vulcanbomber

Just started to renew my interest again and discovered all my old pictures no longer exist, therefore decided to start afresh These are first pics of the room and overall layout

City of Bath just pulling into the station.

View of the hotel in the early evening sun

Don't really want to buy yet another bit of software, hoping to do it with JMRi ot Engine Driver

New locomotive brought off Rails of Sheffield via eBay for £41, as returned stock with faults A few problems which I have managed to sort out. Missing step which I prefabricated our of plasticard, why don't they make this part of cast chassis, it's very easy to break off Poorly running motor, I managed to adjust the brush pickup and it appears to be running alright now. However I think the motor is off very poor quality wouldn't be surprised if it has to be replaced at some point Fitted real coal and moved cover for lamp iron. Gave all the black plastic a coat of grey black The loco number is missing on the other side, but since it will always run in this direction not a problem at the moment, but will be solved by fitting brass ones. I'll let it run in for a while before any more tweaks I see the new one will be be over £150, so a bargain I think

Completed

Probably not since it's not quite so exposed to the Steam engines.Might try and add a bit of green slime growth close to the river,if I can come up with the right method.Might have a look at how Little Muddle have done the harbour wall,but it's a lot of pages to wade through!

When I took the picture of Etarre on the Viaduct, I noticed how clean the stonework looked, so I started adding a bit of weathering today, This is the first pass

View of the scenic area in front of the storage loops, all of this is detachable from the main baseboard The Perspex is for grandchildren fingers prevention! The storage loops themselves . The area below the camera bends around to the left to form a right angle and holds the church. The area to the right is open. this means that with my mobile controller I can judge the stopping point for trains entering the loops. Either by the position of the loco or in the other direction by the position of the last carriage or truck in the train.

Couple of views of the long goods trains still need to get some GWR stone paint to finish water crane

Etarre on the viaduct with it's pullman coaches. I supported the phone on the track in front of the loco, and then used Google Assistant to take the photo for me whilst I held the phone steady

Autocoach now coupled up again and going past the gasworks at dusk

With the locomotive disconnected from the Autocoach I realised how big the coupling was. I had assumed it was a one piece coupling and had cut it off the other end, but at the time decided to leave well alone. .Coming back to the problem and doing a bit of research for a replacement, I realised that if you just pulled the coupling it would unclip and could be replaced by Hornby part R8099 Only problem you have to buy an expensive bag of 10. I have found a home for another one on an old Hornby brake van with similar problem. W

In view of the diabolical weather outside decided to run with lights on, including B set

not sure what the double post is about

One third of the monetary value of British exports in 1913 was from coal, mainly to the continent

Interesting what you say about scalescenes and plastic. Personally I prefer wills plastic sheet and have use it extensively on Barkham Green Just give it that 3D feel. for instance just look at the texture of the wall by the hotel

Had real trouble remembering how to post pics, in future I will probably do one at a time The pics got posted all wrong and I had to do a major edit, and it didn't let me post much comment What I was going to say Well I have discovered that using my new controller I can park the trains more closely together in the loops which means I can now get a small coal train in loop 5 as well as the Auto coach and B set, just need another new loco that's all! ( borrowed loco off Auto coach) It also means I can do some shunting, so decided to make up a new train schedule of on collecting and delivering coal wagons to the gas works. I did briefly toy with the idea of using Kyadees for the wagons which have to be uncoupled but decided it was too much faffing around and a bent paper clip works very well!

Trying my new phone camera Pannier going to collect wagons from gasworks Parked the Brakes van Collected wagons Coupled back up to goods van

Time to get this thread going again. I had got bored with using automation to control the trains, and also didn't like the idea of sitting in front of my control panel. I have now discovered a wifi based controller called Engine Driver of which I have included some screen shots. This means I can now follow the trains around the layout and have no need of any automation to guide the train into storage loops etc, since I can now get close enough to the trains to do it myself. I have installed JMRI on an laptop which acts as an interface between my ECoS and my android phone which runs the software. This has freed the laptop up so I can display a schedule using Excel which is easy to change and can now be kept open all the time for reference. The main throttle, which I have set to control two locomotives, which are selected from the train roster held in JMRI As well as controlling trains I can also control all the points and give them real names This is what I think is the clever bit. Using JMRI I created a list of routes. Then using one of the Panelpro panels I added sensors to the panel, which I discovered can be shown as text, eg Loop 1, loop2. and can be operated just like switches. These can then be made to reference the routes in JMRI and the colour changes as the route is selected. Not only that I can also add text to detail the loco stored in each loop , which is obviously easy to change. There is a route page built into the app, but I couldn't get it to work and it wouldn't show the trains in each loop anyway. So there you are from my phone I can control locomotives, points and routes and therefore no longer need any other control panels. The ECoS now only acts as an interface to the DCC system and I don't use it to control the layout. I gave the system a full test this afternoon and it was much more fun, so expect more pics of Barkham shortly

I have 6 storage loops and one of the loops No. 5 have three blocks A,B,C which can hold up to 3 trains . 1, 2 & 3. At the start all blocks are occupied, then i manually select and move the train 1 out of block A. Then I automatically want train 2 to move into block A and train 3 to move to block B, leaving block C clear. I want this to continue for ever with the trains always moving forward if the next block becomes empty. This is the only piece of automation ,I want on the layout I am just starting to use JMRI and Engine driver to control the layout. It is looking very promising at the moment I have track sensors installed in Blocks A,B,C from the time the layout was fully automated using Rocrail With the advent of Engine Driver I find it more interesting to control most the layout manually, since I no longer need to fixed in one spot in front of the control panel. I imagine I can do with JMRI but haven't any idea how to start.

I have only just set routes up in the routes table of jmri so have still to test them. Is "swipe to bring screen from the right" a Engine Driver preference setup?

Thanks for the idea of using a phone as the throttle, I'm now playing around with Engine Driver on my Android phone

Just started playing with this software, which is completely changing the way I operate my layout, so much easier to walk around following the trains rather than sitting at a dcc controller and looking at a panel to see where the trains are. I have set up routes, I believe you can swipe through screen to go from switches/throttle/routes, but I don't see how to get to routes

We had one as bold as brass on our patio last year, in the middle of town.