kintbury jon Posted April 29, 2013 Share Posted April 29, 2013 Afternoon all, As well as enjoying the BR sector era I also have a love of French trains, particularly some of the dc electric engines. A couple of years ago I bought an N gauge layout which I have made a few modifications to look a bit French. There are some really nice N gauge French items that you can buy but there are gaps, notably (for me) the (ex) Midi electric 'box' engines of types BB4100, BB4200, moving on to the SNCF types of BB300 and BB8100. I have taken 'on loan' a few French items from my dad, notably a Z5100 EMU, a couple of X2200 railcars and a push/pull set of coaches. I have also bought (from Contikits) a Lima BB8500 and a Roco BB4100. Whilst I can run them on my OO layout I got thinking about whether I could produce a small layout perhaps with some working catenary. So.... I have the idea of La Planche (now renamed Pas de la Casa). Board wise, i'm thinking of going with 1 foot by 5 foot though still not sure. Attached is a photo of some track and trains 'plonked' down on a piece of wood 4' by about 8". In terms of stock in the photo, there is an XR6000 Autorail trailer with the X2200 power car behind it. BB4110 is in the middle and BB8595 is on the right. Red line denotes walled off area with the section on the upper far left being the unseen siding where trains arrive and depart from the layout. X2200 and trailer are in the platform. The trailer is in the loop and the X2200 has moved so that it can run round the trailer then back on to it and push it and the trailer towards the buffers before then departing. Points stacked up on each other denote a double slip. I think this would be useful though having used Hornby points (which are very short) I don't know whether there's a suitable double slip that is as short as that. Peco ones look long. BB8595 is sat in an extra siding. Whether anything will come of this, I don't know but i'd like to give it a try. Comments are welcome! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
rs4 Posted April 29, 2013 Share Posted April 29, 2013 Highly amusing name Good luck with it Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted April 29, 2013 Author Share Posted April 29, 2013 Just a bit more tinkering... Ignoring the width, this is what I can do with a 6 foot length, have replaced the double slip with two points for simplicity though it would mean shorter sidings. The platform could fit two coaches from my three coach push pull set though I don't think they ever ran with just two coaches. I could do with some freight stock instead of EWS HEA's! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pacific231G Posted April 29, 2013 Share Posted April 29, 2013 Afternoon all, As well as enjoying the BR sector era I also have a love of French trains, particularly some of the dc electric engines. So.... I have the idea of La Planche. Board wise, i'm thinking of going with 1 foot by 5 foot though still not sure. Comments are welcome! Hi Jon Good to see that someone else is modelling French prototype. You can call your layout whatever you like of course but La Planche (the plank) is the name being used for the current and previous small layouts often exhibited with the SNCF Society stand. The current version- shown most recently at Ally Pally- is Tim Hill's La Planche-Port which is a 5ftx1ft "piano line" design based on a small harbour extension with a passenger halt. It's predecessor was La Planche-sur-Mer built by Alan Marlow and the late Andy Hart. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted April 30, 2013 Author Share Posted April 30, 2013 I did wonder whether it would have been used elsewhere, i'll have a think about a suitable alternative. I have had Tim Hills layout in my mind though had not remembered the name for it. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold SHMD Posted April 30, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted April 30, 2013 "La Nouvelle Planche"? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted April 30, 2013 Author Share Posted April 30, 2013 OK, after some thought, I have gone with Pas de la Casa, a fictional line but a real location. If you wish to get to Andorra by rail the nearest you can get is l'Hospitalet pres l'Andorre which is near the end of the line from Toulouse to Latour de Carol - Enveitg, followed by a bus to the Andorran border town of Pas de la Casa. Idea is that a line has been built from l'Hospitalet to Pas de la Casa and electrified at 1500V dc. Passenger services are made up of X2200 railcars and BB8500 + RIO push-pull sets. Capacity restrictions means that load 2 is the maximum and a RIO set was specially shortened for the route (I don't think RIO's ever ran as 2 cars but the whole things made up anyway so who cares!). Freight (I think) will be operated by BoBo electrics, i'm thinking about going for 4 wheel vans though could be anything though. Further options I could consider are having a couple of Corail coaches that would be attached to the Latour de Carol - Paris overnight service (perhaps one Corail and one couchette). Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pacific231G Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 OK, after some thought, I have gone with Pas de la Casa, a fictional line but a real location. If you wish to get to Andorra by rail the nearest you can get is l'Hospitalet pres l'Andorre which is near the end of the line from Toulouse to Latour de Carol - Enveitg, followed by a bus to the Andorran border town of Pas de la Casa. Idea is that a line has been built from l'Hospitalet to Pas de la Casa and electrified at 1500V dc. Passenger services are made up of X2200 railcars and BB8500 + RIO push-pull sets. Capacity restrictions means that load 2 is the maximum and a RIO set was specially shortened for the route (I don't think RIO's ever ran as 2 cars but the whole things made up anyway so who cares!). Freight (I think) will be operated by BoBo electrics, i'm thinking about going for 4 wheel vans though could be anything though. Further options I could consider are having a couple of Corail coaches that would be attached to the Latour de Carol - Paris overnight service (perhaps one Corail and one couchette). Sounds good. I love those very boxy old BB electrics and the situation looks rather reminiscent of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port