Smithfield - a Minories Inspired Layout in 0 gauge

[thegreenhowards]

Some more progress to report. The wiring is complete (apart from the frog juicers which are on order) and tested. It all works fine. 
 

This view shows the droppers waiting to be connected.

 

and this shows them all wired into the BUS.

 

 

I was slightly nervous about whether a loco would be able to pull six wagons plus brake (the max for a four foot cassette) up the incline from the ‘Billingsgate’ fiddle yard, so tested it with my N1 and some of my heaviest wagons. It managed fine without even a slip.

 

 

I’m now waiting for the final baseboard to finish track laying to the buffer stops. And longer term for a club meeting to discuss detailed arrangements for the goods yard which will be laid after lockdown.

 

Andy

[Siberian Snooper]

Without wanting to appear picky, do you have a scale 6ft between the two turnouts on the right?

 

 

[thegreenhowards]

1 hour ago, Siberian Snooper said:

Without wanting to appear picky, do you have a scale 6ft between the two turnouts on the right?

 

 

You’ve got me worried now! Being a newbie in O gauge I’ve been trying to follow online guidance and set my track centres 80mm apart. I think the scale 6 ft you’re talking about is between the two rails nearest each other on adjacent tracks. So with a 80mm track centre spacing, 32mm gauge and 2.5mm for the rail width that gives a good 45.5mm between rails which is a scale 6’6”. 
 

If the two turnouts you’re talking about are the ones immediately behind the Gaugemaster controller and the one to its immediate left, then yes, the track centres are 80mm apart, so the gap between the rails is 45.5mm. That is measured from the toe of the left hand point to the right turn on the right hand point. Does that sound OK or have I misunderstood your comment?

 

Regards

 

Andy

[Siberian Snooper]

It may just be the camera angle making the gap look smaller, but just to make sure were all singing off the same hymn sheet.

 

 

I have marked the gap in red, with the minimum dimension, this is measured from the outside face of the rails.

 

 

[thegreenhowards]

17 minutes ago, Siberian Snooper said:

It may just be the camera angle making the gap look smaller, but just to make sure were all singing off the same hymn sheet.

 

 

I have marked the gap in red, with the minimum dimension, this is measured from the outside face of the rails.

 

 

Yes, that’s the one I thought you meant. It’s 45.5mm between the outside faces of the rails. It may look smaller because I’ve deliberately made the gap bigger between the two lines furthest right going away from the camera. These will be platform 3 and the goods headshunt and I wanted room for support columns for an overall roof between the lines.

 

I have used the 80mm track centre gap everywhere else. I believe that to be the O gauge standard - please correct me if I’m wrong. It results in a little over 6ft between adjacent rails. I suppose thats a function of the slightly under scale track gauge and an allowance for passing on tighter than prototypical curves.

 

Andy

[Siberian Snooper]

I would think so, like the 50mm used for 00, where the 44.8mm centres should be, to allow for the tighter curves used, particularly for set track.

 

 

[thegreenhowards]

A bit more progress to report this evening. The layout is now set up in my garage as the dining room can't easily take three boards together. In discussion with club member Peter, I have redesigned the goods yard to put the warehouse at the front from a public viewing point of view. The idea will be to make it open at the front so people can see into it. We might have a mirror between the two lines  to give an impression of depth and allow open wagons to be unloaded in the hidden road. The plan is now like this.

 

I have loosely laid the track for this revised layout to see what it looks like. here is a view from the fiddle yard end. The running lines are on the bottom left, then the loco spur, then the road to an unspecified goods facility on a future exhibition layout (which will just be a siding for now), then the two warehouse roads. The milk dock is middle right - to the right of the six wagons which are in the run round loop and which fill it to capacity.

 

 

This is a view from the other end.

 

 

Finally here is a sketch done by Peter of how the warehouse and milk dock might look.

 

 

Any comments welcome.

 

Andy

Edited January 3, 2023 by thegreenhowards

[thegreenhowards]

A bit more progress over the last few days, although it’s been cold in the garage so I’ve done it in short stints. I’ve built the translator board which will act as the entrance to the fiddle yard and will supply two cassettes on the outer roads and a reversing track in the centre. The fiddle yard in the club room will have to be narrow as a wall comes in to restrict the available width. I anticipate club running nights will only have limited stock so this will probably be adequate. For exhibition purposes we will have to do something different but I we haven’t planned that yet. 

 

 

The cardboard mock up in the middle distance shows where a bridge will cross the station throat.

 

I have used the Modeltech rail aligners at the baseboard join. They seem to work well producing a prefect alignment and look fairly neat. Whether they’re worth the £10 for the pair only time will tell - if they work and we have problems with the other baseboard joins then I guess the answer is ‘yes’. Otherwise they seem quite an extravagance but worth an experiment.

