GWC1

Sorry that I haven't updated this lately, I have been a bit busy with organising the forthcoming Nottingham East Midlands show (http://www.nottingham-modelrailway.org.uk). However, I have still done some work on the layout and an article has been written for publication in RM sometime soon. Steve Flint took some photos at Telford to add to the ones I took at Quorn. Layout work has included changing the ground signals in the yard for single disc ones, when I realised that they didn't need to be double. A bit of a waste of effort making them double, really (and they even had 2 servos each to work them!). I have also been building Mk1s for the passenger service and I will post a couple of pics when I have actually taken some. Thanks for the interest, I'll post more soon.

Just got back from Telford and unloaded the layout. Another excellent show. This was the first time I had been there as an exhibitor and when exhibiting, you don't get as much time to look round as you do as a visitor. You do, however, get in before the main rush and can snap up some of the bargains! My rake of HEAs will now be 2 wagons longer, once I have painted the 2 new arrivals. We had our usual crop of problems - you really can't predict them: the worm wheel on the 08 wore out and we had to shunt the yard with a pair of Heljan 20s, the motor in one of them came loose and slid upwards causing the flywheel to jam against the bonnet and seize a bogie. Then to add to the failures-you-wouldn't-expect, the PSU powering one of the LED light units went awry and started flashing the lights on and off at about 4 Hz! Thanks to all who came up and spoke to us, it was a really friendly show and having the fiddle yard on display meant that visitors could view stock close up and discuss things without having to shout across the scenic boards. Special thanks to Nick Dunhill for fitting a sound decoder to his superb model of Tommy and allowing us to run it. It worked a freight train for most of Sunday afternoon - what an amzing model!

Thanks for all your kind comments about the layout. Lots of you are asking about more photos but it is proving to be a difficult layout to photograph. The problem is trying to get low to show the overhead, then having all sorts of non-model background get in the photo. I have some, though, and will post them here. In the meantime, here is a shot of a Branch Line Society railtour we ran on Sunday. Of course, it went to parts of the line not normally used by passenger trains! As we were packing up I had to get a picture of the Netherwood signal box next to its full size brother.

Yes. Just after lunch, when we thought it couldn't get any noisier, they brought out a big boy with on board sound wound up to the max. After an hour or so of that I went and asked them to turn it down. To their credit, they did remove it completely. The normal background tinplate roar seemed quiter then!

Just completed the first day at the GCR show at Quorn. What a huge show! Two massive marquees, though the layouts are well speaced out in them. Just as well as they don't have barriers. Netherwood behaved itself well today. We had a few problems with some of the diesel locos brake gear coming adrift causing short circuits but the new MERG BCS1 block cutouts did their thing and cut the power and sounded a warning. It was a shame that we couldn't hear it due to the racket from the tinplate layouts opposite! I have fitted a Legomanbiffo sound chip to the 56 and this was the first chance to try it, but even at full volume it is drowned out by the tinplate. Being in a tent, with bright sunshine outside, the lighting is superb and I have seen some great photos taken by visitors. Must get out front with my camera tomorrow!

Good idea about the track plan, but I will have to draw one first! I did the original in AutocadLT, so I can probably export that as a jpeg. Netherwood's next outing is to Quorn on the Great Central as part of their big model railway and model engineering show from 20-22 June, then it is Telford at the beginning of September. That's all the bookings I have for now. Graham

Thanks to all who came to see us at Moorways today. I am sorry that I wasn't able to speak to you all, we had quite a few problems today. It started with a transformer packing up, leading to loss of the -12V part of the power supply and preventing all the points from moving in one direction (the +12V was OK, so they could move that way!). It wasn't helped when I eventually found the problem and connected in a temporary supply the wrong way round, blowing up a ULN2803 chip in the main panel. Luckily we were able to revert to the original control panel configuration of the local panels connected directly to the layout. This meant there were no track circuits, only half the signals, and they had to be manually operated. This was followed by 6 loco failures, varying from collapsed compensation beams in the 47 and 40, brake gear falling off another 47 and getting tangled in the bogie, plus the inevitable broken pans that are a feature of scale OLE on a portable layout. We got on top of the repairs this afternoon and I have just fixed the panel, so hopefully we will have some working auto signals tomorrow. I hope to see more of the show tomorrow, there are some great layouts this year. Come and say hello if you are visiting.

Thanks for all the kind comments. As Dava has said, the next outing is Derby show at Moorways Sports Centre on 10 & 11 May. Come along and say Hi.

Great news! Netherwood Sidings will be appearing at Guildex in Telford this September. Here is another pic.

