Harlequin

Many British booksellers list their stock on ABEBooks.co.uk and this is usually my first port of call when looking for a specialist book. Unfortunately they don't currently have what you're looking for either: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=williams&tn=4mm+coach&kn=&isbn= But stock lists are changing all the time...

You could make the program do absolutely anything you wanted. It could easily cycle through all the "cards" before "reshuffling" them.

In BBC BASIC: PRINT RND(100) You could (one could) write a nice little freight generation program to run on your operator's terminals. Software would have some advantages over cards and dice but maybe not the same romance.

It looks a bit odd to me that the shed area is dissociated from the station. If the shed was part of the station complex you could maybe get them to overlap a bit and gain some space from that. (Having said that, it's unusual for a small through station to have shed let alone one with a turntable so maybe they are completely different places after all.) If you arrange the shed area on the outside of the main circuits it could fill one of the corners, making efficient use of space and allowing the circuit radii to be wider. Do you need to get your hands into the storage lines to make up trains? If so, then it might be better to have easier access. There are no crossovers in the storage area so if you want a train to change direction from running down to running up (say) then it will have to appear on scene running on the wrong side for a distance before it crosses over.

With a right angle at point E: You can see that the CE wall deviates from the OS map now but that was probably difficult for the map makers to survey and draw accurately. That feels better to me. Right-angles are good.

Hi Alex, This is from the 1953 OS 1:2500 map on old-maps.co.uk: This map has the standard 100m grid on it so it's possible to measure the building approximately and I get this: Do those numbers seem right? Edit: Actually, I suspect there's a right angled corner against the branch platform as well (Point E on your drawing). I'll adjust the shape to do that and see how far it deviates from the OS map outline...

Can I make a plea for Ply: I made the baseboards for my little test layout almost entirely out of ordinary 9mm ply from one of the big builder's merchants and I have not sealed it or painted it with anything. A year on there's no warping and no unwanted movement. Ply is very dimensionally stable in the plane of the sheet because the long grain of one layer reduces the shrinkage across the grain of the layers next to it. Outside of the plane even quite thick gauge ply will warp unless supported and so the trick to building large structures with ply is to make L, I, H or box girders. Here's the lift out bridging section I made last year: You can see that it's basically a 1440mm long H girder with some cross-ribs. It's all glued, no screws or nails at all, and you can see it's still dead square. It's light and I'm sure I could stand in the middle of it without mishap - but I haven't tried yet... I have softwood blocks supporting the lift-out section and they did shrink in the dry environment in my house (pity my poor orchids!). The blocks are bolted on specifically to make them adjustable and so it was easy to loosen the bolts, tap the blocks into a better position and tighten up again. So what I'm saying is, ordinary ply isn't necessarily a problem and might not need sealing if used in the right way*. In fact, ply I beams or L beams might help solve some of your problems. * Edit: You would, of course, want to seal the surface if your landscaping involves any wet processes.

Does anyone know Andy Williams from the National Preservation forum? If he’s still got the paint chips perhaps we could get sight of them and measure the colours with a colorimeter.

I have been reading Iain Rice’s very entertaining “Mainlines in Modest Spaces”. Hannet Purney has a lot of the ingredients of Rice’s recipe for success but he makes an interesting point: Not to choose a location that requires a vast stock list and a monster fiddle yard. In other words, beware primary main lines like the B&H... I haven’t yet set eyes on an STT for my period but I’m pretty sure that the proposed 13 fiddle yard roads won’t be enough capacity for an average day’s services, even if I cheat by claiming the same stock is actually an entirely different train. I can’t expand the layout so I’m thinking about cassettes to lift whole trains, or more realistically half-trains, on and off the layout. Following up on the comments above: Just to reiterate: The gap in the middle is not an operating well, it’s just the gap left after the boards are joined together. It would be operated from front and back. The layout is as big as it can realistically be in the space available and that determines the minimum radii (given that I do think it’s important to separate the main and branch lines before they leave the scene).. Notice that the minimum 610mm radius is only visible in the scenic area in one place, the branch line, where it is obscured in a cutting.

I found some interesting discussion about the consistency of GWR loco green including a reference to finding "holly green" on City of Truro during restoration here: https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/gwr-light-and-dark-stone-paint.1099053/page-2 Paint archaeology.

Rationalised:

Natural legacies can take a long time to mature. I attempted to create two wildflower meadows some years ago, and ever since then the wildflowers have been doing battle with the strong native grasses and, on the whole, losing. The original range of wildflower species has dwindled so that at this time of year I mostly see ox-eye daisies only, with yellow rattle and pink clover deeper down in the sward if you look closely. There are signs that the yellow rattle is gradually getting on top of the grass and hopefully that will allow more species to regain their footholds. (I have tried reseeding and plug-plants many times but they never do well.) The lack of butterflies and moths here is really worrying. In past years a room with a light on at night would have attracted large numbers of fat velvety moths. This year nothing.

Right. Yes sorry, modern era is not my thing and I didn't realise that the trackwork would have been rationalised so heavilly. A ladder of points would be tricky because of the extra length required (even the slips might have been too much) but the simple pair of crossovers you suggest would make it much easier to fit everything into the scene.