a bit further West but also very close to the Spanish border. A surprising number of French branches did have daily through coaches to/from Paris (sometimes they were the only remaining passenger service once everything else had been replaced by SNCF buses) and in the very steep mountains round there the grades would justify the shortened trains. To see just how much atmosphere you can get into the sort of space you're looking at take a look at this picture http://forum.e-train.fr/album_mod/upload/1a61d1181b32a7db30db655ddd6a0970.jpg The layout is 160 X 50 cms (5ft 3ins x 20ins) plus the fiddle yard. It's worth following the thread at http://forum.e-train.fr/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=27560&hilit=petite+terminus#p701811 as it includes some really atmospheric photos of the layout including night scenes. I think he's probably crammed in one track too many for the space but, unusually for France, the layout is operated to a timetable. The tendency for smaller stations in France including branch termini was to have a two road goods yard (goods shed with open loading bank and a voie de debordement (mileage) siding for wagonload traffic) either opposite or to the side of the station building with a single entrance to the running lines protected by a derailer or occasionally a trap siding. You might also have an EP (private siding) either adjoining the goods yard or sometimes completely separate. Where you are looking at that could be minerals or mineral water and the latter needs supplies of empty bottles etc in and palettes of bottled water out? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold Joseph_Pestell Posted May 1, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted May 1, 2013 The line up to Latour de Carol has some fearsome gradients. Four-coach trains required two locomotives. Pas de la Casa would probably need rack-equipped locos. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pacific231G Posted May 1, 2013 Share Posted May 1, 2013 The line up to Latour de Carol has some fearsome gradients. Four-coach trains required two locomotives. Pas de la Casa would probably need rack-equipped locos. That depends on how much they were willing to spend on it but I don't recall any rack equipped standard gauge lines in France. The straight line distance from l'Hospitalet Gare to a point just below Pas de la Casa where you might build a station on the French side of the border is about 7100metres and the difference in elevation about 650m so obviously an adhesion line would need a lot of twists and turns. The road between l'Hospitalet and Pas de la Casa is about 13kms, includes one section of fairly severe hairpins and has an average gradient of about 5%. For a railway with a ruling gradient of 3 % you'd probably need to double that as you'd never get a completely consistent gradient so you'd need a total of about 25-30kms. Such a line would be expensive to build but French railways often were built for reasons that bore little relationship to economy. Think of the Tramways de la Correze with its three short trains a day trundling sedately along the verges of the local roads but then throwing itself across the gorge of the Luzege on the enormous Viaduc des Rochers Noirs 160m long by 90 metre high. You probably would need a political or strategic reason for building such a minor line at such expense especially as Andorra had a population of only around 5000 in 1900 (It's around 85 000 now) Andorra is technically a principality with the two princes being a Spanish bishop and the French president so some deal perhaps to keep Andorra on France's side in return for a main line connection might have justified a railway. There are also iron ore deposits in the area though small. Nowadays of course the through trains would be full of skiers! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted May 1, 2013 Author Share Posted May 1, 2013 Picking a real location with no railway means that I am free to go with any kind of track work and not worry about it being 'correct'. The sole purpose of picking the real location is it means I can suggest where my trains are coming from and going to. I have visited the area a few times (and really like it), there must be little point in a railway to Andorra or it would have already been built. It does give me an excuse to run a few items that I really like. There will not be room for much scenery at all (I envisage). I need this layout to be small enough to be stored away hence keeping the width to just a foot, ideally i'd like to make the length more of a manageable 5 foot, though this would probably mean that the passenger trains would need to be restricted to single railcars - there would certainly be no room for a run-round loop (which I think it will need). David, thanks for your advice, it's interesting to see images of that layout, I have tried joining that forum without success, firstly it wouldn't accept me as I had a uk email address. I then set up a French yahoo account and successfully created an account but it has not been activated by the mods! Strange, as i've had no problems joining the Forum du n. In terms of freight, I quite like the look of the Sernam branded covered wagons produced by both Roco and Jouef. I assume the Roco ones are better quality though they seem hard to get hold of. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261208189628?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261156793224?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/200584691331?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pacific231G Posted May 2, 2013 Share Posted May 2, 2013 Picking a real location with no railway means that I am free to go with any kind of track work and not worry about it being 'correct'. The sole purpose of picking the real location is it means I can suggest where my trains are coming from and going to. I have visited the area a few times (and really like it), there must be little point in a railway to Andorra or it would have already been built. It does give me an excuse to run a few items that I really like. There will not be room for much scenery at all (I envisage). I need this layout to be small enough to be stored away hence keeping the width to just a foot, ideally i'd like to make the length more of a manageable 5 foot, though this would probably mean that the passenger trains would need to be restricted to single railcars - there would certainly be no room for a run-round loop (which I think it will need). David, thanks for your advice, it's interesting to see images of that layout, I have tried joining that forum without success, firstly it wouldn't accept me as I had a uk email address. I then set up a French yahoo account and successfully created an account but it has not been activated by the mods! Strange, as i've had no problems joining the Forum du n. In terms of freight, I quite like the look of the Sernam branded covered wagons produced by both Roco and Jouef. I assume the Roco ones are better quality though they seem hard to get hold of. