AndyMac1707817969

You could place a potentiometer in series with the resistor and adjust until you get the required brightness. You could then measure the resistance of the two in series and replace them both with an equivalent single resistor.

I seem to recall it was only the very first class 50s in BR blue, Illustrious and possibly Resolution had the issue with the decoder socket. I think at one time Hornby were supplying replacement boards for them or there was various workarounds

When I looked shortly after this post first appeared Hornby still had 1 of these left in stock. Jadlam currently have one on eBay, new for £129

If you ever run your own business then you will quickly find the biggest cost for any business is the labour. When British labour got too expensive they moved production to China where people could be made to work for peanuts. Over the last ten years or so China has been raising the minimum wage for a better standard of living for their people so production costs in China have been rising, Obvious they will still work for a lot less than the Great British worker will get off their sorry backside for. Maybe it’s time to look for production in another country where workers will expect less and the British consumer can get things for a price they think they deserve. I have never quite understood this mentality that seems to prevail in society today. I don’t work for peanuts and I don’t expect others to either, maybe I am in a minority of one on this but its seems to be a compete mystery to the average person that the cost of producing an item is in any way determined by how much you pay in wages. Costs go up, prices go up, it’s hardly advanced economics. Having absolutely no idea on how much it costs to produce an items in no way impacts on your ability to decide how much it should be sold for as its your right to have what you want. This attitude is only something that have sprung into existence in the last 10 to 15 years. When I was 16 you could afford what you could afford and that was it.

When I was young I got one loco for my birthday and one for Christmas. Apart from a few bits of rolling stock the money I saved to go on holiday that was it. Companies and certain institutions like Government unfortunately have to live in the real world where things cost what they cost and what you sell something for has to be more than what you make it for. They do not have the luxury that the general public have where something is what they ‘might imagine’, which of course means they just made it up. Hornby as a company rarely seem to make a profit so I am not sure why you might think their prices are too expensive. They hardly pay huge dividends on their shares. Bit like people complaining the cost of their rail ticket is too expensive when the tax payer is subsiding the real cost by about 30%. Surely to most sane people this means the cost of a rail ticket for example is in fact too cheap and does not reflect the cost of proving the service. When interviewed by the BBC commuters say they support wage increases for rail worker but of course the BBC never ask, would you support these wage increases if they were being paid for by fare increases. In their minds the train ticket fairy will pay for it. The average person seems no longer able to link cost and expense or taxation and public expenditure.

Just about everything made for film or TV has huge holes in it when it comes to facts historical or otherwise. To most people a Spitfire is a Spitfire, they can't even tell the difference between that and a Hurricane yet the Spitfire is described as iconic, ist more teh name than anything else. If you are not even sure it’s a Mk9 then is it surprising the researches, who lets face facts are not absolute experts in everything will not be wasting too much time in case one in a million can spot the difference. Entertainment is made for the masses and such details go far above the heads of the vast majority of people. There are practical implications, for example MK1 coaches and BR locos appear way before their time, mainly due to a lack of actual available stock to use for some pre-grouping railway company. Personally I enjoy picking holes in programmes. My wife is sick of me asking ‘why are all the lights and lamps in that room on’ when its broad daylight. I just wish they would get right what you might realistically expect, the news. Well when I say the news it’s not really the news anymore, more public broadcast social media. Now there is somewhere you would be hard pushed to even spot real facts instead of opinions dressed up as facts.

Two sides to this, what was your Father's weekly wage back then? People might find early 1980s prices attractive but not early 1980s wages. Of course this was all before we got Jonny Foreigner to work for a lot less than a Great British worker would work for.

In the early days GRNI adopted the same livery as the GNR, locos where apple green and the coaches varnished teak.

I believe the second engine pulling the scheduled train was a Sharp Stewart 0-4-2 Number 9 acquired in 1858 and inherited by the GNRI from the Dundalk & Enniskillen Railway

There is a fairly comprehesive list of GRNI locos here https://www.steamindex.com/locotype/gnri.htm Unfortunately a lot of the GNRI locos where built here there and everywhere and then rebuilt at the Dundalk Locomotive works. My great grandfather was a foreman there around the turn of the century.

There were two locomotives involved, the one pulling the excursion train and the scheduled service coming behind which the coaches smashed into. Both locos where described as of a similar type the difference being in the number of carriages as to why the scheduled train was able to make headway up the bank. The link below has photos of H class no 86 the loco I believe that was hauling the excursion train This is a 2-4-0 loco so a LNWR Precedent may be the closest OO produced model. From the of the overturned loco on the bank of the scheduled train this was a tender loco but appears to a 0-6-0 or possibly an 0-4-2.

