Dukedog's Blog

Hi Frank,

 

The key to understanding Templot (at least, from my perspective!) is to get your head around pegs and notches. Take a piece of plain track on the workpad: it has a start position, which is the datum point and this has the peg of 0. This peg is placed somewhere on you drawing workpad, and from this peg Templot "knows" everything it needs to know about the template, which in this initial context can be summarised as:

a) Where the datum is;

B) What direction (angle of rotation) the track goes off at;

c) How long it is;

d) Whether the track is plain, a turnout, a diamond crossing, etc;

e) Wether the track is straight, curved on a single radius, or a transition curve with two radii;

f) The gauge, scale and standards;

g) Information about rail lengths and sleepers/timbers; and

h) a lot of other stuff potentially.

 

The other end of a straight template is the "rail joint" position, 1. This is an important position to remember, as we shall see with turnouts!

 

Using ctrl-F8, you can move the peg along the centre line of the template (and also along the rails, adjacent centre-lines and so on, but we will keep it simple!) and if you wish, put a notch wherever the peg happens to be (ctrl-/). You can save this template, and make another one or copy this, or "mint" a new one (ctrl-Q), and put the peg at the datum end with ctrl-0. You can then put this current template onto the notch - ctrl-*. Or you can click on the recently saved template, and chose to join them at the position of the peg, at the datum point (0) or the rail joint(1), which usually becomes the active notch in any case.

 

Take a plain track template and make it current with "delete to current", and use ctril-I to insert a turnout. This will usually, by default, start at the beginning (datum) point os the template, which is also the rail joint (ctrl-1) position. However, you can add length to the beginning of the turnout (i.e. between the rail joint and the datum point) with F3, or increase the overall length of the template (from the datum) using F4. The end of the template uses peg position 9. Think of it as a single template made up of two components: a piece of plain track from the datum to the rail joint, the length of which could be zero, and hence peg 0 and peg 1 are the same, and a turnout starting at peg 1 and extending as far as it goes: this is peg-9. There are two other peg positions you need to know about for turnouts: peg 6 is the "exit" point for a track branching off from the turnout, and peg 5 is the exit position when making a crossover - you can alter the track centres, but that's more than is needed for now!

 

A bit more....

 

Three other peg positions I find useful are 2, 3 and 4. Peg 3 is probably most important, as this is where the centre lines of the two roads meet, if extended from the crossing vee - or put another way, the middle of a diamond crossing (which in Templot is made from two half-diamonds joined at peg 3, which is also the datum). Peg 4 is the crossing vee nose, which is handy for making up 3-ways and so on. Peg 2, accessed with ctrl-2, puts the peg on the turnout crossing rail, and I move this along the rail with F8 when I am making up a three-way, which I do as follows:

1) overlay a left hand turnout with a right-hand and move it along until the point-blades are clear of each other;

2) do the Cltr-2 and F8 thing until the peg is where the diverging crossing rails cross each other, notch the peg with ctrl-/ and save;

3) create a third turnout template and use ctrl-4 to put the peg on the vee, template;

4) shortenend one end using F4, and the other using ctrl-F3 (this is known as "blanking);

5) edit the vee to be of curved type, and place on the notch;

6) us F6 to curve the "third vee" until the main route matches one of the underlying curved routes; and

6) use F5 to adjust the vee angle until the curved route of the third vee matches the curved route of the other underlying vee.

 

There is a lot more you can do with shoving timbers about, but if you can get this far, then you are familiar enough with Templot to start playing and exploring.

 

I realise I have simplified things a lot above, but Tony Wilkins, who knows a thing or two about track, has produced a very good tutorial which is worth looking at.

 

Hope that all helps.

Hi Frank,

 

That's looking good.

 

Hi Simon,

 

The key to understanding Templot (at least, from my perspective!) is to get your head around pegs and notches.

 

Beginners can in fact forget about the peg and notch until they are well into Templot.

 

For example you can use F7 snapping to create a simple track plan:

 

 

More about that at: http://www.templot.c...7_snap_demo.htm

 

Or you can use extend and split methods, and still hardly need to use the peg explicitly. See this video for example:

 

http://www.templot.c...em_starter.html

 

regards,

 

Martin.

Appreciate this Frank, as well as the comments above, as I'm also taking my first baby steps with Templot.