Mim

That's the sort I've got on order. Plenty on-line about using them, so fingers crossed.

That is the conclusion I've come to. I have a second type of driver board on order. It comes with another of these steppers plugged in and was designed around it, so I am hoping to have more luck. Mim

I seem to have been sidetracked in to building a fiddle yard, rather than the layout. Slow progress, mostly waiting for parts to arrive. Lots of wires and mechanical gubbins are steadily being fitted. Hopefully will have it moving soon. Will get back to working on the layout board itself and some modelling, rather than robotics. The microswitches will be end limits to prevent the table over running and damaging itself. One will also act as a home setting when powering up. They will be actuated by the heads of the two bolts you can see on the end of the table. In this picture the stepper motor is out of the rack while I work out how to get it to run, rather than just buzz. All to do with the phase order and causing me some brain strain. Mim

Thanks Michael, I've found a photo in a book, again from the last few years of the line. This shows a Johnson tender, but this time coupled loco side to loco side with a Fowler tender. It is hard to tell for certain from the photos, but it doesn't look like these later tenders had been modified with conventional buffers, couplings and a hand rail fitted to the locomotive end, as the earlier LNWR tenders had. They couldn't be coupled to any other stock at this end unlike the ex LNWR ones, only an appropriate loco, or another tender. The fact that different tenders are shown in photos within a couple of years of each other suggests that whatever tenders were spare, or about to be scrapped were sent from Buxton on to the C&HPR. Does this make sense? Anyone know any more? Mim

Thanks Ray, I think you are right. I looked at later Midland tenders, but didn't go back far enough in time. Further reading suggests there are a lot of different capacity Johnson tenders, 3250, 3500 gallon and so on. Some had the tank side divided in to two panels. The C&HPR ones appear not to have this feature. They look high sided, so I suspect are larger capacity versions, but anyone able to narrow it down? Mim

Another C&HPR question. I am modelling a section of the Cromford and High Peak Railway for the 2mm Scale Association diamond jubilee layout challenge. A feature of this line were the old converted locomotive tenders used to supply water to the drier locations on the line. I've identified most of them as ex LNWR McConnel and Webb designs of various types and now have drawings available. There are a couple of identical newer six wheel tenders which have me stumped, so I'd like some help from the experts here. Other six wheel tenders on the line had their centre wheels removed, presumably to help them get over the gradient transitions on the rope worked inclines and on the railways sharp bends. These two have kept their centre wheels and are considerably larger than the other bowsers. I am guessing they were worked from the Friden end of the line after the Middleton incline was closed. Links to pictures here, here and here. They are part of a page of excellent pictures of the line. Any suggestions what they are and the locomotive types they might have come from? If I am really lucky there might be a 2mm, or N gauge kit or RTR version available. Thanks, Mim

Hi John, The easitrack turnout kits are bullhead only as far as I know, so that sort of makes the decision for you. Bullhead is perfectly appropriate for grotty sidings in the blue diesel era. You can still see it on some today, decades later. It would make a nice contrast to have flat bottom, even concrete sleeper on the tracks on the low level line and bullhead wood sleeper on the top. B6 points would be shorter than B7, give you more options and are available in easitrack kits. They would also look better in a cramped set of sidings I think. Is the reason for using B7 just that B6 isn't available as an Association paper template? If you'd like some B6 templates just PM me and I'll make you some left and right B6 Templot pdf's you can print out. Can put in any curves to them you need too. Just let me know. If you went with something like the lower plan, then the off screen area to the left could be a short single track sector plate that could access the two lines of the run round loop and replace that turnout. Mim

And the Snaefell Mountain Railway is broad gauge. 3'6".

Looks like a contender. In revenue earning use for between a hundred and a hundred and ten years. Just an ordinary piece of equipment doing its job and not a visitor attraction in its own right. Well spotted. I did do a search before asking, but didn't come across this. A slightly different question as mine was more historic. What survived the longest, rather than what is the longest still surviving. It mentions a couple of LNWR carriages built in the early 1890's in the Queen of Scots train. These are still occasionally used today and would be around 115 years now. I suppose the question is are they preserved or not. Depends on the definition. They are earning revenue for their owners, but many of the people travelling will be there specifically because of the old stock. One of the carriages spent some time as a house! All preserved railways have to earn some revenue, or rely on top up donations just to keep going, so money making can't be the full definition. I would say a preserved item has its history and age as a major reason for keeping it going, rather than because there was no money, need, or inclination to replace it with something newer. I suppose for this question I'm looking for an item of rolling stock that survived unremarked by the railwaymen using it in normal service, just doing its job for over a century. Holwell Number 3 an the older C&HPR water tenders are the only ones so far. I was particularly interested in standard gauge. The various IoM railways, although always carrying some tourists, are still revenue earning railways, using a lot of very old stuff continuously since built. Mim

