Jump to content
 

Dungrange

Members
  • Posts

    2,655
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Dungrange

  1. That's up to you. If you need 100' to model it to scale and you only have 15' then you need to define the least interesting 85% to cut out.
  2. At least Paddington could be fitted in a smaller space. An eight foot wide baseboard to model everything between Eastbourne Terrace and the canal and it would only need to be 18 foot long to capture everything between Praed Street and Bishop's Bridge Road. Obviously there would need to be a fiddle yard as well, but at least a model of Paddington would be smaller than Salisbury, even if I don't think it would be that interesting to operate and too much of the track would be hidden by the overall roof.
  3. Which of course adds substantially to the cost of building such a large station (and the time taken to build it). Which obviously raises the question - why Salisbury? Unless @Peak is a music mogul with a very large property and a few million in the bank, bits of the prototype will have to be missed out. Defining the appeal of Salisbury would help to determine where the compromises should be made.
  4. It depends on the direction you're looking. 😀 If this were to be an exhibition layout, then given the curve through the station, I'd be tempted to model it with the Cathedral being behind the viewer, the station at the front of the layout and the Traction Motive Depot to the rear. However, if this was to be a permanent 'home' layout constructed around the walls of a barn, then I'd exaggerate the natural curve such that it could be bent round the walls, in which case the operator and viewer would be inside the curve. In that case, the station would be behind the TMD and the Cathedral behind that. As you note, if the cathedral were close to the station, it would be a massive building with the spires reaching to the ceiling of an average room. Thankfully it's far enough away that a bit of forced perspective would permit something smaller to be painted on the backscene. I'm not all that convinced that it's particularly prominent from railway infrastructure anyway. Looking at Google Streetview there always seem to be a building or tree blocking sight of the Cathedral.
  5. Finescale Figures (now no longer trading) produced one, but I have noticed what appears to be some of their former figures in the Scale 3D range. @Skinnylinny painted one of these, which you can see in his layout thread.
  6. Indeed - even ignoring the length required, if you were to model the current Salisbury station with the Traction Motive Depot behind it, then you'd need a six foot wide baseboard and that wouldn't even allow for anything beyond the railway fence. If you want to include the car parking in front of the station building, then the baseboard needs to be widened to seven feet. Good luck stretching over a baseboard that is that wide.
  7. 1/76th of the actual size. The obvious question is how much of it do you want to model? If you were to take the A36 Wilton Road as one end of the scenic section and the A36 Churchill Way as the other end, then that seems to be about 2.5 km. In 00, you would therefore need almost 33 metres (108 feet) just for the scenic part of your layout. You'd probably need a 6m (20 foot) fiddle yard at either end. It's obviously doable if you're Pete Waterman and have a crew of Railnuts to help you. But if you're asking such basic questions, I would suggest that you need to curb your ambitions and think about much smaller and more compact locations.
  8. I dare say they could, but it might be more appropriate to ask them directly.
  9. You don't 'fit' sound to a 'chip'. You buy either a sound decoder or a non-sound decoder. The former will generally be ~$60 - $70 more expensive than the latter. If you buy a non-sound decoder now and then want to upgrade to sound, you need to remove the non-sound decoder and replace it with a new sound decoder. It will therefore be more expensive if you adopt an incremental approach. If you ultimately want sound, go for sound from the outset. Motor control is not usually counted as a function (although function only decoders don't have motor control). Similarly, sounds aren't counted as functions when looking at a decoder specification. The sound project will assign various sounds to various F keys, but a two function sound decoder isn't limited to two sounds. The number of functions in the specification is physical functions, such as lights, smoke units, etc. Unsurprisingly, the eight pin interface has eight pins. These should be connections to the track (Red/Black - pins 4 & 8) and connections to the motor (Orange/Grey - pins 1 & 5). Of the other four pins, Blue (pin 7) is a common for all physical functions. The other three wires would be your functions, which are normally, White - Front light (F0) - pin 6, Yellow - Rear light (F0) - pin 2 and Green (F1) - pin 3. Therefore you can't physically get more than three functions on an 8-pin decoder if you are looking for 'plug and play'. However, as has been highlighted, you can get decoders with more functions, it's just that these will come with a 'flying' wire, which you will need to solder to the appropriate thing you want to control, such as a smoke generator. What you do need to make sure of is that the decoder you choose has sufficient power on the functions to control what you want. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) don't consume much power, but a smoke unit may, in which case if it draws say 250mA, then you need to make sure that the decoder you choose can supply that power to the function wires. Some may be limited to say 100mA, in which case they would be no use for a smoke unit that requires 250mA. So to summarise: Motor and Sounds don't need function wires. Headlights, tail lights, cab lights, firebox flicker, smoke generator, etc will each require a separate function, if you plan to be able to control them separately.
