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DutyDruid

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  1. DutyDruid
    Having just walked through a typical operating session of the CORy I thought it might be worth translating that story into something a little closer to home so that it might make a bit more sense to those more used to an English setting than to an American one.  I’ve chosen as my model the Meon Valley Railway in the 1950s as it is the stuff of legend in the Club and we can all relate to the places I’m going to describe; and for good measure I’m going to describe the real railway rather than the fictional one that has spawned Soberton and Corhampton.
    As we all know, the line ran from Fareham (ok, Gosport if you want to be pedantic) up the valley to Alton.  For the purpose of keeping this simple let’s consider that in the “up” direction there was the junction at Knowle where there was a siding for the Asylum (coal), the brick works and the abattoir; there were stations at Wickham, Droxford and Alton; a trailing siding at Mislingford and a facing siding at Farringdon.  I am deliberately skipping the stations towards the northern end of the line just to keep it simple – they would all be shunted in the same way as the either Droxford or Wickham.
     
    Fareham being the main junction, freight bound for the Valley would be brought in a block to Fareham Yard and a train assembled much as I described in the last article for cars being sorted in Chelan Yard. 
     
    Rather than individual industries, each station and siding on the line had a goods shed, a cattle dock and space for a coal merchant to operate; there were also a variety of yard cranes capable of handling containers, but not at all stations or sidings.  The traffic would have been a variety of vans for general goods in, seasonal fruit out, cattle bound for either Fareham or Alton markets (or coming from market), coal and the odd special wagon with an agricultural machine of some sort.
     
    A locomotive (often a T9 or 700 class “Black Motor”) would arrive at Fareham from Fratton to pick up that day’s train for the Valley.  I can’t be certain about this without a lot of research, but it seems likely that it would have shunted wagons from its train at the Funtley/Knowle conurbation (remember: brickworks/slaughter house plus coal for the asylum with several layby loops) and then on to Wickham. 
     
    At Wickham there was a passing loop and the majority of the goods train could be left on the loop line (or set back into the long siding) while the loco shunted the yard.  If a passenger train was due in either direction the signalman would easily be able to direct operations so that it (or they) could pass the goods train.
     
    Shunting done, and once more off up the branch.  The next event is the siding at Mislingford, there is a trailing connection so the siding can be shunted in the “up” direction.  The train is left on the running line with the brake screwed down in the brake van, the Guard acts as Shunter and the loco exchanges wagons in the train.  While this is going on the train has absolute possession of the line between Wickham and Droxford and because on British railways passenger traffic is considered more important than freight – at least in terms of class of train and therefore priority – this particular move has to be conducted with all despatch in order to not impede the passage of the branch passenger, no matter how lowly it is. 
     
    All done at Mislingford, then off to Droxford.  Here access to the yard is laid out in the opposite direction from Wickham; what does this mean?  Well, if there are wagons for Droxford that need to be dropped off “now” then the train will have to stop in one of the platforms, the locomotive will have to uncouple and run round to the rear of the train, part the wagons that need to be dropped off and then shunt them, and then reassemble the train before running around again.  Whether this happens on this pass of the station or the down trip will depend on how busy the line is, essentially will the extra moves required be enough to impede passenger traffic?  One traffic item that would almost certainly be shunted at this point would be loaded cattle wagons due to the general restrictions related to animal welfare during transport by train.
     
    Off up the line again, at each station either a “Wickham” or “Droxford” style shunt will be repeated.  The siding at Farringdon is ignored on the up trip because it is a facing connection which means that any wagons the loco can pull out would have to be propelled on to Alton and placing any wagons in the sidings would leave the locomotive trapped behind it. 
     
    Once at Alton the train will pull into the yard, drop off any wagons whose documentation indicates onward transmission from Alton towards London, Basingstoke or Winchester, pick up any wagons that have paperwork to take them towards Fareham and set off down the branch again, shunting first the siding at Farringdon – possible this time because on the down journey because the connection into the yard is trailing – and then any station it has wagons for that it can access.
     
    All this would be governed by a system of waybills.  Of course, the real ones would be nothing like the ones I described in my last blog post – either in the UK or the US, but why should that stand in the way of us using that American system of car (wagon) cards and waybills on an English model railway?  No reason that I can see, so in the next chapter of this story I will share some thoughts about how we could try something like this at the Club and tell you about a piece of software that has just arrived in the post.
     
  2. DutyDruid

    Right Away Driver!

    By DutyDruid,

    In the last episode I described what had to be done to prepare for an operating session.  I’ve got my controller, I’ve got my car cards and waybills, and we’re off.  Well, if you’re wise – not quite.
     
    The first and probably the most important thing any wise operator should do is to quickly thumb through the cards and work out what we’ve got to do, do the cards match the cars in our train?  Are all the waybills for stations and industries we are going to call at?  If not why not?  Which industries will have to be switched (shunted) on the outwards journey and which on the return journey?  And are the cars in the right order to make this happen or do they need rearranging before you start?
    And then it was “Plug in your controller”, take the necessary actions on the control panel to make your train move and then speak to the Despatcher for permission to move off.  On Peter’s CORy lines that was achieve by calling over to him and asking permission to move off, on a bigger layout the operators all wear headsets and strict and realistic voice protocols have to be observed.
     
