Harlequin

Here's a version with a few tweaks - most notably moving the end loading position. And revised fiddle yard as discussed with Martin.

I happen to have the GWR BLT book open in front of me. It says: "During the heavy snowfalls on Dartmoor small 19XX class tank locomotives fitted with snowploughs were run up and down the branch between trains, often backed with a rough 45XX [snip]. 0-6-0 tank locomotives were used as they could be turned at either end of the journey to face into the snow, using the 23' 6" diameter turntables provided at Yelverton and Princetown"

Yes, my statement was based on stations I had been looking at recently rather than a proper survey. I'll do some more research. Good point about ground levels.

Hi G-DIMB, Some of your track is very close to the outer edge of the boards. Have you thought about how you will make it work scenically? I hope you don't mind me saying this but, the track plan is quite regimented. If you made it a bit looser and more flowing it might look more realistic. Is there room for the goods shed to work properly? "That would be an ecumenical matter"

4575s were very commonly used on the Cardi Bach - at least in later years. There are lots of photos of them at all locations on the line and they appear in a Railway Roundabout film about the line. Moreover they sometimes double-headed goods trains because the line was so windy and undulating. And even better I’m sure I read somewhere that small prairies triple-headed occasionally, presumably to save a light engine movement! But I can’t remember where I read that, so it could be my imagination...

Ooph! Thanks Martin! As you can see there are always improvement to be made! Obviously you can call the station whatever you like but I wonder if my idea for the name should have been "Lamstead" rather than "Lambstead"? BTW: My leanings are always towards the GWR and obviously using Lambourn as inspiration heads in that direction so you might want to check the details of how other companies did things if you're going to set it somewhere else.

It was a different thread but, yes, the end-loading dock is a bit awkward in it's current position. I put it there because Lambourn's end-loading dock seems to at the end of it's very long cattle pens siding and because it seems to me they are almost always found in the goods yard, not near the passnger areas. It's is also a bit unresolved at the moment and would need to be designed properly. You could give road access to the dock, the pens and the yard in general from the south if that made it work better. There is a road passing by after all! Good idea: The red parts show the change with the original underneath: A large Y feeding into a medium left without the short curving section of plain track. It puts a slight wiggle in the line to the back siding but makes the curves in the sidings much more definite and the cattle pens kickback is now dead straight. I'm not sure which I prefer.

Aye, there's the rub: Important infrastructure is off-scene and important operations have to take place off-scene. You then have to be very disciplined to avoid unrealistic operations and to avoid the temptation to cheat to make life easier for yourself! It looks like a very interesting subject but I think it needs a bigger space - or a smaller scale. Or, since there are already critical formations off-scene, a radical solution would be to not model the throat at all! (i.e. move it under Burney Street bridge.) That might work...? BTW: The tracks definitely splay apart under Burney Street - I wonder if they pass either side of a bridge support? If the scene were viewed from the East looking West, as @mdvle suggests, you could edit out the terraced houses above the station and show a more interesting Victorian street scene (London Street) with horses and trams, etc.

Hi Martin and everyone, There have been lots of ideas put forward about possible industries and filling up the corner but because you said you wanted a scenic run into the station I've followed up on @clachnaharry's suggestion of doing something like Lambourn. So it's an upland country station with no industry near the station throat because that would obscure the line running in. I have also resisted the urge to fill up the top right corner with any trackwork. In fact I've removed one of the kickback sidings to keep it clean. In compensation you now have Lambourn's goods loop to make operation more interesting. The other kickback siding in the goods yard is retained but now serves a large cattle dock and possibly an end-loading ramp. It's not Hampton Malstead any more so I've tentatively called it "Lambstead". Don't worry about the green areas too much - they really just signify non-railway scenery and are for you to do whatever you want with. I've expanded to the full 3010mm width available. This is to enable revised fiddle yards to be connected. See below. I found that there was no point shortening the platform run round much because doing so also shortened the goods yard and the Lambourn style goods loop. So it's length hasn't changed much and it's still technically possible to run round 4 coaches - ghost images of 4 65ft coaches are shown. It just means that you can be more relaxed about where 3-coach passenger trains stop and they look good standing against the longer platform face. The platform face doesn't have to be that long, of course, and if it were shortened you could remove the bay and have a short kickback carriage siding like Lambourn. There's only one large radius turnout in use now, in the station throat to ease traffic into the curve. Orange turnouts are mediums, Green are curved and large Ys (my colour convention isn't properly worked out!). The loco release headhunt is 250mm long. Goods shunting only has to clear the double slip and that leaves a length of over 3 feet for use as headshunt so I think most of the time the loco wouldn't disappear into the fiddle yard while shunting. I haven't shown any paraphernalia, such as yard crane, loading gauge, PW huts, etc, etc... You'd need to think about where they go before you start the scenery. Hampton Malstead used a proscenium arch to hide the ends of the sidings on the left and I've done the same here to suggest the yard is bigger than we can see. A neatly boxed and lit display looks good in domestic setting (Mrs Balders might be impressed...?) but you could just have a simple backscene and terminate the sidings with buffers if you want. Fiddle yard I've come up with two alternative fiddle yard designs becasue you said that you'd prefer not to handle locos in the FY, David was hinting at the ability to shunt in the FY without locos appearing on scene and I was worried about locos lifts being difficult to use on the pointwork of the previous FY design. They both use traditional traversers with about 250mm travel out from the wall (using full extension drawer runners). They both have more consistent capacity than the previous FY design, both allow shunting entirely within the yard and both require less handling of stock than before. Roads are 50mm apart, on the basis that less manual handling is needed. Note: Road 0 can't be connected to the track leading to the scenic area - it's just extra storage and/or to help with loco movements. The top traverser design can contain whole trains including locos. To run round or turn a loco would need a loco lift and there are two straight headshunts to make rerailing from the loco lift easier. The bottom traverser design can contain trains excluding their locos. Spurs at the far end allow the loco to run off the traverser and from there they can run round without being handled at all. There are headshunts at the scenic end where locos can stand before backing onto a train. So the bottom design wouldn't require any stock handling and could be fully automated - but it would be quite intricate to operate!

