Harlequin

Where there are crossovers I have stuck with the Streamline spacing for simplicity. It's down to 45mm in a few places where the curves are shallow and locos can safely pass. The spacing of the shed roads is as per prototype (~54mm), where room would be needed to work on the locos and to clear the water columns. There may be some wiggle room here.

Thanks! OK. OK. Check whether there's space to get big enough capacitors in the locos. That's interesting. It's a great way to see more locos. How far can you reach comfortably across, at the current baseboard level? (Without having to rest a hand on the boards.) In the image @Flying Pig posted above there are coal wagons on the siding pointing towards the turntable. Er, this one in red: Isn't that siding doing the job?

I won't lose that cameo, I'm just going to try to angle things very slightly to get a slightly better view of the front of the shed.

Hi Dougie, Thanks for letting me have a stab at this. Before I try to develop the design properly here's an almost direct tracing of Hornsey shed (c. 1954) using Peco Streamline parts, just to illustrate some of the problems: There's no Settrack and all curves are just flexitrack. Large radius turnouts are purple, Medium are light brown, Large Ys and Curved turnouts are dark green. The smallest radii are in the two dark brown double slips. You can see where I've been able to follow the real track plan closely and where I've had to deviate slightly to fit in the fixed geometry of the Streamline turnouts. The problems are: It's nearly 5 feet wide. The coaling stage is obscured by the shed. (At least, the locos using it are.) The crane is also hidden behind the shed. The shed presents a side wall to the viewer. It would be nice if you could see into the entrance from more angles. Locos will mostly be side-on to the viewer. It would be nice to get some 3/4 angles. The trackwork is very dense (very expensive). Realistic but maybe too much for a model - rolling stock at the back will be hidden if there's too much going on at the front. It needs to be combined with a practical fiddle yard in the available space somehow. It will take me a few days to get to grips with this.

Hi Dougie, I think you could fit it all in the one room if you accepted some compression and compromises. CCTV will get you so far but inevitably you'll need physical access to the FY more often than is comfortable and it could become annoying - especially in winter when you've just got the layout room warmed up! Is it correct to say that the design doesn't need to cope with lots of rolling stock? It's mainly locos, a lot of which would be standing in the shed area, with a proportion off-scene when you are operating the layout. I guess the largest set of rolling stock would be coal wagons, which would need off-scene storage and a few odd vans. No coaching stock, though. Is that right? Ideally I think you need a way to turn locos while they are off-scene, so that you can send them out and they come back later facing the other way as if they've just made a complicated trip and or been turned at some other depot. That will give the turntable on scene some operational rationale in the model. The problem with AnyRail is that it tends to create rather anodyne grey angular track plans whereas if you look at Hornsey it's quite flowing and has some interesting organic wiggles, which are unique to the place. Would it be OK if I posted something drawn in my own software? If so, how would you feel if I moved elements around slightly to try to make a visually pleasing model railway scene and, here's the biggie, how would you feel if I reduced the number of shed roads to 6?

Thanks. Just to confirm: Are the internal dimensions of the main space 18ft by 8ft ? I'm not sure of the practicality of having the fiddle yard in another room. Better to have the entire layout in the one space, if possible, IMHO.

Just an observation from years of bitter experience debugging software: When a problem resists the application of numerous logical solutions it's increasingly likely one hasn't understood the problem correctly. Then it pays to revisit one's basic assumptions - one of them may be wrong.

Can you show us a sketch plan of the space available with dimensions and locations of doors, please?

Hi Dougie, By scaling the map I reckon the prototype spacing of the shed roads was ~55mm @ 1:76 scale. That means there's room to use Streamline Large Radius turnouts to feed them if you want and if you choose to replicate the prototype spacing. Like this: (Sorry about the colours.) The purple turnouts are Streamline Large Radius turnouts joined end to end. Their natural 12° angle automatically gives some compression over the prototype and using smaller radii turnouts would not make that point ladder any shorter - unless you play with the angles and then it gets much more complicated. I've roughly dropped on a Single Slip (red) on the line down to the turntable near the engine shed. I think the map shows that. I see that there are actually two connections between the shed area and the rest of the network, from both North and South: (The red circled sidings are probably for empty and full coal wagons associated with the cenotaph coaler, to answer a question above.) So, this all raises a question: Is it an option to build your layout around the outside of your 17ft by 8ft space? I ask because that would allow you to use most of one side for your shed scene with a fiddle yard on the other long side of the space. You can see that the double track connection on the right (south) is already naturally turning and you could make it turn more so that it goes partially around one of the short ends of the space. Thus, instead of 9ft scenic length you could have maybe 18, 19, maybe 20ft... (Need to draw it out to know for sure.) You could also then model the two coal sidings circled by treating the footbridge as a scenic break and just let them run off scene and imagine them extending beyond the footbridge. In fact they would extend into the fiddle yard. You would also then have the option of a roundy-round running around the entire space, between the red arrows, through the scene and through the fiddle yard. Just having a loco running around can be therapeutic but it's also useful for running locos in and tweaking DCC CV settings (if that's your bag). All this would allow the layout to be more operationally interesting.

The coal ramp gradient looks much more workable now. Where do the tracks go to off the right hand side? Since you're getting into AnyRail you can make your life easier, and make the plans clearer for us, by exporting them as bitmap files (File | Export). That saves you printing and photographing them. (PNG format is probably best.) Cartoon character's hands are famously drawn with only three fingers and a thumb because four fingers never look right. I see something like that with the 8 road engine shed...

