Harlequin

Congratulations! I hope it wasn't too stressful. I have just started reading Iain Rice's "An approach to model railway layout design" and it is already an eye-opener. I'll have to get the "urban layouts" book too to study his version of Caterham!

I'm just wondering if reduction to 1:87 scale might be too much. For example, a 6ft tall person would become 5ft2in (effectively).

Here's a thought: It occurs to me that since Modelu can print the same model at any scale, you could perhaps ask them for a slightly smaller scale version of the driver (and anything else). They would just need to know a scale factor relative to either the OO scale or a scale factor relative to the real-world scanned size and it ought to be trivial for them to apply that scale factor to the model before printing it. BTW: Have you seen the superb high-res photos of railcars 16, 17 and 18 in ex-works condition on the Dapol Digest forum? They won't help with your colour questions unfortunately because they are in monochrome but they do show a lot of detail. (P.S. No info yet about the pipe on the roof.)

Hi Clive, Re. Baseboards above radiators: Will there be tracks above the radiators? I wonder if track and standing rolling stock getting gently heated might cause problems...??? You could cut/drill vent holes in the corners of the baseboard, away from the tracks, to allow heat to circulate better. Maybe add some baffles under the boards to encourage warm air to flow to the vents. E.g. just staple some strips of plastic sheeting.

Here's a version adjusted so that the goods platform is shared between two lines: (Click to enlarge) Ironically, this has the effect of straightening everything out and making it more like a passenger terminus and little bit less interesting! Funny how designs can get away from you. Anyway, there may be some useful ideas in it... (BTW: This design uses 3 small lefts, 1 small Y, 1 three-way.)

Hi "MrDobilina", I'm glad you liked my doodles. There's more info in this thread: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/forum/66-layout-track-design/ Your AnyRail version looks very good to me. I love the track emerging from between buildings and the ungated crossing - that's exactly what I imagined. If you positioned a building in front of the tracks on the other side of the road (er, but see below about viewing angle) then you'd get little vignette where trains appear to cross a street - but it might block the view of the layout too much. I think there is room to runaround two Mk1 coaches but the overhangs on the curves might be a problem. The coach overhangs might also be a problem where the track curves into the platform. You can either simulate that on the drawing to test it or mock it up as Rob suggests. On the other hand, a simpler solution might be to ban long vehicles from the site because this feels very much like a small town goods yard... You might be able to play visual tricks with foreshortening and perspective to make the layout look bigger. For example make the road taper very slightly towards the back. It might be better to to view the model from the bottom of the drawings, not the top. That would mean the track that goes off-board is angled more towards the viewer/operator, which means. It's easier to handle the cassettes. It would allow the layout to be placed against a wall - you really don't want to be building curved cassettes!. Further, the ground level of the scenic area could fall away towards the viewer slightly for more realism and to "stage" the layout better. Doesn't need to be much. If you particularly need the cassettes to be on the left of the layout then it's easy to flip the whole design left-right to do that. You could save space by combining the goods platform with the other service platform (whatever you decide that service is). That would need some adjustments to the track layout. I'll try to draw it. As we both showed it, the goods building will dominate the model. To overcome that, and play some clever visual tricks at the same time, you could make it semi-low-relief against the side the layout - cut the kit in half! That would open up the centre of the scene, help obscure the back corner of the layout from the viewer and make the layout look bigger by suggesting the track continues off-stage into the building. (Later on, you could make another cassette connection hidden inside the goods shed...!)

Here's the same topology but this time using your existing points and a bit more organic: Ideally you would replace the Y with a small right to avoid the kink into the loco spur. A small loco like a Jinty should be able to run around without leaving the board. You could imagine a milk or parcels depot in the top left, perhaps. No problems with the kickback spur because it's just for coaling and watering locos. The space at the front of the board inside the natural arc of the lines would be perfect for a bit of scenic detail. (I'm using a normal drawing program and template symbols of the Peco Streamline points.)

