Pacific231G

It does help, thanks. I've been wondering how this compared with practice elsewhere. I've come across examples in France of industrial lines and light railways that crossed main lines, either to reach exchange sidings or because there were installations on both sides, controlled by standard stop signals operated by the main line's frame or box. There were crossings of main lines by private railways in Britain, the one that comes to mind was the crossing of the GW main line at Laira Junction by the 4ft 6in gauge Lee Moor Tramway. That was a gated crossing with the GW lines protected by signals just like a normal road level crossing but I wondered whether signal controlled crossings by private or light railways were ever permitted in Britain. I know that the Port of London Authority Railway was signalled on the part of its Royal Albert Dock system between Custom House and Gallions which operated a regular passenger service but that was a statutory undertaking so just like any other public railway so far as regulations were concerned even though built on private land. I did see the NCB's South Shields, Marsden & Whitburn Colliery Railway, or what was left of it, operating around South Shields with electric locos when I was at college there in 1969 but that was sixteen years after the last passenger trains ran on it. As a passenger line it certainly had been fully signalled but I can't remember whether it still was. . I think that crossed under the main line to South Shields Station to reach the NCB wharves on the Tyne so the question of signalling a main line crossing didn't arise. Whilst there was no signalling within yards and sidings some private and industrial railways did have quite long "main line" runs so would those have been signalled even when they didn't carry passengers?

Question on that last point. A private siding- which could be an extensive works system with its own signalling- would have a trap point or an arrangement of points to protect BR's running lines but, when the sidings were open to the running lines for a mainline loco to shunt wagons in and out, what rules would then affect a works loco working in the private area? Would there ever be direct access to the works system from the mainline or would there always be an intermediate exchange siding. if so what penetration of BR (GWR, LNER etc.) by works locos would be permitted and vice versa?

I'm not sure if this was madness but I see that someone did buy the Tri-ang Minic 10 1/4 inch gauge railway set that was on ebay with a starting bid of £1000 for that price. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282690670592?ul_noapp=true The sale included a loco in somewhat battered conditon, two coaches, one in far better condition that the other,an unspecified quantity of track with a set of buffers and a load of spares. As a youngster I was always rather intrigued by this product introduced in 1963 so wondered what the going price really is for them. Production stopped in 1965 and only about ninety of the locomotives were ever built so over fifty years later they must be rather rare by now. What I hadn't realised was that they used conventional model railway two rail pickup at 35V (AC or DC ?) with power supplied by a transformer that wasn't supplied The loco in the sale has a single motor so it was probably one of those supplied to private customers. A lack of sales to that market did lead Tri-ang to produce a twin motor version aime at commercial operators and a number of Minic railways were installed at Butlins and other such venues. I don't know how many ended up in large private gardens (presumably the intended market)

It's also worth knowing that when you need to make holes in the cross members for wiring etc, making them about half way up will have very little effect on their bending resistance whereas making them at the top or bottom will weaken them. It's all to do with bending moments but there's no need to understand that to use it.

No, and If you've got any bookcases that have been used for that purpose for any length of time, the need for bracing will be clear. Even an unbraced shelf that's just got a few light ornaments on it will eventally start to bend. A thick plank of timber is also heavy so exerts a strong bending force on itself with eventual inevitable results; Trying to achieve rigidity simply by using thicker unsupported timber won't get you very far but might get you a herrnia. So long as the timber itself doesn't actually warp because it's unseasoned or of poor quality, the traditional 2x1 (50x25mm) PSE frame supporting a relatively lightweight baseboard surface is far more rigid. That's because the frame timbers are taller than they are wide so their resistance to bending is high compared with their weight. It's a very long time since I learnt to do the calculation but I'm pretty sure that a frame of 75x12mm PSE timber will give at least as much support as one made of 50x25mm timber but with far less weight. Look at any simple girder railway bridge and you'll see this principle being applied on a large scale.

Thanks for this Martin. It's probably heresy but I'm far more concerned about how a train looks as it passes over a crossover, preferably with the corridor connections not offset by half their width, than within reason the precise geometry of the points they're passing over.

Yes but they weren't newfangled in 1961 and the wording hadn't changed even though most of BR was by then upper quadrant. Surely, the one thing you should never have (but often will have) in any safety critical rule book is ambiguity.

