To call this a blog is to misuse the word. It has turned into an annual report!
So, what has happened since last April? To be honest not that much, I spent a large part of the year avoiding the model Railway. My MOJO was AWOL. But a few months ago, I crawled in under the base boards to try and get going again. Actually the catalyst turned out to be, that the DCC 8 way Solenoid controller that I need to control the points at the other end of the fiddle yard that had been out of stock for alm
As I wrote at the end of my last post, I’m feeling the itch to move on to phase 2. This is a much more ambitious plan to model the end of the branch line at Chard junction where the line meets the mail line from London to Exeter. It is a very strange junction as you can see from this plan.
My idea is to retain the Model of hatch station and to build the new station on the other side of the room. One of the things that I have learnt that I miss is the ability to sit and watch the trains
After an uncharacteristic burst of optimism, my base line pessimism has reasserted itself. I have built three points and tested them by running a couple of trucks through them by finger power and I was really pleased. I tried doing the same thing with a coach, again no problems. But then I tried to push through a locomotive (my Bachmann Prairie tank) and it got stuck. I tried another 0-6-0 loco and it had the same problem. I have checked the Back to back measurements and they are fine, and the s
Time for an update. The first couple of baseboards are complete. I wanted to build light but strong boards, and as this picture shows it has worked. The board that is supporting my weight (about 75 Kg, honest), weighs by itself lrss than 3,5 Kg. As you can see from the underside there is space left at each end. it is here that the toggle clamp catches and dowels will be fitted, there is also space to put connecting blocks and such like. The whole construction is glued there is not a single sc
There are now two large pieces of plywood (9mm and 5 mm) and about 5 m2 of extruded foam blocking the landing upstairs. I have bought a saw blade appropriate, and after much mucking about I Templot AND Anyrail produced a plan for some baseboards that manage to avoid putting edges under any points. My teenage son has discovered the brand new bench saw and is champing at the bit to get building baseboards, so the only thing left to do is to clear some space, Oh dear. I will have to attack that
We are getting there.
A quick concentrated burst of energy and the Easyrail design is now Templotized:
Major differences between the Anyrail version and the Templot one is that the track centres are reduced fra the Tillig standard (59mm) to 50 mm. The whole of the main line section is now on a gentle curve of about 43' in radius :-) Which is still sharper than in reality. The main line curve was 70 chains, Which by my reckoning is about 60' in 4mm to a foot. The whole of the branch stat
One thing I was pretty certain of when starting Hatch was that it was going to be DCC. I chose after much reading of reviews an NCE Powercab as a starter system that could be expanded later, possibly somewhere down the line in the future computer controlled. So I knew that I was going to use DCC to control points as well, but I was equally against having to remember accessory codes for all points. So I wanted to have the best of both worlds I had already chosen Tillig track which does not have s
Here is an update. In the last six months there has not been a lot of time for modelling, and to be honest there seems to have been a lot of wasted time, as the learning curve for motorising and laying of hand-built points has been steep. There has been far too much ‘two steps forwards and 1.9 steps back’. This has made it hard for me to keep up interest. But I hope I have reached a tipping point. I have decided that this post will focus on the things I have learned in that hope that others can
It has been a long time since my last post. This is not just because I’m busy with other duties. It’s also because I did not want to write while in the depths of despair! I finally took the model railway rite of passage and tried to build my first point. My long suffering friend Richard, who as a highly competent school teacher is used to dealing with ‘special case’ pupils undertook to teach me the black art of bending rails and filing vee’s It stated off well. I calibrated my printer and printe
I am lucky to be godparent to a nine-year-old autistic girl. One of the few things she does is play fantasy games with a dragon. Chard Junction is often the scene of carnage bought about by me 'moddeling' but today it suffered an even worse fate: attack by dragon, The sheep were under attack and saved by being loaded into a truck and driven off at the limited top speed of my new Hornby 48DS. It actually managed to escape and hide in the tunnel that leads to the fiddle yard. She has now reluctant
Wow almost six months since the last post, it’s just as well I’m not doing this for a living. As always, I seem to be dividing what little time I have to several different fronts of the project Baseboards are now almost finished I have tested that the storage yard boards fit under the existing Hatch branch line. And the solution seems to work ok. There will be enough space to get for ‘hand of god operations, but not really enough to do train assembly operations. The main open frame boards are m
The cosmetics leave something to do better next time. But it is a point and it works. I have tested by running a wagon and a coach through it. The soldering could be cleaned up a bit, but I'm not taking any chances of unsoldering it.
I have now reached a major milestone. It has taken me almost two and a half years. The main lines are now laid and ballasted. Apart from the points which need to be tested thoroughly before painting and ballasting. This means I can for the first time since I was a teenager, watch a train go round and round. Actually, this is not quite true because not all the points and dropper wires are attached under the baseboard. But we’re close and it all works by finger power.