The clipboard is a standard part of the operating system - you shouldn't have to install anything special...? Try this: While you're looking at RMWeb press Alt+PrtSc, then switch to Affinity Designer, Word, Paint or any program that can display images, make a blank document and press Ctrl+V for paste. You should see an image of the browser window containing RMWeb appear on the page.

Sorry if you know this already, but you can grab the screen in any version of Windows, no need to take photos: Pressing the "PrtSc" ("Print Screen") key copies the entire desktop onto the clipboard as a bitmap and from there you can paste it into your favoured editing software to do what you want with. (And pressing Alt+PrtSc grabs just the window with input focus, so avoiding the desktop clutter of the task bar, icons, etc.) P.S. I've been trying to get my company interested in implementing Post Focus in our software since you started using it to such great effect...

Hi, I just had a quick doodle and came up with this: The idea was: To have only one line running off-board to simplify the connection to the fiddle-yard or cassette and make it more reliable. To fit a runaround loop on the board. (To make the loop work best in the small space it has to fit diagonally across.) To see if Peco Streamline large radius geometry points could be used throughout - so you could use bullhead track and points if you wanted. So this just a technical track layout exercise - whether a track formation like that would ever have existed in the real-world or makes any sense operationally is another matter!

Update: Revised station building roof. Added canopy. Added loading stage near station building. Peco Streamline geometry and colour-coded points. Straightened out the long goods feeder line - much more like the prototype now. The yard beside the top siding was "Kilby's livery stable". I've pieced it together as best I can from photos and maps. (Would need 150mm more baseboard width.) Moved the board joint to avoid a set of points.

To make the layout work better with more goods traffic movements, you could apply some artistic license and add more sidings to Purley. There's clearly space on the 1897 map, almost as if the land had been cleared ready for more sidings, and it seems that Purley was changing fast around that time. In fact there are more sidings extending out of the north and south ends of what later became the goods yard. These would require a huge long baseboard to model so we could say that sidings in a more conventional yard on a more compact baseboard represent those... The neighbouring quarry has lines that connect to the main line a bit further north so you could apply modellers license and say that the quarry was actually accessed from Purley station. A line crossing Warren road into the quarry would be a nice scenic feature. Clutching at straws? Can we fit all this onto the baseboard? --- A house in the grounds of the local aristocracy - very posh! ;-) BTW: If you look at the engraving you posted above, the two simple buildings in front of the station building are the same two buildings that I pointed out in the brown photo I posted above. (Compare the gable ends!) They are part of the original goods "yard" and the wall between them with the gateway in the middle is the access from station avenue. Edit: I've just worked out a much smoother line into that top goods siding at Caterham using Streamline points. Huge improvement! I'll post it later.

Here's the same map from old-maps.co.uk, scrolled a little further south-west along the Brighton line:

I found a photo that shows the yard next to the top siding at Caterham: The photo is clearly later than 1897 but just above the "Ca" of Caterham you can still see the same open yard we see on the older maps with buildings either side. The roofs are very steep with tall stone chimneys, strongly suggesting they were part of the original station design. And this one of the original station building with it's small platform canopy: Both photos are from www.thecaterhamrailway.co.uk, created by someone who was planning to build an N-gauge model. In principle, yes, I'll have a go at Purley shed but it's not shown on the 1897 map I've been looking at. So does it fit with the single track Caterham branch? Or was it built later when the line was doubled?

Here's the station track plan with Peco Streamline parts overlaid on top in red. It uses two double slips and one large Y. All the rest of the points are large radius so can be bullhead. Lots of people seem to be combining Code 75 OO/HO parts with bullhead parts while they wait for Peco to make bullhead equivalents, which they will then drop in (somehow). What do you think? (To be honest, it's better than I thought it would be!)

The building top right is on the 1895-7 plan. You can see it on old-maps.co.uk but not on the nls website (which has a horrible UI, IMHO). And looking at it again, you're quite right - it is part of, or connected to, that huge "building" on the 1869 plan. You can also see it on the 1895-7 when you know what to look for. It has access from station avenue and seems to be a yard, maybe with coal staithes in the middle and surrounded by open-fronted sheds on three sides??? It might be possible to model the edge of it if we squeeze the tracks together a bit more. We could widen the baseboard to fit it in but that has all sorts of other consequences... P.S. I'll see if I can make a decent version of the track plan using standard Peco parts.