The French fermé and ouvert, closed and open, seem far more obvious as the generic term for the position of signals of all types though the British rule book's danger, caution, and clear is completely clear. Since French practice was originally largely based on that in Britain I wondered whether those terms had ever been used here. I was rather surprised to find in my 1961 edition of the 1950 BR rule book (as well as in various other earlier RCH rule books ) umpteen references to stop signals being lowered to allow a train to proceed. for example in rule 68 (b) "When a stop signal has been lowered for the passage of a train, it must not except.......be replaced at Danger before the train has passed...." Replaced at danger is unambiguous but this lowering of signals looks rather as if the GWR got to write the rulebook. I assume it was a hangover from the days when most railways used lower quadrant signals but when most were upper quadrant I can't help but think that this must have caused some confusion to trainees if nobody else.

You can if you go into BBCode Mode. It's a bit fiddly but not too bad if you just use the square bracketed quote and forward slash quote thing around each quote

I think the organisers imagined how many fewer delays there'd be to the main service if the de Dion was relegated to running up and down a shorter section of track and that WAS alright.

Hi Martin I have actually experienced real wheel drop. It was last year at the CF du Baie de Somme's steam gala where one of the visitors was an ex SNCV metre gauge petrol autorail that ran up and down the quayside line which is mixed gauge. This was to Belgian roadside tramway track standards whereas AFAIK the CFBS's own trackwork uses the same crossing clearances etc as standard gauge. The autorail inched its way over one particular mixed gauge crossing very gingerly indeed but there was still a considerable thud everytime that could be felt as well as heard and looking at it from outside you could clearly see the wheel dropping a little.. Unfortunately I didn't get a clear photo of the relatonship between wheels and track, it was a very rushed visit; by cranking up the gamma these are the best I can manage. The wheel profile did look different from that on other metre gauge "railway" stock present. . They did have problems at their previous festival in 2013 with a very early metre gaugeDe Dion-Bouton autorail, really just a bus on rails, which did derail a couple of times and I now wonder if slightly incompatible wheel and track standards may have been the reason.

I think it's more Cyril Freezer (Minories) and Geoff Ashdown (Tower Pier) that have helped you but glad to have passed on their collective wisdom. . Apologies if I sounded like I thought you had been dismissive; you were quite right to emphasise the importance of the bridge. The only problem with it is how to deal with it at the back of the layout. With enough room I suppose a T junction and a low relief street overlooking the railway is one solution. French stations including termini often had overall roofs no longer than the station building with the platform ends beyond so that should provide another view blocker. to hide the shortness of trains. I found Tower Pier incredibly inspiring when I first saw it at ExpoEM in I think 2011 and a couple of times since. This is my rather crude re-rendering of the track plan using Peco pointwork but what I've shown as a slip in the lower right hand corner is actually two interlaced points . Geoff Ashdown's own SB diagram may be clearer The only thing I didn't go for was having the goods lines effectively as a separate layout though it's well justified by there being a junction at the next signal box and the goods lines have their own block instruments. It does enable the goods lines to be at a slightly higher level which is visually very effective and also very Widened Lines.The "legend" that Geoff Ashdown has come up with for the layout, placing it in a real location and giving St. Katherine's Dock the rail connection it looks like it should have had is brilliant. Looking at it again now is reminding me just how well thought out it is. Operatonally the passenger side is equivalent to Minories though with the addition of the loco release crossover and this plan makes platform three slightly longer but with platform 2 departures only . Overall the idea of a layout that effectively puts you in the signal box is terrific. I also loved this little scenic touch We really are in the City with the District and Circle passing beneath. The Underground train never moves but I used to commute on that line so no surprise there

