t-b-g

I have said this before but I don't model what I have seen. I model what I wish I had seen and can only see now through model making. If I want to see a Class 66 on a container train, I don't need to build a model of it, I look out of my window. Blue diesels (my trainspotting days) I can see at preserved lines or on many other layouts. If I want to see a GCR liveried loco pulling a rake of GCR carriages, I have a few snippets of old black and white film, a tiny number of other layouts or my own model making (Until the good folk at Ruddington get theirs finished!).

I wasn't going to say any more about DCC and sound until..... Yesterday, 5 of us had a session operating the DCC layout I have mentioned previously. We gave the rest of the group the choice as to whether they used sound or not and all decided that it was better without. The others are not modellers, or even railway enthusiasts, just mates of the layout owner who come round for a social evening "playing trains".They decided that as there are several stations and some are close together with a narrow operating well between them, hearing locos at the "other" station was just too intrusive. Then the trouble started. A couple of locos wouldn't work at all. I put them on the programming track and "read" the chips, which had the correct numbers. We put them back on the layout and they worked fine, so I don't know why they didn't work first time. Until one of them decided it was double heading and another loco in the fiddle yard ran forward onto a point causing a shut down. This happened three times during the evening, all at random. Nobody knows how to set up a double header and certainly hadn't done so but I have had to learn how to undo one. We have removed all momentum from the locos as judging where to stop them on uncoupling magnets was a nightmare with it. Except the one loco decided that it didn't like having no momentum and went back to maximum momentum, all by itself, just as it was supposed to be slowing to stop at the terminus. The buffer stops were up to the job. The relevant cv had just changed. All by itself. The loco had run earlier with no problems. I changed it back and all was well again. We had a new loco, which I altered from No 3 to 5050. It seemed reasonable, that being the number on the cabside. We put it on the layout and it wouldn't run, so I "read" the chip and it had decided that it wanted to be No 6914. Again, quite random. There is no way I punched that number in. I did it again, pressing exactly the same buttons. This time it ended up as 5050. Another loco, a Britannia, No 70045, wouldn't work. So I tried to "read" the chip on the programming track and some of the controllers on the layout (not all) stopped working and we got an error message No 44 on some and random flashing letters on the others. They all showed either H, A, L or T and if you got enough controllers together (we have around 15 Lenz LH01 types) you could see that it was trying to spell "HALT" with one letter on each one. Nobody seems to know what that is all about despite phone calls to various "experts" today. It isn't in the manual. The best response we got was "There might be a gremlin in the system". After rebooting the system, I "read" the chip again and the same thing happened. So I reset CV 8 to the factory settings and as 3, it worked fine. So I renumbered it to 0045 and the whole system crashed again with the error message 44. So I reset it again and numbered it 0054 just as a desperate last throw of the dice and it was happy at that. So why on earth can I call it 0054 but not 0045? At this point, having wasted an hour of operating time and with his friends standing around wondering what the heck was going on, the layout owner was within a whisker of ripping out the DCC and starting again with DC, even though it would have meant rewiring the whole (and very extensive) layout. The layout and the DCC system must have known this because at this point, apart from a faulty socket that killed the layout every time you plugged a controller in (which could just as easily have happened on a DC layout), it worked reasonably well for the rest of the evening apart from having to reboot to clear a couple more error 44 messages and the odd double heading incident. It was my most frustrating experience ever with model railways mainly because I didn't understand what was going on or what I should do to correct it. I never really had any inclination towards going down the DCC route for my own modelling. These events have dispelled any lingering thoughts I may have had about giving it a try. I thought long and hard before posting this as I must be coming across as very negative and the DCC/DC thing has been done to death. Part of the reason I am doing so is the hope that somebody reading it can tell us what error 44 is and what we need to do to get rid of it!

We did try, just once, to run Roy Jackson's Retford in time to the recordings that Peter Handford made there. We had the correct rakes of carriages and could tell when an articulated pair was going over the crossing as the rhythm changed. It was beyond the skill of any of us to get the twin set on the crossing in time to the record but it was great fun trying. Apart from anything else, a good sound system and plenty of volume and it sounded as if a real life sized train was coming through the shed.

There was a small industrial layout, possibly French or Dutch, at York show a few years ago. The layout had speakers arranged under the layout, activated by reed switches buried in the track. Each loco activated the reed switches by way of a small magnet. So the sound moved along with the loco. I think that the operator pressed a button to select a sound appropriate to the loco. The loco sounds were superb. The silent narrow gauge wagons being pulled less so and the lack of clicks over rail joints stuck out too. I am too young to remember much of real steam but there are plenty of recorded sound archives, such as videos and things like the Peter Handford recordings to tell me what the real thing sounded like. Even on a preserved line, the sounds are there apart from goods and loose wagon shunting noises. Next time the advocates of sound are near a real railway, they should listen and estimate how much of what they hear is rail on wheel noise, how much comes from the carriages or wagons and how much is actual loco noise. Those that run past my house, I reckon the loco noise is less than 25%. Yet on a DCC sound fitted layouts, the loco noise is usually 100% of what you hear. Silent carriages and wagons, no recreation of tons of metal hitting real joints, no creaks or groans as the track dips. So much is missing that I would rather have none provided and imagine it all. But that is just my view and I am happy to accept that some folk think it adds to the realism.

