Monthly group therapy

First Thursday of the month and its time for the monthly meeting once again. I took along My ed's as this months offering. Another chap had a pair fof D locos on the way to being finished which do look quite good, and make me wonder if i could build one that works tolerably in Nz120.

One of the more interesting discussions centered around wires and the whole physics (OK, wake up again now) of electrons zipping through wires to their destinations. Now normally i treat the whole electrics thingy with great suspicion, having been forces one morning in Christchurch to rewire a layout in 5 minutes before the exhibition started to get trains moving (Note; when traveling make sure the electrics guy is crated up with the layout to make sure he can't escape!).
however this was quite interesting and made a fair bit of sense.
Apparently the best wires that you can use for ling runs are those with single strands, with a bit of flat copper shim actually being the best. This all sounds a bit daft, but the physics behind it is sound, and talking to the chaps later it works incredibly well for Hi-Fi systems at a fraction of the cost of those fancy gold wires people are 'tricked' into thinking that they need. There are of course the problems of flexibility and wires possibly breaking so my take would be to get hold of some wire that has 2-3 bight thick copper wires and use it as a bus running under the layout. Of course, wiring for DCC you just take feeders of the main bus at certain points.

Then we all headed down to the shed to play some trains. The Host had just had surgery on his hands (carpel tunnel) and so was rather limited, and I had wired the last crossover that afternoon to get the whole yard completed. as the following photo shows, the point work is quite spectacular (and is all had laid and runs very well).

"slightly out of focus again"

all his locos are fitted with sound chips which is quite impressive and oppressive (well to me, I'd rather have remote uncoupling).. Some time was spent running trains, locating problems and playing with the various bits a and bobs buried deep in the chips programming. Apparently its not helpful if you have some clown saying in a loud voice "oh, that will be Cv 78 then" (pick a number from 1 to 256 at random with ones over 100 a good bet). Apparently some people can actually do this ( and be correct), and if you are reading this, you should get out a bit more.

Apparently you can also get a layout to work with 1 wire to the track an done wire back. Strange I know....