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Some reed switches arrived in the post today - reed switches with changeover contacts. I have fixed one under the turntable, exactly opposite the magnet which aligns the turntable bridge to the track to the point. When the turntable bridge is set to the track to the point, the second magnet underneath the bridge trips the reed switch. At all other positions of the turntable, the switch goes back to its normal state. The reed switch operates the point motor. So the model has no need for a point lever. Turn the turntable to point to the track with the point, the point blades move to suit. Turn the turntable anywhere else, the point blades are set for the "main line/long siding" at the back of the model. It works too, quite chuffed with this. Thank you all for the encouragement in the posts above. - Richard.

The model is mostly finished now. Here are some photos. I'm very pleased with the result. In the past I have built fiddle yards as the last part of a model, and they have always been dedicated to a particular layout and a bit basic. Now I have a fiddle yard I can use with my next layout, and reuse for another micro or any layout with short trains. Or dress it up as a MPD. I layed the track on 1/8 inch cork, partly to make conversion into a layout easier but mainly to help with laying a mixture of thin- and thick-sleepered track. In the end, the track includes Peco code 100 and code 75, Hornby code 100, and C&L bullhead. I put in the inspection pit now because it is so much easier than trying to add it later. The turntable works really well. Hand operated. I've added an "indexing arrangement" by fixing two small magnets under the bridge deck (one at each end) and four more under the well. These are 7 x 3 mm Neodymium magnets bought on eBay, twenty for £2. I'll try some more when I make a lid for the model. The magnets let the deck find its own position at each entry track. The point is driven by a Tortoise motor. The motor is fixed with two layers of foam board to try to cut down the noise. Otherwise the baseboard would act like a drum and amplify everything. This bit of track is un-powered. It might catch a train which overruns the turntable, and it might be useful to hold a wagon. Hope this is of interest. - Richard.

Ikea do a similar Lazy Susan, I bought mine for a static diorama which I started a while ago. The Ikea one is about 38 cm diameter and has their part numbers 900.744.83 and 19891. Mine was in their Lakeside store. - Richard.

With pleasure! I tried to make it as simple as I could. A mod to the controller to fix its output polarity, so the meter always moves the right way: The output from the controller arrives on the twisted pair at the top of the next photo. The +ve goes to the negative terminal of the meter, then through the meter coil and a shunt resistor to a DPDT switch to control the direction of the train. The -ve from the controller goes straight to the switch. The pair going out from the switch goes to two copper dropper wires. The dropper wires are soldered onto the ends of the two rails. These are nickel silver code 100 ones, the tallest/strongest ones I had. When I tackled a similar exercise many years ago, I modified a controller to get at its controlled output before its own reversing switch, took this out to the meter and back to the controller again, and then went from the controller reversing switch to the train. Nowadays I know there are easier ways :-) - Richard.

I've added a built-in rolling road. This makes a use of a spare controller and an unused corner of the baseboard. The rollers are from a rolling road made in Germany which I bought at the Alexandra Palace show a few years ago. It seems to work and having the ammeter in front of it might help to find binding side rods and other problems. The Peco bi-bloc track behind is an experiment, the idea is to ballast it to look like the grass seeded track on some tramways. - Richard.

I doubt the respective manufacturers ever had this in mind, but C&L 00 track fits nicely into a Peco LK-56 "code 100" inspection pit. The track will need a few drops of glue to hold the gauge. The gauge is actually adjustable from about 16.3 to 17 mm, so it encompasses everything from 00-SF to the 'wide 00' used on commercial radius 0 curves. (Following on from my post above, the C&L sleepers are at the manufacturer's spacing. Anything wider was too much of a contrast with the Setrack elsewhere on the layout.) - Richard.

Lime cell details do seem scarce online. At Darlington they had doors: http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-496236-lime-cells- At Goathland they are open: http://www.mylearning.org/goathland-as-a-contrasting-locality/images/3-1684/ Perhaps the best bet is to model them open (so people can see what they are) and quite tidy (like Goathland nowadays). Then it would be straightforward to add some clutter. I'd imagine, they would try to minimise mess because it is so caustic. If you take the model to an exhibition you will probably find more retired lime buyers, traffickers, hauliers and users than you imagined were still alive, ready to put you right :-) - Richard.

