RobinofLoxley

Does anyone know if there is a large pack of these sold anywhere? As I'm going to build with them between almost every piece of track I'm going to need a decent number, at least 100. For what they are they are already expensive and sold in very small packs, is it possible to do better?

Hello Keith, Yes you are right about those sidings but I have scope to reposition them if I need to. As to the crossover, it where it is to enable anything in the sidings top left to get into any of the through station platforms. At 1:1 scale it looks as if I have enough room to fit everything in. If I can't i will take out the central track and shift everything up slightly. if that makes sense. Compared to the DC layout it replaces, there is 120M of track compared to 90M before, a few more points, but a lot more structural work to do as the left terminus and all the approach track is raised. I have a lot of surplus timber from the DC layout I can use for building structure. The new layout should be easier to operate DC or DCC. Its more like a railway!

A bit of background first. About a month ago I posted a couple of layout plans for comment, as I had decided to completely rebuild my loft layout. I got some good suggestions, and also some questions, as in why my layout plans used Setrack only. Well I replied, that’s what I have from previous layouts, plus I needed 22.5 degree point angles to thread parallel tracks between loft timbers. Anyway, the track is all up now and while doing a stock take I found I had some Streamline points in amongst the spare stuff. I realised I hadn’t been completely accurate when I said that I needed 22.5 degree point angles, as part of the rebuild was planned to avoid the timberwork. So I decided to see how I could fit some Streamline points into the new track plans. The original, ‘final’ version below is labelled RMweb1 and the variation with some Streamline points is labelled RMweb2. Most of the rework is in the area of the through station on the bottom half of the plan, although I also inserted some express points into the reversing loop track at the top. I thought that as Streamline points are longer I would possibly lose platform length. Looking at what had to be fitted in I used mainly medium length points to the left of the station and short ones (still longer than Setrack) to the right. Now I don’t supposed experienced modellers will be surprised by this, but when I had adjusted the approach tracks I actually found that I had gained platform space, both length and width, as I could locate the points further away from the platforms without making any problems that I can see. One feature of my old layout was that the best looking track area was a set of carriage sidings where I used express points; the tracks were closer together as a result. I notice that in the station area the same thing has happened, and it will work because the curves are all R628 and there is no gauge trouble to consider. Obviously in the wider layout the original OO gauging has to be respected. From the point of view of the operating well, I think that the Streamline layout flows much better into the station than the Setrack plan, so I’m seriously considering implementing it. There is one point in a board join area, where the point can’t be repositioned and this could be a problem. I don’t think I can alter the Terminus station at upper right, and don’t think I need to change the sidings lower right, they can stay with the Setrack angles. Seen from the operating well, both items are approached from the rear of the layout not the front and I don’t think the impact is so great. One slight quirk that occurred with Streamline points was that lining up got much harder; a lot of the long flexi sections finished with small kinks in, which I assume is a consequence of the point angle being 12 degrees not the exact half Setrack value of 11.25. Maybe someone can confirm. Sorry for the essay length post. Any thoughts?

I think there might be the possibility to link the two part of the laout via a linkage of curved points, at the top of the station right hand side. Tracks are sharing a platform so intended to be level. Just shift the right hand platform down a bit and insert 2 points. There are many places where cross-over between tracks could be introduced. Sidings are a bit tricky but if each track was shortened by the eq of an R600 2 sidings can be fitted at the top of the layout.

Also the square well in the square baseboard isnt great for the flexibility of planning. Imagine the effect of rounded well corners - not full radius as that would reduce the space too much, but just filling them in.

www.freetrackplans.com Where I started for inspiration for my rebuild

I may have missed this, but I can't find through searching, if there is a convention for which side of the track is power fed and would have block detectors etc fitted. For my DC layout, now rapidly disappearing I followed the convention of positive wire to the right hand rail, loco direction of travel. Is DCC the same?

I have seen this item fairly recently, if not in the same thread. I also note the document is from 2008, I wonder if its still valid, that is still required on 2020 versions

A couple of general points here. I too noticed that the oringinally proposed operating well was too narrow. Try turning round in it..... A lift-out section is always a possibility. Second, with 14 foot of length you have room to have high and low level tracks. Its easier to cater for this when the boards havnt been built, as some track can be at intermediate level. But at its most basic it transforms the possibilities.

With these dimensions people almost always opt for a shunting layout of some kind. In this case the toe of the L-shape could take trains off-scene.

Despite the fact that in my working career I have seen many examples of really simple things overlooked in the design of industrial machinery and equipment, could it just be that the designers of some equipment items realised that detected blocks would be different to undetected ones ( a sort of DCC version of the uncertainty principle) and either utilise that or work around it?? The solution is never to say here's my kit to do X, but to make it work properly you also need to do Y.

