DCB

The upper plan looks do able, By applying a quick rule of thumb I make it capable of taking 5 coach BR Mk1 trains in the main platform with 4ft beyond the pointwork allowing for a 3ft radius curve swinging around make a FY. The FY is going to be challenging if you want 5 coach trains. You might need a weird Traverser to make use of the 6ft wall. Bay needs lengthening and Sognal box moved Real Minehead had double track approach for the last couple of miles so trains could "Stack" awaiting platforms. Platforms were / are also very long 10 coach plus main one and the "Bay" must have been 8 at least Lower plan looks fiddly and not much like anything prototypical

The upper plan looks do able, By applying a quick rule of thumb I make it capable of taking 5 coach BR Mk1 trains in the main platform with 4ft beyond the pointwork allowing for a 3ft radius curve swinging around make a FY. The FY is going to be challenging if you want 5 coach trains. You might need a weird Traverser to make use of the 6ft wall. Bay needs lengthening and Sognal box moved Real Minehead had double track approach for the last couple of miles so trains could "Stack" awaiting platforms. Platforms were / are also very long 10 coach plus main one and the "Bay" must have been 8 at least Lower plan looks fiddly and not much like anything prototypical that I have come across. The coal sidings would have to curve around inside the approach curve.

Have you tried to fit the replacement wheels to the existing axle? I am assuming plastic wheels on steel axles and steel wheels on plastic bushes on steel axle as per my old Mainline wagons.

I find a period of running in to be essential. I run chassis in before fitting motors by towing them around the layout, I run in gears by running motors before fitting wheels, If a loco I assemble. Unfortunately my only test track is the loft layout which is a pain (literally) to access so my thoughts are turning to a bespoke running in circuit. The few new locos I have purchased I have run in for an hour approx usually changing direction every ten minutes or so to ensure it runs round left hand and right hand curves as well as forward and backwards, starting light engine for twenty minutes or so and then pulling a medium load increasing to max load. I suspect a rolling road is a rich mans equivalent of putting a loco against a buffer stop and letting it spin its wheels, which is an excellent way of getting oval wheels. After being run for some time some locos traction improves greatly, especially Bachmann 2-8-0s in my experience, I think the tread profile is not optimised for code 100 rails too gentle a curve from flange to tread, Romford Markits wheels seem to be the correct profile from new. Some some degrade rapidly, those with traction tyres mainly Somewhere on here a chap built detachable return loops which were a bit like a Banjo shape with the baseboard cut away except under the track and just a single "spoke" through the middle as a handle. If one applied the same to a circle one could lay a circle of 3rd or 4th radius track on a very light base which although 4ft Diameter would be light and could conceivably be hung on a wall. Edit It was Steve Copley and was on the "Corkscrew Lines" Thread. His was a return loop but could very easily be adapted for a circle. I hope he does not mind my using his picture as an illustration of his brilliant technical and aesthetic creation. I want one now!

I would use isolators all round except one rail of the stub spur, treat it as a separate section and switch it from adjacent points through an accessory switch and relay or pair of accessory switches. I drive 1 amp rated micro switches directly off point tie bars to change polarity in DC where the point is hand operated, obviously not an option for DCC as a 4 amp one is far too ugly. The stub spur looks like it needs an isolator switch if you want to stable engines there. Half the battle is understanding which way is "normal" and which point should control from which way the point is fed. The arrangement looks a bit odd in that it is a facing crossover, a mirror image trailing crossover would be more usual

If you like watching trains in the countryside a looped 8 layout with hidden loops feeding a simple station would seem to fit the bill. Much of Scotland features steepish gradients, nothing like the proper gradients down Devon way but long drags, but lots of single track and lots of twisting curves. A significant amount of single track has a 100 mph speed limit. As you already have a level baseboard perhaps a compromise with the "Hidden" loops screened behind a backscene. With such a wide baseboard you could also angle the tracks so you get a 3/4 view of approaching trains instead of the inevitable side on view. See my suggested sketch below.