One of the layout projects I am involved with has DCC (which works reasonably well but does funny things sometimes that I don't understand) with approximately 50 locos (steam and diesel). Around 10 have sound chips. We have operating sessions with around 4 or 5 of us and after half an hour, when the gimmick factor has worn off, we switch the sound off as we find it annoying. To me, when a loco is gently moving up to some stock in the platform, the sounds and things like the steam are all in my head. In there, they are massively more realistic than anything DCC can provide. We have to imagine plenty on our models. The movement of people and animals. Carriage doors opening and passengers pouring out onto the platform in the rush hour. The crew swinging the water crane out over the tender while they chat about the weather. So I imagine the sounds too. Just hearing the sound of a locomotive without all the other railway sounds, especially those made by heavy carriages and wagons, is worse to me than having no sound at all as it intrudes on my imagination. I live right next door to a main line. The sounds I hear when a train goes past, even a steam special, bear no relation to any DCC sound I have ever heard. No matter how good an individual sound may be, it is only ever part of a picture.

One further aspect of the operational side that hasn't been mentioned is the nature of the relationship between the operator and the layout. Somehow, touching a screen, perhaps on a wireless system, makes the operator more remote from the layout. Perhaps the ultimate is the true mechanical system where points and signals are worked from a "frame" of some sort. On Buckingham, there are no actual levers but they are represented by wooden sliding blocks, each with a small brass knob on the top. These work both the mechanical operation and the electrical switching. The brass knobs are gently polished because they have been in use for many years and there is an element of the history of the hobby about it as I think of the people who have pulled those same levers over many years.. Some of the sliders are a bit stiff in their sliding action and quite a few have little quirks. If you push lever 9 right back in, sometimes the switch doesn't work properly. You need to work hard to pull 39 as it is really stiff. 43 doesn't go all the way back into the frame but works the signal and the electrics well enough. You have to hold 48 over as there is not enough friction to hold it against the return spring. Overall, the relationship between operator and layout is taken to another level. You get to "know" the layout. You sense the levers as you pull them and you feel the tension in the cranks and the signal operating strings as you pull the "levers". I have heard real signalmen saying similar things about their work. "Such and such a lever is a beggar and you really have to yank it over" or suchlike There is a tactile, "touchy-feely" aspect when you are operating it that no amount of high tech computer operation can ever get close to.

I have always thought that building an operating model railway is about far more than getting the correct loco pulling the correct carriages at a good scale speed on a layout. I see more of these highly technical layouts, operated by laptop or mobile phone and all I think is how far away from the real thing it is. Unless you are modelling the relatively modern scene, most real points and signals were operated by pulling a lever. As it is relatively easy to replicate this, either with mechanical rods and cranks or by using the lever to work a motor, then why I can't see what benefit or extra realism a touch screen brings. I am not anti technology and I am even submitting this post via a wireless internet connection on a tablet. I just don't want to spend my model railway operating time sitting at a screen and keyboard. I do enough of that in real life and operation of a layout is, to me, an escape from the modern world.

Got it in one!

I saw the title of the thread and being one of those who models the railways of this country as they were before what nearly everybody accepts as "Grouping" as being the formation of the "Big four" companies in 1923, I thought that there might be something of interest to me. So I read it. What a mistake! I persevered as I was sure it would eventually get onto the topic but no, that was too much to hope for. Another thread going down the pan like the MRJ ones. I will try my best to get it back on the straight and narrow with a photo of my very favourite pre grouping layout.

I will just add one further thought. This show will be the first outing, in a substantially completed state, of Geoff Kent's "Black Lion Crossing". The modelling on this layout is quite simply as good as it gets. It may even be one those shows that people will look back on in years to come and say "I was there". It would be worth the admission price by itself.

