Firstly, sorry to the followers for not being more attentive to the blog.  My wife has Alzheimers and it has been getting worse this year.  Work on the layout has ground to a halt.  One of the big 'show stoppers' is how soon or far, additional care will be needed.  It is very hard to maintain motivation if we have to move into some sort of retirement / aged care village and the layout will need to be trashed.

I did some revised speed matching of locos.  I did have the coal drags with a max of 35 mph, but that was a bit too slow.  I bought them in and reset the top speed to 55 mph.  The result was not what I expected - because - I used the wrong marker for timing the 4 foot distance.  It was hidden by the notebook screen.  I did all the speeds at 3 feet not 4 feet.  The locos all ran 25% faster than I wanted.

 The black screw on the left is the start/end point (white paint on the ballast), the other marker is out of sight.

 When I close the notebook the start/end point furthest away is marked by the blue pen

I didn't want to make the same mistake again, the old notebook gets the 'blue screen of death' every now and then, so I bought an el cheapo notebook with an 11" screen, then I can see all the markers on the test track.

I can see both start/end points with the smaller screen.  There's even a ghost in the notebook taking my picture!

  The old notebook has a 15.6" screen and is just a bit too big.  But it runs XP.  DecoderPro runs sweetly on XP.  The new notebook runs W7.  DecoderPro doesn't do a simple load up and run.  It opens up OK, but I can't access my roster of locos and settings.  The data is there, it just wont be read by DecoderPro.  I think Malcolm Fraser was right "life wasn't meant to be easy".

I need to sit down and do some more work on getting the roster available to the new notebook.  I may even get to do that today.

Happy modelling,
Peter