Jake The Rat

Be careful with Grandma's carpet! She would be furious about any stains of coal or lubrication oil. Meanwhile I'm still working on Rhye on Sea. (OK, maybe 'working' is not quite the right expression. ) A new station at Bree, a 2nd rebuild of the MPD & yard at Rhye & a new bridge across the bay on the northern rim - screenshots later to come... Here is a question for experts. I have an LNWR 2-4-2 4ft6 loco, later classified '1P' by the LMS; this is, I understand, an engine for light suburban or branchline passenger trains. Would it be totally unrealistic to use her for light freight trains? Or for shunting? I don't want her to haul 50 coal waggons, of course. (Something like a Metro Peckett or an LMS Jinty would be nice, but that's not available for the LNWR or the L&YR, AFAIK. )

That's an interesting vehicle. It looks like 3/4 of a bogey coach welded to an 0-4-0 tank loco. I've never seen anything like that, the closest thing that comes to my mind is 'Drummond's Bug'. Is it real or fictitious? Anyway, as long as it's steam propelled I like it.

This is the only L&YR loco I could find. Maybe Rhye on Sea is somewhere near Blackpool... who knows? The Department of Bad Jokes in Kalau (jokes like this are known as Kalauer in German) considers me a hopeless case & has given up on me a long time ago.

Light railway? Why not a darkness railway? Maybe from Blackburn to Blackpool...

... & now for something completely different: Rhye on Sea, LNWR session. Having enough for now of red locos I wanted to see some in black for a change, crossing my new viaduct at the eastern rim of the layout. I think, the new backdrop is also an improvement. A Claughton & a Super D... ...Alfred the Great... ...a 5ft6 2-4-2T... ...a Precursor... ... & a Coal Tank shunting Annie's 4 plank wagons. The ghost of Rhye Castle (also new & located in the northeastern corner) watching the harbour & the station. The midnight train is slightly late... Currently reading: ... so you can guess what my next session will feature.

Eeeelectric! I knew that. The 1st thing I ever read from you was a contribution in the screenshot competition thread. Only later I found this forum, & this is the only thread I post in. Honestly, I'm not really a model railroader - I'm a computer player who discovered his love for steam locos.

What's that? Rhye C You guessed it, Rhye on Sea. I changed a few things according to Annie's recommendations, & some other things. For instance, mostly I used 'UK road 1930s-60s', but for the main street along the station I preferred 'FMA road1 15m 37860'. I've never heard of Mazawattee tea - Annie, can you recommend it? The biggest change is the new 3rd station, & this will be definitely the last one. 4 stations would be too many for such a tiny layout. The original author named the nearby crossing 'Bree', so I named the station likewise. I'm not sure if this is the best solution, or if instead I should build a small terminus in the lower area on the western rim, where the grain silos & the 2nd goods shed are. Maybe I'll try that later & find out which one works better, & then tear down the other one. Bree is an agricultural village with cows & acres of wheat, barley & rhye... err... rye. I'm by no means done with this layout. I want a viaduct (& I mean a real arched viaduct, that looks like a Roman aquaeduct), a small river, a lake or pond, & goods traffic in the harbour, & I'm pretty optimistic that I will get all of these.

The new station 'Rivendell' in the southeastern corner of 'Rhye on Sea'. It has one platform for suburban trains in both directions & two bypass tracks for express & goods trains. I have used the village as some sort of 3D backdrop for the buildings in the foreground. This is one of my non-perfectionist "for-now-this-will-do"-solutions , & from a lower perspective it doesn't look as bad. Maybe later I'll replace it with proper houses, but there are more urgent things to do, for instance, changing the roads to the ones you recommended. Early evening at Rivendell; you might recognize the coaches...

I'm glad to hear that. That's what I expected, & I'm curious what it was, because I would like do the same or similar changes. What road did you use in this picture? I can see, you kept my fake autotrain with 'MV Stock Motor Cars' pretending to be autocoaches. Maybe if I exchange the bogeys for normal Dreadnought ones & somehow mute the engine sound, this would look more realistic. Otherwise they look very much like GWR or BR autocoaches (except for the livery, of course), that's why the idea came to me. Meanwhile, I built a new suburb with a small station in the southeastern corner. Now at least the suburban trains from platform 2 & 3 have somewhere to go. There is a signal box elsewhere on the layout the original autor named 'Bree Crossing', Bree being small town in Middle Earth, so I decided to call the new village 'Rivendell'. Screenshots to follow, first I'll have to tidy up some splines & place some cats...