At the moment there
This time I am not going to start my post by saying it’s a long time since… Those who do follow this blog will be used to that, those who don’t’, won’t care anyway. It’s winter, there is a lot of influenza about, and the day job is taking a lot of time due to a major reform in the Danish unemployment system. (I work as system administrator/ consultant in this area). But this weekend I managed to fit in a trip to Copenhagen to my tame guru Richard. My last post was about a D6 point that I started
Track laying has ground to a halt… to be honest because I’m finding it hard to get points that work consistently, and this annoyed me so much that I was forced to refrain from modelling and do more work to relax. Which is the opposite of what function the railway it meant to fulfil. I decided to start work on the scenery. As I have written before I am reusing the branch line station and the new main lines drop beneath the branch line boards to new fiddle yards. Like this:
I hav
Hurrah! As I wrote yesterday. I now have a plotter full size version of my plan. I was concerned that it would not fit. But it does, even allowing for the sloping ceiling
Now all I need to do is build it.
I have the attention span of a five-year-old, so at this point I started on several projects at the same time, scenery, scratch building the station, goods shed and platform, and ballasting the track, and the electrics for points and control panel. If I got bogged down in one of them, I just moved on to the next. This is a certain technique for not getting very much done at all. Luckily I have a good friend who lives in Copenhagen, every time he visits I get a fresh dose of enthusiasm, and the p
The first pack of the new DCC track arrived today. Here are a few very bad pictures that compare it with Tillig elite and Hornby set track.
In case anyone is in doubt the DCC is at the top, the Tillig in the middle and the Hornby at the bottom. First impressions: well I love the sleepers distance which likes right to me ( I know it’s wrong Martin ) but I last travelled by train in the UK about 27 years ago so that’s my excuse. I have to say the Tillig track if you ignore the fact that it i
One of the problems with building a specific prototype layout is that you cannot just buy the buildings you need. In the past I have assembled superquick buildings with an amazing tendency to cut off the tabs you need to glue things together. As for my success rate with IKEA flat pack furniture…
So obviously for a first attempt at scratch building it would be wise to start with a garden shed, so I started by building a Brunel Chalet type station which according to the English national Heritage
Happy new year everyone. Richard my friend from Copenhagen was here for new year’s eve as usual. In Denmark it's a big thing to celebrate it with friends, Lots of food, drink, and fireworks until about 3.30 in the morning, and after a couple of Irish coffees, he was persuading me to change from Tillig track to hand built track. He’s just built his couple of points in OO 4-SF or something like that. They look brilliant, and I do like the proper sleeper spacing. To quote a certain TV presenter ”Ho
After being directly encouraged by a number (smaller than 2) of RmWebbers to start a thread about a new modelling project, I decided to have a go at a blog. This first post is intended to introduce me and outline my plans for an extension to my model.
I am an ex-pat Brit living in Denmark. My first Hornby trainset arrived on my 6th birthday in 1972. By my early teenage years, I had far too much stock running on a layout that was built on two 6’ by 4’ pieces of unsupported and therefore sagg
Fase one of the project was building the Hatch station section together with a couple of fiddle yards at each end. I decided to build the layout on four baseboards so as to be portable. (during fase2 it might need to move around the room). I wanted to try an open frame section hence the track and road running down to the fiddle yard at the right hand end. This yard is about 10 cm lower than the rest of the layout, as I want to try making an incline. The plan can be seen here
The boys start
Now that point building is underway and baseboards are almost complete. It is almost time to destroy about a third of what I have already built ☹. A shame but it has to go to make space for Chard junction. Hatch was built as an end to end with a three track fiddle yard at each end. The fiddle yard at the right-hand end will now be replaced by the branch line platforms of Chard Junction. Here are a few of pictures that show what is about to be demolished. The new 10 lane fiddle yard for the doub
I have written quite a lot about the trial and tribulations of building my control panel. But I think I have finally arrived at a version that both looks good and seems to work as it should. It ended being built in three sections. The bottom green panel is for a fiddle yard that I have not yet started making as I am waiting to see what clever options arrive for setting routes via the cobalt alpha system. I know something is on the way. but not yet whether it is something I can work out how to us
One of my mistakes with the original control panel was that It looked awful from the front and had wiring where you expected to see two dogs end up chewing the same wire accompanied by accordion music on the back. This time I wanted to do things better. I used AnyRail to make a mimic diagram which I then printed and laminated. Then I watched DCC Concepts’ youtube videos on how to build a mimic diagram. And I started again! This time I fired up my old InDesign DTP program, imported the black and
