009 micro modeller

Isn’t some of that quite close to how the GEM Varikit was supposed to work? In some ways, would it perhaps be better to use the scanning and 3D printing process to create moulds, which could then be used to actually produce new injection moulded kits? If successful the same process could be applied to the kits that did survive into the current Dapol range but where the original tooling is starting to wear out. From a personal point of view and in the context of this thread, the availability of a less rare and less valuable Stirling Single kit would open up some interesting and fun possibilities.

It’s quite common for a lot of museums to be structured like this, though sometimes with two charitable trusts.

Yes exactly. Was trying to remember who the manufacturer was and where they worked (was it APCM Penarth?). They have a family resemblance to some standard gauge Fowlers but the front end design is slightly fancier than the Matchbox one. I have a Matchbox diesel like these somewhere, it would be interesting to see whether the taller cab would make it too tall overall.

You could possibly use it for one of those ex-cement works 2’ 6” locos (I think a cancelled export order, one now at Whipsnade). Is the cab height enough for 4mm scale?

I’ve got a Jouef/Playcraft clockwork loco in that livery. Not sure if it’s the original livery.

That just sounds rather pointless, and needlessly confrontational. And why alienate people who might otherwise have supported a charity?

Would it? Given that funding bodies usually specify what such funding should be spent on - though admittedly not so specifically with ACE now, as since the pandemic I gather that they’ve been giving more money to heritage organisations, and more to fund or improve existing programmes rather than create new ones. Nevertheless I would find it odd if it was being spent on a magazine that’s largely for internal communication.

Actually looking back at the first page of this thread, I’m reminded that prior to using the Locosnstuff bogie I also attempted to cheaply build my own chassis for the standard gauge wagons. There seems to be a bit of a theme developing here of attempting to build stuff but not quite getting it to work, and replacing yet another piece of the project with a solution that involves me modifying a kit or RTR item instead. Is it just that I don’t have the skills to build the transporter wagon well enough to be electrically reliable? I think this is part of the issue but it also seems that it’s inherently a bit difficult to get everything lined up and straight, and having a very long rigid wheelbase also sets up a few obvious problems.

It is a distinct skill and an important role, and some organisations are seemingly only just realising this. Possibly they can’t get past the idea of having a paid volunteer coordinator, which sounds oxymoronic at first but has actually worked well in a lot of cases. The alternatives that I’ve seen or heard about seem to leave themselves open to various issues: either for the volunteer group to be sort of self-managing to an extent (which seems like it would work best in a very small organisation with minimal factionalism), or for them to be managed by someone who works in the department they volunteer with, inevitably on top of all their other responsibilities and not necessarily as a very high priority. Was it a museum that was originally set up and run by volunteers, or one that traditionally used mostly paid staff? I ask because it does make a difference. There was a tendency with some museums a few years ago to do the opposite, directly replacing paid staff with volunteers due to budget cuts etc., in some cases with fairly long-serving staff in quite specialist roles (as you might imagine, this also meant that the skills and knowledge required of prospective volunteers was a bit over the top). It still happens in some places but there has been some pushback. On the other hand, I can understand how annoying it is when paid staff are brought into a situation that has previously worked well using almost exclusively volunteers, and why those volunteers might resent this.

I did originally think that I’d have to ban box vans from the layout anyway in case they were too high to fit under the overhead wire (I was OK with this, but fortunately it turned out not to be a problem anyway), so that wouldn’t be a project-ending setback. It might end up too high for this anyway, if the alternative transporter design is fractionally higher. I would ideally like to be able to run a van but currently I have 3 open wagons awaiting conversion (a Parkside mineral wagon kit, a Bachmann RTR mineral wagon and a wooden Oxford Rail one) in addition to the Oxford Rail wagon already converted, so I’ll probably have mostly open wagons anyway. One problem might be the extra weight of the motor making the wagons heavier and less stable (in which case I might have to look at alternative, inside-framed Japanese N gauge chassis to convert instead of the Kato 11-105), but again it’s probably only a millimetre or two so perhaps it won’t make much difference.

I mean, if it works reasonably well I’m not overly concerned at this point. The designs I have been using were low and inside-framed but obviously the de-motored Kato 11-105 won’t be, though it seems very promising so far in terms of getting the pick-up to work reliably and it’s not really that much higher (maybe about 2 or 3mm - actually in some ways that is quite a lot).

