ColinB

It is a standard Railroad Flying Scotsman. I think the original valve gear is out of stock the part number is X9820. The Railroad valve gear is more rugged, what you can do is replace it with the more detailed valve gear as long as you replace the cylinder block as well., the part numbers are X9382 and X9557 respectively. Doing a quick web search you still seem to be able to get these parts. Just looking at you photo again, to fix the valve gear you only need the little screw that has fallen out. I don't think Hornby sell them separately but perhaps they will send you one if you phone Customer Services. It is also a late version of the Railroad Flying Scotsman as it has the cast pony truck integral with the chassis as opposed to the plastic one you screw on. I have built many of these from bits so I know them quite well.

I know Lendons and AC Spares get them from Hornby, in fact Lendons has a list of parts that he doesn't hold but can get on back order from Hornby. None of these items appear in the Hornby spares on the Hornby site. Generally I have the only parts Hornby are good for are motors but you have to hit the window of when they have them. Everyone goes to Peters Spares which is why he is the first to run out.

Interestingly I was looking at the Hornby spares available on their site the other day. Most of the spares seemed to be from locos well over 5 years old. I have bought motors off of them but generally it is a very short window when they have them. Now if you look at Lendons. New Modellers, Peters Spares and the rest they seem to have much later spares. So basically I just get the opinion they are left with the spares that basically never sold. Perhaps what they should do is write lists of what we used to call in the motor trade "fast moving items" things like replacement buffers, couplings and dare I say it charge a sensible price for them rather than in their case way below what others are. That way at least the things that easily fall off a model could be replaced.

From my preorders wait, generally the time from decision to product is two to three years. As to the spares yes he is right, they do make a lot of locos and they can't be expected to keep spares for all of them but sadly you cannot get spares for a lot of the recently released locos. Good interview though.

I wondered that but it was hard to say from looking at the Service Sheets. If someone could tell me the dimensions I have a type 7 one sitting in front of me that I took out of a Thomas the tank with Mazak rot.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115464201125 or you could try a Mabuchi SH-020SA which people say is better.

I have just run mine and yes it runs perfectly ok. You might need to remove the detailing at the end you put the NEM coupling as the vacuum pipe etc. might interfere with it. On my layout with its sweeping bends it was not an issue but points were a problem. There again all Heljan locos suffer from that. The other thing that did surprise me was that the new ones are exactly the same as my ones which must be about 8 years old. So you get directional lights but no cab lights and an 8 pin decoder. I would have thought they would updated the cab lights and fitted a 21 pin socket but they didn't.

I use Peco Streamline and I bought the gauge, although I found it was easier to make one out of wood with the right spacing. On certain curves though I found I had to increase the distance because of the "swingeout" of carriages. I suppose it all depends on the tightness of the curve. The one where I had to do it was a lot tighter than my other curves but it was still greater than second radius.

I think it is not that big a capacitor, it will probably round off the edges of the square wave PWM, so a lot depends on what frequency your PWM runs at. I doubt it would make that much difference, the biggest issue is they can go short circuit, which does cause a lot of issues. I suppose it depends where the micro tries to read the back emf but I must admit I would be surprised if it made that much difference.

When I was fitting decoders to my locos with Ringfield motors I use Zimo MX600R decoders they are rated at 0.8 amps. I tried several different makes and these worked the best and didn't self ignite when the loco stalled at some points (some did although their current rating was the same).

Of course you can, the function tables though and photos for setting up the HW7000 all refer to Hornby locos. Of course you can load an equivalent Hornby setup if you are putting a HW7000 into another loco. Then if you are like me you have a load of LokSound and Zimo sound decoders from different sound suppliers it is not going to do that. I was just pointing out that using the z21 app means that you have to do a lot of that work yourself.

I must admit I don't know how Hornby do it but I assume Loksound and Zimo have probably a standard set up, pointer table to separate functions containing the individual sound entries. It must be pretty constant because the likes of YouChoos, Road and Rails and others have a standard way of adding their own recordings. A bit like how we used to add calibration/tuning data to an engine control unit software. They just have to agree to a common format. Either way it doesn't help much, Hornby likes to be insular. To me once you have the sound file it should be pretty easy but as I say it is probably the support functions that take the time.

