Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench

[Oscillation]

Quick little snap of my latest modifications. Sadly I didn't have the time I wanted tonight to work on this. I've currently replaced the barbed wire with this fence. It was meant to be a placeholder until I found a fence like your 4 bar one, but I actually quite like this! Also the lineside shall be pruned! (Not to mention we can't have that in the way of the track yet to move aside! )

 

The telegraph poles were to be placeholders too, but I actually quite like them! If  I bring them down they are a very close match to a pair in a Broad Gauge photograph I have. The only difference is I think they have 5 bars, where as this has 6.(I will try and find a 5 bar one.)

So, that's sadly all I had time to do today! I hope you like it so far Annie.  

Edited May 13, 2020 by Oscillation

[Annie]

The 4 bar fence i use is  <kuid:342053:37246> DS Fence 4 Bar.  It's a close match for several pre-group companies' 4 bar fences, BUT the only thing about it is that it can't be used as a bulk replacement for another fence spline.  If you want to change over to this fence you'll have to do it the hard way by deleting sections of the old fence and then laying the 4 bar fence in place.  I've been progressively doing this on my GER Norfolk layout and I've still got a long way to go yet.

 

Telegraph poles are difficult as nothing is a close match for the type of telegraph poles in use during last couple of decades of the 19th century.  For my own Cornwall Railway Broad Gauge project I ended up using  <kuid:425700:1454>  CL Telephone Pole 12 wire which is a type used on the Ffestiniog Railway.  It looks like an older design, - not perfect, - but I'm happy with it.

 

I use the ballast splines by Euromodeller.  Search under EMT in Content Manager.  There are several different kinds and I've found nearly all of them to be useful as well as being more flexible in use than track with ballast included as a part of the track spline.  It is a bit of a faff having to lay it in place and adjust it for height, but I think the finished appearance is worth it.

 

You certainly are having fun with your own Broad Gauge project which is the whole point of doing it really.  Keep on with what you are doing because you are making good progress.

I think you are going to have to widen the track spacing on your double track though since it is way too close together.  I know that might be a pain because it will mean having to move things like station platforms, fencing and possibly having to alter clearances under bridges & etc, but it's one of those jobs that has to be done when converting a standard gauge route to Broad Gauge.  I was lucky with the Cornwall Railway since in my time period it was all single track, but sorting things out at Truro where the West Cornwall line and the Cornwall Railway from Falmouth have to pass through a double track tunnel to enter the station took me ages to get sorted out properly.

 

Edit:  I've just remembered that you said in your previous post that you were working on a Mk 2 version of your layout that would have correct track spacing so feel free to  ignore my comments if you want.

 

I gave 'Iron Duke' a good run on the still very much unfinished West Cornwall line (and yes I know that's the wrong tender, but the others wouldn't couple up properly).  Long stretches of the line are still a mess with all manner of faults in the landscape that need smoothing out and a track bed that hasn't been properly leveled and for a long time I couldn't face doing anything with it, BUT after taking 'Iron Duke' for a run I found that my interest in my Broad Gauge layout had rekindled and I've started work on it again.

 

 

 

Edited May 14, 2020 by Annie
more to say

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

I suppose because it is the Iron Duke a driver would be superfluous because who was ever going to tell His Grace what to do.  

[Oscillation]

Thank you for the advice Annie! I’ll keep it all in mind! 

 

I may try and find a 4 bar fence just like the one I’m already using then. What you said about clearances and such, I found that out too when I first started this! The station issue, well, shouldn’t be an Issue because I am replacing them after all.

I may try out your telegraph pole suggestion.

 

How did Iron Duke run for you by the way? I wouldn’t be surprised if you said poorly with the small, wrong tender! (I’m kidding! )

 

I’ve also been thinking of trying out your method with the trees on that route, just to see the affect on the Frame rate for myself.

 

Edit: I’m glad your interest has been rekindled  Iron Duke to the rescue!

Edited May 14, 2020 by Oscillation

[MikeOxon]

8 hours ago, Annie said:

...  I found that my interest in my Broad Gauge layout had rekindled and I've started work on it again.

