Signalist

Terraces are an important part of an urban environment, and what we called the East Terrace where Dr. Legg had his surgery was no exception. Unfortunately Dr. Legg had his surgery in the basement so these terraces had to be kit bashed in order to add the basements. The East Terrace was a pre-build built by Mark Leigh.

The 'Walford Towers' tower block was a key feature which we included as a way to get some height in to the layout to meet the height criteria for judging. Although it was intended to be a pre-build in the end due to transport limitations of getting it in hand luggage on an internal flight from Orkney it travelled as a kit and Paul Tyer constructed it on site from his pre-made kit of parts. It is a really nice building because it really gives scale to the layout and is a great way to include something big without taking a lot of ground area. It was built completely to scale from the real Canterbury House in Borehamwood near to the BBC Elstree studios. The bollards were part of our scratch build challenge and were made from the rawlplugs. The tower block helped make a scenic break to hide the short distance between Walford South and Walford East stations. Here is the prototype for comparison.

A key cameo for us Tracklaying Ninjas who all met when doing the Biggest Little Railway was the canal scene. As well as the quad bike in the canal we had made the canal from a piece of 32mm gauge Biggest Little Railway track. Having Dirty Den floating face down with his faithful poodle Rowley standing by was just incidental...

I will kick this thread off with some pictures of Walford showing some of the details that were included. Many of the pictures were taken during construction so don't necessarily show it all in its finished state. Here is the team to start us off. From the left me Paul Harman, Chris Robertson, Maggie McBride, Team Leader Mark Leigh, Derek Souter and Paul Tyer. Here is an overview of the layout looking from the allotment end towards the 'Walford Towers' tower block itself. Walford South station is on the left in an urban cutting, while Walford East is on the right. And here is a shot looking the other way towards the canal and allotments before the final ballasting and titivating was done.

The S-Stock is made by Bachmann and was very kindly supplied by the London Transport museum for which we were very grateful. The museum is the only source. Although we did not get it running on the day it did look quite nice as a (very expensive) static exhibit. We did have the on-board DCC controlled announcements working as an 'animation' which was not shown. Our points were motorised and DCC controlled so that had the S-stock been running we would have been able to switch the S-stock and 350 in to their respective platforms automatically under JMRI control, and the signals set their correct aspects based on the point positions. We even had a motorised point on the Faller car system so that we could set the route for the bus down bridge street with a big red latching mushroom switch. Because it was market day the switch was clearly labelled 'DO NOT PRESS'.

It is hard even with hindsight to choose a different path. I think that the big difference would be to try and scrounge some known working rolling stock and work it into the theme! That way we could do some testing prior to the build so that we know the Faller road system will work. The track was being laid on the pre-build (the little bit that was on the flat) before we had got hold of the stock from being weathered (there was a lot of focus on weathering in the rules). If we had used loco hauled trains we could have had a bigger choice of motive power and would have had something that could make it up the inclines (probably should have used the GOBlin with some 170s and forgotten about the underground - I have a couple of 170s). Probably would have had a bit less focus on detail and height too.

It is all about the detail really for us. Anyone can lay a circle of track, plonk in a pub and terraced houses and say 'That's the East End'. We were adding detail so that it looked a bit like it could be a real place and as railway modellers the railway was believable too. We were told we would be up against the best modellers, and the judges were looking for detail - so detail we did! Anyone who is a fan of Eastenders would know their way around Albert Square and we included as much as we could find short of breaking in to the Elstree set and measuring up. All the buildings were in the correct place with respect to one another, the bus was the correct model, we had trains that you might see north of the river in the last thirty years (not easy to find suburban trains for London north of the Thames ready to run). It would have been nice to model Bromley by Bow station where the real filming for Walford East is done - but overhead catenary was well out of budget and would never have been completed in the time, so we just did something that fitted the space and budget and was believable. It was the judges we were trying to please.

The tracklaying misjudgement was just a few millimetres. The big problem was that it took so long to get the brand new trains running that a big chunk of the scenery had been built before we had two trains running and noticed the conflict - the test loco ran round without a problem. With hindsight we should have just popped out and bought a couple of tank engines with copper chimneys and some wagons and we might have been in with a chance! I don't think anyone appreciated that we had dual voltage EMUs - none of us were in the mood to scratch build a couple of sets of 313s.

