Leaderboard

Dead easy, several suppliers make plastic ones. Buy some and plant them ? Well, no. These are not any old telegraph poles, these are the telegraph poles of the Caledonian railway. As with so many aspects of pre-grouping different railways did things in a different manner. “Signalling the Caledonian” by Jim Summers has an entire chapter on the subject giving many details and a couple of useful pictures of the L+D under construction so combined with photos from elsewhere I know what I’m trying to build. So, for my location and period big A frame poles where possible, though single poles if space is limited. Alternate long / short crossarms with two insulators. The original shackle type insulators were replaced very early on, so Cordeaux style insulators on J hangers. Stripwood and dowel from Cornwall model boats, insulators from Express models. I had a play about on the bench. Hmm. It didn’t take long to realise that in order to make a consistent set of parts and assemble the posts in an accurate manner the first part of the exercise would be to manufacture a set of jigs. This is what I have come up with. This photo shows the three crossarm jigs, a bit of square brass tube with holes in and a catch as an end stop in two sizes. Wood in, drill holes, lift catch, slide out. The lower one has the catch tube in two parts forming a place to bend the J hangers. The one on the left is to hold the crossarm while superglueing the J hangers in. A photo of an assembly jig laminated up from bits cut on the silhouette. That’s the method, should keep me busy for a bit.

Another updated plan, I’ve now reached v15! Too much pondering and not enough physical modelling you may think. "The Devil is in the detail” and I may be overthinking some aspects of this plan. In the end I hope I will have thought of most of the gremlins that might creep into this project. In looking at the previous plan, I started to contemplate the proposed signal box diagram and the comments made. This brought me around to asking what happens beyond the bridge (scenic break) on the left. The realisation then struck me that the large expanse of the bridges across the 6 tracks exiting stage left would not provide a very good scenic break. Even with well placed trees the exit would still be difficult to disguise. After a couple of more drawings the below plans should help to resolve both of my above thoughts. Plan 1 Plan 1 is the starting point and one that I’ll be using at home. As space is a premium in the ‘Man Cave’ my intention is to cassettes in the fiddle yard area while at home. The spot heights have been included to give me an idea of inclines which will create the different track levels. The Engine Shed entrance is a concern but as long as I keep it all in the same plane (with no twist in the track) all should be OK. Another question raised by a reader has been where is the coal stack? It seems coal stacks were not photographed very often especially in the Cornwall area. I do have a recollection of seeing a photo of a coal stack built over tracks somewhere but currently cannot find it. So I’ve suggested this might have been the case in this restricted Engine Shed layout. The Warehouse at the back is still up for debate. The building is intended to help hide the exit of Rospeath Lane off the back of the layout and my intention is to base the building on the Penzance Workhouse, just have to see if this works out. Plan 2 Initially this plan was drawn with the purpose of designing the signal box diagram with all track work beyond the bridges being fictitious. I then realised the plan could future proof this project. What if I should ever get the opportunity to run full length trains along the main line? If so I’d need larger fiddle yards each at end. Plan 2 would allow all three tracks access to a traverser on the left. At stage right a few trees should help to hide the mouse hole through the back screen but Stage left the expanse of bridges makes hiding the exit impossible. I then remembered seeing Paul Marshall-Potter’s Albion Yard layout at a Newark show. He cleverly extended a row of cottages into the fiddle yard area which negated the use of a hole in the wall type scenic break. Borrowing his idea should help me disguise the exit beyond the bridges on the left The photo above has been taken from a reasonable distance (about 1 foot) from the baseboard edge opposite the Running Shed. The PVA Tube is supporting a piece of foam board where the scenic break will be, with the back scene running in front of the pin board behind the cottage mock-ups. As trees in this area of Cornwall can be on the stunted side I’ve brought the warehouse back onto the layout. The warehouse may be a little far-fetched for this location but I don’t think trees would do the trick here. For now I’ll be working towards Plan 1 keeping in mind the creation of a jigsaw piece for the interchangeable area with Plan 2. When viewed from the front at an exhibition this area would be hidden behind a movable/hinged display/information screen. One of my main concerns about this project has been the depth of the baseboards especially the right hand one being 3’ 6” deep. Creating the full size mock-up has convinced me that I’ll be able to cope. After all while building the layout I’ll be able to turn the boards around. Once built, I’ll have to stand on a tool box to reach but it seems it will be manageable.

