KingEdwardII

"The floor ain't level" certainly occurred to me - nice shiny new set of baseboards constructed, with legs carefully constructed all to have the same length to get a nice level surface. Lay the track carefully. First time I ran a test goods train with lovely modern wheelsets - all went very well until I uncoupled the trucks. Then I discovered the downside of low friction metal wheels and watched as the trucks disappeared off into the buffers at the end of the siding. Much cursing and measuring with my long spirit level revealed that the builders who created our lovely attic bedroom conversion had thoughtfully put a slope of over 1 inch across the room. My trains were only too happy to show me what fun they could have with that. So I had yet more entertainment adding shims to the baseboard legs... As for "the room ain't square", I already knew about that before I started and made allowances in a few places.

Yes, Covid-19 has a few small advantages... ...another one is extra cash available for modelling since I can't spend it on much else Mike.

Keith, The present-day Richmond probably counts as Minories - the current arrangement is that the terminus District / Overground lines are entirely separate from the SWT through lines - there is no connection between them whatever. The present-day operations are a bit monotonous - 4 TfL trains in/out per hour plus up to 10 District line trains - busy but not much variation. The older trackplan in the map above is a very different story since all the tracks were connected and there were goods facilities on both the down & up sides of the station - much more variety possible, but it's a lot larger than the Minories plan. Yours, Mike.

Equally importantly - do all your measuring and then find that: - the railway room ain't square - the floor ain't level - you just covered up the power socket you need to use... Yours, Mike.

Attached is my OO layout plan - fitted into an Attic bedroom left free when the children moved out to their own homes. The room is an "L" shape and I have a space of 3.6 x 4.0 metre to use. The left hand and top of the diagram are under sloping ceilings so that the height of the baseboards is deliberately low at around 830mm and I operate sitting down in a chair on castors that I propel around the central well. I have a worktable that can be slid underneath the baseboards in one of a couple of locations. I decided on a roundy-roundy design with one station on the right hand side (platforms etc. not drawn in) and then a branch line with a terminus station on the left. The door is in the middle of the bottom of the diagram and I have a removable section / duckunder to get into the central well. Lots of track and not so much space for scenery! Mike.

Yes, pretty well the first thing I did with my PA2 system was to replace the short handset cable with something longer. I used a standard Ethernet Cat5e patch cable and it has worked well ever since. Since I work in the computer field, I didn't even have to buy the cable since I have a whole heap of them stored in a box - but they are cheap to buy in whatever length you need. Yours, Mike.

Sure, The discussion was about Ealing Broadway station in West London, which has a number of elements including a terminus of the District Line (one of the London Underground lines). A general introduction to Ealing Broadway station is available on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ealing_Broadway_station I can't promise that all the details are accurate on that page, but it should give you a general idea. The station has terminus facilities for both District Line and Central Line underground trains and through facilities for the Great Western main line running west from Paddington. There are other stations in the London suburbs with a similar flavour - terminus facilities for London local trains and through lines for trains destined for further afield. I think we started the discussion with Richmond station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_station_(London) In the current era, these stations are extremely busy, not only serving their local communities, but also acting as interchange stations. I used to use Richmond as an interchange on a regular journey from Winchester to Gunnersbury via Clapham Junction. Yours, Mike.

Phil, I'm curious to see "Ashford Cables" on the drums rather than the more local "Aberdare Cables" - I was born a couple of miles away from their works. Yours, Mike.

Runners & Riders. So what should we cover in the set of Buses? Here is my starting list - I am sure that folks here can suggest others. I'm not suggesting that we cover all of these in any detail, but I'd like not to miss anything at the start. S88 / S88-N LocoNet (B and T variants) NMRA LCC BiDiB SSB B-Bus R-Bus RS-Bus XpressNet (plus X-Bus) CAN Bus Layout Control Bus That's already quite a list, but some of them are very specialized I think, at least with respect to Automation. Yours, Mike.

You might look at the Dremel 225 flexible shaft or equivalent, which has a much smaller diameter than the main Dremel multitool body: https://www.dremeleurope.com/general/en/dremel®flexibleshaft-223-ocs-p/ I use that for more hard-to-reach places. There are also cutting disks up to 38mm available for the Dremel, which give quite a deep cut. I suppose the other piece of kit I'd consider using if I have a need for deeper cuts is a jigsaw. I normally use one of those for slicing through plywood, but there are metal cutting blades available for jigsaws and I suspect it is going to be easier to keep a jigsaw in line with the desired cut than something like the Nanoblade, although I have no experience using a Nanoblade. Yours, Mike.

I'm scratching my head to understand why one of these Nanoblade saws would be better at fine cuts in track (etc) than a Dremel (other brands are available ). That's what I use for these sort of cuts and there are a variety of cutting tools available for the Dremel that suit various materials. For track the thin disk cutters are great - very fast, accurate and a minimum of fuss. The only hassle is the need to clean up the fine metal particles thrown off as you cut. Yours, Mike.

Phil, That's my approach - I find it makes getting the track geometry right much easier, especially for curves and the related cutting Yours, Mike

I am curious that you prepare your plans on paper. This seems like a lot of work when you need to modify the plans as you have shown in your last posts. I choose to use computer programs for these purposes largely to make the work of redesign and editing simpler and faster. I assume that you have chosen not to use this approach for very good reasons - can you say something about this please? Yours, Mike.

John, do you have interference from other WiFi systems in your vicinity? You might be able to see this with your PC or Smartphone, where there are apps available that will show you all the WiFi networks and info like which channels they are using. Or perhaps interference from non WiFi devices broadcasting in the 2.4GHz band, which would show up as noise. Yours, Mike.

