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Back Yard


Morphaniel
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Back Yard is my addition to the world of planks - a 9 foot layout in an urban setting with an integral fiddle yard (more of a fiddle siding!). It began life on RMWeb3 and is getting built extremely slowly. The sloth explains why it has taken so long to crawl onto RMWeb4, but I have been stung into action (of a sort :blink:) by having it obliquely pointed out that I am one of the guilty posters in the 'feedback' thread who hasn't yet knuckled down and created any content.

 

So clearly I have to fix that over the next few days. Anyone who is eagerly awaiting an actual construction update from the position on the old forum (God bless you sir - you were much younger wehen we last met...!) should of course not hold their breath. My apologies if you have been holding your breath - though more than likely I am too late :O!

 

More when I have the pictures available!

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  • 1 month later...

So, to the plan:

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This is the XtrkCad plan of the layout. The two tracks on the right form the 'fiddle area', which will be located behind a large viaduct but otherwise on show. Within the confines of the board dimensions (9' x 18") I have tried to leave myself enough space to model stuff in and around the tracks. The top three tracks on the left run into an engineering shed of some kind (most likely a wagon works).

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This would be the baseboards coming together - I can't remember whether I hit the wine before, during or after, but I know I wasn't using it to weight the top down while it glue

 

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The baseboards are 6 feet and 3 feet long. Originally, this was becausethe layout was to be housed in my shed in the back yard (hence the name) but it has since obtained squatters rights in the spare bedroom

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  • 3 months later...

More than time for another post!

 

Popping up a few pictures from old RMWeb, here we have a view of the baseboard connectors. These are baseboard alignment dowels from C&L and work extremely well. The layout is not intended to be frequently dismantled, though it clearly is portable. Not shown in this picture is the missing element of the baseboard end 'system', which are the brass devices that the rail is soldered to - I have tried that shot twice and poltergeists keep making it out of focus :O

 

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Next we have a view of the layout with the cork laid. In retrospect I would not again use cork strip in a yard - yards tend to be flat and by using strip I simply made life harder for myself bringing the ground level up to the rail! Cork mat would be my choice, leaving strip for main lines where it is useful for creating the 'cess' effect and for line spacing (this C&L product is designed to aid both). The quality of my cork laying is variable but no-one will see it. Except you ;)

 

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Following the C&L instructions (the RMWeb instructions have a thousand variations and arguments...) I used PVA to stick the trackplan to the baseboard, and the cork to the trackplan and then Evostick to stick the track to the cork. A minor flaw here was that the cork covered up the trackplan - luckily I am using Peco streamline, not building my track using Templot...

 

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Finally, for those eagled eyed enough and twisty necked enough to have got a good view of the track on the photo above, confirmation that I have varied the sleeper spacing on the Peco streamline - I read the arguments on RMWeb passim and thought 'what the heck'. It was a painful job but I like the improvement. I did my spacing by hand using a rough spacing guide - this is yard track after all! The photo below gives proof of a kind...

 

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  • 2 months later...

Still catching up with 'progress' to date...

 

With all of the track laid, attention turned to the electrics. Having recently returned to the hobby with a blank canvas, DCC seemed the obvious choice and the track was laid with droppers on every separate section of track and with Electrofrog points. I checked out Peco, Fulgurex and Tortoise point motors (I had never used any type before...) and Tortoise was the clear winner, so I got a bunch of those and ran a DCC bus and a separate 12v bus under the boards, the latter being wired through various DPDT switches on the control panel.

 

Although it still exists at present, the mark one control panel is very poor and I will be rebuilding it with different switches, a metal box and with a couple of the switches wired the opposite way round as currently the throw on a couple of points is not logical. Incredibly it all worked and continues to work many months later. The rebuilt control panel may even have varied wiring colours as currently all of the wires are red - I couldn't be bothered to colour code and naturally, will seriously regret that when I unbuild the mark 1!

 

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So the attention tuned back to the layout topside. A big feature of the yard is the concrete hard standing and after reading through many different experiences of how people have tackled this I decided to use tile grout. With a little poster paint mixed in I slapped it over everywhere, hastily dug a section back up when I realised it wasn't supposed to go everywhere and left it to dry.

 

Once dry, I sanded it more or less flat and invented the tool in the photograph to dig out the flangeways. Surprisingly this worked very well - I had been expecting the worst and kicking myself for not doing something about the flangeways when laying the grout but I got away with it. I was not so lucky about colouring and weathering...

 

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...not being blessed with a shred of artistic skill I spent months wandering around looking at weathered concrete in real life and trying to get the effect on the model. 'I'm painting my concrete' became such a common utterance that my partner thought it was a euphemism! currently, having been every shade of white, grey and sand under the sun (often with a green tinge) it is back to a uneven white, stippled on and waiting for some deepening and weathering.

