Camden Shed

[cb900f]

1 hour ago, 92220 said:

Hi Pete,

 

Well, yes that’s true I know, but 

(a) I will just do it bit by bit as it was always going to be a long term project. 

(b) I hope for a bit of assistance (paid) for the two most complex formations, and

(c) Wayne’s new British Finetrax OO-SF point kits will shorten the build time a lot.  Assuming they can be available soon enough.

Planning to get the mainlines laid and fully functioning before starting on the yard.  
 

There is quite a lot of plain track too!

 

Iain

I cheated and bought a fair bit of pointwork from Gordon S when he was having another rethink.

Those new points from Finetrax look very interesting and hopefully will open up a new market.

 

Pete

[LNER4479]

4 hours ago, 92220 said:

Morning all,

 

Gate fully built and functional.  I do think I will prefer the brass rod and tube locating pins to transfer power and ensure perfect fine alignment at the southern (diagonal cut) end.  If anyone has advice where to get these, I’d be grateful.  If I just went with my own ideas, I would buy some 2mm rod and 2 mm ID tube and make them from scratch.

 

Started to lay the Hobby Holidays closed cell foam for the mainlines.  I thought it would be worth getting a sense of the overall scene so here are a couple of snaps.  Ignore what 46248 is (not) pulling.  It’s a random collection of stock.  
 

 

 

 

 

Iain

Hi Iain,

 

That looks FAB! Bet that's given you a buzz, just setting things out like that?

 

Good to see progress, 299 miles (minus 1) away!

[92220]

22 hours ago, LNER4479 said:

Hi Iain,

 

That looks FAB! Bet that's given you a buzz, just setting things out like that?

 

Good to see progress, 299 miles (minus 1) away!

Thanks Graham, yes, it is really good to get a sense of how it might look as it progresses.  
 

Starting to lay the trackbed with the Hobby Holidays foam that Norman Solomon used on Little Bytham.  I may not have his skill but I can certainly steal some of his methods.  I’ve carefully aligned these pieces to transition from the cork to the foam.  
 

Slightly unsure still about ballasting with thick sleepered track.  My previous method, stolen from Captain Kernow and Gordon S, worked well, but I fear it won’t be as good with the thicker stuff.  However, I don’t have much choice if I am to be able to use even some of the British Finetrax point kits, not to mention the 20m of mainline chaired track I have ordered from C&L.  
 

I always said that I wanted to lay, test, wire, test, paint, test, ballast, test, weather, test, on the mainlines especially.  Last time, I tried to paint, wire, lay, and ballast all in one go as Mr. Solomon does.  That’s all very well if you can guarantee that what you have built is perfect.  Which I can’t and couldn’t.  
 

All we need now is to connect mine to yours, as it were.

I have 0.001% and you have about 30%, of the total track mileage on the LMR.

 

Almost a year since you were here and you well and truly kicked me off in the right direction.  
Thank you!

 

best wishes,

 

Iain

Edited January 31, 2021 by 92220
Added text

[Portchullin Tatty]

Hi Iain,

 

That does look really good; a significant part of which is the gentle flow of the curve.

 

It will be really important to keep this consistent; it is very difficult to do this with a shallow curve.  I would suggest you make a template.  Maybe get Tim Horn to laser up a template (as long as possible) or glue a templot print out to a sheet of plasticard and then cut to one of the railheads.

 

You only need to do one line like this, the others can be set out from the first one (again with a jig or template of some description).

 

Keep up the good work and the defence against all the east coast layouts that seem to be on this forum!!

 

 

Mark

Edited January 31, 2021 by Portchullin Tatty

[LNER4479]

2 hours ago, Portchullin Tatty said:

Hi Iain,

 

That does look really good; a significant part of which is the gentle flow of the curve.

It will be really important to keep this consistent; it is very difficult to do this with a shallow curve. 

 

Absolutely agree. My - simple(?) - method is to knock in alignment pins along the centre of the trackbed. Knock 'em in through the template then remove the template. Then you have a fixed reference to check the alignment against.

 

 

Edited January 31, 2021 by LNER4479

[92220]

3 hours ago, Portchullin Tatty said:

Hi Iain,

 

That does look really good; a significant part of which is the gentle flow of the curve.

 

It will be really important to keep this consistent; it is very difficult to do this with a shallow curve.  I would suggest you make a template.  Maybe get Tim Horn to laser up a template (as long as possible) or glue a templot print out to a sheet of plasticard and then cut to one of the railheads.

 

You only need to do one line like this, the others can be set out from the first one (again with a jig or template of some description).

 

Keep up the good work and the defence against all the east coast layouts that seem to be on this forum!!

 

 

Mark

Thanks Mark, much appreciated.  I thought of something broadly similar but not as neat, and then gave up the idea of a template.  The slight issue with it is that the gentle curve isn’t constant, as I found when trying to fit the templot plan to the OS map.

