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O Gauge - Peco Level Crossing

Bill

Entry posted by Bill

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The Peco Level crossing has been assembled and painted and located (not finally, but good enough for now,).

The paints used were Tamiya and excellent they are too, they give a good finish and are water clean up. They appear to be consistent in quality, which is more that can sometimes be said for other brands.

blogentry-6939-0-66076000-1372634745_thumb.jpg

 

Because of the way The gates were hung and in trying to conform to Peco's picture on the box. Essential if one does not know what one is doing, it wound up with having to put the closing bolt on upside down...

 

So I searched for a prototype to see whether the hanging post should be on the right or left from a streets eye view.

Here is a photo of it -

blogentry-6939-0-30800500-1372635230.jpg

 

<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" about="http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/17/58/175826_a44be158.jpg"><span property="dct:title">Level crossing gate, Oakington, Cambs</span> (<a rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName" href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/2182">Rodney Burton</a>) / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></div>

 

(with appropriate permission...)

Now the Peco image shows it reversed... i.e. hanging on the left from the streets eye view

So some questions for anyone who wishes to answer..

(1) Does it matter which way the gates are hung?

(2) More importantly - was this style of crossing gate ever used on the Western region?

The layout is more or less stuck with it - maybe in this instance GWR bought some surplus gates from the LNER? :-)

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Miss Prism

I don't think it matters which way the gates are hung, and I suspect the determining factor for manual gates would have been whatever was felt to be more efficient/ergonomic for the signalman. For wheel-in-box operated gates, I can't see that it matters much, but Stationmaster Mike is likely to know chapter and verse. Your arrangement does seem to be the rarer form though. Here's Frinton.
 
The Peco product is strongly GER. I don't recall any pure GWR designs having 'tall corner post' styles, but they did exist on the system, probably originating in absorbed railway areas (and I don't mean just the post-1922 grouping). Here's Bronwydd Arms.
 

The two things that jumped out from your picture to me was driving on the wrong side of the road and having the starter signal in advance of the gates. (But no doubt there were exceptions to that general rule as well!)

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Bill

 

The two things that jumped out from your picture to me was driving on the wrong side of the road and having the starter signal in advance of the gates. (But no doubt there were exceptions to that general rule as well!)

Thanks for your very useful comments - I guess I have been living too long on the wrong side of the pond (that and all the codeine in my system from my last root canal) - The cars do need to revert to UK driving rules. And that's really helpful about the signal - it felt as though it was in the wrong place but I could not quite put my finger on it... And with a little bit of tinkering the level Xing could be made to look a bit more like the Bronwydd Arms version... Maybe I should get another Peco Kit and start from scratch - unless someone else makes a GWR 7mm level Xing kit?

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paulprice

Its looking very good it shoyuld make a great layout when finished, I have always wanted to move up towards O gauge, but for the moment N gauge still holds away but your locomotives look top notch

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Bill

Paul - thanks for the encouragement. I wish I could say I built the locos :) The pannier is RTR from Lionheart Trains and excellent value it is too - the Prairie and The Saddle tank came ready painted from Tower. They are all very nice runners, not that they do that much running on a 12 foot layout... In my view the 45XX prairie was the most beautiful tank engine ever built. Whoever designed it loved engines and got the proportions just right. Though I am pretty sure not all would agree....

I would encourage anyone to try out a small O gauge layout - It s quite a revelation to do so..

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