ian

Yes,a wonderful book. He even managed to hide the Suez canal!

The recent monsoon season has made the garage a less than welcoming environment but a break in the weather allowed a brief excursion to the Ercallverse. For quite a while now I have wanted to get an ET 420 set to Neustadt. Neither my Röwa nor my Roco examples could make it up the hill from Maifeld.Currently there is a long-term project on the workbench to replace the chassis of a Roco example with one from a Märklin BR515 railcar. But a bargain Märklin ET420 might just change all this... There are one or two tweaks to be made to the track and catenary so that it can use all the platforms at Maifeld and correct one at Neustadt but it can get there and back which is a win.

As you used your sinister hand to wipe your backside it had probably just been doing something in the woods.

For that matter 'take things back to their colony' is wrong as well. We took things to the colonies (railways for one) and brought things back (tea).

And there it was, gone. An object lesson in the ephemeral nature of websites. I was enjoying trawling through some of the sections that I hadn't so far visited. Many thanks for salvaging the above for future reference.

That's a shame, but fully understandable. Cheap web-hosting seems to be an increasingly rare bird and terms can change over night as companies know that migration to another host is a pain in the proverbial. I am one of the people who reads and enjoys every word. I realise it takes a lot of time and effort to tell those stories and posting them to different fourms takes even more time but please post as much as you can.

No, Jethro Higgs the Pentowan lifeboat bos'n. He was some sort of secret research wallah during the war...

Now go to your room young man and think very carefully about what you have done.

More messing with the Arduino. It has gained an LCD screen to impart useful operation to the operator - although with the backlight on you can't see what it says on a photo - it is fine in reality. I have also added a small board to run a point servo. Now, given that an Arduino can operate a servo with one arm tied behind its back, standing on one leg whilst humming the national anthem why go to the trouble of an extra board? Using the arduino's in built ability for servos requires you to either wait until the servo finishes moving before continuing on to other things or do some tedious coding. This way it can just tell the board that the servo needs to move and let the board do the donkey work. It also has the advantage that the servo leads from the layout to the control panel could get quite long - anything upto five feet and in an electrically noisy environment like a model railway this can lead to unwanted twitching (from the operator as well as the servo). The servo board can go close to the servo and the electrical interference is minimised. (The board is a MERG kit, available to members only - https://www.merg.org.uk/content/kits)

Meanwhile I have been mithering an Arduino to persuade it to take up layout control duties. Firstly it is being trained to be a controller.... The upper sections of roadbed have been removed from the layout so that I could glue down the plan for the narrow gauge. Now I know where to cut the slots for the point mechanisms.

I did look long and hard at the WHR/Cambrian crossing but the interaction of two railways and the road would be an operational bottleneck and require a larger baseboard to compensate for the loss of the narrow gauge level and the requirement to get the off scene curves around the standard gauge. Yes, N6.5 is one of those rarely trodden paths. Already I can see why!

More than a little while ago I was building an OO/009 exhibition layout called Aberlaff (see elsewhere in the forum) which got culled long before completion. Now, as Minffordd has hit a similar problem - the allocated space has disappeared - I started to think "What DO I have space for?" (or rather, "For what DO I have space?"). The answer is either one 3' x 2' board or a pair stored face to face. Now 3'x2' isn't a great canvas to work with but 6'x2' is a possibility - especially if it is fattened up to 6'x 2'3". Aberllaff had (in OO) ended up at 12'x 2'6" which was the absolute maximum that I could get into the car. It had been slimmed down to almost anorexic levels to get to that width. So shrink the plan to N and Bob is, if not a parental sibling, certainly a close friend of the family - with extra width available to boot. Still narrow gauge in N isn't exactly off the shelf. It usually involves Z gauge track and mechanisms at 6.5mm gauge to represent 3' gauge prototypes. Most North Wales narrow gauge was somewhere around 2'. But fret not - 3' gauge lines were (albeit short-lived) to be found at Pwllheli, Portmadoc, Barmouth Junction, Penmaenmawr and LLechwedd (plus one in Pembrokshire and another in Llanelli) - so reality can be plausibly stretched. So take an oval of Z gauge track and a cheap mechanism, some N gauge track and an even cheaper train for comparison and what do you get? I was brought up with the Festiniog as the essence of narrow gauge railway. Whilst it was main line in attitude it has to be admitted that the actual stock was, shall we say, on the diddy side. Now 3' gauge railways tended to be somewhat chunkier, not far off standard gauge light railway size. This is fortunate because when you take a Z gauge coach chassis it is pretty much the same size as the inside of a N gauge coach. The smaller running gear does give a lower overall height helping with a more narrow gaugey feel. I still need to add step boards by the doors, paint it, glaze it, replace the roof moulding with something a bit thinner and decide on couplings but it has potential. Of course if you really want 3' gauge around these parts you need to head westward to the Isle of Man or Ireland. I have always had a soft spot for the West Clare's Walker diesels. So this was sort of inevitable... I'd forgotten just how fiddly smaII scale soldered track is. 6.5mm gauge is even more so! A full-size plan was printed out to see how it goes together. Some quick placeholder buildings were knocked up for effect. The DMU is standing by the BR platform. Behind the DMU a road rises to the left. At the bottom of the hill is the bus garage, Dai the Death's premises and a garage where the road turns to go over a level crossing. This is a one way street with traffic running left to right. On this side of the level crossing the road splits to a two-way road climbing a hill on the right and another one way street which runs past the BR station and then climbs to the left. The narrow gauge station is at a lower level, and the beach lower still (about sea level in fact). Here the DMU is on the bridge over the narrow gauge and about to enter a tunnel. The road climbs steeply and an RAC van is attending to a car that gave up the struggle. The snaking blue line is the backscene. Looking back the other way you can see the backscene crosses the standard gauge near the end of the terraced houses and then runs along the back of the shops. After much jiggery pokery the plan ended up at 72" x 20" on two 36" x 20" boards. The railway line that looks like a railway line is the narrow gauge. The crimsony one is the standard gauge. The weird roads are a Faller Car System circuit for the buses (dark grey) and Magnorail for cars (light grey). Rather than a continuous stream it will be one on each circuit. I intend to put in animation of various sorts and as a result am contemplating calling it Abercadabra. Which gets us to here:

Is there perhaps a local club that have premises that could house a portable layout?

Filling the potholes in the parade ground?