I found an older station plan (1869) that strongly suggests the three goods sidings did come together in the station yard. I don't think these older maps can be trusted to show station topology accurately but it's a hint that we're on the right track. (Haha! I made an awful railway joke, just like Mr. Pooter! I suppose the 1890's was his era, after all...) I tweaked the trackplan slightly last night: Added some scenics and buildings. (The photo of the station building from station avenue was really useful.) Tweaked run around loop to flow better. Placed some 27ft carriages. (They look small but 27ft @ 4mm:1ft == 108mm plus spacing for couplings.) Altered loco shed and spur to be better aligned and give a more tapering platform. Showed the board join line. I've also shown a Peco Streamline large radius point for scale. We could try to create a trackplan using Peco geometry but I fear it wouldn't be as flowing as the current one.

Great images! I guess the large half-timbered building on the other side of station avenue is what is shown on the 1897 map as, "Hotel". It would be great fun to model the face of that building (although a little bit of artistic license would be needed to slide it along the road and onto the baseboard)! I think that the platform would be about 1.7m in the model or 425ft long - close to your estimate. I think you can comfortably fit eight 27ft coaches against the platform and still run around them. (You'll see them the next time I post an image.) I imagined both crossings in the goods yard would be double slips but single slips might be OK - it depends on the usage. An earlier map shows that there was a trap point on the exit of the goods feeder line but I can't find any concrete evidence for the crossover and slip between the goods lines.

Woohoo! I have a layout design in this month's Railway Modeller! (January edition.) They haven't used the final revision I sent them, though, in which I corrected some problems and added some details. And some elements seem to have very heavy line widths... Ho Hum. I think I need to check it thoroughly.

Update: I think this is more topologically correct. I think when the station was first built the goods feeder line just fed the bottom of the three sidings. The other sidings were added later and I reckon that the reason why siding 3 comes so close to the others is because there's a crossover there so that all three sidings are connected to the goods feeder line, which can be used as a headshunt. I also managed to include the loco "headspur" and I suspect the reason for that was so that a loco could access the goods yard without interfering with passenger traffic. I'd better stop fiddling and do some work!

Here's how Caterham could fit onto the 2ft * ~11ft boards of my drawing: Reduced the three platform tracks to two to make a bit more room. Change curvature slightly so that track is perpendicular to board end and sidings parallel to edges (shame, but makes best use of limited space). I left space at the end for "station avenue" and some low-relief buildings. Added a trap point before the top goods line joins the running line - hinted at in the maps. Points kept clear of the board joint. (I tried to include the loco "headspur" because it would be a distinctive feature but I couldn't fit it in either!) Looking at it, I think the runaround should be longer...

A continuous run is not the only way to run trains without manual control. You could use a DCC Shuttle module to automate end-to-end running or even go further and add computer control.

That looks pleasingly simple. You're right about compression vs. a sense of space - that's always one of the biggest challenges. Probably best not to compromise the length at this stage, I would say. (In my drawing Caterham has baseboards ~11ft long simply because it fits in the gap between two of your roof trusses but of course it doesn't have to be that long and shortening it would allow a longer fiddle yard. On the other hand 11ft would allow a leisurely scenic entry to the station.) If we could tweak it to fit on 2ft wide baseboards that would make it easier to move and easier to fit into the loft (while you can stand upright beside it!). I sometimes wonder about the accuracy of the older maps - for example, why three tracks beside the platform??? Wouldn't the escape crossover just have connected directly to the outer track? (I think it did later on.) And on the 1895/7 map of Kenley there seems to be some track parallel to the branch line, offset from the platform and not connected to it at all. BTW: The road to the south of the station with the hotel and post office facing up the high street looks ripe for a little scenic bolt-on section! (Or maybe make room for it on the Caterham boards - it would be a great visual full stop...) Coincidentally, I took some shots of the H class that was at Warley this year - they get everywhere!: