Harlequin

Hi Richard, There seem to be some inconsistencies in your plans... The prototype station is straight but your model space is L shaped. The bit of the prototype you are interested in, the shed area, is relatively simple and well-defined but the peripheral bit that you are less interested in, the passing lines, are complicated and extensive. To model the shed you only need storage space for locos but if you model the mainlines you seem to be thinking about mainline traffic, which will need much more storage. I’m sure all these things can be resolved. One idea might be to use just one leg of your L shaped space to model the shed area with simplified mainlines either in the foreground or background just as a non-working scenic element?

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

" Captain Webb the Dawley man, Captain Webb from Dawley, Came swimming along the old canal That carried the bricks to Lawley. Swimming along - Swimming along - Swimming along from Severn, And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven "

Hi John, Do you do requests? Could you snap the same scene from closer to eye level? I bet it would look even more wonderful (apart from not showing off your new fence so well)...

That’s what my brief research suggested too. A “snubber”.

That sounds great! I had to ask because a number of people who start threads here haven't really considered whether their space is suitable for a railway or not and we only find out after multiple plans have been proposed... What's the rest of the loft used for???

Hi spikey, This is a really interesting query because it's not something that has come up much before. If it was a general problem you'd expect to see lots of people saying the same thing but that doesn't seem to be the case, AFAIK. I can imagine that cheap switches might go wrong after a while but I think point motors ought to be more reliable than you suggest. So, I'm wondering whether the CDU is in fact the real problem? Maybe it's just putting too much energy through the system? Arcing in switches is a well known problem and it's worse in DC systems than AC because the conditions for the arc across the switch contacts can last longer and always transfers metal the same way. With AC the voltage reverses very quickly, of course, and any arc deposits metal randomly between the contacts. There are simple ways to reduce arcing but you'd need an electronics expert to suggest what might work in your case. On my old layout (40 years ago) we used stud contacts to drive our point motors and it worked well except that the violent flashes were a bit scary and there was always a small chance that the probe tip would weld itself to the stud when you touched it!

Loft spaces can be very tricky. Are there any beams crossing through the space that would affect the plan? Does the roof slope inwards? Are there any purlins getting in the way? (Hopefully the space isn't filled with braced trusses every 2ft!) Has the loft space been "converted"? If not you need to think about the temperature extremes and humidity levels.

No substantive updates yet but I have some more technology. The website I was using to convert CIELAB values to RGB belongs to a company that makes another affordable colorimeter. (I didn't that realise until the wonder of cookies showed me adverts for their devices while I was looking at the weather forecast... ) This device, a NIX Mini 2, is a very different beast: The original blue device is far eastern basic technology - a standalone workmanlike unit. The new device is a slickly designed, tiny sensor module from Canada that pairs with a swish app running on a Smartphone. So I can now compare samples from the two devices and hopefully solve some of the problems with the initial measurements from the big blue device.

"Loft eaves"? "a more precise measure up"? I have a bad feeling about this....

I think you need to "report it" to Andy and ask him to move it, but... IMHO, it would be cleaner to start a new topic because people who like to follow builds might not be interested in the design process and it might seem odd to have all that discussion suddenly appear as if it's still "open" in some sense. I would suggest just putting a link to this thread on the first page of your new thread.

Time to start a Layout topic?

You'd be surprised how many people don't think of that!

Hi Reg, Have you considered using more prototypical looking track for your layout? E.g. Peco Streamline? Lengths and curve radii would be more constraining - i.e. you would get less into the space and you wouldn't be able to have a loop in the head of your tadpole but it would look more "grown up", as you put it. Since you say you're into the scenery more maybe that would still work for you? 4ft is generally considered to be too far to reach across. Remember that when you put your hand down you will inevitably be degrading some bit of scenery and your clothes will be catching the little details at the front. Most stock these days is made to work on R2 curves. You see it stated on the boxes. (There are exceptions like the beautiful little Pecketts and their like.) Curves less than that radius will be a pain when you want to run some new stock and find it derails, locks buffers or needs to be modified to run on your layout...

Remember to leave enough room for the traverser to connect the front road to the rest of the layout - not how your sketch shows it.

Just needs a bit of plastic sheet across the opening and I'm sure Mrs Bacon can make do until the railway is up and running...? Got to get your priorities right!

And leave room for the band, of course... But whoa! Hold on there! We didn't see Bradley Manor in the loco release spur! Wasn't that what the tension was building up to?