We would get the trains running and then the code 60 conductor rail would heat up and buckle while waiting for the camera to come back and foul on the bogie detail. I have been recommended to use code 40 rail for the conductor instead next time to allow a few thou of extra clearance.

The block of flats is mentioned in a few episodes and is named Walford Towers in Eastenders - some of the characters (I think the Beales) lived there at one time. It can be seen behind the car lot usually. We included it because there is mention in the rules that credit will be given for height (Paul even modelled the mast on top with the illuminated beacon) and we thought that 18 stories would make us the tallest layout, that is why we included the gradients too having one station in a cutting (Walford South) and the other (Walford East) on an embankment. We modelled most of the terraced houses that you see people running in and out of including Dr. Legg's surgery for which Mark had to add basements to a row of terraces. Even the roofs had the correct Velux window on one of the houses (which we could have left off - it disappeared when they rebuilt the Eastenders set for HD!) While we might have started with Metcalfe and Superquick buildings they were mostly modified to look like and be identifiable as the 'real' thing. New Lines signals do look a bit different to most colour lights being searchlights with splitting junction signals. They have an automatic extra yellow light to allow permissive working of closely spaced trains. All very subtle really and lost on most of the audience!

Total budget was about £3000 per layout and baseboard was provided. Sounds like a lot but does not go far - and we were not expected to buy any stock with that budget. a 4-track Gaugemaster DC controller was provided - but if we wanted DCC we had to bring our own.

Here is 'The Animator' :- The Queen Vic was still under construction here so I have not added the 'Water Tank' where the figure is dropped in. The flap on the servo sits under the water tank, and when the servo is activated the figure yells 'Weeeeeee' and goes down the slide before coming out the front door. I am sure it will be a real ride when they build the Eastenders theme park.

We had points, and signalling, and two stations. It was a passenger railway so all the fun of operation is obeying the signals, stopping at the stations, making the station announcements (the trains all had specific special announcements for each station), and the bus (had we got it running again) would have been automatically controlled and pulled away from the station bus stop when the trains departed. The bus did run a treat until we put down the road surface! The points had to be set for the correct platform (like Harrow on the Hill) since we had dual running of underground and network rail trains on part of the layout. It was fully signalled with LMS 'New Lines' signalling as was used on the Watford/Bakerloo and Upminster lines. There was no room for points or another viaduct platform on the inner line so we just pretended the junction was off scene (5' x 10' really is a tiny layout in my book). Team Sci-Fi had points too on the lower level line.

We were expecting to be up against top modellers, so settrack was out because we would not be able to hide the corners from looking like corners, and we wanted it to look really good, so the track layout was planned with medium radius points and transition curves since we were able to make that fit in the space and give a nice lead in to the island platform where network rail splits from the underground (it was all 4-rail except the network rail only platform which was 3-rail). None of us are used to working in such a confined space with such tight radius so track did not quite get laid where it should have been - but we learned from the excercise! It was not until we laid the track that we discovered that the Bachmann trains do not work with a central conductor rail out of the box, and we had to file an awful lot of plastic away from under the bogies - even on the S-stock! The track laying was all timed in the plan and was laid in the expected time, and really does not take that long when compared to most of the scenic tasks. What really let us down was not having anywhere to test the trains beforehand - they were all brand new and we expected them to just work - but we had to fettle the pickups as well as having problems with the bogies clearing the conductor rails. The S-stock was especially problematic having two motors that are not electrically connected and with the inertia in the decoders the two ends were never running at the same speed, and the 350 struggled to get up the 1 in 30 gradient hence the one on the inner track had to be shortened to 3-cars. You will see a few clips here and there of the 350s running - we did get there in the end and the crew had great fun filming them, and after the filming with a couple of days work (including a trip to Coastal DCC) I got the S-stock in a good state of running too. It was really fun to do, and we would have kicked ourselves if we had not over challenged ourselves and finished early with time to spare. RVD did an excellent job of completing what they set out to do with a great impression of the feel of the space, and Team Sci-Fi did an excellent job of building pretty much the whole of their layout in the last four hours - they really need a medal for that!

