Harlequin

Did you check the decoder was aligned correctly?

Fair enough. You can never rely on a damn computer to do the same thing two times in a row!

For the record the website was down in the wee small hours last night, giving 522 errors. This follows the pattern we have seen prevously: sporadic deterioration in response times then a crash.

You might have misaligned the socket and the pins, I.e. the socket is one pin too far to the left or right. I did the same thing once and it was very confusing for a while!

I don’t think it’s related to high traffic at any given time because it seems to be semi-random (it’s been doing it on and off all afternoon for me) and it’s doing it now (stupidly early in the AM). Whatever the problem is that builds up and requires a reset is possibly building up more quickly recently. Some sort of resource leak, I guess.

You could try a fibreglass pencil to clean the sides of the rails down in the gap between the blades and the stock rails. Be careful not to get any fibres on your skin, though, and hoover out any fibres from the points after cleaning. Also remember that the electrical connection to the frog relies on the hinges where the blades join the fixed closure rails. I’m not sure how to clean that joint in situ but you could perhaps try putting a drop of isopropyl alcohol on the joint and working it a bit. Then test whether you have electrical continuity through these various junctions using a multimeter. That will tell you where the problem really is.

IMHO, @Flying Pig nailed it with his revised plans. Specifically the removal of the facing points, so that goods trains on either Up or Down have to set back into the goods loop. Beautiful.

Hey TA! You might like to go and check one of your own track plan threads, where I suggested just such a thing for you some months ago.

Your curved 6 road trad fiddle yard above has the problem that you need to man handle rolling stock from the outbound side to the inbound side because there are no crossovers within the FY. So, in the bonkers vein (is it because we're all in the holiday mood?): What if that entire curved FY was a traverser that slid across the two feed lines? (I.e. up and down as we see it on screen) That would allow any FY road to connected to either feed line, meaning that no man handling would be needed (or at least it would be greatly reduced). Whichever road is spare could be the headshunt. The cost being a slight reduction in the length of the storage roads. But seriously, I suggest a KISS approach and avoiding curves in the FY. Keeping the FY roads straight will allow closer, more accurate, coupling of vehicles. Cassettes can also be used for transport to exhibitions and just keep an empty cassette pushed to the back that you can plug in quickly for shunting.

The bottom road of all the designs above can’t be connected to the “outbound” line from the scene. Ideally you want to arrange it so that all roads can be connected to both lines feeding the scene. Would cassettes be an option instead of a traverser? At 40in long they would be just about manageable and you could store a lot of them on shelves just above the fiddle yard. More storage than a four road traverser allowing for a more varied and intensive service and giving the ability to turn trains.

Now, this is getting interesting because you are heading from Ashburton to Moretonhampstead (sort of) while I am heading from Moretonhampstead to Ashburton... Let me explain. You might like to have a look at my topic "Hampton Malstead". The early ideas were inspired by Moretonhampstead but were compromised by space (and lack of experience) into a rather generic trackplan. The much more open and curvaceous, flowing plan at the end of the topic is a huge improvement but I'm still not entirely happy with it because there's still not much room for non-railway scenery around the station. When I worked up the Ashburton-like sketch for you I realised that a linear station on wide baseboards doesn't suffer from that problem and the more I think about it, the more attractive it seems! Hence, I’m potentially heading in the opposite direction to you - wider boards and simpler, thinner, straighter trackplan. So I hope you won't be upset or surprised if you see me do something like my Ashburton-like suggestion above. And I too am already thinking about spreading over three boards making up 12ft scenic length. (Feel free to have a dusty loading area - I'm not going to claim copyright on it ;-)

"So I just have to pose here like a Charlie for 5 minutes? And you say the Modelu scanner is hidden in the carriage?"

Exactly. (I thought that perhaps David had spotted a subtle difference between this plan and Ashburton that changed the operation significantly.) Notice that the goods yard in my suggested plan is right at the front of the scene with only the dusty yard/lane in front of it (in my imagination). So you can reasonably easily reach in to connect and disconnect a rope and actually perform rope shunting...!

