Harlequin
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Posts posted by Harlequin
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Something like this maybe:
- ECML station, bridge, tunnel. I made the bridge straight for easier construction.
- Track all on one level but the scenery rises and falls all around. This is simpler and more reliable than trying to create gradients in the track.
- R2 and R3 radius curves are used but are hidden. Elsewhere min radius is approx 610mm.
- The only turnouts that have to be Setrack are the optional facing crossover under the hill within the R2/R3 curves. Everything else is Streamline and If that crossover is omitted you can use Code 75 if required.
- Streamline: 5 curved right, 5 curved left, 1 large Y, 2 medium left, 1 medium right.
- The only place where the twin track has the normal Streamline spacing is over the bridge and in the fiddle yard.
- Basic fiddle yard in the form of two passing loops where you can manually set up one train while another is running on either circuit.
- There is a facing crossover on the left hand side. That is as per the prototype.
It's still a bit rough and some details would need to be worked out to turn it into a working layout.
The track gets close to the backscene in places so the scenic edges could be difficult to disguise but that's pretty much unavoidable in such a small space.
The operation would have to be checked. I know that some wrong-road running is needed to exit the inner FY loops in the clockwise direction (and enter the outer loops anti-clockwise) but that might not matter if the layout is more about play value?
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Might the smell of old model railways actually be the smell of tobacco smoke?
Some second hand books and models I've bought over the t'internet have had that distinctive aroma when they arrived.
Old Hornby adverts often show Dad with a pipe in his mouth and I know that if Dad was a pipe smoker, like mine was, the smell and the staining got everywhere.
On the plus side St Bruno tobacco tins were invaluable for storing bits and pieces!
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
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How about Berwick-upon-tweed as inspiration?
- It is on the ECML where it is double-tracked.
- There is one island platform between the up and down lines and there are a fairly simple set of loops and sidings on the down side.
- The station is built in the grounds of a castle, of which the west wall survives.
- One end of the passenger station immediately abuts the river Tweed, which is crossed by an impressive viaduct. (One of the station crossovers is actually on the viaduct.)
The modelling possibilities are mouth-watering and the station is not too big or complicated - so it should be able to be compressed. Station (with castle ramparts!) on the long side, bridge over river on the right. Some station pointwork on the left, skinny duck-under section at the bottom, as you have shown it.
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44 minutes ago, Mallard60022 said:
Jilted John was actually Clive Morty, but Morty won't admit that.
Twopintsoflargerandapacketofcrispsplease.
Ar$£
Jilted John of course went on to further fame with his massive Eurovision hit, "Pigeons in Flight":
Ooph!
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18 hours ago, Mallard60022 said:
Just leave that there shall we?
Ar$£
Sorry I'm a bit late to the party but that, Sir Duck, is the most excellent thing I've seen for a long time!
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Here's how the trailing crossover and goods shed loop could fit:
You can see that the route into the loading dock (the old shed siding) has to turn through the double slip.
The down siding and the new shed loop could be longer but only by sacrificing the river crossing.
Edit: The abandoned back siding is in light grey.
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34 minutes ago, Aire Head said:
This was the one thing that has really irked me about my plan so far. I just couldn't get the loop to work!
I would also like to add an additional trailing crossover as shown in your top plan so I can also use the down loop as a refuge.
The goods shed loop might be possible by abandoning the back siding but it will be quite short.
Amazingly, it looks like the extra trailing crossover can be fitted in without much trouble. (I was expecting it to be a real headache.)
I'll post something tomorrow.
Remember that Compound said that the extra crossover was only needed when the down siding was also used as a refuge and that doesn't have to be the case, esp. at a smaller station. And not all Midland stations followed the archetypal pattern. (Just thinking about the less-is-more principle...
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OK, so here's a revised version of my previous idea, which tries to make efficient use of the space by combining the access route into the operating well with the fiddle yard.
This concept assumes that 4-coach trains are the maximum sensible train length, given the size of the layout.
It uses cassettes to perform multiple functions of the traditional FY to save space:
- Multiple storage loops (infinite!)
- Passing loops
- Crossovers
- Turnout fans
- Min radius: 610mm
- There's a lifting flap in the main circuits so that continuous running is easy and separate from storage.
- 4-coach cassettes (1080mm long) have their own separate connections, with room on (some of) the feeder tracks to place and remove locos.
- The cassettes no longer have to be in place for the duration of a running session and so, if you are methodical about removing cassettes when they're not being used, access in and out is easy - just lift the flap. I would also suggest making rail level quite high so that it's easy to duck under when you don't want to lift the flap or remove the cassettes.
- The inner cassette connection is double ended but the outer connections are single ended and when they are in use the door can't be opened or closed. These restrictions might seem odd but they are carefully thought out compromises to make the whole design work. (The outer cassette could be double-ended if the minimum radius was allowed to drop down to R2.)
- The station passenger buildings hide the fact that the tracks keep turning and hide one of the cassette loop turnouts from normal viewing angles.
- The station track plan is deliberately simple - not trying to fit a big station with lots of features into a small space.
Bad things: the curve of the platforms - but that's part of the design compromise.
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Are you open to an improved cassette idea?
I have worked out a scheme with a bit more flexibility than my previous idea. It uses 1080mm long cassettes - long enough for 4 Stanier corridor coaches or 3 plus loco. Locos could be handled separately. Cassettes would have side walls, lifting end stops and optional covers to keep stock safe while moving.
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I like the elderly dying tree! That's more like real life and it fits in the scene alongside the tumbledown barn.
Could you persuade some ivy to colonise it?
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Also off-topic: "Running plate" vs. "Footplate". Discuss.
Would it be correct to say that outside the cab it's called the "running plate" while the "footplate" is inside the cab?