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Thanks for this series of pics. Its always helpful to see how someone builds their baseboards, lays the cork, and spaces out the sleepers - looks good but a fair bit of work, no doubt. I accept that you're using multiple droppers and a control panel but the photo of the underside with all the wiring in place will be of use to people who don't always realise just how much wiring might be required, whether DCC or 12V DC. I include myself in that comment - I've wired up several layouts and never really thought about just how much cable is actually involved, I just get on with it. Then I saw the underside of my local club 10' x 4' 12V DC layout wired for sections and electric points. I thought it was overkill but realised soon afterwards that it wasn't. Your pictures help clarify the situation.

Steve.

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With regard to finding the right colour for concrete, I found myself in a similar situation a while ago but found that a little bit of plain old Magnolia in the mix helped enormously!

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Yes - I think Magnolia is a good bet for the kind of effect that I am trying to achieve - I saw that Mr Nevard splashes it around on his china clay models and tried it out but I had messed up the colouring too much for it to work properly. I was able to get it back to a dirty white by overpainting the magnolia though! I am now plucking up courage to return to the job...

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  • 5 months later...

And so I stared - on and off - at the concrete yard for 6 months and it began to look as if it would weather in real time. However, come Christmas I finally plucked up courage to make up a few washes with acrylics thinned very thin with water. The first wash was a yellowy brown applied fairly thinly while the second wash was a dark grey applied rather more (splashed all over, you might say...). The result is close enough to what I want - old concrete weathered very pale and as seen on a summer's day - for me to be able to put it behind me and move on.

 

I haven't been idle while thinking about the concrete (well, I have, but not totally idle B) ) and have been slowly superdetailing and weathering a set of Wills retaining walls. No-one wants to see a blow by blow account of building them as they're ubiquitous, so they appear as if by magic in the photos below. I am also part way through kit bashing a Ratio carriage shed to look like a modern metal sided building, have almost finished converting a Metcalfe viaduct into plastic and have started on a backscene. This all looks something like this:

 

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The retaining wall needs bedding into the baseboard still.

 

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Building up a nice rake of coal wagons - not sure why!

 

I have a few drains and gratings to put into the yard concrete and it needs some grass too. Incidentally, the ballast you see in these photos is a base layer to bring the level up to the cork.

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  • 1 month later...

The driver of the Stobart Class 66 has to inch gingerly around the curve from the refuelling point - as well he might: the glue isn't yet dry on that retaining wall!

 

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This earth bank at the front of the layout adds a bit of landscape interest and I rather like the partially hidden view it creates of the layout beyond the curve. My photography doesn't do it justice at the moment! I suspect that in real life the gap between the Class 66 and the retaining wall may not be allowed but there's a prototype for everything and even if that's not the case, there's always modellers licence..:lol:

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  • 6 years later...

So here we are, closing in on the end of 2017! it wouldn't be true to say that Back Yard has been abandoned exactly, but progress since my last post has been achingly slow. Of course, I don't claim the record for slowness, lack of achievement or any such thing - we all know that railway modelling has a high failure rate!

 

What I have mostly been doing since the last post is firming up my back story in my head, collecting a few more locos, thinning out the collection just a little to marry up to the back story and getting more freebie wagons from the Bachmann Collectors Club. And I have definitely been spending almost all of my modelling time reading about other people's layouts, rather than building mine...

 

I visited Warley for the first time this year. After spending all day in the show I came aware inspired by the trader's stands, rather than the layouts and as a result, I have taken the momentous decision to do a rebuild of Back Yard in an attempt to address some of the niggles that perhaps are dampening my enthusiasm for actually getting on with something - and hopefully a second go should improve on the mistakes and compromises of the first one.

 

The first issue to be tackled is the baseboard. My own attempt, illustrated previously, was robust and flat but heavy and with a poor baseboard joint that the track has never been fettled over properly. I have now decided to buy two laser cut baseboard kits from Grainge and Hodder. This changes the footprint of the layout slightly to 2400mm length from 9 feet but the width remains the same at 18".

 

The second issue is the trackwork, which was previously Peco Code 75 clumsily adapted for a more realistic sleeper spacing and laid on cork strips. The cork strips have been a big problem. They are poorly laid under the pointwork and the thickness varies slightly - all of which means that the trackwork is occasionally not as flat as I would like. Most importantly, this is a yard layout and having track on cork strip doesn't make sense.

 

So for the track, I have decided to build my own instead... Hah! Just joking :onthequiet: I have decided to use Peco bullhead... I still like the idea of British sleeper spacing and have looked at all of the alternatives to Peco track many, many times but there is a high proportion of pointwork in my yard and I want it to look good (and work) and I don't see that happening if I don't use off the shelf points. I considered Marcway and even spent quite a bit of time trying to make the invisible part of the DCConcepts Legacy track page stay visible long enough for me to look at their upcoming pointwork but in the end, I concluded that my modelling efforts would be best served by sticking with Peco. Of course... that means that all of my pointwork in the yard is now large, where it was small, so I spent some hours with XtrkCAD to come up with a plan revision. Oh yes... and I will be laying the track on cork sheet roll. Partly because I have some and partly because it will allow me to pin the track while the glue dries easily. I'm fairly convinced that that is the main advantage of using cork at all.