I don't think I understand the problem that you see here, David, but I'm no shunting expert so very willing to learn! Setting aside rope shunting for the moment (or is that what you meant?) here's how I see it being done: Goods train pulls into platform line. Say, one target wagon in the middle of the train needs to be deposited in the kickback. So the Loco does this: Optionally pick off the guards van and propel it into the loop siding beyond the loco release crossover where it is out of the way before crossing back into the loco release headshunt. Propel the train back until the target wagon is past the yard shunt clearance point. Uncouple, leaving the target wagon and the tail of the train standing on the main line while the remainder of the train is drawn back into the platform line. Cross over again, run round and couple up to the target wagon standing on the main line. Uncouple the target wagon from the tail. Draw the target wagon into the goods shed line. Propel it into the kickback. (Assuming no gradients and that wagons will stand where you leave them, even without brakes.) What do you think, @DavidCBroad?

A lot of those points are Insulfrog, I notice... The "toe" and "heel" terminology is actually derived from just thinking about the point "blades" and the closure rails, not the whole turnout. Once you realise that it makes much more sense! What actually is this bit of pointwork for? The trackwork is all spaced out so that it's not obvious which lines are up and which are down but from looking at your gallery I see there are several routes that can feed Up trains directly on to Down tracks running in the wrong direction and vice versa. P.S. NSW commonly stands for New South Wales, the Australian state.

Maybe someone taped the wrong castings to the card...

Yes, I agree it's a bit awkward but we know that it was done where necessary and it goes back to what I was saying above about deliberately not rationalising everything so that track plans have a bit more personality.

Sorry but the cylinders don’t look right to me. They are surely the outside cylinder pattern used by all the 4 cylinder classes, aren’t they? Here’s a photo of the right hand side of a Hall in good light: No curve inwards under the running plate. Castle (converted from Star): Curve in under running plate.

Hi John, I've got a suggestion for you. I hope you don't mind me posting a design in your thread but it's the simplest way to explain the ideas: It's quite linear and simple with long sidings - hopefully more realistic that way. There are some subtle curves (maybe too subtle!) Sort of like Ashburton but with the platform on the other side and the engine shed flipped to be behind the platform, where your bay was. The kickback turntable spur traps the engine shed from the running line and helps to keep things compact. (Princetown and Fairford turntables were on similar spurs off the shed lines so this is a realistic position.) The turntable is shown as a 25 footer but you could go larger, just model it as unused or remove it. Could all be done using Peco bullhead in the near future, when the slips are released. The double slip is a necessary evil to help with compression. Very simple long thin goods yard right at the front of the scene with wagons being parked up at different positions along its length to be unloaded, including coal. You could have fun simulating rope shunting!

Hi Jimmy, You've got a reasonable space and you can fit a continuous run layout (aka a "roundy round" layout) in there with a bit of thought. It would need one hinged/lifting section (because you said one door is rarely used) but it would be worth the effort. As David said: you can terminate trains on a continuous run but not run trains continuously on a terminus to FY layout. A continuous run is the simplest form of automation - just set something running and sit back (assuming you've set the points correctly and there are no obstructions!) The layout surrounds you in a very satisfying way - the layout is not just in the room the room is the layout. You can safely let younger visitors play. The rarely used door has the advantage of opening outwards so you could build baseboards in front of it. The door would still be usable by crawling under the baseboards when needed (hopefully not often).

I can give you some info about this but some of it is speculative. Both MH and Ashburton were built as Broad Gauge lines and were initially operated by 0-6-0T and 2-4-0ST locos. (Possibly also Gooch 4-4-0STs?) The turntables date from those broad gauge days. I think that these broad gauge tank engines preferred ro run "forwards" for some reason and so the ability to turn them was required. Hence the small turntables. I guess that this need was still seen as important around the time of gauge conversion because the turntables were retained at that time but soon after that improved locos probably made them redundant. The MH turntable was removed between 1900 and 1913. Princetown was different. It was standard gauge from the start and the turntables there and at Yelverton were specifically retained to allow 19XX 0-6-0 locos with snowploughs to be turned and run between trains to keep the line open during heavy snow.

Another sad story! It seems like we've lost a lot of info that would have been very useful to us now.

I prefer the goods sidings the right way round as well but I don’t like the cattle pens being through the goods shed. Edit: In all the plans I think the platform should be much longer. Unfortunately Rational planning usually leads to the same old anodyne BLT track plan. If you want to have something different I think you’ve got to be slightly irrational!