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The Spare Bedroom Layout


Lacathedrale
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5 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

(quoting someone else) "I would have no problem modelling a train of three carriages if that train could operate prototypically on my railway, than eight and not be able to operate at all"

 

 

But can a Pacific (or a copper-bottomed 4-6-0) hauling a train of train of three carriages operate prototypically on any railway (other than the "Withered Arm")?  The LMR Pacifics were my trainspotting love, I want them on my layout and they can't really look right with less than, what, 7 maybe behind ..... but otherwise I agree completely with @Lacathedrale & @Zomboid that operations trump (can I use that word now?) passing trains in a lovely landscape if a layout is going to hold my interest for an extended period - and the layout I most need to hold my interest for a (hopefully) very extended period is, funny old thing, my layout (if I ever build it).  And I reckon I've just got one chance at it .....

 

On which subject, I may be offering up my latest attempt at compromise for ridicule critical assessment before the weekend's out .......

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2 minutes ago, Chimer said:

But can a Pacific (or a copper-bottomed 4-6-0) hauling a train of train of three carriages operate prototypically on any railway (other than the "Withered Arm")?

At that extent it would be purely representative. An A4 with a 3 carriage train would be a bit of a stretch for most. I'd be happy enough with a 4-4-0 or as my "express" engine, but being more into the Southern then I could get quite late with such things thanks to the Hastings problem leading to the Schools class.

 

Of course modelling pre grouping would create make problems if RTR trains are desired, but an elegant 4-4-0 and about 4 or 5 relatively short carriages wouldn't look at all silly as an express train, and then everything else could be even smaller. Except possibly heavy freight.

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There were cross-country trains of three coaches (often ‘and a van’), hauled by moguls, if not 4-4-0, almost to the last knockings of steam, in many parts of the country, so there is plenty of scope for doing what is under discussion. As zomboid suggests, the Schools were semi-retired onto such trains, and if you move back from the early-60s into the 50s, things like 2P.

 

I think the phrase that Thomas used in P-to-S was “a representative selection of operations”, which is what it’s all about IMO. I think CJF talked about some people being happy to operate using tennis balls connected with string, provided they ran to timetable, and using correct bell codes, although that does sound fairly extreme!

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The whole point is if you just do not have the room for a pacific with at least 7 on  you could give up modelling or compromise.   You could go for N gauge but you do not really get the feel of being close up to a train like you can in 7mm . I like both before any one takes offence but 2mm finescale (my choice rather than N) is great for the railway in a landscape feel whereas 7mm can make you feel like you are stood in the yard or on the platform. Going back to pregroup days suits me but if the designs of Sir William Stanier float your boat pregroup wont do.  I would go for a 4-6-0 with three behind rather than nothing.

Fortunately a Manor with 3 behind on a named express is fine although not with my pre-group stuff.

 

I am very much of the proper operation side. I find trying to replicate what I can of the operations add much to my pleasure.

 

Don

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14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

There were cross-country trains of three coaches (often ‘and a van’), hauled by moguls, if not 4-4-0, almost to the last knockings of steam, in many parts of the country, so there is plenty of scope for doing what is under discussion. As zomboid suggests, the Schools were semi-retired onto such trains, and if you move back from the early-60s into the 50s, things like 2P.

 

I don't think you'd struggle much to find pictures of Black Fives, B1s or similar on that class of train.

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Well, I think you can "get away" with quite a lot more if you model a preserved railway. All kinds of locos hauling all kinds of stock. Formations that fit the available space. Mixtures of different eras.

 

GWR King hauling a fine rake of LNER teak coaches? No problem - happens in the real world on the preserved lines...

 

Mike.

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There are plenty of photos taken on the Great Central, just before it closed, of rebuilt Scots on four coach trains. You also have plenty of scope for prototype the diesels, as well as RCTS railtours etc. Maybe stretch the scenario to be somewhere else entirely, and well, you are firmly in 'rule 1' territory then, but at least you do have a reference point.