Maybe something like this??? This is just schematic, of course. The actual trackwork would be curved and angled to best fit the baseboards. The next challenge is to see if such an arrangement could be fitted into your space reasonably using standard Peco parts (!!!). The brown lines would be the heritage railway yard, taking over an old goods yard. The dashed line is the boundary fence with gated connections out onto the main line. The heritage railway also inherits an old branch line bay platform. The branchline itself could either still be in use and could head off-scene alongside the main lines or could be truncated and simply provide a headshunt for the heritage yard. The exact arrangement of sidings can be altered to suit. I'm not sure if the platform loops need traps at the ends in the contemporary scene. I imagine that your rake of Mk1s for heritage excursions would be stored in the fiddle yard and brought on scene into one of the platform loops by a modern loco (either on the main line or down the branch). Then the heritage loco would couple up and head out onto the main line. BTW: By reversing I simply meant a train that had previously been running on the Down line that later heads in the opposite direction on the Up line (or vice versa). E.g. Paddington to Penzance, then later Penzance to Paddington.

For the record, Swiss 721 was designed in 1982 and is a version of Helvetica, which was designed in 1957.

I hope you don't mind me saying this but it's a bit dull. Especially the heritage part, which would get very boring very quickly, I imagine. If you want to run a heritage train on the main you'll have to move it by hand. Your hands might simulate Fraser's road-transport connection to the heritage but it's a bit unsatisfying in terms of modelling. The loco release spurs at each end of the heritage line are not long enough to let a loco run round. There's no storage space at either end of the heritage line, if you are going to use those run rounds as run rounds. All you can do is run from one end to the other, run round, and repeat. If you want to reverse trains on the main line (I.e. pretend they have reached a terminus somewhere and are coming back) then you really need crossovers outside the fiddle yard loops. Crossovers within the loops as you currently have them mean you have to do a lot more manoeuvring, which may obstruct both the running lines while you do it and may result in the train momentarily appearing on scene in an unexpected place. I notice that Fraser's plan has the main double track circuit only visible in scenery for one-quarter of it's length, BTW. I would go for just a heritage yard (with lots of sidings for shuffling locos and stock and steam era ephemera such as coaling stages and water towers) with a gated connection to the main line so that you run heritage specials on the main lines amongst all the other traffic without having to pick them up and move them.

I have collected all the GWR loco green colours I can find on the web into a single panel, with some other relevant colours for comparison. As always, the reproductions of the individual colours depends on your monitor and the lighting conditions where you view this graphic. The colours here may or may not translate well to real world paint. However, we should be able to assume that paint manufacturers have striven to present their products as accurately as possible on the web sites, using properly calibrated monitors, so this at least allows the colours to be compared against each other. The small rectangles in the bottom right hand corner of each cell are fully saturated so you can see the "root colour" a bit better. Where those small rectangles are not obviously visible that means the paint colour is already highly saturated. The bottom row are all taken from photos (including Mikkel's plastic cup) so are even less reliable than those above! From the photos I sampled the lightest colour not showing obvious light reflection and the darkest colour not in shadow and made a graduation between the two. I'm not saying this is in any way definitive - just interesting and hopefully informative.

Yes, thinking about it, the yard could have trailing access to the outer circuit, of course.

Hi Anthony, The lifting sections are quite big. How will they lift without damaging the scenery and how will the joins in the scenery be disguised? Have you got enough storage loops in the fiddle yard and are the loops long enough? The fiddle yard might be difficult to use if it's hidden behind a backscene. There are places where the track gets very close to the backscene and it might be difficult to disguise that proximity. With the station in the middle of the room, the back of the backscene will be presented to the entrance doors, which is a bit ugly and cuts you off from the room. The branch line station is very close to the through station and the double-track circuit behind it. Can you visually separate those elements satisfactorily? The goods yard in the through station looks difficult to shunt because it faces the main line and has a small headshunt - so you'd either have to use the main line as a headshunt through a facing connection (not good practice) or shunt a very few wagons at a time (tedious).

By "weathering towards black" do you mean the build up of soot, dirt and dust on top of the paint? If so, wouldn't it be better to get a good solid green colour underneath, as if the loco was just out of the shop, and then weather it down? I.e. to replicate the natural processes rather than produce something where the weathering is baked into the paint? If not, then can you explain why a green coat of paint would weather towards black by some other process? (Consider also that the varnish applied to locos tended to yellow and lighten the appearance of the paintwork with age.)

I have a rough colour coding but I haven't quite tied it down and applied it consistently across my drawings yet. You've deduced it correctly except that the green points are all of the curved variety. The blue is Peco's short crossing. I imagine that the rear of the platform would be fenced where the goods shed siding runs alongside it for passenger safety but maybe there could be gates if regulations allow. I haven't drawn any goods platforms (loading banks) at all but one could wrap around the end of the shed siding to give end loading and side loading on the yard side. Or you could arrange a bank alongside the shorter siding, possibly splaying it out into the yard for end loading access.

The editorial on page 3 says: "Class 11 0-6-0DE [snip] it's perfect for steam-era layouts from the 1930s onwards." Really?

Some revisions to the scissors idea: Got rid of the slips entirely and moved goods yard connection up. Slightly longer straight sections through crossing reduce effect of reverse curves a bit more. Crossover to trap goods yard properly. Short goods headshunt or stub siding. Third siding somewhat like Flying Pig's sketch (may or may not be for not end loading), One less traverser road but now there's finger room between trains.