    And just a word about those “necessary actions on the control panel”; this layout was built pre-DCC so you will probably guess that that the wiring was a bit of a nightmare.  The simplest way to describe how it worked is Cab Control – but there were 6 possible cabs.  Cab selection was by way of a rotary switch with an on-off toggle switch in the output line; to select your cab you switched the output off, turned the rotary switch to your cab number and then turned the toggle switch back on.  The practice was to set your train rolling and drive it to a predefined stop just ahead of the next industry or station; stop, unplug controller, set the panel you are leaving to Cab 6, walk to the next control panel, set that to your cab number and then bring your train “in”.  The one thing you don’t do on a system like that is just turn the rotary switch because as sure as eggs are eggs you will pass a “live” cab and your train will lurch either forwards or backwards as it momentarily gets full throttle and (worst case) will fall off the layout.  Trust me, I did it one evening, it’s embarrassing.
     
    The Despatcher sets the road out of the classification yard up to the first junction – and we’re off, to our first stop. 
     
    On arrival at the first stop – a station with a passing loop – the train pulled up in the siding (loop).  A quick scan of the waybills told me that I needed to drop off one car to a factory at that location.  The rule was that if you were dropping a car off then you took the one that had been at that location for the longest time.  Car cards for the cars at that location we held on a hook in a foldback clip.  You put the card for the car you were dropping off on the bottom of the pile, the waybill that had brought it to that location in a separate clip, and then removed the car card from the top of the pile noting whether there was a waybill in it; if there was you had to work out what to do with the car, if there wasn’t you simply took it back to the classification yard at the end of your duty. 
     
    And then the fun really starts. 
     
    You need to work out the most efficient way of dragging the car you need to drop off out of your train and dragging the car you need to collect out of whichever spur it is in and putting it back in the train.  I had several DOS based games that I could use to practice the mental agility skills during quiet moments in the office. 
     
    The next event up the line is a spur – we have a car to drop but we can’t deal with it now because it’s a facing connection which means we’ll have to do it on the way back.
     
    Now we’re at a spur with a trailing connection that we can deal with.  We need to drop a car which means we need to pick one up too. 
     
    Same routine as before: pull the car card for the one we are dropping; remove and stow the waybill; put the car card on the bottom of the pile; remove the car card from the top of the pile; this one has still has a waybill in it which says that the car we are collecting has to be taken to the top end of the line and left in an exchange siding to be collected by an east-west train operated by a different company.  The switching here is pretty straightforward as the spur splits into two half way along its length and it’s simply dropping a car in the empty arm and collecting the outbound one from the other arm.  The car we need to drop is in the centre of our train so we split it, pulling the car to be dropped forward and then setting back into the spur.  Having dropped the inbound car and collected the outbound one we re-check the waybill and realise that the outbound car has to be marshalled at the rear of our train so we leave that car at the end of the spur, re-couple to the train, draw forward and then set back again onto the car awaiting collection.  And we’re off again.
     
    Say again despatch, over.
     
    The next “event” is another station with a siding (loop).  Despatch have just told us to get to the siding as fast as we can, a passenger train has been diverted and is heading our way.  Rush, rush, rush…
     
    We make it and the passenger train doesn’t have to stop and wait for us.  Passenger train out of the way, we have two cars to drop so two to collect, the spurs are at either end of the station complex and with a bit of careful switching we can shunt both of them in this direction meaning we don’t have to stop here again on the way south.  All done and we’re off again, just in time to get the message from Despatch “Go for Beans!” – time for coffee and a donut.  Next stop is the head of the line.  This needs us to contact Despatch again as we are joining an east-west route.  Now, where’s that coffee?
     
    We have three cars to drop, two we brought with us from Chelan Yard and the one we picked up on the way up.  We check the car cards/waybills and find that there are 4 cars in the exchange siding that need to go down to Chelan so we switch those around, re-marshal the train so that the one car we need to drop on the southbound trip is at the rear of the train (saves time, trust me).
     
    Despatch, this is train 123, request permission to hold CORy southbound, and we’re off again.
     
    As we approach the first station Despatch tell us to take the siding and await a bulk train coming north to pass us.  Curses, that slows us down but at least we did all the shunting we needed to here on the way north, or did we?  Check waybills for the cars we picked up at the exchange sidings, no, they are all for industry south of Chelan.  The bulk car carrier comes through, we check with Despatch and we’re off again.  We do the one-car exchange as we pass the last spur before Chelan, talk to despatch and roll back into the yard.
     
    Now, our turn of duty doesn’t end here; we talk to the Chelan Yardmaster and learn that the other operators who are working the east-west lines that pass through Chelan have picked up several cars that need to go south on the CORy to an industry at Entiat and for the exchange sidings at the southern end of the line.  This is in addition to the ones we have picked up at northern end of the line, all destined to this section of the line as well.  As a favour the Yardmaster re-marshals our train (I haven’t been cleared for that control panel yet) so I grab a second coffee but decline a second donut.
     
    Despatch this is Train 123, request to take CORy southern section.  Off we go.
     
    Basically, this leg of our journey is more of the same.  We drop half the cars in our remarshalled train at Entiat, the rest at the exchange sidings and then head north again dragging a motley collection of cars from there to Chelan to be classified for the next operating session.  When we arrive in Chelan we pull the controller for the last time, check that the car cards/waybills really do match the train we have just brought in and pass the whole lot over to Despatch.  We then get our hours logged (if you were trying to clock up hours for an NMRA operators award this was important).  Thank Peter for his hospitality and home to bed.  
  3. DutyDruid
    In what is most definitely the last episode of this story I’m going to talk about what happened in my last 4 months working in the US, but first a quick recap of the modelling scene in the US.
     
