “proper train” manufacturer knows what it’s doing. I’ll probably be able to afford one by the time it comes out, completely out of era and period for me but oh well.

Wow! Maybe I should drop the hobby for a while and then start again- hopefully it will endow me with your skills! Obviously you have prior experience, but I envy your confidence and, again, skill!

I suppose long-haul, flying makes more sense, but I feel like it would be better to try to replace long car journeys with European-style, high(ish) speed, high frequency rail, it would eliminate a large amount of traffic and CO2 emissions. Not that any government will ever manage to push that through without multiple important people being killed by conspiracy theorists who think passenger rail is fascism’s greatest tool and Ford, GM, etc.-hired hitmen.

In fairness they do keep getting voted in so presumably they’re pleasing everyone enough to keep that out of sight and out of mind. The entire island of Ireland outside of Dublin, Belfast and a little bit of Cork has fallen into a rut of car dependence. It’s a little like America in that we seem to have forgotten how useful and important effective passenger rail (or in our case rail altogether) is. It’s unfortunate but unavoidable. Maybe the new developments in Dublin will spur on the rest of the country to demand effective public transport.

I have been known to post layout topics that don’t go anywhere and I thought I’d explain myself and prevent it from happening again, all in the one thread. Some people enjoy planning layouts, some don’t. I count myself among the former and have created enormously detailed plans before of layouts in many scales that I never plan or planned to build. I thought I’d stick up a few here as some people might be interested in reading all of my brain farts and maybe can find some inspiration- anything to feel helpful. My most recent idea that’s been floating around is a large balloon loop in OO/HO, with a large coal-fired power station at the centre of the loop, a Magnorail-powered motorway crossing the board, and some Soviet/British Isles 1960s blocks of flats anywhere they’ll fit. As with all (read: most) of the ideas in this post, I’ll outline this one in a later post, based on interest. Another recent enough idea, which I have posted a little about, is a massive model of Connolly and it’s adjacent junction, several Luas stops, North Wall yard and literally all of East Wall, in T scale. I still have no idea what size this would be, but likely at least 60 or so square metres, so not a likely undertaking. Going back to before I joined this forum is a London terminus called Liverpool Lane. This started out as a large sketch of a modern-image ex-LNER station in north London, based on a drawing by CJ Freezer, consisting of a double track tail chaser with a triangular junction feeding into a terminus. It later evolved into a much more realistic post-steam, pre-TOPS Western Region terminus, somewhere in northwest London. Another idea, more a track plan than anything else, I nicknamed the Bandaid. It has quite an odd story- it’s based on a pattern I once spotted on a mattress. After tracing it with my finger, I realised it was actually one compressed loop and not two overlapping ones. A *very* rough plan is reproduced below: I do have a few more, I think, but these, for me, are the highlights so far. If you would like to see more of this, please tell me. If not, that’s fine. I understand if you have no interest in my layout-planning brain farts. Best wishes, LNERW1.