I found out, that I had already visited this site & downloaded the peckett (& a few other items), but somehow never installed it & totally forgot about it. Kirk's Midland Flatiron, for instance, is not exactly a masterpiece , but he obviously got better with practice. Thanks for the link anyway.

Yes, 'Ratte' is german for 'rat', though I prefer the ancient word 'Ratz'. Comparing the city council of Bremen, which I like to call 'the Junta', to rats would be an insult... to the rats. My nickname, which I use everywhere on the net, is older than my cat, & before her I used to keep rats. You're welcome. Just send me a PM with your e-mail-address & I will gladly send it to you. Where did you get them from? I haven't purchased any Trainz payware yet, but there's always a 1st time... Thanks. I think it has something to do with my overhaul of the trackmarks, which now all end on either 'clockwise' or 'counterclockwise', so you can tell on which side of the double track they are.

I've decided to make this cat my trademark. Probably I'm the only rat in the world that likes cats. Great idea; Edward Heaps' E, G, H & K Class locos & his Dreadnought coaches would look good on 'Rhye on Sea'... well, they look good anyway. If you want, you can have my current version of the layout. Except for the goods yard in the middle it hasn't changed much. I have mostly worked on details & on trains & driver setups. (The schedule finally seems to work : 5 trains running for 2 hours now without a deadlock. I will add a 2nd goods train to mess things up again. ) The original author, kelly88, wrote "You may use this route as you wish, feel free to enhance and redistribute it", & that's exactly my approach.

Some more of your models still running: the GWR Dean Goods... ...the GWR 2021... ... & the GWR 1361. I remembered the title of this thread & backdated 'Rhye on Sea' some 30 years.

Meanwhile in Rhye on Sea... The rebuilt goods yard, now with coal stage, 2 water towers, 2 engine sheds & more sidings. I would have liked a roundhouse, but there was not enough space, so I settled for a small shed for the pilot engine (a 57xx pannier tank for now) & a 2-stall-shed for other locos. Still no shunting signals, but the original author has placed dozens of invisible signals everywhere, so I think at least functionally this will do for now. & a few pictures from the station: The hornsound of the Large Prairie (crossing the viaduct with 4 suburban maroon coaches) reminds me of Godzilla, & if she wants to have the green bus for lunch, I'm fine with that. The driver of the autotrain is the one who drove me insane with his preference for the righthand track. I threatened to rename him to Adolf (for now his name is Ian), if he doesn't change that, & that has apparently convinced him; more so, as his train shares the conterclockwise track with the Battle Of Britain Class No.34051 'Winston Churchill'.

As long as you don't run electric locos on this 3rd rail track, I like it. (Electric locos are for me what diesels are for you: an abomination that, in a perfect world, wouldn't exist. ) As I said before: you didn't. I understand that & there's nothing wrong with this. So everything is fine & we can move on.

You didn't give me that impression. Maybe MikeOxon did (though I understood his warning more generally & not particularly against me), but you didn't. So these backdrops are your own work & not from the DLS? That's something I'm not capable of; not yet... The more I look at this layout, the more I like it. It's only 1 baseboard, half a square kilometer in reality, but there is quite a lot going on, & there ist even potential for more. I'm thinking about a narrow gauge branch line with 2 or 3 stations, a forestry & a coal mine in the southeastern corner. No, I'm kidding. What I'm really thinking of is 1 small station in this corner & a real harbour with 1 or 2 tracks instead of the carousels north of Rhye Station. But first I'll have to complete the signalling of the rebuilt goods yard, which is otherwise done now. "A schedule that the Trainz AI can't mess up" - is that even possible? Their creativity seems to be infinite. While the other 4 - I have added a goods train, that for now aimlessly runs around in circles - have learned by now to behave halfways reasonably, the driver of the 14xx 2-4-0 insists on driving on the right track whenever he finds a turnout & doesn't run into one of those yellow triangles immediately. I'm not sure if this is normal artificial stupidity or outright mutiny. Screenshots to follow...

Generally you're right to be suspicious, but in this case the site you are redirected to is always the same, very uncomplicated (no captchas) & trustworthy (never encountered any malware there). Otherwise I wouldn't have posted this. The backscene looks great, but it reminds me of the total lack of backscene in 'Rhye on Sea' & the work I'll have to do on it. I found that installing backdrops is not so difficult, but choosing the right one for the given situation can take hours.

If you take a close look at the picture, the black writing above the author's name tells you where you can get this book. Tonight I didn't feel like getting lost in the endless plains of 'A moment in time' & instead returned to the tiny, tidy 'Rhye on Sea'. I set up a Castle, a Spamcan, a Large Prairie & a small 2-4-0 with appropriate trains (at least I hope so) & told the drivers what to do, & then I watched them doing something completely different.

