The Night Mail

[Dave Hunt]

6 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

With what solvent? 

 

NB 1/16" = 4 3/4" at 4 mm scale so pretty much spot on.

Plastic Weld AKA dichloromethane/methylene dichloride

 

Dave

 

PS Just seen the Bear’s reply - butanone isn’t as effective on plastic and won’t work on resin.

Edited June 5 by Dave Hunt

[AndyID]

13 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

I've one of the first Triang train sets, the R0,  containing Standard Track.  Like the traditional banana coaches, the track base can be a bit warped...

http://www.tri-ang.co.uk/RO Set.html

 

The last time I looked in the box, my coaches weren't so badly warped!

 

 

I had this one.

http://www.tri-ang.co.uk/rcxset.html

 

The coaches didn't warp by then. I still have them. The 2-6-2 was converted into a BR Mogul under a Kitmaster body 😀

[Dave Hunt]

5 hours ago, AndyID said:

Later I moved on to SMP. The later version is pretty good. I think I still have an unmade plastic base point kit.

That’s the make I couldn’t remember. I used their track and point kits back in the mid/late 70s and found the latter quick and easy to make even though I’d never made any track before. I also made plain track using copper clad sleepers in fiddle yards as well as some with ply sleepers.

 

Dave

 

Edited June 5 by Dave Hunt

[jjb1970]

Call me an amateur with low standards but I use N gauge Kato Unitrack. The downside is you can't get the sweeping curves you can with flexitrack, the upside is it's a high quality product which just works and let's me play trains on the floor.

[AndyID]

45 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

Call me an amateur with low standards but I use N gauge Kato Unitrack. The downside is you can't get the sweeping curves you can with flexitrack, the upside is it's a high quality product which just works and let's me play trains on the floor.

 

That's OK, while you are still capable of getting down to the floor 🤣

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[TheQ]

It's not the getting down on the floor, it's the getting back up again...

[jjb1970]

I also use Kato controllers. They're from the cheap 'train set' end of the spectrum and very basic but I find they work extremely well and my models operate very smoothly with them.

[polybear]

10 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

Plastic Weld AKA dichloromethane/methylene dichloride

 

Dave

 

PS Just seen the Bear’s reply - butanone isn’t as effective on plastic and won’t work on resin.

 

Thanks for the info Dave; I'm pretty sure that Butanone works well on C&L/Exactoscale chairs on plastic sleepers though - it's what Norman Solomon uses/used.

[AndyID]

36 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I also use Kato controllers. They're from the cheap 'train set' end of the spectrum and very basic but I find they work extremely well and my models operate very smoothly with them.

 

Since "going West" I've become a big fan of Kadee knuckle couplers. They are fairly unobtrusive but the main thing I like is you can park rolling stock anywhere without manual intervention.

 

The Kato controllers sound interesting. Considering how inexpensive electronic components are these days I'm amazed at how expensive a lot of the controllers on the market are 😀

 

 

Edited June 6 by AndyID

[AndyID]

6 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

That’s the make I couldn’t remember. I used their track and point kits back in the mid/late 70s and found the latter quick and easy to make even though I’d never made any track before. I also made plain track using copper clad sleepers in fiddle yards as well as some with ply sleepers.

 

Dave

 

 

Found the point kit. Pretty basic but it only cost 1.08 GBP

 

 

Here's a piece of the later version of SMP track. This piece has the phosphor-bronze rail. Along side is my 3D version also with SMP N/S rail. I tweaked the proportions slightly to make it look a bit more like the real thing. It's quite subtle but I think it's a lot better.

 

[bbishop]

20 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

When Tortoise point motors first became available I was a bit sceptical about their longevity as they hold point blades over by stalling out still with current applied. After seeing them used on some exhibition layouts I was involved with, though, when they gave no trouble I was convinced that they were OK and have used them ever since. So far I have known of only one failure in over fifty units and that was on the Severn Mill layout I worked on.

 

Dave

One should only use Tortoise point motors during the summer.

[AndyID]

20 minutes ago, bbishop said:

One should only use Tortoise point motors during the summer.

 

'cos they hibernate 😀

 

An alternative is to use an inexpensive servo, throw away the electronics and replace it with a micro-switch with a lot of hysteresis. (I've posted this somewhere on RMweb previously.)