 

[pwr]

These look really neat. Somehow though my preferred  soldering of the rail to a brass screw at the rail end feels a bit more cost effective!! With careful positioning of sleepers you can achieve the same effect but I agree it was worth a go. 

 

I must admit I am taken with those DCC Concepts live baseboard dowels as a means to get power across board joins without wiring a cable. ideal for DCC.  I am not DCC but don't but I need a feed across several board ends to power signals and as I have no spare connections in my inter board cables that's my solution!

 

Paul R

[37114]

Shaping up nicely. Nice MGB in the background as well!

[thegreenhowards]

1 hour ago, pwr said:

These look really neat. Somehow though my preferred  soldering of the rail to a brass screw at the rail end feels a bit more cost effective!! With careful positioning of sleepers you can achieve the same effect but I agree it was worth a go. 

 

I must admit I am taken with those DCC Concepts live baseboard dowels as a means to get power across board joins without wiring a cable. ideal for DCC.  I am not DCC but don't but I need a feed across several board ends to power signals and as I have no spare connections in my inter board cables that's my solution!

 

Paul R

I agree that the screw or PCB strip solutions are much more cost effective. However, I think that in the overall scheme of things this is not too expensive and is worth an experiment.

 

I am also taken with the idea of the DCC Concepts dowels but fellow club members have ruled them out on the grounds of cost! “We have perfectly good dowels and you want to spend £15 to save plugging two wires together?!” I think I may invest in a couple myself just to try them out. My plan is that there should be no need to do up any bolts or connect any wires when we put this up. With DCC I think that’s achievable. My other solution is to use standard dowels for alignment and connect the wiring via the heavy duty spring clips which will hold the board together.

 

Andy

[thegreenhowards]

1 hour ago, 37114 said:

Shaping up nicely. Nice MGB in the background as well!

Thanks on both counts. The MGB was my first car, bought in 1989 and still going strong....although its a bit like Trigger’s broom!

[pwr]

7 minutes ago, thegreenhowards said:

I agree that the screw or PCB strip solutions are much more cost effective. However, I think that in the overall scheme of things this is not too expensive and is worth an experiment.

 

I am also taken with the idea of the DCC Concepts dowels but fellow club members have ruled them out on the grounds of cost! “We have perfectly good dowels and you want to spend £15 to save plugging two wires together?!” I think I may invest in a couple myself just to try them out. My plan is that there should be no need to do up any bolts or connect any wires when we put this up. With DCC I think that’s achievable. My other solution is to use standard dowels for alignment and connect the wiring via the heavy duty spring clips which will hold the board together.

 

Andy

 

 

Yes the cost of these dowels is not cheap and I have seen very effective connections using chocolate blocks with a round rod inserted and screwed up once the boards are together. However as a retrofit I felt they were worth it as some of my boards don't have any dowels being held together with clasp clips.

 

Paul R

[37114]

2 hours ago, thegreenhowards said:

Thanks on both counts. The MGB was my first car, bought in 1989 and still going strong....although its a bit like Trigger’s broom!

Nice. My mum still uses hers as the everyday car, owned since 1980, similar in that there is not much original car left...

 

[Pacific231G]

On 07/03/2021 at 21:11, thegreenhowards said:

 

I have used the Modeltech rail aligners at the baseboard join. They seem to work well producing a prefect alignment and look fairly neat. Whether they’re worth the £10 for the pair only time will tell - if they work and we have problems with the other baseboard joins then I guess the answer is ‘yes’. Otherwise they seem quite an extravagance but worth an experiment.

 

Thanks for showing these; I've been eyeing them up for H0 and H0m . They actually look a lot more unobtrusive here than in their advertising and all but invisible once painted and ballasted?  Their apparent virtue is that they provide positive vertical as well as horizontal alignment  but how good does that look to be in practice? 

Edited March 9, 2021 by Pacific231G

[thegreenhowards]

31 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

Thanks for showing these; I've been eyeing them up for H0 and H0m . They actually look a lot more unobtrusive here than in their advertising and all but invisible once painted and ballasted?  Their apparent virtue is that they provide positive vertical as well as horizontal alignment  but how good does that look to be in practice? 

They provide good horizontal alignment. I’m not convinced they offer any vertical alignment. Was that claimed?

[Pacific231G]

On 09/03/2021 at 23:35, thegreenhowards said:

They provide good horizontal alignment. I’m not convinced they offer any vertical alignment. Was that claimed?

I 'm not sure it was but it seemed to be inherent to the design with a lip above and below the sawtooth on each side.

[thegreenhowards]

19 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

I 'm not sure it was but it seemed to be inherent to the design with a lip above and below the sawtooth on each side.

