jamespetts

I am indeed aware of the LBSCR New Cross terminus - that is part of the inspiration for this layout. It is very hard to find a track plan for it, however. I note that there appears to be somewhat inconsistent information about the history of the East London Railway; some sources seem to put the connexion with the Metropolitan/Metropolitan District Railways at 1880, and others at 1886. Quite when the terminus was used as opposed to through running to Croydon is not entirely clear, but some sources that I have seen suggest that the LBSCR ran all the passenger services onto LBSCR lines, including those to Croydon, but that the GER ran goods trains (and then ran passenger trains to New Cross (SER) when the SER ceased to run from Liverpool Street. I have ordered a book which I hope might clarify things. The sources do seem to suggest that you are correct that the Metropolitan District ran to New Cross (LBSCR), so that might be an interesting opportunity to model that line rather than the Metropolitan, which tends to get considerably less attention; the only kits available of locomotive and carriages are 3d printed, which should be interesting. Sadly, the carriage kits are only available in a more crude type of material and no interior is available.

If you want unattended running, had you ever considered computer control instead of a loop? It might be easier to fit an interesting layout into the space without a loop.

Inspired by a fusion of the classic "Minories" layout and the only known photograph of the old Central Croydon station: here is a track plan for a Victorian suburban terminus: The coloured lines represent fiddle yards (blue for locomotives, green for everything else) and the white lines represent the scenic area. The upper part of the diagram represents the viewing area: the lower and left edges of the diagram are walls in the room where this is intended to fit. The unusual fiddle yard design is intended to take account of the available space and the (probable) inability to couple automatically on a curve. The idea is that the trains will be hauled into the left hand fiddle yard, then propelled into the fiddle yard below the station, where a locomotive will be waiting at the far end to couple to it: the locomotive that propelled it in will then uncouple and rest in the locomotive siding section of the fiddle yard. I should prefer a simpler means of arranging the fiddle yards, but have not thought of a way of doing this effectively. The intention is for the layout to be computer automated. The minimum fiddle yard curve radius is 600mm. All scenic area curve radii are >1m. This is intended to use Peco Bullhead track in the scenic area and Streamline in the fiddle yards. It is intended to represent a fictional south of the river East London Railway terminus circa 1880, with LBSCR and Metropolitan Railway services. The intention is that the LBSCR services off peak will mainly use the middle platform, but sometimes the lower platform, the locomotive being released on the centre tracks, re-coaling (as the A1s had a limited coal capacity) before coupling to the front of the train; the LBSCR peak time services using both platforms with kickback working and the Metropolitan Railway services using the upper platform with kickback working at all times. Locomotive coal trains would reverse in the platforms off peak. I am not sure at this stage whether I will build this layout (or a version of it) as my other layouts are still at relatively early stages and I currently plan to develop those more before building another (and deciding which, if any, to build; other possibilities include using the space for storage, an 009 layout, or a 20th century London Underground layout). This is intended to fit in the last space available for a layout in my shed. However, the improved availability of pre-grouping items ready to run does make this project more attractive, even if the Metropolitan stock is likely to have to be kit built (although the layout can at an early stage be imagined in 1879, just before the spur to the Whitechapel & Bow opened to allow through running to the Metropolitan).

I have just received my three from the second batch in SR olive green (without numbers, as I had requested, so that I can renumber these myself without having to remove any numbers). Out of interest, has anyone any pictures of the LSWR livery ones? I do not believe that I have seen what these look like.

It is interesting to note that the similar E class were used on London Bridge to Portsmouth trains in the 1930s (hauling LSWR stock by the looks of it, so that SECR locomotives were hauling LSWR stock over an LBSCR line): see here and here. I wonder whether the D class ever hauled similar trains?

I use mine now only for programming.

I approve of being fully recovered.

Interesting. How well does the body shell fit on with this?

Most carriages of this age did not have steam heating, though some may have been retro-fitted later. These are intended to be of 1880s vintage, whereas steam heating generally was introduced in the later 1890s onwards. In the 1880s, passengers had to make do with blankets and acetate bottles.

