Harlequin

Will the band be taking up their place at the end of the platform for the big send off? I think the Stationmaster still has the bunting from King George's coronation in that big cupboard in his office.

Hi Pete, No offence taken, that was just a sketch showing what I thought might be a neat arrangement in broad terms. I didn't put any details on but you can see how Keith's detailed plan is broadly similar and they could perhaps be melded together. You aren't asking too much and stick to your guns on a through station with more than 2 platforms. Regarding the high level line: That would be much more satisfying (IMHO) if it had a connection with the rest of the layout. Yes, that means a gradient but fear not - you've got the space to do it easily and reliably. Maybe that is where your future expansion could be focused. Plan in a gradient to a high level station now but build it after you've got the basic layout working.

In Keith's plan it's very difficult for mainline goods traffic to get into or out of the goods yard. It requires shuffling backwards and forwards using the branchline as a headshunt. The curves in the top left corner are the tightest in the plan, the most likely to need to be hidden, but the proximity of the TT makes that very difficult to do. And I agree with the others that the high level track really looks superfluous. Going back a few weeks, I posted this:

After trying a few measurements I realise that getting meaningful results is going to be more involved than I thought! 1. If I repeat measurements in roughly the same spot I get slightly different results every time. Fair enough but that means that I will need to take a number of measurements and average them out before it's safe to post any numbers here. 2. The colorimeter can tell you whether two samples are close to each other within a defined tolerance. When I sample one side tank of my Hornby 6110 Large Prairie all the samples are fine, within the tolerance but here's the kicker... When I compare that colour with the other side tank it's consistently outside the tolerance and the colorimeter reports a colour match "failure"! The biggest difference is always in the L axis - in other words one side is darker than the other... I suspect the paint has not been sprayed evenly on both sides. That's an interesting finding already, even if it does make my idea of comparing models much more difficult. 3. When I try to convert the CIELAB values into colours that my computer can display (on a properly calibrated monitor) the results are always more grey than green - green-ness is barely detectable. I don't know yet if the conversion is going wrong, my monitor is wrong, my eyes are wrong or the colorimeter is wrong. So I have some problems to work through here!

I think that's a story from BR days. In Great Western days, the era this sub-forum is about, paints did not arrive in a ready made colour and did not naturally have a gloss finish. Thinners were a normal part of the paint formulation and in fact white spirit was the specified thinner for the "China Red" used on buffer beams. To re-iterate, I'm not suggesting there is any one "pure" colour for GWR Loco green.

At the moment I'm not intending to compare model colours to prototypes, just to compare them to each other in a quantifiable way for now. However... I have got a copy of Railway Archive No.5, as recommended in Great Western Way 2nd Edition, for the article "Painting Victorian Trains" by Dr. Anthony J. East. It gives some useful clues about the formulation of GWR Loco green ("Middle Chrome Green"). The exact mix of pigments and the resulting colour was quite closely specified by Swindon and the GWR were very careful about their "brand identity" so I think colours would have been rejected if they were not up to scratch. We know about the effects of weathering and heating and we know some of the reasons why paint formulations and painting methods changed over the years. So, I think we can explain most variations without resorting to stories from the pub about chucking ingredients recklessly into the pot! On the subject of Lakes, Dr. East says that lakes are a specific subdivision of organic pigments: "A lake is a chemical complex formed between a [soluble] dye [snip] and a metal salt. Together they react to form a stable insoluble chemical complex." "In general, lakes are darker and more violet than the dye itself." He says, Alizarin, the natural dye extracted from the madder plant combined with an Aluminium salt creates Crimson Lake. Crimson Lake is transparent and so needs all those undercolours but I don't know if that's true of all lakes.

Yes, they do. When two vehicles are fully in the same curve, their buffers overhang the rail by the same amount and on the same side and so they can't ride past each other. The difference in their outswings is effectively zero. Imagine track that simply goes from straight directly to a constant radius curve. The end of the vehicle still on the straight will have very little outswing but the one fully on the curve will have maximum outswing - maybe enough difference for the buffers to ride past each other. A properly designed transition curve just ensures that the outswing of adjacent vehicles both increase gradually together so that the outswing difference is never greater than a buffer width. Sorry if that's teaching Grandma to suck eggs. (Did someone say Euler Spiral?)

Hi Paul, That's an interesting topic but I'm not going to get into it yet. It might eventually be possible to quantify the effects of scale and/or distance as a vector in CIELAB space but first things first - I need to just get some basic colour readings and see if they say anything about the relative colours of different locos. (Yes, Hornby King class, I'm looking at you!)

Hi Tim, The device runs a series of self-checks when it starts up including an "internal whiteboard" test. The operating instructions do not suggest any kind of external calibration is needed, or even possible. The acid test will be whether it gives the same reading for a known sample colour (or colours) over a long period of time. Yes, that's a possibility which might help me but other readers might want to use a different loco as their personal baseline so I'm not sure that publishing results in that form would be generally useful. And of course, we know that GWR Loco green varied over time, even during the first weeks after out-shopping due to effects of heat on the varnish, so there is not one single loco colour that I'm happy with. I expect them to be different. I won't be glossing up the surfaces. Model loco paint finishes are generally very similar in terms of the gloss level and I will rely on that to allow model colours to be compared. I also don't want to add another variable in to the measurements which might complicate things and make it more difficult for others to reproduce my results. In theory anyone who cares to buy one of these colorimeters should be able to measure the same make and model of loco as me and get the same results, within some acceptable level of tolerance.

