SRman

We had a visit from an old friend we hadn't seen for quite a while. He brought along a few unusual visitors.

I recently noted that Lendons of Cardiff have the Hornby class 73 parts going at very reasonable prices, so ordered a chassis, motor bogie and a complete dummy bogie, plus some crankpins and screws for Hornby steam locomotives, for a grand total of £29.14, including the postage to Australia. This allowed me to utilise one of the spare bodies I have, of E6015 in early BR blue with small yellow panels and grey roof and windscreen surrounds (a repaint I did some years ago). I had a set of suitable buffers that plugged straight into the holes in the buffer beams. The Pullman rubbing plates were already fitted to the chassis. I took the cab interiors from one of the surplus Lima chassis, and also found one of the central chassis weights from a Lima version. All that remained was to solder some wires to the pickups and brushes, and hard-wire a decoder (I chose a Lenz Standard v.2 decoder with the 8-pin plug cut off). A quick test on DC with the wires loosely held together proved the pickups and motor were working perfectly, then the decoder was wired in. I painted a wash of red paint onto the buffer beams, and cut off the oversized sand pipes from the bogie mouldings (something I have done to every single Hornby or Lima class 73). And E6015 is ready and waiting to enter revenue service. I can, of course, change its identity at any time with one of the other spare bodies, but for now this one suits the time period I am running.

A few photos with my new Rapido West Midlands Daimler Fleetline. Compared with the prices of other diecast bus models, this is very good value as it also includes built-in lighting and poseable front steering. While a Birmingham bus doesn't really belong on Newton Broadway, I plan to alter the livery a little and put it into service as a second-hand bus with a more southerly operator (undecided whose, yet). I am so impressed I intend buying a second one and giving that a complete repaint. Rapido put out a warning that these models require only a 9 Volt supply, and that 12 volts might blow a component on the PCB. As a temporary measure I hooked this up to a variable voltage wall wart, set to 9V, but it also worked well at 7.5V, with no loss of brightness, although I would not have minded the interior lights being a bit dimmer.

A few from a recent lunchtime walk around Blackburn Lake.

I have strung some multi-coloured LED strip lights parallel to the existing white lights now, and am experimenting with lighting effects. These photos show blues being used to represent a late twilight effect.

I did something very similar with most stock that had pivoting axlebox carriers, using Blu-tack, which retains a small amount of resilience to cope with uneven track but prevents them pivoting. I have never gone to the more permanent solution with glue, but if I did, I would try to use a glue with a little bit of 'give' once dry.

ESU non-sound (i,e, LokPilot) decoders of v4 and v5 have the facility to program in a delay to cater for working with a LokSound decoder in a consist. I'm not sure if Zimo can do this or not. The upshot is that if ESU decoders are used, one LokSound and one LokPilot, they can be adjusted to work with each other in the same train.

Just a thought: could the loco be momentarily shorting through the points? The Zimo decoder has overload protection built-in, the TTS does not.

What Ford (and a few other manufacturers) listed as a "mandatory option".

I fitted the pipes to the cab end only of 20 142, and glued the etched name plates on, then gave her (him??) a stretch with the pseudo-Dreadnought coaches. I posed it beside a Met Bo-Bo, but this one is actually No. 8, 'Sherlock Holmes'. This is the reason I chose 'Sir John' rather than the alternative class 20, which also bears the number 8 and name 'Sherlock Holmes'. I do actually have 'Sarah Siddons' in preserved livery.

Back to British: My Bachmann Collectors Club LT class 20 arrived today. It has had a quick test run and a few CV tweaks applied (mainly to lower the top speed and increase the time taken to accelerate), but is otherwise straight out of the box. I will attach the etched name plates later, and maybe some of the buffer beam details, which may have to be cut down to allow me to retain the tension lock couplings, or I may actually detail up the cab end and remove the tension lock altogether. I envisage using it to top-and-tail trains with 'Sarah Siddons'. 20 142 'Sir John Betjeman' is here posed on my combined programming and photo-shoot track.

A short video of the Jeco X2000 running, crossing the Piko DB ICE 3 unit.

For my model that was fine: I had modified it to class 101 style with the yellow diamond multiple sockets filed off and painted in the refurbished white with blue stripe.

More X2000 photos.

Having received a decent tax refund this year, I treated myself to another European model: something just a little rare and different. It arrived today (Wednesday), amazingly after being sent from Sweden on Tuesday a week ago. It is a Jeco SJ X2000 set. The basic set has the power car plus three trailers, including the driving trailer, but I added a Bistro car as well to create a 5-car set. I also opted for the Zimo sound decoder, factory fitted. The glossy box and packaging give a very good first impression too. The power car has a good amount of weight built-in to its metal chassis, and the finish on it and all of the coaches is also impressive. I do find the SJ grey scheme a little dull, but that's the livery I saw them in when I was in Copenhagen in 2018. A quick test and a couple of CV tweaks saw it running faultlessly around Newton Broadway. The sound was very loud, so I adjusted the master volume, CV266 from its default of 65 down to 25. I also tweaked CVs 3 and 4 to increase acceleration and deceleration times and make them slightly more gentle than the defaults settings. The red tail lights are pre-set on this decoder to flash.