Thank you for taking your time to give me such a detailed answer, Annie. When I wanted to post last night, my internet connection broke down & only recently reestablished. I examined the problem spots in the north (Fenton & Watertop) & couldn't find anything. I set up exactly the same train as in your screenshots (Skipper1945's Armstrong 4-4-0 with his clerestory coaches is a real beauty) & passed Fenton Station 5 (the small one east of the large one with the roof) without any problems. At Watertop no crash occurred either, but this station in fact has a different problem: if you drive on the left side of the double track (as you are supposed to do in England), it is totally unaccessible. Correcting this mistake was easy, though; 4 turnouts, 4 signals & a few meters of track... I haven't looked at Knewtonmore yet, but that was the smallest problem anyway, if I understood you right. The signalling of this layout is a mess; I have started deleting signals on the right-hand track & inserting track direction markers, so the AI drivers will hopefully abandon their stupid habit of driving on the right side whenever possible. Currently reading:

I downloaded this layout a few month ago after you mentioned it in this thread. I have never seen a route where I didn't want to change anything, & this was no exception, so I rebuilt Potterton Station (the main terminus) & edited some other things, & then my interest turned to something else... A 100-baseboards-layout like this makes for a nice change after the 1-baseboard-layout Rhye on Sea. (The rebuild of the goods yard is almost done, & though I'm not sure if my version is better than the original, it's definitely different, & larger. I'll get back to this soon... ) So I set up one of my favourite locos & a rake of GWR coaches & took a ride... (I haven't found these 3 problem spots yet, where are they?) Trainz2009 was where it started for me. It was given away for free in summer 2018, & before that I didn't know much about railway & next to nothing about British railway. (Flying Scotsman? Never heard of. Maybe a ship? Or a plane? ) I started with a German winter layout, & then I explored what else there was in stock & found British railway much more complex & interesting than German. In the last 2 years I have read a lot on the internet & even a few books, & today I am a German steam railway enthusiast whose railway knowledge is 95% British & 99% in English language. Of course there is much more to learn, on history as well as on modelling... Last year I bought T:ANE, but found it too demanding for my mediocre (at best) GPU, so I bought Trainz2012, & that's what I use most of the time.

Valleyfields? (Or one of the many variations like Milbourn James etc. etc.)

Now I know what an Axminster carpet looks like. (Almost everyday I learn something new here, not only about railway.) & it's in LMS crimson, very nice...

This is by far the strangest idea I have seen in this thread so far, but somehow I like it. When I was a child, my first ever loco was a clockwork H0 gauge all black 0-6-0 tender engine of unknown origin. Electricity wasn't yet invented back then. Last night I've been working on toying around with a 1-baseboard route designed to model a model railway, named Rhye on Sea. I like the layout, except for the goods yard in the middle of it. Either it's the work of a genius & I'm too stupid to understand how it might work, or it's a total disfunctional mess. Anyway, I'll rebuild it... Afterwards I'll probably return to Ashburton, unless it gets hotter than 25°C, then I'll prefer my cold & snowy Canadian layout, where the ice hockey stadium is twice the size of the railway station.

Probably your Seaton looks more like the real Seaton than "my" Ashburton looks like the real Ashburton or the model railway one. Anyway, it's only 1% mine, the other 99% were made by razor (who built the original 'Asburton' layout) , paulsw2 (who enlarged it to 'Ashburton & Windrush railway') & Steve Flanders (who modelled the station building, the roof, the goods shed & the loco shed). It's amazing, how many hours it took me to get this 1% done. 3 days ago I had never heard of this small town (4000 inhabitants), & now I'm obessessed with it. This is what it looks like now: In German, cats are jokingly referred to as Dachhase, which translates to 'roof hare' or 'roof rabbit'. Don't worry, he or she might fall off - they never do. & finally, my colleagues waiting for passengers... Next on the to-do-list: - edit many many details - backdate it 20 years to GWR days - backdate it 20 more years to pre-grouping-GWR days

Thanx for the link! I've downloaded the 3 Ashburton buildings & a few dozen other items. Most likely I'll come back & download the whole rest, except the diesel railcar & the electric trams, of course, which have no place on my strictly steam-only British layouts. Replacing the loco shed took only a minute: delete, insert, connect, done. But rebuilding the station is not quite as simple, because the author has made it passenger enabled, with tracks, & the tracks a little too long. So the street & the houses north of the station will have to move, as well as a few others. & then there is the goods shed. I'm working on it...