Harlequin

Hi Richard, Are you open to suggestions for alternative baseboard arrangements that might allow you to make better use of the space and an easier track plan? If so, could you post a drawing of the room plan with dimensions and door and window positions?

I used to prefer old-maps.co.uk’s UI and I subscribed to it but their map quality isn’t as good as the NLS and their gazeteer (place name look up) recently stopped working, for me at least. I complained and they fobbed me off with a nonsense reply. So I cancelled my subscription and went to the NLS... The SRS website is a curate’s egg.

Hi Martin, There are a lot of places where track is very close to the walls of the room. Have you thought about how you will make it look natural? How the scenery merges into the backscene without too visible a join? Obviously, in some places you can just have a boundary wall and that will look good but you can't do that everywhere. I notice that the colliery is much bigger than the first version. If you reduced it's length a bit the purely scenic East end could continue round a bit further into the South East corner. I feel this would balance up the different scenes a bit better and make the scenic section between station and colliery valid in it's own right - somewhere where trains can be seen in plain countryside travelling between destinations. I feel duty bound to remind you that the original version could reverse a whole train (or a loco) without having to remove it from the tracks and the latest version can't do that. (But it might not be too difficult to add it back in...!)

I emailed Dapol two weeks ago about the lack of external steam pipes on 6385. Here's a copy: I concede it could have been better written but... No reply... Draw your own conclusions. The Mogul spare parts are all now listed on the DCC Supplies website. Steam pipes are not among them. P.S. The drawbar assembly is a spare so if the mechanism does weaken over time it could in theory be replaced.

I used the "fang" technique for the bridge section on my test layout too, but in stalagmite orientation... It wasn't built to be regularly opened and closed - I just duck under most of the time. The dowels really only like exactly parallel movement so it takes a bit of wiggling and lifting at both ends to lift the bridge off. Some sort of conical devices would be much better. (Are the DCC Concepts things conical?) Notice that the landing block is bolted on, not permanently fixed. When things rarely go out of alignment I can slacken off the bolts a bit and tap the block into a better position, then tighten up again.

Here's a little package of suggestions regarding your BLT: Have more, but shorter storage lines because that's probably more flexible. Leave the lower storage points fan where it is and start the upper fan more towards the West, feeding into the shorter storage roads. That means there's a run of simple plain track in the NW corner, and that means you can angle the BLT more into the NW corner (as far as you can without cramping the fiddle yard operator's space. That means that the entrance to the room is more open and there's more room for the BLT operator. Then the BLT approach curve is more open and the BLT can be a bit longer. Idea: The curves at the East end seem to be quite relaxed now and if there's no need to disguise them any more that would be a great place to drop the baseboard away and have the two lines cross a river valley on bridges or small viaducts of very different characters, say, one brick and one timber!

Related topic here: So there is something good happening in the world!

Well, yes and no... You don't have to make any changes to the turnout, but if you have been carrying out the "standard mods" to your other electrofrog turnouts, which your OP implied, then what I said above is the equivalent mod for this type of turnout. (I.e. make the closure rails permanently powered rather than relying on the contact of the blade on the stock rail and switch the frog using a more reliable external switch.) (Note that because the moulded insulating parts are so close to the frog you could have the same problem with some wheelsets as has been found with the Unifrog turnouts but it's easy to fix with a bit of nail varnish painted inside the closure rails.)

They are electrofrog, as Andi says, it's just that some Peco Streamline turnouts have an older design than others. I think the Small Ys are an example of this (and there are physical reasons why these small turnouts need to be a bit different as Andi says). If you cut both long link wires then you will isolate the frog from the closure rails and the closure rails from each other. Cut one of the link wires as far away from the frog as possible and that becomes the frog dropper wire. Then solder new link wires to the underside of the closure rails. You can see there are openings in the moulding where the closure rails are visible and channels in the "sleeper" to route wires to the outside of the turnout but nothing to allow you connect them to the stock rails so either bit of carving will be needed or just route those wires through the baseboard as you would any normal power feed dropper.

The branch line joining the main line before the platforms seems to conflict with the idea of allowing trains to run on the main circuit while other operations are going on. (And would the Board of Trade allow a connection like that?) Based on a true story: A through station on the single track main line might start off as a simple passing loop with a small goods yard. Then the branch line company build their line and engine shed near the station but not connected at first. After some negotiation a bay platform is built and the branch line comes in alongside the main passing loop, with a suitable junction to the main line. Another branch line joins the main line a few miles further down the track and since its services also terminate at the through station, it also gains a bay platform but this time on the other side. The main line company takes over the two branch lines and the original branch engine shed becomes the local shed for the main line. All the time traffic is growing, the importance of the branch lines wax and wane and the station facilities are tweaked and expanded to suit revised operating patterns but the underlying simple original passing loop is still the backbone of the plan.

Hoist by your own Petard! Yes, exactly, you can do all of that at a through station, and then there are the extra through services to add more operations. With a suitable back story you can terminate main line trains at the station even though it's not a terminus.

The blue high level BLT section is not so big that it couldn't be made demountable... That is to say, it could be permanent most of the time and you duck under it normally but when frequent access is needed to the storage end it could be carefully lifted off and stacked somewhere. The crossovers against the platform faces might be troublesome for your 4-4-0s. If the main station were a through station, then you could imagine the left hand end of it being off-scene, like @KNP's Encombe, and you could then run some of the loops off-scene to the left, thus removing the crossovers from between the platforms. But that would mean more track crossing the controversial lifting flap so maybe a non-starter... Can you explain why you prefer a terminus to a through station? I still don't really get it so I can't decide at the moment if the pseudo-terminus is the best solution or whether a proper through station could be made to do what you want. (Wouldn't the miner's halt be on the colliery side of the track?)

