Harlequin

I like it. It is arguably a bit cramped at the left on plan but in 3D the headshunt and the coal yard are low profile features and won’t be so prominent. Cramping happens in the real world. If you remove the headshunt you will need to replace the turnout with a trap to protect the running line. You could maybe curve the platform to make it more interesting. Bow it towards the front. That would absorb the left hand kink where the running line currently straightens up to follow the platform face. It looks like you might have some turnouts over baseboard joints. That may or may not be a problem.

The rolling stock was a bit of a mish-mash inherited from previous layouts. Here are some of the "prize" locos: (Click for larger images) A Ks Small Prairie hauling a Triang/Hornby track cleaning car. I was never happy with the Ks Prairie but I can't remember why... A Lima King, possibly with printed card names and numbers stuck on. Look at the size of the wheel flanges! Er, except on the centre drivers where there are none at all! An Airfix Large Prairie with rubber traction tyres, I seem to remember. A Hornby Hall. They all look coarse and lumpy by today's standards. Also on the layout were a Jinty chassis inside a Pannier tank body, an Adams 0-4-4, a Brush 47 (I think) and a 56XX, which I cobbled together somehow. There were also a couple of Airfix 0-4-0 saddle tanks made from plastic kits. I eventually installed the Brush 47's power bogie inside an old fish van so that the saddle tanks could be pushed around but since they had all plastic running parts and no proper bearings they were never a great success! I still have the motorised fish van. (The old Jinty body can be seen in some of the upcoming photos, painted "Brunswick green" and with a brass steam dome... These were more innocent times!) The loco we really wanted above all others was the Airfix 14XX, for its iconic GWR cuteness and for the step forward in quality it was supposed to bring. We asked in the model shop so many times for so many months that when the manager one day produced one from a hidden shelf it felt like stumbling across a mythical treasure! It will appear in some of the later photos.

Yes, we're not talking Father Ted here, it was a big caravan! About 8ft wide internally and the layout was maybe 12ft to 14ft long. The terminus buffers were in the alcove that used to house the fold-down double bed. It would be difficult to recreate it now and it really did have some big flaws. There was some complex trackwork under the terminus, including storage loops, reversing loops and gradients - possibly in combination, I can't remember the exact layout. It was usually me who had to go under there and reach up through the access holes to poke stalled locos. It might be interesting to draw up the plans again, though. Yes, these big caravans have some good points as a railway room: Ready to go - if you can get it on site. Water-tight and insulated - warm enough for a railway, anyway. Lots of windows and usually a skylight so lots of natural light. Large clear space when you have removed the built in furniture. You can attach stuff to the walls easily. Built in kitchen for tea and messy modelling tasks.

Here's the terminus station. It never got developed further than this. To orient yourself we are now looking south-west where the first photo was due north. the engine shed appears in both photos. I remember pouring over the trackplan with Dad and setting things out on green graph paper using pencils, protractor, compasses and rulers. The most important tool of all was, of course, an eraser. That difficult planning process (by today's standards) paid off because the trackplan looks pretty good. You can see 4 platform faces, one of which is a bay, a goods depot with a number of sidings, turntable and shed area. The approaching double-track has crossovers to get incoming and outgoing traffic directly where it needs to go and seems to flanked by a carriage siding on the far side and a goods reception loop on the nearside. All very neat and efficient! The turntable mechanism was a very clever idea, involving a big ring of perspex under the baseboard with a bar across the middle to support the deck. Unfortunately it was not a success because the rubber wheel that should have turned it couldn't get enough purchase on the perspex... The water tower and the grounded container to the right of it both cover surface mounted points motors, I think. Clearly some work was still going on because tools, track joiners, point motors and clutter litter the area around the control panel. Swan Vestas matchboxes and tobacco tins hold useful bits and pieces.