 

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Comparing the new plan (above) with the original, you can see a short siding missed off in the centre, the bottom left siding/shunt is rather short and the top right siding omitted. The short siding never made much sense and losing it was already decided before the trackwork decision. The short siding/shunt on the bottom left is temporary (I hope!) to be lengthened by replacing the long bullhead point with a short one if and when Peco provide one. The shunt length prevents access to the adjacent siding by almost anything that is coupled to a Class 66 or similar but if XtrkCAD is correct, my Hattons Garratt will just make it and I have quite a few small locos for shunting the yard... It may not be pretty or prototypical but I still like this plan.

 

The vast area to the right hand side that has no trackwork is mostly occupied by a viaduct, which partially hides the track behind it, which for all practical purposes is my fiddle 'yard'. There seems no real need to do anything else. At home there is no more space and if I ever get this finished and show it, I will need to knock up a storage board that will connect here. In the meantime, I have a length of track where stock can be lifted on and off 'backstage'.

 

I'm continuing to use DCC - I like it. Pointwork is controlled by analogue slow action motors. I used Tortoises before and could easily re-use them but I am seduced by the Cobalt range and will almost certainly make the change as I already have their switches and much else besides.

 

More soon. Don't hold your breath  :no:

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Why no run round loop?

Gordon A

 

I thought long and hard about this because I had plans for the white space to the right of the sidings. But in the end, especially given the length of the lower spur, I had to agree that some method of getting a loco out from behind it's load was going to be necessary to make operations more interesting. Since I don't have the space to do something fancy, I simply extended the two lower sidings and connected them, as below.

 

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​It's not just armchair modelling either - now that Christmas is over I have a few days free for practical work! Happily the Grainge and Hodder baseboard kit arrived before Christmas. Beautifully packaged for transit it's incredible how light the boards are compared to my previous hand built job. 6mm ply instead of the 9mm I used previously but they must also be using a fundamentally lighter type of ply. The boards in the kit were straight and clean and the joints were tight enough for a solid dry fit but should certainly be tacked as well as glued if you're going to move the board much. I tacked them using a light duty electric stapler charged with 14mm nails and was relatively generous!

 

 

 

The boards come with end panels that contain cutouts to accept 25mm pattern makers dowels, which is perfect for me as I had trouble fitting these to my earlier boards. I also have my 2.5mm cork sheet for the top surface. As I said above, I'm not a big fan of cork but these baseboards are so light that I suspect the cork will be very useful to dampen the top surface vibrations and will also allow me to pin track while the glue dries.  

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Progress so far...

 

post-6966-0-15434400-1514980438_thumb.jpg

 

The backboard is a single sheet for the full 8 foot length. The tolerances in my fitting of the end boards of the baseboard kits meant that bolting them together tightly caused the centre to ride up a little. With them slackened enough for the boards to sit flat, using the full length backboard adds stability and strength. This whole unit can easily be lifted and spun around at present. The backboard bolts on with a number of bolts and wing nuts and will not have scenery attached directly to it so it can easily be removed to make the layout portable.

 

Having painted the backboard white, I have ordered a lasercut screen from Razorlab (http://www.razorlab.co.uk) to replicate the townscape background on the original version of the layout. I never got beyond cutting out the first two A4 sheets of this and it will be £50 well spent to have the full 8 feet cut professionally.

 

Trackwork has been delivered to the site - what I need now is a 4mm gang of labourers to turn up...

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  • 2 years later...

Well, the gang of labourers haven't turned up to date... but in the meantime a whole cityscape has been built outside the layout... I got this professionally lasercut in black card to the same design as my original paper print. The paper print was showing signs of wear and the card strengthening was extremely complicated to cut out cleanly. In the intervening months I have also spent much armchair modelling time thinking about the track layout, with the result that I am back on the pure yard them in which shunting is the name of the game and run around loops and the like aren't required.

 

So the new track plan is this:

161681279_BackYard.png.d2b8d875fed9fd03f26f53e62138b58f.png

 

The entrances into the yard are on the right, under a cut down Metcalf viaduct that crosses the board. The curved line ends inside a Ratio carriage shed and the two parallel tracks on the left end inside an engine shed. With all the track being Peco Bullhead, the eagle eyed will have noted the pivotal reliance on a double slip in the centre of the plan. I'm a patient man...

 

So the view of the layout currently looks like this:

20200524_104056.jpg.a4103c20f994072aa2056d90715a4722.jpg

 

 

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A yard will always have an entry / exit track. This will allow for stock to arrive and depart which will give you a greater variety of vehicles to play with.

This will require some requirement to release an engine from the arriving end of the train.

 

Gordon A

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  • RMweb Premium

Hi,

 

I realise that it's already been commented upon but that is an impressive backscene!  From my own experience it's original, and excellently executed.

 

Regards,

 

Alex.

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1 hour ago, Alex TM said:

Hi,

 

I realise that it's already been commented upon but that is an impressive backscene!  From my own experience it's original, and excellently executed.

 

Regards,

 

Alex.

Thanks! I saw something similar at an exhibition a few years ago, so I don't claim the idea. I should have said that this new version was done for me by RazorLAB...

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