Plywood would be nicer than MDF. The MDF did the job though - but foam would be far too specialist to work with for most. Better sound insulation would be good - I think that is why they invented studios! How the budget was split among the sponsors was a complete nightmare - along with the lack of availability of many items. The track budget from Peco was adequate, but it was hard to find anything useful in stock at B or H. After protests at no Metcalfe being available from the initial suppliers Metcalfe were very generous with their sponsorship and this is reflected in what you see on the layouts! If you stock it teams can use it. We were required to provide our own rolling stock - hence on many layouts the builders had to make do with what they had to hand rather than what fitted the model. KBG were very helpful at trying to obtain difficult to get items (for which I am very grateful) but some things were just not available and had to be got from auction sites. The short lead time made it difficult to obtain any new stock items and get them up and running to a good standard in time let alone getting a custom sound package produced for each train. Don't think that stock new out of the box is going to run - it does not, and they don't build new models like they used to! The scratch build challenge does sort out the boys from the men when it comes to being innovative and producing something with what you have to hand quickly. Alan Downes would not have had any problem with this aspect and I think his standards are not to be quibbled at. Hiding the source material and making it unrecognisable without explanation is probably key to winning the audience over. This aspect is really as you see it - the materials are a complete surprise and there is little time to work with them. This competition is not for those who procrastinate and need a long time to do anything.

Heat 2 of the Great Model Railway Challenge complete now. It was jolly hard work, but lots of fun too. It is quite impressive what can be achieved with one hundred and forty four man-hours of hands-on modelling without the usual interleaved prevaricating. I for one will be looking forward to see what the teams have produced in the other heats. If you are near enough to go and watch as an audience member you should see some excellent modelling close up - heat 3 should be well underway now (the times and dates shown above are probably wrong so make sure to contact Molly for correct details and availability before travelling). (Big) Paul Artistic Designer TL Ninjas

We still laid more track than the other teams that day, and the limiting factor was getting hold of track to lay - we could have done twice as much. What would have helped was allowing the teams to have control of their own logistics, it is not like we didn't have a truck driver in our team!

On the first day of track laying we (Team 'D') were meticulous in getting the track properly supported and ballasted throughout the whole length of the site alongside the canal, and we laid every bit of track we could get our hands on that day with beautiful manufactured corners round every layby. At the next briefing we were told that the train was very forgiving of the track and we did not have to worry about packing, ballasting or even leveling the track - just slap it down and it would be fine - "Just good enough is good enough" was the catchphrase. I think you have drawn your own conclusions as to what was really needed, and it was not a relaxation of standards. I suspect that this 'advice' was more a ploy to double the rate of track laying which was already behind schedule rather than an observation on the running qualities of the train. Paul

This was an example of where we were set up to fail. We had already seen that the track was sufficiently grippy with the rubber topped rails that the Silver Lady would run out of power before losing traction, so the rack was of no actual use in this scenario. The gradient that we built the rack up was sufficiently steep that we could not even walk up it on some parts without falling over and sliding down, and to top it all no one from production would tell us how high the rack needed to be to engage with the gear under the loco - so we guessed at approximately rail height and were 2mm out! An error when scaled up that would come out at an inch and a half so not really that big and should have been within the suspension travel. We were just given a box of stuff and had to guess what to do with it - fortunately a couple of us knew what a rack railway was! While we knew it was unlikely to work we went ahead and laid the track and rack the full height of the ascent in atrocious weather when the biggest difficulty was the rain washing the cyanoacrylate adhesive off of everything (except our fingers) before we had a chance to stick anything together. we had to allow for the fishplates when fitting the rack over them by using thinner packing. It actually looked quite impressive when finished and the rack fitted to normal nickel silver rails would probably be very effective in a garden situation. There was enough material shot on this build to fill a full programme from the head scratching at the beginning as to what the box of stuff was and requests for information on the dimensions of where the gear was to the stuck together fingers and the sliding down the site on the mud. Even the factory site set up to cut down the fishplates to a manageable length and cut the packing down was well organised. Achieving what we did on this task was teamwork at its best, just laying the track would have been an arduous enough task without the rack - no quad bike on this location! Paul p.s. I will try and find an avatar photo.