Hi Everyone, In the late 70's my Dad and I built a medium sized layout in a static caravan. It was the most ambitious of a string of layouts that had started back in the 60's with a classic tight oval on a board. I have just found some photos of that last layout and they provide a window into times past and what might have been. Sadly, the layout was never finished, partly because of technical problems but also because we were both getting interested in other things: Computers were calling me! Dad and I agreed that the layout would never be finished and, with University looming for me, the rolling stock and trackwork was sold off. I used the proceeds to buy a BBC Model B computer. I learned to program and this led directly to my career because after University I joined the preeminent company writing software for the BBC Micro and I still work for the basically the same organisation today! A few years after the demise of the caravan layout Dad also bought a BBC Micro and he became obsessed with playing Snapper and then Lemmings. In the end we both had PCs and spent many happy hours playing Age of Empires with each other until his death in 2008. So the conversion from model railways to computers was a good thing for us. Looking back now I can see that my Dad was the driving force behind all "my" railway modelling. He found the space and the time, he designed everything, he built the layouts and ultimately he paid for everything - being the source of my pocket money!. I merely "helped". So this topic is in tribute to my wonderful Dad, David Martin. The layout in the caravan consisted of a terminus station on the top level and a smaller circuit with a minor through station on the lower level. A double track partial-helix connected them. I only have 14 photos of the layout, and they appear to have been taken in two batches. They are scans that my Dad made (yes, him again!) of 35mm transparencies. They were taken by a novice photographer (me!) using a not-very-good camera and this was before the dawn of digital photography so the cost and effort of each each photo was significant and had to be thought about. I'm going to show you all the photos I have. As you will see, the quality is not good! I have processed them a bit but not too too much because I want to to retain the 1970s feel. Here's the first establishing photo, from "Batch 1": You can see the helix on the left curving up to the terminus station. On the right is the small through station. On the platform of that station is my pride and joy - but more of that later... The window curtains on the right are pure 1970s(!) and outside the far end window you can see buildings on the other side of the valley where we lived: Mawgan Porth in Cornwall. At bottom right you can just see the corner of the main control panel and the "pen" stowed in the baseboard side profile that was used to touch brass screw heads to set points with an alarming blue spark + BUZZT-CLACK noise. I can't remember whether the "Cornish Mint Humbugs" tin in the centre was significant!...

Hi Ross, The spaces available are quite small. Can the shelves (is it two or three?) be arranged to join together to form one 6ft9 or 9ft6 long layout? You could get up and running more quickly if you committed to one of the RTR gauges, either 4mm or 2mm. (Less chance of losing your "mojo", as they say...)

The description of the Rectank as a "Steam Roller Trolley" comes from the 1933 STT. See Atkins "GWR Goods Train Working Vol 1" page 124. "GWR Goods Wagons" says specifically, "RECTANKS 17310/13/19/20/4/48 were strengthened later to carry 20-ton steam rollers and traction engines." As Colin says, there was a system for dealing with "Exceptional loads". Some images and information about Rectanks being used for their original purpose here: http://www.landships.info/landships/tank_articles/Tanks_to_the_Front.html (Sorry for the topic drift.) Edit: I just noticed that there’s a very good view of a chain tensioner in the photo above.

The delays may not be in RMWeb itself: I'm seeing the occasional long delay while waiting for the ad servers. This is typical of a lot of web sites that serve GoogleAds, in my experience. The delays are random because the adverts are changed randomly (or at least changed in some pattern that's not apparent to us end users) and some ad servers are fast while others are slow. If you're using Chrome watch the small popup in the bottom left of the window that says, "Waiting for...".

You could read that as referring to the lamp light colour, not the lamp body colour... So it could be a suggestion to do the very thing you mentioned: to ensure that tail lamps on light engines show the red filter. ?

For the record, another wagon type suitable for the job of moving "traction engines", to use the vernacular, was the "Rectank". It was described as a "Steam Roller Trolley" with max carrying capacity around 35 tons.

It's a shame the Peco don't yet produce anything so how about 3D printing yourself a set? I.e. Make a model that matches the Peco product, including boltheads and whatever other details you want, combine a number of them onto a sprue and send it off to Shapeways to be printed. ???

Yes, front to back and it's hard to see but I think that having passed from outside the wheel through the spokes each chain passes right through to the other side. Looking more closely, the chains on the side that can be seen all seem to have tensioners about 6-8 links above the anchor points. Probably the same on both sides. This type of thing: (Image from cplproducts.net) The Atkins books are very good. Somewhere in "Goods Cartage Vols 1 and 2" lies the answer to the question of numbers on the sides of horse-drawn carts but I haven't quite teased it out yet. They are basically sequential "fleet numbers" in the order in which the vehicles were constructed and so they come in batches. However it gets complicated because I think unpowered vehicles had a different sequence to self-powered vehicles, some numbers got reused and, of course, all the powered vehicles were renumbered at some point when the entire system was changed!

Hi Kevin, Tony Atkins' "GWR Goods Train Working Vol 2" has a chapter on Exceptional Loads and on page 280 there's an anti-aircraft gun lorry chained to a Loriot D. In fact there are two photos, one showing how not to do it and what happened when the gun turret hit a bridge after breaking loose and a subsequent photo showing how it should have been secured! The lorry has spoked wheels and chains through the spokes like your photos above but in a slightly different arrangement: Edit: That's probably the first time the chain link brush stroke in my drawing program has ever been used for a serious purpose!

Fine. Your loss.

