whart57

The Krauss diesel hydraulics were the main locos at Thonburi when I first went there in 2008. In fact the two Krauss locos were the only two outside the shed except for a 4-8-2 steam engine. Cold of course. In those days the Nam Tok trains were the only services out of Thonburi. There were a GEK and an Alsthom being worked on inside and the bodywork of an Alsthom was lying in the grass beside the approach road but none active. That changed over the next few years. The diesel hydraulics came into their own during the 2011 floods. So much so that the 3000 class diesel hydraulics which had been withdrawn and were leased out to an Italian company contracted to do track doubling on the North Eastern line, had to be recalled. A GE 4550 was working the Southern Line service Prachuap Khiri Khan last time I was there in 2016. The new Chinese built locos have probably displaced the 4550s from the heaviest services now. They are getting on for thirty years old now.

Considering that these days you can get powerful can motors only 8mm in diameter I really don't see why that would be necessary.

Hattons seem to be doing well with their generic four and six wheel coaches. The generic approach might work for the early Victorian period too, perhaps producing a couple of the locos that are nicely drawn in the Appendix of Whishaw's 1842 book. A generic 2-2-2 Patentee type and an 0-4-0 would complement all the Titfield Thunderbolts to enable some decent models to be made of the Railway Mania years.

Perhaps recalibrate the sights on a recent near miss and produce a Manning Wardle K class rather than the L that Rapido have announced.

Surely the reason franchises work in Ireland is because the four provinces were already well established in the Gaelic sports of football and hurling. A hierarchy of club > county > province was already well understood. The fact that Leinster and Munster then went on to be forces in the European club game didn't do any harm either. The problem in Wales was that the new structure was effectively club mergers, and that requires a level of sensitivity and intelligence well beyond what the Welsh RFU possesses. There is another historical lesson from the professionalising of Dutch soccer. Before 1954 Dutch football was amateur and club based. There were six top divisions, regionally based, and the title of champion was decided through a play-off competition involving the six regional champions. Germany, pre Bundesliga, had a similar structure. When professionalism was allowed all but a few of the top clubs adopted it, but it was still ten years before one club, Ajax Amsterdam, offered players fully professional contracts. To a young gentleman named Johan Cruyff incidentally. Other clubs followed but most couldn't afford to. Some chose to drop back into the amateur system, others decided to remain semi-pro accepting they would rarely grace the eredivisie, but a number sought to solve the problem by merging with a neighbour. The results were very mixed. An undoubted success is AZ Alkmaar, but that was really Alkmaar FC taking over a much smaller rival, Zaanstreek. FC Utrecht and FC Groningen have also turned into successful merged entities but in these cases it was only the professional first teams that merged, the community clubs that supported them did not merge but returned to the amateur ranks. Alkmaar, Utrecht and Groningen all benefited from being the only professional side of their home cities. Something that the Amsterdam merger did not have. In Amsterdam the problem for the cities other three professional clubs was that Ajax was dominant. Not only in winning the eredivisie title many times but in winning the European Cup three times in succession as well. Ajax was Amsterdam, even to the extent that their home games were advertised in the drivers' window on the trams. Of the other three, DWS was an eredivisie side, they had even become champions in the early sixties, but the other two, Blauw-Wit and Volewijckers, were second tier. DWS proposed merger, but the memberships of the other two were against losing their identity as the merged side would play in south Amsterdam at the Olympic stadium as DWS were doing. Not so much a problem for Blauw-Wit who were also based in south Amsterdam but for the Volewijckers from north Amsterdam it was. So the two smaller sides hived off their professional operations to the merged entity and dropped back into the amateur ranks. The fusion failed. FC Amsterdam folded in the late seventies after a few years playing to a nearly empty Olympic stadium, but none of the clubs did well in the amateur game either. The community aspect had been lost.

Chassis sorted out, sits nicely on wheels, still good slow running, top speed is a bit low for a general loco, but not for a shunter. Body fits neatly, now for pick-ups and couplings.

