RobinofLoxley

I would hope fervently it turns out to be something simple. But in the Layout and track planning subsection a few days ago there was a problem tabled by someone with just a single short and after several days with plenty of advice given and a few questiosn not being clearly enough answered, there was no 'Problem solved' post to celebrate. Here there could be multiple shorts, wiring errors, and kit failure. It will have to be broken down into small sections for reliability testing, trouble-shot, and re-assembled in my opinion. Nightmare to resolve with miles of cabling in place

I guess a lot of people would prefer the concealed storage roads but when I first saw the plan I looked at it and thought hwo would you run a train service on that, given a three platform terminus but only one running line through which a lot of traffic might pass. I thought the storage roads might split into blocks as a holding zone for the single line - I am thinking more automation these days which is probably toxic for some....

If you dont mind a transmitter on the front of the loco, there is no reason why this shouldnt work. I daresay the receiver can be mounted further away from the centreline of the transmitter than you did for a test. I think you are saying that as the system is saturated at 7" distance that at that point you lose control of location, so can the system be adjusted so that 100% is never reached? Could be then that you can't detect the loco early enough for a reasonable deceleration.

Oh dear. Hard to help at this point without knowing where power feeds are and where insulated joiners have been used. You will finish up dismantling large sections and rebuilding bit by bit.

I think that this is a really imaginative use of the space and it could be fiendishly complicated to operate. Two complex yards in one layout is just plain greedy. The sidings in the MPD are somewhat short, however. As you have a reversing loop do you need the triangle section? You don't seem like a roundy type of person.

From what I can very vaguely remember as a young lad cruising the tube network, the 3 track terminii worked off mainly 2 track working in quiet periods, lets say T2 and T3. Trains going out of service arrived into T1 and then departed empty for sidings or shed. This kind of working was facilitated by having 2 island platforms with T2 in the centre having the arriving train discharge to one side then open the opposite side for departing passengers. Very quick turnarounds at the likes of Cockfosters were done like that; if you were coming down the stairs or short escalator to platform level and passengers were coming through the turnstiles, it was best to run if you didnt want to wait the 10 mins for the next one. I think almost all the deep line termini were like that, as well as others further in that were termini earlier in the build, like Arnos Grove, Finchley Central, etc.

https://therailwayconductor.co.uk/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIt4bS0oqK7QIVUuztCh3ynAhzEAAYASAAEgJwMvD_BwE The Old Dairy Centre is worth a visit anyway, in better times. Great cafe, if it survives

The question of expansion was discussed on another thread. I have a loft with big temperature swings, which I catered for by leaving expansion room in the conventional fishplate joints. I had no problems with track going out of shape. Plastic IRJ's have some flexibility to take up expansion but I would be leaving security gaps, especially as the power is always from a bus underneath, in most cases I wouldnt need power continuity at the fishplates. Anyway, back to the original topic. I found a seller on ebay offering 2 packets for 3.49 free postage, better than a kick in the teef

When I first read this I thought you had the ideas, Dan, that different builders could hook their layout section up to yours. That would be ambitious requiring a lot of prior co-operation among participants including an agreement about common hardware, addressing, etc. If you do it yourself you won't have that problem, it will be like having a layout broken up into districts

What would have happened to Northampton if the local landowners had encouraged the railways to come rather than obstructing them? It would have been the first main town reached by the LMS with massive implications for later developments up to Milton Keynes. Its strategic location would have made it a railway hub as important as Crewe. The line of the LMS would have been different with the section of existing line from Bletchley to Rugby never being built. Even so, Northampton had connections to Peterborough Bedford and Leicester and I can imagine the Leicester connection being intact, the population of the town more than double what it is today, and Castle station double todays size at least. A lot more railway infrastructure may have found its way to the town in general.

To answer the OP's last question, locos will be fine provided that they are well wrapped and stored in a box. The extremes of the climate that might be experienced won't get to them then. The exception might be split chassis Bachmann types if you have any. I had an approx 20 year gap between the kids leaving, packing the track and stock away; when I got the stuff out again, I put an oval together on the living room floor, connected the power up and having applied a spot of lube where appropriate, Mallard made one creaky slow lap while the lube was finding its way around, then ran as well as ever. The loft is a dry one in a modern house, getting the proverbial 3C to 43C as mentioned above. I have a fan heater and extractor, and if I want to spend more time in the loft in future summers I will put a cooler up there as well. The extra power requirement will probably be less than the track will pull during operations, and will never cost enough to justify buying the appropriate insulation panels. My access is up a loft ladder which is no more difficult to negotiate than the stairs in some of the victorian cottages in my village, and safer. I walk up and over onto boarding. I could do that as long as I can climb a set of stairs.

Ian, have you downloaded any track planning software? You can get the demo version of anyrail, which will allow you to make a layout with up to 50 track pieces, which will enable you to play around. One question, where your proposed baseboards meet at a right angle, is there any scope to 'round' the corner at all? Since track will have to turn there, you will get some extra flexibility if you have a rounded corner there

I have managed to drill holes in sleepers with a minimum diameter drill (1mm) in a conventional large chuck Black and Decker not a specialist item. The drill bit tends to slide so you need to make enough of a dent in the sleeper face to stop it slipping. MDF is Ok but not the easiest for pinning. With a 1mm hole my track pins can be pushed through with fingers.