Well in Northwest Frontier the loco must have had magnahesion to make it across the damaged Anchurón bridge. Von Ryan's Express, another one filmed in Spain, well at least the final scenes. Just could never figure out why they spent all that time fixing the track when they could have just all went on foot through the tunnel. Must have been shorter than trying to walk around the mountain.

If you have the room for a wider board then you could have a board 4 foot at each end but narrows to 3 feet in the middle a sort of U shape so you stand in a recess and this would make most areas reachable. Either that of a wider board with a hole in the centre to stand in. A dog bone shaped layout, 4 x 4 sections on each end a 10 x 3 section in the middle.

With uncertainty in the economy and unsold stock and 2022 releases pushed back I don’t think it would have been realistic to expect much new this year. No point in making it if don’t think you can sell it. Would have been nice though to see some articulated Gresley coaches to go with the teaks but maybe next year when things will hopefully look brighter.

If you use eBay a lot either as a buyer and / or a seller then you will know the vast majority of items go for a lot less that they are probably worth. Although 99% of buyers are fine and great to deal with, as with anything dealing with the public you get a very small percentage who you just have to tell to just go away. I do not contact, nor expect to be contacted by people hiding behind a keyboard who are quite frankly rude and more often than not ignorant of what an item is current selling for. You do just learn to laugh at a lot of it, mostly people looking for discounts, not small ones, a loco listed for £100, you get a message, would you take £40? If I was looking £40 I would have listed it at £40 and it would have sold within minutes, deluded is not the word for it. You get to know the messages from the first line when they nearly always start by asking after your well-being, some amateurish attempt at phycology. You are sitting there as a seller, been selling items of nearly 20 years, over 4000 feedback all glowing (apart from the odd one from people who think you own Royal Mail) and you get contacted by someone asking is you really own this item, the photos could just be stolen from someone else. Other cases you accidently leave the decimal point from the postage costs and the message start arriving demanding an explanation as to why you are ripping people off charging £495 for postage on a £50 item. You would have thought they could have at least looked at all the items you have and realized they were £4.95 and not £495 and dropped a friendly and polite message. The best bit is they demand you justify to them this price. Not sure why they think I have to justify anything to them, clearly deluded as they are to their own importance. It is also worth saying that many sellers including myself sell all over the world. Items often go a lot more to overseas buyers than to those in the UK. A typical example of this is selling Irish models. For some reason people in Ireland think they are the only ones who buy Irish models, they may be the largest single group but 95% of the Irish stuff I have sold has gone to the USA, Europe and Japan. Several cases I have seen comments on various forums on items I have listed, mainly they will never sell, well they do and several months later that’s what everyone elses’ are selling for.

Quite correct, if the item is yours to sell then you can ask what you want for it. Simple fact if a seller only ever got what the entitled citizen thought they should pay for something then every business would have gone bust a long time ago. There are two parties in a transaction but if you listen to the entitled citizen you would think they are the most important person spending spare cash on their hobby while a seller may just be trying to make a living. They just make up a price out of thin air as to how much they think something should cost, no facts behind it at all its just ‘what they would imagine’! When selling on eBay you do get contacted by people who seem to think you are charging too much for something even though many have sold at this price. Maybe someone did die and leave them in charge of ‘model railway hobby’ but if you are not intent on actually buying I can’t see why they believe it is any of their business. You get other ridiculous statements like why are you charging twice the price this was when it was in the shops 10 years ago. Another favourite, why are you asking twice the price one of the sold for a month ago for half that and they send you a link. Of course they just pick the one that sold as a buy it now listed by someone who clearly did not know the real value and sold in 5 minutes of it being listed. Maybe they think they are the only ones using eBay who can search sold listings. Another common one is comparing your item which is twice the price of some completely different item still widely available from retailers. Personal favourite has to be those who contact you to insult you regarding your asking price and then expect a favour in the way of a discount by making you some silly offer, what planet are they on. To any business or private seller, customers as a whole are important but generally speaking individual customers are not unless they contribute to a sizable proportion of your income. So the ones that tell you they are not buying anything from you, well you are not exactly going to stick your head in the oven over it are you. If a £500 train for £3k is morally questionable then is also say a £100 loco for £50 also not morally questionable but buyers seem to have no issue with those morals. Guess for most people morality is a one way street.

At the end of the day they are all competing against one another. People want to pay as little as possible for postage so that is just going to drive things in one direction, downwards. The idea of pay less get more is hardly realistic. No courier can make money if they have to drive time and time again to a drop-off until the person is actually there. Pay for a one star and expect a five star service. Reminds me of those who bought a £100 holiday in Spain and then complained because the hotel was not very good. If any business is required to suddenly do ten times the thought-put of the rest of the year then there is always going to be problems. Margins are tight so they can’t just have vast resources on standby that may or may not be needed. Maybe the solution is simple, when a courier including Royal Mail reach the capacity of what they can handle then they should stop accepting parcels. Go to the post office to send your parcel and you are told the system has reached capacity try again tomorrow.

