Noel

Well done Glover. Excellent results. Layout looking fab. It reeks of real place atmosphere. I can almost imagine the 'Railway Children' running across the meadow to wave to passing trains.

Experiment no 2 finished by weathering track with a light spray of RailMatch sleeper grime on rail sides and track. The Peco foam underlay has blending in better than I had expected and the spray made all the difference. Also after the spray the medium grade ballast doesn't look as bad as before. Both of these are virtually silent btw. Next up will be woodland scenics fine buff ballast with the Peco underlay and another with medium for comparison.

Excellent. Very impressive effort. Getting all those cab shapes and body angles right with brass is some achievement. They should really look the biz when painted and glazed.

Thats a very good price for one of the best DCC systems on the market. We only had to connect two wires from our NCE to drive the entire layout. BTW, for the benefit of others, the 1.5amp Power Cab can be later extended to a 5amp system by simply adding a booster, and additional cabs can also be added so its cost effective starter option, and the cab is one of the best economically especially for sound.

Very nice. I particularly like wonderful scene above.

Thanks Patrick. WOW - I've nearly fallen off my perch with delight seeing both of those iconic scenes. Pure magic. There are some amazing layouts covered on this forum, but your layout is my personal favourite - it is simply fabulous and pure class.

Stunningly gorgeous scenes . I really like the nicely blended colour tones of your layout Patrick. Everything looks so natural and real world. I can imagine being on a train to Moate in the 1960s to visit a relatives farm. Would love to see that particular scene again if you had a spare black'n'tan livery loco to put in it.

Not strictly railwayana but I spotted this sign off the old Fenit railway track bed. No mention of a fine, but the consequences would be pretty self evident. Beautiful part of the world. What a tourism boost it might have been nowadays if it was still linked to Tralee and Killarney even by a single powered coach.

Thanks for posting for many super pics Broithe. Really enjoyed your post. Many superb layouts. Ellesmere caught my eye.

Looking forward to delivery date

Thanks for posting those super photos Kieran. Very interesting.

Brilliant. You must have been there once upon a time - classic imagery John. I vividly remember such scenes from the midlands many moons ago

As John highlighted, back in the days of the flying snail, most dairy infrastructure was short distance local from pasture to small local dairy, to market and direct to door, only later going through retail channels Churns by horse'n'cart, later trucks from farm to dairy and local co-ops. As Dublin grew road tankers brought milk to bottling plants and the horse'n'cart distribution direct to homes at 5am every morning later replaced by electric milk floats. It's hard to believe returnable milk bottle delivery to every home in Ireland was only replaced by retail 'tetra' packs only 25 years ago (i.e. as recent as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait when state of the art stealth fighter F117 was considered modernity). But I'd hazard a guess around 1906 when most of the rural branch railways were still intact a certain amount of milk must have been delivered to dairies in churns on rail wagons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_Ireland#/media/File%3AMap_Rail_Ireland_Viceregal_Commission_1906.jpg

Don't worry you are not alone, it caught out JB as well. That's what Ireland should do in future when the All Blacks perform the Haka - play diddle-i-a music to distract them

Agree it is fabulous. Reeks of atmosphere.

Hope it helps. IrishThump has a Gaugemaster Prodigy Advance2 so if there are any issues he may be able to help. From memory CV31 should be left at 16, but CV32 set to 1 before attempting to write to CV266, 523, 287, etc, as they are all >255. BTW, Out of the box MrSoundGuy's Zimo decoder limited the top speed of my 141 loco because CV5 (max voltage/speed) was set to a default of only 140 out of a max value of 255. I changed mine to 255 and the loco then was able to run at a faster scale top speed of 74mph. That Zimo decoder by MrSoundGuy is my favourite to drive because of the 'coasting' and 'braking' features. Enjoy. Attached CV settings I have used on an MM141 with this sound chip: DCC_Sound_141_Zimo_MrSoundguy.pdf

Hi TDR, hop this helps. On Zimo MX644D decoders: CV266 is master volume level (0-64) I used 40 as I find 64 too loud CV523 is the sound level of brake hiss (i.e. when F4 brake is applied on the move) CV287 is the duration of brake sound as loco stops - I increased mine to 44 instead of default 22 because the brakes only sounded for a moment BTW, on some DCC controllers you may need to set CV31 and CV32 appropriately to write to CV values above 255 like these, but I had no problem with the NCE. Noel

Nice find thanks. Don't you just love these old clips from the heyday of diesel trains on Irish rails. The music takes me back to the 60s.

Brilliant

Thanks. I am very pleased with the Irish RTR stock we have collected over recent years from Murphy Models, Irish Freight Models, Silver Fox, and others . Ten years ago it would have been but a dream to have access to decent looking Irish RTR stock and locos, unless you were prepared to build it and more importantly had both the talent and time to produce a good end result. Combined with suppliers of Irish kits such as Provincial Wagons and SSM, etc, we have never had it so good, and the quality bar is ever raising. Looking forward to IRM raising the bar even further when their models start shipping in the not too distant future. In the mean time I am still hoping to bodge some of my old LMS and GWR stock into some form of Irish coaches and goods wagons.

Hi Tony. It's 35 years since I have ballasted track, and the method I used then was quite different (ie. direct to baseboard, emulsion paint, pin track on wet paint, then sieve ballast material over track, wait to dry, then vacuum up surplus). With N gauge you may prefer an extra fine ballast. It seems N gauge ballast looks great with 00 gauge track Thanks Mike, will check out his site for 3mm cork. Cheers Dave. Enjoyed his video, he's entertaining yet concise and informative unlike many boring long winded youtube videos 'look what I made mom' that yap on for ages off the core subject matter. If I can get a bit of Isopropyl Alcohol in the local chemist I might try that with the next experiments. Is it compatible interaction wise with the 'fairy liquid' in the 50/50% PVA/water mix?

Thanks Wanderer. Enjoyed that.

Good advice. I find some photo hosting sites (eg: photobucket, etc) very convenient for sharing images on web forums. Photobucket and others allow you to define in your account profile, a default max image size which it will automatically resize during upload, so you will never get the image to big message. I have my sites set to max width of 1024px wide which keeps them below 200k in size so fast to display. Then you just wrap the URLs using standard BB IMG tags [noparse][/noparse] Some sites like photobucket, flickr, an smugmug, etc, allow you to edit photos on their site via web interface after uploading for cropping, adjusting image exposure, and rotating without breaking the URL link already posted to this or other forums.

Magical - Noel, I love every aspect of your layout. It looks fabulous and is alive with interest and activity.

I have the SSM kit and looking forward to making it when I get the time.