Much simpler and more reliable if you avoid changing track levels. If you do, the steepest gradient should be about 1:35 (Peco recommendation) or shallower if you can do it but that takes a lot of space (length). With steep gradients like 1:35 you may run into issues of locos tractive effort - some locos won't be able to climb the gradient pulling a decent train. With multiple levels you can run into access problems when locos stop or derail under another bit of track. However, while keeping the track level you can vary the landscape levels to great effect, like Alex's layout above.

Yes, sorry I should have said that the grid squares are 305 by 305mm - i.e. 1ft square. So the operating well is 6ft by 2.5ft - a good size and you can reach across all the boards easily.

Quick suggestion: 12 by 4 when the hinged bit is raised. 12 by 5.5 when the hinged bit is down with 2.5 foot wide operating well.

Hi, Would it be against a wall? If so 4ft is too wide to reach across. If not, and you've got access all around, then reach is not a problem but something that size would be basically unmovable, in the middle of the room, once built - unless you build it in sections. You can do a good OO layout in that size, people have done them in much smaller spaces! Sketching is OK for basic ideas but layout designs live and die by the tightness of the track curves! So you probably need to draw it to scale eventually, either on paper or in the computer.

Lovely photos but have you noticed the gap between the front frames and the running plate of the King? (It's a bit unfair to put those two photos alongside each other but they show how good the model really is in most respects!) It seems to be a flaw of the model because upon examination my King looks exactly the same...

Hi John, I hope you don't mind but because you mentioned 1939 and technicolour you gave me the idea to take one of your photos and replicate the distinctive feel of a 1930s colour photo: I'm not sure I've quite got it yet but I think I'm on the right track. I desaturated the colours overall, flattened out the blue levels, emphasized the shadows to make the photo look slightly underexposed and applied some edge shading on top.

I like the sunset cloud formations in the backscene of that pic!

Yes. To try to make the run in longer and more room to shunt up the main line. Titanius is right about a train looking good against a longer platform but we have to accept that things are going to be a bit compressed in the 10ft available. Re. Lambourn: How wide can the scenic board be???

No problem (I hope your dog is OK!) This is a useful post to visualise the old layout: Your answer about fiddle yards is very useful, thanks. So, the kind of thing I showed above, all scenic with a skinny bridge connecting the ends to make a circuit should fit the bill. The scenic area should have quite dense trackwork, in the Freezer style of the old layout, as @Zomboid pointed out. So maybe we could have two opposing goods yards at either end, an Up yard and a Down yard, with a passenger section in the middle and a turntable and engine shed somewhere. To operate the goods you'd make up a train in one yard and send it out to run on the doube-track circuit for a while before it enters the other yard where you shunt it to break it down again. And while one goods train is running, maybe with a passenger going the other way round at the same time, you'd be shunting the other yard (headshunts allowing). Sounds like fun to me! What do you think?

