Dave Searle

A working Saturday and a club night saw the construction of four trestles to support the layout. Starting from some lengths of 25x50mm (nominal) timber (and a few of 25mmx75mm) from our local timber merchant and a chop saw, we soon had a kit of parts: First we assembled the smaller leg frame: Then we built the larger leg frame around it (using £1 coins as spacers to give the legs clearance from on each other): Finally the hinges were added to the two top cross bars, and the folding hinged link added to the lower cross bars (this holds the legs the correct distance apart): This gave us a completed trestle: We then repeated the process to create all four trestles. We now need to source some aluminium bars to place on top of the trestles, some brackets to hold them in place and adjusters to ensure they are level. The bars will be 20 feet long to support the whole length of the layout, but split into 3 pieces. The trestles will go at the outer ends and under the two joints). Unfortunately our previous source of aluminium bar has now dried up, so we are having to look elsewhere. Cheers, Dave

Hi Ben, The aluminium will have some cork added as a foundation for the scenic work, our tests show that we can glue it successfully to the aluminium. This will give a starting surface slightly lower that the main boards which will give room for minor height variations in the scenery. One of our members works for a coach builder and has the skills to cut and join the aluminium to create the angled ends. He did say there was a large file involved Cheers, Dave

Last night we added most of the mounting points on the reverse of the backscene so the front extension boards can be stored. In theory we could have put one on each of the 5 baseboards, but it is planned to put the main control panel on the central board, so some doubling up was called for. The clearance between the stacked pairs should allow enough room for some low level scenery. We also looked at one possibility for the lighting: a lightweight 620mm, 20W fluorescent tube (usually used above kitchen worktops). Although this would give good lighting if mounted less than 2ft above the layout, we felt that it wouldn't work when mounted 3-4ft above and up to 1ft in front of the layout. We may still use a couple of these in the fiddle yard where they could be mounted on the new mounting points. So back to looking at alternatives which need to be light and bright. Various club members have offered some suggestions - possibly T4 size tubes and lightweight fitting, so we will continue to investigate. Any recommendations would be welcome. Cheers, Dave

Whilst the wiring is continuing, we are working on some other parts. Flight case wheels We originally put eight 6" wheels on the flight case to give it a smooth ride over the uneven slope we need to push it up every club night. Unfortunately the wheels were more fragile than we had hoped, and the hard plastic centres of several of them shattered when hitting bigger bumps at an angle. So we decided to replace them with four more robust ones. The original wheels: Fixing the first new wheel: Finished: Front scenic boards After much discussion about the add-on front scenic boards, we decided that they should be 2-3" deep and demountable on the front of the existing boards. The idea is that these add a little depth to the front of the scenic area and keep the front tracks further away from the front edge of the layout. Since the main boards are already a close fit in the flight case, these new boards needed to be demountable and stored on the fiddle yard side of the backscene. These boards will also have their gaps staggered compared to the main board joints to reduce their visibility. After an abortive attempt at making ply boards 44" x 2" x 2" we decided to use some square aluminium box section. These are then mounted on the front of the main baseboards by small brackets: so by the end of the evening we had done three: The skirt hiding the legs will be velcroed to the front of these, the tops will have scenery on them and the gaps with be filled will some foam to allow for movement and to help hide the joints. So we are still making progress, but at a gentle pace. Cheers, Dave

Hi Jo, I shall look forward to that, they look very good. Many thanks, Cheers, Dave

Very nice weathering there - it certainly looks the part. I'm intrigued by the autoballaster, more info on that would be interesting - in particular where did you get the "carillion" transfers for it? Cheers, Dave

