Of the things I did while living in the US, I look back with much fondness at those operating evenings at Peter’s and if I could find a way of replicating them here in the UK then I would, but what would be needed to enable this?  In what I am planning to be the penultimate post in this blog – at least for the time being – my intention is to share some ideas about something I have often wanted to try at the Club but never had the courage to make a start on, as much because of the complexity of making it work as for any other reason. 

A very special and different type of layout would be needed for a start.  Most UK layouts are designed either as a tail chaser (Soberton or Forleigh) or to represent a terminus station in space and time (Nictun Borrud).  Very rarely do you find a layout that would have two locations represented in the same model.  Ok, we did try that once by constructing a triangular junction and running Nictun Borrud and Soberton from Soberton’s fiddle yard, but that wasn’t a very successful experiment.  Firstly there were only 2 locations (rather than the 10 that appeared in version 4 of the CORy), plus we didn’t really plan how we should operate it; there were other problems too, not everyone involved shared the vision of what we were aiming at and at 33’ x 20’ it almost completely filled the Clubroom – we even had to modify the kitchen area to accommodate it.  No, ideally to make this work we would need to build a layout with the same sort of philosophy as the American ones I described; imagine the Clubrooms, double the footprint width-ways, that’s your ideal basement, that’s your ideal train room and that’s where you get to build a layout big enough to do something like this. 

Or is there another way? 

One of the ideas I did kick around when we started to build the current test track around the main room was to suggest we put a slack handful of sidings and loops (spurs and sidings in my CORy narrative) which could then be operated in the way I have described; this would have allowed us to have a stab at the basic concept – but it would have been at the expense of the other gauge tracks so I shelved the idea. 

Then there are modules, remember modules?  The idea that we pioneered some time back using pasting tables as baseboards?  That would have lent itself to each member of a team building a couple of modules that could be arranged as a cross, each module to have one “event” on it – a station or a siding – and some sort of classification yard in the middle – a junction station such as Fareham?  Just thoughts…  The problem with this idea is that it would need that precious thing we are always short of – SPACE.

And then there is the whole question of how we generate the required traffic flow.  We could get Graham to produce the spreadsheet he and I discussed some years back, using his output to generate waybills for the wagons and freight facilities we have at each station; OR we could look for a software package that might do the same thing – and yes, one does exist.

Twenty plus years ago when I first started looking at ways to improve operations – and the Internet was just getting started – I stumbled across a software package called Wagonflow.  http://www.wagonflow.co.uk/. I corresponded with the author and established exactly what the package could do, and then almost immediately the Club got into the protracted battle with the council that eventually led to us moving out of Fareham Community Centre as it closed.  When that battle was over we had moved on in a lot of senses, and the better part of 7 years had passed, so I never got round to picking up the thread with the author again; until, that is, Covid19 happened.  With the driver of finding ways to keep everyone engaged with all things model railway in order to stave off cabin fever, and discovering that there was a bit of an appetite to hear this story, I contacted the current owner of the Wagonflow brand and have purchased a copy.  Now all I have to do is to sit down and get my mind around how it should all work.

So, in the final chapter in this epistle I will float a few ideas about what we could be doing down at the Club when we all escape from this lockdown.