It got so many responses that it collapsed inward on itself, making a cyberspace black hole that sucked in all the computers in ten block radius around the Bachmann Inc. headquarters building.  Your bill be be in tomorrow's mail.

Seriously, congratulations on a post that run up over 1000 hits.

Stewart, you might want to go back and reread my earlier posting.  I did NOT say it looked fine on photobucket.  I told you that the photo at the url you used looked exactly like what showed up on Bach-Man's Board.  Go up a couple of posts, click on it, and see.  It is still there at this time, and no, it is not just in my cache.  I checked it on my spare computer and on my wife's computer, neither one of which has seen that image before.  And it STILL looks like it does above.  Did you possibly link to a tiny thumbnail or something?

I like Atlanticcentral's differentiation of poles by function, but am left wondering what you call pole that support only tv cable?  The only time I have seen these is where the utilities were being relocated under ground, and the cable company was the last to get around to it.

However, I am sure a certain model railroad company would be delighted it we referred to out bare, unstrung poles as "Airwire poles.'

Not everything sticks to foam.  That is why I reccommended "Weldbond" by brand name, not just "white glue."  Our group's large scale portable layout is subject to a great deal of physical abuse as it is moved around the country and to a great deal of temperature stress in storage (+50 to -40 C. or a range of about 160 Farenheit degrees.)  Not only are the ties held to the roadbed and the roadbed held to the foam with Weldbond, but the scenery, which is a "porridge" made of diluted Weldbond and sawdust, is also bonded to the foam with Weldbond.  So far, after 10 years of road trips, and 9 winters in cold storage, nothing has come loose.  Incidentally, we used white "bead board", pink closed cell foam, and blue closed cell foam for the tables and even some ground up "packing foam" in the scenery.

With some help from Hunt, I got the DCC On Board decoder to accept values for CV19, but still not in Operations Mode programming.  It appears that the decoder does not accept OPs mode programming.  What this means in terms of Advanced Consisting is that you have to program each locomotive to the Advance Consist address on your programming track.  This in turn means that there is little if any advantage over Basic Consisting.

For anyone interested in consisting, let me explain.  With Basic Consisting, which works with every DCC system that can program a locomotive's address, you simply program all the locomotives in the consist to the same address.  When you send out a message to that address (using your throttle and command station) ALL the locomotives on that address, i.e. your consist, obey the message.  This is very similar to Multi-Unit operation of strings of locomotives in real life.  Not surprising, then, that consisting is also know as "MUing."

With Advanced Consisting, you leave all the locomotives addresses as they are but you also give each locomotive an additonal "consist address."  When a locomotive has a consist address, that is the address the locomotive will respond to in terms of speed, direction, and possibly other functions.  So with all the locomotives in an Advanced Consist having the same consist address to monitor for speed and direction, they will all respond together.  That is exactly what you want, and so far, is exactly the same as Basic Consisting.  But, and this is a big BUT, there are additional features.  One is that most decoders that support Advanced Consisting also support Operations Mode programming.  That means you can change a locomotive's CV's even when the locomotive on the mainline, whether it is stopped or running, and even if there are other locomotives stopped or running on the mainline at the same time.  So you can set one locmotive to a consist address, add another locomotive to it, and change the address of the second locmotive to the consist address even as they are running down the track.  Similarly you can add a pusher on the end of a train "on the fly" and turn its operation over to the operator of the head end locomotive.

The other "big but" is that with Basic Consisting, if you turn on the headlight of one locomotive in the consist, you automatically turn on the headlights of all the locomotives in the consist.  BUT with Advance Consisting, you can set CV's to enable the functions or disable them in each particular locmotive.  You can, for example, enable the headlight of the lead locomotive for running forward and the rear light on the last locomotive.

There are some other tricks possible with OPs mode programming, but let's leave that for another time.

 

Stewart, how about trying that image again.  The problem with your image has nothing to do with this board.  It looks exactly the same if you download it directly from photo bucket.  You can check it at its URL:
http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r188/seasaltchap/tpo.jpg

I have never heard of using a net for catching mail in North America, but that is not to say it never happened.  But I would be willing to bet that platform sweepers never got hit by flying mail bags twice.

Good point, chucknlead.  On my own layout, I have just the poles.  Anybody asks, I tell them the scale wires are so fine they are just having trouble seeing them.  Funny thing about the power of suggestion.  Some people have seen my layout and later sworn that I did have wire on the poles and they had seen them!

Hmmm. 
Trains since 1948 (Hafner windup.)
Electric trains since 1950 (Marx and later Lionel)
H0 trains since 1966 (Tyco. followed by many others)
G-scale trains since 1987 (Bachmann, of course)
12" to the foot since 1988 (Saskatchewan's only operaing steam locomotive)
And when I die, I hope they cremate me, mix my ashes with a shovel full of sand, and use them to clean the flues on the steam locomotive of their choice.

Nigel, do you know if LifeLike (Walthers) will still be offering a remedy to all users?  The link to it on the page you referenced is dead.  I see their recommended method is similar to my own, except I attach a wire to the brush holder rather than trying to attach it to the brush itself.

On the one and only small scale layout that I built on foam, I simply glued the track to the foam with Weldbond.  Some places I pushed a few 1-1/8 blue lath nails into the foam to keep the flex track horizontally aligned.  To hold the track down while the glue dried, I used both bricks and sand bags (I didn't have enough of either one.)  Once the glue was dry, I removed the nails.