    Firstly, remember, there are virtually no clubs as we would recognise them, at least around Washington DC.  OK, I did eventually find one near where we lived, it was based in the Station House at Vienna, Virginia; they had built a multilevel layout in H0 inside the building; they held open houses about once a month where they operated the layout for members of the public.  I visited it maybe half a dozen times and whilst marvelling at the layout I don’t think was really railway modelling as we would recognise it, it seemed to run more along the lines of a minor tourist attraction.  This Google Street View shows the station building and the camera is sitting on the course of the old Washington & Old Dominion Railway.  Roughly where the cycle can be seen there was a caboose which Alec and myself used to climb up into.  There is nothing here I can see to say if the group is still going and because street view hasn’t ventured down the cycleway on the old railway we can’t see the front of the building to read any notices; that said, the building does look well cared for and is clearly maintained in the style of an old American station.
     
    Back to the mainstream:  Most of the people I met in the model railroading scene either had a basement layout or they operated one for someone else.  If you were a member of the National Model Railroad Association or NMRA then your local Chapter would organise a Home Layout Tour each winter season where you could go and visit layouts that were normally closed to the public.
     
    The other sort of modelling, also largely sponsored through the NMRA at the time, was modular modelling, on the N Gauge side the standard and whole modular movement was known as N-Track.  As I had fallen into the N Gauge world through my association with Peter and the CORy I did get to go to one of the regular N-Track modular meets; they got together on one Sunday afternoon/evening a month in a school not far from where we were living in Burke, VA.  They would meet at about 3PM, assemble their modules for about an hour, run trains and socialise until about 8PM, spend an hour packing up and then go home until next month. 
    As I didn’t have a module, was only a transitory visitor (so had no intention of building one) and had no stock to run I didn’t really fit the profile that they wanted as a member – if I remember correctly the rules actually said you had to bring a module if you attended more than twice although I think that was more to allow them to regulate membership rather than a hard and fast rule.
     
    So, back to the story.  In the summer of 1996 the Annual National N Track Convention was due to come to Washington DC., well Alexandria actually, and as a part of that gathering there was to be a home layout tour which Peter managed to become a part of.  What happened next is a bit of a mystery, but one Friday in January he announced that this would be the last operating session for a while as starting the next week we were going to be converting the layout to DCC.  It seems that what he had done was managed to negotiate a deal with one of the big DCC suppliers that if he was on the Home Layout Tour he could DCC the layout at a fraction of the retail cost, but that layout had to be fully operational in DCC mode by the weekend of the N-Track Convention and if it wasn’t you had to pay full price.  Remember: this was 1996 and DCC was very “new” so this was an early advertising ploy for the suppliers.
     
    The next week all hell broke loose, we separated all the boards and removed anything that wasn’t firmly attached to the layout.  Next, one board at a time, we upended the board so that we could work on both the sceniced surface and underside at the same time, and the rewire commenced. 
     
    To understand what we were doing we need a quick revisit to what I described as “necessary actions to move a train” in the main part of the narrative.  As built, the layout was wired for Cab Control.  I think everyone knows that Cab Control means that if you have more than one controller it is possible select which controller has control of a particular section of the layout by selecting the appropriate “Cab” by a switch.  Traditionally on a UK layout you would find two, or at the most three, cabs.  In the case of the CORy there were – I seem to remember – six, yes six cabs. 
     
    The selection of a particular cab was by the use of a rotary switch and a toggle switch; you flicked the toggle switch “off”, turned the rotary switch to the cab you were working on and then flicked the toggle switch back on.  What the toggle switch did was to disconnect the output of the rotary switch from the layout, if you didn’t use the toggle switch first as the rotary switch was turned if it connected to a cab that was “live” from being used elsewhere on the layout there was a real risk that you would suddenly find trains lurching unexpectedly back or forward under momentary control of someone else. 
     
    Now, Peter’s “user requirement” was that if this didn’t work we needed to be able to roll back to analogue operation fairly instantly.  The problem he had was that with six cabs – all of which were used in the general operation of the layout – and a rotary switch that was only able to support 6 inputs – it wasn’t possible to do the blindingly obvious “thing” of simply wiring one of the cabs to the DCC system and then sitting back and playing trains again; no, we had to do a complete rewire with a parallel system.
     
    Step one on each board was to insert a completely new set of droppers, one to each piece of rail on the board.  This is where I learnt to fold up a neat piece of solid wire and solder it to the web of a piece of rail.  I’m not sure what size of wire we used (it was an American Wire Gauge single conductor after all) but we had to put a new dropper on every single piece of rail on each baseboard, these dropper wires were all led back to the control panel for that area of the layout.  At the same time we created a “bus” of wires which we braided together along each baseboard, roughly following the course of the line.  This bus consisted of six wires, the two DCC track wires, and a 16V AC and a 12V DC accessory supply. 
     
