Sean

At this stage ive put them onto a good range of IRM stuff as well as the accurascale pfa and both types of baby GM. In general they are working for me on anything with kinematic or bogie mounted nem pockets but fixed nem are generally incompatible (more on that later) For me to be satisfied they must be able to go through my set of peco settrack points crossing over, so im setting the bar a little high. the only caveat that i have found is that on locomotives and certain wagons (including P42) you must space the coupler out or buffer lock will be commonly experienced , this is consistent with reviews left on the IRM site when others have tried using them on locomotives. its not really a big deal and if you put a small amount of pva onto the very end of the dellner, set it to your needs and come back the next day the glue should be solid enough to pull a train whilst still being removable from the socket later (first few times i done this the glue unstuck the next day because i had'nt added enough out of fear of permenantly sticking them in) Looking at your photo it looks like you've seated them all the way into the socket so i have a feeling you will be derailing from buffer contact rather than the ol, coupling flick. Heres what my A looks like with a flat for comparison; What i have found is that whenever I try them on a new piece of stock and get buffer lock on the crossover, spacing them out until the face of the magnets are sitting just proud of the buffers, they are spaced out a tiny bit on the flats but by a good amount on the loco. NOW!, These photos highlight somthing that has been ticking me off for a little while. One of us, likely me, have put the dellners on upside down! Anybody know which way is supposed to go up? I aint changing mine either way

Have you anything from Tinahely? the station i have planned (mostly in my head lol) is sort of a hybrid of three stations, Initially I was looking at gorey but the sheer lenght of the place made it unfeasible to do properly so i started looking at the other stations on the network and stumbled upon tinahely which in my head is a cut down version of the track plan at gorey, So essentially as a modellers comprimise I will be building the gorey station around the tinahely track plan. then after that its going to resemble Arklow in terms of surrounding buildings and surrounding roads and infrastructure, that evolution is more of a conincidence though. Your latest book is on my list for within the next week or 2 which will undoubtedly help me, have you got any copies left?

192 arrives in with her first liner load after being transferred to the yard for long freight runs

15 minutes later. Methinks it was very generous to allot an hour to this task

kinda feeling bad for my 192 which does not see enough time on the layout so shes in for the works tonight before being transferred to east wall tomorrow in anticipation for a new project. mag couplings iphone 5 speaker 645 loksound should take me about an hour or so,

You know they make tablets for that

4 trains seems like a good rule of thumb, 12 dependant on load sounds very misleading. https://ncedcc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201479649-How-many-trains-can-I-run-on-a-Power-Cab- (I think this is official NCE documentation, not sure) @Leynyshould check out this link to as a follow up to questions raised in his thread. my own system is 2A and they recommend 2 or 3 trains in the documentation so i think this is a good rule of thumb. totally agree about the blanking plates, I usually incorrectly refer to them as a dc decoder as technically that is kinda what they are there for. re the non standard function list, I usually just leave them alone as with the more advanced controllers you can usually put a custom label onto functions, I can see why you would be more inclined to change to a standardised set with a basic interface such as that of the EZ command.... I actually have a bit of a soft spot for that controller too as ive got the analog version here (ez control) and i do miss having hands on control of a throttle from time to time, sometimes using an app is boring

the stock should go around fine for the most part but alot of the time you will run into issues with the buffers and or couplings binding and this causes derailments. so start with short trains and keep a close eye on these areas for fouling.

true but its a good bit of extra work for a simple 1-10 address change

the notches are the rpms the engine runs at. so notch 8 being full throttle and notch 1/2 being barely moving. everything comes as 3 by default, theres probabaly an easy way to reprogram it using that controller but youd need to check the manuals, i usually do it by changing cv values with my laptop. I would avoid using the analogue mode on that controller as damage can be possible quite easily. once you have this all worked out you wont want to go back to dc operation at all https://www.bachmanntrains.com/home-usa/images/E-Z_Command_instructions.pdf Page 3