After a few Monday evenings taken up by a post-exhibition review and some Bank Holidays, we've got back to work at a much more relaxed pace. So, point motors are being fitted, most of the scenic side ones have been done and the fiddle yards ones are next. Phil is continuing with the wiring. Meanwhile, we are looking at some other areas: Support system At present the board are supported on 6 trestles which are borrowed from the club's test track, which leads to a conflict if both want to run at the same time. This was not a problem at the exhibition or while we are working on the wiring, but I would like to get our own support system. Some ideas: Use the trestle & beam idea described in the book on St Merryn. This uses a trestle at each end of the layout and two long (16ft) jointed aluminium girders to support the baseboards (with a further adjustable support halfway to ensure the beams don't droop). Create more of our existing style trestles. Create free-standing "table frames" for single boards or pairs of boards. Possibly with simple braced pairs of legs connected by clip-on braces. Ideally the support system would allow the easy mounting of a lighting gantry and easy assembly. I'm not keen on our current method of putting the first board on two trestles and then balancing the next one on a single trestle whilst trying to bolt them together. Lighting This needs to be carefully thought out: Minimum visual and physical intrusion Even lighting where it is required Easy assembly and storage Again the St Merryn book has a useful idea: a single span made of 3 lightweight vertically stiff sections with suitably strengthened and angled joints to prevent sagging over the length. I would like to avoid intermediate supports getting in the way behind the layout if possible. Clip-on front scenic boards These would be a few inches deep and designed to prevent diving locos and provide an interesting scenic foreground. They would only need to extend the length of the visible scenic side (about 18 ft) so could be made as 5 boards about 44 inches long. This would mean that they would partially obscure the real base board joints and they could be attached to clips on the reverse of the backscene for storage. As the scenery at this part of Hinksey is mainly bushes and small trees, they could provide a useful foreground, with some larger trees placed to hide anything that shouldn't be seen. So some thinking to be done. Any thoughts would be welcome. Cheers, Dave

Hi Edwin, I've just checked and yes you are absolutely right, it was a Farish 66. Some of the stock seems to run very smoothly, but other items do seem to hit bits of low lying trackwork, hence the intention to inspect very carefully what is happening as the stock goes over points. I missed out some further points: add a lip to the baseboard edge to prevent stock diving to the floor (both at the front and in the fiddle yard). check couplings on mainline rakes to avoid droop & subsequent loss of connection. change some couplings for shorter ones to improve the close-coupled appearance (the HST in particular would benefit from this). Cheers, Dave

Thanks Bernard - that is quite a compliment. Well the dust has settled and we've survived our first outing. Generally the layout & stock behaved remarkably well, given the rush to get things to a working state. We managed to cope with manually switching the points at opposite ends of the fiddle yard loops - a code soon emerged to get the guy at the other end to set the incoming points for the correct road, to save walking down there. An odd electrical gremlin appeared in the last hour on Sunday, but we were able to cope with that. Only one "disaster" - on the first time round a loco on the outer track found a bit where the inner rail was raised and turned over and (being right at the front of the layout) dived onto the floor. Crash! - it separated into 5 parts: body, chassis, 2 motor bogies and a broken buffer. I picked up 4 parts (couldn't find the buffer) and reassembled it. Amazingly it still worked The raised rail was soon encouraged by a large file to stay flat. We've put together a list of things to do in the short term: Finish off the wiring of the fiddle yard & main line - get the point motors wired up and working. Put some better expansion gaps in - at one point, as the temperature rose in the hall, the outer main line developed a very interesting sinuous kink as the rail could only expand sideways. Everything stayed on but this needs to be fixed. Check the Back to Back on all the stock and check rail gaps - there were a number of wobbles going over some point work. Check for any raised soldered joints or point motor clips that might foul parts of passing stock. Build our own set of legs that are height adjustable - the trestles we were using did not give a consistent height Replace the Peco point motors (& associated switches) with Seep ones with integral switches - this is really a personal preference, having tried to wire one of these up (in a hurry last Thursday) and found that they really need a lot of careful adjustment. Phil, the wiring guy, also prefers the Seep ones, so was "suggesting" them. So a short rest and then back to work, albeit at a more relaxed pace than the last 41/2 months. Cheers, Dave