    Next we…  Well, I’m not quite sure what happened next because I got temporarily seconded to an organisation in New Orleans, LA, for a couple of weeks (which actually took me out of circulation for nearly a month of Friday meets) and when I got back the control panels were in the process of being disconnected and coupled up to the new wiring loom.  The way this was being done was to cut the old wiring loom between each control panel and the layout and insert a plug and socket into it – so that it could be disconnected or reconnected as required.  A new wiring loom had been created on each panel duplicating the point controls and providing a couple of sockets for the DCC handsets, this was connected through to all the new droppers (but not through the section switching on the panels) and the bus from the base unit and power supply. 
    I probably haven’t explained that very well, it sounds horrendously complicated but the effect of the way it was done meant that you could operate the layout as an analogue system, power it down and unplug all the control panels from the layout, and then plug in the other set of connections between panels and layout, power up the DCC system and off we go… 
     
    Unfortunately the way work was going for me at that point effectively took me out of the loop for a good couple of months (we were now into May and I was returning to the UK in mid-July), I was on a horrendous roundabout of meetings and trips away whilst trying to make sure my relief was inducted into a different part of the USN organisation from the one I was working for, and simultaneously transferring the function of my department to a different organisation in New Orleans.  And you thought the British Government was convoluted…
     
    Of course, Peter also had the problem of converting all the locos to DCC as well.  This he had for the most part completed the last time I visited him in the latter part of June before we left in mid-July.  Don’t forget, this was before the dawn of the current genre of chips with 6, 8, 18 or 21 pin chips; no, to chip a loco you had to cut wires and solder new connections – and don’t forget, this was being done in N Gauge with US outline locomotives.  On that visit the layout had just become operational in its new DCC guise and I got to at least run trains up and down on the line even if I didn’t get to do a proper operating session. 
     
    And that was my experience of converting a layout to DCC.  It probably wasn’t a good example of how to do it and I have to say that to this day it has coloured my view of DCC.  Have you ever asked me what I think of DCC?  My answer will almost certainly have been “Never let anyone tell you that it is just 2 wires, it isn’t”; now you can see why.  And converting locos?  Well, as I’ve just pointed out this was the very early days, no “plug-in” chips, everything on a wiring loom that had to be trimmed and soldered on in a very confined space and the body refitted without destroying the detailing; and, of course, the chips were somewhat less reliable than they are today.  One of the reasons I give of fighting shy of converting my stock is that I do have a couple of kit-builds that utilise Black Beetle (or similar) bogies that actually site the motor inside the bogie in a supposedly “sealed for life” unit; I have met a DCC supplier who has offered to chip one of these for me – at a cost which I have chosen to ignore.
     
    So there we are, a quick canter through my experiences as an American modeller.  I hope you have found it informative – and hopefully inspiring.  I have had some feedback which suggests that there are a number of members of the Fareham Club who would be interested in looking at some more “formal” operating sessions when the world gets back to some sort of normality. 
     
    My Work here is done I think, writing a blog has been an interesting experience and I'm now actively thinking about how we could use it to contribute to the Club's communications strategy in the future.
  4. DutyDruid
    Anyone who has had to work with me closely in any capacity will know that I tend towards having bright ideas, tossing the hand grenade into the conversation and then sitting back and watching things develop.  Indeed, at one point when I was working for the US Navy I went into the office one morning and said to my team “I had a really neat idea on the train on the way in” – and they all scarpered, every single one of them.  Oh well!
     
    INCOMMING!
     
    Now, I must prefix this post by stating very publicly and VERY LOUDLY that I am playing Devil’s Advocate here.  In some ways we are getting a little stagnant in what we do.  We have just made a significant leap forward in securing the future of the Club in the form of gaining our CIO status so perhaps now might be a good time to review where we are and what we are doing.  I am going to float ideas in this post, they are not necessarily views I hold, they are only intended to provoke thought and discussion when we escape this confinement. 
     
    So, the starting point for this post has to be to review the layouts we have in the Club and I’m going to concentrate on the 00 gauge ones – to attempt what I am thinking about in 0 Gauge would require, well, a warehouse; equally, I don’t believe we have enough N Gauge modellers to make it work in that scale either. 
     
    We have:
    Soberton built in 1997/8 and a menace to take to an exhibition (I designed it so I can say it), given several new leases of life over the years; a big layout that doesn’t get out much because not many exhibitions can accommodate a layout of that size.  Forleigh, original build date unknown, donated to the Club when Fawley Power Station MRC closed, big layout, not easy to transport and exhibit, doesn’t get out much for the same reasons as Soberton. Nictun Borrud “converted” around the same time as Soberton.  Used to get out quite a lot but is now becoming “old hat” on the exhibition circuit.  Gosport.  This is a special project so I am going to skirt neatly past the subject. Fareport Wharf, new, a different concept of layout, approaching completion. Bramley Oak has gone, again a big layout which was only ever exhibited once. Ditto Mislingford which was only ever shown as a work-in-progress.  
    Children’s Corner is deliberately excluded from consideration here as although it does visit exhibitions it doesn’t really count as an exhibitable layout in the accepted sense.
     
    So, we have three 00 Gauge layouts that in my view are life expired (Soberton, Forleigh and NB), all of which have done their time on the exhibition circuit, we have Fareport Wharf which is approaching its debut and we also have Fairhaven Town (0 Gauge and easily portable) which has scope to showcase the Club’s work, but currently not the active manpower able to exhibit it.
     
    Also, thinking about invites to other exhibitions: aside from both Nictuns at Warley – supposedly next year but that has to be in doubt in the current climate – NB to Bristol and our pledge to help Victory MRC out of the situation they find themselves in with their exhibition, we don’t have any outstanding invites; plus Soberton and Forleigh have both reached their pinnacle, they have been to Warley and several of the other national shows, in fact the only big show we have yet to break into is York. 
     