So here's my thinking, but first a railway map of Thailand: Thonburi is on the West side of Bangkok and was the original terminus of the Southern Line (red on the map). This line was the fourth line to be constructed after the Northern (blue) and Eastern (green) lines and Thailand's first railway, the now defunct Paknam Railway. Until 1926 the Southern line was isolated from the other two main lines, which given that it was metre gauge and the other two were standard gauge was just as well. The British chose metre gauge, much influenced by their use of it on the secondary lines in India. In 1926 the Chao Praya river was bridged and the decision taken to narrow all the standard gauge lines. The Paknam Railway was metre gauge too but never formed part of the national network. It was turned into an electric tramway in the 1920s and survived until about 1960. It's terminus was next to the main Hualamphong station however. Now I have quite a fertile imagination when it comes to thinking up might-have-been railway lines as layout backstories, so this is the one here. The Paknam Railway is brought into the national network through extending it to Chonburi. Instead of being an electric tramway it becomes a fully fledged line that is later extended to Pattaya and Rayong and forms the SRT's South Eastern Line. Loco facilities to serve the line are built at Maenamburi where the freight line from Makkasan to the river port makes a junction. However the last bit of line to Hualamphong was truncated in the 1990s back to Maenamburi. So the services we see - and I have to kit out for - are: Ordinary trains to Chonburi, Pattaya and Rayong made up of third class open carriages. A "Comuter" service to Paknam operated by diesel railcars And then, as this line would pass the new airport at Suvarnabhumi and the attraction of tourists to Pattaya A "Rapid" service to Pattaya operated by a Class 158 unit. One thing that arrived in the post a couple of weeks ago was an etch for a pair of Class 1200 railcars, which I will tackle in the new year. A suitable number of 3rd class carriages of two different types are in hand. A Class 158 set is about 90% complete and just for variety - and frankly the hell of it - I built a couple of the ex-Queensland Railway thirds that were acquired in the 1990s. A full blow-by-blow account of their construction appeared in Continental Modeller a few years ago. A friend in the 3mm Society had a copy of a Queensland Railway stock book which gave me the necessary information. My two ex-QR carriages are posed by the track maintenance shed.

As might be obvious, all locos and rolling stock for this layout will need to be built specially. Choosing the locomotives is not a tricky exercise. Two obvious selections present themselves. One is the large class of Alsthom Co-Co diesels supplied in the 1980s in four very similar batches. I think the main differences are the power plants under the covers and some other technical hardware, not things to worry us in small scale modelling. These Alsthoms turn up everywhere. And another class that turns up everywhere are the General Electric Co-Cos that first appeared back in the 1960s. Aside from their ubiquity and longevity they are also - now - uniquely Thai. General Electric hoped to sell a lot of this metre gauge diesel but in the end it was only three dozen or so to Thailand and the Philippines. The Filipinos scrapped theirs in the 1990s but the UM12cs, to use their GE monicker, still soldier on in Thailand. Other loco classes were associated with Thonburi, such as some Bo-Bo diesel hydraulics supplied by a German consortium which were the mainstay of the Kanchanaburi and Nam Tok services for a dozen years but while I'd like to build one of them, that is low on the list of priorities. And then of course, Thonburi shed stables the small stud of working steam locos kept for special occasions ............ Carriage stock is a different matter and for that I needed to consider what sort of services my Maenamburi station could realistically have. The starting point is the real timetable from Thonburi. Not many trains, but some variety. Of note are the Comuter (sic) trains to and from Salaya. Salaya is a small town some 10-15 miles west of Bangkok. Its station lies on the main line to the South and Malaysia but commuters can save themselves twenty minutes or more travelling to central Bangkok by taking a train to Thonburi and crossing over on a river ferry. Funnily enough these trains didn't start running until after the powers that be added a fifteen minute walk between station and ferry ....... The Ordinary trains, i.e. Third Class only trains stopping at every station, are on two routes. One group of trains take the Southern Line as far as a suitable end point, the other route is the one to Kanchanaburi, the crossing of the river Kwai and then up the Death Railway as far as Nam Tok. The rest of that notorious line to Burma/Myanmar was abandoned though recently part of it has become a footpath and memorial. Thousands of Thai labourers also died alongside the Allied POWs building it. So for carriage selection, third class open carriages - open because the air-conditioning for this tropical country is open all windows fully - and a Japanese-built railcar set for the "Comuter". That did however leave out something I not only wanted to have, but also felt would be essential if this layout ever did make it to a British model railway exhibition, namely a Thai Class 158 set. My first railway journey in Thailand was in a Class 158 and I was also able to persuade someone to modify their CAD files to produce a Thai variant of the 158 through Shapeways. I'll pick the story up again later.