So.....it is slightly hard to explain this really clearly in words, but here goes.....

 

What I have done is to mark the board through the templot plan at roughly 4-6” intervals for the trackbed edges and the 8 railheads (it was clearly pointless doing the rails except at each end of a foam-length section, as I realised after one round of this)

Then cut a section of foam using the templot plan for the trackbed.

Glue this down

Align the section of templot plan at both ends, and fix it temporarily with tape. 
Then mark the rails at the same intervals as before, creating a dashed line for each.  

 

I’m not sure whether this is visible on the photo but it’s clear enough in person.

 

Graham’s method is good too. Neat and mathematical too, as I recall.  Versines?

 

Again, the issue here is the track spacing.  Nominally I have up fast - 10 foot - up slow - 6 foot - down slow - 10 foot - down fast.  You would think.

But the 10 foots widen approaching the dive under, and narrow at the south end a little.  This is off the OS map.  I have considered redoing the south end of the mainlines as a more regular 10’-6’-10’ spacing throughout, even though it is not what my information tells me, just because it will look better.

 

So anyway, I felt I needed to mark all 4 lines individually.

This part, the north half, is easy.

We will see when I start on the long crossovers how this all lines up at the south end.

 

Iain

[LNER4479]

18 hours ago, 92220 said:

Graham’s method is good too. Neat and mathematical too, as I recall.  Versines?

 

Well, yes ... but I was trying to keep it simples!

 

Just in case it is of use / interest to others, a versine is the measurement of the offset from a chord line of known length. The picture below should help explain that far better. I knock my pins in every 6 inches, making my chord line 12 inches. The offset of any one pin from the two either side is thus the versine at the centre point of the chord. What I actually do is to knock the pins in along as accurately as possible by eye then do the measuring depicted. The versine measurements then easily show up any misaligned pins which are then adjusted accordingly.

 

This measurement comes into its own for very gentle curves, as we're talking about here. Via some complex maths (which I don't tend to delve into if I can help it), the versine is inversely proportional to radius, ie 1/R (that's as complicated as the maths will get!). Sometimes referred to as degree of curvature. The beauty of that is that, whereas the radius of a gentle curve gets ever more impractically large (for our purposes), the versine measurement is nice and manageable, eg 2 or 3mm, transitioning into a versine of 0mm for a straight line (a curve of infinite radius!). Its other attribute is that it copes easily with varying radius.

 

If you really want to delve into it, then a quick Google search led me here:

https://www.trackopedia.info/encyclopedia/maintenance-of-way/track-measurements/versine-measurement

It's the principle that track tampers on the big railway use when checking lateral alignment of the railway (which is where I first came across it, c.1987 - far too useful a piece of information not to use on model railway, thought I ...)

 

Edited February 1, 2021 by LNER4479

[92220]

Storage yard control panel is taking shape:
 

 

 

 

 

I reused the box from Camden Shed mk1, but made a new fascia.  To be honest I thought that this would be a temporary version, which, if it worked well, I would replicate with a properly printed perspex/ acrylic one.  But white-faced mdf and tape works quite well, I think.  It might stay as it is.  
 

if it works.

 

Iain

 

 

 

Edited February 21, 2021 by 92220
Photo placement

[millerhillboy]

Going to have great operational interest that Iain, will keep the operator occupied for sure.

[92220]

An important update if not a desperately interesting one.  I now have a fully wired and functional storage yard at a basic level.  15 roads each able to accommodate 2 trains in theory, although road 8 will be for up locos to reverse back on shed.  There are 2 full length kickback sidings in theory available from road 15 (up fast), probably 3 spurs off the other end of 15, and something as yet undecided off down fast road 1.  All the point motors work as they should and each section can be switched in and out as required.  I overdid the number of switched sections because many will never need to be used but I figured they might help with fault tracing anyway.  
 

I still have a couple of things to work out, as explained below.  
 

Inside the control panel, developing and almost finished (except for the spurs, kickbacks, final soldered connections and obviously the final Qs):

 

 

 

 

The clear area at the top (the bottom when it hinges down and it is viewed from the correct side) is for fitting rotary switches so that I can switch any route to any controller.  I think.  I have to work out how to wire the diamonds in the centre of the two scissors crossings on the up and down slow/bidirectional roads.  I fitted on-off switches as for all the other sections, but I know they need replacing to enable them to be switched not on or off, but to whichever controller is running a train across them:
 

 

More to follow as I have reached the 10mb max 

 

Iain

Edited April 5, 2021 by 92220

[46256]

Iain they say soldering is the black art....nothing compared to wiring...my head whirls with my simpler set up let alone yours. It’s when I travel past a GPO engineer working on a roadside jct box that I really look on with incredulity..