I have not seen it advocated here, but could glue dots be a solution? I tink a few people would be curous as to why track pins didnt work for you. Are you using OSB for baseboards or something?

As I said about half a mile further up the thread

Sorry about going off topic, but I am bewildered by this risk of exansion thing. I suppose people have experienced it. I have a layout in an uninsulated loft it gets up to 40C on the hottest sunny days, and probably 5C on cold winter nights - goes without saying the insulation on the loft floor is pretty good. I haven't noticed a problem with expansion, and this was my DC layout with few breaks in the track. What I didnt do is lay the track so as to leave zero gap between each rail, I always left a small expansion gap where I could and relied mainly on the fishplate to carry the power. By small I mean just visible, less than 1mm. As I am converting to DCC and have lifted all the track, I wont be relying much on fishplates but I will have a lot of insulated joiners. These are quite soft plastic and if laid with that same approach, Im not expecting any trouble from them. The plastic is fairly soft and would compress very slightly under pressure in the worst case. The longest gap between IRJ's is likely to be the full length of a piece of flexi, so just under a metre.

You have Electrofrog points. Have you complied with the recommendations for the wiring of these points? There are many threads where its discussed but i cant point you to one as they aren't that obvious. What kind of loco is causing the short, in other words where is the rest of the loco at the point where the short is. District 1 would not seem to be involved as the loco hasn't reached it in an electrical sense, from what you have told us. There is what looks like a small piece of wire running across the switch rails, which are of opposite polarity. One or other rail may be dead depending on the point position and the rest of the track wiring. is it real or just a piece of hair? Based on what we can see, the small section of track between the two points needs a power feed on one side only, as the other side in theory is getting power through the metal fishplate connection to the stock rail of the point. If that is how its wired, is that particular piece of track (the isolated side) powered from the correct side of the DCC bus?

This is an interesting project to me because I have a similar kind of loft, with the same space between the timbers to put boards, but less central open space, but a longer run. What I have elected to do is bring the track into the main loft space in order to be able to turn the track round to have a non-roundy track plan but still continuous run. The plans are outlined for criticism in the recent thread setrack vs streamline. Most of the responders on this have already seen it. AS far as running between the timbers goes, it does spoil some of the views but as has been suggested, some of the track can run in front of it, if you think of 90cm as being an easy stretch. Not sure how to integrate N and OO, if it was me I might be tempted to run the N around an elevated section at the back. It looks a very complicated thing. Run before someone mentions the word 'helix'

I didnt think of that. I dont have one but you never know..... Also it didnt occur to me at first that although I need to power individual track sections I can leave the original fishplates in place a lot of the time. Doh.

That was the last layout!!!!

Thanks for the comments. Those points at the bottom I wanted to keep in that position as they will be on the flat before the track starts rising to the terminus, but I suppose they could be on the slope. Those sidings are long enough as they are, in fact I have a bit of room to spare there. The point orientation at the top right, I plan to test lay it as the first part of the layout and check that all locos can ride over it. I had a similar feature on my DC layout and I got complete trains across it, strangely it was on the curved points where I had derailing problems. I recognise that the reverse curve entry into the first platform is ugly but I cant otherwise fit 4 tracks and keep the sidings, plus the way its laid out I have access to all four platforms both incoming and outgoing. The impact of the reverse curve can be reduced by inserting short straights, meanin gone of the sidings has to be lost. However I came across another snag which is that Anyrail shows gaps in funny places, for example. The one below wouldnt be easy to fix we will see if its really like that when I test lay.

That is really helpful. I didnt realise the Streamline separation was so different - to be honest I only started looking at it as a possibility last week. As it happens, the two points you have highlighted in my track plan are Hornby Express points and the only way I could see to use them in that configuration (they seem to me to be designed only as crossing from one line to another, not as I have used them) was to employ a Streamline crossing. When you are organising a track plan that you are going to publish so to speak, there's a temptation to tidy it up for neatness more than accuracy. I can see quite a few places where a bit of surgery is going to be needed - more than three quarters of a degree

I'm a dab hand at removing joiners from setrack. I am building the layout on the premise of DCC with block detection/automation to follow, which requires the majority of the track items to be powered separately. Hence a lot of insulated joiners. There will be 53 points at the last count and they need minimum 106 joiners just for the frog rails. There will be quite a lot of flexitrack but I have some situations where I will have setrack reused from previous layouts. The bulldog clip is a nice trick. No doubt I will have a shot at aligning track without joiners but its one of things where I dont feel the need to take what I see as a risk.

I dont envisage operating that way; the loops are for engines only. There are several ways a loco can get across from one main track to another, for example using the approach track to the right hand terminus. And definitely I am building in sections. The high level terminus and approach tracks and everything else will be built separately. The first. that is reference track to be layed are the parallel right hand bends top left. Thanks for the support.

Up until now I have found the alignment with plastic joiners to be a useful feature. I know I could use plasticard to separate tracks as an alternative. That price, when individual packs of 12 can be had for 2.50, is what I am trying to avoid paying. Just seems a lot of money for very little. No much in the scheme of things of course but my perception is poor value. Oh yes I model OO. Doesnt seem to make lot of difference tbh