James Harrison

A few months after drafting this and- surprisingly- I'm still sold on the general look and concept. But I really, really don't like that awkward curve on the right hand side. Does anybody know of a way to draw up ellipses on SCARM? I think now what I need to do is redraw it with the proper curves, and I always kind of see it as a pair of half-ellipses, one set inside the other and the two touching at the junction. But I can't see a way of getting a nice large radius curve in SCARM with flexible track.

Ah! Thank you- I'll have a look at this.

Not much to say about building this one I'm afraid. It's a very nice kit, it goes together with the minimum of fuss and bother and it's a shame it's (to my knowledge) no longer available. Most of the work has been painting; I could have gone to town with detailing but as I told a friend earlier this week, if I were looking to build a finescale model I'd be starting from somewhere else.

At the moment, I'm working on another specimen of Rufford Corporation Tramway's fleet - a 'Bellerophon' class car of 1907. Any resemblance to Blackpool's slightly earlier 'Dreadnought' type is completely coincidental, of course. It's a much more satisfying kit to work on than the Keilkraft Birmingham tramcar I built a few years ago.

Progress report; I've bought a copy of the freight WTT for the ex-Midland lines around Mansfield. If anybody knows of the passenger timetable, please let me know. Then looking at the various ground levels and topography; -RLS station site sits at around 65mAOD to the south and drops away to around 60mAOD to the north; RLS station is likely to be on some sort of gradually rising embankment. - This means I could actually have quite a pleasant-looking scene of RLS and what we know as the A614 running parallel, with the road dropping, and then the goods yard lines crossing the road on a bridge. I don't need to worry about how I get from goods yard track level (65m) to road level (60m) here because that topography isn't modelled- it's where you stand to operate the goods yard. - Coming away from the junction the Mansfield-bound line starts to rise up to somewhere around the 70m level. - The Worksop-bound line meanwhile encounters a relatively high ridge as it heads toward Edwinstowe. That gives me my excuse for a tunnel entrance into the fiddle yard... it would also handily disguise that the line is on a downhill grade. Speaking of Edwinstowe, it's less than 2 miles from Rufford and the LDEC comes through here at about 60mAOD. In my fiction then I'm wanting to keep the Rufford line at about 65mAOD so that the two can cross over.

Hornby following the typical Steampunk outing trend there then. 20 people dressed as aristocracy/ high-level Victorian military officers, nobody dressed as a stoker.

My fix for it is not to lose sleep over it. It's a compromise that means I get a working model. Your mileage may vary 🤷‍♂️

I fail to see the relevance of the Hattons 66 having a screw-on bufferbeam in the context of a comment about the Heljan Hunslet. Smacks of 'it doesn't happen to X therefore it didn't happen to Y'.

This week, timetable-drafting has taken a big leap forward, as I've finished the train graphs for Sheffield - Retford, Retford - Sheffield, Lincoln - Shirebrook North and Shirebrook North - Lincoln. It looks like I can also get a reprint of the working timetable for the Midland lines around Mansfield, however only for freight. Hmm. If there's a reprint of one of the Midland Railway passenger timetables available I might be able to combine the two and do a similar exercise for that area. So, what this little exercise has told me is - What level of line occupancy occured at Worksop and Edwinstowe, as a basis for fitting my own services around; - How long it might take a train to get from Worksop to Sheffield, or from Edwinstowe to Shirebrook North or Lincoln; - The level of service that Worksop and Edwinstowe saw for both freight and passengers; - The type(s) of rolling stock that I need to be concentrating on for the future build programme. From this point then what I can do is start to go off-piste from the real world and draw up my own train graphs for Worksop - Rufford and Edwinstowe - Rufford (and vice versa). Broadly at this point what I can say is that it would be in line with prototype practice to aim for a semi-regular passenger service to Sheffield and something a lot more ad-hoc to Lincoln and Chesterfield. In terms of freight the Sheffield- Retford route seems to have seen a reasonable mix of fitted and unfitted fast freights, pretty much exclusively in the dark hours, the daytime being monopolised by through freight and minerals traffic with a few pick up goods trains. In contrast, the ex-LDEC saw through freight. Lots and lots of it, to the virtual exclusion of everything else. Also of note is the sheer volume of light engine movements. The elephant in the room of course is that the timetables I'm using are of the 1953 - 1956 period. Much of the traffic on the graphs is to and from colleries that didn't exist until the late 1910s/ early 1920s and the LDEC graph obviously has a number of services that disappear at Clipstone as they move onto a stretch of line that wasn't built until 1917. That said, I think I've now got a strong starting point for a working timetable. Conceptually, from this point on the timetable caper becomes one of asking - What level of service would be prototypical; - To achieve that service, what time do my trains need to be at Worksop or Edwinstowe; - From that, what time will my trains be arriving at or departing from Rufford. So that gives me a basic timetable and from that I can start working out where stock needs to be, and when, to be able to work it. And from that I can work out more of the timetable - the empty stock moves, the light engine moves and so on. And it's arguably at that point that I start to gain an appreciation of what I need in terms of platform faces, carriage sidings, locomotive stabling bays etc. So we circle back to the track plan again at that point and determine whether what I've currently drawn - which I do quite like, at the moment - is in any way appropriate to the timetable. I suspect at some point there will be a tension between the operational capacity of the track plan (and of course the constraints of the available space) and the demands of the timetable. Well, it's going to be a lot more rewarding going at it this way.