Unless I’m missing something I can’t see any lip. I think mine just do horizontal alignment. This link is to the Modeltech user manual and doesn’t seem to show a lip?

 

https://bae8ca78-54b1-45f9-998d-b32cddd9a653.usrfiles.com/ugd/bae8ca_29e1272113ff41a584b70785ba2b1dc5.pdf

 

[Pacific231G]

2 hours ago, thegreenhowards said:

Unless I’m missing something I can’t see any lip. I think mine just do horizontal alignment. This link is to the Modeltech user manual and doesn’t seem to show a lip?

 

https://bae8ca78-54b1-45f9-998d-b32cddd9a653.usrfiles.com/ugd/bae8ca_29e1272113ff41a584b70785ba2b1dc5.pdf

 

I think I may have misinterpeted their photos. But, if the baseboard surface they're mounted to is hard and the joiners are tight to them then the protruding "teeth" on both sides should stop any relative vertical movement. I think I need to to get  a couple of them to experiment with but the manual does sat that they can't be used for lifting sections unless offset for that reason.

They also advise the use of solder paste which I've not used but looks useful. .  

 

 

Edited March 11, 2021 by Pacific231G

[thegreenhowards]

37 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

I think I may have misinterpeted their photos. But, if the baseboard surface they're mounted to is hard and the joiners are tight to them then the protruding "teeth" on both sides should stop any relative vertical movement. I think I need to to get  a couple of them to experiment with but the manual does sat that they can't be used for lifting sections unless offset for that reason.

They also advise the use of solder paste which I've not used but looks useful. .  

 

 

I agree that so far they’ve held in both directions but I have dowels in place as well so I don't know how much is down to the rail joiners.

 

I just used my normal flux for soldering. I don’t think paste is necessary. 

[thegreenhowards]

We had a good day’s progress on Tuesday. Peter brought over the last board and we spent the day (outside) getting our planned hinged system of baseboard pairing working. It works better than we could have expected and it was a bit of a whoop, whoop moment when we completed the first pair of boards. 

 

When stored the four main boards are in pairs like this which will fit neatly on the shelves in our club room (and my garage fortunately for now!). They are held together by a spring clip on each side - see middle right. These are 250kg rated, so should hold it.

To set the layout up, one just undoes those clips and folds it out. Then another set of clips each side and the hinges locate the boards together. There doesn’t seem to be any movement, so I’m hoping we won’t need bolts.

 

 

The hinge and clip arrangement looks like this.

 

From a cosmetic point of view, the ply sides form the back of retaining walls as the layout is set in a cutting. we may develop a clip on street scene to hide the hinges. The last board has Perspex instead of ply to allow viewing into the station platforms - we’re assuming the wall has moved further away from the tracks at this point. The boards will be permanently wired together with enough slack in the wiring to allow the folding.

 

I think this will be very quick and easy to set up, so I’m pleased with how it’s turned out.

 

We also got the cassette system working, but Peter took our prototype cassette home to produce some more so I can’t demo that.

 

I will be working on track laying and wiring the final board over the next few days.

 

Andy

 

 

Edited March 19, 2021 by thegreenhowards

[thegreenhowards]

I’ve been track laying over the weekend and have now finished the track on the fourth board. So the entire sweep of the station platforms is now finished. As a reminder the track on the left leads to what will be a hidden cassette.

 

 

 

This has allowed to to check that platform lengths are sufficient for the trains I’ve been building. I had worked it out in theory, but it’s nice to check in practice!

 

 

 

These picture show that they do indeed fit.

 

On the left are five Gresley non corridors with an N1 and N2 on the ends. This is rather tighter than I’d hoped but just fits. There are a few inches to spare on the next board before any point work, so that will give room for the front loco to uncouple and pull forward.

 

On the right is a J52, six wagons and a brake van which easily fit into the goods headshunt. There’s probably space for one more wagon.

 

Onto the wiring this afternoon. This board will be very straightforward.

 

Andy

 

 

 

 

Edited December 11, 2021 by thegreenhowards
correct right to left

[woko]

Your stock is definitely increasing there Andy. looking forward to seeing it all  

[thegreenhowards]

18 minutes ago, woko said:

Your stock is definitely increasing there Andy. looking forward to seeing it all  

Indeed, I’ve been knocking out kits steadily in between building the layout. Two of the coaches are not quite finished as you can probably tell, and some of the wagons still need lettering and weathering.

 

 

[woko]

1 hour ago, thegreenhowards said:

Indeed, I’ve been knocking out kits steadily in between building the layout. Two of the coaches are not quite finished as you can probably tell, and some of the wagons still need lettering and weathering.

 

 

Well its definitely making some great progress thanks to you and Peter, has Peter been making any LBSCR stock?