I was never very sporty but once in a while I helped a friend out by making up the numbers in a cricket team. I was a poor bowler. My exploits were limited to bowling at our batsmen to warm them up and one over, right at the end of a match where the opposition needed 45 to win. I got cramp after three deliveries and got in the way of one of our fielders going for a run out. I was a poorer batsman but I could catch just about anything either close up or out on the boundary, so I could at least contribute something. Luckily, in the games I played (about 4 in total) I was only called upon to bat once and got the grand total of 3 with a lucky slog. I once created a school chess team to get me out of playing rugby when I went to a very small school where the top two classes made up the rugby team, irrespective of size, skill and experience. We always got hammered by other schools but we could hold our own at chess, so I started a team. We had something the school could win at, which earned me some brownie points. With three members of the rugby team playing chess, three youngsters from the next year down had to play instead of us. The rugby team went from losing by 70 points to losing by 80 but other than that, it worked on a couple of levels. The school were happy that we won something once in a while and I came home with a mental battering rather than a physical one! I didn't get the cricket genes my Dad had. He once took 4 for 32 playing against Surrey for the RAF, or so I was told. I was always the nerd sitting at home building train sets, rather than the sporty type. That has never changed!

"Valleyfields" is all packed up, tested and all the locos and stock have been serviced so we are as ready as we will ever be for the weekend. It will be the last show for the layout (and very likely for Ken, who feels that it is time for him to retire from rigours of the exhibition circuit) and it looks like we will be going out on a "high" as it looks to be a superb line up. I hope lots of folk come along. This event is one of the best kept secrets in the exhibition diary. Superb layouts, trade and demonstrators but usually quite small visitor numbers. Perhaps it is because it is seen as a minority interest show for EM modellers only but it is much more than that. Hopefully see some RMWebbers there. Tony

I may have my answer but I am not sure what the question was! I do sometimes wonder if taking the original "Minories" design and altering it with different radius points and by taking out the double S bends results in a plan that is no longer a "Minories" but rather is inspired by "Minories". The arrangement of pointwork and platforms works in an identical way operationally with larger radius points and with a straighter run through but is it still a "Minories"? Now that one, I don't know the answer to!

Quite right. Buckingham has the advantage of not relying on RTR points so has crossovers on continuous curves to avoid buffer locking. The station throat on the present version has all the pointwork crammed into 18* length. We still have to be a bit careful with a couple of the carriage sets, which have to be shunted from platform to platform via the down line rather than the up line, otherwise the buffers lock. With the points available at the time, having a bit of straight track between the curves was probably the difference between having a layout that worked and one that didn't. To my eyes, the simple act of keeping the platforms straight (rather than having an S bend in them) in the second of the two plans above has actually made a an improvement in the look of the layout, without taking away anything from the clever design of the station throat. They may look even better with a really nice gentle curve through them, either along the whole length or just part way along.

Looking at those two plans above, the straight version compared with the "true" Minories, the second one looks more prototypical to me and is very much along the lines of "Mansfield Market Place as built by me. That has 1 in 7 points and I don't experience any problems or poor appearance as the trains snake over them. With points like those, an 8' length is what is really needed, with a 4' board for the station throat and 4' for the platforms. I made the platforms longer to allow 8 coach trains. The Freezer "Minories" drawings also had a reverse curve in the platforms too. So two of the platforms were in approximate alignment with the arrival and departure tracks but with a rather unlikely swing out to the side and then back onto the original alignment. That was always the least satisfactory element of the design as it looked a little unlikely to have happened on the real railways, although I am sure that somebody can come up with an example, I can't think of one. I also wondered why the point for the loco spur wasn't a LH point immediately next to the point of the first cross over. It would have given a longer siding and you have a curve there just waiting for a point to be inserted.

Not cheap but I can thoroughly recommend the 150w soldering iron produced by ERSA. I got mine from a firm called "Blundells". I saw most of the 7mm chaps at the Missenden Abbey modelling courses using them. They could solder big lumps of metal together with a tiny soldering iron. When I decided to try my hand at some 7mm modelling, I got one and it has transformed my soldering completely. Being able to laminate several layers of 18thou with no trouble is lovely. It gets one end of a 7mm boiler so hot that you can't hold the other end without something wrapped round it as insulation. I use Templers "Telux" paste flux from Geo W Neale, together with standard 60/40 solder and end up with nice clean soldered joints. It is one of those areas where there is never just one answer. There are many different approaches to soldering and most people will eventually find something that suits how they like to work.

I can't be sure this many years later although that photo is almost identical to one my dad took, so it may have been 1980 when we went. I did a web search and the 1976 open day came up for me but not the 1980 one, so I put two and two together and may well be wrong. There was also (again from memory that is not 100% reliable!) an open day at Derby Works where the single appeared around the same sort of time.

There was an open day at Tinsley Depot in June 1976. It is a long time ago but I remember my dad taking us along and I am pretty sure that the single and an LMS 4F were on display there. That could be a possibility.

That all sounds very impressive. The next stage would to link it all to thought waves so that you only have to think about which point to change and it would happen. Of course, in our quest to build model railways that are as near to the real thing as possible, we could always have a lever and a few metal rods and do it that way. One of the very best things about the hobby is the diversity of approaches that we can adopt. Nobody can say which approach is right or wrong as long as, in the end, the point changes and the train goes along the right track. At the recent Missenden Abbey weekend there were a few people working on various circuit boards, to create electrical interlocking. I was quite impressed by what they are doing but we also visited Princes Risborough signal box and the real railways did the same with far fewer components. As always, it is a case of each of us following the hobby the way we choose to.