Carriages to match announced....

After sleeping on the problem, a few things became clearer. Restriction 1. The room is approximately 12' x 8' and there is no opportunity to increase that. Restriction 2. The entrance doorway is in the corner of one long wall and the door opens into the room, effectively reducing the 12' wall to a 9' useable length. I'm very reluctant to rehang the door to change that. Restriction 3. The other 12' wall has a chimney breast in the middle of it that projects somewhere in the region of 8 - 9" into the room. The chimney breast has to stay. Restriction 4. My shoulders are 19 - 20" across, so unless I turn sideways any working space between scenes has to be at least 21 - 22" wide. Restriction 5. I have a reach of about 24", so if a board is 3' wide and something comes off the track at the back, I can't reach it. What I've always done with my trackplans to date is to draw them up in the order that a departing train runs through the layout; so start at RLS, bit of plain line to a junction, another bit of plain line and then either CfP or the fiddle yard. Which is fine, except the space has a tendency to start running out at just about that second bit of plain line. So I think from a track layout design perspective my focus has been in the wrong place, the track layout is made or broken not at RLS' buffer stops but rather at the junction. Figure in as well that from RLS to the junction has to be tolerably level, and then any difference in level (say CfP has to be in front of and above the fiddle yard) has to be achieved in that second bit of plain line. Which, as I say, is just around where space becomes tight and then I need to find around 100mm vertical difference in about 700mm of track length. The obvious thing to do - having already established that the fiddle yard and CfP seem to fit quite neatly in the 9' arm of the U - is to try to maximise that second length of plain line and move the junction further down the 8' wall or even into the corner. This obviously shrinks or even consumes entirely the first bit of plain line but that might be an acceptable compromise, if in return I get one longer free run which allows the gradients to work that bit better. Another issue is that, whilst I can design a passenger station layout well enough, the goods yard side of things is another story. I've mentioned before how they become either a space-hungry cats cradle or a very boring series of straight lines. Perhaps part of the issue is that I'm looking at the track in isolation, and when detailed up, with structures sketched in, the scene becomes more interesting. But I can't imagine it at the moment. Well, I started to draw it up again - from the junction this time - and I got the CfP/ fiddle yard bit in well enough. But the jnction being in the corner now, means that the two tracks coming out of it toward RLS are no longer parallel. This started to suggest to me that the junction is not only where the lines to Mansfield and Worksop split, but also where the passenger and goods lines into RLS part company. Knowing how my goods yard designs start to end up all over the place, it kind of made sense to try to run that element close in to the 12' wall, because when it does start to fan out I've got an inglenook I can run lines into. Unfortunately that means having the passenger station in front - the issue is that my goods stock has three link couplings and see Restriction 5 above - so if the goods yard really does go there, I need to be able to gain access to it. This then suggests that the passenger side of things has to be brought out more to middle of the room. I have a pathological fear of peninsular baseboards - they just don't seem very secure to my way of thinking, one errant nudge and the thing might topple over. But in the order of things that have to give, I think that fear is pretty close to the top. So I put the station in on the diagonal, which opens up at least a bit of space for access. Hmm, that might be a way of doing it. I'm not too struck on those curves on the right hand side, maybe if this one survives long enough to being laid out full size I'll look at making them a bit more believeable. With the CfP line rising at 1 in 40 and the fiddle yard line descending at 1 in 40, I've got no real space between the two for that change in levels to be natural - I think the fiddle yard line is going to have to plunge into a brick-lined cutting and then a tunnel. I've basically come up with a variation of Weekday Cross here, haven't I?