Three of the figures are standing still, and the fourth one (in the foreground) seems to be walking away from them. So judging by their poses waiting for a train and to start digging, and there being two engines in steam, I'll suggest "The crew training day was unannounced and unwelcome". - Richard.

And Sn3.5, Sn3 or Sm. Or 1:55 scale narrow gauge. Just about anything of the same gauge. So it I can keep the model free of structures, and let the trains set the scale, I shall have somewhere to run and even display my unruly collection of trains, and a short test track for ancient models (the code 100 bit), and the fiddle yard for the next layout project. The turntable well is a bit too deep for 1:76 scale, so if I finish the sides of the well with brickwork at a nominal 1/64 scale, it will become a 64-foot deck in a scale well. Only an HO loco would look really out of place, but I haven't got any of these, only coaches. - Richard.

Hi Ian, Yes. I read about this stuff many years ago but I've never seen it in use. It seems to be widely sold in the UK, so I can give it a try. I've bought myself a Peco Setrack point, the geometry of this looks and fits a lot better here than a Streamline one and will help to lend a narrow gauge flavour to the thing. Although, as I keep telling myself, this is a fiddle yard.

Hmm. I've tried to play down this aspect because the turntable is very large compared to most of the locos I have. But it's very true. I am trying to build this up from bits and pieces I have at home, bought and never used, these include the turntable, the Gaugemaster controller, the baseboard ply and various bits of track. Supposing the entry was to a Peco code 100 streamline point, and I took code 100 across the back in the long siding, this would run "anything" which might be useful one day. But the roads off the turntable could be some C&L stuff with bullhead rail, so I could have "British" track without having to make any points to go with it. If I closed up the two long sidings a bit closer together they could go to the front of a dummy engine shed. I could even put a Peco ash pit / inspection pit in front of the shed. I've got one of these lying around somewhere. The entire new expenditure could be limited to the one Streamline point. The next step would then logically be to build a fiddle yard to continue the tracks inside the engine shed. That is, build a fiddle yard for the fiddle yard. Hmmm. - Richard. Redrawn with a Streamline point and some MPD features

I hate “woodwork”. I can, with a dose of necessity, cope with the bigger projects where you can wedge and haul things into shape against an immovable object like setting up a door frame. And I enjoy small, unstressed projects like model making which need some wood in them. Unstressed wood and unstressed me. But there is an in-between size where my woodwork descends into absolute misery. This size is “model railway baseboard size”. I bought a plywood kit for a baseboard a few years ago and the parts have been acclimatising in my living room since then. Bad move - they had started to curl up. Also the intended site of that layout no longer exists. So to try to make something from the investment I have used some of the parts to make the baseboard for a compact fiddle yard. The fiddle yard will be for a layout with very short trains (loco + two wagons) so it seems best to post it here in with the micro layouts. It’s mostly for home use so I expect I will give it a small scenic treatment. Trains will enter at the rear left and go onto a Peco turntable. From here they will go onto one of the sidings, two full length and two short ones. The long siding at the back is for a bogie vehicle (perhaps a small dmu), a rerailer, some kind of cassette system, or even an extension to another layout. For what it’s worth, I found the baseboard murderously difficult to put together. I wanted a workbench to do the job but the only large flat surface I had was a spare sheet of ply on the living room floor. The four cross members are not symmetrical and although I knew this when I started I still ended fitting two of them back to front and so I ended up with a dog-leg along the ‘spine’ section in the middle. Some of the joints needed a mallet to put them together and some of the joints fell apart. At the end of the day, I managed to get the top flat and I suppose this is the main thing. The completed frame with its top in place could twist very easily, so I put in the diagonal strut from a length of softwood. I got the frame “square” (both diagonals equal), but I failed to pull the long sides of the frame straight and these both curve about 2mm along their lengths. Next time I would want to open out all of the joints to make some room for the glue. I would also knock a panel pin into each joint to hold the alignment, then fix down the top and then finally screw the joints up tight. However, I would also want to use 6 mm ply throughout. It took me most of fours hours to trim the pieces and another three hours to assemble them, and another hour to sort out the diagonal. I get the feeling, for me at least, it would be more satisfying and probably easier to get a timber merchant to cut some strips of ply and then make the thing from scratch. I have drawn the track plan to use a Peco Setrack point because the geometry fits nicely, I don’t suppose anyone knows of a simple way to convert these to a live frog? - Richard.