No I do like the other ideas, including those you’ve suggested (thank you everyone for your suggestions), it’s just that for now I’m sort of committed to DC, and it’s almost on the point of working quite well. DCC might help with some of the issues but would probably be quite a big investment and does still rely on some form of electrical contact. The battery-powered radio control idea in some ways is the obvious solution (as it would allow me to just disregard the electrical issues) but I’m not very enthusiastic about the idea of fitting it to 5 or 6 wagons that will only run up and down about 6 inches of track on this particular layout and won’t really have any other use. I must admit when I started the project I was expecting this bit to be easier to get right and the alternative means of powering the NG loco (either by overhead wire or radio control) to present more problems. I was hoping someone might reply to the thread. Obviously as an 009 modeller I’m aware of some of this stuff but track-powered lighting for bogie coaches isn’t something I’ve ever needed to get involved with before. I do, though I doubt they’d have something particularly suitable. At the moment I’m playing around with the idea of a Kato ex-loco bogie chassis, with the motor taken out but the pickup/power arrangements basically left alone and just connected to the standard gauge rails.

Sorry to dig this up and ask again but can I ask how stable it is, given that the standard gauge wagon sits well above the NG axle box height when in transit? I know the prototypes were usually extremely low to the ground and received wisdom seems to suggest that they also need to be like this in model form (which is how I originally got into rigid wheelbases and inside frames - no room for bogies to swing or for outside framed axle boxes). But if they don’t have to be quite so low that potentially makes everything a lot easier. Possibly it won’t work quite as well in my case as the motorised wagons are heavy and I want to be able to pull or propel two at a time, but it might be OK at low (accurate for shunting) speeds.

The Association of Independent Museums guidance on trustee recruitment (and some heritage railways are members of AIM) recommends that organisations recruit widely and attempt to fill skills gaps, and that trustee vacancies are properly advertised (though compared to the rest of the private sector it’s slightly different in a charity context where trustees are not paid). That is obviously in tension with the idea of a membership organisation that has traditionally elected its trustees from within its existing membership, which I’ve mentioned earlier in the thread but I’m not sure that’s as relevant here. But the idea as you say is to give a different perspective. In terms of needing insiders as day to day executives I would usually tend to agree, but for a heritage railway who are the ‘insiders’? Lots of them in the past seem to have been run by people who understood railways and were thus insiders in that sense, but didn’t necessarily know much about the wider heritage sector or how to run a tourist attraction, which I’d argue are equally relevant in this context. More recently there have been people who know about those things and come from a museum background but don’t know as much about railways (or engineering?), which in some cases hasn’t worked very well either (though it should work in theory, if they are willing to learn from those around them and to employ people with appropriate technical knowledge).

Well, that didn’t work very well. Yesterday I attempted to rebuild both the loading dock and the transporter itself, successfully curing the see-saw effect but not completely eliminating rocking from side to side. I also attempted a system with more wheels, to aid pickup, but if anything that’s made it even worse, with a slightly outrageous, mostly rigid 8-wheel arrangement with a scale wheelbase of nearly 15’. I could probably rebuild it (or build another one) to its original configuration, or some other configuration, but at this point it’s become clear that anything that has a rigid wheelbase and has been inexpertly soldered up by me is particularly vulnerable to electrical problems caused by even slightly uneven track. A better, and perhaps more RTR/kit-based approach might be a good idea. I was wondering about things like pick-up fitted pony trucks, coaches illuminated with track power etc., more conventional applications where a chassis is unpowered but still needs to reliably pick up power. Then I realised that a suitably modified loco chassis was a more obvious solution. The photo shows the transporter, with its rather questionable modifications, next to a de-motored Kato 11-105 chassis. Importantly, the latter is about the right length - it might have more end overhang than the existing transporter in its current form but not enough to recreate the tipping up effect seen previously. I could of course lengthen it, but that would slightly defeat the point, which is that it’s a widely available, well-made bogie chassis, with all-wheel pickup and seemingly a fairly straightforward layout of bronze strips on top. I don’t really want to mess around with it too much and risk damaging the electrical contacts. I’d probably have preferred something like a Tomix Portram, simply because it’s inside-framed, whereas the outside frames on the 11-105 mean that the standard gauge rails will probably need to sit slightly higher than I’d like, but it’s what I had to hand so will do for now. To be honest, the centre of gravity doesn’t seem to have been a major issue so far so it could probably be fractionally higher without too many issues. I’m not under any illusion that this will be a quick fix and it will all suddenly work perfectly; there’s still a need to add weight to the chassis and put everything together, but it looks like it might work quite well compared to my previous attempts.