For spares you need to hold a large inventory of stock. Each item has relatively little value and even less profit. You then have to employ and pay staff to manage these. Many costs are the same whether you are selling a £200 loco or a £2 bit of plastic. Let’s face facts even being charged £2 for some spares would bring howls of discontent from some. There is no money in it and what percentage of people who purchase Hornby locos how many are actually fixing their own. You get this all the time. For spares to be available an item has to be economical to repair. People blame lack of spares for the throw-away culture but a lack of spares for any item is not the cause it’s an effect. There is little demand for say parts to fix a washing machine if a part is going to be £50. As most people would have to pay someone to fit it then you are probably looking at maybe several hours labour. All that is more than the cost of a new machine. I guess part of the issue is new items have become too cheap if they were a lot more expensive then they would be economical to fix. Again people seem to think others should work for peanuts so they can have what they want for as little as possible but it just does not work that way. They days of someone fixing something and calling it £5 for the time is long gone. Hornby do not own their own production facility so can’t produce parts on demand like they did when they were done in Margate. I am guessing additional parts are produced at the time of manufacture of the item but once they are gone it’s not economical to produce anymore. Hornby are running a business and have enough problems, they don’t need a loss making spare parts division.

A padlock indicates very little other than communication between browser and the server are encrypted. Anyone with a domain name can purchase a certificate and indeed they are now available free from places such as LetsEncrypt. For most certificates there are no checks, all you need do is have a domain name and anyone can purchase these. There are various certificate types such as ‘True Business Certificates’ where the site and business behind it are checked and scrutinized but the vast majority of certificates do not guarantee identity. You need to view the certificate info to see if the domain is issues to a spacific company or just a domain. Even if its the former, for most certificates of this type, no company checks are carried out.

Easier to select the 'Outlet' option under 'Shop'. Been there for a while

Hornby make both a railroad single bogie drive class 67 and a super detailed twin bogie drive version. As far as I can tell X6514 are for railroad version and as you have said do not fit the super detailed version. I tried asking Hornby but they just go by what is on their system. It’s not unknown to find that stated spares do not fit the model they are meant to. I had an issue years ago with an Arriva Cross Country Class 43. I was looking a replacement light unit for the power car. Even though the service sheet shows it as having the same version as the other super detailed class 43s at that time it in version fact has a completely different one. That time after an exchange of about 4 emails and several photos with Hornby they agreed it was not the same and sent me one they took from a written off loco. To this day the service sheet still has the wrong info. You really see this issue around different versions of PCBs and which loco takes wh

Cleaning it on a wet sponge I found never presents that much of an issue. On the iron I have a display shows the temperature of the tip. It does drop slightly when cleaning but comes back up to the set value within a couple of seconds. One thing that is important I think and overlook especially if you are doing a lot of soldering is a good stand. You often don't want to take your eyes off what you are doing to set an iron down or to pick it up again. A stand which you can just drop the iron into and with a guard to stop you grabbing it by the wrong bit is always a good thing

Problem with heating the joint is that lots of things you are soldering don’t like heat. I learnt to solder during a year’s work placement. Mainly component level repairs on PCBs, some very expensive PCBs (well when they were working). First you had to de-solder the old components before soldering in the new. A lot of the boards are made very cheaply and more than a few seconds in contact with an iron and the tracks lift or though-hole plating come out. A hot iron, small tip and only about a second or so contact of all 3, the iron, the solder and a clean joint all at the same time. Good soldering come down to speed and that only comes with practice you end up developing your own technique which works best for you. You can solder delicate things with a hot iron, you just have to do it really quickly before the metal can conduct the heat into any nearby plastic. If the solder joint looks spherical then it’s wrong, quite possibly you will end up with a weak or dry joint. A good bench magnifier can also be a wise investment.

Ideally you want a temperature controlled iron but it depends if you want to spend that much. It all comes down to what you are soldering, If you are soldering onto a large lump of metal that will conduct the heat away from the joint so you need a hotter iron. Professional irons you will pay over £100 for second-hand but you can buy a range of different tips and spares such as replacement elements. I use a Weller WSD80 I bought a couple of years ago when you could get them for about £60 on eBay second hand but this supply seems to have now dried up.

If you look at eBay there is one seller selling a lot of Pacer bits mainly bodies. You can try contacting them. They may have old chassis bits etc these bodies came from and may be able to supply what you are looking for. It has worked for me in the past. I also sometimes buy old busted items just for parts, take the bits I need and then sell them on for other to scavenge what they need