Our group's large scale is also built on foam, 1-1/2 inches thick, bordered with 3/4" plywood.  The track is hand laid on ties glued to a roadbed of 1/4" plywood which in turn is glued to the foam.  I suspect that one could use the same idea in H0, gluing a roadbed of 1/4" plywood to the foam, then nailing the track to the plywood.  Predrilling the holes for the nails and simply pushing the nails in place instead of pounding them with a hammer would protect the foam from deformation.

Yes, on the pre-DCC ready S1.  One of the motor brushes is connected to the motor frame via the brush retainer cap.  The motor frame in turn is connected to the locomotive frame.  With one of the decoder output wires indirectly connected to the locomotive frame, you violate the rule that says "the track inputs and motor outputs of a decoder MUST be isolated from one another at all times" if and when one of the wheels touches the locomotive frame.

The solution I used was to make a styrene washer to put under the brush retainer, just like the other brush retainer already has.  Then I wired the decoder lead to the cap and reinstalled the motor.  The next step, making sure the caps are isolated from the locomotive frame when the motor is back in, is very important.  Use an ohmmeter or a GOW bulb and a 9 volt battery to make sure there is no conductivity from either brush retainer to the locomotive frame.

I don't know about accessory wires for heavy switch machines and such, but you could run the power for lighting buildings on poles.  You would have to use LED's to keep the current low.  A single LED can light a house or a floor of an office building using only 10 milliamps of current.  That is well within the rating of #40 copper wire, which is about 1/4" diameter in H0 scale.  In fact, you could run up to 9 LED's on a single #40 wire, or even a low power switch machine such as a Tortoise.  A Tortoise machine at the end of a 10' run of #40 wire would lose only a couple of volts, which is normally acceptable.  For LED's, the 1 ohm per foot for #40 wire is only a fraction of the series resistance required and could be ignored on runs less than several hundred feet.

For main feeders, you could use #36 wire, which is about 7/16 inches in diameter in H0, and is rated to handle 210 milliamps or enough for 21 LED's.  Need something even larger?  #32 wire, which is still less than 3/4" in H0 scale, can carry over half an amp, or enough to light  about 53 LED's.  The sizes are for bare copper wire.  Varnish insulated wire ("magnet wire") is a few thousandths of an inch more.  Paint it all black and it will look smaller than its true size.

Now for the problems:  If you try this, expect to spend many hours with a magnifying glass trying to get it to look just right.  The hardest part is getting it to sag properly.  I suspect that a momentary massive overload could heat the wire enough to let it sag convincingly, but whether or not that could be done without destroying the insulating varnish I cannot say.

What I can say, having actually seen it happen, is that anything strung on poles is an invitation to disaster.  Hours of work can be devastated in seconds if you or anyone else reaches for something on the layout and accidentally catches one of the wires.  In the case I saw, the fellow had used thread to simulate wires running all over his 4' x 8' layout.  He had done a marvellous job of it.  He was showing his layout to several of us when a locomotive derailed.  Without thinking, he reached for the locomotive.  Feeling the "wire" against his arm, he yanked his hand out of the way.  Unfortunately, his sleeve button caught some "wires" and he pulled out virtually every pole and "wire" on the layout.

From my observations, power (utility) poles are still used in the older parts of town, the parts where railways are most likely to be located.  And a question:  aren't the poles along the railroad right-of-way properly called "telegraph" poles?  If not, when did they change? 

And another that needs a bit of buffing up:



I don't think this was particularly high speed, but it would make an interesting model.

Several thoughts come to mind.  In no particular order:
 
(1) make sure there is no dc on the rails.  To do this, you may have to switch to your dc address (usually 0 or 1) and set the throttle to zero.  If the headlight is wired for half wave operation, then its brightness depends on what dc is on the rails.  I don't know if your locomotive headlight is half wave or full wave, (ie. returned to one rail, or returned to the decoder) but setting the dc to zero is easy to do.

(2) Is it possible you plugged the decoder in backwards?  If memory serves, a backward decoder will still run the locomotive but affects the lights.  Depending on how your decoder is programmed, it may have a dimmed headlight when the locomotive is backing up, and with a reversed decoder you are really backing up when you go forward.

(3) If you have extensively reprogrammed your decoder, an error may have crept in.  You might want to reset the decoder and see what happens to the light.

(4) It is also possible that you have a bad decoder that is not driving the headlight hard enough.  Do you have another decoder that you could plug into this locomotive temporarily?  Or another locomotive that you could plug this decoder into temporarily?

(5) Does your decoder allow setting the headlight brightness?  If so, it may be just a matter to changing a CV to brighten it up.

(6) When you say it is dimmer than when operated on dc, how much dc are we talking about?  If you are comparing it to the brightness you had when running the locomotive full speed on dc, then you are probably not going to get it.  H0 locomotives are normally designed for 12 volts maximum but a lot of dc power packs with put up to 16 volts on the rails.  So at full speed, the light is actually brighter than full design brighteness.  If the locomotive were not moving, there would be a chance that the heat from the bulb would melt the plastic shell.  Normally, with dc, you have motion when the voltage is up to maximum.  With DCC, you have full brightness of the light even when the locmotive is stopped and the plastic shell is not being cooled by movement through the air.  This is all assuming your locomotive has an incandescent light bulb for a headlight.  If it uses an LED or if you install an LED, then you can get lots and lots of brightness with very little heat.

As I said, just some thoughts.

If you used E-Z Track, it should not be too hard to disconnect major sections of your layout to isolate the short to some particular section.  Once you isolate it to a major section, you can disconnect one piece of track at a time until the short is isolated.

Chances are you have accidentally created a return loop, that is, a pattern that allows a train to traverse some of the track in one direction at some times and in the other direction at other times.  You might check for this even before taking any track apart.