Will the band be taking up their place at the end of the platform for the big send off? I think the Stationmaster still has the bunting from King George's coronation in that big cupboard in his office.

Hi Pete, No offence taken, that was just a sketch showing what I thought might be a neat arrangement in broad terms. I didn't put any details on but you can see how Keith's detailed plan is broadly similar and they could perhaps be melded together. You aren't asking too much and stick to your guns on a through station with more than 2 platforms. Regarding the high level line: That would be much more satisfying (IMHO) if it had a connection with the rest of the layout. Yes, that means a gradient but fear not - you've got the space to do it easily and reliably. Maybe that is where your future expansion could be focused. Plan in a gradient to a high level station now but build it after you've got the basic layout working.

In Keith's plan it's very difficult for mainline goods traffic to get into or out of the goods yard. It requires shuffling backwards and forwards using the branchline as a headshunt. The curves in the top left corner are the tightest in the plan, the most likely to need to be hidden, but the proximity of the TT makes that very difficult to do. And I agree with the others that the high level track really looks superfluous. Going back a few weeks, I posted this:

After trying a few measurements I realise that getting meaningful results is going to be more involved than I thought! 1. If I repeat measurements in roughly the same spot I get slightly different results every time. Fair enough but that means that I will need to take a number of measurements and average them out before it's safe to post any numbers here. 2. The colorimeter can tell you whether two samples are close to each other within a defined tolerance. When I sample one side tank of my Hornby 6110 Large Prairie all the samples are fine, within the tolerance but here's the kicker... When I compare that colour with the other side tank it's consistently outside the tolerance and the colorimeter reports a colour match "failure"! The biggest difference is always in the L axis - in other words one side is darker than the other... I suspect the paint has not been sprayed evenly on both sides. That's an interesting finding already, even if it does make my idea of comparing models much more difficult. 3. When I try to convert the CIELAB values into colours that my computer can display (on a properly calibrated monitor) the results are always more grey than green - green-ness is barely detectable. I don't know yet if the conversion is going wrong, my monitor is wrong, my eyes are wrong or the colorimeter is wrong. So I have some problems to work through here!

I think that's a story from BR days. In Great Western days, the era this sub-forum is about, paints did not arrive in a ready made colour and did not naturally have a gloss finish. Thinners were a normal part of the paint formulation and in fact white spirit was the specified thinner for the "China Red" used on buffer beams. To re-iterate, I'm not suggesting there is any one "pure" colour for GWR Loco green.

At the moment I'm not intending to compare model colours to prototypes, just to compare them to each other in a quantifiable way for now. However... I have got a copy of Railway Archive No.5, as recommended in Great Western Way 2nd Edition, for the article "Painting Victorian Trains" by Dr. Anthony J. East. It gives some useful clues about the formulation of GWR Loco green ("Middle Chrome Green"). The exact mix of pigments and the resulting colour was quite closely specified by Swindon and the GWR were very careful about their "brand identity" so I think colours would have been rejected if they were not up to scratch. We know about the effects of weathering and heating and we know some of the reasons why paint formulations and painting methods changed over the years. So, I think we can explain most variations without resorting to stories from the pub about chucking ingredients recklessly into the pot! On the subject of Lakes, Dr. East says that lakes are a specific subdivision of organic pigments: "A lake is a chemical complex formed between a [soluble] dye [snip] and a metal salt. Together they react to form a stable insoluble chemical complex." "In general, lakes are darker and more violet than the dye itself." He says, Alizarin, the natural dye extracted from the madder plant combined with an Aluminium salt creates Crimson Lake. Crimson Lake is transparent and so needs all those undercolours but I don't know if that's true of all lakes.

Yes, they do. When two vehicles are fully in the same curve, their buffers overhang the rail by the same amount and on the same side and so they can't ride past each other. The difference in their outswings is effectively zero. Imagine track that simply goes from straight directly to a constant radius curve. The end of the vehicle still on the straight will have very little outswing but the one fully on the curve will have maximum outswing - maybe enough difference for the buffers to ride past each other. A properly designed transition curve just ensures that the outswing of adjacent vehicles both increase gradually together so that the outswing difference is never greater than a buffer width. Sorry if that's teaching Grandma to suck eggs. (Did someone say Euler Spiral?)

Hi Paul, That's an interesting topic but I'm not going to get into it yet. It might eventually be possible to quantify the effects of scale and/or distance as a vector in CIELAB space but first things first - I need to just get some basic colour readings and see if they say anything about the relative colours of different locos. (Yes, Hornby King class, I'm looking at you!)