I have just discovered that my original post contained an error regarding module addressing. After many hours of trial and error, I have worked out the correct method for module addressing, and have updated my instructions above. I have also added information regarding the correct setting for RailCom Rerpot.

The coach ends are very interesting - the brake end windows and the strong tumblehomes are very LBSCR, which only increases my surprise that they are (apparently) not planning this livery. As to the full brake, it would seem to have more windows that many full brakes of the era had (although this is possibly consistent with Midland and GWR examples). However, a 6 wheel full brake in Southern olive green might be very useful for my 1930s layout (especially as these are plausibly LBSCR-looking), as these were used far longer than the equivalent passenger vehicles on, e.g., parcels trains or on secondary cross-country trains as brake vehicles, so this would definitely be a worthwhile thing to add to the range.

The larger pad is ground, I believe, at least if this is the same specification as my MX618N18 non-sound chip that I have stay alive fitted in a Dapol Class 50. Common positive can usually be found in the lighting circuits somewhere.

This is exceedingly interesting. My initial reaction, which I posted in the comments on Hattons' website on my mobile telephone during my lunch' break is that I am very surprised that they have not announced these in LBSCR livery. I remain surprised at the lack of LBSCR given the popularity of this company and abundance of locomotives for it, but thought that it might be adding a more nuanced set of comments, since it is evident that people from Hattons are reading this thread. First of all, it is a splendid thing that there is a serious effort being made to make pre-grouping carriages. The 4- and 6-wheel carriages were ubiquitous for decades and this will make a huge difference to the viability of the pre-grouping period. If these are a success, and I hope that they will be, they are likely to make it more viable for other manufacturers to release pre-grouping rolling stock and locomotives as there will be things to run with earlier era locomotives. I can understand why the decision has been made, at this really quite early stage of UK ready to run pre-grouping production, to use generic bodies with multiple liveries: the immense proliferation of marginally different types of carriage is a very difficult thing to mass produce economically. One can only hope that increasing interest in pre-grouping models will make it more viable in the future to produce a wider range of more specific rolling stock, including more pre-grouping bogie stock. I might have been inclined to be more favourably disposed to an intermediate solution between a fully generic profile as here and several generic profiles to accommodate, e.g., arc roof, cove roof, high waisted, low waisted, etc., but the economics of this may not have been viable. This may occur with other manufacturers in the future. For my own part, my preferred period to model is pre-grouping, but I am instead building a 1930s layout due to lack of sufficient ready to run rolling stock and locomotives. These carriages would not by themselves fill enough of a gap, but, at least for the companies for which these are passably plausible representations of the real carriages, these make good progress. I do plan to make my 1930s layout back-datable to the 1910s, so any progress in pre-grouping is of potential assistance in that respect, although the lack of LBSCR hinders this. Likewise, I do have an idea to build a smaller 00 gauge layout broadly on the "Victorian Minories" theme (set in the 1880s) that would suit some of these 4-wheelers very well, but the ideal livery for those would be the LBSCR, which is not planned, which is somewhat disappointing. In any event, any serious progress in pre-grouping rolling stock is an excellent thing even if some of the specifics do not suit all tastes.

I did look into this in some detail when first choosing the software to use, and chose TrainController over iTrain specifically because I concluded that iTrain could not do these things. Do you think that there is a way of doing these things in iTrain? If so, I should be very interested indeed to know specifically what that way of doing things is.