The programme has been broadcast in full now so it is probably safe to comment as a participant without spoiling anything. It has been interesting to read some of the comments suggesting what might have been going on and the perception of what was successful and what was not. It was a fun thing to do, and I think on balance everyone who took part had a very positive experience. We are all very fit now having walked about 150 miles during that fortnight much of it carrying heavy kit over difficult terrain inaccessible to even a quadbike. What was broadcast bears very little resemblance to the reality of what went on, and the finished cut was obviously created based on the footage that was obtained rather than what they thought they were going to show - otherwise the hours of footage following the teams filming every waking minute and interrogating us on every detail both on and off the job would not have been bothered with. Left in the can is material for a whole different series of programmes showing how the teams worked around problems and innovated to create solutions to problems that were not seen beforehand despite some quite meticulous planning for the most part. I think in the end most participants featured have been shown in a positive light - you need to see the whole story thread in some cases to get the whole context. We all have personalities and don't always show a sunny disposition twenty four hours a day, so it only takes ten seconds to create a sound bite that can last a life time. My wife has her's printed on a tee-shirt now after her appearance on four in a bed (yes I do have a B&B too). When we started I don't think any of us thought that we were going to get all the way, but we tried our hardest and working in our teams we managed to make progress way beyond what any of us thought we could do. The question has been asked 'is it modelling or is it engineering?' The answer has to be it is both. The fundamental task was an engineering one - creating a railway in the landscape. The solutions to the problems though were often more akin to modelling where we were using what we had to hand and often using materials in a less than ideal way but in a way that did the job. For those that think the crew just stood around and watched I can assure you that they were always on the move. While a team might be spread over a mile or more of worksite the crew would be constantly moving from place to place to ensure that everything got filmed and nothing at all was missed, and the crew took everything they needed for the whole day's filming with them on foot. There was quite a lot of false jeopardy done with the intention to create suspense - but on the whole it probably backfired. Things were kept secret like the scale of the train which rather thwarted us being able to add a lot more. If I had known it was 16mm scale I could have brought along my rake of W&L wagons - they would have been great for testing! You might have seen the Silver Lady fall off the track a few times. The rather beaten state of the loco at the end testifies that it was not really compatible with the track which was insufficiently rigid for a top heavy loco of such a weight. While the little steam loco definitely became the star of the show it was not quite as popular with the majority of track laying teams. There was a definite disconnect between the train provider and the track designers! The smaller and lighter and less top heavy battery locos would run all day on that track and never derail (well, not on Team 'D' track anyway!) It might have been nice to have more than one train run as a comparison. You saw the back stories of a handful of the participants, but there were equally interesting stories to be told of most of the participants. When you recognise someone from the telly don't be shy - have a chat. For the most part you will find someone a lot more interesting than you have seen for twenty seconds on the telly, probably someone who is a major spoke in the wheel of the UK modelling industry and more than likely the organiser of your favourite exhibition. Paul

You will need more than just ground signals now...

You might like to try the Signalist SB1 servo motor. It can be mounted above or below the baseboard and has the provision for fitting a pair of V3 microswitches for end point feedback, or frog and route switching, if required. It converts 90-180 degrees of rotation in to a 5mm linear movement. The cam wheel can be rotated to give smaller movements if required when rotation of the servo is 90 degrees or less. Cam wheel can also be rotated to reverse the action. Fitting is via three screws the same as a Peco PL9 (below baseboard) or PL12 (above baseboard) mounting.

