Sean

A JCB has arrived onsite to shovel ballast.

There's a solid justification for each and every one of these busses...... Except for like two of them

Fleet Goals DJ, Fleet Goals.

lol i got one in the post from brian this morning

Dimming the floodlights like i was on about in my email made a nice difference. they looked good before but maybe a little too bright, and made the models look a little bit like they were in a shed under artificial light rather than in a shunting yard. In one way i installed a few too many but dimmed down im getting nice overall coverage so i think i called it right overall and theres a nice balance in illumination between the loco and the floodlights the photo is also heavily edited to make it look nicer

was there another cat related incident?

007 is at work tonight

reminds me of:

Spreading a different kinda. Ballast between the tracks today. And proof that no 181s have been harmed during the production of this layout The ground cover is making a big difference to the look of the models for me its also highlighting the code 100 track a little bit but its not too bad.

Any idea when they will be going out? still got an unpaid preorder i need to take care of...

lol its just sitting in the base of the casette outta the way

Today has been spent spreading ballast. Almost ready to flood it with glue

Im operating in smaller rooms and that particular issue is quite a lot more pronounced for me as well. I think the flip side to that argument could be in the case of someone who brings their layout to a lot of exhibitions and when there are a lot of people in the room they may have the ability to drive the speakers harder rather than have them drowned out by crowd noises. Or ya know, maybe some people like to bring the loco down to the local club every week and show off how loud and bassy they could make the thing compared to everyone elses, lol

I can definitely tell the difference but its subtle enough that I wouldnt really care, the horns sound better to me on the modded loco in the video, the brake squeal sounds better in the first video however, and the prime movers sound a bit different, but as i said above different means not authentic and the guys primary goal seems to be to make things louder by getting as much power into the top speaker as he possibly can. I personally turn all my locos down to 75-100 because i find it that bit more realistic to not fill the entire room with the sound of one tiny little machine and by doing this i am running the speakers well below their full power anyway so im thinking things would actually sound better with the 2 speakers at this volume rather then removing one. @DJ Dangerous its hard wire only unfortunately as you are swapping an always on function with a directional one.

So I am most definitely putting the lighting mod on my to do list going forward. I have been looking at the speaker mod for a couple of days mostly with curiosity thinking of just why he wanted to do this and what the actual percieved difference would be. having not looked at the pcb, I wasnt sure why the mod had been undertaken until i found these comparison videos, the descriptions of which shed some light on his reasoning behind this. It should be noted that in these videos he states that he connects the EM1 directly to the decoder bypassing any additional circuitry on the board which differs from what he says in the above video. The first impression of he sound is that its not really loud enough though, I have set the max volume to 192 and I'd still like it a bit louder so I'll have to have a look on the Lokprogrammer to see if I can increase anything. I wasn't sure whether to do this video or not, because I didn't want to be the person to criticise an excellent model, but from the moment I first heard it I felt like the speaker setup wasn't quite getting the best from the sound file. It comes with a sugarcube type speaker under the PCB as well as an EM1 type speaker on top of it. From past experience, you need to get the EM1 working hard to get the best out of it, and in this two speaker setup it wasn't doing much. I decided to try removing the sugarcube and connecting the EM1 directly to the decoder, I also turned up some of the individual sound slots to make the loco a bit louder, which again helps to get the best from the EM1 by achieving more bass. You can hear sounds in the file that you couldn't before, and the higher frequency sounds like the horns don't seem to sudden at all either. If you haven't seen my original video of the model you can find it here, this has the original speaker setup and volume. Now whilst the second clip definitely is louder, louder isnt always better and I personally like to run all my locos at a reduced volume which would probabaly reduce the effectiveness of this mod by the authors own logic as that would be running the EM1 at a reduced power level. It should also be noted that "this sounds better than that" is very subjective and doing the mod would certainly be altering the authenticity of the sound, which may be more important to some than out and out loudness Everyone will have a different opinion on this, so see the videos and come to your own conclusions

VID_20230815013604.mp4 After Dark, An Asahi liner passes through.

these 12 pre orders just popped up on the Marks Models site, due date and price.

ugh its like the whole "light machine oil" debacle all over again

so i got these tubes of grease in the post today; https://www.roads-and-rails.co.uk/products/twin-pack-model-railway-grease?_pos=4&_sid=319807b91&_ss=r problem is there is absolutely no description of what types of grease they are or what areas they should be applied to, does anybody know? the white stuff looks just like the stuff you would see inside the A class bogies.

Was pretty underwhelmed by the iPhone speaker I fitted the last day so this morning I'll be attempting to squeeze in this fancy one from road and rails.

VID20230810000352.mp4 Perhaps the finished product will explain things a little better

This is an open source wireless throttle for DCC++ it has a 1 inch OLED display and onboard charging via this full sized usb-b connector, I could have used micro usb here but I did not because i hate that particular connector. Overall it is a very simple build consisting of 4 components(plus the extra usb port and battery) works with or without JMRI. https://github.com/flash62au/WiTcontroller/ Now its time to wire it and hopefully flash the software and away I go.

Something different for tonight. Been looking forward to this for a little while.