Using domestic wires is always dodgy, There is always a potential to mistake 12 volt for 120/240 volt and that can be embarrassing/ painful/ life threatening. I find flex easer to solder to rails, but I have a pretty cavalier attitude to track and prefer to solder the "Droppers" in place before laying the track drilling holes inn the baseboard to suit. DCC wiring can be simpler or more complicated than DC depending on your needs. If you run 5 loco lash ups on your Rocky Mountain pike you probably need droppers every yard or so. If you run Thomas the Tank , Percy and whatever that shed on wheels is called on a 6X4 you probably don't. If you run Tornado and 12 lighted pullman cars you need something in between The problem is fishplates. Code 100, 83. 75 fishplates won't take loads much over 1 amp, neither will point blades and tags. I have had fishplates glow red hot on 2 amps with a heavy double headed freight grinding round the patio.... What you must do on anything but the smallest layout is to section the layout so you can identify which part of the layout has a fault when the cut out cuts. If you have isolator switches on the sections you can quickly switch off and switch back on section by section to identify where the problem is. Without isolator switches you can end up taking every piece of stock off the layout and still not know what's wrong. Over the past 55 years or so I have had everything from a loose point blade in a tunnel to a displaced layshaft on a Q1 stop things. No need to have isolated sections for running round etc but you do need to chunk it up into 20 feet mainline and 3'X3' or 9'X1' siding chunks to give a sporting chance of fixing faults in 10 minutes or so.

The Cheltenham Honeybourne section of line did suffer from being a late comer, built to prevent other railway building such as the Midland / MSWJR Aschurch - Winchcombe -Andoversford line as much as for any strategic purpose. It suffered from the Midlands parallel Birmingham Cheltenham route being one of the fastest bits of the LMS with many speeds in the high 90s recorded along the long straight through Ashchurch and Swindon Village something the GWRs twisting corkscrew through the Cotswold Foothills could not possibly equal. In practice it seemed to replace the GWRs awkward Over Junction-Ledbury Tunnel - Malvern route from Gloucester to Birmingham for freight with trains turning left at Honeybourne to access the north west of Birmingham via Worcester. This avoided the Snow Hill tunnel bottle neck with traffic principally for the Midland at Saltley being routed through Stratford on Avon and Bordesley Junction. With iron ore traffic going via the SMjR most Honeybourne line traffic avoided Stratford on Avon entirely, leaving Stratford as effectively a terminus for Birmingham area suburban services with little through traffic. The line was used for excursion and extra traffic in the early 1960s, My parents lied to me that it was disused/ dieselised when I wanted to see it as a 9 year old in 1965. The 1969 picture is interesting, prior to 1957 the LMS platforms were much shorter and were not anything like as close to the GW line, The GW sort of jammed Malvern Road station into a cutting and despite being considerably closer to the town centre was still too far to walk, only St James Teminus of Cheltenham's 6 stations was anything like convenient for the town and that was a long way from the fashionable Promemade and town centre, the Midland and GW High street stations were technically on the high street but in reality about half a mile from the town. The Stratford line did provide a good GWR route for traffic from the Midlands to South Wales and seen in that light it makes sense, but passenger traffic was light and the Cornishman was really only a bit of showmanship operated over a longer slower route than the midland it only made sense by serving GW stations by connections at Wolverhampton and Snow Hill which could be served by one train rather than two portions from Snow Hill and Wolverhampton combining at say Stourbridge Junction or Worcester and running on the Midland line south of Worcester. The proximity of High Street halt to St James Station and the need for Auto trains to reverse in Malvern Road station made St James to Honeybourne locals farcical, lord knows how they coped when they had a 94XX instead of an Auto engine, but they should have been popular with Winchcombe residents if the line had actually gone to Winchcombe as promised (and as proposed by the MSWJR) but Winchcombe Station was at Gretton a mile of so away. Genius, they built a tunnel especially and still didn't get to Winchcombe. The upside is the GWR have preserved it, the downside they have over extended it the wrong way and instead of connecting to BR near the racecourse for lucrative race specials have extended to Broadway so coach tours can do a one way trip over the line instead of a round trip. Little changes.