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261208189628?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261156793224?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/200584691331?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649 Building an imaginary railway to a real location does give you some freedom but it's worth sticking, so far as you can, to the general principles of station design in the area. Different countries' railways do have their own characteristics and if you can suggest those they will help to make a layout look right. You can get a complete station with a run round loop into five feet no bother. Mine is 62 inches long (but I did mainly use medium radius points) on a folding tapered baseboard 8 inches wide at the throat end and fifteen inches at the buffers. It's based on a development of the Inglenook sidings principle so the run round loop is designed to hold a five wagon train. It will just about take a couple of full length coaches though a local train of three four or six wheel coaches looks more believable and fits into my period of around 1960. The layout includes a two road goods yard and a private siding. The four pictures below show the whole layout and were taken at the Wealden group exhibition in Arundel in March. It needs more detailing and won't win any best layout competitions but it's good fun to operate. I'm surprised to hear that you've had problems with the L-R forum. I joined it several years ago without any trouble. Perhaps they need reminding that they're in the EC but did you make the request in French? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted May 20, 2013 Author Share Posted May 20, 2013 Just to say, this project has gone on hold for a bit as I'm a bit busy at the moment. I should get some time to hopefully make some sort of start in the summer. It hasn't stopped me making three further purchases though! Below shows the three new arrivals on the left, BB8257, BB8251 and BB3xx. BB4110 on the right. BB8257 has some alternative running number plates and I might change them as one of the plates is a bit damaged. The BB325 class has a choice of three numbers which i'm thinking about which ones to use. I'd like to number it BB352 (as I have the real engines plate) but I don't think the plates look like they can be easily modified. All four engines are very short so I think they would be ideal for a small layout. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted June 27, 2013 Author Share Posted June 27, 2013 Well after thinking that i'd probably knock this idea on the head, I have decided to continue with it, having located a piece of board. Space is an issue for me with this one as I don't really have any room for the layout which is why I want to keep it as small as I can. If I want to run longer trains, I can do so on my OO layout. Anyway, the board I have is 4' by 1'. Plan is to use the Roco Electrics (which are all fairly short - about 6" long), freight about 3 wagons long (I don't think 4 would fit) and 1 passenger carriage (either railcar or loco hauled). I would also prefer for the entrance to the layout to be on the board with a small unseen siding where trains can be assembled and removed. It may well be that space is too limited and that I might need to have a separate board, but i'd rather not do that. Here's a couple of ideas: Red lines represent the hidden area (will be about 18"), green block represents platform. Top idea - problem is that the run round is not long enough. Bottom idea - better run round but all freight would have to run into the platform and reverse out. I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions anyone might have. I have a few 2nd radius points which is what i've played around with. Are tighter/shorter points available in radius 1? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted June 28, 2013 Author Share Posted June 28, 2013 A couple more ideas, this time using the whole of the board, with a separate board required for trains to enter. Photo below shows a few trains added. X2200 Railcar at the run round. 2x UIC coaches in the platform BB8595 in what could be an engine shed 3x EWS wagons (as I have no French wagons at the moment) in some sort of freight area The following photo is a modification that has the advantage of trains running around stock do not need to leave the main board. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted July 19, 2013 Author Share Posted July 19, 2013 A bit of progress with the layout. I have purchased a double slip today so I am now able to finalize where the track goes. The double slip is quite long but I think it will be useful to have. The run round points need shortening so that the tracks are a little closer to each other. I was also delighted to win a huge lot of 1500v dc catenary on ebay. It looks the part and I hope to make it live (not at 1500v though!) Finally some wagons bought from a site called 'leboncoin' - a french Gumtree. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sparks Posted July 20, 2013 Share Posted July 20, 2013 The masts look good - is that the JV stuff? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
kintbury jon Posted July 20, 2013 Author Share Posted July 20, 2013 Yes, there are some used masts as well as a few new packs. I'll need to think about location of posts but i'm a long way from doing that. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest 838rapid Posted July 20, 2013 Share Posted July 20, 2013 Hi Jon. Have just found this thread,Your new layout is looking good. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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