[92220]

All the boards were wired to the board edges and then wiring down the side to the panel. It made for a lot easier work both in building and fault tracing.  
 

I combined tidying and covering the wiring:

 

 

Judicious use of cable ties etc, and some 2”x1” (nominally - it’s more like 45x19mm) planed battens:

 

 

Followed by some 6mm ply strips both to cover the wiring and provide a barrier to stop unintended plummeting of rolling stock to the floor.  
 

 

So this:

 

 

looks a bit tidier.

 

Iain

[gordon s]

.......and to think you could have saved all that wiring by going DCC.........

 

It all looks very neat and tidy though.....

Edited April 5, 2021 by gordon s

[92220]

The front of the control panel:

 

 

The two black roads bottom right are the loco lines on and off shed.  I am fairly sure from research that the “onto shed” road was also an ecs line, crossing over to the down fast or slow via the scissors opposite the south end of the shed.  Whether I  use that function I don’t yet know. But I could. 

 

Now I just have to build the rest of it.  Complete the mainline circuits first, fully wired and tested, before doing anything else. 
 

Iain

[92220]

16 minutes ago, gordon s said:

.......and to think you could have saved all that wiring by going DCC.........

 

It all looks very neat and tidy though.....

True but even if I wired for DCC I would section it for fault and/or short finding.   But it’s the £20k for chips that I don’t have....!

[gordon s]

At £28 per decoder that’s 714 loco’s. You kept that one quiet.......

[92220]

Ahh, I have plans.......

 

But not that big a plan - more fat fingers and poor proofreading 

 

Iain

[Barry O]

2 hours ago, gordon s said:

At £28 per decoder that’s 714 loco’s. You kept that one quiet.......

HOW MANY?????

If her indoors thought I had that many locos planned that equates to a lot of bits of wood with tuneful holes drilled in them...as in Crumhorns, recorders, shawms.....   lummy!!

Baz

[millerhillboy]

nice work Iain, looks like you've done a good job on what I find a very unenjoyable part of layout building

[92220]

When you haven’t built any track for at least 6 years, you start with a straightforward B7 tucked away in a corner of the goods yard that will be modelled non-functionally, don’t you? You know, ease back into it?

 

No, if you’re a muppet, you do a full D12 up fast to slow crossover that is about 3’ long in OO-SF and has to be spot on or it will grate every time a train passes over it. 
 

 

 

I did a little more after taking this final one so tie bars etc added and all electrical connections done, and we are actually only one trailing turnout away from a complete circuit on the up fast.  Although that is also a crossover so will be built as a pair (up slow/DC to fast)

 

I will try to get a video - somehow this is really really smooth. 
 

Iain

 

 

[lezz01]

What are you using for tie bars Iain?

Regards Lez.

[92220]

Morning Lez,

I use just a gapped copper clad timber so it’s basically a moving timber.

I’m aware of several shortcomings of this method, and others, but I’ve gone for this on balance.

With switchblades as long as these, the angles and stresses placed on the joins by a tortoise motor are very low.  It would be better certainly to have 

1. Full timbering with tie bars between the timbers

2. Two tie bars or even three for such long blades (or is that a more modern practice?)

3. Pivoted joins of tie bar to switch blades.
 

But this (I think rather graceful?) crossover will be hidden behind the shed building anyway, so viewing and photo opportunities will be fewer.  You can see it here on the opening to Train of Events (screenshot from YT).

 

 

On the mainlines, I wanted the prototypical-length trains to be seen to run smoothly around the sweeping curve on accurately built track so I need it to work reliably: I hope most people’s attention will be on a kit or semi kit built Coronation with 14 on.  

Once I add the DC rails and associated on/off ramps, I guess some sort of early 1960’s vintage AWS ramp, facing point lock (?) etc, attention might be deflected further.  

 

When I get onto the shed area, where viewing will be far less obstructed, and everything will happen at a slower pace, I may try something different.  
 

thanks for the contribution. Just followed your layout thread with interest.
 

Best wishes,

 

Iain

[lezz01]

I've gone with 0.4mm double sided copper clad pads soldered to 1mm square section N/S rod Iain. It's a variation of the system Kipford has used, I just used square section instead of round section. It is easy to make consistently and easy to install, it also looks prototypical. I'm also using slow action point motors so I'm not expecting the solder to fail in operation, how the system will work with solenoids is another matter and will need testing. The main problem is that I'm running out of N/S square bar and it's out of stock everywhere I've tried. However I managed to source some 1.2mm and 0.81mm square section half hard brass from a jewellery supplier on ebay so I will probably go with that in future.

Regards Lez.      

[Michael Edge]

1mm square bras should work just as well as n/s.

[woodenhead]

10 minutes ago, Michael Edge said:

1mm square bras should work just as well as n/s.

For 4mm scale ladies?

 

This must be a P4 layout in the making if we going down to correct underwear on the model people.