No problem: Headshunts. I think you have plenty of tracks to use as headshunts in the current version of the main station for the goods yard, the parcels and the engine shed areas but you might consider adding more depending on how you think the station would be operated. You would only need to stop running on the main line when something needed to cross from the branch/engine shed side to the parcels/goods side. Maybe an acceptable compromise?

To separate the main and branch lines more you could possibly run the main line closest to the well, then the colliery, then the branch line outside that. That would be good in a few ways: The main and branch lines would be better separated and have very different paths, helping to better differentiate them. The colliery buildings would partially obscure the branch line. They could be quite close to the branch line because colliery development might have cut into the hillside and created retaining walls. It feels "right" for a colliery to be set on/in a hillside in my mind. (Is that true for your kind of colliery?) It helps the mainline cross under the branch at a less acute angle. The difficulty with that idea is that the main line would then have a much tighter curve around the end into the main station - but there are probably ways to manage that. There might be room in the bottom right corner for a private siding off the branch line, either inside or outside, to feed a small industry.

Here’s my lash up this year, GWR of course (sort of)...

Quick sketch of how a simple round-the-room circuit could work without losing the key elements: Obviously you'd want to re-arrange the main station a bit. (It is unavoidably a through-station but terminal platforms could be justified, especially associated with the branch line.) Arrows show where I've pushed things around to get more space. There are Pros and Cons, of course! But hopefully it's food for thought...

Maybe this also is a diversion too far from the topic of the Dapol Mogul and would be better in a topic of it’s own?

How steep is the coaling ramp, taking the transitions from level to grade and back to level again into account? Is it workable and will it look right? When the scene is fully developed can you reach the back without damaging things at the front? 3ft 6in is a long reach. How are coal wagons moved between coaling stage and storage sidings without trapping the loco? There is no run round loop.

I just had an idea about a possible arrangement for a high level terminus that would hide the storage loops but still leave them accessible with minimal tracks covering other tracks: The downside is that you'd have to duck-under to perform manual fiddling but the BLT board would be higher making that a bit easier and some fiddling could be done where the main circuit emerges near the doorway.

Hi Martin, If you bridge the entrance door then I suggest the bridge should not attempt to be scenic, should be just one level and only the main lines should journey over it. That makes life much simpler! Following on from that, since the storage area will also be more or less non-scenic it makes sense to position that to one side or the other of the entrance bridge so that the remainder of the room can be unbroken scenic area. (It might be worth investigating having the storage to the right of the door so that the scenic panorama presented to the visitor on entrance spans the entire length of the room...?) Then your main line, single or double, can circumnavigate the room in a meandering fashion, without exploring it's limits too far. A through station on the mainline would be more efficient spatially than a terminus and would avoid both the need for a mainline junction feeding it and the need for the mainline to pass by the station artificially. It could include all the same elements of a terminus, allowing trains to run through at speed (period speed!) as well as allowing trains to terminate and reverse if required. If the through station incorporated the branch line junction, exactly as you have it in your major station now, then there would be no need for any junctions in the countryside except for possibly the colliery, which could be off the main line, off the branch, or maybe terminating the branch. You might think that this all sounds a bit anodyne but maybe the simpler bare bones would make it easier to flesh out the character and interest? (Your stations always seem to be naturally characterful to me, BTW.) If the branch line remained outside the main line along its entire length then you wouldn't have any problem with the main line or storage loops being covered - but it would, on the face of it, be a bit boring again.

With the duckunders remember that operating is not the only time you might (or might not) need to access the separated areas. There's also tracklaying, ballasting, track weathering, track cleaning, making scenery, fixing backscenes, planting buildings, etc., etc., etc... Stacking trains in storage loops obviously affects operations (although, if you're prepared to see the trains you don't want at that moment, to do circuits of the scenic area to open the path for the train you do want, then maybe that's not such a big problem). If the lifting section and possibly some of the support structure either side was made of ply or metal then the problems of wood shrinkage could be largely eliminated.

Hi Martin, I can see the reason for all the talk of CJF, now, and to my eyes there are some typical CJF problems. (Sorry!) There’s almost no room for non-railway scenery. Unrelated tracks passing close to each other. Goods yards are cramped. Lots of Double junctions out in the open. Relatively sharp 90deg turns following each other in the right-hand dumbbell. Duckunders making access more difficult. Also, I worry about the storage capacity and how it will work in practice because of the lack of crossovers. Edit: Maybe the reversing loops obviate the need for crossovers? Not sure. I wonder if it would be possible to engineer a lifting section across the doorway that works reliably rather than abandoning the idea? After all, you know what the problems are now and you know that this is the first thing to get working before spending time on anything else. If you could cross the doorway then the plan could be simpler while still having all the same elements, with more room to breathe and more chance of being able to do some of the things on your wishlist. I hope this message doesn’t put you off. It’s offered constructively and obviously you may not see some of these things as "problems" at all!

Minories, as originally conceived, is portable and so you set it up wherever there is room for it... (And then fold it up and take it away when the room needs to be used for something else.)

Great, thanks! Adv starter: OK Bracket: Oops - trying to get the drawing together too fast! Loco release: OK Trap/catch: I was using Andy's own terminology. OK "traps". Distant: Great, OK. Bay trap: Interesting, OK.