 

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Well, if we look at layouts built in the 30's, 40's and 50's - they certainly didn't feel that realism was particularly disturbed by the use of a "modern" loco with a short train - but they would most certainly would have umbrage with the nest of switchbacks which typify most shelf layout designs - with that in mind, I think the idea of 'unrealistically short trains = bad'  is very much down to interpretation, and not a fundamental truth

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The availability of highly detailed RTR (and RTP) models, along with better quality kits, static grass, airbrushes and so on has enabled vastly better visual realism than was achievable by most people in the mid 20th century. This seems to have led to something of a shift in emphasis from modelling being a representation of an operating railway towards a moving representation of pictures of a railway. (Nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just different)

 

Probably makes sense when you're thinking steam age, because the memories of what actually happened are fading, but we still have the photos to know what it looked like.

 

I'm sure in the 1950s they would have jumped at the chance to achieve the level of finish that "the average modeller" can get now, but for me it's still about operating trains. Once a train is long enough that the engine doesn't look ridiculous pulling it, extra carriages are just extra expense from which I would derive no additional enjoyment...

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The easiest way out of this self-imposed dilemma is to stop loving big engines, and start loving smaller ones. Assuming that you must have a tender, 0-6-0, 4-4-0, and Moguls are very nice engines, once you get to know them, and the Class 2 Ivatt Mogul, and even more so the Class 2 BR Mogul, are positively cute little engines.

Edited by Nearholmer
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16 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

Well, if we look at layouts built in the 30's, 40's and 50's - they certainly didn't feel that realism was particularly disturbed by the use of a "modern" loco with a short train - but they would most certainly would have umbrage with the nest of switchbacks which typify most shelf layout designs - with that in mind, I think the idea of 'unrealistically short trains = bad'  is very much down to interpretation, and not a fundamental truth

I've been on the horns of a similar dilemma and if you really want large locos then that becomes a must have. For my next H0 layout I want to run main line stock including Pacifics and Mikados hauling trains including CIWL Voitures Lit, Pulman's  or Dining cars . Unfortunately, for a double track MLT, in my spare bedroom only have room for four coach trains and have thought I really needed five for a train to be convincing.  I already have a BLT layout where, in a length of just over five feet,  smaller mixed traffic tender locos happily arrive and depart with trains of five or six wagons or passenger trains made up of three four or six wheelers and that seems to work fine for me and everyone else who has seen it but I now want something far more dramatic.

 

The obvious solution is to model the outer single track terminus of a route where the long distance expresses have shed most of their other sections - a sort of equivalent to the ACE on the withered arm, the West Highland line or Kingswear, and quite common in France with four coach expresses fairly normal. However, that wouldn't provide the urban city terminus busyness that I want as a contrast to my current H0 layout. Furthermore, in my practical experiments,  watching a five coach train leaving the platform passing over two sets of points and running straight into the fiddle yard did seem distinctly underwhelming whereas the greater length of a double track throat didn't seem to suffer from that. 

No prizes for quessing which well known design I've developed my current plan from and the conclusion I've come to is to bite the bullet and accept four coach expresses (with their shortness hidden or at least de-emphasised by judicious used of view blockers) in my spare bedroom but to build in the option of adding sections to extend the platform and fiddle yard lengths for exhibtions or occasional use in my through lounge. This option may never actually be acted on but knowing it to be there should avoid spending a year or more building a layout that's inherently compromised that I then regret.  

I do though also look at a classic layout like the pre-war Maybank and note that this four platform MLT only handled four coach expresses. Nevertheless it worked well and inspired a generation of modelellers (including Cyril Freezer).  I suspect that 0 gauge lends itself to a greater compromise in train lengths than 00/H0 and even more so than N but we shall see. 

 

 

 

Edited by Pacific231G
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41 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

I suspect that 0 gauge lends itself to a greater compromise in train lengths than 00/H0 and even more so than N but we shall see.

 

I think so.

 

Its got something to do with what you take-in with a sweep of the eye when standing at normal viewing distance.

 

My usual three-car trains look convincing as cross-country trains in 0, and if I have a mad five minutes and add a restaurant car and a bogie luggage van to make "an express", the train looks genuinely "main line", and that's with under-scale length tinplate coaches.

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21 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

under-scale length tinplate coaches

I doubt many will agree, but using short carriages is quite a neat trick in some contexts. A higher number of bogies/ wheels and gaps between vehicles gives a greater feel of length than longer vehicles occupying the same physical space would.