One thought for you concerns modelling a suitable station. One of the more interesting stations on the Leeds - Carlisle railway is Skipton. Even more so in its pre-Beeching form, with the lines to Ilkley, Grassington, Colne still in place, in addition to the Leeds, Bradford, Carlisle and Morecambe links still present today. Not too large - 6 platforms in total - but a good variety of different types of train from the small locals up to the mainline London - Glasgow expresses. With the space that you have available, a substantial through station is practical and there would be plenty of variety possible. Yours, Mike.

While across the way, the main line tracks have 14-coach "Cornish Riviera Express" flying through ... maybe even hauled by my namesake

Indeed, although once we are talking about modelling a station on the 4-track section of the GWR main line, I note that we are a long, long way from "Minories". ;-) Mike

I too have a Prodigy PA2 system, but I am in the process of moving away from it. The PA2 is fine as far as it goes, but you need to select a system that will work best for your needs. One simple problem is using the PA2 to control turnouts as well as locos. This can be done with the PA2 handset, but I find it very clunky switching back and forth between accessories and locos and there is no display of the current state of a turnout. The standard PA2 handset is also a wired one, which can get a bit clumsy with a 2 metre cable snaking about back to the controller unit. My longer-term goal is to control the accessories via a touch-screen monitor attached to a Raspberry Pi system, and control the locos through a wireless handset - "look, mum, no cables!" ;-) I am also thinking about using the computer to provide further automation of some train movements, which gets me into occupancy detection and feedback. For this, I first need a controller which supports a suitable computer connection. The PA2 system does support a computer connection, but the necessary cable has a hefty price - > £50. The PA2 has provision for a wireless handset, but it too has a hefty pricetag. The PA2 is also a very closed kind of system and there does not seem to be a good approach to adding detection and feedback. So I am looking to replace the PA2 with something much more computer-oriented and supporting detection and feedback. The current front runner for me is the Digikeijs DR5000, although I am aware of a number of other systems that would provide what I need, some of which are considerably more expensive. One advantage of the DR5000 is that it is relatively open and supports the use of equipment from other suppliers, such as handsets. The NCE systems seem more on a par with the PA2 - relatively old school in terms of design and connectivity - and I am not considering them. Mike.

Richmond in west London is today peculiar in that it has a set of terminus platforms serving a double track line and a pair of through platforms serving a double track main line, but there is no connection whatever between the terminus platforms and the through platforms. Unsurprisingly, it was not always like this and more varied modelling can be had with the track plan of the 1930s, where the lines are all connected and there are goods facilities on both the up and down sides of the station, long since built over. However, such a plan looks rather large to my eyes! Mike.

Indeed. Aberystwyth until the Beeching axe in the 1960s was a substantial 5 platform terminus serving 2 single lines - most certainly qualifying as "the far reaches of the GWR"! Summer services were quite extensive, given the holiday resort nature of the place. Mike.

Yes, the AD-2FX looks like a good cost-effective solution. Regarding the DR4018 - I think it is possible to locate the unit a long way from the turnouts. I have cable runs of over 2.5m using 0.5mm2 3-core flex and I'm pretty confident that I could double the length of the runs if required. Mike.

Iain, There is an unstated part of the problem here, that any solution must cost sigificantly less than the DR4018 - and the DR4018 is already a very cost-effective accessory decoder typically in the low £30's. Since you have some existing DR4018s, can I ask whether you have any pairs of turnouts like crossovers that need to operate together, which are not already operated from the same channel on the DR4018? If so, then you can change these to use a single channel, freeing up a channel for new turnouts. I have done this for all my crossovers and a few other cases, so that I have substantially more MP1s driven than I have DR4018 channels. My other thought is that to beat the price point of the DR4018 you may need to consider kit-built approaches such as those available at MERG or Rocrail. Unfortuantely I have no experience with these. Yours, Mike.

I think there is a problem having the sidings off point 6 and also trying to treat the whole of the section from point 5 to point 8 as the reversing loop. Let's assume that a train is making some movement between point 5 and the sidings. Now see what can happen if a second train is permitted to travel on the track from point 8 towards point 6 (I'm assuming that it gets stopped short of point 6 by a signal, say). In this case, the first train needs the polarity one way, while the second one needs the polarity set the opposite way - a clear conflict. I can agree that the reversing loop section must be capable of holding the maximum length train. If the section from point 8 to point 6 is treated as the reversing loop, to avoid the conflict, one approach that retains the sidings might be to shift point 6 nearer to point 5 - e.g. flip from using a LH point to a RH point - making the section from point 8 to point 6 longer. Another approach is to prevent separate train movements between 8 and 6 and 5 and 6 - e.g.interlock points 8 & 6. Yours, Mike.

I think that you could simplify things a little by only treating the upper half of the reversing loop as a reversing loop - i.e. only the section between point 6 and point 8. That means that the sidings off point 6 are always at the same polarity as point 5. I think that would make your concern about the sidings go away. Would that work for you? Mike.

Wordsmith, How you wire up your track is partly dependent on what you want to achieve. So, for example, if you want to have automation, you are going to need some form of occupancy detection. One form of occupancy detection is based on monitoring each section of track for the current taken by a loco. The more sophisticated forms of this detection include getting info from the decoder which enables identification of the decoder address and hence the identity of the loco. If you want to go down this road then each section of track needs its own separate feed that can be monitored independently of any other section. If you're not doing this, then you have more freedom in how you organize the wiring. Clearly, getting a good feed to the track is top priority. Personally, I have not found that there is overmuch wiring involved in having feeds from the DCC track bus to each track section, but I recommend using a quick and easy method of connecting the droppers to the bus. Yours, Mike.