I’m in London and I saw a hst

Wickes, thats where you get your wood from. I never have wonky bits from Wickes. Just as much choice, but when they deliver to you they hand pick the bits for you and you always get the best ones. At least in my four years of expeirience buying timber from them.

Ive never been keen on Dapol. The old club I was at once, we had a bit 00 gauge layout with lots of different locos and stock from all different decades. The only issues we had were with Dapol rolling stock, namely the damn six wheel milk tankers. Droopy couplings, back to backs on the wheels so far out they fell off on straight track, bent and warped chassis which caused them to teeter totter on the centre axle. and even now, my brand new Dapol large prarie in 00 stutters like a mother****** on practically every single point on my layout -_- I know the issue here though, pickups. Not aligned correctly, or possibly the "sprung" centre axle insnt sprung enough to keep at least one set of wheels on the track. Im thinking either stay alive fitting, or trying to fit extra pickups on one of both of the pony trucks. Ugh. Personally, I would be nervous about buying any dapol models at all! With that said though, my dapol 00 gauge Class 121 is a delight. It does stutter sometimes though.....which is odd given that it has a total of 8 wheels collecting power.........its not that smooth either.....i might fit that with a stay alive aswell....I will see.

I have stopped buying Graham Farish and Dapol. All have had issues with poor running (mainly wheel wobble) Even rolling stock, has bad wheels that wobble. Even brand new replacement wheels in the pack. They look good but the quality is crap.

Umm, I am in the middel of replacing all bar one of my Dapol Locos with Farish with the odd Sonic for good measure. It is also worth saying that I have preowned Farish that work better than new Dapol. The only issues experienced with Farish have proved to be simple operator error when adjusting C.V's. 🙂

You haven't been unlucky many people experience issues with dapols Tender drive, It's like they try to copy the old Bachmann n scale 4-4-0 technique, Bachmann was making loco drive 0-4-0s and 0-6-0s in the 1980s and to Today (Updated motors), Sams Trains and others had derails and problems

Really enjoying this, looking forward to trying a similar build as my n gauge layout progresses.

I've only had problems with dapol. I have Farish, rapido, kato and dapol. My dapol B1 gave, and still gives problems. Stopping and starting, pausing, just a jumpy runner. I had an A4 that also gave me trouble. The driveshaft comes out way too easily imo. My other steam models are fine, i even started getting dcc sound ones as my confidence in the other companies grew.

Boah is' das winzich :-)

Good morning Jonathan! Some impressive stuff here! Can't believe you're able to drill holes so small! I love how you've persevered and gone through iterations of design / implementation to get a better working model! Hope painting everything doesn't impede the mechanism! I was quite surprised to hear you talking about setting frequencies to control the servo positions! I've dabbled with servos as you know, using an Arduino, and there's at least one library available where you simply set the angle you require, or am I misunderstanding? Cheers, Ian.

Very impressive

Excellent bit of signal construction Jonathan 😊

I am in awe that you have made an N signal without gluing it solid, the engineering after this is amazing code stuff is fun, there are PWM boards that drive them with an I2C interface, can be useful, a PiPico is pretty powerful though

Did you intentionally name your layout after the famous forest moon from Star Wars?

was gonna say there's also an issue with the Executive set showing dual tail lights but it seems HSTs started doing this circa 1983, ahead of the rest of the BR fleet. Originally they used just one tail light.

have you considered the possibility your locos are being sabotaged by ewoks

slow or fast its lovely to see these Trains go round and Yes I did believe these looked fast close to their known real world Speed

T- gauge ha ha AMAZING, can't wait to see your new long oval layout, subbed oh I see! this Vid is Nine months old, I will look up your videos to catch with things

That’s smaller than Justin Trudeau’s brain

Just moving to N gauge & having researched on forums I have already decided to go down the Japanese route as I am not overly bothered about accuracy in running the correct loco's. I have a Tomix train which was a second hand new purchase. It runs amazingly on my Kato setup & the crawl is outstanding.

i have shifted to N gauge now and immediately picked up on the forums to dump dapol in favour of any Kato stock or even German stock from abroad. Whilst with oo scale i found Hornby engines even brand new at £150, were unreliable with many similar problems you have had with your locos. Had mostly diesel classes like the 56 as a child which ran several times until it stopped. Later on in my teens, bought a brand-new class 90 off Amazon, which burnt the motor out on its first run. Hornby warned me they weren't liable to repair the loco, but did it anyway free as it was still in warranty. After that, i stopped all model rail purchases of bigger locos from Hornby and switched to a different scale, but that was mainly due to scale and size.

