Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Sea Siding
I was going to find some modern marketing speak for 'digging up the track' but the language used by the real railway is now so far detached from reality that I decided against it.
As most readers will know, St Ruth is 'based on' Penzance but exactly how far that goes is rather flexible. Starting from the pre-1938 track plan, the very first departure from reality that we made was to add a headshunt to the goods yard and then continue this along the sea wall as a goods loop. This has been very successful in allowing operation to continue in the yard without interfering with trains on the main line as well as making life easier for arriving and departing goods trains.
So... we're going to change it.
No, we're not going back to a strict adherence to the pre-1938 plan. Instead we are stealing a little bit of the post-1938 layout in this area. The new plan will still have a loop (which will double as a headshunt) but we will reverse the crossover that provides access to the loop at the 'up' end.
Why would we want to do that?
Well, it allows some prototypical empty coaching stock moves that we currently can't do. The real thing (both before and after 1938) had the ability to push empty coaches back out of the platforms and into a siding on the sea wall called the 'sea siding'. After 1938 there were two of them (called the long one and the short one). We only have room for one (like the pre-38 plan) but we will keep the loop line between the sea siding and the goods yard (like the post-38 plan).
The work on this started several months back - the new control panel diagram and the starting signals that cover moves over the scissors crossover already assume that the sea siding is there but we've always had things coming up that have put us off actually making the trackwork changes. Nobody has complained about the rather spurious extra signal arms. Now we plan to make the changes before the next show (Aldershot in October). Here are some photos of the new crossover on my workbench. It's built with the now discontinued 'Easiline' chairplate system to match the rest of St Ruth's track... with thanks to several people who sent me their left over stocks of chairplates.
The template was done in a slightly convoluted way. First I took a paper 'brass rubbing' of the track. Then I left this in my bag for several weeks. With the next meeting approaching I finally got round to plotting the curves out in CAD by measuring the XY coordinates using a ruler and then joining the dots. I did an initial rough stab at drawing the pointwork using the same CAD templates that we used for the rest of the track before finally deciding that Templot might be a much better bet for drawing curved pointwork. The original CAD tracing was then loaded into Templot and used to locate and 'bend' the templates for the new points at our last meeting.
The resulting template is pretty rough and ready because there was no time (or expertise) to sort out niceties like correcting the sleeper spacing but having printed it and checked it against the real track, that became the template for the job.
All being well the saws and scrapers will be out to do some serious track modifications at our next meeting on Tuesday. We need to make a gap for the new crossover just east of the scissors and (hopefully) slot it into place. Then we need to rip out the original crossover which is even further to the east and replace this with some plain track, plus shift the point motors and associated gubbins. The job will also entail moving one of the signals - naturally it's the route indicating home signal with call-on arm - the one with 5 servos underneath. I will probably use the opportunity to fit some beefier wires to this signal because it does have a tendency to get stuck.
Another job (later) will be to have another crack at the 3 doll starter bracket for the scissors. This was fitted in time for Railex earlier this year but the 3 foot arm that covers the sea siding shunt never quite worked properly once the thing was painted - not too big a problem when it covered a move over a non-existent crossover.
Finally of course we need to re-jig some of the empty stock moves in the operating sequence and figure out how to arrive and depart good trains from the already cramped goods yard without using the loop.
UPDATE:
We've passed the point of no return now I didn't quite get as much done as I had hoped tonight though...
I also found a couple of photos on my camera that I took during the earlier stages of the build and then forgot about so thought I'd add them so that you can check out my hi-tech crossing soldering jig.
- 14
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