That is in the back of my mind with the door, and with the house being ~120 years old, naturally the door swings into the room rather than into the wall. One of my other interests is architectural conservation, so I'm loathe to re-hang the door just for some toy trains. By the same token the chimney breast is an obstacle to be worked around, rather than broken out. The health and safety aspect of completely blocking a door from opening is also something that has to be given more than cursory lipservice. So why do I keep circling back to the layout plan? Why is it that something looks (to me) brilliant for maybe a month or so, and then becomes unacceptable? Part of it I think is layout envy, taking Railway Modeller and Model Railway Journal on a monthly (well, ish in the case of MRJ) basis. One for keeping my ambitions realistic and the other for giving me something aspirational to aim for. Typically RM delivers at least once a month an object lesson in what I'm aiming to avoid (layouts with larger fiddle yards than scenic areas, layouts running super-detailed locos and stock in a landscape composed largely of unmodified cardboard kit buildings, layouts comprising long dead-straight runs of track around the edge of a room, and layouts which model somewhere where very little happens being immediate turn-offs and relegated to my 'NOT LIKE THIS' file). Occasionally a layout that I find actually interesting is featured and that gets the cogs turning, what lessons can I take from this, can I improve my own design, is there something here that I just have to incorporate in my modelling? You'll notice that my criteria for inspiration ar anathema have little, if anything, to do with the layout's prototype, era, location - there have been BR blue era or narrow gauge layouts that I drool over and similarly Big Four steam layouts that I (mentally of course) condemn. Another part of it is I'm constantly questioning whether the latest iteration of the design is answering my goal, which I think I've stated before (June 2021) as Now, 'A' and 'B' might of course be two stations, or a station and a fiddleyard, or something else entirely, but the 'through a landscape' implies a certain distance between them which the train will take at least a little time to traverse. 'A' and 'B' might only be opposite sides of the same room, but as you'll only see on side of it any time (and if operating alone I'll need to keep passing between the two operating points) you get an idea of trains actually going somewhere. Which illusion is of course utterly destroyed the second the plan becomes complex enough that the separate spaces required for points 'A' and 'B' start to merge. (This is a big reason why I turned my back on double track). Then there's the fact that, at the moment, just about the only modelling work I can do (other than some desultory rolling stock repainting) is designing the layout. The layout room is, currently, still a junk room full of piles of model railway bits and pieces, bits bought for the house renovation, tools, books etc etc etc. So in this enforced pre-build period - in other words, whilst my energies and resources are primarily diverted to the roof over my head - naturally I'm going to keep reworking the design to the point where I'm completely satisfied with it at the time I start cutting wood. Once the layout is actually under construction the design to some large degree is locked in and whilst some minor revision is possible, it's not like I'd be able to start over from (another) blank sheet of paper. Unless I'm fond of throwing money away, that is. There's also an element of not-quite-frustration in comparing my designs with those of others, who somehow manage to work what feels like two or three times the operational potential and visual interest into a layout design that's only three-quarters the size of mine. I feel another session of staring at a blank screen in SCARM coming on.

I did originally have double track in mind, but I just couldn't get it to work convincingly in the space available. You require just that it extra pointwork, which ate more into the space, and as a result the junction started running into RLS and CfP started running into the junction, and there was little to no unencumbered running line. Woth single track I do at least get a couple of feet of open track between each element. It might only be a train length or so but I think the visual effect is going to be better than having the design elements so cramped together that a train is halfway through the junction whilst it's tail is still in the platform. I think the visual benefit of that more than balances the operational constraint of single track.

'The Ashworth Branch' in this month's Railway Modeller got me thinking about the trackplan again as I was really taken with the imaginative use of the available space. A quick calculation suggested that, shrunk to 4mm scale, the same trackplan might reasonably squeeze into a 12' x 8' room. Just, unfortunately, not my 12' x 8' room. The chimney breast and the doorway put paid to that. A couple of attempts to lengthen the run between RLS and CfP and use the diagonal space looked promising, until I reflected that there was no access space. I'm thin, but not that thin. One madcap idea I had was to make the layout completely portable so it could be stored in the back bedroom but brought out and erected in the master bedroom for operating sessions (which measures something like 14' x 12'), but I think if I did that setting it up would be too much of a chore and it wouldn't see any use. But then, if I'm considering a portable section, why not just have a lift-out bit behind the railway room door? That gave rise to this; Now of course, the fiddle yard will need to be a good 100mm or so lower than RLS, but that was always the idea (in fact one of the my worries about the previous iteration was getting that 100mm drop and how it would interact with the junction, considering the short run between that and the fiddle yard entry). Moving it around the room means a more reasonable 100mm drop in around 4m of running line. It also, quite excitingly, means that CfP could become the through station that it was imagined to be, if I accept that it is on a gradient. Suddenly I get trains running (we suppose) through to Mansfield, as well as Worksop.

Most of the Airfix announcements are just re-releases though; there only seem to be one or two new toolings. In the warships range for instance, Iron Duke and Ajax both date from the 1960s.