 

That's certainly the case with the American models I have - 5x 40' boxcars (plus caboose) looks like a more impressively long train than 4x 50' cars (plus caboose), even though both are a scale 200' long. Of course that doesn't require use of vehicles that aren't actually to scale, but if I'm honest, I don't know how much I'd miss one of the windows from a mk1 carriage if that meant the train could have more vehicles for a given physical length.

 

I'd still be happy enough with a 4-4-0 or 2-6-0 pulling 3 carriages (plus van) as a train length, but lopping a few cm off the length by using under scale carriages probably wouldn't bother me.

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It’s one of those things like curve radii, and the depth of flanges, which seems to separate pre and post-reformation railway enthusiasts. 
 

The compartment coaches I use actually are scale-length for pre-grouping stock at 50ft, but the BL ‘blood and custard’ corridor coaches are actually shorter, and scale out at about 47ft.
 

 

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Some of my carriages are true to certain diagrams but are fairly short. I look for short coaches there were quite a few in pre-grouping days and just forget about Churchwards 70 footers!  If you want to run a biggish engine with an assortment of shortie coaches. A works excursion using a collection of spare coaches seems plausible and you could always pretend the train started out twice as long and some went to a neaby location  or the train was picking up some more coaches from elsewhere later.

 

Don  

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Well, the sale and purchase lumber ever onward, it looks like we'll miss the stamp duty holiday but should at least get this house sold, and that house bought. As has been the case since the start of my thread - the workshop remains packed up, as do all my (2mm) model railway equipment and 99% of my reference books and source material. 

 

With regard to live steam - I have managed to settle on a 5" Gauge loco - a Don Young "Glen" 4-4-0 which is a lovely edwardian design in the vein of the SECR D-class so beloved by myself. I think that i may be able to get away with modifying the platework on the Glen to represent an LCDR M3 or an SECR D-class, but it's wonderful as it is, and all of that is years in the future. For now I'm stockpiling reference docs and looking at getting some of the raw material. I imagine that this kind of content isn't all that welcome on RMweb (as opposed to Locomotive-Modelling-web), but maybe I could stretch to it being a 'garden railway' if I have a 10' test track :)

 

This has the unintended side effect of focusing the spec of a spare bedroom layout wonderfully:

  1. Needs to be affordable RTR with the use of a semi-coarse standard (i.e. commercial 00/H0/N) to be achievable both financially and in a timely manner.
  2. Representative of a part of system rather than single location/diorama/cameo with focus on authentic operation, but will be a sole-operator type affair - so will need to have all areas accessible (no duck unders) and not so sprawling as to be unmanageable!
  3. Limited scenery beyond the railway boundary, except that which is required to communicate the essential flavour - be it a viaduct, mill, or embankment.

 

 

Edited by Lacathedrale
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Spec 2 could perhaps be explored further, authentic operation tends to require some sort of fiddle yard which eats space, so ....... to fiddle or not to fiddle?

 

And is some sort of continuous run facility, possibly heavily disguised, required at all?

 

Cheers, Chris

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1 hour ago, Lacathedrale said:

 

  1. Representative of a part of system rather than single location/diorama/cameo with focus on authentic operation, but will be a sole-operator type affair - so will need to have all areas accessible (no duck unders) and not so sprawling as to be unmanageable.

Sounds like N is the way to go given the space. 

 

You might be lucky with the stamp duty holiday, as it might be extended. There is some talk in the industry press about that happening. 

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Have you seen the model of The Findhorn Railway in 0 in Railway Modeller this month?

 

It is a simple L-form,  junction to terminus job, but the clever bit (well one of several clever bits) is the way the guy has used the FY as the junction station.

 

In 00 in the same modest space, one could represent a rather less tiny branch-line using that approach, and even more so in N, although I'm biased against N because it is too tiny for my tastes, and would probably go for 009 rather than that.

 

Something like the Seaton (Devon) branch, with its complicated way of dealing with through trains from London at the Junction, would be 'systemic' enough.

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6 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Something like the Seaton (Devon) branch, with its complicated way of dealing with through trains from London at the Junction, would be 'systemic' enough.

 

We covered that not long ago in the Scenic Fiddle Yard thread:

 

 

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Well, in this model we wouldn't really 'need' a fiddle yard if we had discrete areas in the railway.  I tried a fiddle-less railway in the early 00's with an American plan  in H0 but the layout wasn't really my core interest so didn't last long. The intent was that before operations, you would stage a train on the 'inbound' track in the yard, and switch that location, setting out cars for the 'branch', servicing locos, etc. and you would then operate the branch train around a loop over my workbench and do the same there. Cars were shuffled with car-card and waybill operation, and there was an interchange track at the end of the branch.

