t-b-g

On 22/03/2024 at 22:24, gingerangles said:

Loving that, looks great.  It was the appearance of the track that made me ask about scale.  It really does look good.  I've got my finger hovering over the button on a cart full of the peco bullhead wondering if it's worth the expense.

 

Love the signal box, I'll be needing something very similar 😂... is that the colour the thing would have been for its entire life span or is that a GCR thing?

Thanks for the kind words. The colour scheme for the box is the LDECR colour scheme. Although my layout is set just after the GCR takeover, they haven't got around to repainting the buildings yet. I may yet get the urge to backdate the layout to before 1907, so I have my bases covered. The signals are LDECR pattern somersault types too. The GCR replaced those with lower quadrant ones but I don't know when. If you look at the signalboxes on the preserved GCR at Loughborough, you will see the two most common GCR colour scemes. There us a rather garish but very distinctive ( to my eyes anyway!) two tone green livery or a brown and cream. My recollection is that they were originally brown and cream, changed to the green around 1910 and possibly back to brown and cream after a few years. I have seen details and dates somewhere but can't remember where.

I will also post a shot of the pointwork. It shows the improved appearance of EM quite well.

1 minute ago, gingerangles said:

Thanks @t-b-g that's been immensely helpful.  No, I'd missed that that was a single slip!

 

EM eh... very nice - assume you are building all your own stock and locos then?  What area / era are you modelling?

My layout is a fictional terminus based on the Sheffield District Railway. In real life, they had a goods station at Attercliffe in Sheffield and they had started to build a passenger station nearby when they obtained running powers into Sheffield Midland. In return, the Midland was given running powers onto the LDECR. My period is just after 1907, when the GCR took over the LDECR, allowing me GCR, LDECR and MR liveries. The idea is that the passenger station was built before the running powers were agreed and lack of capacity at Sheffield Midland led to both companies using my station instead of Sheffield Midland. I am mainly a GCR/LDECR fan but I recently acquired a quantity of lovely MR stock, so the joint running became attractive. The MR used to run to Edwinstowe using their running powers, which ended there, hence the terminating trains. Pretty much everything is kit or scratchbuilt.

The only building finished so far is the signal box, based on features from several LDECR boxes. I attach snaps of one of my MR trains plus the signal box.

2 minutes ago, gingerangles said:

Right... taking a closer look at the Western end... I think I may also have '34' & '36' wrong as well...  I had put this in as a simple cross over but I think it may actually be a single slip to allow a route from the down either onto the up or into the 'Dock' sidings and doesn't allow passage from the up line into the dock?

That end had a single slip too. I didn't mention it as it looked as though you had drawn it as a slip at that end. Edwinstowe is a good example of railway practice from that period of avoiding facing points whenever possible. The extra signalling and need for facing point locks plus the fact that they were regarded as less than ideal by the railway inspectors of the day meant that they were not used unless unavoidable by most companies.

50 minutes ago, gingerangles said:

 

Thanks for the input!  I guess that it would make sense to have that access to the back platform... wonder why it wasn't installed.  To be fair the correct arrangement will actually give me a little more room I think.

 

That building looks great!  You can definitely see the resemblance.   What scale are you modelling in there?

Yeah I've seen the plans and have also downloaded the lamp schematic ready for making those 👍 

My model is 4mm scale. The layout is being built to a rather unusual gauge, using the original 18mm EM gauge, instead of the modern 18.2mm.

I am not 100% sure how the back platform was used but there were services that used to terminate at Edwinstowe. So the trains would have to arrive in the main platform. To clear the main lines, my guess would be that the stock would then be shunted to the back platform, where it could depart from for its return journey. So if the stock was there for a while, the main lines were kept clear.

4 hours ago, gingerangles said:

Have I misunderstood this @t-b-g...  are these in fact double and single slips?...

 

I'd be lying if I said I understood this diagram in terms of the signals so could do with doing a bit of research I guess.  Do the same numbered symbols act in unison or lock out?

 

2 hours ago, stivesnick said:

Hi 

 

I managed to find another (hand drawn) signal box diagram.

 

 

Hope this helps

 

Nick 

Those clarify it nicely. There is no signal for coming off the main line directly into the back platform, which you would need if there was any use of a direct access. I am attaching a snap of a building I am working on that is based on the one at Edwinstowe. As my model is a fictional terminus, the two bays of the refreshment room have been omitted. The building was a bit too long as it was. There is a nice drawing of the building and some photos online, if you search for the website of the Edwinstowe Historical Society and look under Local History, then under Transport.

2 hours ago, gingerangles said:

So... having decided that I do not possess the knowledge required to create a from scratch layout and confidently be able to recreate a reasonable facsimile of the real thing I have decided to base my layout on a real place.  That way at least I have a guide line of what things should have been like upon which I can frame the inevitable compromises in size/content.

