faded_Glory

Yes, that drawing is also included in the booklet I have. Thank you for the encouragement to have a try at scratch building the superstructure. Perhaps one day I will take that plunge. Is the pechot bourdon akin to a Double Fairlie? Peco/Kato have announced that they will bring out a model of one of those

Wow, that very much looks the part, beautiful! Is that a kit or scratch built? Mind you, either would be beyond my capabilities! Talking about Sweden, the second half of the booklet discusses a Decauville line in Sweden near Helsingborg, between 1890 and 1906. I haven't studied this in detail but it seems that there was a short line running from a place called Ramlosa to the shore, where there appears to have been a pier. The whole area is now absorbed by Helsingborg and industrialised, there will be nothing left of the line. There are some photographs but of poorer quality than those of the World Fair.

Some more progress with the ballasting and landscaping: The brown border along the lawns will be populated with flowering plants.

Ha yes, you are right! Or Brie, which comes in even larger wheels. On reflection, I think I will call the layout simply 'Paris 1889' and refrain from referring to foodstuffs at all.

Been laying the track today, and then covered it with black paper strips to get rid of the sleepers. When dry I will cover this with a thin layer of fine cinders, grading into brown soil cover towards either side. I tested the train and it runs fine. Not very subtle, but good enough. I like the (Metcalfe) stone edging and will probably also apply it to the lower baseboard edge for a better finish.

Baseboard building is finished The two MDF circles have been joined together and I've added four legs. I have also drilled a series of small holes around the perimeter to fit some fencing later. I have started with the ground works by sticking a square of fine sandpaper in the middle, underneath where the Eiffeltower will go, to represent the compacted sand that I think is likely to have been in place there. Pictures of the era show little in the way of tarmac, most roads and streets appear to be simply made of tamped soil. I'm thinking of adding a small platform canopy at the front, various pictures show these to have been jolly affairs made of wooden frames covered with (presumably) red and white striped fabric. That will add a splash of colour. I have ordered some suitable paper napkins for this

That certainly sounds like a plausible idea! The booklet I have lists a lot of interesting details about that particular Decauville railway (even though it is in Swedish I can more or less figure out most of it). I think a larger model of the prototype could be really interesting - you would need to scratch build lots of the amazing buildings they put up at the exhibition: every country built a 'typical' house in which they showed off the goods they offered to export to the world so there was immense variety in building styles. Then there were the huge French exhibition halls like the Galerie des Machines, like the EIffel tower built from steel trusses: Of course the Eiffel Tower could be relegated to the background or omitted completely if you were to show a different corner of the exhibition - it covered a large area after all. Before deciding on the simple pizza I played around with a possible larger layout and designed something in Anyrail: I have my doubts about the running qualities of the Jouef loco (and 009 on the whole, to be honest), and anyway I don't have the time right now for a more serious layout, but it could be done. I think Minitrains offer another type of Decauville engine that might be suitable. In case anyone wants to model a bit more, the booklet contains the track plans for the two end stations at the exhibition. Pretty interesting and challenging to build in model, I'd say. The line in between was mostly double track and there was actually a tunnel underneath the approach to the Eiffeltower, probably to prevent accidents with the crowds that would pass by there. Anyway, enough with the chatting, I have a layout to build

The Swedish booklet contains a scale drawing of the coaches, showing that they were 8.7 m. long overall. The Jouef ones measure 112 mm so that makes them 1/77, near enough to 00 scale and not H0 as I believed. They are a bit too wide though, 25 mm for a real width of 1.7 m equates to a scale of 1/68. The engine is more of a problem. First of all, although it does resemble a Decauville loco there is no evidence that this particular type ran at the 1889 World Expo. The pictures in the booklet show a much bigger engine - a beefy 040-040 Mallet: The Jouef model is actually quite a decent representation of the smaller Decauville 0-4-0 engine Type 1 as per their official documentation: This type was only 11' 6'' long. The Jouef model is 48 mm long which makes it 1/72 scale. Oh well, compared to my Eiffel Tower I don't think these discrepancies are too bad

I am in the middle of building my fixed spare-room layout which is taking up a lot of modelling time so I don't want to start on something big right now. Also, as nice as this trainset looks, it is old fashioned technology and the running propeties are not exactly stellar. I experimented a bit and it basically has only two speeds: stop or flat-out. Moreover, it pretty much always stalls on pointwork. To avoid frustration I decided to go for a basic pizza layout. I leave the track plan for you to work out as homework Now, the elephant in the room of course is this, ahem, Eiffel tower. In real life the thing is over 1000 ft tall - 12 ft in H0 scale......ok... So now all pretense of building a scale model goes out of the window. Instead, I scored a Heller kit of the Eiffel Tower at scale 1/650 and will use that as the (literal) centrepiece of the layout. The layout is based on a 50 cm diameter MDF board with a 40 cm board sandwiched on top. The trackwork is a circle of Peco 009 track with radius of 22.8 cm. The engine and carriages will run perfectly fine on this because the original Jouef circle has only a 15 cm radius! Some frantic Googling later I managed to source a set of excellent metal period figures by Andrew C Stadden that only need some painting to get us straight back into the 19th century. I also got myself a Woodland Scenic grass mat, and some cheapo Chinese park benches and park lamps off EBay. Armed with all this I made a first mock-up of the layout as I hope it will turn out: The very improvised background is a print of a picture of part of the exhibition that I found online. I'm not sure yet if I want to use this - if I mount it on hardboard I might be able to make a screen that shields the track from view at the back. Either that, or perhaps I could build something to resemble a train shed. So there you go - nothing too serious, but hopefully a way to capture some of that atmosphere.

For many years I have had in my collection the well known Jouef/Playcraft Decauville passenger set, but I have never built a layout on which it could actually run. Recently I came across a very interesting little booklet, in Swedish unfortunately, with a lot of background info about this particular type of narrow gauge train. It turns out that the Decauville railway played quite a prominent role in the 1889 World Exposition held in Paris - the same Expo for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed. They built a line to take visitors along two sides of the exposition and along the Seine. I found a plan that shows the line: There are a number of delightful old photographs in the booklet, such as this one: Seeing this I just had to do something, and I've decided to have a go at building something to try and capture some of this atmosphere... but how?

Thank you, I just wanted to check before wiring them in and perhaps blowing something up!

I have got myself some of the Gaugemaster autofrogs and the instructions simply sat to connect two of the terminals (the ones on two of the corners of the print) to the rails or the bus - but it dosn't say which terminal goes to which rail. So my quick question: does it matter which way round I connect these? Especially, when I use them on several points, should the connection always be the same regardless of the orientation of the points (i.e. should I always connect the 'top left' contact of the autofrog to the same polarity bus/rail), or should I always connect the 'top left' contact to the straight stock rail (as per the Gaugemaster diagram) and the 'bottom left' connector to the diverging stock rail, regardless of their polarity - or does it not matter at all? To clarify, I use Peco Code 75 electrofrogs with the little connecting wires snipped away and isolated rail joiners to totally isolate the frog, and with the switchrails hardwired to the adjacent stock rails.