The chassis now moves under power. Still needs pick-ups fitting to be truly independent but a test using croc clips to the motor wires suggests the running is OK. The front axle, the unpowered one needs to come down about half a millimeter though. It will be easier to adjust that than to mess with the driven axles since the gearing seems to be fine. The excess bits of axle also need trimming but tests suggest that 1.5v is enough to get this chassis crawling. That seems good enough. I now need to consider how best to make the adjustments before moving on to fitting the buffer beams and couplings.

And this Youtube clip of the opening credits of French Dressing simulates what a driver's view - or conductors's view might have been on the working tramway

While looking for something else I found this image taken from the 1964 Ken Russell film French Dressing. It's Herne Bay pier showing the remaining tracks of the pier tramway, and also the reason why it didn't reopen in 1945

This station sign on the platform of Thonburi station (still there in 2016), shows the history and why the layout at Thonburi is the way it is. According to this sign Thonburi is another 0.866 km. Talingchan is the junction with the Southern Line which goes from the main Hualamphong station (for the moment) to Malaysia and (almost) Singapore.

At this point I'd better post the trackplan. This is my working plan, minus fiddleyard, though the actual reality differs in small details, mainly as a result of easing a couple of curves and avoiding sudden reverse curves. That meant a couple of points had to be moved an inch or three. In terms of topology though, the plan is accurate. Obviously there has been some simplification. The loco shed has three roads instead of six and there aren't tracks that go all the way through and further. Similarly there are fewer carriage sidings and of course the whole thing is about a quarter of the length it should be. However the main features needed for operation are there. Except one. On the real Thonburi there is no direct route from the loco headshunt to the station. Locos leaving the shed have to reverse in the headshunt and then reverse twice more to execute a sort of 'Z' manoeuvre in front of the signal box. I felt that was too much of a complication Looking at the plan now, I am amazed at the number of hand-built points I made. They are all functional but I don't think they would have been if I'd followed the original idea of laying track to 2mm FS standards. However tracklaying was completed sometime ago and things have moved on I don't have a fixed plan for the scenic treatment, and any plan is in my head rather than on paper. In broad terms the left hand end is traditional Thai, the right hand end more modern Bangkok. I'm not intending to model either Thonburi or Maenam beyond the railway fence - or where the fence would be if Thai railways had such a thing. The former track maintenance shed at Thonburi has been modelled along with a couple of the squatters' shacks. The rest of the buildings come from elsewhere in Bangkok. Currently under construction is a temple based on one on the Rama I Road, a row of shops from a Sukhumwit soi - one was a fish and chip shop though I think mine will be rather more Thai - and a Starbucks. I have a building site and plans for a modern shopping mall and office development. My company didn't have its own office in Thailand (at least not before it was taken over by IBM) so I'll give it one. But there's a few years work there.

Well at least one is essential really. It would be like a GWR branch without a Pannier.

