Long and Thin Shunting Layout

[xveitch]

Hi All, 

I've just moved into a new flat with a lovely long wall. This has got me thinking about what kind of layout I would like to build and I'd love to hear any thoughts from the RMweb 'Hive Mind' on it. 

 

A couple of details and wishes:

• 5m by 0.5m 
• 00-SF (Hand built track) - no exotic/complex pointwork
• Shunting focus
• Would like to run my 2 YEC Janus's (Jani?) and my early BR(S) locomotives - so probably Mid-to-Late 1950s, BR(S) region. 
• DCC
• Would rather go for a countryside/edge-of-town feel rather than urban as I'd like to scratchbuild the buildings and don't want to be overwhelmed 
• Scenic view along the whole length
• Most of the time I'll be operating it alone, but it should also be fun/challenging when a mate comes over. (Probably along the lines of the american-style wagon-ticket system)
• I'd like to try and get some kind of height variation into the scene 

 

I'm trying to compromise between something that will help teach me new skills, something that I can get running fairly quickly and something that is interesting to operate. I'd like to learn how to build track myself, so I'm going for 00-SF, but this means I'd rather stay away from slips and threeway turnouts but diamonds would be okay. I'd also like to scratchbuild the structures, so would like a couple of interesting/diverse structures to tackle, but not whole streets of buildings!

 

After about a month of pondering, trawling the web and sketching, I think I've drawn up something that may suit my needs. However I'm more than interested in hearing completely different ideas, as well as changes/critique to the stuff I've drawn up myself! 

 

 

[Above; Plan A]: This is what I came up with. The fiddle yard/storage sidings won't be hidden behind a backscene, merely behind the treeline and buildings - the layout will be mounted fairly high, so the low relief nature of the "Engineering Company" building shouldn't be too noticeable. I feel like the layout is nicely divided into three 'scenes' and there's lots of opportunities for parallel moves for when mates come over to play. The river gives some nice height variations and helps to break up the rather rectangular baseboard. However, if a train ran in to exchange a rake of wagons, there's no ideal space for the outgoing rake to be placed, ready to be taken away. 

 

[Below; Plan B]: To give the outgoing rake of wagons its own siding, I've extended the short loco headshunt. i not really quite sure I like this though - for some reason it overpowers the right-hand side of the layout too much. 

 

 

A nice element of these plans is that I could start track laying in the back right of the layout and get an inglenook layout up and running fairly early on. 

I'm not quite sure what kind of traffic I'd like to depict... probably the more diverse the better. 

 

Any thoughts or critiques, or completely different ideas would be welcome!

 

Thanks, 

 

Xander

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RobinofLoxley]

Hello zander,

 

I dont usually start with scenery but I do have a question: how do you see the river valley working. As it runs longitudinally and there is a bridge, by how much are you going to build up the banks in order that the bridge doesnt look silly? When you build up the banks the river becomes a crack in the baseboard, if you leave it flat, so maybe a canoeist can pass underneath, this means you have a flood plain and the tracks have to be banked a bit above the terrain.

 

I'm sure that layout wise you may get the suggestion to have a separate fiddle yard. The sense of things coming from 'somewhere'. Maybe its possible in that case to incorporate a casette system or lift.   AS for the two versions they are very similar but I feel that its the left hand end that might need tweaking.

[Harlequin]

Hi Xander,

If the layout is set high how will you actually reach the fiddle yard? It’s not fully hidden but you’ve got bits of scenery in front of it.

 

[Mol_PMB]

I was thinking the same about the river - you won’t see much of that either. 

I like the idea of it as a feature to split up the layout though. 

A canal might be a more realistic option in a tight urban setting, less worry about flood plains, and it could change levels with a lock or two. Could also justify an abandoned wharf serving one of the factories. 

 

[Mol_PMB]

 

Note the steeply-graded siding down to the canal transshipment shed.

 

[xveitch]

49 minutes ago, RobinofLoxley said:

Hello zander,

 

I dont usually start with scenery but I do have a question: how do you see the river valley working. As it runs longitudinally and there is a bridge, by how much are you going to build up the banks in order that the bridge doesnt look silly? When you build up the banks the river becomes a crack in the baseboard, if you leave it flat, so maybe a canoeist can pass underneath, this means you have a flood plain and the tracks have to be banked a bit above the terrain.