Could you go further along the back wall? I don't want to push you to make something bigger than you can cope with or adversely affect your workshop, just exploring to find the best compromise to make the railway as good as it can be for you. The thing that worries me most about the 9 by 9 baseboard above is the lack of an off-scene fiddle yard, meaning that there's nowhere for trains to go to or come from... The back of the layout would basically just be double-track running lines - not doing anything very useful other than allowing trains to circulate. How do you feel about that?

I'm happy to use buildings, trees or anything to disguise exits sideways but since this exit is more torwards the operator I felt it needed to pass through a definite portal of some sort to mark the boundary between on and off stage. Balders might not want a gasworks at the suggested location because it would rather obscure the running line. We need to tie things down a bit more. Yes, absolutely. That should open things up on the right and I might lenghten the loco release headshunt a bit and move it away from the backscene on the left.

You're dead right! It's convoluted and difficult - but that's deliberate to make life more interesting for the operator... (See Wallngford - which was even sillier in real life!)

Hi Balders, The large radius turnouts work fine in some places but not others, especially the FY and the entry curve, so I suggest you use Code 75 throughout. I've assumed a minimum radius of 610mm - I'm trying to avoid anything as sharp as a 2nd radius (438mm) curve! The main baseboard could be wider, and that might be worth doing to make the goods yard more generous. Here's attempt number 1: Starting at bottom right: Fiddle yard sidings 1-4 with a kick-back siding 5 for storing and re-railing locos. 60mm spacing between track centres. Sidings 2-4 can store 3 coach trains (2 is a bit tight). Two small radius turnouts (red) are used in the FY to save space. Curved turnouts (green) start to turn the track before it leaves the FY board, giving a radius of ~712mm at this point. The final FY turnout is partly on the scenic board hidden by the scenic break. I'm assuming the boards are securely joined and there's no problem laying a turnout across the join. The scenic break is a road overbridge which is low enough not to obscure too much behind it. Only the further parapet wall is modelled. The track curves at 610mm radius into the curved turnout for the bay then a bit further to the run round crossover. This directs the platform line away from the bay and creates a gently curved platform. The platform can easily accomodate 3 coach trains even with large radius turnouts (purple) in the loco release crossover. A double slip creates the trap to protect the passenger line and the feeds to the goods yard sidings. This saves a lot of space! The two kick back sidings, to the gas works and engine shed, could be moved, swapped over, re-purposed, or whatever you like. There isn't much of a scenic run into the station, I'm afraid. You could make it more scenic if you abandoned the engine shed kickback and move the shed elsewhere. I haven't shown the third goods siding from Hampton Malstead because I feel it cramps the goods yard. There is room between the double slip and the goods sidings turnout for another turnout (or even another slip crossing) to take lines off either to the left (maybe a short stub siding for end loading) or right (maybe alternative engine shed position) or both. But it wouldn't be wise to make the trackwork too dense...! Or maybe just use that space to make the goods sidings longer? I have shown a dashed 3-way turnout in the FY and you can see that it would seriously compromise the usable lengths of the sidings so I don't think it's practical. I think loco-lifts are the best way to turn locos and run round trains in the space available. What do you think? Don't worry about being critical - it's only a drawing and it can all be changed! P.S. I'll send you a PDF when you're happy so that you can zoom in and/or print real size, if you need to.

The probnlem with a 3-way point at the top of the FY is that it will turn the outermost track in the opposite direction to the general curve so you'd get an ugly wiggle, a reverse curve, which could cause problems. I'm worried about the space taken up at thebottom by any pointwork but I'll try it out and see. Loco lifts are a really good space saving method of moving locos without handling them. The turnouts were/are all large radius so that the design could be built using peco bullhead track. If you use standard Code 75 turnouts large radius would make the station trackwork look more open and flowing. But they could easily be changed for smaller radii if you want. 3100mm is only 50mm more than the current width so it probably won't make a difference but you never know - I'll bear it in mind, thanks!

I suggested putting the lifting flap in the room rather than near the door so that you can move in and out of the operating well without having to open the external door. Thinking about making the best use of the space and how to fit a representation of Leominster into it(!), how would you feel about something like this: It's 9 by 9 overall , so I've borrowed 1ft 6in from your workshop area on the right but in compensation I've given back space near the doors. I imagine your station and its goods yard would fill the two big boards with the goods yard doubling as a scenic fiddle yard.

Hi @Balders45, Is this roughly right for the space you have available? Each grid square is 305mm * 305mm. The scenic length is 10ft and the fiddle yard arm at 90 degrees extends 2300mm from the back wall. The task then is to connect the station track plan to the fiddle yard with some reasonable scenic break, to set out an efficient points fan in the FY and allow for 3 coach trains. I suggest using loco lifts for "running around" in the FY. Are you aiming for steam era GWR, the same as Hampton Malstead?