I should perhaps show what is actually happening on the layout at the moment. I have started work on the scenics from the outsides in. That means the ends of the layout are much further advanced. In the first contribution there is a pic that shows how the entry from the fiddle yard is shaping up. Like the real Thonburi this is a single track line, somewhat overgrown, with huts and other buildings pressing in on the line. At the other end the layout ends by passing under a motorway bridge. This too is taken from Thonburi, though the interpretation has differences. Until 2004 Thonburi was a terminus on the bank of the Chao Praya river. Then it was decided to expand the neighbouring Siriraj hospital and then Prime Minister Shinawatra insisted that the state railway "donate" land for this expansion. Unfortunately the land wanted was that of the approach to Thonburi station. The line was therefore truncated and the small halt of Bangkok Noi upgraded to be the new Thonburi terminus. Fortunately the connection into the loco facilities was just outside the "donation" so loco servicing could continue at Thonburi. The headshunt is however on the other side of an overhead motorway bridge. My headshunt is under such a bridge and the bridge forms the scenic break. This is where the Maenam bit comes in. At some point I would like to run freight as well as passenger trains and there are none of those at Thonburi. Not least because the goods facilities are now the foundations of Siriraj hospital. Maenam however is a staging yard for container traffic to the river port and tank wagons to a Shell distribution depot and and oil refinery. Maenam too has a road overbridge at the end of the station yard, only here the tracks go on to the river port. The line to the refinery branches off before Maenam station however. So my layout design keeps that as a possibility, and for the moment the other tracks under the bridge are used for stabling the various freight wagons I am building. The car parking, containers as storage sheds and the cast concrete bollards are taken from Thonburi though. I have plenty of 1:100 cars as a few years ago I bought a bag of a hundred on spec on eBay for something like £15, hoping that at least some would be usable. Turns out most of them are. As I have so many though I am quite happy to disassemble and repaint some. The brightly coloured taxis of Bangkok are an essential requirement though I have to admit I haven't got the pink right yet. They all need the Taximeter sign putting on the roof, which will get done when the place where most are to go has been sceniced.

I've been working on the chassis for the carriage shunter this week. So far the frames have been cut out from thickish nickel silver. I used to sweat two pieces together but I have found that bolts through the drilled out axle holes work just as well. Frame spacers are made from pins from salvaged 13 amp plugs. I have a small Peatol (now Taig) lathe and that lets me face off the ends accurately square and to the right length, give or take 0.1mm. In this photo I have put the gear train in place just to check everything is in the right place. When the chassis is complete the gears will of course be inside the frames. One axle will remain unpowered. As the wheelbase is very unbalanced I couldn't see how to power all axles. However the wheels will still be picking up the volts. To do this they had to be made conductive down to the axles. Well nearly, there is a plastic sleeve between axle and wheel. Each wheel is a 3mm scale wagon wheel with the plastic tyre knocked out and replaced by a brass disc turned as accurately as possible to the correct diameter. As the difference between a tight force fit and a loose push fit is beyond the capabilities of my lathe, the tyres need securing with solder. I don't really like outside frames on models because of maintenance issues, but there really is no alternative with 9mm gauge and stock to mainline dimensions in a larger scale. I hope to get the motor plate fitted and the frame blackened this weekend.

This pic from the Kent Photo Archive turned up on another of my feeds. It shows where this imaginary line would have ended up. So imagine a functioning church rather than a ruin and a harbour where the sluice pool is - the stretch of water visible through the former church east window. The path past the cottages would be a street leading down to the station and harbour. (https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=757358763098287&set=a.463117125855787)

As Supaned has pointed out, carriage shunting forms a key part of operations at the real Thonburi. The locomotive of the incoming train would release itself and head off to the depot and the station pilot, back in 2010 this was a Henschel six wheel shunter, would come and fetch the carriages and add them to the long rake in the nearer carriage siding. This siding gained water taps and carousels to hold brooms and stuff for the carriage cleaning teams. When a train was due to depart the requisite number of carriages was pulled out of the siding and placed at the platform. The shunter then returned to the carriage sidings and the train loco would come out from the shed and place itself at the head of the train. All done in a very laid back way. Clearly I would need one of these Henschel shunters. Using a basic drawing from Ramaer's book on Thai railways and photographs to correct the significant errors, I produced the art work to create a brass etch. The main brass bodywork has been assembled. The intention was to use a Bull-Ant motor bogie, but this didn't work that well.The design of Bull-Ants is that each axle is driven by a worm and gear, which means three worm gears. Each causes significant friction and thus impacts slow running. Additionally the rigid chassis means that really only three wheels are in contact with the rail at any one time. That means pick-up issues, particularly troublesome with DCC, and haulage issues. This shunter needs to handle five coach trains and with the motor bogie it just about manages three without wheel slipping. That's with a few fishing weights Blue-tacked to it. With a Co-Co train engine there is room for a fair bit of lead and pick-up on some unpowered bogie wheels helps with the continuity issues. Not possible with this small shunter. I think the solution is to build a bespoke chassis. I'm a great fan of the chassis design Geoff Helliwell has developed for the 3mm Society. For those who don't know him can I say that Geoff is the most innovative model railway technician I have ever come across. If he worked in a mainstream scale I'm sure he would be much better known. Geoff's design uses the N20 motor which comes with its own gear box and Geoff has designed, and had etched, a gearbox using nylon crown and pinion gears to turn the drive through 90 degrees so that the motor can turn the wheels. Geoff's designs were marketed through the 3mm Society and I modified one to drive my Thai 158 set. Not easy to see the gearing but this 158 is the quietest and most controllable bit of motive power on the layout. So a design based on Geoff's principles has been made and work commenced on replacing the Bull-Ant bogie. A little bit of slop, a few thou at most, in the driving axles will allow them to stay in contact with the rails more which should mean that just having four driven wheels will be more effective than the six of the Bull-Ant. The next week or so should see that tested.