The high altitude sections of the Cromford and High Peak railway were on limestone and had little surface water available for the railway and adjacent businesses and homes to use. thousands of gallons a day were carried in converted LNWR locomotive tenders, which were used as bowsers and supplied the locomotives, winding engines, quarries and other users on the dry sections of the line. Some of these were McConnell 4 wheel tenders from the early 1860's and were in use right up till closure in 1967, when they were over a hundred years old. Were there any non-preserved standard gauge items of rolling stock, that reached a greater age while still in regular use? A picture of a couple of the McConnell tenders can be found near the bottom of this page. There were younger Webb tenders and some much younger tenders in use too, but these were very old. Mim

We have different problems. Yours is trying to move heavy stock. Mine is that any bump will scatter 2mm wagons all over the place, so I'm more worried about smoothness of travel and precise location than power. I've just put it on the kitchen scales and my entire fiddle yard currently weights 2.6Kg!

Tolerances will be more forgiving in 7mm, unless it is S7 of course. In 2mm we are probably talking about better than +/-200micron each end of the 450mm table to have a hope of stock getting on and off without derailing. Repeatable again and again. This is with chamfering of the rails to help things along and is a big ask for plywood and cheapo ebay components. I suspect I'll probably have to use tapered locking pins at each end to fine align each position. Possible to motorise these too. Will try with just stepper motor drive first though. The linear slides are these. You can get versions with four short slides, two on each rail, which would be better I suspect for a wider 7mm traverser. For motorising I was initially thinking of a leadscrew with a stepper motor on the end and the nut attached to the table. Instead I am going to try this. The rack will be fixed and the pinion and stepper motor assembly attached to the table. No idea on quality, or if it will work yet. The popularity of home made 3D printers and other CNC machines has made this sort of stuff crazy cheap. For industrial equipment we always used to reckon that each extra axis of motion added £10,000 to the cost, so although the precision and reliability is of a different order it is amazing how easy and low cost hobby stuff is now. Mim

I've started building the fiddle yard. This is going to be a traverser as, in addition to holding trains, it also has to represent the rest of the run round loop that is too long to fit in the 600 x 240mm Challenge area. It needs to be able to run round trains and move the brake van. All the photos I have seen of the C&HPR have the engines with the firebox at the east end. This is due to the very steep inclines. Trains from Middleton Top have to climb Hopton incline, which was 1:14 at its steepest. I have seen a photo of a loco being hauled up Cromford bank in steam, with a crew on board so it can provide some power to assist the winding engine. Going up an incline firebox up risks exposing the firebox crown, so they all seem to be sent on to the line facing with the firebox down the steep inclines. This precludes turntables, cassettes, or fiddle sticks for turning trains on the model. The need for a bit of track long enough to take a loco and brake van at the other end means that a sector plate isn't going to be so easy either, so traverser it is. The linear slides were each mounted on to some aluminium L section. The bolt holes were drilled with the sections clamped back to back to ensure they would be parallel. These were mounted in a plywood box with large holes in the ply to provide plenty of adjustment for height, tilt and parallelism and bolts with penny washers used to clamp the L sections in place. I seem to have got a bit carried away with the 50mm hole saw on the framework. The deck of the traverser is two thicknesses of 3mm ply, bolted together. The screws on to the linear slides are in the bottom section, then the top section bolts to that. This is so there is no risk of the bolts getting in the way of the track. Seems to slide nice and parallel so far. Repeatability of alignment at both ends hasn't been tested yet and will be key to its success. The 0.8mm track beds at each end haven't been added yet, and the traverser top bed isn't screwed down in the picture, which is why they don't align vertically. Overall size is 2'x1' with an 18" traverser. The bed will take four tracks. The slide rods need cutting to length. A hacksaw won't even make a mark, so they are going to need a cutting disk in an angry grinder to get through. After aligning the end panel with the main baseboard end panel when drilling the alignment dowel positions I then messed up by glueing the traverser end panel in upside down. I still managed to do this after writing on the piece of ply which way up it was supposed to go . This has messed up the alignment to the main board and I suspect the easiest solution will be to drill new alignment dowel depressions. Fortunately there is space to do this. I have got a bit carried away and have decided to try automating the traverser. I have a stepper motor actuated rack and pinion drive on order, £26 or so from a well known auction web site and have been playing around with Arduino sketches. There is an improved stepper motor library you can add called AccelStepper, which allows acceleration and deceleration to be programmed, minimising the risk of stock being disturbed. Not sure if I can get all this to work, but the aim is to have five push buttons and get a single button push to send the traverser to any track position. I'll always be approaching the programmed position from the same direction to remove backlash effects. Not a lot of progress on the main baseboard. I am probably going to scrap the first go at a turnout and start again. A neighbour was throwing out some offcuts of Celotex, so I now have all the extruded foam I need for the scenery. Mim

My vernier says 2.4mm.