It is easy to talk about the hobby being in decline but when I look at an exhibition diary there are more entries than ever. This is not necessarily a good thing as there are not enough good quality layouts and traders to fill them all and the quality has, in my view, suffered. But it would seem that this aspect of the hobby is still growing. The RTR scene is more buoyant than ever. Superb quality models with new releases creating many pages of reviews in the magazine. The people who are new to the hobby seem to be those in of middle age and over, looking for a hobby for retirement. We also have more magazines than we did in the past although again, they seem to struggle to find enough material to fill them with much that I find inspirational. People have been forecasting the demise of the hobby ever since I can remember. The one area that does seem to be declining is in kit building, with new RTR items seeming to outnumber kits by a significant factor. There is little point in somebody spending many hours and much up front finance producing a kit that a tiny number of people might build into something nearly as detailed as the latest RTR. Perhaps it is leading to a hobby where many people have the same locos and stock but for a home layout, that matters little. The lack of individuality only stands out at exhibitions and even then is only of any significance to a tiny number of people like me who prefer to see things that people have built rather than bought. At a show, I bet less than 10% are concerned about such things. So we may reach a time when the average age of people in the hobby means that a decline sets in but I am not sure we are there just yet.

I was standing by the show stand of the late George Norton one time and a customer was having a bit of a dig about some instructions. With a perfectly straight face George replied "The sort of modellers who build my kits don't usually need instructions". I could never work out whether he was being serious or if it was his rather strange sense of humour.

I know of some kit instructions written by somebody who has not only not designed the kit in question but has never built any kit himself. They are written with a confident style and have allowed the kits to be built with successful results. My "takes the biscuit" award goes to DJH. I have recently spent some time with somebody who was building the Austerity 2-10-0. The body instructions (I may have forgotten some of the numbers) are "Assemble parts 1 to 46. Fit wires to parts 36 and 39." And that was it! There was an exploded diagram. Photocopied many times and with lines so feint you couldn't see them, which gave a bit of guidance as to where things go but was open to misinterpretation. Yet for all this, by reference to the diagram and a few photos, the chap (who has built a few kits but is by no means an expert model maker) put it together.

I am not sure that anybody advocating 31.5mm has suggested that it is more accurate and the sort of track you mention is very much in use by the Scale 7 modellers. The idea is to obtain smoother running and a slight improvement in the way the points look by getting a smaller gap between check and running rails, despite the slight reduction in gauge.

I had not even considered RTR when making my choice of gauge. I enjoy building things and my chosen prototype is GCR in pre-grouping times. I am not sure that RTR will be playing much part. Of course there may be visiting locos from time to time and it would be a shame if they couldn't run well on the layout. My experience of 7mm isn't great but if the RTR wheel situation is anything like 4mm, then there may be some inconsistencies. Working in EM gauge, there are some wheels that can just be pulled out on the axles and will work with a 1mm check gap. There are a few that have flanges so wide that they either bind over check rails or have to be so far apart that they bind between the rails. If that is the case with 7mm RTR then it is a good argument for somebody sticking with the more tolerant 32mm gauge. Edited for spelling.

I think that Cyril Freezer's long standing friendship with Peter Denny convinced him of what could be done in EM and I believe he did dabble a bit. However, it was more OO with a wider gauge than anything too finescale by way of wheel profiles, flanges etc. Buckingham has tight curves, very short, small radius points and check rails set really wide to allow for a big variety of wheel standards. The running can be a bit bumpy at times but most things stay on most of the time! It is not anything like as "finescale" as many an EM layout that came later. To me, there are two reasons why 31.5mm should give smoother running. One is the gap through crossings, as has already been mentioned. The other is that the tighter gauge will not allow vehicles to "crab" from side to side quite so much and will keep the wheels more in line with the rails, which can make a big difference through crossings and at point blades. I am not one of those who say that 32mm won't work, because I have seen enough proof that it does. I just feel that it is a standard that has been around since for ever and dates back to the days when most wheels were a lot heavier in the flange than they are now. Wheel profiles have improved but the track hasn't adapted with it. If you want to tighten up the track standards but still using commercially available wheels, then you can't really open up check rails without increasing the B2B measurement so the only way to do it is to narrow the gauge slightly. It works and it looks slightly better than conventional 32mm track through points. Many people won't notice the difference. Lots of modellers only see the track as somewhere to run their locos and that is absolutely fine. But for those of that do like to model the track in the same we that we model other things, it is a practical and easy to adopt improvement to our track.