Older Inspirational Layouts

[bécasse]

9 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

 

Yes and no! 

plan S43  in the 3rd edition (1971) of 60 plans is the same Smokey Bourne Harbour station which was Plan of the Month in September 1961 (though not credited to him in 60 plans!) and a very interesting idea as docks and harbour branches have scope for all sorts of things that would never be found on a BLT.   Plan 43s in the 2nd edition (1958) is a different, but still L shaped, plan attributed to Smokey Bourne and described in CJF's accompanying notes as "one of the most compact L's ever designed"  It was originally published in the June 1956 RM and the design credited to T.W. Bourne though with what looks like Cyril Freezer's brief notes. The Harbour Station in September 1951 is credited "Plan and Notes by T.W. Bourne" 

 

It is, perhaps, worth remembering that Smokey and Cyril were close friends, albeit that Smokey lived in Brum and Cyril in East Devon.

[kevinlms]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Somebody, by which I really mean 231G, should write an article for RM, sawing these classics from the past to the attention of newbies - if it covered the classic Deane branch-line circuit, and a couple of others (Piano? And ??), with plans using modern geometry, and some nice examples of the art, it would be a really good read.

In a way Peco are doing that. For the last year or two they have had several articles entitled 'whatever happened to such & such layout'? With some scans of the original layout as it appeared in RM and some updates.

 

I believe the Deane track plan was shown in a recent issue of Railway Modeller, 2020 March I think. I can't confirm at present as that issue is in hiding*.

 

* Hiding because my library is in disarray, because we had a leak in the bathroom last year and my study is directly below. Some magazines are water/mould damaged, but I haven't finished sorting yet. Most are still in temporary residence in the shed, which isn't the best.

 

I think the damaged ones are some MRJ's and Model Railways, perhaps 50 all up.

[Pacific231G]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Somebody, by which I really mean 231G, should write an article for RM, sawing these classics from the past to the attention of newbies - if it covered the classic Deane branch-line circuit, and a couple of others (Piano? And ??), with plans using modern geometry, and some nice examples of the art, it would be a really good read.

Since the overwhelming majority of these were in RM, it's probably the sort of thing they'd get a staffer to produce rather than a freelance writer like me. I have contributed articles to Continental Modeller (about French prototypes) but not to RM. 

A purely plan based article wouid be entirely possible; they did that for Minories a few years ago. However that was about an RM  plan of the month that layouts are still being built from, not a layout that has yielded an interesting plan (as in Maurice Deane's Portreath or Rev. P.H. Heath's Piano Line) that has been adopted by other layout builders. 

 

I'm also not sure what the copyright situation would be for Peco for photos of these layouts contributed by their authors. Layouts of the Month tended to be photographed by professionals working for Peco  such as Michael Longridge (or some early ones by CJF)  but most of those for these smaller layouts were contributed by their authors so the publisher wouldn't, unless it was in a contract, have automatic rights to reuse them in another publication. Besides that, though their quality was acceptable in the early 1950s they probably wouldn't be good enough for modern publication even if they still had the original prints rather than just the published magazine to work from. I notice that the images of some of them - such as the Piano Line- were fairly small on the page, often an indication that they wouldn't take being reproduced at a larger size. The actual plans would be OK as these were certainly redrawn for publication by RM's graphics artist and would be redrawn in colour now.

[RJS1977]

I'm not sure the quality of the photos is an issue - when you publish a photo of something from the past, be it a long-scrapped loco, long-demolished station or historic event, you accept that the photo will be of the quality of the era in which it was taken - you can't just go out and take another!

[5050]

Reading about the plans by John Elmslie (and also John Ahern) I'm of the opinion that some of them wouldn't actually work in practice.  The points are drawn to short and also headshunts etc.  Drawn as a plan with a single line all looks reasonably OK but when transposed onto a baseboard with proper track gauge and centres etc. I'm sure they would be difficult to build with any degree of real life workability.

 

But they are very useful for inspiration!

[Pacific231G]

On 12/03/2021 at 19:14, RJS1977 said:

I'm not sure the quality of the photos is an issue - when you publish a photo of something from the past, be it a long-scrapped loco, long-demolished station or historic event, you accept that the photo will be of the quality of the era in which it was taken - you can't just go out and take another!

