At Macclesfield the chaps from WFRM kindly let me borrow one of their Digitrax UT6 utility throttles and I was very quickly sold on the idea of them (Thanks again guys). On the left one of the DT402 throttles I was using and the UT6 is on the right. The 402 has 2 throttles per handset and while this is a good thing, in the reality of an exhibition you don’t really use them much and if you do you can easily end up driving the wrong loco. The other thing about the 4o2 is after a while the buttons get a bit sticky and they use 9v batteries which these days are not cheap. I found that one battery would last 1 day, roughly speaking, per throttle. The guys at WFRM confidently say that the 3 AA’s the UT6 uses will happily last a whole exhibition. I’ll find out at Stafford in September.  The UT6 fits nicely in the hand and comes with a lanyard so you don’t drop them, yes I have dropped the DT402’s in the past – thankfully without damage! You can’t do everything on the UT6 that you can on the DT402, so they aren’t completely redundant but you can do everything you would expect to have to do at an exhibition.

Remember my thoughts on uncoupling in the dark?  No?  Well you can have a refresh here if you want to.

I ended up using a somewhat expensive laser UV torch which worked quite well if everything was set up perfectly. In reality though, because the light is so small, one slight ding on the coupling hook and you couldn’t see it anymore to pick up the links. Also the eye strain over 2 days was quite noticeable. Phil never really got on with it and I found myself reverting to the much cheaper pen torches that I also took along to shows.

A lot of talk is had on forums and social media groups of the “hand of god” and how unrealistic it is.  However experience shows that people are generally quite fascinated by the coupling up process. I wonder if it’s because of the darkness? I still feel that the cheapo pen torches chuck out too much light though and given that when operating (and viewing the layout hopefully) your eyes adjust to the gloom it can take a moment to re-adjust back after coupling something up.

The low tec’ solution is a simple rubber washer and a 2mm brass washer to drop the intensity and size of the light down.  Again Stafford exhibition will be a test for the new approach.