Where to start?

Drifting off topic if I may...

Some aircraft wiring is insulated with Kapton, due to various excellent properties, but it has one fault unlikely to be seen in a model railway environment.

If the insulating layer is damaged or contaminated and the cable is carrying high current it can fail and the whole thing catch fire. I have seen some spectacular wiring loom burn-outs when a single Kapton wire has failed and taken the whole loom out.

Well that’s a bit alarming. But as you say, unlikely to happen in this hobby. Either way I’ll take care to apply the tape carefully.

The Valley Drifter train set looks good, I'm getting it in mail soon. But if you want to jump into DCC first maybe go on google and search up 'Hornby Mixed Traffic Train Set'.

Or maybe the Flying Scotsman train set, it has a good engine but a horrible controller it makes the engine sound like a generator. I'm actually not an expert on Hornby the Valley Drifter is my first Hornby train. I hope you take some advice from this, Goodbye! :)

HI DRC

Years ago I was into the Zero One system that Hornby was selling at the time, I put a brand new loco chip into a class 25 loco, it had not been on the track more than 10 mins before the chip bust into flames inside the locomotive. So never say it can not happen in this hobby

This is giving me flashbacks of the time I built my first PC and fully expected it to explode on pushing the power button.

I’ve been involved in several hobbies that involve fiddly electrical parts, so I’m fairly competent in working with that side of the hobby. However I’m fully aware that accidents and user fault can always occur. Not to mention just getting a bad egg, which is mostly out of our control.

Running that first loco around is gonna be hellish. sweat

Rob, continuing your drift further, if I may ….

You take me back 58 years to the 2nd year electrical engineering lab at Sydney Uni. This had a 240V 3-phase set up with a ring main bus around the walls, each rail around 20mm x 12mm cross section, so no problem with current availability. The bus was floating and the floor insulated so, if you kept one hand in your pocket and touched anything you liked with one finger, you were safe. Each station had an old 3-phase motor generator set. Wiring was solid core insulated wire, 2-3mm I figure and connections made by knurled nuts onto threaded studs fixed to the bus and all connection points on the motors/generators.

I remember one of the guys in my group standing in front of a running set, holding a wire already attached at one end, looking at where he wanted to attach the other end and doing an out loud exercise to convince himself that his connection point was at the same potential as the connected end. So he undid the nut and went to screw down the wire end.

Unfortunately, his logic was wrong and the potential across the 2 ends of the wire was 240V with a lot of current available. There was a moderately loud bang and his hand holding the wire was suddenly empty. The wire and insulation had vaporised, fortunately not enough heat to burn him.

But that was nothing compared to the day we were doing motor generator synchronisation. Both sets were connected to the bus and turning over and the aim was to synch them in phase mechanically and connect them to each other. They then just floated along with very light current draw covering losses in the set. But a group on the other side of the lab who had wired their set up using birds nest 101 wiring practice and went to connect their set way out of phase. Under such conditions, current draw is very high and the birds nest wiring started to get hot. There was a flash and a loud bang and the whole lab came to a halt. On inspection, there was about a foot long gap in the birds nest where all wiring had vaporised.

No fires Rob, but spectacular and memorable just the same.

Now returning to 12V DC.

PS. Built quite a few PCs in my time too. Only ever blew up one item. Unfortunately a motherboard so an expensive learning exercise.

@fishy

Yes - synching phase before connecting.

My last in service aircraft - the Victor K2 tanker had a 200v 400Hz electrical system, with four main engines and an aux power unit poking out this potential.

You had to wait for the phase lights to go dark before hitting the on-line switch to synch them, else it simply snapped the 1” diameter quill shaft between the alternator and the constant speed drive unit driven by the engine.

Get it wrong and incur the wrath of the tradesman sent out to fix it, which was not a five minute job.

You could always recognise a old hand electrician or painter as they always worked with one hand in their pocket. The former to avoid touching different potentials with each hand and sending that across their heart and the latter to avoid putting the spare hand on fresh paint.

Didn't want to make a new post about this, so I'll just ask here.

What year did Hornby move from RailRoad quality to the super detail models?

Was this a sweeping move across the whole Hornby range, as in, from X year all of our newly released products will be super detail. Or is a continuously ongoing process of updating older models to super detail?

The first super-detailed locomotive was the all-new rebuilt Merchant Navy introduced in 2000. The Railroad range started in 2007 with the traditional Flying Scotsman body on a re-engineered motorised chassis following the introduction of a super-detailed A1 and A3 in 2005.

Fantastic information there GS. Thanks very much.