Good as a step-by-step video, then. But the loose end to your tape measure is on purpose, so unless you've damaged it, it should work like this: - an internal measurement will have the hook end pushed IN so that the measurement is correct in that way. However, if you are after an external measurement, the hook end has a bit of 'give' - that's the thickness of the end hook which slides OUT to accommodate for the hook's thickness. A couple of tips here - predrill for the screws, especially at the ends of the wood to stop splitting. One drill bit the size of the screw's shank, and a thinner one that is just enough to give the screw something to 'bite' on. The other is, hold the end of that plywood you are cutting off with one hand and raise it slightly as you work - that'll stop the saw binding and the plywood tearing out. Personally, I'd have clamped the main piece, and then held the cut-off piece slightly (an inch or so) upwards. And - just mind the furniture: cutting thin plywood is quicker if you don't saw through the stool! And a tip for those starting out and finding warped wood... get your lumber retailer to rip 3/4" or 19mm plywood to the widths you want the frame to be.

I mainly own Graham farish locomotives and rolling stock but also German and Japanese models as well including a few others.

I havnt had much luck with dapol steam locos havnt had a good one yet details great but mechanicals noisey and poor performance as for the diesels the lights stop working after very little running not good

Hi Jonathan, what radius curves are you using on your layout? My Large Prairie struggles a bit on R1 curves. Cheers Nick

Very nice! Unrelated to this video, but I just got a Graham Farish WD Austerity 2-8-0 today! It’s a somewhat old model, if you consider 2019 old. But it’s a splendid runner, and have really nice detail. I recommend you purchase one if you can find one.

Hi Jonathan. Many thanks for this video. Like you, I pre-ordered my loco early and it has recently arrived. I'll now need to order a decoder. Was the Bachmann decoder just one you came across first, or did you look at others?

Very nice indeed Johnathan

If you haven't had another go at soldering the rails, theres a good chance this is a nickel iron alloy of some kind, akin to low grade stainless steel which will be magnetic, sanding, degreasing and a lot of heat quickly using a short blunt tip along with an aggressive flux and a flux free solder containing some silver (rosin will interfere with the acid in your aggressive flux) This will be the best chance you have. 60/40 tin/lead will do in a pinch too, get in and get out before the heat spreads. Placing the track on a metal or glass surface to dissipate the heat from the plastic to stop it melting will help too. Alternatively you could look into "wire glue" a conductive glue that would suit this application especially if you have a Dremel style tool to make the rail joints overlap instead of butt together. Either way its fiddly work and I wish you the best!

Good morning Jonathan! This will undoubtedly become a very useful reference for me when I come to fit the decoder to my model! I went for the same decoder in the end! I did find one that supported RailCom, but I think it would have been too large to fit inside the loco! Argh! Instructions! These must be the worst I've come across yet! Also, it does annoy me that they make it so fiddly to get inside! Why oh why are those boiler support rods designed like that? Anyway, great little instructional video! Hopefully my decoder fitting will go as smoothly! All the best, Ian. P.S. The Revolution Trains class 128 needs running in on DC for one hour in each direction! :)

Do you do any z scale?

Don't know why dapol just do tender drives like bachman, I have a dapol A4 its very noisey but works ok.

Hi Jonathan! Another really interesting video! Funny, but I always think my model trains run far too fast rather than too slow! Interesting observation about the difference in model and real life speed though! I wonder what it would look like if you mounted a camera to the train looking at right angles to the track? Would probably seem much faster! I was going to mention the Super Creep motor in the newer HST sets, but someone beat me to it! It's the same motor that's in Dapol's class 33, and is super smooth at slow speeds! I wonder why the motor speeds up though? I can't think of a plausible explanation unless the momentum settings act for a lot longer than we think they do!!! All the best, Ian.

