BusDriverMan

Your layout looks grand IMO - there's plenty of separation between the sidings at the back and the loop at the front for a start, it looks like it won't crowd out the scenery and the industry the railway is there to serve. And the contrast between the buildings at the right hand side and the trees on the left. If I'd gone ahead with my plan, it would be very obvious there's no space to access these wagons to work on them or unload them or do whatever they've been shunted here to do. The schematic cut into the control panel is much more spacious than the reality - didn't fully appreciate how dense it would look until I mocked up the trackplan fullsize.

Daisy's a Met-Camm design, right? Plans to produce a 101-based bubble car?

That's a coincidence! My layout (more of a test track) is also 1200x200, on a salvaged baseboard section, and originally intended to hold Inglenook and Timesaver in their entireties which is just about achievable in N. Fits neatly on top of a piano-keyboard on indefinite loan from a friend. Only got as far as building Inglenook though. The original plan would've resulted in a ridiculously dense sea of rails on the left side of the board while the other end basically just has a headshunt. Points are motorised with SG90 servos superglued directly to the underside of the board with a paperclip tie-rod and driven from an Arduino. The control panels are an early experiment into CNC engraving. That photo was nearly two years ago, and since then… it looks almost exactly the same! Going to rebuild or possibly start over - have decided the headshunt needs to be the specified Inglenook length, with a facing connection (guarded with a yellow position-light signal) to the rest of the layout.

I'd never heard of this unit until reading your blog - what a unique design!

Could it still be used as a grounded van body in a goods yard, set a few decades later?

What kind of errors did you encounter?

I love this. I have the opposite experience - I have a small shunting layout with a homebrew controller running via DCC++. I hate the centre-off speed control and am gradually getting round to building a controller that's even more cumbersome than the direction switch plus speed knob you were using. What I'm going for is a reversing switch, potentiometer power control, and spring-loaded release/lap/apply brake switch, and controller-side physics simulation… I'm expecting it will make shunting more fun. If so, will invest the time in printing/fabricating more elaborate controllers, with notched power handles and gear selectors!

I drove a Wrightbus-bodied Volvo which was worse. Start the engine with the doors open and the bus silently stays in neutral when you put it into gear. Bit of a surprise to be rolling backwards when trying to leave a bus stop you were waiting at for five minutes on a hot day with the doors open. Cue fifteen minutes phoning call with the depot, who haven't got a clue, turning everything off and on again, attempting the engine bay start button, before more or less arriving on the solution by chance. Never drove a Streetlite but disappointed by the reports upthread. Was always supremely disenchanted by the Optare Solo and hoped that the Streetlite, while too big to be a Solo replacement, would at least be better :/ We had one Solo which, IIRC, would ignore movement of the accelerator pedal if you didn't leave a considerable pause between releasing the handbrake and pressing the accelerator. Great way to take the driver's attention away from the road and into the cab when intending to turn right at a traffic light, or leave a bus stop. Resulted in consciously breaking the habit of applying the handbrake whenever stopped for more than a few seconds. What? Oh, the trains? Yes, very very nice modelling! Good info on the Railmatch cans. I've got a few which I intend to use for total resprays - starting with a 122 - and now I'm mentally prepared

Hi all, I'm gearing up to start painting models. Late 70s in N. On a bit of a budget - my painting equipment so far extends to a 3M spray mask. I don't have an airbrush or compressor (yet). On my workbench right now is a Class 122 that'll be in plain blue, and some Peco wagons I'm not sure what to do with. This is the plan: Prime with Halfords Anti-Rust Primer Grey Main body colours with Railmatch spray cans (yellow ends directly onto grey primer, mask ends with Tamiya tape, then spray sides) Brush paint details with Vallejo acrylics / generic acrylic paint / metallic Sharpie Gloss varnish with…? Used to be Krystal Klear but I've heard they've changed the formula? Railtec transfers without Microset / Microsol (as per DM from Steve from Railtec - thanks Steve) Matt varnish with…? I've heard Hobbycraft do a good spray varnish but it can't be posted, I can only buy in-store? Weathering - either pastels / oil paint or deferred until I can get an airbrush I live alone in a one-bedroom flat, so spray painting will either be in my kitchen with an old sheet set up to catch overspray, or in the yard out back with the model firmly blu-tacked to a stick. Any advice greatly appreciated!