I, too, am in the process of planning a fully computer controlled N gauge layout: . My plan is to have not only computer automated trains stopping at the stations and being selected from fiddle yards, but also shunting/reversing of terminating locomotive hauled trains and use of carriage sidings. As a result of this, I have looked into this in detail. For my own purposes, I decided in the end to use the TrainController software. I did this after testing it against JMRI on a specially built automation test layout: see here for the PeerTube video of this in action. I chose TrainController over JMRI because JMRI does not have sufficient built-in automation features (e.g. it has no built-in functions for schedules) to allow any real level of complexity robustly. It is possible in principle to make JMRI work for automation using scripts, but for any non-trivial case, this gets very complex very quickly and is either not robust or easily maintainable (e.g., you would need to do some major re-engineering of the code in your scripts to make a minor alteration to the schedule), or, if you added the necessary abstraction layers yourself, would amount to you having to code a substantial piece of complex software in a scripting language not suited to the task which could easily be broken by changes in updates (and this has already happened to something vaguely like this). I did look into iTrain, but found that it also had insufficient abstraction features for my needs: in particular, it would not allow for choosing one of a set of trains to run from one of a set of places to one of a set of destinations, which of the sets in each case being chosen being algorithmic and either determinable by macros or randominsed (or some combination of both). iTrain also does not seem to allow the scripts/macros permitted by TrainController. It is possible that the next version of iTrain will be better in this regard, but it is very difficult to judge this without knowing in more detail the actual features of this software. It is apparently due for release at the end of the year, but this has not been officially announced so far as I can tell, so this is far from certain. There are other things to consider besides the software, including: (1) DCC electrics; (2) layout control electrics; (3) feedback; (4) coupling; and (5) reliability and stay-alive capacitors. DCC electrics Building through hole electronic kits is not too difficult, but if you wish to avoid these, then I suspect that you would do well with the Roco Z21 command station. This is a sophisticated command station that works with many different types of bus (more on which below) and is known to be reliable. I have not used this type myself, however, as my N gauge layout is using a kit built unit from Hans Deloof (this unit's main drawback is that it does not allow computer controlled DCC programming, but I get around that by using the command station salvaged from the automation test layout for programming). For my automation test layout, I chose the less expensive Digikeijs DR5000, which is capable, but, I found, less reliable: it has a tendency to freeze and ignore all commands of any sort until powered of and on again occasionally. Layout control electrics This need not be connected in any way to your DCC electrics, although a multi-bus compatible command station such as the Z21 makes using the same command station for both an attractive option. Many accessories (such as point motors) are controlled using the DCC protocol, and can be controlled by using the same DCC bus as used for the track. However, this has two disadvantages: (1) on anything other than a small layout, using the same bus as the that which powers the track can make for unreliable operation due to electrical interference; and (2) the DCC bus does not allow for two way communication. You can circumvent issue no. 1 either by having a very small layout (e.g. the size of the automation test layout in my video), or by using a separate bus for accessory control. This can either be a DCC bus, or an accessory specific bus, such as LocoNet. Beware that there are some accessory buses which are not compatible with TrainController or iTrain, such as the MERG CBus or the NRMA's new LCC, so bear this in mind when choosing a bus. I chose the LocoNet bus as this is widely supported in both software and hardware. The LocoNet bus also solves problem no. 2 as it is a two way protocol. I chose to power my points using servos and Dingo servo mounts. These are robust and allow for reliable frog polarity switching using microswitches. Do not use frog juicers - these rely on detecting (rather then preventing) a short circuit and are inherently prone to difficulty. Feedback As you will probably have gathered by now, feedback (that is, hardware to detect where on your layout that your trains are and then communicate this to your computer) is essential for computer control. There are many different ways of doing feedback, from reed switches and magnets to infra-red sensors, but perhaps the most satisfactory is the current drop sensor. These detect whether anything is drawing current in a particular section of track and report this to the command station. Because of the need to communicate from the sensor to the command station (rather than the other way around), sensors for detecting trains cannot be connected using the DCC bus. I use the LocoNet bus, as set out above. Digikeijs produce a good range of LocoNet compatible current sensors, which work (I am told) without problem with the Roco Z21 command station. They also work with TrainController. These connect using