    No, with our current portfolio of layouts we’ve been everywhere we are likely to go and done everything we are likely to be invited to do; if we want to maintain our “presence” in the hobby locally with other Clubs I think we need to start to refresh ourselves, I think the time has come – we need to review our layout portfolio, at least in the 00 arena.
     
    We also have a major problem, the Elephant in the Room so-to-speak:  SPACE.  Nictun Borrud isn’t too bad in that it stacks into two pods plus a few extra bits, but both Soberton and Forleigh are monsters; Soberton’s support system was very much a product of its time: at Fareham Community Centre we only had the portacabin as our Clubroom in the car park.  It was designed to go from flat pack into a workbench system and back to flat pack in the blink of an eye, a real boon in those days, but now it’s a nightmare to store.  And Forleigh?  I understand it was originally built as a static layout, in converting it into a portable one we have made a rod for our own back; end boards that are 8’ long and 2’6”+ wide, they are a minimum 4-man lift (but preferably 5 or 6) and present another nightmare.  PLUS: I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but those end boards flex in the middle when lifted, this is because they weren’t originally designed (or constructed) to be that long.  In converting the layout we bolted what was originally two boards at each end together to make one in order to get the uninterrupted scenery on the top BUT in doing this what we should have done was to introduce support members underneath that run the full length of the boards (or at least bridge the gap by a couple of feet either side of the join).  Result: in my view there is a very real risk that one day we will lift them and one of them (probably the farm end) is going to suffer a major structural failure resulting in the board trying to fold in half.
     
    Thanks to Derek we have attained our CIO status, thus assuring the long-term stability of the Club, but this has come with a certain amount of responsibility if we are to truly act out our charitable purpose.  We are an educational charity and we have said that (among other things) we support the hobby locally by providing layouts and demonstrations to other club’s exhibitions, BUT we also need to look to what we do as a Club on meeting nights.  In other words, we need to provide something for people to do on Club nights beyond drinking tea, eating biscuits and reflecting on past glories.
     
    Sorry, tough decisions are needed. 
     
    But if we dump our older and bigger layouts what do we replace them with? 
     
    As a starter for 10, here are my thoughts on the sort of layouts that show managers like these days, the sort of layouts that are likely to get invited out, and coincidentally the sort of layouts that are easy to store when not in use: layouts like Fareport Wharf and Nictun Borrud (and Geoff’s Nictun 2000 – although that is technically not a Club layout).  The basic formula seems to be about 16’ to 20’ long, (about 12’ of scenery) either a terminus to fiddle yard or through station with two fiddle yards – not roundy-roundy layouts because the depth of the ends means that they tend to stick out too far into the hall; number of operators is also an issue – the Nictuns can be worked by 2 or 3 operators, Forleigh needs at least 6, Soberton at least 8.
     
    Now, if we were to dump those two big layouts (frees up valuable storage) in favour of building – say – six newer, smaller layouts that would get us back into the exhibition circuit, it would keep the Club’s profile where it should be in order to allow us to attract other clubs to participate in our exhibition, our main fundraiser of the year.
     
    OK, I realise that not everyone is interested in going on the exhibition circuit but with a handful of new layouts those of us who enjoy that side of the hobby would be able to carry on promoting the Club.  So, my thought process turns to what goes on in the Club; with a handful of smaller layouts we could have more of them up in the Clubroom at the same time, there would be more for people to do on a club night and if we were to do something similar to the arrangement that we have done in the past with Soberton and Nictun Borrud we could actually link layouts together as shown in the following picture.  This would allow us to have more interesting operating sessions, remember, this story is supposed to be about recreating my experience of the CORy here in England.
     

     
    Yes, this fits in the Clubroom!  With a bit of creative manipulation (and discipline) there would be room to keep the recently shrunken Corhampton (N) and Fairhaven Town (0) up as well.
    This arrangement would be made up of the six layouts shown in the next picture plus the extra components shown, that’s two single track triangular junctions and a couple of sceniced corner units.  Fiddle yards for these layouts when used individually could be “traditional”, cassettes (my preference), sector plates or even turntables for the through stations; in fact, there’s no reason why fiddle yards couldn’t be shared between layouts chosen to the preference of the person who will be operating them.
     
     


     
     
    AND: These don’t all have to be Club layouts!  Geoff has already proved that a personal layout can very successfully be displayed under the Club banner with Nictun 2000.  Ok, there is a potential problem: talking to another club with “Charitable Status”, during their “set up process” they were picked up by a community adviser because they were storing a number of member’s layouts in their clubrooms plus several members were abusing their use of Club facilities.  It was resolved, there was a big argument about something called “deriving benefit” and they had to revise the way they were working.  We would have to be careful, but I’m sure we could work out a way to get members to build layouts that could be included in this system.  For example, I would happily build “Layout 1” from this system, I have a plan for a Swanage-esque terminus with a small goods yard which could easily be incorporated.  Anyone else?
     
    My design for the fiddle yard for the “joint” layout is set up with two banks of sidings, one bank for passenger stock and one for freight with plenty of scope for locomotive changes.  The suggestion is that we limit trains to 3 or 4 coach rakes, or an equivalent length of goods train, and we have properly structured “operation sessions” where trains traverse all of the layouts during an operating session.
     