Well, I'm now refreshed after a nice glass of red wine, some food and a little snooze and I can say we've had a really good day, tiring but very rewarding. The layout ran extremely well for it's first outing, we enjoyed ourselves, and there was a chance to chat to several RMWeb members (thank you for your encouraging comments). Lots of very positive comments generally about the scale of the layout and seeing trains in context. Here we are ready to go: We had printed out a number of screen shots from Bing showing aerial views of the area and placed these in the appropriate places along the layout together with some signs explaining the features, or showing the work done on the layout: Some of the autoballasters Ben and David mentioned earlier are sitting by the ballast pile (OO wagon loads at the moment): The fiddle yard was loaded and we were off: (not sure how the Chairman's Oliver Cromwell on a Steam Special got into this shot. Still on it's first run we put a class 67 on the back in case it broke down ) Once again it was great to meet and chat with several of you and your comments are much appreciated. And we get to do it all over again tomorrow Cheers, Dave

Thanks Chris. About 4 hours sleep, but I'm surviving We've now set it all up and run a few more test trains - all running happily so far. Added the drapes (borrowed from another layout, should we be using EWS maroon?) and some signs - still some more to add - and some stock. Will take some more photos in the morning. Cheers, Dave

Well, Phil & I have just finished working on it after a very long working session this evening! Phil has worked very hard and made excellent progress with the wiring: A couple of minor glitches were sorted out and we were able to run the first test loco round at about 1am (after I'd put my camera away). The fiddle yard and main line through the scenic section are all working. We will come back to the rest (the yard and the control panel) when the dust from the show has settled. So we're ready for the show setup later today Maybe I need some sleep first. Cheers, Dave

Another Monday - the last before the show and wiring continues. Phil has been busy with the rest of the droppers, the power supplies and some of the switching. His plan is to put as much of the "final" wiring in place as possible (to avoid redoing things later), but to ensure that we can run the fiddle yard, the main line and a couple of the loops at the front. After the show we will re-assess what still has to be done and think about the main control panel. The fiddle yard will be controlled by two small control panels, one at each end of the layout, for the up and down drivers (there will be a third driver for the yard at the front). These panels can be seen in the picture below together with the twin controller to allow the driver to move a second train forward in the fiddle yard. The switches are quite complex beasts, as they will be switching several things behind the scenes, making life easier for the operator. They will just need to select the fiddle yard road and whether to use the scissor crossovers to change lines: Meanwhile, we turned the boards upside-down for fitting of tag strips. Each point will be connected to a six-way tag strip (to allow easy swap-out in the case of a failure). The dropper wires from each rail will also be connected up to their own tag strips. One of the advantages of making the backscene a structural part of the baseboard is that we can do this safely: Here you can see three of the five baseboards with all their dropper wires, having the inter-board wiring attached by Phil: : Eventually a few of the others came back from tea & the Chairman's pep talk and lent a hand: So, still quite a lot for Phil to do this week, but we should be ready for a test run on Thursday. Cheers, Dave

Another Monday night and good progress. Phil, the wiring guy, had made up the looms of wiring during the week from tag strips to the inter-board connectors and the connector cables themselves - some 1100 soldered joints! John was delegated to test these for any dry joints or shorts. They passed successfully. Phil then continued with more dropper wires on the middle board: Meanwhile the rest of us attached the Peco twin accessory switches to the point motors in the fiddle yard, and added the first of the Seep point motors to the scenic side. Both have their individual challenges. It would have been a lot easier if we had fitted the Peco switches to the point motor before fixing it to the point. Fortunately we can turn the boards upside down or put them on their side, but it was still fiddly, especially where the point was very close to part of the baseboard framework or another point. The Seep points (with their built in switch) were easier once we mastered the knack of using a modified wooden clothes peg to hold the pin centrally and then use the two point positions (left/right) to guide us where to put the fixing screws. This ensures that the switch actually changes polarity when the motor operates. In this photo the Seep point motors are at the top and the Peco ones at the bottom (along with the back of a Gaugemaster twin controller) The idea is to have the fiddle yard, the main line and one scenic loop operational ready for the exhibition in less than two weeks time. Cheers, Dave