 

I'm pleased to read that and hope to see more BG trains!

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Oscillation said:

How did Iron Duke run for you by the way? I wouldn’t be surprised if you said poorly with the small, wrong tender! (I’m kidding! )

With a 140 ton train 'Iron Duke' was managing a steady 50mph on the West Cornwall line.  The line is reasonably flat with minimal gradients so that's why I used it for the experiment.  Sending 'Iron Duke' over the steeply graded Cornwall Railway line to Falmouth would have been very cruel.

I will be fixing the tender situation even though single driver engines didn't work in Cornwall.  I may want do something else in the way of a Broad Gauge project later on and it would be annoying to have mess around with tenders again.

 

CL Fence Wood - 03a  <kuid:425700:101341> is a 4 bar fence that can be bulk replaced.

 

3 hours ago, MikeOxon said:

I'm pleased to read that and hope to see more BG trains!

I'm mostly doing landscape and scenic stuff at the moment Mike.  I deleted hundreds of inappropriately placed trees at Chasewater which cheered me up; - just as well the replacement mouse I'm using is a heavy duty one with strengthened switches.  When I first started working in this area I couldn't find the town at first as it was completely hidden in the trees!

I'll be blowing the dust off my 19th century OS maps very soon though as I need to completely rebuild Chasewater station since even for its supposed 1930s period it's completely wrong.

Edited May 14, 2020 by Annie
more to say

[Annie]

Book Corner:

 

I've just picked this book up second hand at a pocket friendly price and I'm hoping it will help with my Broad Gauge endeavours.

 

[Oscillation]

Hello Annie, today's progress so far...(Still working on!)A special train of Members of the Railway Board sits at the station, ready to whisk them away! As you can see, there is some track missing. Most of the station has yet to have the new interactive platforms fitted. Ignore the people! They are purely temporary and will be replaced by static period people.(Although being interactive, my Trains will bring real people to and from stations!  )

The Railway Board is shown the brand new spaced track! The lineside still needs pruning and the fence needs spacing out! Also the tracks on the left need spacing out too. 

The Railway Board seem happy so far with the work, but what do you all think? 

A fine view showing off both the telegraph poles and fence Annie recommended. As the telegraph pole seemed much more of a match to the one's in the photographs in my book, I chose these! This fence is brilliant too and shall be staying! 

 

The Railway Board however, are nervous as they are taken along the yet to be spaced track approaching the next station! They worry a train may pass by too close, however, they are assured that no trains but theirs is running, due to engineering works. They are also assured the lineside will be cleared of fouling vegetation and the lineside fences spaced out.

The track does hover in places and I'm going to sort that out in future!

Edited May 14, 2020 by Oscillation

[Annie]

I'm glad you found the fence and the telegraph poles suitable.  I went for the other type of 4 bar fence which I do like, but is a lot more work to install especially when using it to replace other fencing.  Track spacing is looking much better too.  The creator of Tristyn has always had a bit of a thing for rampant hedgerows close to railway lines which can get tedious to deal with when attempting to take his layouts back to the pre-grouping era.

 

Track testing on the West Cornwall line.  I did level quite a lot of it up to where the stone viaducts will need to be replaced with Brunel's timber viaducts, but a fair bit of landscape smoothing and sculpting will need to be done before the new viaducts are installed as that whole stretch of the line is a real mess.  I'm discovering that having been away from this project for so long my sense of where everything is supposed to be is all shot to bits so I'm having to familiarise myself with the OS maps all over again.

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by Annie
added picture

[Annie]

This is a little embarrassing.  While searching for information on Chacewater suddenly a lot of images of my Broad Gauge Cornwall project here on RMweb started turning up.  I would hate to think that anyone looking for information on the Broad Gauge in Cornwall would be guided by anything I've done since by and large I've been proceeding on a very slender amount of information and a lot of guesswork.