A decent DCC system you can control with an app, I have the z21 app that I use in conjunction with my rechipped Digikeijs. I must admit I prefer a pc front end with a mouse but the z21 app is pretty good, you can load a picture of the loco and set up the function keys, of course the HW7000 front end does all that for you but only for Hornby locos. The z21 also has the advantage in that it uses the Digikeijs as a pass through device so you don't have to define a pure DCC loco twice (once on the HM7000 and once in the Elite/Select that you are using with the dongle). You can also control two locos on the same screen in landscape mode.

Actually you would be quite surprised, I have worked for avionics and automotive. On the automotive the electronics were generally small teams and in the case of of an instrument cluster at one point, only one guy. On EEC (powertrain control) we initially didn't have that many people, similarly on radios not that many on software. Hornby probably have added complication because they have to provide menus for the HW7000, if it was straight DCC they could turn it round very quickly, as is demonstrated by a lot of the sound decoder suppliers, who I gather have even less staff. The difficult bit is getting the necessary sound recording.

May be next time Hornby shouldn't give a pre released copy to Jenny Kirk for her to do a demonstration to everyone for a currently non existent product. No wonder you guys are getting so much flack.

Ok enlighten me, what happens on Monday? As to the original post, where is Hornby going to find one of those to take some recordings? It is not the sort of thing you are going to find on a preserved railway.

Thank you, that is why I couldn't find it. Must be the only one I didn't check. Without offending too many people, don't Hornby think it might be beneficial to make it easier to find.

I haven't checked for ages, but where do I find the link to the spare parts pages? I have checked under shop and support, but I can't seem to find a link. I know they still sell motors because if I google it I get a link but there has to be a proper way to find them.

Have you actually looked at this forum lately, a few posts about HM7000 but the posts have been drying up for months. I must admit I use RMWeb most of the time so if this forum becomes unusable so be it.

For a start it is wrong, secondly it was implying I was old and senile. Now if you are happy with that label than I will not complain. Actually you didn't read my post there was no mention of court. So your guys are using style sheets, explains a lot.

No I fully understand web tools, as I said I don't really care what you think, I use apps all the time, hence how I know a bad one when I see it. The previous iteration had checkboxes, now you have changed to a drop down menu which is probably similar to the iteration before the checkboxes although it wasn't on a drop down menu. I used to write this stuff for a living so I know a little bit about it. Now the RMweb page has embedded links in each heading so if you select Dapol it takes you to the Dapol page. It is pretty easy, definitely in C# it is. Raw Java doesn't have that so generally you use some add ons to do the same. From what I remember when I talked to my friend's wife who teaches how to design apps, generally they use a tool to make it easier. Either way you have decided that is what you are going for, so that is it but please don't try to belittle me with technology XXXX. I may be old but believe me, the fundamentals of writing software never change, been there done it. I missed the bit about style sheets, that explains a lot.

Really so the tear up of all the menu options, completely changing the front end. In my book that is not a planned release. As to things moving on in the last thirty years yes you are right but that doesn't mean I haven't kept up to date, Thirty years ago we were using assembler because high level code wouldn't fit in the available ROM (yes write it once), then there was C, C+ and C sharp. Actually I take offence at that last statement, do it again and I will report you to Hornby.

To be honest it doesn't bother me that much, I just find it annoying that whoever Hornby employs is so naïve. When I went on a software course many years ago because I was involved in safety critical software, the guy explained the different models of how you develop software. We used to use the iterative model where you change a bit at a time, so it is easy to backtrack to an earlier release if something goes wrong. Hornby have obviously gone for the big bang approach where you change it all at once and then spend forever trying to fix it, losing customers in the mean time. If they are happy with that who am I to complain. I am lucky I grew up with computers programing so it isn't a problem, my concern is for those that are not so fortunate.

I have a Heljan class 47 with a TTS decoder fitted and I don't remember any issues ( I haven't run it for a while). TTS is supposedly rated at a lower current limit than HM7000 so it should work. My only suggestion is try them with a different DCC decoder and see if you get the same effect.

Actually that is the issue, you and 96RAF spend your time heavily involved in Hornby that you don't notice the simple things. People always default to this thing about not liking change they use it as an excuse, change is good if is for the better, if it isn't you are just wasting your money. I must admit I can navigate around the new format, I see very many faults like reiterative menus where you effectively could go round and round in circles but again that is not my issue. If you guys are happy with it then I will leave you to it.