A contemporary view of the same site. Heartbreaking, isn't it I've just finished "The Arbroath and Forfar Railway" by… a disappointing author. The book was good, but rushed exponentially towards the end. I wanted to know why Forfar got this new(?) signal box in its later years. Found another photo here, a 1981 railtour from Edinburgh Waverley to Forfar, with a 122 leading what might be a 108. Very inconsiderate to marshall the van end of the 122 at the front of the train and deprive passengers a view forwards! https://www.sixbellsjunction.co.uk/80s/810725db.htm ps @sulzer27jd John - I like your location

Amazing thread Izzy! Two things I found inspiring in particular - the folding integral sector plate, and the motor bogie. I think I have some of those motors, bought for another purpose and unused. Tempted to plan a similar layout based on nearby Kirriemuir, a fictional version that was still open in the 70s and served by blue diesels. Should fit well with living in a rented one-room flat. Those 309s are incredible! I have a minor nitpick - should the intermediate ends retain side-buffers? I think they were omitted. edit: found a photo in amongst all the 3/4 views of the driving ends: Are the tantalum stay-alive units off-the-shelf or DIY? Brilliant! Any chance you could do the same for DMUs in N / 2mm?

Quite the transformation!

Can you do the window frames with a silver Sharpie and a steady, well-braced hand? Excited by the possibilities of 3D printed cabs, etched sides, donor chassis / subframe - just wish there was an equivalent of the Replica Railways motorised chassis for N gauge!

Oh nice! Didn't realise the layout already exists despite the first sentence of your first post… d'oh Incidentally - if there's colour light signalling, there's probably also power-operated points. Point motors almost always have a facing point lock built in, so if you're controlling this with a lever frame, you wouldn't need FPL levers.

The desk in my living room, where I've spent almost all my waking hours since the middle of March, overlooks the site of one of the stations on this route. Trucks go past all day. As an aside to the history of the route, where should the new Strathmore Route go? I'd take it as a given that it'd take more or less the historic route from Stanley Junction via Coupar Angus to a new site in Forfar. But from there - to Dundee via Broughty Ferry/Monifieth? To Arbroath via Friockheim on the original route? My preference is to have a new through route from Forfar to Brechin to the ECML south of Laurencekirk - thus allowing an alternate Aberdeen-Perth route avoiding the single-track section between Montrose and Usan. When I moved to Scotland, I spent a year or so driving buses to most of these places. A train would've been better!

Can you squeeze in a headshunt around the top left curve, and change the connection to a trailing connection on the other side of the scissors? This eliminates the facing point and lets the last siding act as a headshunt / catch point to stop runaway trains going straight into the Down main line. Trains arriving and departing from the station on either line will both need to reverse on the Down main line. With the original design, there's direct access to the Down platforms, but getting to the Up side of the station requires two reversals on the main line to use the Down scissors, or travelling right through the station to use the Up scissors. The yellow subsidiary signal in the yard before the crossover to the main line only applies to travel over the crossover - movements in and out of the down headshunt / last siding are unsignalled. I'd imagine the crossover and the two signals next to it would be controlled by a ground frame released by the main signalbox. The two Down signals next to the scissors might be redundant - the platform starters could do the job. I've sketched in subsidiary signals for travelling onto the Up line to reverse at the Up signal by the scissors crossover - the Limit Of Shunt signal (fixed red subsidiary signal) stops the train running on the wrong line all the way to Holyhead. Alternatively they could be eliminated, and trains would reverse at the subsidiary signal by the Down yard crossover to access a different part of the station. There might need to be route indication on the Down line subsidiary as routes can be set from it straight into the Down yard or any part of the station. In which case, I'm not sure how it'd be operated - the signaller would clear it for routes into the station and the Up yard, while the shunter would clear it for routes into the Down siding? Doesn't seem insurmountable. I was procrastinating yesterday and found a fascinating document on the RSSB website (while googling for something else entirely) - "Signalling and Operational Telecommunications Design: Technical Guidance". A 327-page PDF written by Railtrack in 1999 and filled with far too much detail even for me - but on page 199 there's signalling diagram for a fictional junction station with multiple-aspect signals controlled by a lever frame and a description of the interlocking, followed on page 273 with the same location but with relay interlocking and NX panel control. Found it quite interesting!