 

The coverage of the area around Chacewater in the NLS's 19th century OS map archive is not especially good with only a 1888 6 inch to the mile map being available.  The base layout's original builder used Goggle Earth as a guide for building his supposedly '1930s' layout so a great many things are incorrect even for the 1930s.  BUT you've all heard me say this before so I won't bore you anymore on the subject.

I do know though that there were more than a few areas of 'blasted heath' with ruined buildings and open shafts left over from tin mining and that there wasn't much in the way of tree cover.  I hope my replacement heavy duty mouse with reinforced switches will survive since I've already deleted hundreds of trees in this area with a lot more to go.

 

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Annie said:

This is a little embarrassing.  While searching for information on Chacewater suddenly a lot of images of my Broad Gauge Cornwall project here on RMweb started turning up.  I would hate to think that anyone looking for information on the Broad Gauge in Cornwall would be guided by anything I've done since by and large I've been proceeding on a very slender amount of information and a lot of guesswork.

 

Possibly someone has done a search on google for previous posts by you about your BG project.  This will have ended up in the Google search cache and (waving hands about a bit) fed back into their search algorithm.

 

Bingo!

 

Evryone searching for info on the Broad Gauge in Cornwall gets your project listed too.

 

Congrats, you're now an interweb authority on the subject.... 

 

If you google Wroxham Zombie Apocalypse, you get 2 hits to the discussion in the Castle Aching thread on the first page of results alone...

 

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/107713-castle-aching/page/219/

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by Hroth
Link to 1st mention of theinfamous Wroxham Zombies...

[Annie]

9 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Possibly someone has done a search on google for previous posts by you about your BG project.  This will have ended up in the Google search cache and (waving hands about a bit) fed back into their search algorithm.

 

Bingo!

 

Evryone searching for info on the Broad Gauge in Cornwall gets your project listed too.

 

Congrats, you're now an interweb authority on the subject.... 

 

If you google Wroxham Zombie Apocalypse, you get 2 hits to the discussion in the Castle Aching thread on the first page of results alone...

Oh the horror of it all.  

A good many historical images that I'd dug up from here and there are showing up too, - which might be no bad thing since some of them were hard to find, - but me being any kind of authority on anything is somewhat daunting.  Perhaps I should go hide under my bed and not come out until everyone has forgotten about it.

[Hroth]

8 minutes ago, Annie said:

Oh the horror of it all.  

A good many historical images that I'd dug up from here and there are showing up too, - which might be no bad thing since some of them were hard to find, - but me being any kind of authority on anything is somewhat daunting.  Perhaps I should go hide under my bed and not come out until everyone has forgotten about it.

 

You'd be under the bed a long time, the Wroxham (etc) discussion dates back to September 2017 and its still lurking in the search rankings. Every time someone searches for Broad Gauge Cornwall it'll push your contributions up the rankings.... 

 

[Annie]

11 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

You'd be under the bed a long time, the Wroxham (etc) discussion dates back to September 2017 and its still lurking in the search rankings. Every time someone searches for Broad Gauge Cornwall it'll push your contributions up the rankings.... 

 

I should demand compensation for suffering mental trauma.  How can I build a layout with the whole world looking and saying, 'What on earth was she thinking when she did that!'  Perhaps I should give up and collect souvenir teaspoons instead.

[Hroth]

16 minutes ago, Annie said:

Perhaps I should give up and collect souvenir teaspoons instead.

 

Railway souvenir teaspoons are not a problem....

 

 

 

[Annie]

It's alright I'm back on with my project now.  I've decided to direct my annoyance at mentally crippled archivists that use American language to describe historic places in Cornwall.

 

It looks like the 1888 (surveyed 1879) 6 inch OS map is the only one to be found.  The 25 inch OS map for this date is missing and can't be found anywhere soooooo I guess I'll just have to make do and wing it.  I suppose the big advantage of that is since little or no information exits nobody can criticise what I've done unless they are hiding a time machine in their garage.

[Oscillation]

3 hours ago, Annie said:

  I suppose the big advantage of that is since little or no information exits nobody can criticise what I've done unless they are hiding a time machine in their garage.