the LocoNet bus. If you are doing feedback this way, you will need to make many more electrically isolated sections of track than would otherwise be necessary. Make sure that turnouts are fully isolated from every exit road (are effectively in their own section) and that a short section beyond the turnout be isolated separately from a main platform road if you are to do shunting so that the software can detect the presence of a locomotive entering the station even if there are already carriages in the platform. (If you did not do this, the locomotive would simply be entering another already occupied section, and the software would not know where it was and would fail to stop it in time). One thing to consider with feedback is whether you want RailCom. RailCom is a system whereby the train detector circuit can read the DCC address (and sometimes the direction) of the locomotive in the section. (This is a limited exception to the general principle that DCC is a one way only data bus). Normally, once fed with the initial positions of locomotives, the computer will keep track of where everything is, so it is not necessary to have this system (which is more expensive than an ordinary feedback unit) installed in every section on the layout. However, where it can help is in the fiddle yard, where you might want manually to add and remove locomotives; this will save you the trouble of manually entering the data as to what train is in the section every time on the computer. Be aware that you need RailCom compatible decoders as well as RailCom compatible sensors for this to work, but it is feasible to have some sensors equipped with RailCom and some without. If you are ever uncoupling your carriages from your locomotives, you will need a way of detecting carriages as, unless they have lighting bars or similar, they will not draw any current and not be detectable by current drop sensors. The normal way of dealing with this problem is to affix a 10k ohm resistor accross the axles of the front and rear carriage/brake van (and perhaps add to its weight a little to ensure good contact) so that some current is drawn when the carriages/wagons are in the section. If you are re-marshalling carriages or wagons, you may need the resistor on many of the carriages/wagons in the rake. Accurate stopping is important for automation. TrainController and other packages do this by calibrating the speed of each of your locomotives by testing them using a piece of track of known length and running the locomotive between those two points at different speed steps, timing how long that it takes on each occasion. It then uses this data together with information about when a train entered a particular section to calculate when to stop a train in order to stop at a fixed distance beyond the entry of the section. Some members of MERG have tested and found that this can be made unreliable by inconsistent locomotive speeds depending on the temperature of the motor. There is not an easy solution to this. However, one thing that is important to ensuring that this works accurately is to use a decoder that is equipped with BEMF - this measures electrical signals generated by the motor when running to work out how fast that the motor is turning to ensure that it be kept at a constant actual speed for any given commanded speed. Coupling If you want to do any coupling/uncoupling, you will need to think carefully about how to automate this. The default couplings that come with UK N gauge rolling stock do not cope well with automatic uncoupling, and also look awful. I have decided to use the Dapol EasiFit couplers. They can be uncoupled by a magnet (strictly, a pair of magnets, but the ones made by Dapol are in a single unit) under or on the track. They are also much smaller than the default couplers. The Dapol supplied magnets are bulky and sit above the trackl but it should be possible to use smaller rare earth magnets buried in the cork with a thin sheet of polystyrene ("Plastikard") between it and the track (and underneath the ballast) to hold them in place. Note that you will need a pair of these on opposide sides of the track with opposite polarities to work these couplers. This type of coupling is demonstrated in the video. For any couplings that need not ever be uncoupled automatically, you can use either the default couplers, or, infinitely better looking, the Dapol NEMCoup dummy knuckle couplers, which are easy to use and inexpensive. Reliability and stay-alive capacitors Because you are running the layout from a computer that cannot intervene (or often even know) when things have gone wrong, it is important to make sure that your layout is reliable, so use good components and techniques and make sure that your track is well laid. This is not the place to give general reliability advice, but there is much to be found on various fora and elsewhere. One particular aspect of reliability worth mentioning, however, is stay alive capacitors. Stay alive capacitors store a small amount of energy to allow a locomotive to keep going for a short time even if because of some dirt on the track or wheels or badly laid track there is no electrical power reaching the locomotive. Without doing this, locomotives may often stall and be unmoveable without a push, especially at lower speeds. There is some very good information about stay alive capacitors from the retailer YouChoos here. For N gauge, I have had good results with the 470uF tantalum capacitors and the SACC16 charging circuit using Zimo DCC chips. *** In any event, very best wishes with your project, and I shall look forward to updates.