  10. Same here. The rest of the website seems to work - just not the railway pages.
  11. They appear to have a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091651800767 They posted a list of products ad prices last summer.
  12. I seem to recall that it was more than patent infringement: more a case of creating a clone and badging it as their own, including copying bugs in the original decoder.
  13. Accurascale provided an answer to that back on page 32.
  14. Have you filled in an Expression of Interest? Your wish won't come true if you don't.
  15. The Edinburgh and Lothians Miniature Railway Club (ELMRC) are hosting a new exhibition in Edinburgh at George Watson's College Colinton Road Edinburgh EH10 5EG Sat 1st June 2024: 10am – 5pm Sun 2nd June 2024: 10am – 5pm Adults (16 years and over) – £8 Children (5 to 15, must be accompanied by an Adult) – £3 Under 5s – Free Family (2 adults, 2 children) – £18 Tickets are available on the door, or can be pre-booked for a discount at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/elmrc. Advance booking will close on Friday 31st May 2024. The following Layouts have been confirmed (with more to be added): United Mills - 1950s/60s Scottish Industrial - P4 - East of Scotland 4mm Group Dains Yard - 1970s Scottish Shunting Puzzle - 00 - Dundee MRC Glendevon - 1950s Scottish Branch line - 00 - Edinburgh and Lothians MRC Glenkiln Road - 1930s southern Scottish branch line - 00 - Glasgow and West of Scotland MRC St Cuthbert - 1950s Southwest Scotland - 00 - Thistle Modelmakers Tulloch Bridge - West Highland 2004-12 - 00 - Martin Stewart / Scottish Modellers Balornock Goods - 1970s Glasgow Yard - H0 - Kirkintilloch MRC Eastern Steel & Iron - 1950s/60s North American Industrial - H0 - Stirling & Clackmannanshire District MRC Levenbank - Scottish ECML Post privatisation - N - Glenrothes MRC Wallacetoun Junction - 1990s Scottish station - N - Dundee MRC TBC N - Perth MRG The following traders have been confirmed (with more to be added): Franzi's Scenic Dioramas Lathalmond Models Rainbow Railways The following Societies and Demonstrations have been confirmed (with more to be added): N Gauge Society Model Electronic Railway Group (MERG) An up to date list of attendees is on the club's exhibition website at https://elmrc.org.uk/elmrc-exhibition/
  16. How easy are they to paint? I note that they are available unpainted (£4.25) or painted (£5.75). https://www.lightrailwaystores.co.uk/products/npp-421?_pos=1&_sid=c512ab260&_ss=r&variant=7040820215874 Also, I note that the models of both the pre- and post-1919 liveries have printed plates that give the build date as 1908. I don't think that is correct for either model. No 127 entered service in 1914 and No 125 entered service in 1921. However, both numbers were previously carried by an earlier G15 (Y6) class tram. Number 125 was built in 1891 and number 127 was built in 1892. This therefore raises the question, when running numbers were reused, were new plates always cast, or were the old plates sometimes reused? The earlier number 127 was withdrawn six months before the new number 127 took its place, but in the case of the former number 125, it was still running when new number 125 entered service, which is why the older G15 was renumbered to 0125 and had new plates cast.
  17. I'm assuming that they will arrive with all of the other RCH 1887 7 plank PO wagons. I understand that these are somewhere on the high seas at the moment.
  18. Although it does depend on the date of the photograph. In the later part of the pre-grouping period that is certainly true, but a bit less so in the period prior to the Great War. That photograph is dated 1925, so that's six years after the Railway Clearing House (RCH) Common User agreement for covered goods wagons, so in essence the Southern Railway could use a Caledonian wagon as though it was one of their own.
  19. Interestingly, I've found a few black and white photographs from around the 1960s, which don't seem to show much more than a hedge along the line the of the Poplar trees in the first two photographs I linked to. That is, whatever is planted there doesn't tower over the railway vans sat in front of them, so perhaps these are in effect and overgrown hedge. Though there are a couple of bigger more mature trees near the entrance to the depot - I just don't know what type they are.