     
    Note about this diagram: It is a Trax track building template (much reduced in size).  The intention is that the ladders on each side would be either slips or more likely so-called Barry Slips like the one show below which would give loco (or wagon) stabling roads at each end of the fiddle yard.  The problem with ordinary slip points is that they are expensive to both buy and make, Barry Slips are simply two interlaced points and although I haven't built one yet I reckon it should be possible to knock one out in a couple of evenings, they are simply "two points".  Credit for this photo Mark Grady who sent it to me in an attempt to confuse me...
     

     
    Once this enforced suspension of our group hobby is lifted and we are able to meet again the Club will have to have its postponed AGM – should be happening in May or June but who knows when it will actually take place – and there will be a lot to discuss by way of understanding the new structure we are working within. 
     
    We also need to decide where we are going in terms of Club activity.  This is my “Starter for 10” and is very much intended to provoke discussion rather than to be a proscriptive way forward.
     
    Over to you.  Discuss…
     
    Oh, and the intention is that we DO NOT have to do this all at once, I see it as something that is going to take a number of years to come fully to fruition.
     
    POST SCRIPT 1:  A number of you will know that I have designs on building a new home layout that depicts a terminus station set somewhere on the Gosport Peninsula, writing and reviewing this blog has helped me to crystallise in my mind how I could work the freight operations for it, so a big thank you to everyone who encouraged me to record my experiences in the US.
     
    POST SCRIPT 2:  Oh, and I lied.  This isn’t going to be the last post in this blog after all.  In finalising this episode I realised that there was another part of the story that would be worth telling – the control system and our efforts to convert it to DCC.  As I haven’t started that yet it is unlikely that it will be published a week or so after this one, just give me time…
  5. DutyDruid
    Of the things I did while living in the US, I look back with much fondness at those operating evenings at Peter’s and if I could find a way of replicating them here in the UK then I would, but what would be needed to enable this?  In what I am planning to be the penultimate post in this blog – at least for the time being – my intention is to share some ideas about something I have often wanted to try at the Club but never had the courage to make a start on, as much because of the complexity of making it work as for any other reason. 
     
    A very special and different type of layout would be needed for a start.  Most UK layouts are designed either as a tail chaser (Soberton or Forleigh) or to represent a terminus station in space and time (Nictun Borrud).  Very rarely do you find a layout that would have two locations represented in the same model.  Ok, we did try that once by constructing a triangular junction and running Nictun Borrud and Soberton from Soberton’s fiddle yard, but that wasn’t a very successful experiment.  Firstly there were only 2 locations (rather than the 10 that appeared in version 4 of the CORy), plus we didn’t really plan how we should operate it; there were other problems too, not everyone involved shared the vision of what we were aiming at and at 33’ x 20’ it almost completely filled the Clubroom – we even had to modify the kitchen area to accommodate it.  No, ideally to make this work we would need to build a layout with the same sort of philosophy as the American ones I described; imagine the Clubrooms, double the footprint width-ways, that’s your ideal basement, that’s your ideal train room and that’s where you get to build a layout big enough to do something like this. 
     
    Or is there another way? 
     
    One of the ideas I did kick around when we started to build the current test track around the main room was to suggest we put a slack handful of sidings and loops (spurs and sidings in my CORy narrative) which could then be operated in the way I have described; this would have allowed us to have a stab at the basic concept – but it would have been at the expense of the other gauge tracks so I shelved the idea. 
     
    Then there are modules, remember modules?  The idea that we pioneered some time back using pasting tables as baseboards?  That would have lent itself to each member of a team building a couple of modules that could be arranged as a cross, each module to have one “event” on it – a station or a siding – and some sort of classification yard in the middle – a junction station such as Fareham?  Just thoughts…  The problem with this idea is that it would need that precious thing we are always short of – SPACE.
     
    And then there is the whole question of how we generate the required traffic flow.  We could get Graham to produce the spreadsheet he and I discussed some years back, using his output to generate waybills for the wagons and freight facilities we have at each station; OR we could look for a software package that might do the same thing – and yes, one does exist.
     
    Twenty plus years ago when I first started looking at ways to improve operations – and the Internet was just getting started – I stumbled across a software package called Wagonflow.  http://www.wagonflow.co.uk/. I corresponded with the author and established exactly what the package could do, and then almost immediately the Club got into the protracted battle with the council that eventually led to us moving out of Fareham Community Centre as it closed.  When that battle was over we had moved on in a lot of senses, and the better part of 7 years had passed, so I never got round to picking up the thread with the author again; until, that is, Covid19 happened.  With the driver of finding ways to keep everyone engaged with all things model railway in order to stave off cabin fever, and discovering that there was a bit of an appetite to hear this story, I contacted the current owner of the Wagonflow brand and have purchased a copy.  Now all I have to do is to sit down and get my mind around how it should all work.
     
    So, in the final chapter in this epistle I will float a few ideas about what we could be doing down at the Club when we all escape from this lockdown.
  6. DutyDruid
    So we arrive at the real purpose of this series of articles, what was an operating session like?
     