THIS

fun tip: load up a heavy train and turn on drive hold whilst its stationary, set desired notch and toggle drive hold so that the train is crawling on a high notch. toggle it on and off as you see fit until the train gets up to speed, once up to cruising speed turn on DH once more and drop it down a notch you can simulate a long heavy train very easily now bliss

if you turn the controller from say 80% to 0 it will slow down based on programmed momentum. if you press the brakes during this you should be able to perform a much sharper slow down stop a quick stop. theres also the hand brake and train brake and i think they all work differently from what i can remember. the emergency brake is pretty self explanitory. theres also manual notching instead of drive hold but you need 3 buttons for that to work fully. I mainly just use, lights, engine sounds, horns, drive hold, and manual notching. I dont usually bother with the brakes at all and have a dedicated emergency stop button incase of runaways so i dont use the e brake either. I tend to use manual notching on heavy freight and drive hold for passenger work but both functions achieve mostly the same thing it just comes down to personal preference about what one to use

have you tried to run any "second radius only" trains through that circuit to see how they handle it before you go tearing it up?

I would LOVE to see IRM making the loco and turf wagon.

Lol i never would of thought of it being the same thing.

been taking some time away whilst i sort out some other stuff around the place but yesterdays arrival (the bus) prompted me to get in for a tidy up and small running session, which then turned into me putting up the backscene and making a small carpark for the station as the train ran around, the code 75 seems to be very smooth and well laid. also have the unfinished dutch van on the line for testing purposes. still need to find somewhere to put all these green boxes

Are you referring to like a pure graphite stick from an art shop @murphaph?

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when i looked into this a few months ago the consensus seemed to be that these three terms are used generically by manufacturers to allow them to avoid listing specific specs of lubricant to buy and best practice would just to be to go out and buy specific lube and grease from your local model shop. that said there are a few things ive learned over the years that might help. Silicone oil should be fine - I used to use it to oil my airsoft guns and in particular a part called the "hop up" which was an adjustable piece of very soft rubber that the BB strikes at full velocity before travelling down the barrel to add back spin. this was a specific recommendation and we were to NEVER use wd40 (dont wd40 your model train either lol) "sewing machine oil" seems to just be a different terminology for 3 in 1, I have the bottle of singer machine oil here and when you read closely it seems to just be 3 in 1 in a fancy bottle. same nozzle etc. in the end i tried a little bit of hair clipper oil as the hair clipper has lots of plastic parts and it seemed to fit the description of a light machine oil perfectly. I later read that this too is probabaly mineral based so could also be unsafe but so far things have been grand and if i need to relube ill use something more specific but it seems fine for now.

definitely looks sandy to me

id go for 5 or 10 in cie as well.

Perhaps "a man we know" can investigate the true story here and bring us the inside scoop from wexford street.

I didnt actually realise we were waiting for additional mk2d's lol Perhaps thats a good point as I dont recall hattons making ANY mention of the upcoming 141's, are they still listing the mk3's as upcoming?

outside of the arduino method the other end of the scale is the roco and nce options which most people seem to go for, I like the roco and have played with one a little and the app is nice but i dont think it can do anything that my arduino system cannot and is a little restricted as it uses its own protocol(not too badly mind you). however it is plug and play mostly straight out of the box. I think you need to stop an ask yourself how do you want to drive the trains? do you want handheld controls or do you want the ability for app control over bluetooth(and maybe you want both eventually). Do you want your trains to be smart controllable ie automated runs eventually etc or will you always drive them manually. Do you want something you can take out of the box and just plug in and go or do you mind spending additional time setting up a system for the first time. There are also small DCC controllers out there such as the bachmann ez command and ive always liked the look of these for their simplicity but at the same time they are supposed to be very limited in terms of programming and you might not be able to access all of the locomotives functions with one of these. @DJ Dangerous has one but i dont know if he has used his one too much yet. they come up used on hattons from time to time. Whatever route you go down, you will need to work approximate power needs for your layout before you start shopping. every decoder on the track will draw some amount of current even when doing nothing. it can be wise to leave some overhead for safety reasons and or future expansions.