It's not so much the quality of the original photos as, when taken by a competent photographer, they can be just as good as those taken on a modern digital camera.  The problem comes when the  only source is the version of it printed in a book or magazine. A good photographic print, even a very old one, will reproduce perfectly well on the printed page but an image taken from a printed page, though it may look OK, often won't. I've noticed this with old postcards, those reproduced photographically will generally print very well but those that were printed can be very disappointing. This becomes is even more true when the publication you're trying to take then from had a small page size as the detail you need for reproduction on a typical A4 page simply isn't there.

[Pacific231G]

5 hours ago, 5050 said:

Reading about the plans by John Elmslie (and also John Ahern) I'm of the opinion that some of them wouldn't actually work in practice.  The points are drawn to short and also headshunts etc.  Drawn as a plan with a single line all looks reasonably OK but when transposed onto a baseboard with proper track gauge and centres etc. I'm sure they would be difficult to build with any degree of real life workability.

 

But they are very useful for inspiration!

That's often said of Cyril Freezer's plans as well and some of them do look very crowded but I've found that those I've tried it with can be drawn up with modern pointwork so I'm not so sure.

Plan 7  in the first edition of 60 plans by John Ahern looks like a case in point but, in his notes, Freezer does say that it "uses very sharp points but has proved highly popualr with many successful railways  built following it." If you look at the points on John Ahern's Madder Valley Railway, some of them are also very short and sharp but they do work. 

 

John Emslie's plans don't actually appear as cramped as John Ahern's to me but if you can quote one that seems unworkable it might be fun to try it with modern pointwork and see if that's really true.

I  could never quite figure out how Wilbert Awdry's Ffarquhar managed to fit on a 6x4 board (Though I knew that it did and even saw it once and met him at an MRC show) It looks even more crowded than CJF's 6ft x 4ft hollow baseboard version of Maurice Deane's concept (18s in the 2nd edition of 60  plans and S10 in the 3rd edition) In fact though, when I tried it in AnyRail it wasn't that difficult and I didn't even need to use Setrack. I did use it for some of the curves just to make them easier to draw, but the points are all Peco Streamline small radius.

I think the trackwork he actually used was Wrenn  and their range  did include 18 inch radius points  but I'm not sure whether Awdry used their 18" or 24" radius points. 

 

A number of the plans in 60 plans for Small Railways do require one to accept 18inch radius points (which I personally wouldn't use) but that is actually a tad larger radius than Setrack.

 

 

 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Pacific231G

[RJS1977]

1 hour ago, Pacific231G said:

It's not so much the quality of the original photos as, when taken by a competent photographer, they can be just as good as those taken on a modern digital camera.  The problem comes when the  only source is the version of it printed in a book or magazine. A good photographic print, even a very old one, will reproduce perfectly well on the printed page but an image taken from a printed page, though it may look OK, often won't. I've noticed this with old postcards, those reproduced photographically will generally print very well but those that were printed can be very disappointing. This becomes is even more true when the publication you're trying to take then from had a small page size as the detail you need for reproduction on a typical A4 page simply isn't there.

 

Good points, but not all necessarily insurmountable. The photo doesn't have to be reproduced larger than it was originally. It's relatively common for RM to reproduce a page from an older issue, often from the pre-1966 era (the year RM changed to its current page size).

 

Again, I think people will forgive some imperfections in the reproduction (unless of course it's just a fuzzy grey blob!) if it's the only surviving photo. The other option, if printing is an issue, would be for RM to put the photo on the Peco website with the link appearing in the magazine.

[St Enodoc]

6 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

If you look at the points on John Ahern's Madder Valley Railway, some of them are also very short and sharp but they do work. 

You will also see that they have moving wing rails, like the old Wrenn ones.

[Donw]

7 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

You will also see that they have moving wing rails, like the old Wrenn ones.

 

That would be to allow the use of different wheelsets with varying back to back settings.  If allows very coarse wheels through while avoiding the drop when narrow wheels cros a wide gap.