Some lead flashing, as used in roof gullies is still actually made from lead. If you know a builder they could supply a small piece of sheet that would last a lifetime! Off Ebay, 1m x 100mm x 1.32mm for £16.75 delivered is the cheapest and smallest quantity I saw at a quick glance. Solid lead is hard to beat for density at minimum cost and easy to shape. Mim

On non-scenic areas like fiddle yards. If building track with copper clad sleepers (bullhead rail), how far apart can you comfortably space the sleepers without risking the gauge wandering too far away between sleepers? This will be straight track across a traverser. Mim

3'7" sounds about right. They seem to fall around elbow height on an average height (5'8") or so person. I know they tend to be taller these days if cyclists are going to be using a bridge for example. I have seen lower walls in older places, Georgian walls on some canals, rather than Victorian, but by Victorian days, 1840's, 50's and later, they seemed to think it a good idea that walls and fences were high enough so people didn't easily topple over the top. And this is the Victorians mind, long before Ealth-n-Safety was invented! A fence on a harbour wall is going to be replaced fairly often, wood, or metal, what with salt, wind and impact damage from men working, so by the 1950's, it is going to be a reasonable height I reckon. Mim

Hi Michael, Like this: I'll use your profile picture as an example. Say we wanted to print your profile picture out so that it is 4mm wide to use it on your model. When we open it up in Gimp you can see on the top of the image that it is 300 by 196 pixels in size. To see and change the print resolution click on Image, then Print Size You'll then see that the X and Y Resolution is currently 72 dots per inch, which is 72 pixels per inch and that the image will currently print out at around 105 by 69mm. To reduce the print size to 4mm wide simply overwrite the 105.85 in Width with 4. The Y dimension and the X and Y resolution will all adjust automatically to the new width as they are all interrelated. In this case it comes out as 3.99mm, which is due to the number of pixels available, but is only 10 microns out and a tiny error. Click on OK and the change is made. X and Y resolutions are now 1907 pixels per inch, which is hugely in excess of what most printers can do and the human eye resolve, but that doesn't matter. The printed image will be at the best resolution that your printer can manage. As a rough guide, 72 pixels per inch (or dots per inch dpi, which is the same thing), is good for display on a screen. 300, to 600 dpi is good for a printed page. You can print directly from Gimp with control P, or File > Print, or click File > Export to export it as a png, or jpeg format image. Saving the file will give it an xcf, Gimp only format extension. Mim

These days, saving an image in Gimp will save it as its own xcf format. This preserves things like layers, masks and so on, but it is a format only Gimp uses. You need to Export the image to a jpeg, png or whatever image format you require. This can be the same file name as the image you opened, or a different one. As others have said, Image > Print Size then width/height and resolution are the things to alter to print at a particular size and keep all the detail, not Image > Scale Image, which leaves resolution (dpi) unchanged and blurs and pixelates the picture as you scale down. Gimp has a pretty steep learning curve. A downside of its excellent functionality. It can do very many things very well, but learning how to do the thing you want takes time! Mim

Good point there. Didn't think of it interfering with using a button gauge. I will experiment and see what happens. Easiest way to check, if you'll pardon the expression, would be to put in the check rail first, but without a bend at the inner end, so it can be removed if it interferes with placing the crossing accurately. Mim

Another day, another question. When building points with bullhead rail, easitrack plastic sleeper strip and chairs, is it possible to put the fitting of the check rails first in the build sequence, rather than last? The idea is to get round the need to bend one end of the check rail when it is in position and only 0.5mm from the stock rail, necessitating modifying a cheapo set of pliers and risk damaging the delicate chairs. My logic is that the plastic chairs set the check rail gap anyway, so fitting the check rails last doesn't allow any chance of alteration and the important relationship is between the crossing and each stock rail done earlier. My idea would be to thread the chairs on to the check rail first, then bend the check rail ends, then thread the stock rail and all its chairs, then align and glue the stock rail and chairs to the sleepers and build the rest of the turnout from there. Does this make any sense at all? Is there something important that I've not considered? Should I just stop overthinking and follow the instructions and get something built? Mim

No joggles on my prototype that I can see in photos, so I'll be leaving them out. Thanks everyone. Mim

Hi John, There is a way where your old XP computer could run Templot for free, which is to install a Linux operating system alongside, or instead of Windows XP, then install Wine, a windows emulator program and use that to run Templot. This is the way I run Templot. Linux is a way of getting more use out of an old computer that doesn't have the power to run more modern versions of Windows. Many people also find it easier to use once installed. I installed it on my Mum's laptop and she is a real 20th Century gal. Not a natural with computers at all! Linux comes in many flavours called distributions. Something like Xubuntu works well on older lower power machines. Installing something like xubuntu, then wine and Templot shouldn't be difficult. Depends how much in to computers you are. If you are very computer-phobic, then ignore all this. Alternatively, you may know someone nearby who can help install this. Templot has a very steep learning curve, but is excellent once you have a handle on it. Carrying on with paper templates as you are doing still works fine though. Mim