 

I'm sure that layout wise you may get the suggestion to have a separate fiddle yard. The sense of things coming from 'somewhere'. Maybe its possible in that case to incorporate a casette system or lift.   AS for the two versions they are very similar but I feel that its the left hand end that might need tweaking.

 

So for the river valley I was thinking along the lines of the Dart, as it runs alongside the South Devon Railway. It'll have to be smaller and slightly narrower, but that's the kind of feeling I was thinking of. I'd rather reduce the river's size further to make the proportions look right than try and plaster a huge river through the middle of the scene. 

 

 

A canal is another option, unfortunately it doesn't appeal to me much: I'd rather downscale to a large stream.  

 

In terms of bridge design, the AnyRail bridge is rather grandiose - a simple single-span design would be sufficient: 

 

Xander

 

Edited December 6, 2021 by xveitch

[xveitch]

21 minutes ago, Harlequin said:

Hi Xander,

If the layout is set high how will you actually reach the fiddle yard? It’s not fully hidden but you’ve got bits of scenery in front of it.

 

 

Hi Harlequin! 

 

The layout is probably going to be operated more like a shunting puzzle than anything else. The fiddleyard is therefore more a storage space to allow the on-scene stock to be varied than a key part of the operation - so I'm not planning to need to access this except in emergencies (in which case, a small step stool will do). Or I could reduce the layout height and operate it sitting on a bar stool or something similar... 

 

Xander

[Nearholmer]

It’s got a number of similarities to my old H0 New England layout, although that was ‘waterfront’, the size is virtually identical, ditto the general principle of multiple industries/locations to shunt.

 

The way I used to operate that was on a ‘mixed train daily’ basis, with the train emerging from off-scene, dropping the passenger car at the depot, the ages spent switching, before disappearing again.

 

If you have a Janus, one option is to have two FY ‘bolt holes’, with one being the industrial line destination. Kent was the best for industries on BR(S) at that date, and steel (sheppey), paperwork’s, or cement might make good heavy industries. Maybe cement somewhere in the lower Medway valley as inspiration (it wasn’t very inspiring in the conventional sense!).

 

Or, a bit further up at Maidstone, which actually had a freight/industrial spur (overhead electrified too!) crossing the river valley to Tovil yard and paper mill https://www.kentrail.org.uk/tovil_goods_siding.htm.

 

 

Edited December 6, 2021 by Nearholmer

[xveitch]

5 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

It’s got a number of similarities to my old H0 New England layout, although that was ‘waterfront’, the size is virtually identical, ditto the general principle of multiple industries/locations to shunt.

 

The way I used to operate that was on a ‘mixed train daily’ basis, with the train emerging from off-scene, dropping the passenger car at the depot, the ages spent switching, before disappearing again.

 

If you have a Janus, one option is to have two FY ‘bolt holes’, with one being the industrial line destination. Kent was the best for industries on BR(S) at that date, and steel (sheppey), paperwork’s, or cement might make good heavy industries. Maybe cement somewhere in the lower Medway valley as inspiration (it wasn’t very inspiring in the conventional sense!).

 

Or, a bit further up at Maidstone, which actually had a freight/industrial spur (overhead electrified too!) crossing a steep river valley to Tovil yard and paper mill https://www.kentrail.org.uk/tovil_goods_siding.htm.

 

 

 

Interesting - I haven't seen much paper traffic modelled before...  

Was your layout good fun to operate? Any unforeseen limitations? 

You mentioned FY 'bolt-holes' - do you mean just a hidden offstage siding which would represent the loading/unloading facility itself? 

[Nearholmer]

The layout was plenty entertaining, both at home and exhibitions. One thing I did make sure was that it had lots of ‘destinations’ for different cars. Trying to recall, I think it had:

 

- paintbrush factory (boxcars)

- poultry feed silos (bottom discharge hoppers)

- boat yard (rare arrivals of bits of machinery on flat cars)

- fish cannery (boxcars)

- fuel supplier (coal in bottom-discharge hoppers; diesel, petrol, and heating oil in tank cars)

- potatoes also went out in reefers in season (they used to put oil stoves in the ice bunkers to prevent the loads freezing-up!), and Christmas trees in boxcars.

 

So, several “small town” industries, rather than one or two biggies, all based on real industries in coastal Maine. Having lots of small things made for variety.

 

By “bolt hole”, I mean a tiny FY representing an off scene (painted on the backscene maybe) industry that is too bulky to go on-scene. Paperwork’s and cement mills are huge!