 

Don

[Donw]

The question of printing publish photos is not always simple the print undera microscope may show as tiny dots to small to see. However if these dots are spaced differently to the pixels used in digital scanners they do not scan well. Peco probably no longer holds the originals of many of these photos. Authors photos would normally be returned to them and those produced by proffessionals would be quite a large collection by now. I assume a lot have been kept for stock images but some of the early ones may have been considered 'below' standard and dicarded.

I lookk at the photos I thought accepteable when editing the Gazette and see how far behind today's standard they are.

If you had original glass plates these can be quite good quality.

 

Don

[Nearholmer]

It is possible to make something out of some very low-res "dotty" printed photos by using interpolation software, but sometimes things go very strangely, and the result comes out looking very "soupy".

[Pacific231G]

9 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

You will also see that they have moving wing rails, like the old Wrenn ones.

A few of John Ahern's points were closing frog, including both of those in my photo at Gammon End where you can see the pivot. I'm not sure about the other pair of points at that terminus but I found at least one other on a siding at Madderport. However, all the points he described in his many writings in MRN about the MVR in the 1940s are conventional and, in a description of Gammon Magna in January 1946 that's clear from the photos and he also says that most of the points are two foot radius. There's also no mention of closing frog points in his articles about going two rail and in those he does mention the wheel standards he was using which appear to be BRMSB. I don't know whether he used closing frog points for exceptionally sharp points or whether these were just some of the very early ones. There's no reason why  Gammon End should need such sharp points so I suspect the latter. The small "branch" terminus of Gammon End was a late addition to the MVR so it's also possible that he'd just built a few to try them out. 

 

It's interesting that in one of his "Peco Topics" track builiding articles in October 1952  Sydney Pritchard did explain how to build  "universal points" using Peco components. Different wheel standards were a big problem in those days. 

 

[Nearholmer]

If you spend half a day searching, my thread contains a copy of Ahern's article describing a quick and easy way to build universal points.

 

OK, I'll make it easier: p51 of my thread, copied from MRC July 1947.

 

 

Edited March 16, 2021 by Nearholmer

[laurenceb]

Has anyone mentioned Crewchester yet?

[Pacific231G]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

If you spend half a day searching, my thread contains a copy of Ahern's article describing a quick and easy way to build universal points.

 

OK, I'll make it easier: p51 of my thread, copied from MRC July 1947.

 

 

That's fascinating Kevin and Sydney Pritchard's design in Peco Topics  in RM five years later looks to be based on it.  Rather oddly, a similar design appears in the 2nd (1950) edition of the Peco Platelayer's Manual but without any explanation (I think something was left out) though it's not in the first (1949) edition which has a forward by John Ahern.

 

The MRC article does suggest that he'd previously built points of this type for outer third rail but he added Gammon End, which has this type of point, to the MVR when he moved to a larger location in 1948 and that was before he went two rail.  If it was a later development this probably explains why that station in particular used this type of  points. I now need to find out when Wrenn first started offering universal points.

 

I'd actually assumed that, for John Ahern,  going from universal to normal points was the natural progression  but it looks like  it was the other way round. There aren't that many of them on the MVR and they're on tighter radius points, mainly, apart from Gammon Magna, within sidings (like the locosheds at Madderport and Gammon Magna) rather than on main running lines  

In any case, almost eighty years later, the MVR still runs pretty well over his original points of both types.

 

Don't say this too loudly but one thing he was  right about is that in OO the closing frog is suprisingly unnoticeable from normal viewing distances. When I wanted to take some images of them at Pendon I actually had to look quite hard to find them.    

[bécasse]

16 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

 

In any case, almost eighty years later, the MVR still runs pretty well over his original points of both types.

 

Roye England told me, back in 1964, that the Pendon team had failed to find anyone who had seen more than a nominal train running on the Madder Valley when it was still in John Ahern's ownership, and that was also true among the many Model Railway Club members of my acquaintance. It certainly didn't work effectively as relocated to Pendon and the fact that it does now says much for the efforts of the Pendon team over the intervening decades, restoring (upgrading?) the layout to a running standard without destroying its historical heritage.