  20. Are there any tree experts, who can tell me what would have been the most common types of tree along the line of the Wisbech and Upwell Tramway around a century ago? In particular, I'm interested in the area around Outwell Basin. The caption to the above photograph refers to a line of Poplar trees, on the left of the image, which I think would have formed the tramline boundary (with the tramway itself behind that line of trees). Unfortunately, these look rather too young to have been around in the early 1920s, so I don't know what would have been there before these were planted. The photograph below seems to show the same line of trees, but from a different angle. Both photographs seem to have been dated 19 April 2009. I believe that these trees cross the line of the former tramway, so wouldn't have been around a century ago, but I'm assuming these might be typical of the regions, so what are they? Again, I think these are on the line of the tramway (so not around a century ago), but again, what type of trees are these?
  21. I don't see why not, although I suppose it depends on what part of the Highland Railway you're modelling and also what time period. As distance from the Caledonian Railway network increases, the likelihood of one of these appearing would presumably have declined. I'd imagine that the majority of traffic from the Scottish Central Belt (ie Caledonian territory) to north of Inverness would have been transhipped in Inverness. I'd therefore expect to see these CR wagons on the Highland Mainline (ie between Stanley Junction and Inverness), but perhaps they were rather rare visitors to more far flung destinations like Kyle of Lochalsh or Thurso. Of course after 1919, when the Railway Clearing House extended the common user scheme that had been introduced in 1917 for open wagons, to include unfitted covered goods wagons, they would have started to wander further from Caledonian territory, giving an increased likelihood of one being seen north of Inverness.
  22. For those modelling in 00, we scale distances by 1:76, areas by 1:5776 (ie 1:76^2) and volumes by 1: 438,975 (ie 1:76^3). However, we can't really scale time in the same way as we do the three physical dimensions. Time isn't faster or slower depending on which scale you choose to model in. However, whilst we can't really scale time if we want trains to run at what most would consider a realistic speed (remembering that speed = distance / time), we probably should adjust the passage of time in relation to the amount of compression that we have had to introduce when creating our model railway. Therefore if you build a model that is a perfectly to scale section of line, then time should be normal. However, if we've represented five actual miles in the prototype with just one scale mile of track, then there is a case for making a clock run five times faster. However, the speed of the clock should be determined by the amount of linear compression in the model, rather than the scale of the model (ie it doesn't matter whether you're modelling in N, 00, or even in O gauge, albeit there are few O gauge layouts with a scale mile of track). The problem with this is of course that we don't compress our models in a uniform manner. The coaches are 'scale length', the platform has been compressed by maybe 10%, the station throat by 20% and the section of track between stations by 80%. This means that the passage of time on the wristwatch of a tiny passenger on our train should not pass at a constant rate, but should pass more slowly as the train leaves the station (ie just a little faster than real time) and get progressively quicker as the train moves through the more compressed parts of the model until they reach their destination. Of course, once we get to running a model railway with multiple trains, the time on the watches of all of our miniature passengers will vary depending on what train they are on!
  23. Who's complaining? Expressing disappointment isn't the same as complaining.
  24. I define a 'train set' as a layout where the focus is on the train. The train departs from the only station on an oval, completes multiple circuits of a continuous circuit and stops again at the same station. The reality is that the train is back where it started from, but there is a pretence that it has left from somewhere, passed through some intermediate stations without stopping and ended up at a different location. The train set is effectively a 'prop' to tell the story of the train's journey. Since the focus is on the train, there is less need for scenery beyond the track, although the layout could be fully scenic and it would still, in my opinion, be a train set. As the station represents multiple locations, it doesn't need to be a scale model. I define a 'model railway' as a layout where the focus is on a location and it aims to capture realistic operation at that location. Where a train set is telling the story of a train's journey, a model railway is presenting a day in the life of the location, modelling the trains that arrive and depart from that location. For example, it may be intended to replicate the station that serves a settlement. It therefore needs a representation of that settlement and the station needs to be operated in a reasonably prototypical manner. Ultimately, I think all 'model railways' need to have some place that represents the rest of the railway network (ie a fiddle yard). I very much see that as a train set, because the focus is on the train. It can't be operated in a prototypical manner.
×
×
  • Create New...