I picked this up as a "DMU Chassis" as part of a small ad a week or two ago along with an aged BH Enterprises Class 121/122 kit and a few other items. Took a little while to recognise it for what it was with those external driveshafts! Runs OK with a 9V battery across the tracks - I don't have a DC controller. Was thinking of using the chassis and kit to make a grimy Scottish Region Class 131 as a modelling exercise, as I already have a Dapol 122 cobbled together from spares. This would mean replacing the bogie sideframes, adapting it for DCC, and ideally replacing the wheelsets with something less pizza-cuttery. My question is, in the year 2020, is this a good use of the chassis? And if so, can I source better wheelsets somewhere? I've searched a bit but haven't found clear answers. Meanwhile, it can push a CCT back and forth under the monitors on my desk

Hmm - that looks like the makings of a Class 34 to me!

Oh my gosh, that's adorable and also extremely cool.

I got (re)started into railway modelling a few years back because of DCC++ and from a Robin Simonds (The N Scaler) article about block detection. I've had an interest in railway signalling since I was a toddler and wanted to build something with interesting and accurate signalling and interlocking. So instead of doing anything like that, I acquired a 20x120cm baseboard from the local model railway club's scraps pile and built Inglenook on it, for fun and experimentation. Initially it was DCC++ driven by JMRI, then I built a basic controller, fixed to the board edge, with these features: - Four pushbuttons and a rotary encoder for input - Four-digit seven-segment display for output - Favourite loco addresses hard-coded into the firmware - Clunky programming mode added after I lost patience with DecoderPro - Connects to the DCC++ Arduino Uno via a serial connection It also has an engraved control panel - I bought a "T8" CNC engraver after watching a few too many sponsored YouTube videos. It's somewhat underwhelming due to the components it came with but can be fettled up into something more useable. Principle lesson is that engraving doesn't really suit plywood A second Nano operates the points, which are servo-driven, with a second engraved plywood panel. It is independent of the DCC components except using the same 5V power supply. The servos are superglued directly to the underside of the board and operate the tie bar with a straightened paperclip. Occasionally the servo angles need to be adjusted by a degree or two to fully close the point but without the servo buzzing - this can be done by plugging the laptop into the Nano and sending commands over the serial connection. The servo angles are stored in the Nano's flash memory. I'm in the process of designing and building a complete replacement with these features: - 128x64 OLED screen - Layout fleet and point config information stored on an SD card - Point servo angles configurable via the controller - Trains driven with a genericised version of real train controls: separate power, reverser, and brake controls - 3-digit 7-segment speedometer display - Driven by ATMega328P microcontrollers in a modular I2C network I'd originally planned to cram Timesaver onto the board too - there's just about enough space to fit Inglenook and Timesaver together behind a headshunt long enough for a loco and five 15ft-wheelbase wagons, raising the possibility of simultaneously solving Inglenook and Timesaver with two locos and transferring trains between the two. The idea is definitely ridiculous, I'm just not sure if it's workable or worth the effort! I'm quite excited by the potential of more realistic train controls than the traditional turny-knob plus decoder-defined momentum. Should make shunting trucks more interesting. Moving forward - I now have a working 3D printer, and a 121/122 railcar - might go for a more advanced controller with a notched power controller and gear selector, and see if I can make it dual-purpose as a model railway throttle and as a Diesel Railcar Simulator game controller…!

Going back a bit - if producing the entire panel in one go is too expensive / inflexible, might be worth emulating the real thing and building a panel as a series of tiles? Even if it's only cosmetic and there's just one monolithic wiring harness behind it.

I used to drive the bus through Inverkeilor. The underbridge south of the former station with the 13'9" height limit - IIRC we operated a bus which was placarded as 13'9" tall or thereabouts, but the memo came round we were to cease operating them under that bridge. Driving south, the road descends, then abruptly levels off just before going under the bridge. I think a colleague discovered that if driving with the requisite aplomb, the suspension will compress when the road levels, and bounce the bus upwards enough to strike the underside of the bridge. No idea if it happened or not though

Anyone got a spare 122 roof (destination blinds rather than headcode panels)?

That's what got me :/ The tight spots are: a) the gap between the top of the chassis and the inside of the long bonnet end - the chassis needs filing down to make space for the decoder b) the gap between the gearbox cover and the cab interior moulding, the middle one with the driving controls I tried to reassemble with too much wire on top of the gearbox cover, and popped that cab interior moulding loose. Not easy to put back without removing the entire cab from the running plate and I don't think that's possible - so might just live with it!