Most (all?) model GWR signal boxes, even on the most famous layouts, use a font that doesn't look right to me so I made one based on the info in "G.W.R. Signalbox Nameplates" by Michael Dunn. I haven't decided whether to publish it yet because I have a related idea I'm still thinking about.

I can send you the vector file, if it would be useful.

Why do things always turn up when you're looking for something else? On pages 108-109 of "Great Western Infrastructure" there's a double page spread photo of Aberayron. (Dated 17 July 1929) The viewpoint is on the inland side of the bridge, looking across the tracks towards the platform. River running below, point rodding and signal wires running from the tiny signal box across the bridge in the foreground, 517 steaming gently with autocoach against the platform, goods yard to the right, buildings behind and hills arrayed in the background. Perfect.

What is the gradient up the coaling ramp? You might need to move the turnout before the ramp further to the right to get a sensible gradient. Edit: Remember you need to allow some distance to transition from level to grade and then back to level again. It looks like you might have used Settrack turnouts in the entrance crossover? If so, that will look worse than the rest of the trackwork and it will really show up when locos run through it. The small Y's in the centre of the plan will also create sharp turns for big locos. (The larger radii turnouts you can use everywhere, the better.) What is the smallest track-centre-to-centre spacing of the tracks in the shed?

I looked at my books and searched the t'internet but I can't find a clear example of a simple GWR, "Engines must not pass this point" board. It might have been a cast plate or a board with cast letters, the sources are not clear. It might have said "MAY" rather than "MUST". It might have had a light stone border when fixed to a building but it might have been white. In other words, there are rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty... However GWW says that one of the standard "plates" was "Engines may not pass this point" (nothing more) and it was 20.75in by 14.5in. We know that lettering came in certain standard sizes. So here's an educated guess at a cast iron plate in a font that's close (the signal box nameplate font) with 3in and 2in lettering:

Hi Chris, I think a sign like that would have either been cast iron or painted lettering on plain board. Always white lettering on black in GWR days with the border white if it was cast. And the wording would simply be optionally "Caution" or "Danger" followed by "Engines must not..." all in bold caps. (And I suggest the word "Goods" is superfluous.) https://www.google.com/search?q="engines+must+not"&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB933GB933&sxsrf=ALeKk01OIEmCLHoNUfFm2BiIk77_p0GuIw:1618564558465&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi65LXstoLwAhV38rsIHXEtDHoQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=2560&bih=1298&dpr=1.5

Hi Keith, Just click in the quote, press return, then press return again. The quote will break open.

Absolutely stunning! @Oliver Rails Do we need to do anything to 'confirm' our pre-orders now that the prices are set or do we just sit back and wait in anticipation?

Hi Dougie, Almost everyone who aspires to model a real location makes compromises, chooses to omit things, shorten things, simplify things. And yet they create scenes that look amazingly atmospheric and realistic. This is where the true artform of layout design begins! So don't worry about changing things. Pick out the aspects that are really characteristic of the place and the things that are important to you, the views you used to see. Where there is repetition in the prototype you can reduce the amount in the model. Where there is featureless open ground in the prototype you can shorten distances to help get the scene into your room. BTW: Don't forget Peco Code 75 trackwork. That is closer to prototype scale than Code 100 and has an equally large range (with some small differences to Code 100). You only need Code 100 if your rolling stock has the older larger wheel flanges. Buying a length of flexitrack and a turnout won't break the bank and would allow you to test your stock.

"It's Lego, Jim, but not as we know it..." https://uk.bassettlowke.co.uk/catalogue/brickpunk

I started playing with a model in Sketchup:

Software... "The cause of, and solution to, all life's problems"

I've just noticed that the forum knows the difference between a status update that a member has made him or herself and one made by another member in that member's account. In the latter case it shows both account names with a » character between them. So would it be possible to filter them out from the home page Recent Status Updates panel by using that distinction?

@ISW of this parish has used a particular floor underlay product. I'll leave him to tell you about that because I haven't tried it. I have used cork and PVA, which is quite noisy when things are running at speed and I have noticed that the sound is much louder when running over a large board that completely covers the baseboard frame than when running on the boards that are just wide enough for the tracks leaving the frame open around them. When you think about it, that's not surprising - the traditional baseboard is not unlike a guitar's sound box or a flat drum. So my suggestion is, no matter what kind of underlay you use, make your baseboards so that they don't amplify the running sounds.

Hi Burtos, If the layout is unlikely to move very often and you've got room to walk around it, why don't you create a more traditional setup with the layout around the outside of the space and a hole in the middle, the "operating well", from where you operate it? There are good reasons why this design is preferred when you can do it: The trains are all around you. You don't have to move so far to reach everywhere. The fiddle yard can be open on one side. There's more length for the track and the curves can be larger radius. Etc., etc... You wouldn't then have to worry about joining boards together in a tessellation - they just join end to end. Then you could think about using Streamline parts instead of Settrack to improve the appearance of the track work (and fit more storage loops in the fiddle yard). BTW: Why are you still talking about using N gauge parts when you are designing a OO gauge layout? It's very confusing! For example in OO gauge (4mm scale) your "station" loops are little more than a foot long.