Unfortunately, I have a Delorean in my garage! Sorry Annie!

Just kidding!  (I wish I had that car for sure!) I wanted to share today's progress(and fun and games) so far! Still time for plenty more: 

Mixed Gauge! Well... not really. The actual mixed gauge track set I believe is for T:ANE only and I only use Trainz 12. This is a simple just for fun experiment using rails only track! It somewhat works, but you have to be very specific with your track placement, or(as you can probably see behind the Dean Single!) the coaches decide to hover! The Dean Single however blends in quite nicely.

 

Racing along with an express! Well... not quite. I only took this as far as a station off a junction, but soon after she derailed! I missed a piece of track I accidentally forgot to connect properly!

(The Railway Board were involved I suspect!  Can't blame them... this is supposed to be Broad Gauge Only!)

Even if I had done the entire line, it would be very difficult, I'd have to have two of anything interactive and signals would only work on the Broad Gauge Track. Still, it would be fun to have mixed gauge for perhaps a small part of the line!

 

Speaking of the Railway Board, here they are! Whisked away down the other two track line that branches off from the main station(which still has yet to be spaced out and worked on) the Railway Board is quite satisfied itself with the latest spacing. This is rather more narrow however, because of the surrounding landscape.

 

Approaching the station the Railway Board came from to first see the spacing for themselves.

Now, both the tracks have been spaced out. The 'Six Foot' is a little wider in the middle than the gap between the two tracks. This section however is far wider so that the signalmen aren't standing on the tracks and so that the Switches(which I chose after the one's Annie used! ) clear the tracks too.

 

So far this section has to be the widest on the network! I've had to move the fences back and delete some vegetation(that would of fouled the line anyway!), the route however still seems to adapt quite nicely. I did discover on my run one of the signals is a deathtrap! There is one model which has the 'lever' to control the signal pointing straight ahead, while another points right out onto the line! They shall be replaced before The Railway Board are seriously hurt or injured!(Then where would we be? )

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by Oscillation

[Annie]

Things are definitely coming on. 

With the dual gauge track Steve Flanders and team have been working on that for a good while now.  What has been made available in TANE is about as good as they can get it for the present time.  Signals remain a problem since it's proved to be near impossible to get a signal to register traffic on both tracks which means that while a Broad Gauge train might stop at a signal a standard gauge train won't (or vice versa) which will lead to collisions happening on the line.  Work is still continuing with trying to develop a system where a signal can be linked to both tracks, but progress is very slow.

 

 

 

By the way with your signals if you have a look in their config files you'll see there is a distance measurement for their spacing from the track.  Clone the signal, add 'RHS' to the user file name and put a minus sign in front of the distance measurement.  Save the file, commit the signal and now you will have a signal that can be placed on the other side of the track.  This should stop your signalmen from suffering terrible accidents.

[Oscillation]

Thank you for the advice and diagram Annie!

I've discovered the problem is actually with the, funnily enough, Caution signals! Caution indeed of the killer signals! (Out to see the end of the Broad gauge no doubt?!) 

 

Your advice will come in handy, but it does mean that I will have to space out the tracks again! Oh well, to be fair spacing them out to begin with didn't turn out to be a nightmare, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

I can't imagine the scripting nightmare in dual gauge signals, if only it was as easy as it was in the real world!

 

Speaking of Broad Gauge, here's the (in?)famous image that has appeared in this thread before! I may have borrowed a certain joke about an uninterested wife! 

Edited May 15, 2020 by Oscillation

[Annie]

On 16/10/2019 at 00:14, Annie said:

Brunel viaducts between Chacewater and Truro:  Chacewater and Blackwater.  Newbridge is a very ordinary stone viaduct across a stream.  Chacewater seems to cross a fairly deep valley, though it's not all that long, - possibly only six piers, 99 yards long.  No pictures of the Brunel viaduct seem to exist and the 1906 OS map shows it gone and replaced by the masonry viaduct that's still there today.