 

I have a few photos:

 

The start of the layout - the inbound main line was the track between the grey hopper and the yellow boxcar. Note, the wraparound on the left - this was actually the end of the branch that went around the room in the other direction:

image.png.654c8a00a5bb2db01fd573106eb6d6a6.png

 

The throat of the yard, showing the loco fuelling depot (note, boarded up window to left!)

image.png.f4ef8f9189a24a5eb6e5d108d40b2e7b.png

 

The loop of plain track over the workbench, showing the branch terminus on the right hand side. This workbench was far too gloomy and claustrophobic!

image.png.c13b7d0b9901e3d84a688bc9fc979d5c.png

 

I think there were too few places in this system for it to be really effective. A terminus to terminus operation with nothing in the middle stretches disbelief too far and is too simple. However, add a junction and a passing station (maybe with a continuous loop) and I'm sure it would provide enough logical separation between components. Paddington-Seagood has some layout design elements we rarely see - goods arrival/departure lines and separate goods headshunts, lots of coach sidings, etc.  - so a train could be constructed from stock on-layout at a terminus by a pilot, have a loco that's on shed draw up and take it away, split at a junction station or passing terminus to hand over to another branch line engine (which has itself run up with morning empties or LE from the top shed earlier in the day), to handle the onward procession to the branch itself. If the train was a regional or express, it could perform a non-stop service around the loop a few times (maybe while some shunting is going on elsewhere) before being directed off at the junction (this time representing somewhere at the opposite end of the line) into the other terminus.

 

C.J. Freezer had a suggestion to model a station with multiple levels (say, London Bridge) as a single visual unit, but served by different parts of the railway (i.e. our passing station is the 'express' platforms of our terminus, which are not linked by rails directly, only via a return loop of some sort). All of this elaborate system design does somewhat preclude 4mm or 3.5mm/ft !

 

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  • 2 months later...

Well, we find ourselves a couple of months later - contracts are exchanged and completion looms. Finally.

 

Here's a revised look at what I think would be 'the room' should an indoor model railway take shape:

 

image.png.097f7285a349d8ce7ccc2c97dd089cab.png

 

In this example I have knocked out the built-in wardrobes to use as a desk nook in beige - the footprint includes 3' of depth for a chair and access. The solid orange square represents a potential bed, with the dotted outline a recommended 2' clearance to walk around it - clearly there is room to shuffle or rotate it as required.

 

The left hand wall has a slightly sloped ceiling which has no impact on daily use (the straight part of the wall is easily 8' tall) but which may naturally suggest a separate space from the rest of the room, so I have chosen that to show the scenic section of a given layout. If the layout was modelled in N rather than 2mm/4mm/3-16/7mm/etc. here is room for a pair of minimum radius return loops should they be required without undly imposing on using the room as a bedroom in future. A more likely configuration as a terminus to FY or small system  the west (top) wall is more than long enough for fiddle yards. In 2mmFS or N these would probably stop by the foot of the bed or potentially just loop underneath the scenic section - but larger scales and gauges could leverage that length. The  leg is noted as a constant width (6") throughout, but there is no reason why this could not be widened a little beyond the window for a second 'country' terminus rather than a FY.

 

The room is west facing and bridging over the window is a no-go, so seated, 'desk height' operation is probably where I'm leaning. I appreciate this puts me in the territory of 'toy trains' especially in the smaller scales - but this is an office foremost, a (potential) bedroom second, and a railway room last.

 

Edited by Lacathedrale
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Having mulled the ideas over in my head I've come to some fairly obvious conclusions:

  1. With my primary interaction with the hobby at the moment being large scale live steam (at least with that intention), I've gone right off finescale for myself (though hopefully I can help out others)
  2. The space is just too small for 10mm/7mm/3-16ths/etc.
  3. A stylised 4mm layout may just about be feasible - i.e. shorter train lengths.
  4. TT is off the cards unless it's euro RTR
  5. N is most feasible for a layout - but probably least appealing. Neither the fineness of 2mmFS nor the heft of any of the larger scales.

Much food for thought here!

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