Its not your unfamiliarity with the software but your failure to realise the track formation won't fit the space. The left bottom pointwork needs at least another 6" sideways Ok I could make it fit with soldering iron, solvent, hacksaw and severely distorted points but its not worth the hassle. Much of the plan is pretty un operable the facing sidings at top left and middle sidings off the short headshunt are awkward. I would get CJ Freezers 60 plans for small Layouts and expand one of his 6X4 layouts to fit your space as this layout looks like providing hours of derailments and general frustration and makes very poor use of your space.

I make the gradients 3" in 10 feet... better than 1 in 36 or about the same as Newton Abbot to Plymouth. The upper track only has to clear the lower one 60mm for trains 5mm for track 10mm framing 75mm or 3" Edit A current generation bog standard Hornby King and 6 Airfix Centenaries sailed up a curving 3rd radius 1 in 33 earlier this evening, a bit embarrassing for an 8P as our standard load for a 5MT is seven, but if you "only" have 10 X 6 it could be great fun. Just cries out for DCC..... 2 trains on each main line plus the branch.

It makes an awful lot of sense for companies selling predominantly to the UK market to manufacture their own product in the UK rather than outsourcing to companies the other side of the world. The ability to make items "to order" rather than have bast inventories stuck in a container has to make economic sense in an era where poor estimation of likely sales lead to fleets of unlikely locos like Adams Radials waiting forlornly on dusty shelves in model shops from Camborn to Wick, and sets of coaches sitting idle waiting for the day when Mr Lu can be bothered to make the Brake/ Restaurant / Kitchen Car/ TGS/ DVT what ever needed to complete the set. I admire Dapol's engineering in N gauge and don't know what I would do without their ex Airfix kits and trackside figures so I wish them every success with this UK manufacturing initiative.

How would you know which colour a Waverley route V2 was unless you took a rag and some white spirit and cleaned off the dirt? Poundland Matt black is a good match for dirty BR Lined black and dirty BR Green I read a book by Charlie Meacher which refers to N2s and Gresley inside cylinder locos in general being loathed and detested by fitters due to appalling detail design.....

Should be Ok but allow a few inches extra around the edges as Streamilne points have grown larger over the years. 2nd radius curves (18") and 2ft Streamline points should be fine, and now we have 3rd and 4th radius set track unknown back in the 60s so no more kinky sub 2ft radius flexi curves. The gradients need careful attention so no 1" framing under the tracks where levels cross. A fiddle siding somewhere to swap cassettes a la Crewlisle would be good. There is a lack of loco storage, coach storage, wagon storage, but in 1961 if you had a K's 14XX a H/D Castle, a H/D 8F, a Farish Prairie tank a Gaiety pannier 9 coaches and 20 wagons you were doing well. The upper station is a bit odd in that the branch train can only reverse in the middle platform... It took me a while to work that one out. It looks like it will work very well and in a very railway like manner, keeping a couple of operators amused even if it wont satisfy the fine scale end of the hobby who would struggle to fit a parcels bay into the area this layout occupies

I would wait until Bachmann bring out a working shunting horse because without one I can't see how you would shunt the goods shed.

Its all to do with these new fangled controllers. You want a pair of Marshall 3s or similar, proper 1950s technology. Or a pair of anything, not a double unit as all too often one circuit interferes with the other.

It needs a fiddle yard on the right hand end and everything shoved to the right as far as possible. As drawn you can't get trains into the carriage sidings or parcels depot as the head shunt is too short. Making the loco spur a platform and putting a couple of carriage sidings between it and the baseboard edge would be good as would a loco release crossover between the platforms