 

So, a few (a lot of) coffees later, a bit (a lot) of internet browsing and the addition of some local railway history books to the library and I settled on a location.  Straight of the bat my priorities were something through-station to scratch my roundy-round itch and with added goods-handling interest.   Oh and local... to hopefully add a little interest for the family.  The end result has been Edwinstowe.

 

To me this looked like a great location - quite a large facility given its location (in anticipation of large numbers of tourists originally), that existed into the era 4/5 that I'm after, but in a relatively compact layout... 3/4 platforms, goods shed, SB & Cattle loading bay.

 

 

The bridges at either end of the area of interest nicely framing what I hoped I'd be able to squeeze into the area I have available.

 

I also managed to find the signalling layout which got me very excited... (spun upside down so as to match the layout layout)

 

 

I set about trying to see how it would fit.  Luckily I'm OK on CAD and have access to the program so have overlaid the image of the map onto my available area in real life 'scale' - i.e. the size of my loft.  I've then drawn my proposed track plan in OO Gauge size on utilising Peco Large radius points and maintaining 'good' transitions, tangents etc as I see it.

 

I'm hoping you can tell what is going on here and hoping further that folks could let me know if I'm 'on the right track' with it 😁

Proposed track layout shown in red, platform and buildings in green, the grey are guides I've used, the orange the base board(s) and yellow the loft outline.  All superimposed on the OS underneath. 

I've obviously exaggerated the curve of the main lines compared to that of the real lines to help me get round at each end.  And mirrored this with the platforms.  The mainlines will continue round all the way and form a loop - those being the central 2 that run between platforms.

I've squeezed in the turnouts where I can. I've just realised I haven't joined the top right 'bay' line back to the UP main - but this will work without issue I think.  There is also the lower siding to finish.

I'll probably change the RHS rail over road bridge to a road over rail and move it in to create a scenic break and leave the LHS open and scenic eventually going round to the board on the other side of the loft.

 

 

I'd love to get feedback on the layout or suggestions as to problems I might face - I've had some great guidance about prepping for low areas of relief during baseboard construction so got that... are there any obvious issues with my track plan?  Something that wont work?  Having followed the prototype layout more or less I am hoping not.

 

Any comments gratefully received thanks 😁

 

 

MR Layout-Model Rev A.pdf 284.42 kB · 5 downloads

It is a station I have looked at once or twice myself but I just don't have the room to do it justice.

You have altered one bit of the plan, which has a knock on effect for the signalling. The lower platform, marked  "back platform" on the diagram, could not be accessed directly by a train arriving from the right hand end. The access was via a single slip so trains could not run directly into the back platform. Quite a few trains terminated at Edwinstowe back in the day, so it would have been useful to run round and shunt into the back platform to keep the main lines clear. What period will your layout be? In later days, the passenger traffic was quite dull and uninteresting but in pre-grouping times, you had a mix of Midland and LDECR or after 1907 GCR services and there was much more going on.

2 hours ago, Bob5860 said:

Tony,  Following on from your post with regards to layouts that never leave home I attach photos of BOB my loft layout which is “Based On Bawtry” on the East Coast mainline.  Bob comprises a scale half mile from the 5 arches over the river Idle up to the station signal box to the North.  The attached ordinance survey map indicates the actual area modelled.

 

BOB was started in 2018, the fiddle yard was first and reused boards from 2 previous railway layouts going back to 1980 & 2000’s.  The fiddle yard comprises  a total of 35 loops, the scenic boards were all new build by myself Christmas 2019 and from there on progress continued up to Christmas 2023 when I started on the station building.  Unfortunately I have been unable to find definite information on some of the buildings.  I have used Metcalfe houses for the houses fronting the A614, the industrial building is pure fiction but I do need to re-visit the houses on Queens Crescent and the water treatment plant as more information has become available.

 

The track is Peco 100 in the fiddle yard and Peco bullhead on the scenic section.  The scenery is a joint effort with my 12 year old grandson, my wife and myself.  The signals are by my friend Greg.  The stock is probably 95% RTR but nothing goes onto the railway until it has been detailed, close coupled, weathered and in most cases lamps and crew.

 

At 72 I still have a lot to learn about train formations so BOB is definitely a work in progress.  It is just a simple layout to watch trains go by and especially by our grandchildren.

 

Thank you for the inspiration that is Writes Writes and thanks also for Peterborough North, Grantham and the West Hill wagon works.

 

Regards Nik

Lovely stuff! Without giving too much away, you have modelled at least part of two properties owned by me and my family. I never knew the station when it was open but my old father in law, who passed away about a year ago and used to live in one of the Queen's Crescent properties which back to to the line knew it well and used it often. He could remember the pre war streamliners going through, accelerating off the viaduct. He used to scrounge coal from the crew of any freights that were held in the long lay by siding. He would reward the crews with a selection of his chrysanths or some veg from the garden.

