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Wind!


confused?
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Yep, something that never even entered my head. Daughter has been out in the (chilly) sunshine this morning and has had an issue. The trains if they get hit with a gust are blown right off the rails, the engine is fine but if she runs the 2 larger carriages. Whoosh, they are on their side. I know weight is the answer but, where d you put it on a carriage. Waggons are easy, just load then with something. Or am I wrong there too?

Words of experience anybody?

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There's not a lot you can do other than weighting everything down which isn't always possible. It's just one of the many obstacles we face outdoors and in my case I simply do something else until the wind eases down. I think if you take notice of what people have been posting over the past couple of days there's very little appears to be running so most will be in the same boat. But yes, in order to have something for the little one to run add some loads to a few wagons if it's nice enough to be out there and save the coaches for calmer days.

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Ah ok. Just another obstacle then. It does appear that the track has at least one area developing a name already.

We noticed little swirls of dust and whatnot swirl around the corner of the kitchen just before a train flattening gust (by afternoon it would level the whole train, engine included), like dust devils.

That was all she needed "Aye we be negotiating Devils Turn!", "should nae be up on Devils turn in a blo", comes from my ( drama obsessive) daughter in a not all bad Scots lilt..

So Devils turn it is. 😄

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5 hours ago, confused? said:

Ah ok. Just another obstacle then....

Just one of many but you'll learn to live with them and find a way round them all.

5 hours ago, confused? said:

...So Devils turn it is. 😄

It's good fun putting names to areas of your layout and your daughter's made an excellent start. I went through the process some time ago naming sections of the layout after various locations around my place of birth - some of which have long since disappeared.

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Talking of weight, I spent Tuesday evening in an intricate attempt to insert lead inside the boiler of a Hornby Black 5 loco to improve its adhesion.  As this is often referred to, I'd assumed this would be easy.  But of course few jobs are as straightforward as you hope.  The boiler space above the driving wheels turned out to be mostly taken up by the motor.  There was some limited space above the front driving axle, and I decided not to put anything forward of that to avoid any risk of unbalancing the loco.

It was also hard to gauge the height of the space available, as getting the body on and off the chassis is tricky, always with risk of damage to fittings.  If I'd had blu-tac, I could have used that as a height indicator and also to wedge lead into the boiler, but there wasn't any around.

My lead was a small folded strip that had literally fallen off our roof, probably 2mm thick, which was just the job.  By cutting layers and putting them in place iteratively it was possible to build a lead sandwich at the right point on the chassis.  This was finally held down (I hope) by the pressure between the bodyshell and the chassis.

Altogether it was a lot of effort for little extra weight installed, but the following day the loco did seem more surefooted and managed to haul ten bogies without slipping, so that's good enough.  Some attention to my ageing wood track base might also help, getting rid of awkward twists and unplanned gradients.

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