The problem I have with scale rods is they snap. Romford crankpins snap, the retainer comes un soldered one rod comes off the other twists hideously and snaps. my locos have to work hard so I don't use scale rods if I can help it. Crank pins are big items in full size and wear is a big problem with the small Romford type crankpins. I have been re drilling Triang Chassis to different wheelbases with Romford Markits wheels and using various rods, Mainline/ Bachmann are pretty good and can easily be opened out to take Triang 10 BA crank pins. It is absolutely vital that the rod length and wheelbase are absolutely identical down to a couple of thou, otherwise the loco will run like a three legged armadillo. The Later Romford wheels take the Triang - Triang/ Hornby etc crank pins, some very early wheels were not drilled at all. I believe they are 10 BA certainly smaller than 8 BA while the return crank screw on Flying Scotsman etc is I believe 12BA The centre axle drive 0-6-0 can be re wheeled really easily with Markits oversize axles which are a direct fit in the chassis, why oh why didn't Romford do these 40 years ago! The crank pins need a spacer, a 10 BA washer under the shoulder of the pin on the pick up side to stop the rod shorting on the insulated tyre and either the holes on the wheels need opening out to take the fixed pins or the rods need the fixed pins pushed out and opened up to take screwed in pins as per the centre axle. Front axle drive chassis are probably similar.

I prefer to integrate the railway into the garden without a baseboard except under stations. Apart from one terminus station it barely affects the garden at all, just the step in the wall shown, it crosses two paths on the level and runs along walls and around the boundary of the lawn before diving through an 8 ft or so tunnel to a station built on a ledge in a grass bank. Its the complete opposite to the Original Post but achieves the same object of not having raised wooden baseboards impinging on the garden when the railway is not running. The downside is the very high maintenance is involved in ground level railways,

Many years ago we used to get white metal kits to fit old Triang Chassis which we fitted with Romford wheels. 40 years on they are still working though probably relegated to the bottom of the scrap box. So why not get an old Triang chassis and Markits Romford wheels and stick the T9 body on it. It will probably run for years and even pull a worthwhile train and stay on the track, 2 things our T9 can't get the hang of. Thus far it shows no sign of motor problems, but as it won't pull the skin off a rice pudding it isn't exactly overstressed.

Your best bet is to get in at an early stage and have a new build adapted to take rooms in the roof during construction. My friend did this, strengthened ceiling/ floor and an RSJ along the roof ridge of his bungalow leaving 30ft plus length of roof unobstructed for his layout. Sadly he was forced to convert it into bedrooms for his ever expanding family. There are lots of building regulations, trouble is lots of people don't take a blind bit of notice now local councils are no longer required to deal with them. A 2015 new build near me has no fire escape or fire retardant corridor or stair well for the 2nd floor as it was certified as a 3 bed but now had 2 loft bedrooms and the "Study" is now bedroom no 6. All this in a "Similar size" replacement for a 2 bed cottage

I just wish we could buy something like that today, I find getting gears to mesh a complete nightmare

Bodmin Parkway where Bodmin and Wenford meets BR is a near ideal real 2017 location for modellers, HSTs the GW Sleeper, Voyagers, 66s, etc on the main line and 64XX/ Beattie/ T9/ 42XX etc and 3 or 4 coaches leaving from the back platform, with carriage sheds, steep gradients, lots of trees and bridges and steep sided valleys for scenic breaks. and all on a sharpish curve. Near perfection.

You don't have much overhead clearance where the frames cross. We use 2X1 framing on its side for cross pieces to maximise clearance and a 2X1 frame put on the operating well side of the upper level with the lower edge level with the bottom of the cross pieces and the top projecting above the baseboard surface to provide a lip to stop stock escaping while maximising the headroom

I think glue is a great short term fix.. However I have dismantled numerous araldited and evostuck kits both white metal and aluminium and can honestly say I have never found one that was stuck together robustly. Maybe a superfine tip and some superfine mig wire?

I have used Relcos for 30 odd years and they work extremely well and would heartily recommend them. They work well with resistance controls providing better starting but we use them with variable voltage controllers OnTrack and Hammant and Morgan Variable Transformers which give beautifully smooth slow speed running on track that has not been cleaned for weeks, Obviously they can't cope with thick layers of traction tyre gunge but generally they seem better at coping with ordinary run of the mill grime than PWM control and the locos run much smoother. They aren't a universal panacea, but if you want to spend your train time running trains instead of cleaning track they are an excellent investment. I have never known one get hot but ours are very well ventilated anyway.