Wonder what the G force would be on the trains going round your corners on your set to scale

Very interesting video, I did some similar tests using camera frames to calculate the speed with some of my HSTs a few years ago. What I found the most interesting was the difference between the older power cars and newer ones. As of 2020, Dapol changed the motor they used in these sets to a 'super creep motor', and while the slow speed running is much better, it does compromise the top speed. My older models were achieving a good 150mph with a full set! But they are quite inconsistent, some would do 150mph, but others would struggle to reach 100. So maybe the new motors are better overall?

Well that was fantastic and i notice when standing over a layout the speeds seem to be slower but when viewed at board level they seem faster. The youtube video editor allows the magnification of the time lapse but the set up with sensors and laptop is brilliant and amazing how they increase as they warm up.

I approve of Monty Python references. If you want to increase the speed, incidentally, and you are using DCC, you can always just increase the track voltage.

African or European swallow?

The HST is actually capable of a higher top speed (148.5 mph). The line restrictions keep it to 125. So, the Kato, arguably, is actually far more correct. Interesting video again!

Extraordinarily professional and proficient work. Not a fan of N gauge and never really have been, but I watched it end to end because of the intrinsic quality. Not sure I would buy Dapol - ever, as it appears from this that you are directly financing and 'enabling' the furtherance of enthusiastically poor quality goods. Consumers deserve better.

Good morning Jonathan! It's so annoying when our locos don't run properly, and I can't believe that Dapol's "no quibbles" guarantee promise was met with a response of "we've not seen that problem" before! Isn't the point of a "no quibbles" guarantee that the customer is always right, so whether they've seen the problem before or not, they should simply replace the faulty unit? At least that was my understanding! And how poor that they sent a different unit back to you with even worse problems! Dapol have certainly gone down in my estimation! Anyway, I've just taken my dummy unit out of storage and whizzed it down the 2nd radius curved 3% incline on my test track, and while it does initially roll, it stops halfway down! Now, this isn't unique, and I have other rolling stock that also stalls on the descent, but the majority of these are medium sized wagons with fixed wheelbase, rather than ones with articulated bogies! It does appear to be more free rolling when on a straight, so maybe it's the tight radius it's having problems with, rather than an inherent problem with the bogies? I'm just making excuses for it now! Lol! I look forward to seeing if you find a fix! All the best, Ian.

Interesting - I have three N gauge Dapol HST sets and have not noticed this. I do run them at a scale speed of 200km/h (measured with software). Remember - N gauge is 1:148, so 1mph in real life is 148mph in N gauge. Walking speed is 3mph - so an HST at full speed should be less than a third of walking pace. A good way of testing if you don't have software is to find a video of an HST of the same number of cars as yours going past at full speed, time how long that it takes to pass, and see how long that your model takes to pass at its full speed.

Thanks for the shout out, for some reason youtube keeps removing my comments? So here is attempt 3: I posted on the dapol digest about this issue, I think you may find it interesting just how common this fault is! With a fleet the size of mine, I've encountered nearly every known issue with these models, but this has meant I've been able to find the cause and a fix for most of them. If you have any issues in the future, I'd be more than happy to help. I'm on a fb group called the intercity 125 modellers group, if your on fb, have a look for it and post your problem you are having and I'll be able to help. Hopefully this comment isn't removed by yt like the other two, and you can see it.

Hi Jonathan - I've got 3 HST'S - run fine in one direction but make a God awful grinding noise in the opposite direction! Must check the dummy power car as I've never really checked them out before. Thanks for the info. Cheers Euan

Weight would be an issue with them staying on the tracks.

someone posted a fix for this on n gauge forum ages ago as I recall. i think it was a few simple cuts to the chassis or bogie.

Who knew you'd get prototypical corporate reliability with a train company

Well done 👍🏻

Hi Johnathan, that would be an interesting subject to calculate the scale speed. What type of decoder have you fitted?

defitently issues with dummy power cars not rolling, have a number of sets Hunts magnetic couplings defitently help keep your rake from seperating. I have a kato 800 which is the best train in my collection, the difference is night and day.