During the changeover period from trolley poles to pantographs on Melbourne's trams, there were some routes and areas where both could be used, and some which were no-go areas for one or the other. Nowadays the system is only geared to pantographs but there may still be some wiring capable of accepting both, particularly in depots and their approaches. There are still a couple of railway level crossings where trams cross, and those had to be differently set up for pantograph usage on the trams, compared to before when all the trams had trolley poles (the trains had pantos from way back). We still have some Z3 and A1 class trams, like 247 in the third photo) running around that used to have trolley poles: the solution when pantographs were fitted was to crudely cut off the trolley poles and leave the stub sticking up. The Melbourne W class in the first pic is actually in Denmark in their tramway museum, but still has its trolley poles (picture taken in late 2018). The W class retained for use on Melbourne's streets all have rather inelegant pantographs fitted - they are so oversized they remind me of Heljan's first attempts at the class 86 locomotives. The City Circle tram in the second photo, though, was still fitted with trolley poles at the time of the photo - it is an old photo. B2 class trams (fourth photo) had pantographs fitted from new.

The remaining warm white LED strip has been wired up and fitted to the frame. I still have the option to fit extra strips with different colours to vary the lighting, but I am very happy with the result as it stands now. Two of the photos were taken with the main room lights turned off. The last shows that the area in front of the village is a little darker because it is in front of the frame. With the room light on it isn't as apparent.

Progress has been made with the lighting frame, although there has been one minor disaster. I inserted the piece of square section wood to take some of the strain as a temporary measure until I can repair and replace bits. Fortunately it isn't that expensive or difficult to fix. Further along, I have the framework standing properly, and have tried out the first strip of LED lights, using the warm white ones. The result was better than I had expected. The first of these two photos shows the effect with the main room light on, and the second shows the result with the room light turned off. And to illustrate one of the reasons for having the more distributed light pattern: a photo without my or my phone's shadows spoiling it.

My latest extravagance has been to fit legomanbiffo sounds into my LT Museum/Bachmann S Stock train. This required two LokSound decoders - one for each powered driving car. I put lights in some time ago, using direct pickups from the track to power the LED strips, but a couple probably need the wheels cleaned and pickups tweaked as they are flickering a bit. I did a very quick run to demonstrate a few of the sounds. About two-thirds of my Underground tracks are, well, underground, in tunnel, but I kept the recording going to capture the traction sounds as the train gathered speed. Braking uses F5, and I seem to have judged it rather well, considering I haven't had much practice with it yet. The speakers I used are some square mega bass types from Roads & Rails.

We know what they could have looked like in large logo blue from 25 322 and the preserved class 40 that was put into LLB for a while. I wonder if any might have got into Regional Railways liveries too.

Yes, Hornby. They cannot be Mainline or Lima, the only other contemporary mark 1 coaches. The Mainline roofs were integrally moulded with the sides and ends, while the Lima ones were also part of their glazing.

Yes, it built up then remained pretty constant. Those 30 seconds felt a LOT longer, didn't they?

This one was, as far as I can ascertain, tectonic in origin. I was merely illustrating that the area is rather more geologically active than many people realise. Apologies for any confusion I caused.

That's almost certainly the case. Back in the 1970s, Victorian Railways here in Australia bought some Hitachi suburban trains, initially run as 4 +2 car units with three driving motors. These all had the pans at the leading ends, which was fine while they were spaced along the trains. Then they reformed them into 2 x 3-car units with driving motors at the outer ends of each three car set. This meant that now the two inner DMs had pantographs with much less than one carriage length between them, they soon found that the extra strain on the overhead lines was causing the droppers to let go, even at our usual slow suburban speeds (VR considered 40 mph points to be "high speed"!). The trains were still being delivered at that time, so an amendment was made to only the last 10 or 20 DMs to have their pan at the rear of the coach. That was too late to save the problem, so strengthening works had to be implemented, adding extra dropper wires to the OHLE. Our trains run on 1500V DC, but suburban trains don't have quite the power draw that the freight locomotives would have that required two pans to be up to feed the one unit, but most Melbourne suburban trains have run with one pantograph for each motored coach, with the exception being the current X'trapolis units, which have one pan for a 3-car unit. From all this, one can see just how much of an effect two pantographs on a high-speed train could have on the OHLE, especially if they are too close together.

It was near full strength here in Melbourne. I'm in the eastern suburbs, but it was felt all through Melbourne, and much farther afield. Our friends in Geelong and Gheringhap felt it very strongly too, and another friend in Echuca, on the Vic/NSW border as well. There is something to be said for having a wooden house as it can flex without falling apart. Fortunately we suffered no damage, but there was a fairly old brick or stone building in Chapel Street Prahran had a partial collapse. We have had a few much smaller quakes over the years, but that was the biggest one I have ever felt. New Zealanders and Japanese people, and even some in the USA (like around Los Angeles) are much more used to such things. The news said it was felt as far north as Sydney and as far west as Adelaide. What a lot of people don't realise is that Victoria had a lot of volcanic activity on the past, and that many of those volcanos are not extinct, merely dormant. There is a world of difference in those two terms.