Thank you for your thoughts. As to the number of operators, I plan to have this automated and computer controlled, so that should not be an issue, although it might be fun to run it with multiple human operators, too. As to the locomotive sheds and servicing points, this is an interesting thought. Bear in mind that this arrangement has to work equally well for the Bournehampton guise as the Port Tawe guise, however. Do you know of anywhere where I can find more detail as to the differences between the two in operation and also some examples of each so that I can compare the two? I can certainly imagine the LBSCR/LMS (depending on the guise) area being a a servicing point, although did not some servicing points also have sheds, such as Ranaleigh Bridge?

I have updated the track plan for this layout: This is explained in more detail on the layout thread here.

Because the wiring for the fiddle yard of the N gauge layout that sits below where this layout will be has not yet been completed, I have not been able to start on the baseboards for this, which is why there have not been updates recently. However, I have given some consideration to one aspect of the track plan, and made some alterations to re-instate the double junction a version of which was present on earlier plans (albeit not in this form). Here is the latest track plan: I have also slightly lengthened two of the platforms. The purpose of doing this is to work better with the Port Tawe guise of the layout, in which all GWR trains from west Wales will have to use platforms 4 and 5 (as platforms 6, 7 and 8 will only be accessible by the LMS shed, not the GWR shed, as the LBSCR and LSWR sheds as marked on the plan will be designated in this guise), and it does not make sense to have a single lead junction in a significant terminus of a double track main line. This should still be plausible for the Bournehampton guise of the layout, as pairs of double junctions of this sort were a prominent feature at Brighton station. Operationally, this allows a train to be arriving on platform 5 and departing on platform 4 simultaneously from either of the two mainlines, as well as train arriving or departing on platform 5 from the LBSCR/west Wales line at the same time as a train is arriving or departing on platform 4 from the LSWR/London line in each case.

Given that it appears that there are considerable complexities and difficulties with any given approach in this regard, what I will do is renumber the locomotives as originally intended without at the present undertaking the repainting work, but make sure when varnishing to mask an area small enough so as to allow me to have a go at the repainting at some future time. Thank you all for your assistance so far.

Precisely: not having developed the skill necessary to produce good quality results with brush painting, this technique is not suitable for use by me on a new model.

Thank you for your response - do I understand that you imagine white primer being used here as the actual colouring paint without a top coat of actual white paint? I do not imagine that a brushed finish would be satisfactory.

Thank you all for your responses. To clarify - is the issue with: (1) the amount of paint that an aerosol dispenses (in which case, could this not be solved simply by moving the can further away?); (2) how widely that the paint is dispersed (in which case, would not masking suffice to deal with this?); or (3) the inability of masking to prevent penetration of paint around detailed areas in the vicinity in which I wish to apply the paint (in which case, this would potentially be an issue with airbrush spraying, too)? JiLo - do I understand that you suggest that Halfords white primer plus varnish would be a sufficient paint surface without the need for white paint of any sort (other than the primer)? I am reluctant to brush paint on account of the relatively poor and uneven finish that this gives.

Thank you for your replies. As to the aerosol issue, do you mean that it is not possible to mask securely enough to prevent paint from being sprayed underneath the boundaries of the mask? If that is so, I do not see how an airbrush would be an advantage, since that would also spray over the boundaries of the mask; it would just have less overspray in other areas far from the mask boundary. If not, then it is not clear how this is not a problem that could be solved by masking the whole body shell, inside and out, aside from the specific area that I am intending to paint. It would be helpful if you (either or both) could elaborate on precisely what the masking issue is in this context.

Arising out of discussions in this thread, I am interested in overpainting small, rectilinear areas of a Dapol N gauge class 50 that are currently NSE blue in white. I am generally confident with masking (including masking of windows) and spraying with aerosols, but I am not so confident about overpainting a darker colour (NSE blue in this case) with a lighter colour (white). I have tried before to over-paint a darker colour (black) with a lighter colour (yellow), and that was not very successful; I had to remove the black paint with a fibreglass pen first, which was problematic, but just about managed it in the end (albeit ended up damaging the fibre optic lights in the class 47 on which I was working). I do not think that it will be practical to remove the paint just in the areas that I want to over-paint (especially around the cab door window, which has very small raised/indented areas), and I am not up to stripping the whole model and re-painting it afresh. Is there any workable way of doing this? Are some paints less translucent than others? As white is the colour that I am after, I do not need to worry about finding rail specific colours if there is a particular type of paint that will do this well. I wonder about whether primer would help - I have Tamiya plastic primer (grey); might this be more opaque than ordinary white paint? Would a white primer be better, perhaps; or would priming than overpainting leave the finished paint too thick and proud of the rest of the paintwork? Ideas would be appreciated. If this is not really practical without stripping and repainting from scratch, I may just have to tolerate the incorrect patterning around the door/cantrail.

Gosh, yes, I see that. Some of these variations are extremely subtle.