george356

Wow, fame at last! How will you handle the rock star lifestyle, I hope it doesn't spoil you

I like the look of the paint scale half way between the chimney and the handrail. You should be proud of the work you have done on this loco, Mick.

Cor, that looks great!! I am 65 and remember the days of steam very well, and that is EXACTLY how they looked when the mainenance teams, the shed crews and the loco crews themselves realised there was no point spending time cleaning them up as they were going to the cutting torches within a few weeks anyway Top job, Mick.

Top notch, Mick, and great instructions too. Thanks very much, it is inspiring me to a) Buy a load of 16t minerals and b) Get weathering

It's probably the same these days too, Griff. Keep the lid and the vest but add a clipboard and a couple of pencils With that lot who would question you?

Although you claim not to be an expert on weathering Mick, I am sure that those wagons would stand against anything I have seen offered for sale at shows for silly prices. Any chance of a tutorial, maybe even some video of how you get those effects?

I'd like to see the capacitor that keeps the house "alive" for 5 hours, Chris I think you are within an ace of cracking the problem though, having the DCC Concepts decoder with the wires attached is a big plus. The probable fail point of your experiment will be the diode, probably gone open circuit, as you most certainly will have already figured out.

Most Americans would pronounce it Ch eye chester, with the emphasis on 'eye', but it should be pronounced as Chi chester with both ch's as in chicken. As to how it got its name, it is partly Roman ( the chester part) and partly Saxon (the Chi, a corruption of the mythical Anglo Saxon king of Sussex, Cissa).

What did you try, Chris, to avoid others repeating your experiment (and failing too)? If my memory of electronics is reliable (not always the case these days ), to charge up the cap from 15-18 v AC you will need to rectify the input to DC and have the capacitor as close in operating voltage as possible and be a high value ufarad, as we discussed previously. The discharge path back to the motor is the unknown, IMO. Do you discharge through the decoder or directly to the motor? Hmm................ that is the question. ETA - a little googling has found this - where the poster has found the decoder bridge rectifier and has soldered wires to the pads on the decoder board. He is able to apply 12v to these wires and drive the loco. I think that from this point he needs to use a voltage regulator feeding into a capacitor and he has cracked the problem, what do you think?

Aye, I have got a Class 101 DMU on pre-order (green with speed whiskers) - no announcement of its release yet though

Lol, once the weather improves I suspect that 'I' will be that suitable friend. I know Rod personally from our shared interest in sports cars and he is more than welcome to run whatever he wants on Cherry Parkway (as he already knows )

If you DO put lights in, Chris, I would appreciate a photo tutorial (as I am sure others would too). In particular the positioning of resistors and any rectification needed.

I totally agree about the Peco re-railer, a boon for those with shaky hands, long sight or a bad back

I wonder if he is getting wind of your intended action, Ian. Maybe he reads here, or has someone who tells him? Strange that after all this time there is suddenly movement from him.

I would have thought 5 amp would be more than suitable, Ian. When I went about wiring my layout I didn't bond the rail ends, I just used the fishplates to make a mechanical connection. I fed a dropper from the middle of each metre length to a ring bus around the layout. My thinking on this was, with end to end bonding you are relying on the soldered joints between each rail length for total continuity, thus when you get 40 metres away from your power feed you have 38 bonds and 76 soldered joints on each rail (+ & -). A break or dry joint in any of those soldered connections means either loss of power or a high resistance to the rest of the track from that point. It was a pain in the butt wiring all the droppers, but that was done before I set foot outside, all I had to do once out there was solder the droppers to the bus, and for that I used a soldering gun more than capable of bringing the joint up to temperature. (it was 150watt and made light work of it) I don't regret going down that route as I didn't fancy trying to bond the ends together at ground level outside (bad back, bad eyesight etc) Sorry for going on so long, but if you take a look at pages 10 & 13 of Cherry Parkway you will see me doing the job. George