I understand that the real Flying Scotsman loco has been heavily overhauled multiple times in preservation and hardly any of it is definitely known to be original, so this actually seems very appropriate, given the attempts at restoration you mention in the rest of your post…

I suppose the other issue, as alluded to in that article, is that someone who has the experience and drive that prompts them to set up a charity doesn’t necessarily have the skills or experience needed to run it when it grows into a huge organisation (whereas somebody hired specifically to run the organisation generally would, as they’d be selected on that basis).

Surely for DCC you’d want all the standard gauge wagons to have decoders? I don’t think the transporters would have them as in electrical terms they are part of the track (which for DCC would all be electrically linked, unlike the isolated unloading siding and separate overhead wire lines in DC - it’s just that some of it wouldn’t be the same gauge as the rest). If you were sending power via the loco would you be able to command it to not move, and instead to send its power to the transporter, on a conventional DCC system? If I end up not using the rails to supply power to the transporter it’s also annoying because that suggests that the overhead wire stuff is all a bit of a waste of time as well, though it doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t use it (just that I don’t have to exclusively use pantograph-fitted locos). The irritating bit is that the OLE system all works really well, it’s just the reason for it to be like that (the 2-rail supply to the transporters) that seemingly leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability. Is there really nothing (maybe something intended for coach lighting, picking up from the rails, or spare loco bogies) that is already available and would work? I feel like the real issue here is that I don’t have enough experience of building chassis precisely (except on more conventional wagons where it doesn’t really matter as much if it’s slightly wrong), yet am now rather foolishly attempting to build one completely from scratch for a project that requires an absurdly high level of precision. Which is why modifying some sort of proprietary or kit built item might be better for me.

I did originally consider it, but for the narrow gauge loco (as an alternative to overhead wire). The issue if I use it for the standard gauge wagons is that I have to fit 5 or 6 vehicles with radio control, not just 1 or 2, and they probably won’t get used much on other layouts (what else am I ever going to build that requires 5 00 gauge motorised wagons with no couplings?). But it’s not a bad idea in principle because each individual wagon would only run very occasionally (compared to the NG loco, which would be more intensively used), so the batteries would potentially last for ages before they needed to be recharged.

OK, I see what you mean. And I definitely agree with the general idea that one of the causes of unreliability is the lack of weight on the transporter (though on the other hand it’s seemingly not massively improved when the heavy, motorised standard gauge wagon is on it and is running off, which slightly complicates that theory). I might have misunderstood, but how would you prevent the loco itself from moving when it’s supposed to be supplying power to the transporter instead? You could have one of the loco’s bogies wired to supply the transporter and the other connected to the loco’s motor as normal but that seems needlessly complicated. An incredibly heavy ‘shunter’s wagon’, semi-permanently coupled to the loco and fitted with pick-ups supplying to the transporter might work, but it might all get a bit complicated when the wagon being unloaded is at the end of a train of 3 and not immediately adjacent to the loco (as it might be on the finished layout). Would the conductive couplers be suitable for remote, delayed uncoupling and still be conductive enough? Another thing that occurs to me is vaguely based on my experience with overhead electrification from that side of this project. Obviously I’m using it because it avoids the issue of power going to the transporter when not required (and because I like NG electric railways), but the interesting thing about live overhead wire in small scales is that everyone expects it to be hugely unreliable because the contact point on the pantograph is really small. But actually, it can work really well because the spring in the pantograph causes it to push up against the OLE and simultaneously down onto the rails (so the loco is effectively sandwiched tightly between two conductors). Maybe a similar principle could be applied for the transporters. I’m starting to think that in some ways I’m actually doing it the wrong way round and the most electrically reliable way, if still using the transporter wheels to supply the rails on top, is to have the standard gauge wagons running off OLE and the NG as conventional 2-rail, though obviously I can’t do that as it would look ridiculous (and actually, thinking about it it would probably create a short elsewhere on the layout).