[Dave Hunt]

2 hours ago, polybear said:

 

Thanks for the info Dave; I'm pretty sure that Butanone works well on C&L/Exactoscale chairs on plastic sleepers though - it's what Norman Solomon uses/used.

I agree that butanone works well for styrene on styrene joints but for styrene to wood I find dichloromethane better and it’s the only solvent I know that works with the cast resin chairs that my mate made for me and I used on the pointwork for my 7mm layout.

 

Dave

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, AndyID said:

 

'cos they hibernate 😀

 

An alternative is to use an inexpensive servo, throw away the electronics and replace it with a micro-switch with a lot of hysteresis. (I've posted this somewhere on RMweb previously.)

 

And with small servos being so cheap, you can afford to burn out a few until you get things right!

 

[Dave Hunt]

3 hours ago, AndyID said:

Here's a piece of the later version of SMP track. This piece has the phosphor-bronze rail. Along side is my 3D version also with SMP N/S rail. I tweaked the proportions slightly to make it look a bit more like the real thing. It's quite subtle but I think it's a lot better.

 

Like with most, if not all, commercially available track, that suffers from the fact that the sleeper spacing is constant throughout. Whilst that may be OK for long lengths of continuously welded rail, on older track laid with fairly short lengths of rail, the sleeper spacing varied along each length; as the rail joints were neared the spacing reduced. Not that I realised that during my 4mm modelling days or even when first getting into 7mm.

 

Dave

 

 

Edited June 6 by Dave Hunt

[PhilJ W]

4 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

I also use Kato controllers. They're from the cheap 'train set' end of the spectrum and very basic but I find they work extremely well and my models operate very smoothly with them.

I use a couple of Bachmann N gauge train set controllers on things like my test track.

[Dave Hunt]

I use, and have done for a long time, Gaugemaster controllers and transformers that I build into home made panels.

 

Being a dinosaur, of course, it’s DC and not the modern clever electronickery but the Gaugemaster units give very smooth and positive control.

 

Dave

 

 

[polybear]

7 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

I use, and have done for a long time, Gaugemaster controllers and transformers that I build into home made panels.

 

Being a dinosaur, of course, it’s DC and not the modern clever electronickery but the Gaugemaster units give very smooth and positive control.

 

Dave

 

 

As well as a lifetime guarantee

[Hroth]

10 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

I use, and have done for a long time, Gaugemaster controllers and transformers that I build into home made panels.

 

Being a dinosaur, of course, it’s DC and not the modern clever electronickery but the Gaugemaster units give very smooth and positive control.

 

Dave

 

 

 

And with slight modification, the turntable can be used as a spindryer....  🙂

 

[Dave Hunt]

The turntable uses state of the art indexing - I do it by eye. One of the benefits of using a Gaugemaster unit to control it is that as it approaches the point at which I want to stop it I can slow it to a crawl.

 

Dave

 

 

[Happy Hippo]

I was interested to see that Dave has a switch on his layout control panel for 'Legs'.

 

Jamie has one for 'Head Shunt'

 

I must now go and get one similar for my current layout  and mark it up (in true hippo fashion) 'Back Siding'.

[Winslow Boy]

Not only has he got one for legs he's also got one for 'ash' as well. 

[iL Dottore]

8 hours ago, AndyID said:

The Kato controllers sound interesting. Considering how inexpensive electronic components are these days I'm amazed at how expensive a lot of the controllers on the market are 😀

 

 

I am assuming that they are costly for the same reason medical text books are costly: limited and specialised customer base and thus no economies of scale.

 

Somebody like JK Rowling or a company like Sony probably sell more books/consumer electronics in half-a-day that the entire medical textbook industry/model railway controllers makers sell in a year.

 

With controllers, I suspect the cost is not down to the components (highly mass produced and very cheap) but with how those components are put together and how long that takes (especially with more hands-on as opposed to computer controlled assembly)

[iL Dottore]

3 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

Being a dinosaur, of course, it’s DC and not the modern clever electronickery but the Gaugemaster units give very smooth and positive control.

 

Dave

 

 

May I ask? Were the aircraft you flew also suitably "steampunk" retro?