To try to get a grip on GWR Locomotive green in model form I bought a cheap colorimeter: This device measures colours using it's own calibrated light source and gives results in a colour space called CIELAB, which is device independent and is widely used to specify and compare colours throughout manufacturing industry. CIELAB (more correctly "CIE L*a*b*") is an international standard that describes colours in absolute, unambiguous mathematical terms. The three components of CIELAB are: L*: lightness 0 to 100 a*: green to red (usually given in the range -128 to +128) b*: blue to yellow (usually given in the range -128 to +128) By changing the values of each of those three components you can specify every colour that the human eye can see. Each colour can be thought of as a point within a 3 dimensional shape - a cylinder with the L value measuring the height of the colour within the cylinder. At the bottom of the cylinder where L (lightness) is 0, colours look something like this: At the top, L lightness is 100: In the middle, around where GWR Loco greens are found, it looks like this: To be able to compare CIELAB measurements against each other, and to reproduce them accurately, it's important to know the colour of the light source that was used to measure them. My new device uses a standard D65 illuminant with a 10° field of view, which is equivalent to noon daylight. So, the colorimeter should give objective measurements of loco colours without any bias due to the perception of the viewer or the lighting conditions. I just need to be able to get access to a flat area of colour at least 8mm diameter on the models I want to measure. More to follow...

Hi Neal, Have you considered the GWR overbridge style kits here: https://greenwoodmodelrailwayproducts.co.uk/shop/turntables/oo-turntable/ (All out of stock currently) and here: http://www.metalsmith.co.uk/4mm_scale_00_EM_P4.htm I have no idea if they're any good but both claim to have motorised and indexing options.

Agree but if you design your transition curves correctly, they will not allow the buffers to slide past each other. If your reverse curves & transition curves allow you to propel stock through them without buffer locking then you have truly found Nirvana. :railway bhudda:

Agree. This is one of the reasons for using transition curves between straight track and constant radius.

With one stroke, @melmerby chops right through the Gordian Knot!

I found a photo of her in later years in the "Everything Great Western" group in Facebook. Date of photo not given but it looks like she's standing in a line of condemned locos with her number roughly painted on where the plate used to be. The letters GWR are just visible under the grime on the tank. The caption says: "1901 Class loco No.1925, was turned out from Stafford Road Works in December 1883. In 1949 it was specially painted at the works ( including GWR lettering) in order to appear in the film " The Chiltern Hundreds" The engine then returned to normal service until withdrawn in April 1951, by which time it was then the last GWR O-6-0 saddle tank loco in existence." I can't copy the photo or provide a link because "Everything Great Western" is a closed group but it is well worth joining. If you join, search for "saddle 1925" to find the photo.

Okehampton

The 20th of September 1938 was a Tuesday... The "Suite for jazz orchestra No. 1" by Dmitri Shostakovich, was premiered on this day, 1938. (To pick a fact not related to the rumblings of War in Europe.)

Thanks for the answers. To be brutally honest I don't think that space is usable for a scenic model railway. You will be looking through the trusses all the time so the scenic illusion just won't hold up. And if you look into the model diagonally the view will be blocked even more by the trusses. I would have suggested a scenic area in the central aisle but, since the aisle is under 4ft wide and the inner posts slope into the aisle, I don't think that will work either. I can't offer any more thoughts, except to get the builders in and open up some of the trusses (with building regs approval of course). Sorry.

I think that would have to be, at least partly, a rock-sided cutting for two reasons: Banks take up a lot of space and in the real world they were kept clear of trees. You could possibly also attempt the neat visual trick of continuing the cutting towards the backscene so that the line of the track appears to be straighter than it really is. Maybe put some dummy track in the bottom! (But you then need to disguise the junction of the cutting with the backscene somehow.)

I agree with Keith that the curved points look like Setrack parts. Redraw using Streamline Code 75 parts to find out if the plan still works. You may need to do something clever to achieve the tight curves in Code 75 flexitrack. I'm sure it can be done but it won't be as straightforward as laying to the typically larger radii used with flexitrack. P.S. I think having one siding without road vehicle access is fine because you need somewhere to store your empties and generally shuffle wagons around during loading and unloading. Edit: I don't think there's room between the tracks for an island platform. The minimum width for an island platform should be 48mm but you can fiddle that a bit. With the tight curves you may need to leave ~25mm between the platform edge and track centre to allow for the overhangs of long vehicles - you need to test that. That adds up to ~100mm between track centres either side of the island platform for most of its length.

The roof trusses are really constraining. Are the inner ones upright? What is the distance between the inner posts? (Looks like about 5 feet?) Do you want your railway to be scenic? Are you using Setrack parts for a particular reason?

I stumbled across a hint about the two whistle tones in this photo of the cab of Odney Manor: In the top right you can see the two labels, “Whistle” and “Brake Whistle”...

That weasel word, "Nominal", is their "get out of jail free" card...

This is 7828 Odney Manor at one of the recent WSR open days: Sorry, not the best photo and take it with a pinch of salt because, (a.) it's one of the 1950s BR-built versions and (b.) it's in preservation livery. I've only just noticed the helpfully labelled Whistle chains - "Whistle" and "Brake Whistle"... Interesting...

The staggered point blades don't reduce the radius of the smaller right hand route by very much. I measure ~915mm for the left hand route, as expected, and ~800mm for the right. Peco do make mistakes with their stated radii. They sometimes claim the Large turnouts are 60in radius - and that's just silly.