I have re-roofed the two main sections of the roof. The model now has some laser-cut 7mm scale roofing by York Modelmaking. This is self-adhesive and goes on in overlapping strips. Slates come in some quite large sizes, so I'll imagine this represents slates rather than tiles. The "ridge tiles" are from the borders of the York sheets. I think this is an improvement over the printed sheets of tiles I had before. A nice little project for Boxing Day! - Richard. Posted 26 Dec 2014, edited 28 Dec to upload a better photo.

Nowadays, Colchester is numbered left to right. But Shrewsbury is still right to left, and indeed its 1 and 2 lost their track years ago so the numbering runs from 3 to 7. Wolverhampton was right to left too (with 1c being the bay facing Shrewsbury) but I am sure it has been renumbered. I cannot find a convention, except that for Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton at least, the numbering began on the side of the station where the main entrance was. Somewhat out of area I realise. - Richard.

Have Rapido chosen the wheel profile for the model? I have EM wheels by Markits under most of my rolling stock, regauged to 00. They worked fine on my layout but derail on some club layouts. The mainstream manufacturers seem to invent their own profiles, ranging from subtle to ghastly. - Richard.

Seems worth sharing. - Richard.

A plastic curtain rail in its original packaging. - Richard.

I scored 54. I'm 52. But some of the questions I didn't really agree with any of the answers. - Richard.

Supposing the APT-P sets had been allowed to succeed in revenue-earning service, might the APT-E have been retained as a test bed for further engineering development, perhaps extended - or still withdrawn as 'spent'? I've ordered up a 6-car set, and I'm wondering if such a prototype is a bit fanciful. - Richard.

On the plus side, we can still enjoy loco haulage (or propulsion!) twice an hour between Norwich and Liverpool Street, and the Mk3 coach always seems to me to be the peak of British passenger accommodation design. The HST seat layout is arguably better, but the ride is usually superb. - Richard.

I placed my order before I found this thread and went for a non-DCC six-car set i.e. two extra coaches. I think it will make a nice display as a 'reasonably plausible might have been' - the experimental set strengthened to carry 100 or so passengers and find out about catering, walking about on board, travel sickness and so on. I will probably never have a layout large enough to run it, but the local club probably always will. I do imagine the market for a full 14 car APT-P is very small, and the price would be set by what someone is prepared to pay - a bit like houses over a million pounds. But, such a purchaser might be more 'Golden Age' than 'Hornby' so to speak, and looking to blow a lot more. Just looked at the eBay posting, it made £370. Sounds about right, if a bit low, for a model to finish off. - Richard.

It would be difficult to answer this question without first-hand knowledge of every locomotive. Possibly neither. A search on Google suggests D9500 entered service with wasp stripes on the bonnet, and the NCB painted these out on this particular loco in favour of stripes on the buffer beams. I think you have got to either pick a real locomotive and model it as it was at a specific time; or do what you like and accept that one day someone will tell you it is "wrong". There is a nice artists impression of an all-black one here: http://andrewbriddonlocos.co.uk/abl2/locos/br-class-14-d9500-s/122-br-swindon-class-14-d9500.html You could force the issue one way by adding a nameplate to be sure the model is in a fictional condition (perhaps 'freelance condition' is better). I'm very happy with my Loadhaul one, and it was popular enough to sell out at Hattons. - Richard.

The building at Stonehenge Works on the Leighton Buzzard railway was built by Italian POWs. Their stone work in the upper left hand corner (see second photo, below the fourth rafter) seems to be a record of their opinions at the time ... - Richard. (photos by myself on 1 October 2009)

I have updated my spreadsheet of details for a blue Western with full yellow ends. The changes are in bold text in rows 5 and 13. This spreadsheet replaces revision d which I posted last summer. - Richard. Class 52 Western details e.xls

D1011 Thunderer was fitted with the Talisman clips. This loco also had headboard clips at both cab ends (like the Dapol moulding), unlike the real D1005. I felt the Dapol blue FYE model was closer to D1011, and wanting something slightly different I went for this and sold on the original plates on eBay. - Richard.