Blackwater is said to have been 132 yards long, but it doesn't look like it on the OS map.  The Wikipedia article notes that some of the viaduct lengths it quotes are uncertain.

Wikipedia confuses the Cornwall Railway's Penwithers viaduct as being the West Cornwall's property when it's the bridge near Newbridge that belongs to the WCR.  I'm not bothered about that one since the bridge I have there now is an adequate representation.  The WCR's Brunel viaducts were replaced in the mid 1880s, but would still be in place in my layout's time period.

I may have moaned about becoming a Broad Gauge 'authority' according to Goggle, but it is awfully useful with helping me to find my way around my own postings on this thread.

I'm presently considering the job of replacing the two masonry viaducts on the West Cornwall line with proper Brunel timber ones since  it's getting to the point where other tasks on the line are being held up due to that section of the line still being a mess.  Quite a bit of landscape bashing will be needed, but at least I've done all that before with the viaducts on the Cornwall Railway line to Falmouth.

The trouble is I just want to go to sleep at the moment, but from experience I know that I should do that or else all I'm going to is is make a right mess (sigh).

[AdamsRadial]

When I first got TS2010 I managed to get the Restormel Castle BG map onto it and enjoyed the lovely timber viaducts, then one of the upgrades seemed to break things and all the viaduct splines collapsed. I tried replacements using the Moorswater viaduct but it just wasn't the same.

Edited May 16, 2020 by AdamsRadial
Lockdown-loopy, totally wrong name for the map

[Annie]

1 hour ago, AdamsRadial said:

When I first got TS2010 I managed to get the Turks Head map onto it and enjoyed the lovely timber viaducts, then one of the upgrades seemed to break things and all the viaduct splines collapsed. I tried replacements using the Moorswater viaduct but it just wasn't the same.

Turk's Castle (you did mean Turk's Castle?) is an amazing old layout.  Created in TS2004 days with what was available at the time it manages to capture the spirit of the prototype very well.  I've been gradually updating it in TS2019, though taking care to do only the minimum necessary so as to not mess up the layout's positive qualities.  Difficult to find any information about the line in Broad Gauge times though and such photos as are about are from the BR error.  It's wonderful that the line has been preserved, but as good as it is the preserved line can't really be used as a guide as to what the line was like in the 1890s.

[AdamsRadial]

My edit didn't get through in time, it's Restormel Castle I use mostly, I do have Turks Castle but I find Restormel a lot more appealing. Most of my favourites are TS2004 which I've been slowly getting up to date. You mentioned Angelia H's Kent and East Sussex quite a few posts ago, that's one I ramble up and down quite a lot. Incidentally, she got Biddenden the wrong war round and the wrong side of the road  I haven't yet corrected it, but coming from Tenderden towards Headcorn you should cross the road first, then comes the Y-points for the loop, and the sidings. When I upgraded it from TS2006 the tunnel at St Michaels broke and I've not been able to mend that yet. Another thing on my list of de-procrastinations for next week.

[Annie]

I have a big soft spot for some of the old Uk TS2004 layouts too.  Creators back them were doing some very good layout building and weren't limited at all by simulator's basic simplicity.  I'm now going to have to take a look at Restormel Castle since that's not one I've seen before.

 

I haven't done any further work on Angelah's  K&ESR layout, but I'll be going back to it soon.  I've been checking station yard layouts against OS maps for the area, but I haven't got as far as Biddenden yet.  Thanks for the tip though.  Again as much as possible I've been trying not to kill the essential character of the layout and keeping to doing only what's really needed.  I haven't had any problems with the tunnel at St. Michaels, but I'd loaded the layout into TS2012 first and then saved it to CDP and took the CDP file across to TS2019.

[Annie]

Now available!

 

 

 

 

http://lightmoor.co.uk/books/broad-gauge-engines-of-the-great-western-railway-part-2-1840-1845/L8764?fbclid=IwAR3WoKZ0GWbDHbEMeGDl-Lh2J07rw5dqCZNpgREWD-c0OdQPzttwvnL6taQ