    Well, on the CORy sessions took place on a Friday evening after work was over for the week.  Most of the other operators were Government employees of one sort or another and The Federal Government would shut down at 4 on Friday afternoon  which meant that by the time you had got home, changed and eaten you could be back in Alexandria at around 7 – and that was “sign-on” time.
    We would front up at Peter’s house and go down to the basement where we would be assigned our duty for the evening.  Duties included Despatcher (generally carried out by Peter himself), Yard Master at Chelan (also usually Peter unless there was a surfeit of operators that particular night), and no less that three “Engineers” or drivers.  In the time I was a part of the crew I was an engineer every time, mainly because I was having to learn a completely new way of working and effectively a new language as well.  Remember a couple of weeks back our esteemed Chairman posted a picture of his Union Pacific 16-wheeler in the Facebook group and I came straight back with what the English term would be for it – a DO-DO?  Well, that’s a really fast way to upset an American Rail Fan, I know, I accidentally did it, it really is a different language in every respect…
     
    So, the duties of the Despatcher are basically what we might recognise those of the Controller, with the responsibility of the signalman thrown in as an aside.  He calls the shots.  He gives permission for trains to depart – and bear in mind that on a rural backwater or Shortline in the US a train effectively gets the word to go and then isn’t in communication with the rest of world until it appears at the other end of the line.  There are of course passing places but these aren’t signalled in the way that they would be on a single line in the UK.  The Despatcher will issue a Train Order which will be communicated to the Engineers of the trains involved (originally by telegraph but more likely these days by radio) telling them who should do what.  If two trains are approaching a passing place one will be told to take the Siding and the other told to take and hold the Main.  From memory, taking the Siding means taking the loop line and stopping to let the other train pass, Taking and Holding the main means taking the main line thru the passing place, the word “Holding” implying that this train has right of way and if everything has worked should be able to pass through unchecked.  I may have got this last bit wrong and am prepared to be corrected if I have – if anyone knows the truth…
     
    The other thing the Despatcher had to do was keep the passenger traffic running, there wasn’t much of this – the American railroads are for the most part a freight operation – but you can impose a lot of discipline on an operating session by having a passenger train run at a scheduled time, and then having to have all the freight trains pulled off the “Main” to allow it to pass.
     
    The function of the Chelan Yardmaster was to assemble the trains that are needed, sometimes these are for the operating session currently underway but could equally be for the next session and I will explain what drove that in a bit.
     
    And the Engineers?  Well, we drove the freight trains; the question is how did we know what to do?  Before we look at that though, let’s take a moment to talk about what you might expect to find as you travel along a Shortline.  Most of the lines on Peter’s layout were single so there were passing loops (US term Siding) and what we would call sidings (US term Spur).  At each of these “features” there was “industry”, it might be a grain silo, it could be a warehouse, a factory or even a Lumber (Timber) Yard.  Each industry would require a regular exchange of rail vehicles of a type appropriate to its business.  A grain silo might need an empty hopper to be delivered once a week (every 7th operating cycle); a furniture factory could require a monthly delivery of raw lumber on a special lumber car and a daily supply of empty boxcars to take away its products; a food factory could require a regular supply of Refers (refrigerated boxcars) – say 2 cars three times a week: and so it goes on, Peter had a list of all the industries on the layout and a list of the cars each one would require to perform its function; a bit like real life really…
     
    What comes next in the story is a bit of a mystery, at least in that it was something I never saw because Peter did between operating sessions so I have no idea how he actually did it, but it involved making a list of the loads that needed to be moved between industries and yards in the next session – in accordance with the list of the requirements for each industry.  I think – and it is only supposition – that he was using a spreadsheet to do this, but I can’t be sure.  Anyway, sometime later I did talk about this to our esteemed former Treasurer and Excel guru Graham I who assured me that he could write me a spreadsheet macro to produce the required output. 
     
    So, how did this output appear?  Well, when I “signed on” I drew my walkaround controller and a little pack containing two different types of cards:  Car Cards and Waybills.
     
    Car cards?  Think Library cards.  There’s a photo attached of some I designed in Visio a long time ago and have printed on thin card as a prop for this essay.  There needs to be one card for each car or wagon on the layout.  Basically, Peter’s gave a description of the car, including a running number.  In my own inimitable style I haven’t really thought through what ought to be printed on a UK wagon card, I have simply noted down the sort of things I thought might be of interest to the operator (such as braked/unbraked) and moved on to another project, but as a starter these work.
     
    And Waybills?  Those were simple slips of card that were inserted in the car cards.  On them were contained the details of the industry that needed that particular car on that operating session.  If you were lucky (or unlucky) sometimes there were two waybills in the car card.  Why?  Well, you might want to drop your grain hopper off at the silo this trip to be filled and then next trip take it down the valley to the distillery to be emptied.  
     
    Just to explain the concept of library cards for our younger readers, those of a certain age will remember that in order to get a book out of the library you took your library card and the book you wanted to the desk where the clerk would stamp the “return by” date inside the front cover, and then pull the book’s record slip out of its pocket, put it in your library card and file that card in a wooden tray in a slot corresponding to when it was due back.
     
    So, my train typically had 8 to 10 cars, I had my controller, I had my car cards with their waybills which were held together by a foldback clip, and I was ready to go – which will be described in the next edition.
     
    If you want to read the American take on this you can find useful notes at:
    https://www.building-your-model-railroad.com/model-railroad-operation.html


  7. DutyDruid
    Having set the scene in the last entry, let me introduce you to American houses, layouts, and Peter's railway.
     
    When I first got started in the model railroading hobby in the USA I found that, unlike the clubs I was used to in the UK, the "standard" seemed to be for an individual with a large basement to effectively start his own club.  Having just been through the home-search process we were very aware of the differences between UK and US homes; briefly for the uninitiated: almost every home I visited in the USA had a large basement that typically contained a laundry room, a boot room of sorts and possibly a half-bath (loo).  There would also be at least two big rooms, each approaching the half the size of the house, and don't forget, American houses are significantly bigger than UK houses.  Oh, and for good measure, the walls are almost exclusively of studwork construction making it very easy to punch holes in walls for railway tracks to pass through.  
     