I think that if the OP took the track plan apart and reassembled it joint by joint starting with the top right hand curves that it would all fit together properly. Its just a quirk of Anyrail how its come out with so many not-quite 100% joins.

There are public domain recommendations about wire gauge. There are some on here, if I knew where to find them I would post a link.

Okay, so 14ft, then 7 feet from the dropper to the track ends, less to the last fishplate. Not a long distance, maybe 3-4 fishplates each side. Risk increases the more you have between the source and the loco. Goes without saying that while there are board layouts such as 8 x 4 where 7' would be typical but equally there are lofts with hundreds of feet. Run one of those from a single dropper, I don't think so

Both layouts look pretty good; you are pushing the limits at the board edges. The layout without the reversing loop looks better, and as you are not in the steam era there is no absolute requirement to reverse anything. And remember, most of the assets so to speak will pack up into quite a small package for transport when you move. The baseboards can be left behind.

Personally I prefer the swept curves and curved points of the second design, probably because I used this strategy in my own loft to maximise the train length I could achieve. However as has been pointed out, with as many as14 roads on some plans you wont be able to reach the farthest ones unless there is some access that we can't see on the plans. I just wonder if the nearest to the operator pair of sidings that are accessed through Y-points (on plan 2) are really necessary.

A bit more off topic, but this was exactly where my research took me five years ago when I had to decided whether to build in my loft with the OO stuff I had, or throw it away and build from scratch in N. My loft and its space would have been more suited to N but it was the restriction on running stock in steam that decided it. I had the idea to build a layout based on where I lived as a boy in London near the GNR, but I found that there weren't the A4's etc available as there are in OO; not that i built the idea, as based on OO as it needed more space than I had.

Thanks. I assumed you had an auxiliary power supply. I am just noting the OP's original question, and the various ways it has and hasn't been answered. I'm not competent to make a list and be 100% sure it would be correct. There aren't that many possibilities.

In this case, the OP is already contemplating a fairly ambitious layout. He is not going to be put off by any discussion about future options, pitfalls, etc etc, in my opinion.

So what is the actual power supply for the accessory bus that you use?

I know that. That's where I'm going but there is a full layout rebuild between. Curiously I can run 4 solo on my existing DC, two on loops and 2 shunter. With the occasional accident..

Just going back towards the original question , I would suppose that the power rating for the device has a nominal value that can comfortably be exceeded for short periods?? It would be unusual in this kind of situation for the 3A quoted for the Z21 to be a fixed ceiling. Hence folks with restricted power systems reporting they can run lots of gear on them without problems. When I get towards the far end of my project it will become an interesting case in point. With the possibility to have maybe 10 trains in motion plus shunting, how the Z21 I intend to buy will cope

I dont expect to relay the layout again, after the rebuild over the coming winter. I might do a more table top project in the future, but I think it will be 5 years to finish all the scenery etc. I have another hobby inthe summer. Since I am heading down the fully automatic route I dont dare cut any corners.

What I am getting through here is that the objective is to have very high reliability. That doesn't just mean power supply to the trains but if you are looking to any level of automation, all the peripherals, particularly detectors. I am teasing out answers as I go by asking questions that may or may not be silly, which is how we got onto soldering fishplates; it was in the context of avoiding having a dropper on more or less every rail. I would say that only for detection purposes might it be necessary to have every rail separate from its neighbour, but in most situations it won't be (necessary). The extra detectors introduce more precision in positioning (in terms of feedback to the CAB or to the computer supervising). But then you might have a long run of track where the only requirement is to know if there's a train in it or not. Then you might have 1 dropper only if you were confident of the integrity of the rail joint itself, which in turn is a function of track laying expertise. It makes a difference what kind of track, too. I will re-use a lot of setrack when I rebuild my layout, and there are a fair number of short R600's for historical reasons and they might go back on the layout. But someone else might be building with exclusively flexitrack, covering metres with few pieces, and there you might consider 1 dropper per track section completely reasonable. Also, someone building a branchline scenario with more emphasis on realistic modelling and operations than I am, might have so few track sections that putting a dropper on each is hardly a problem. My new layout plan is hardly super large but as it has about 500 track segments if I use all my old stuff, I might be justified in welding sa few short sections together. I did exhale a bit when I was told I needed to fully isolate every point and power feed each part of it, but now I get why, I will just have to get on with the soldering.

I had been wondering, as I am in the planning stage, about doing exactly this. There is comment around about corrosion affecting rail joiners long term that is bypassed if the track is effectively soldered into longer sections, a bit like real railways. I thought about making up track sections that would correspond with the blocks for detection purposes. This would be for track runs of some length.