Harlequin

It sounds like the DCC signal is getting scrambled. How long is your bus? Or if your bus follows the track, how long is your outside loop?

There’s also rumour of a remake of The Titfield Thunderbolt, featuring all your favourite contemporary stars: James Corden Russel Brand Danny Dyer Ant & Dec Katie Hopkins Katie Price Brendan O’Carrol (Mrs Brown) Gemma Collins Piers Morgan making his acting debut and featuring Lady Gaga It’ll be a box office smash!

All this film talk in the topic related to the company that doesn’t have the relevant film rights...

It's also a signal box with a brise soleil ! (It needs it because of it's ugly minimalist design.)

You know I was thinking the other night, "What have Hornby ever done for us?" (to use another Monty Python reference ). And the first thing that came to mind was the Pecketts. You could almost forgive Hornby anything for these cute little jewels!

Maybe we'll get more insights about Hornby's recent operations from this: https://www.world-of-railways.co.uk/news/uktvs-yesterday-channel-announces-new-Hornby-series-this-autumn

Have you got any photos you could share with us?

I think the storage area could be laid out more efficiently with the same capacity by pushing the loops out to the edges of the boards where they are more accessible, moving the reversing loop into a corner and moving the lift to a position where it's alongside some of those loops instead of in it's current, separated location. Then the offset between the levels could be reduced making the gradients easier and/or the ramps shorter. If the storage loops were underneath the countryside area rather than under the station, there would be fewer problems of the electrical gubbins for the upper level interfering with the lower. In fact, it would be easier to access the electrical stuff for the upper the less stuff there is below and vice versa, it's easier to make lift off section to uncover the storage tracks if those lift offs are purely scenic. @davidprentice How do you get access to the operating well?

You could perhaps combine the L plan and the oval plan to get the best of both worlds and make more space for all the parts like this:

The ramp up from storage to scenic level obviously has to join the main lines somewhere. So you need to decide if that junction will be scenic or hidden. If it’s scenic then you need to decide if you can justify all the traffic on scene either coming from or going to the diverging route. If you have a reversing loop on the upper scenic level, again you need to think about whether it will be visible or hidden, although it will obviously be more difficult to justify it being out in the open. On the other hand, a reversing loop is a very big feature to hide - taking up a lot of area that should really be scenic. The same kinds of problems also apply to the train lift, of course. On the upper level is it visible in the scene and how do you represent the lines/junctions leading to and from it? Given that you’ve gone to all the trouble of having two distinct levels, storage and scenic, I think it would be great to maximise the scenic area and only have hidden or technical trackwork on the upper level where absolutely necessary. If you want to go down that route and avoid a reversing loop on the upper level then you need to allow trains to come up form the storage level running clockwise, run around clockwise and eventually descend clockwise. And similarly for anti-clockwise running. Your train lift could accomplish that but I worry about making it work reliably and the amount of manual intervention it will need. To do the job using ramps you need two, one clockwise and one anti-clockwise, assuming you don’t want to stop trains on scene and reverse them down a single ramp...! If you have two opposing ramps you again need to think about the junctions where they join the main scenic running lines. They can take up a lot of space if done prototypically and could look a bit odd out in the open but it is possible to compress and combine them if they are hidden. Then trains can magically appear and disappear from the scenic level with all the visible running taking place on track that makes sense in the scene, without any need to justify funny looking junctions. We have discussed these issues in this forum before in @Chimer‘s last great layout thread and you will find some drawings of different ideas if you're interested. Sorry for the long post! I hope it’s of some use.

Hi David, Happy Easter to you too! Unfortunately the drill pushed the whole turnout up before breaking the tiebar so that it is now hump-backed and no longer glued to the cork. It's got to come out. Thankfully the copper clad sleepers and the rail soldered to them just a few mil's away don't seem to have been affected. Your experiences of folding layouts are very interesting. My Minories is easy to move short distance on level floors (and castors would make that even easier, of course @St Enodoc) but if I was having to lug it up stairs or for any serious distance by myself it would need to be made easier somehow. Carrying straps are another great idea, @Nearholmer. As you say, the structure has to have a certain strength to allow the hinge to work reliably and so that inevitably means that the weight increases - unless we started to get into aluminium frames and carbon fibre shells... I tried to keep it light and strong by having the parts support each other, for instance using the side panels to brace the corner posts (see the diagonals in the front panel) and I added the bar across the hinge posts rather than just fixing hinges to the posts directly, as per CJF. I used mostly 9mm ply simply because that's what I had to hand. I think I would still use 9mm for the actual trackbed because it's good for that to be rigid and it’s very useful to have that depth to screw into from below. But I can see now that many other parts could usefully have been 6mm without sacrificing the strength or rigidity much. My curious little cat has been very interested in the layout. She "helped" to find a couple of dry joints by sitting on some dropper wires when it was folded up... Actually it's good that she did! By the way, there's one other thing about Minories that CJF never mentioned as far as I know: You need a lot of headroom to fold or unfold it! I can do it on my dining table but not when it's on my workshop bench, which is higher. Having separate boards that can be connected for transport is probably a much better idea overall - like David's removable hinge pins.