    The typical pattern for a railroad group seemed to be for a homeowner to build benchwork (what we would think of as baseboards) around the walls of a room and because the rooms were large they would very often build a peninsula into the room with the railway running down one side, around the end and then back up the other.  If you want an example, think of the Fareham Club 0 Gauge layout Middleton.  The branch fiddleyard on that layout runs down the middle of the operating space, think what might be achieved if that fiddle yard was laid with 00 or N gauge track and a high backscene was put down the middle; you could easily fit a lot of interesting scenery in the space.  Anyway, when I was there the preferred method for benchwork seemed to be what they called "L Girder"; think of this as a framework with a roadbed shaped and supported on risers coming up from the frame of the benchwork.  Anyone who has looked at the underside of Soberton's main boards will recognise this construction method, the only difference being that because an American layout is "fixed" the tendency would be to make the basic frame from 2" x 1" prepared timber rather than the ply I used when we built Soberton.
     
    Now, when I knew layout owner Peter he was living in what the Americans called a townhouse in Alexandria, in English, a terraced house.  The basement of this house was small by US standards but even so it was bigger than our front room in England, a good 25' x 12' occupying about 1/3 of the footprint of the house.  The layout didn't exactly fill the space but went a good way towards doing so; there was room to move all around it and the main operating or dispatcher desk was in the back corner of the room behind the layout with the staging area (in English: Fiddle Yard).  This area Peter referred to as Chelan Yard and was effectively the meeting point of a main east-west route on the Burlington Northern and a Northbound local line, the Colombia and Okanogan Railway (The CORy); also from Chelan there was a BN line running south to join up with another east-west line operated by another of the big  companies (possibly Union Pacific). 
     
    From my ragged memory, the layout was built on a set of 4 boards that were each of the order of 6' x 3' .  The staging yard was on one of these, the Spur to the south on another and the main northern line on the third and fourth; the basic arrangement was not a horseshoe shape, but it was getting on for it.  
     
    Oh, and it was N Gauge!  
     
    I have struggled to pull all these details back from memory, but having re-read them they are reasonably good description of the layout, unfortunately I don't have any photos or sketches and Peter hadn't created a website for the line.  What I do remember clearly was him telling me though was that this was the third iteration of the layout as both he and his wife worked for the US Government and they had moved around a fair bit in their lives.  At the time (mid 90s) he was expecting that they would be moving back to somewhere near the Rockies, he was a geologist and at the time there was a lot of "official" interest in the seismic activity in that area.  He then went on to say that they intended to stay in that area to retire; this would create a 4th iteration of the layout and something I found on the web late 90s/early noughties suggested he had indeed moved to a community called Brighton on the outskirts of Denver Co.   The web article I saw was in his personal webspace on AOL and it was clear that he had indeed achieve his goal of finding a permanent home for the layout.  Fortunately I had printed some of these pages out, and I have managed to locate them and scan them.  The quality isn't brilliant but attached are two scans of the two levels of the Mark 4 layout.  
     
    Some of the names on the Mk4 layout have changed from the ones I remember on the Mk3 so  I can't give you a detailed description, what I will do though is to study the detail of the plans and in the next edition of this story I will describe how an operating session worked - which is really why we are here.
     
    Stay safe everyone!


  8. DutyDruid
    This blog is a part of an effort the Fareham MRC are making to prevent our members getting cabin fever during our enforced isolation from our hobby.  That said, anyone else interested in a different way of operating a model railway is more than welcome to browse it and comment.  This first post is going to be a bit short and will not convey much useful information, I'm using it to give our members who are not regular RM Web users a chance to catch up and find a way to access it before I launch into the full story.
     
    It is fairly common knowledge that although I am dyed in the wool Royal Navy I did spend two-and-a-bit years on exchange service with the United States Navy.  This was the early to mid 90s and just at the time that I was starting to get back into railway modelling after the effect of the kit cars and fast sailing dinghies I had gotten into whilst studying was starting to wear off.  When we arrived in Washington DC and I had got my feet properly under my desk I picked up a copy of Model RailRoader and discovered that although there were no clubs per se in the area there was a thriving local Chapter of the NMRA.  I contacted "The Clerk" (Secretary) and discovered that he personally was looking for a couple of new operators for his layout,  I signed up and the rest - as they say - is history.
     
    The railway I operated was called the Columbian and Okanogan Railway and was based on a real railway system found in the Rockies.  It was owned by a fine chap called Pete Matthews who was a Geologist with the US Government Survey.  As well as his home layout he had an N-Track module called Ribbon Cliff which was a stunning representation of a real place of the same name.  https://goo.gl/maps/gkorBCDLcnPYPJqG8  This, of course was back in the early 90s and I have long since lost touch with him.  Sadly I don't have too many pictures of the railway, but I do have some printed pages from his personal website that described his railway.  I also have all the ideas I gained from working with him, some of which I have converted into graphics.  This could be an interesting journey into a totally different way of operating a model railway, I hope you enjoy it.
     
    So, the next post into this blog will set the scene for the railway and be made after I have managed to get all the Fareham Club members who are interested to a place where they can read it.
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