Jackson... Just joining layouts is fraught with problems that are hard to address:- - Control system? - Region? - Layout height? - Minimum track radius? This type of situation is usually addressed by modular clubs or modular groups who build to a standard, but even modular setups have to deal with some of these problems. If you see a big layout at an exhibition like the Thamesider's Essex Belt Lines with Freemo at Alexandra Palace which was 70' x 30' you can bet it is more than just a single layout. Essex Belt Lines had club modules, Thamesider's members' modules and also modules built by others to Freemo standards. Several of these modules form individual layouts when not connect up as part of a modular setup. North American is probably a bit more amenable to 'getting together' because changes over time and region on the other side of the pond are quite subtle compared to the very marked changes you would see in Europe and the UK. The sections are easier to join up without noticing the joins and it is hard to make any North American freight stock look out of place. Just exchanging a few vehicles and buildings can change a layout by fifty years! There are some modular standards where each module is accessed via a 'tunnel' and the Cheshire Layouts Committee is one that springs to mind. Every module is very different but the trains just run through the whole lot. There is the BritMod standard which people could build to, but it has not really caught on. This is something I would like to see work and I would love to build a module for it if I thought there would be any chance of exhibiting. I think it would be nice to get away from loads of small charity exhibitions with just tiny layouts that don't hold much interest to bigger exhibitions where you are sure to see something you like which can afford to attract the bigger layouts that don't go out very often. The good layouts are out there and I am sure you will find some to your taste at DEMU Showcase this weekend. May it get bigger and better still. Paul

Hi I just thought that I as chief dispatcher would add my 2p worth as I have a bit more insight than most as to what activity you see on the Essex Belt lines. The first thing that needs to be noted is that despite its size compared to other layouts it is still big compromise on scale. Real freight trains are two miles long, and the biggest we could fit in the staging yard was only one scale mile in length, and even that was big enough to break the drive on a pair of very expensive locos that caused a bit of outage while we found some more traction for the train. The setup we had at the show was a scale five miles or so end to end. That is quite a lot of distance and some of the trains took over an hour to get from one end to the other. Chances are that you might look at one part of the layout and not see anything happening, but there will be something happening somewhere! Maybe on the main line, maybe on the coal branch, perhaps on the Freemo branch. The layout consisted of two key parts representing different types of line, there was the busy class 1 single track main line at the front consisting of Thamesiders' spec main line modules, central traffic controlled with full prototypical Union Pacific signalling, and a density of traffic well in excess of that on the prototype (due to our much shorter than prototype block length). There was also the long branch line at the back operated as dark territory with no signalling made partly from Thamesiders' branch line spec modules and Freemo modules. As with the prototype, different types of trains had different priorities. The branch line trains often had to wait for a while before going on to the main line because mainline freights had priority, and as with any single track line after a train has gone one way it has to be 'looped' in order for another train to come the other way - and there is never going to be much to see while that is happening unless you want to listen to the turbine idling or look at some of the excellent scenery (we have some very talented scenic modellers in the club). At times there were five trains out on the CTC controlled part of the layout, so it did get very busy at times - that is without what was running on the branches. If you can't see anything going on it is always worth asking one of the team because we are a very approachable lot and we can always run a special, and most of the time the drivers were operating from outside the layout 'Captain Peacock' style so they could see the signals (often using phones as throttles, they were not texting!). There were two screens set up outside the barrier with some information so you could see where the trains were in real time on the CTC parts of the layout and see the CTC panel operating just like in an operating tower (signal box), and as with the prototype seeing the signals change as the dispatcher sets a route gives you an indication that a train is imminent. A few people must have been interested in watching the signals because all my big pile of handouts explaining the signal aspects went - unlike in the UK with simple 4-aspect signalling, the UP has around 24 aspects that can be shown on some of the masts so it can be quite interesting at times for the drivers. Something a bit unfamiliar from an easy going part of the world might not be everyone's cup of tea, but despite a few teething troubles like the little hiccup on Saturday with the cab bus wiring, the odd delay trying to roster a driver or find a controller for the driver, we kept people entertained most of the time with probably 90% or more utilisation of the single track main line section. It was nice to be invited and to be able to provide what was probably a unique exhibit that has not been seen before in the UK on such a scale with full prototype North American signalling on a modular layout (did you notice it was all modular?). I think the signalling worked because there was not one collision or head-on meet on the CTC controlled parts of the layout all weekend! Paul .