I’d already thought of that, as mentioned above. The unloading section next to the dock is wired for 2-rail so the standard gauge wagon can run on and off the transporter. Elsewhere, the narrow gauge track has both rails at the same polarity (because it’s wired for the overhead electric loco, i.e. overhead wire with return through both rails). Thus on the rest of the layout there is no potential difference across the standard gauge rails on top of the transporter. It works fine in theory, and in practice it does work intermittently. Even the live overhead electric operation is, to my surprise, very reliable (though obviously doing it this way does mean that all the NG locos used must necessarily be electric types fitted for overhead wire operation, but I’m OK with that). However, the electrical contact between the transporter wheels and the rails seems to be the weak point of the design, and I’m wondering if there is a way to improve this or whether I need an alternative method. I did vaguely look at the idea of sprung contacts. One issue I did have before was that the transporter would tip up as the standard gauge wagon ran onto it; as well as being unsightly this also fairly comprehensively destroyed the electrical contact at one end. That was all to do with moments around a pivot (the axle) and seems now to have been much improved by moving the NG transporter wheels further out and the ends of the SG rails further in, removing the possibility of tipping up. However, it hasn’t cured the problem entirely because while the transporter can no longer tip end to end it can still tip side to side, if there is any kind of unevenness in the wheels (not a particularly easy thing to avoid on a very long, rigid, inside-bearing chassis). In theory this should be mitigated by the guide beams I installed alongside the unloading siding (which unfortunately don’t look great either), but these are potentially just as vulnerable to tiny imperfections as the track itself, and the electrical contact appears incredibly sensitive to any imperfection. I did wonder if, for pick-up through the rails, having a compensated chassis for the transporter would help (if it’s even possible for a 9mm gauge vehicle with inside frames and tiny 5.1mm wheels) but I’m not sure that will work as well in practice as the wagon would need to be reasonably heavy to allow the compensation to work. Based on your suggestion, I do wonder if the solution is not to use a sprung contact, the guide beams or the rails on their own but actually to use all three methods at the same time, with each acting as backup to the others.

Like this? https://amp.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2017/apr/12/founder-syndrome-personality-crippling-charity Or alternatively there might sometimes be no way to achieve the good outcome, if Bob can’t come in on Thursdays or whatever. In which case, a good manager might try and find something else for him to do (that he actually would want to do, not forced on him obviously). But that potentially then comes down to issues around what motivates people to volunteer and the benefits to the volunteer vs to the organisation. I get the impression with some organisations (including some heritage railways) that they originally started with a reasonable number of volunteers volunteering because they enjoyed it and got something out of it, but have subsequently moved to a situation where they’re using a fairly overstretched and relatively small pool of volunteers to do a lot of work, largely because they can’t afford paid staff. In your hypothetical example, if Bob still comes in on Wednesday (because he can’t do any other day instead) but can’t/doesn’t want to do hedge trimming, and the volunteer manager has to invent some non-job for him to do instead, then the benefit to the organisation is fairly low. The benefit to Bob might be quite high though (though not if the work he’s now doing as a volunteer seems less fulfilling or interesting than what he used to do). Having not seen that particular episode I might be missing something here, but that sounds amazingly petty. On railway carriages or people’s front doors? 😂

I remember doing some training where they talked about leadership as a process, rather than an exclusive role, which initially sounded rather pretentious but actually in the end I thought was quite a helpful way of looking at things. I also read a good article a few months ago (which annoyingly I can’t find now) about so-called ‘heroic leadership’ and its potential pitfalls, which I definitely thought seemed relevant to discussions like this thread. And personally I’ve found that the managers I work well with are those who appear (and actually are) trustworthy and competent but are also willing to let people who work under them take on responsibilities when they’re ready, without unnecessarily micromanaging.

Possibly in a way that didn’t accidentally imply, as @Blandford1969 mentioned, that neurodivergent traits make people unsuitable for leadership roles. In the case of the NYMR there’s no evidence whatsoever that any of those “leaders” stirring up trouble are neurodivergent in any way, but seemingly an increasing amount of evidence that they may have behaved like overbearing, self-important prats. To be honest, I was mainly pushing back against the old (incorrect) stereotype of autistic people lacking empathy. Not sure of the relevance here of whether you are in work or not. As I previously said though, I was willing to cut a bit of slack because I didn’t think your intentions were bad in your original post. I would say, talk ‘with’ not ‘about’ them, ask them how they want to be talked about individually. It’s probably better to create a work culture where the hypothetical Fred can openly tell people he is autistic/neurodivergent and they know what that means (via training, preferably delivered by someone with lived experience rather than a neurotypical “professional”) and are accepting of it. And yes, I realise the practical difficulty of some of this. Exactly - though to complicate things a bit I am a neurodivergent person who does a job that can’t be done remotely, so I do sort of see that side of that argument as well. 😅

They are motorised wagons, simulating hand-shunting (as far as is possible in 4mm scale). The standard gauge wagons and pick up for the transporter is 2-rail DC, the narrow gauge loco is overhead wire with return through both rails. Isolating the loading siding keeps the loco separate from the 2-rail system and having both rails at the same polarity stops the standard gauge wagons running off the transporters on the rest of the layout. But without getting too much into the specifics I’m just wondering if there is something that already exists (perhaps coach lighting pickups or similar) that could be used for this. How does that actually make electrical contact?