[t-b-g]

On 15/03/2021 at 19:10, Pacific231G said:

That's often said of Cyril Freezer's plans as well and some of them do look very crowded but I've found that those I've tried it with can be drawn up with modern pointwork so I'm not so sure.

Plan 7  in the first edition of 60 plans by John Ahern looks like a case in point but, in his notes, Freezer does say that it "uses very sharp points but has proved highly popualr with many successful railways  built following it." If you look at the points on John Ahern's Madder Valley Railway, some of them are also very short and sharp but they do work. 

 

John Emslie's plans don't actually appear as cramped as John Ahern's to me but if you can quote one that seems unworkable it might be fun to try it with modern pointwork and see if that's really true.

I  could never quite figure out how Wilbert Awdry's Ffarquhar managed to fit on a 6x4 board (Though I knew that it did and even saw it once and met him at an MRC show) It looks even more crowded than CJF's 6ft x 4ft hollow baseboard version of Maurice Deane's concept (18s in the 2nd edition of 60  plans and S10 in the 3rd edition) In fact though, when I tried it in AnyRail it wasn't that difficult and I didn't even need to use Setrack. I did use it for some of the curves just to make them easier to draw, but the points are all Peco Streamline small radius.

I think the trackwork he actually used was Wrenn  and their range  did include 18 inch radius points  but I'm not sure whether Awdry used their 18" or 24" radius points. 

 

A number of the plans in 60 plans for Small Railways do require one to accept 18inch radius points (which I personally wouldn't use) but that is actually a tad larger radius than Setrack.

 

 

 

 

The "trick" to getting such small radius points to work with the minimum of problems is to make a crossover of two dissimilar points. In the example illustrated, it is a Y and a LH point. The same crossover made from two RH points would have an almighty swing over in buffers and couplings. Peter Denny did the same in the early versions of Stony Stratford and Leighton Buzzard and the approach to Buckingham is arranged on a curve so that the routes through the throat have as few reverse curves as possible.

[RJS1977]

54 minutes ago, t-b-g said:

 

The "trick" to getting such small radius points to work with the minimum of problems is to make a crossover of two dissimilar points. In the example illustrated, it is a Y and a LH point. The same crossover made from two RH points would have an almighty swing over in buffers and couplings. Peter Denny did the same in the early versions of Stony Stratford and Leighton Buzzard and the approach to Buckingham is arranged on a curve so that the routes through the throat have as few reverse curves as possible.

 

Another classic example being 'Minories' of course....

 

It always surprises me how many layouts I see where a line approaches a station on a sharp left hand bend, immediately followed by a crossover with two right hand points (or vice versa)  often for a passing loop with sidings off it, whereas making the crossover part of the curve with a left hand and a right hand point would have both eliminated a nasty set of reverse curves and made the loop longer. 

[D-A-T]

I seem to remember reading about the designer’s “optimistic pencil”, possibly in a Barry Norman article or in his book? This I found to be true in my many attempts to scheme out Iain Rice’s Harestone plan. As drawn by IR it is approximately 6’6 x 1’6 max. Using the Anyrail design program and PECO Code 75 (giving a reasonable platform length) gives a minimum length of 7’6. Moving to C&L in EM gauge (my intention) gives an absolute minimum length of 8’0. Now 18 inches is an approximate 23% increase in length which is not inconsiderable in the scene of things regarding the intention of the original plan.

I wish I could master Templot as I would like to see Harestone drawn up on that to see if space could be saved by using custom turnouts etc. 

[Donw]

1 hour ago, D-A-T said:

I seem to remember reading about the designer’s “optimistic pencil”, possibly in a Barry Norman article or in his book? This I found to be true in my many attempts to scheme out Iain Rice’s Harestone plan. As drawn by IR it is approximately 6’6 x 1’6 max. Using the Anyrail design program and PECO Code 75 (giving a reasonable platform length) gives a minimum length of 7’6. Moving to C&L in EM gauge (my intention) gives an absolute minimum length of 8’0. Now 18 inches is an approximate 23% increase in length which is not inconsiderable in the scene of things regarding the intention of the original plan.

I wish I could master Templot as I would like to see Harestone drawn up on that to see if space could be saved by using custom turnouts etc. 