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Hi @Aire Head,
I have a cunning new idea. To know if it would work, can I ask you: When the door is open 90 degrees, what is the gap between the wall and the back of the door? And is the door 768mm wide?
Edit: Supplementary question: What max train length are you realistically targeting now?
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2 hours ago, DavidCBroad said:
I reckon that unit is overhanging the platform. As long as the overhang is 3ftb 3" or so high it can overlap the platform with no problems.
Melmerby.
Some GW stock was 70 ft long and some was 9ft 7" wide, Super Saloons and Centenaries were 9ft 7" wide . Maybe 40 coaches in total. . They didn't actually do both. I believe the centre overhang was broadly similar.
Los of older pre WW1 GW Coaches were 70 ft long, while other railways struggled to get beyond 57ft and were some of the most efficient coaches around for tare weight vs passengers carried.
Dreadnoughts, 1904 onwards: 70ft long 9ft 6in wide. Fair enough, not the 9ft 7in quoted but very close and my books say that was the maximum possible within the loading gauge. They had inset end doors to reduce the effect of the outswing.
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39 minutes ago, Michael Edge said:
My advice, based on experience, is to forget the cassette idea and stick with the loop fiddle yard.
Can you explain why?
In the context of Aire Head's layout they could solve multiple issues and so they might be worth the potential downsides.
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Hi JR,
- The curves at top left look a bit sharp.
- Your cassette connections allow trains to exit from the layout but you haven't got any connections or crossovers to feed trains in.
- How would the inner cassette spur actually work and where are the cassettes stored? Is it going to be practical?
- The line though the goods shed will have to be straight and that could affect all the nearby curves.
- The viaduct section will obviously have quite deep baseboards but that's right where you'd ideally duck under.
- Can you reach the back of the scene bottom left? The baseboards look very wide there.
- It would look better, and help setting out later, if you could make parallel tracks actually be parallel.
If you abandoned the cutting you could maybe re-arrange things like this:
Or like this:
Hope that helps.
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Sorry. No worries.
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“No answer!” came the stern reply.
Ah well, I think it's got possibilities. An idea to bear in mind for the future.
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To my mind the few faults are minor and the model is fundamentally very good.
No-one has mentioned the unrealistic coal load in recent posts... That arguably looks far worse than the handrail!
On the subject of the greens, I have 4013 Knight of St Patrick in 1940s "G crest W" livery and 4050 Princess Alice in 1920s "Great Western" livery. The two versions of loco green are definitely different. The 1920s green is slightly more washed out but I think that's correct because we know that more coats of varnish were applied in this period and that ageing and heating made the varnish go cloudy. (See gwr.org.uk and the Precision Paints range.)
Is it just coincidence that Hornby seem to have "got it right" with my two particular models or have they been striving for correct period colours all along while modellers have been wrongly expecting some sort of generic, unchanging GWR loco green???
P.S. Both my models have 10-spoke bogie wheels.
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3 hours ago, halsey said:
Hi Phil
Did the text you posted above come from a larger "document" detailing all CVs and their values??
If so its a much easier format (for me) than the link kindly provided by Ian
Hi Julian,
That was just my attempt to rewrite the most useful parts of the NMRA document in plain English.
The NMRA spec and the DCCWiki version of it are very low level technical documents. They're not really intended for everyday users to read or understand. DCC would be more user-friendly if there was a layer on top of this stuff that worked at a more human level but I don't know of a controller or a software package that does that.
The JMRI "Decoder Pro" program gets some of the way there but it's still too techy, in my opinion.
The core CVs are 2,3,4,5,6 and 29 and they are the simplest to understand, although CV29 flummoxes a lot of people because it's not really a number, it's a "bit field" (a set of switches attached to the bits that represent a number).
Outside that core set things get more complicated and more specialised - so you probably don't need to know about them unless you need to do more advanced things.
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Here's the basic cassette bridge concept drawn out:
- The concept in its purest form - the "fiddle yard" consists of simply the two bridge cassettes (and a loco spur)
- The scenic area (green) is thus much bigger - immersive almost.
- Cassettes are 1m long and spaced apart so they are easier to handle individually.
- Valuable space is not taken up by FY points fans.
- I turned the layout inside out so that the interesting goods yard is more visible instead of being in a corner.
- The operating well is a bit bigger.
- Min radius: 610mm
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35 minutes ago, Johnny Rock said:
I can to an extent as long as room to enter through new right hand side door. This would allow storage loops along the window wall.
Do you mean the door is in one of the long walls? If so, that makes things much more difficult.
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Oooh that's Smoooooth!
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I picked 4ft out of the air because I thought that was about the length of train the current loops could accommodate but if the loco was uncoupled and either stored separately or provided with a siding on the layout then cassettes could be in the region of 3ft to 1m.
2 hours ago, Flying Pig said:It doesn't seem sensible to store stationary trains on a lifting section that could be needed for access in a hurry.
Reasonable point but I would say that: (a.) removing a cassette ought to be made very easy so that the layout is easy to operate and thus doing the same thing for access shouldn't be too tiresome, and (b.) the cassettes would only have something standing on them if you were about to do an exchange. A lot of the time they would be clear, just being used as part of the main roundy-round circuits.
It would definitely involve compromises but maybe they would be worth it for the gains, especially the increased scenic run?
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29 minutes ago, Johnny Rock said:
Lots of S and C prototype plans are available on freetrackplans.com.
This is the Kirkby Stephen plan.
This is Setrack. Very small radius turnouts and not what you want if you're trying to represent the S&C. It also lacks a crucial single slip - really not a very helpful plan!
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8x4 OO for kids
in Layout & Track Design
Posted
I think you still have R1 curves in the inner circuit. That will cause problems with a lot of rolling stock.