Living and working with the layout reveals some interesting things that I wonder whether CJF had considered... It's a bit unwieldy to carry around - 3ft 6in is quite a spread for the arms, it's too wide to tuck under your arm comfortably and in both cases you end up with corners biting into you. It's also quite heavy and it's only going to get heavier when I add the scenics. The end frames that I made were not part of CJF's design but they do provide good hand holds and the hinge bar is particularly useful because it allows the whole unit to be carried upright. With rubber feet on the underside and the outer ends, and latches to hold it tight, it can be set up and moved around in various formats. This has been very useful while I've been working on the electrics: The upright position is really good for storage because it can stand in a corner where it's protected and doesn't get in the way. Maybe I'll put an aspidistra plant on top when it's not in use! All track sections now have droppers which should be inconspicuous once everything is ballasted and weathered. I prefer to solder them after track laying so that I don't disturb the sleeper spacing. Here's a very cruel close-up: I have wired up the turnouts initially so that the frogs are powered by the blades, just to be able to do a quick test run. I can easily change them later to be switched by the point motors when they are installed thanks to @Suzie's wiring technique and the use of Wago connectors. The connectors tuck away neatly into "Wagoboxes" which are screwed to the underside of the baseboard. I was hoping to be able to run a loco over the holiday weekend but I'm stymied by the lack of the special connector to plug into the back of my old Prodigy controller. And even when the part arrives from Rapid I won't be able to run anything into platform 3 for a while because I accidentally drilled through the tiebar of the last set of points! I was test-fitting one of the MTB point motors and trying to open up the hole when the drill bit caught and went straight through. Stupid! So I will have to cut that turnout out, clean up the PVA and do some careful fettling to put in a new one (which are as rare as hen's teeth at the moment) without disturbing the surrounding trackwork. Urgh!

Consider the situation of a loco at the back simply being stuck because it has lost electrical connection with the rails. Is it realistic to lift the upper levels simply to poke that loco and clean the track? You will have to clear the upper module of all stock, make sure anything removable is removed, undo the alignment locks, and afterwards reverse this process. This could become very tedious.

Hi Simon, I think the roof needs to be insulated to mitigate the temperature extremes that are normally found in a loft space. That will also save you money on heating/cooling the space. You also need to think about humidity control to prevent condensation on cold surfaces when you are heating the space or have the loft hatch open. Humidity will also affect the layout. For instance, it will make the rails tarnish quicker and need more frequent cleaning. You've got a list of things you want to include but have you actually drawn a plan to see whether they will all fit? Most people who have built gradients on layouts will tell you that 3.5% is too steep to operate without extra measures - especially for recent models of steam locos. Anywhere that you have tracks running above other tracks for any distance create a whole set of special problems. The electrics and point motors of the upper level can conflict with the lower. Access to the lower tracks is more difficult and so cleaning the track and poking stuck trains is more difficult. To get the flowing track of the real railway, look at real trackplans and understand how they work. To avoid the flat board look, don't build flat boards! Don't fill the width with track, leave room for landscape and think in advance how that landscape will work. Then build the boards to suit. BTW: I suggest not going for bullhead track because that system doesn't yet have the curved points, Ys and slips you'll probably need to compress the things you want into your space. In the 1950s-60s the trackwork was largely unchanged from the Steam era and that commonly made use of slips, which are also very useful for compression, but Bullhead slips are not on the market yet.

You Luddites! Here's a good reason for being on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1128119553992857/ Adrian Vaughan and various other high profile Westerners hang out there, posting photos and memories of working on the railway. (And yes, RMWeb is social media too!)

Have you noticed that very often in the period photos, especially in Bruce's wonderful shots, what appears to be the signalman's personal transport is parked alongside the box? Sometimes a bicycle but more typically a car. They are characteristic of the era and they make a connection with the man on duty at the time. The Austin Allegro parked alongside Balne above is a great example. I wonder what shade of brown it was?

The Ignore topic feature never used to work for me. The button never appeared where it was supposed to in any of the Themes. I could see that other people had the same problem and that there wasn't an easy answer so I just kept quiet. I don't use the Activity Streams - I just go to the areas I'm interested in and look at what's changed. That seems like a simpler way to filter the content. So, for me the new Ignore Topic system works perfectly - it's where I need it to be and it works now. Thanks Andy!

The Oxford Dean Goods, has this feature.

It just seemed more polite.

Report the first post to the moderators (click on ... and then click Report) and Andy will move it for you. Thanks.

Hi, You seem to be well past the stage of layout design so would you consider moving this thread to Layout Topics, please? Thanks.

Great photos but they look like they’ve been published before so is it OK to reproduce them here?

Here are the plans, drawn from memory and from the photos. And the lower level alone: While Dad was working it all out on A3 graph paper I think at times the paper got so flimsy, and the surface so hairy, that the plans had to be completely redrawn. And maybe that partly explains some of the flaws, because continuing to redraw things might have seemed like more effort than it was worth eventually! (The Magenta dashed lines on the hidden reversing loops show the isolated sections where the tricky electrical reversal took place.) The horrible helix was the Achilles heel of this layout but I can see now that the plan was flawed in many other ways, as well... I think I understand better now why it was never really satisfying to run and why the impetus to finish it waned.

The End of the Line. .

The new episode of "Signal Box" on YouTube mentions the Lion release but does not show any image of Lion. Instead it shows a still from the Titfield Thunderbolt featuring 1401 and a poster for the film. Strange, when Hornby don't have the rights for the film tie-in... What's wrong with promoting Lion as Lion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thNe29h3wAo