If using the MERG Servo4 boards, you might find it necessary to thread the servo leads via a couple of turns on a ferrite ring as they are prone to chatter, especially if the leads run near the traction supply. Even worse interference can arise if the traction supply is DCC. You will need to get a ferrite ring big enough to thread the servo plug through. If you like I will look up the details of the ones I used on Netherwood Sidings - I can't remember whether they came from CPC or Farnell (same company, actually).

The portals look good planted in the layout but I think the clearances to the one in the sixfoot in the first picture look a bit tight. Have you tried running anything past it? It looks like you might have trouble with anything with a front overhang, like a Midland 4-4-0 for example. Graham

Thanks for the kind comments, Jamie. Please note, though, that the Nottingham show is not this weekend, but 15 & 16 March (see our thread http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/80879-nottingham-east-midlands-model-railway-exhibition-15-16-march/). We are at Barrow Hill with Deepcar this weekend.

You can see Meadow Lane at the Nottingham show this March - see http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/80879-nottingham-east-midlands-model-railway-exhibition-15-16-march/

Some excellent present-day modelling - well done! The big question, though, is it portable? A show invite is waiting if it is! Graham

Wakefield show is behind us now - what a great show! We had some problems on Friday evening as we didn't really set up quickly enough, we are not practiced at this yet. Sorry if you saw the layout on Friday and didn't see many trains. Nevertheless, we couldn't have been that bad as we won the visitor's trophy! We had problems with the contacts on the tortoise motors failing to make contact and causing trains to stall on the pojntwork. Gordon Hopkins, of MERG fame, was a guest operator and pointed out to me that the PCB tracks that make up the switch mechanism in a tortoise are not rated for DCC current. The answer is to use a relay to do the switching and I am planning an upgrade to the wiring to do this. We also had a problem with the DCC system in that the sound fitted locos would shut down as soon as a controller went to move them. This bug was fixed by a firmware download to the MERG CANCMD on Sunday morning. The operators are from the 'Deepcar' crew and operated the layout like Deepcar, i.e. lots of trains going round. We had two trains leave the fiddle yard at the same time in opposite directions, pass at the front then return to the yard. That sounds simple until you realise that we only have a single track offstage. At times we had four trains running and that demanded a great deal of concentration. On Sunday Nick Dunhill brought along his superb prize winning EM1 'Tommy' - what a treat!

Thanks for spotting the error in the website bri.s, a paragraph from a club layout crept in! I am looking forward to the layout's second outing, Jamie, and a lot of preparation is going in. I have rebuilt the power supply and done a number of reliability improvements since Nottingham. The layout is entirely DCC now, apart from a visiting analogue 76, and we have 5 diesels fitted with sound. I have built 2 more 76s, and there are baseboards on the (exhibition configuration) layout that they have not yet run on! Dismantling has begun in preparation for the show and as I type this there are 2 boards behind be receiving some more vegetation in bare areas. I will stop now and get on with some more modelling.

The layout now has a link from our club website with a few pics and a write up on it. http://www.nottingham-modelrailway.org.uk/netherwoodsidings.htm I will try and post some more info when I get some better pics.

Superb OLE - well done. Is the layout portable for exhibitions? If so, I'd like to book it!

Well spotted Rob D2! The footbridge does indeed just stop in mid air. I ran out of space. It is based on the real one at Rotherwood which has the stairs straight in line with the bridge and goes down over the railway fence into the land beyond. I didn't have space for that. I could have squeezed the stairs in parallel to the railway but it would have been two close. In the end I took the easy route and just cut it off (like the two road bridges) close to the baseboard edge.

Thanks for the positive comments. Here are a few more pictures. I don't have very many as I haven't had chance to take them. At home in the loft I can't get the good angles and the most scenic board doesn't actually fit in when the layout is in 'home' mode. A general view taken at the Nottingham show. A line-up of most of the 76s we had at the time. We should have 9 at Wakefield.

Name: Netherwood Sidings Scale: 7mm finescale (32mm gauge) Size: 10m x 3m Era: 1976-81 I started building this layout in the loft many years ago and it finally reached the state where it was exhibitable in 2011, when it appeared at our club show in Nottingham. Since then it has returned to the loft and show invites have not been forthcoming. Until now that is - it is having its second outing at Wakefield later this month and is booked for Derby next May. If any RMwebbers are at Wakefield, come and say Hi. There should actually be enough of us operating it for me to be able to speak to you (unlike the first outing wher I was on my own most of the time!). I will add some posts with stuff about specific aspects of the layout, stock, OLE, etc as I get chance, but please ask if you would like to know more. Graham