Well, what is a walk-around throttle control anyway? It is a little hand-held control that you can plug in on several places on your layout. It means that you don’t have to be tied down to one place on your layout.

For example, for shunting manoeuvres you might want to be very close to the locomotive as you marshall up a train. At other times, you might want to be close to the straight, so you can see your train barreling down towards you. Or perhaps you have a turntable and you want to watch the locomotive closely as it comes on and off.

Inside the modified Railpower. The infrared receiver components have been replaced by a hard-wired connection terminated in an 8-pin DIN plug on the rear panel. The modification is quite simple.

Whatever the reason, you want to be able to plug the hand control into one of a number of sockets around the layout to closely observe and control your trains.

You want to be able to plug it in, set the train speed and direction and then unplug, go to the new location and plug in again, all without the locomotive faltering in any way – it should just maintain the settings, as if you had not touched the controls.

Of course, you have most of the advantages of a walk-around throttle with the infrared remote control version published in the previous two chapters.

But perhaps there are parts of your layout which will not let you use the IR remote control – perhaps they don’t have a line-of-sight back to the control unit.

Possibly, you don’t want the remote control version because it uses batteries and yes, the AAA-cells will need to be replaced from time to time.

OK, so you want the walk-around throttle; here it is.