One of the last two remaining railway buildings in Bawtry goods yard bit the dust this week. The goods shed remains, now clad in modern steel sheeting. The other building, the one to the right of the goods shed on your plan, which was originally served by a wagon turntable, hence the strange orientation, has been demolished to be replaced by a tin industrial unit.

On 16/03/2024 at 22:08, Lord of Narnia said:

 

Modelmaster used to do them. Not sure what’s going on with them. Found some on Fox transfers website. They are for buses but might well work ok.

https://www.fox-transfers.co.uk/transfers/fleet-name-london-transport

https://www.fox-transfers.co.uk/transfers/white-fleet-number-set-stl-g-d-b-rt-srt-plus-pairs-101-200

Just checked and at 2.35mm high, they won't fit in the 2mm panel on the carriages without spreading over the beading, so the hand lettering will have to stay. Thanks for trying to help anyway.

And the prize for the worst thread drift in RMWeb history goes to.........

12 minutes ago, Andy Keane said:

It’s really hard to know of course. But I rather fancy a change of colour since I got a crimson lake top light as a gift. Hence I updated my preorder on the autocoach to crimson and so the 517 will follow suit. But I do wonder how closely matched these colours would have been in real life.

These will all form part of stock for a slightly “earlier” Helston, set around 1920.

I agree that the crimson livery looks very smart indeed. I have just been having another look at the photo of 828. To me, it looks as if there is no discernable lining on the tanks and bunker but I could convince myself that there is lining on the boiler band just in front of the tanks. I could also convince myself that the cab sides might have a black border, with the possibility of an orange line between the border and the main colour. When you get colours like dark red, brown and orange on photos of that age, it can be really tricky to tell the apart.

8 hours ago, Miss Prism said:

 

I have never seen a picture of a crimson lake 517 with lining. Apparently, crimson lake for a few 517s was tried in 1919, by which time, lining on tanks had fallen out of fashion. I sometimes wonder if this pic of 828 (Swindon, 1921, looks like it is just out of the shops) is in crimson lake, and there is clearly no lining on it.

 

The loco doesn't look quite as dark as the carriage behind it but the carriage that appears behind the bunker looks the same sort of shade as the loco. So I am wondering if the carriage at the front end is crimson lake but the loco and the carriage at the rear are chocolate brown? 

1 hour ago, PMP said:

Xxx as can’t recall the names, and I think the following is the ‘basic’ history.

K&L was I think the initials of Ken xxx from scalefour society and Len xxx the designer/toolmaker. IIRC they developed the system including some architectural bits, and marketed initially through the S4 society. News travelled that it was good stuff and a deal was done where Maygib distributed it to the trade in the early mid 80’s. I think it got too time consuming to look after and the track range was sold and changed it’s name to C&L and they sold direct and distributed direct to the trade from a premises in Bristol. After a good few years the C&L track system was sold to the current owner.

 

Ken York, Len Newman?

Possibly Ken Pelham?

42 minutes ago, PMP said:

I was referring to both types in case I’ve not been clear. In the early/mid 80’s when I was at MRM Kings Cross models we sold SMP flex/points kits, and C&L(nee K&L) flex and components. SMP was and is ok for ‘coarse’ flanges, and C&L flex and component built track suffered chair strikes from coarse wheel sets. Interestingly running a Lima 31 on the contemporary Peco CD75 bullhead track I’ve had no issues, but not tried anything with the original style Lima wheels.

Retford has SMP plain track but some of the Buckingham locos catch the inside of the chairs with their flanges. I wonder whether the flange profile in the 1940s/1950s was deeper, or if wear on the wheel treads has made the flanges deeper than they were when new? That is certainly the case on the only loco I have measured, which has the very rare Romford 20.5mm diameter wheels but was built with 21mm ones. Either way, they bump along on the plain track.

1 hour ago, Lord of Narnia said:

 

Modelmaster used to do them. Not sure what’s going on with them. Found some on Fox transfers website. They are for buses but might well work ok.

https://www.fox-transfers.co.uk/transfers/fleet-name-london-transport

https://www.fox-transfers.co.uk/transfers/white-fleet-number-set-stl-g-d-b-rt-srt-plus-pairs-101-200

Many thanks. I had spotted those but I wasn't sure if they would be the correct size for the carriages. The waist panels are quite small!

Doh! Just spotted the sizes are shown on the website! Next time I visit my friend I will measure the carriages and see if they will fit.

Just now, rob D2 said:

Looks good , but very “ loosely “ I’d say 

It was very loosely! The other end of the line was based on Henley on Thames and a train running at a scale 60mph took about 12 minutes to get from one end to the other. There were a total of 12 stations on the layout, large and small. It required around 200 locos to work the timetable. With that amount of layout to build, plenty of corners were well and truly cut.