Sorry, but it's not rubbish. High brightness LED tapes do generate significant heat. Some tapes have a thicker substrate partly to help with this issue - it's one of the differentiators between cheap tape and good quality tape that will last longer. Google it if you're interested.

Aluminium channel is also ideal for mounting LED tape because it helps to dissipate the heat.

Specifically: buy LED tape (not "LED strips", which can mean fluorescent strip light replacements). LED tape has no limit on length - you roll out as much as you need, fix it in place above the layout and it gives consistent lighting without any gaps. The important number to look for when buying LED tape is "Lumens per metre", which quantifies the lighting density you will get. If you buy one "cool white" tape and one or two "warm white" tapes for the length of your layout, @ between approximately 1200-2000 lumens per metre per tape with separate dimmer controls for the cool and warm tapes and mount them alongside each other, you should have every eventuality covered. You can then balance the white colours depending on the ambient conditions and the conditions you want to display on your layout. Cool whites are like midday in mid summer (but you still need a bit of warm mixed in). Warm whites are like an autumnal morning or evening. You will also need a "driver" which converts 240V mains supply to a constant current at either 12V or 24V depending on the type of tape you buy. Edit: I forgot to say, you can get LED tape with warm and cool white LEDs combined on the same tape. It's easier if you buy the controller that's specified for such tape to balance the warm and cool white colours. All the best,

Hi @Joseph_Pestell, I wasn't aware of your project until yesterday. I can see you made some serious efforts towards creating alternative RTL turnouts but the thread is very long and the page and post references seem to be out of whack so I'm not sure exactly how far you got. Now that we know what the Peco Bullhead products look like and that they seem to be sticking with their existing geometry, I wonder if a range of complementary products might be a feasible proposition? Similar chair design Similar sleepering The same rail profile Similar electrical design (but avoiding the shorting problems...) Similar systematic geometry with a known angle at the rail joins (6, 7, 8 degrees?) and 45mm between track centres. Manufactured in modern small run technology Sold online only I imagine that, in combination, the Peco system and such a new system would sell more than either alone. Each would enhance the other. I realise I'm largely going over old ground but maybe there's something slightly different here and maybe conditions have changed to make it workable this time.

They haven't delivered the previously announced OO Bullhead slips and crossings yet so I don't hold out much hope for swift delivery of the the medium radius Bullheads! The request here is not for longer RTL turnouts as such, rather it's for more variation in geometry, which would in some cases result in longer turnouts but, as Martin pointed out above, doesn't necessarily have to.

It's a matter of compromise to satisfy the range of possible viewers but you could say that a model railway is a work of art and the artist's concept of how it should be viewed trumps everything. For instance you might be relying on a building blocking the view of something the viewer shouldn't see. So, if you care about the viewing angle in that way then set it at the height you need, accepting that it might not suit everyone. Obviously the layout can be set at different heights for working on it and viewing it. That shouldn't be a big problem. So a high viewing height doesn't necessarily mean it will be difficult or tiring to work on. Seating or standing operation shouldn't make a difference to viewing height - you can buy or build a seat of the required height and transport it with the layout. The seating could be height-adjustable and that might inspire the ultimate solution to exhibition viewing height: Mount the layout on gas struts so it can be raised and lowered on request!

OK... Can I poke a bit further? Would you build the 1300*2000mm as one piece or in sections? (If one piece then it might be be very difficult to move.) If you're going to build it in sections then maybe you could connect the sections in a different way: Could you remove the table and build the layout in the same space with an operating well in the middle? E.g. 450mm wide boards in a space 1500mm by 2000mm up against the wall leaving a 600mm by 1100mm operating well???

Hi Pete, I'm going to throw you a curve ball... Here is Henllan 1906 from old-maps.co.uk: It is very modellable in the more traditional way of a foreground scene, a backscene divider and a fiddle yard behind that because it is in a curvy cutting, framed by two overbridges, and oozes character. It has lots of great features: Notice how skinny the goods shed is. The goods shed is on a loop with stub sidings at either end, trapping it properly. The loop in the main line starts beyond one of the bridges, which could be very helpful in compressing a model. Goods yard at the front, passenger building at the back - perfect staging. The weighing machine is actually up on the public road, opposite the pub, the Railway Inn! Trees behind. (Notice no private sidings, no level crossing.) Are you dead-set on your current 120*160 solid board plan as a starting point?

Another one for the list: Ross on Wye. http://www.ross-on-wye.com/index.php?page=ross_541-Old_pictures_and_photos_from_Ross&pg=3

I'm afraid not because the total angle of divergence of the Large Ys is also 12 degrees: -6 for one arm and +6 for the other.