It's 1954 and another cold start to the day at Pensyflog. Mr Pritchard's woodbine smoke hangs in the cold air as he pauses on his morning walk to chat with Mrs Williams. What could they be chatting about I wonder... maybe Richard Burton on the radio narrating the recently deceased Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, or how her garden looks uncommonly colourful for the time of year, or perhaps more likely they are just talking about the weather

One of the least appreciated aspects of our hobby (by those outside it) is the opportunity to expand your knowledge and experience into areas that simply hadn't crossed your mind. For us controlling trains on your "Model Train Set Railway" soundly fell into that category. With both of us having a rudimentary understanding of electricity (management more so than me; she's the smart one), the wiring and potential issues with signal data and power being pushed through hap-hazzardly fabri-cobbled together birds nest of wire didn't cause much concern. Generating those signals did in the first place did. We're both a little old fashion in many senses, and bought (again back when the board were being made) into a system which seems solid, functional, simple. We bought one of these: Actually (and this is whole different story), her old loft space did have a quite sizeable Train Set installed and in reality the Prodigy Advance 2 was bought for this with two handheld controllers and a booster pack too. Now this system worked well enough for us at the time and once the move to consolidate our assets had been negotiated and approved (thanks to a trip in the West Somerset Railway), this controller and its accessories came along too. "Sorted", I thought, "One less thing to worry about". However, if truth be told, both of us found the use of the system a little cumbersome, and once Lyghtondown had reached the "functional testing" phase (i.e. lets play trains) these little issues seemed to grow. Thinking back, the fiddly nature of the system was far less apparent in her loft because the layout was so much bigger: the time spent driving the trains about was much larger than the time spent setting points, selecting a loco and moving away. With Lyghtondown the journey time from the traverser to the station is best measured in seconds than minutes (even at a realistic pace), and so it now it took much longer to set things up for the next train than it took the train to move. Suddenly we're not "playing trains", we're primarily playing with technology. Not what we wanted. It was about this time that we felt that joining the local club would be appropriate, we'd been to a couple of their local shows (very good), and thought to show our faces. We got a very warm welcome, and in that frenzied bout of questions during that first evening ("What scale do you model?" "DC or DCC?" etc) a young chap (younger than either of us) called Gary (BlueLightening) said something like "I use and Arduino and some software". There was some dumb struck awe at that point. Was that even possible? As I guess everyone here is aware, this is of course eminently possible, and indeed really not that difficult. I think it took a week to order the necessary parts and find the right software to drive it (JMRI), some fiddling to get the DCC++ sketch operating. I'm an old hand at programming and computers but this micro-controller stuff was all new to me. So here is our trail blazing Arduino, now in standby mode as I've accidentally bought a few more : We took our lead from Mr Heath-Robinson and cobbled this together with a small 15 volt power brick from some defunct piece of kit that had long since made it to recycling and, amazingly, it worked! An old laptop furnished the computer power to run JMRI being installed on top of Linux. Further investigation of options available in JMRI found the "Wifi Server" and suddenly a couple of old smart phone became mobile controllers. Fan-tas-tic! Several things quickly came to notice: The Phone interface is cool (to us at the moment) and being wireless is great, but not necessarily faster in use than the Prodigy kit. This, though, is a function of which Application you use to make the connection to JMRI, and so is subject to change and update, unlike the Prodigy kit. The speed control though the phones was much smoother and lost some of the "stepiness" that seemed apparent with the Prodigy system. You don't have to remember the numbers of things any more We might have gone over the top a little, but seeing that we were going to stay with the Arduino based solution, it made sense to build something more .. permanent. So we built this: We built the box under the stand. It features: Mains powered (fused at case socket) Red 240v LED to indicate supply on 15 volt 4 Amp switch mode power supply 4 Amp breaker on output of PSU Volt and Amp meters giving output of PSU Switched supply to Arduino motor shield Green 15v LED to indicate supply to the Motor Shield Arduino with 4 Amp Motor Shield installed The analogue meters were surprisingly expensive given that a combined digital one was about half the price. Sign of the times I suppose. The old Compaq laptop (and that name gives away its age) serves this purpose well, and generates its own Wifi network, so we don't have to try and work through the house one (two floors down). The only downside really is that the laptop battery has long since retired from active service, so pulling the power on it will turn it off quite quickly. As I said at the start .. an opportunity to learn new things. Having grasped some of the possibilities of the of the Arduino loads of ideas bubbled up. More of those another time. Jeff.