1 minute ago, Peak said:

When layouts are built and they are through stations like Doncaster, they build a loop so the trains can come out the other end. How do they deal with that when modelling terminus stations?

Either the lines go on to a fiddle yard or reversing loop to allow the trains to be returned, or they go on to a larger railway system (like the one I illustrated above), with perhaps another terminus station at the other end. 

A friend of mine built a layout based loosely on Paddington many years ago. He didn't call it Paddington as it was very much modified to fit the location. He sadly passed away before it was properly finished but I did take this snap of it in an "under construction" state.

3 hours ago, Buhar said:

I prefer these more imaginative names (Gresley Beat, Hills of the North) as opposed to using just the station (usually). Little Blytham could be "Bottom of the Little Hill".

Alan 

I agree entirely. I always thought " Half term at Ditchling Green" was a wonderfully evocative title for a layout. As was "The little long drag".

I have never been creative enough to come up with anything that good!

1 minute ago, Tony Wright said:

Good afternoon Tony,

 

Do you remember Ynysibil Fach (my spelling is probably miles out!), a South Wales colliery layout in O Gauge built by the Gibbons brothers?

 

At one show at Ipswich, short of operators one day, elder son Tom was press-ganged into operating its working coal tipplers. By the day's end, he looked exactly like my late uncle Percy just coming off shift (he was a miner at Dinnington pit). 

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

Hello Tony. I do remember it well. I saw it a couple of times, at York and elsewhere. I couldn't have told you whether it had working coal loading or not. It didn't make that much of an impression on me. Tom's experience would be another reason for not bothering with such things on a model.

For a short while, in the late 1970s, I worked at the Orgreave coke works. I have never seen anything on a model that comes even close to the experience of seeing their hoppers working close up. The whole area around the hoppers was caked in a thick layer of dust, which when wet became the most horrible black slimy sludge! Yet I have seen models of such facilities with relatively clean ballasted track.

I have rarely been convinced by attempts to have working loading and unloading facilities. Most hopper systems involve lots of noise and great clouds of dust, which you just don't get on models. Plus, you often have a scene where the figures are in static poses, when in real life they would be moving around. The best we can really do is to create a scene that looks realistic when photographed. When it is a moving 3D scene, we need lots of imagination to complete the gaps in the movement. The loading, unloading and movement of people in my imagination works just fine. Making one part of the action really happen without the other parts doesn't convince me, although I can be impressed by the work done to make it happen.

Seeing the mentions of Buckingham reminds me that I have wondered about producing an exhibition layout based on one of the earlier versions of the layout. Probably either the double or single track version of the Mk 2 layout. The real Buckingham is not ever going to be taken to an exhibition as it is too fragile to move. It would need a couple of days setting up time to repair all the soldered joints that would break when the boards were lifted, as they twisted and flexed. Yet it would be good to share the locos and stock with a wider audience, so building a replica, perhaps using "old school" methods, Merco printed brickpaper and such, would be an interesting exercise.

I hadn't even considered what I might call such a layout. It would have to have "Buckingham" in the name, so perhaps "Buckingham Mk 2", or even "Two tracks to Buckingham" as per the title of the Denny article in Railway Modeller all those years ago.

I do think that there is a bit of a difference in philosophy between a modeller building a layout of a real place that has already been done by somebody else and a modeller building a duplicate of a fictional place. One is re-using a location. The other is re-using somebody else's creation. 

32 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

 

A question if I may.  I like the sequence, all of which makes operational sense, but how do you justify getting 6 empty wagons back into that siding for the next repeat of the sequence?

 

I have the same dilemma with regards full wagons delivering to various spots and somehow departing later still full of coal.  

Each coal wagon has two bodies that fit on the same underframe. At the start of the sequence, empty coal wagons are scattered all over the layout. Between then and when the coal empties run, the wagons are collected together by the pilots at Buckingham and Grandborough and the train, starting at Buckingham, collects the empties from Grandborough and heads "north" to the fiddle yard. Once there, the bodies are swapped for the full loads. They then work back and get split up. At the end of the sequence, one of the tasks to carry out before the next day is to swap the full bodies for the empty one. So the body swaps are not done on scene during the normal running. There would be a further complication in that some wagons would go to Leighton Buzzard but that still isn't connected to the rest of the layout yet, so 6 wagons remain at Grandborough, rather than 3 there and 3 at Leighton Buzzard.

Lovely stuff. Although not a big LT enthusiast, I have been helping g a friend finish some ancient Harrow Model Shop carriages to go with the kit built electric he built many years ago. I ended up hand lettering (not my greatest skill) the carriages as the transfers supplied with the kit were pretty poor.

The lettering on the ones illustrated is much better. Are the transfers used still available and where might I obtain some please? They would be an improvement on my efforts.