Model Railway Forum

Walkingthedog wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 3:43 pm Very nice loco Steve. I always tried to dispose of moulded coal. The one thing model railways never get right.

I have a jar of crushed steam coal from Haworth for that very purpose.

Mine is from Didcot. Nothing looks like coal except coal.

Got mine from the coalman £39-50 a bag now.

Think mine came from the coalman (coalperson) via Didcot.

Mine came from the Southampton MRE in about 2019 - genuine Welsh coal - I think WTD spotted it on a stall. I usually remove the fitted coal load, give it a coat of PVA and the sprinkle the real coal over the top - sometimes it requires a coat of matt lacquer.

An issue with small tank locos is that they tend to suffer relatively poor running due to their short wheelbases and fewer pickups than larger locos. Of course you can fit stay alive capacitors but my past experiences with them have been less than rewarding and you have to be very good with a soldering iron to add them to a TTS decoder.
When Hornby announced the new Bluetooth decoders with plug in stay alive and sugarcube speaker, I saw this as an opportunity to upgrade some of my smaller locos.

This however introduces a conflict - small loco plus decoder plus speaker plus power bank and virtually no space in which to fit them.

I opened up my Hornby J15 that had been fitted with a 8 pin direct fit decoder, which just about filled the available space without anything else being crammed in. No space in the boiler area, not even for the larger TXS decoder and there’s a weight stuffed inside the coal load.

20230324_102820 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

In the end I drilled a small hole in the cab floor and secured the stay alive and the sugarcube speaker in the cab (both are eventually hidden by the crew). The decoder was a different matter - the J15 has small weights in the side tanks secured by screws, so I popped one out and the decoder just clipped into the space with no further mods needed. All the wires were tucked up inside the firebox in the space where the old decoder sat and the body screwed back into place.

I don’t yet have access to the HMDCC app so programming is limited to changing the address and using the default sound file but I’m rather pleased with how this has turned out so far.

https://youtu.be/9dpxwjrM2NI

Can you guess what it is yet?

20230324_105155 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

16D17E99-4F73-40EC-A751-1481D852C28E by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

If that is supposed to be a bungalow Steve I’m afraid your printer has failed.

Walkingthedog wrote: ↑Fri Mar 24, 2023 12:22 pm If that is supposed to be a bungalow Steve I’m afraid your printer has failed.

I almost took that seriously!