 

You could even fit in a vestigial passenger operation, with tatty little station served by a 2-HAL or a 2-HAP shuttling to-and-fro.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 6, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Flying Pig]

13 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

So, several “small town” industries, rather than one or two biggies, all based on real industries in coastal Maine. Having lots of small things made for variety.

 

 

On the other hand, a larger site might receive and dispatch a variety of traffic all on its own - fuel, raw materials and components in, say, and finished goods out.

[Nearholmer]

Indeed, and either paper or cement are good, because at the dates under discussion both involved coal (maybe oil in a few cases by then) as fuel in, and product out.
 

Paper also involves masses of waste paper and rags inwards, but they always seem to have come by water to the big Kent papermills, places like Northfleet, Sittingbourne, and Gravesend, and even the mill at Maidstone Tovil took those things in from river barges. Maybe something to do with how rubbish was dealt with in London, although they imported ‘rubbish’ from Holland too.

 

When I researched for my own H0 layout, I didn’t find any big “two direction traffic” industries on the Maine Coast (they have huge papermills, but a bit up-river inland) - chicken and turkey farming was the nearest, for which they imported feed from the ‘grain belt’ and shipped out birds to places like Boston.

[xveitch]

@Nearholmer Do you happen to have any pictures of that layout that you'd be willing to share? I would be interested to see how it came out

[Nearholmer]

50 minutes ago, xveitch said:

Do you happen to have any pictures

Very few, because it was back in “the old days” before phone cameras. I’ll see what I can dig out.

In many ways it was pretty conventional: waterfront/wharf-side along about 50% of the front; level area for most of the track; rising ground to rear.  I made sure that the main tracks were behind several of the wharf-side buildings, to give view-blocking, and spent ages scratch-building and kit-bashing structures to make them visually interesting, different roof angles, different “bulking”, variations in colour, varying angles and elevations etc.

 

I lifted a lot of ideas from a US magazine, Narrow Gauge & Shortlines Gazette, and from Iain Rice’s earlier layouts and writings. He actually built a Maine-themed H0 layout himself, but shortly after I’d built mine.

BYW, the ‘epic fail’ of the layout was the baseboard size: lightweight plywood box structures, but too big at 1500Lx500Wx500H  (including back-scene). They were a pig to carry to-and-from the car from the study on the first floor on my own, and ditto at some show venues. If I’d used four, instead of three, boards to make the 4500L total, it would have lasted a lot longer. As it was, c5 years of intensive hobby hours only led to c2 years exhibiting.

 

 

Edited December 7, 2021 by Nearholmer

[KeithMacdonald]

@xveitch- I like the "long and thin" layout idea.

 

If you (or anyone) wants a real-world inspiration, may I suggest Coombe Junction on the Looe Valley branch line?

 

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=17&lat=50.44648&lon=-4.48110&layers=168&b=1

 

Coombe Junction's current claim to fame is the "second least used station in Britain", with passenger trains reversing. But it did run up a long thin valley to serve the Duchy Tweed factory and the St.Neots China Clay Factory.

 

 

[The Stationmaster]

On 06/12/2021 at 20:32, RobinofLoxley said:

Hello zander,

 

I dont usually start with scenery but I do have a question: how do you see the river valley working. As it runs longitudinally and there is a bridge, by how much are you going to build up the banks in order that the bridge doesnt look silly? When you build up the banks the river becomes a crack in the baseboard, if you leave it flat, so maybe a canoeist can pass underneath, this means you have a flood plain and the tracks have to be banked a bit above the terrain.

 

I'm sure that layout wise you may get the suggestion to have a separate fiddle yard. The sense of things coming from 'somewhere'. Maybe its possible in that case to incorporate a casette system or lift.   AS for the two versions they are very similar but I feel that its the left hand end that might need tweaking.

Simple answer - make the bridge a bascule bridge on the skew.  That would give plenty of headroom on the waterway when the bridge is open for waterborne traffic.   Daft?  No way because that was exactly what was done in order to serve a private siding near Newport (Mon) Mill Street

 

http://www.newportpast.com/gallery/photos/php/photo_page.php?search=cordes&search2=yyyyyy&pos=5

[Grovenor]

On 06/12/2021 at 21:15, Mol_PMB said:

 

Note the steeply-graded siding down to the canal transshipment shed.

 

Note that is Guide bridge but the picture needs flipping, the railway should be on the right hand side (the picture is looking East)..

Here is the same transfer dock some years later but looking the opposite way, West.