 

Have you tried setting the switch to a 9ft or 12ft  straight blade. Instead of the ABC ones. 

 

One thing changing the gauge from 16.5 to 18.2 mm an increase of 1.7mm will immediatly increase the length by 10%. The length of turnouts diamonds etc. are all dependant on the gauge.

Ian with his penchant for small locos would be happy to use tighter curves. Harestone may have been envisualised for short locos. 

 

Don

[New Haven Neil]

I like Riceys designs as a rule, certainly for inspiration I think he's great, but sometimes think his gradients a little understated -  to actually get the fall in the spaces at the gradient indicated never looks possible.

[Kubes]

On 16/03/2021 at 14:27, laurenceb said:

Has anyone mentioned Crewchester yet?

Two seminal points in my sixties childhood. First a gift of a box of Model Railway Constructor magazines featuring Jack Ray's creation. I spent most of one summer sitting on our concrete coal bunker just turning from page to page but mostly fixated on the Crewchester articles. Also Geoff Holt's Derby to Cheadle Heath line - I could probably recite the article even now. Then one Sunday my parents took me to tea with them to another Polish family in Surbiton. The daughter of the family was charged with keeping me amused to her dismay. On learning I liked trains she took me around the corner and abandoned me in a nearby garden while she went to see her friends. The garden was home to what I later discovered was the Midland & South Counties Joint Railway. I was transfixed by this 0 gauge railway and insanely jealous of these bigger boys who were allowed to operate the system with its block bells and proper trains. Happy memories!

[LBRJ]

2 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

I like Riceys designs as a rule, certainly for inspiration I think he's great, but sometimes think his gradients a little understated -  to actually get the fall in the spaces at the gradient indicated never looks possible.

 

As the man himself told me, most of the plans are meant as inspiration, a starting point if you like.

 

What he didn't say, but I will, is that his locomotives and stock tend to be superbly engineered and will cope with track specifications (not standards!) that many others just wouldn't do

[Pacific231G]

12 hours ago, bécasse said:

Roye England told me, back in 1964, that the Pendon team had failed to find anyone who had seen more than a nominal train running on the Madder Valley when it was still in John Ahern's ownership, and that was also true among the many Model Railway Club members of my acquaintance. It certainly didn't work effectively as relocated to Pendon and the fact that it does now says much for the efforts of the Pendon team over the intervening decades, restoring (upgrading?) the layout to a running standard without destroying its historical heritage.

I've heard that too. I've just been sorting out those John Ahern's articles in MRN and MRC that I have based on the listing in MRJ no 75 (Christmas 1994). That was compiled as part of a superb article by David Kitchiner who was responsible for the rebuilding of the Madder Valley at Pendon. In MRC I  did find letters from at least one modeller who had seen it working and, in answer to frequent queries about whether it was a truly operational layout, Kitchiner said that once installed at Pendon, it took relatively little servicing of the track and stock to get it running. For a long time it was really a static display at Pendon and only run on special occasions (It was still inspiring though) Keeping such an old layout running reliably enough for its regular running days (three or four each year in normal times) has required rather more work and considerable rewiring but the team there are very dedicated to it. However, Kitchiner also said that Ahern's main leisure pursuits were photography in the 1930s, railway modelling in the late 1930s to late 1940s and vintage cars in the 1950s to the end of his life (though he was still writing articles about the layout until the mid 1950s). It's therefore very possible that, when he showed it to people in the 1950s, it wasn't really being used.

 

Though it's best known for pioneering the "railway in the scenery" layout concept, the design is actually an excellent one for operation.  Facilities at Madderport and Gammon Magna are nicely balanced, with the docks providing a logical focus for goods moving up and down the valley. The two main termini are sufficiently different to make shunting them interesting while Gammon End and the two industries (brickworks and sawmill) provide extra variety. As with the Culm Valley there's a lot to be said for layouts where you can operate a  train - a pick-up goods for example over its whole journey. How much operating John Ahern actuallly did and whether he did so alone or as operating sessions with others is probably now lost in time but he certainly could have done.     

Edited March 17, 2021 by Pacific231G