Working on a Henschel shunter right now. I was going to use a Bull-Ant (Hollywood Foundry) motor bogie - I ordered one a few years ago with the right wheel spacing - but I am finding the six wheel bogies are not very good runners. So I am building my own works based on an N20 spur drive motor. I'll post some pics over the weekend.

I have posted on this before and have a blog, which I admit I have not kept up. However I have now restarted work on this layout after a hiatus of about a year while I got a club project up and running. The reason for starting this thread is that the layout has been promised for the club Open Day next April and having to report on progress is, I find, a good way of ensuring progress. A topic is better than a blog for that For this opening post I will just give a broad outline of the layout. It's 13'6" by 2'6" in the scenic section (4m x 0.75m) and will have a fiddle yard as well. The scale is 1:100, or 3mm to the foot and 9mm gauge, this representing the metre gauge used in Thailand. The prototype is the State Railway of Thailand in the period 2006-2016, though the livery will be the pre-2011 one. The track plan is based on Bangkok's Thonburi station, but the operation movements planned imagine this being located across the other side of the city on the Rama IV road near the freight only station of Maenam. Hence the name Maenamburi. If the scale seems a bit weird that has a number of reasons. The first is that there are absolutely no commercial models of Thai railways so I could use any scale or even make one up. However most of my modelling has been to 3mm scale so I have an eye for what looks right in that scale. 9mm gauge is three quarters of a millimetre underscale but the advantages of having a tried and tested track standard along with commercially supplied wheels and gauges outweighs that. The trackwork in the sceniced areas is hand-built with copper-clad sleepers and FB rail, but the fiddle yard will have PECO N gauge points. 3mm scale also lets me get an extra carriage on trains compared to H0m, and 1:100 sounds more logical when talking about this project with people who know nothing about railway modelling. I was lucky enough to visit Thailand many times while I was working, and amassed a fair bit of research material. Certainly enough when combined with the very limited amount available in books or on the internet to complete this project The layout can be at the Open Day as work in progress as the purpose of that event is to showcase members' projects rather than put on an exhibition. The aim is recruitment as much as anything else. One reason for me putting this forward though is to test whether it is a feasible exhibition layout. Have I built it robust enough, can it be reliable enough, can it show something visitors might want to see. If it is, then I will certainly aim to get it out to a wider audience.

With franchises, where do the next generation of players come from? In US sport the professional franchises sit on top of a massive, well-funded, well-supported college sports structure. But even there the gap between the top college sides and the professional game is wide. Few rookies drafted at the end of their college careers make it into the pro sides as a regular in their first year. How do those who propose a franchise system for rugby propose to replace players who retire?

Yeah, but if lardy boy is in the saddle he won't need to park the bike though, will he?

I think modern bikes are simply too light and don't hold the back wheel down well enough.

Actually it's the fact the countries are flat. The braking power of a back pedal bike is quite adequate for normal cycling, and unlike the fiercer cable brakes of British bikes you don't normally lock the back wheel in a dodgy skid, which can have you off on a wet road. Where a back pedal brake is not good is on long downhill stretches, then you need a bit stronger braking. But there's not many of them either in the Netherlands or Denmark.

You didn't pose that specially for us did you?