Hi Brian, For this layout I want to be reasonably accurate (within the time and space constraints we're working with). So we may re-lay some of the yard track with concrete sleepers later on. I may have to see if they are visible on Google Earth or Bing. As it happens, I've got a photo of some of the mixture of rails, chairs & sleepers in use: However I think I'll leave worrying about that level of details for a 4mm scale layout (unless we rebuild this one in 2mmFS). With N gauge the subtleties are less easy to portray successfully. Cheers, Dave

Some quiet progress last night at the club. Last bits of track are now in place and the first bits of wiring have started - droppers from the rails ready to join to tag strips under the boards (sorry no photos this week). We discovered a problem that we had created for ourselves with the small screws used on the scenic side to support the rails over the boards joints. In a number of cases these had pushed the surface ply up and away from the board end plates, causing a distinct hump over the joint However some patient work with a slitting disk in a Dremel sliced through the problem screws and some large (1") screws were used to pull the surface down onto the top of the end plates. A lesson learned - glue it all solid before adding the track. We are beginning to run out of time - our NESCOT Exhibition is in less than 3 weeks time. Even though we will be showing the layout as under construction, we hope to have some trains running. So point motors, switches and wiring are next. And some stock Cheers, Dave

Hi Martyn, I believe that's a distinct probability, especially as we have photos of Carillion ones. We will need quite a lot of these and a variety will be useful. Cheers, Dave

Hi, We made good progress at the club last night. This is where we started from: The south end team worked very hard and managed to complete all their track: The north end team had a bit more to do including a tricky "sneak back siding", which connects through to the fiddle yard via a small hole in the back scene. This will allow us to replace loaded ballast wagons with empties and vice versa to simulate the unloading and loading of ballast from the rear two sidings. This is at the top right of the picture. So very nearly there with the track. Those who know the north end of Hinksey will be aware that we have modified the track plan there to give us a usable headshunt - even with 20' to play with, we ran out of space. The highlight of the evening was the arrival of some of the partially completed auto-ballasters. David who is building these has made great progress. He said he would be interested in building something for the layout and how about an autoballaster. I said "Thanks, could you do 25 of them!" - and he agreed! He's building 5 of the earlier ex-Railtrack JJA (N Gauge Society kit-035b), 10 Network Rail HQA (035c) and 10 ex-Railtrack HQA (035d). As you can imagine he was "chuffed" to hear that Farish are now bringing out the JJA in N gauge. Here's where he's got to. It was really nice to see that we could get 10 of them in the rear ballast siding. So a bit more track to finish and then fix the point motors to the 34 scenic side points. Then we hand over to the wiring guru, whose been busy working on wiring diagrams and ordering wire & switches. Cheers, Dave

This is a closer view of the copper-clad, you can see the gaps (off-white) where the surface has been scraped away between the rails. Edit: Looks like Kris just beat me to it! Cheers, Dave

Hi,We are using small brass screws under each rail for the scenic side rail joints. The idea is that they will be easier to disguise with cosmetic sleepers. I'll try and take some photos later today. First, the copper clad in the fiddle yard, these are strips about 8-10mm wide cut from a larger sheet (about A4 in size) The scenic side uses these small brass screws No.2 x 1/2", hopefully they will get hidden by the cosmetic sleepers and ballast. Some other close-up photos. The baseboards alignment dowels: We have modified the large radius Peco code 55 electrofrog points on the scenic side by removing much of the extra plastic around the switch blades. Just visible at the top of each tie bar is an 8mm diameter hole through the baseboard to allow for the point motor drive. The shine is from the Copydex we have used to stick them down with. Hope this is of interest. Cheers, Dave

Hi, We are using small brass screws under each rail for the scenic side rail joints. The idea is that they will be easier to disguise with cosmetic sleepers. I'll try and take some photos later today. These are very nice products (I have some for 4mm scale) and on a smaller layout I would seriously consider them. However, there are around 35 tracks crossing the 4 baseboard joints on the scenic side, so the cost (about £140) of these would be rather high, and I thought the screws seemed expensive at £11 for a box of 200! One of the advantages of this layout is that the club can afford a larger budget than many (most?) individuals can afford, but we still have to keep an eye on the costs. The club will fund the infrastructure, but the members will be responsible for acquiring the stock to run on it. Cheers, Dave

Tracklaying We decided to use Peco code 55 track work - it would have been nice to try 2mmFS Easitrack and build finescale pointwork, but the team felt they would like to get the layout running in a reasonable length of time (and the Chairman's request for it to appear in the next exhibition rather sealed the decision). Point motors would also be Peco in the fiddle yard and SEEP on the scenic side. There was a lot of discussion over this and we changed our mind several times. There are around 60 point motors on the layout, so the cost was a consideration, as much as ease of fitting. Even now, I'm not sure that we made things particularly easy for ourselves. First we put down 1/16" cork: And started planning where the fiddle yard track should actually go (as opposed to where the track plan suggested): And cut out the slots for the sub-track Peco point motors starting with one of the scissors crossovers: The fiddle yard begins to takes shape: And is nearly completed. This picture also shows the trestles that the layout will normally be supported on, they are shared with a number of other club layouts and bring the height up to a more convenient working/operating level Once most of the fiddle yard was complete we started on the scenic side: As you can see it is quite an intensive effort getting this layout built: Cheers, Dave

It's quite a heavy unit as there is quite a lot of wood there - the carcase is made from 18mm ply sheets. Transport will require a van with a tail-lift, but this should be easier than heaving the current club layouts around. Cheers, Dave

Baseboards Each baseboard is built from 6.5mm birch ply with 12mm thick end plates. The surface is also 6.5mm ply and the butt joints are strengthened with 19mm square timber in the corners. All the ply came from our local timber merchant starting as 8'x4' sheets which they cut down to our specification. We then spent December cutting the more fiddly bits to size. To ensure consistency the boards were assembled in a jig while they were screwed together. As can be seen, the backscene forms a full height spine down the middle of each board. The end plates are a "T" shape to give the backscene a positive location. The end plates are aligned by metal dowels and joined by 6mm wing-bolts. At this stage there is no internal bracing - this will be added later to stiffen the boards up. The first board was one of the end boards, so has one solid end and a small fascia to hide the return curves: Finally we got all the boards together: The boards on their own will be carrying delicate models, so some form of transportation protection is needed. We decided to build a storage trolley (or "flight case") to move them around. This ended up as a mobile wardrobe! All 5 boards slot into their spaces with enough clearance to protect board ends and scenery. The trolley also has a storage compartment to hold the miscellaneous bits that will need to travel with the layout. All supported on 8 large casters. This was all done by mid of January. Cheers, Dave

Background Being a club layout there are always a number of conflicting requirements and we are trying to find a good compromise to them all. The design criteria were: Modern or contemporary era. Space to run a variety of trains including long freight trains and HSTs. Double track main line with lay-by sidings. Engineer's or Permanent Way yard. Ability to use conventional DC control as well as DCC. Involve members in the construction allowing them to try new skills. Suitable for exhibitions. Easy to store, set up and disassemble. This last point was very important and determined the size and number of baseboards. Some of the club's existing layouts are over 40 feet long. As we meet in a rented church hall we need to pack away everything at the end of a club night into a storage unit some 20 yards away from the hall. The size of some of the layouts means that they can only be got out for a longer Saturday session or an exhibition. We are also not getting any younger and humping large baseboards around is not as easy as it use to be. Like Ben A, I had felt Hinksey made a great location for a model and tried to get the essence of it into the plan. The real place is very long and would need a lot of space to do it real justice - we hope to get the flavour of it in the model. However none of us had much knowledge or experience of the current railway scene, so we are learning fast. In the end the space criteria crystallised down to 20' long by 2'9" wide on 5 baseboards. Cheers, Dave