I'm not understating the middle road bridge, I think it was a key feature of Cyril Freezer's original Minories and not including it has always, in my view, been a mistake made with many layouts based on Minories. I don't think it's needed in 0 (and maybe wouldn't be in S) for the field of view reasons you mention but in OO or H0 a four coach express train that you can see both ends of at a glance does look a bit inadequate behind a Pacific . In this, photographs can be misleading. The four coach trains on Maybank look quite short in photos but I'm pretty sure, from the experience of Newford, that they wouldn't have for a viewer actually seeing it. As a home layout it occupied a long but narrow shed so you'd never have seen it from a distance and it seems to have generally been exhibited that way. It's interesting that Geoff Ashdown never intended Tower Pier for exhibition (though I'm very glad he does exhibit it from time to time) but only for his own pleasure and that of fellow operators. Even then you seem to need the suspension of belief that view blocking enables. It's only in the photo of the fiddle yard that you see clearly just how short the trains are. The front retaining wall also makes it impossible to view the whole layout from a distance so the illusion is never broken. I have a small terminus layout that though very portable was supposed to be strictly a home layout (though it has been exhibited half a dozen times) with front operation and point levers and section switches along its front. I desgined it specifically to enable all shunting moves to take place "on-stage". so that it can be a shunting layout that occupies very little space. What I've found in practice is that even on my own I almost always fit a short simple fiddle siding for operating sessions. With that, once a train has been made up it can disappear down the line and after a bit of crane shunting reappear (with the loco on the other end) as a new train. Though the extra length clutters the room, for some reason it feels far more satisfying that way even though I know I'm only driving it four feet and stopping with the last wagon barely out of sight. Ths does lead to another point. If a layout is purely intended for exhibiton then you can employ tricks like replacing half of a terminus with a traverser and only showing one end of it so the audience can simply imagine the rest. From the side of a busy city station it's quite rare to be able to see more than about three coaches in any case and I know at least three exhibition layouts that do this very succesfully. For a personal layout though I want to be able to carry out all the relevant moves in full and, so long as it isn't staring me in the face how short trains really are, I'm satisfied.

There was an article about this in MRR way back when this was still happening which said this was particularly common in the Southern states. As the train backed in the conductor rode in the final vestibule, which was open, armed with a special fitting attached to the brake line that included a brake valve and a whistle. Presumably the whistle didn't use enough air to cause a brake application. There were several termini like this in France (including Tours, Orleans and the orginal Boulogne) but trains didn't AFAIK back into them I've re-read the original description of Maybank and you're quite right that the Pacific (Robinson 1911) that ran on the pre-war O gauge layout was a tank loco. The longest locos, at least in 1934 when the layout was featured in MRN would have been the two Robinson 4-6-0s "Valour" (1920) and "City of Chester" (1913) MRN's description is interesting. "Entering the station we find nothing pretentious in the way of buildings but the (four) platforms are roomy, and long enough to accomodate a tender loco and four long bogie coaches, (56 footers) and yet leave room for a shunting loco, to couple on for transfer of stock, if required, to another road" I don't think a platform only long enough for four coach trains would be considered roomy nowadays, even in O gauge, but in the 1930s large express locos hauling three coach trains were considered quite normal on indoor layouts. With larger scales you seem to be able to get away with such short trains not looking absurd even without view blockers probably because even four coaches won't be seen in a single glance from a typical viewing distance. With 00 or H0 you do seem to need view blockers and that's even more pronounced in N. We can control the scene that appears in front of viewers limiting it if necessary with view blockers or a proscenium box but we can't control what they choose to look at within that frame. In terms of film grammar we're offering a wide shot and I think that is more akin to a stage set . A film or TV director has far tighter control of which part of the set is seen within a shot so making two or three coaches look like an important express by choice of shot sizes and angles is fairly straightforward as demonstrated in Murder on the Orient Express. One of the best examples I've seen of the effective use of view blockers is Geoff Ashdown's EM gauge "Tower Pier", This puts the entire terminus including its throat in a cutting between retaining walls with a goods line on a slightly hiher level but still beteeen the walls. That,and judicious use of road bridges and a train shed roof, ensures that you're simply not conscious when watching the layout that the whole thing is only two metres long (plus a metre long fiddle yard) My iPhone images of this wonderful layout really don't do it justice but I hope they illustrate the principle. .

Medium radius points I hope. I've a use for them.

Hello has no one noticed this post .........everyone's been speculating and if that's the price I reckon it's a fair price...... It seems to be about double Hatton's price for a large radius point in code 75 FB. Given the amount of hand assembly probably required to produce it I'd agree that this is a fair price. The bullhead plain track is £4.50 against £3.00 and again that looks fair. On Hattons website Peco's 83 line turnouts which have metal guard rails (check rails) are between £16-19 so the pricing does seem to reflect the complexity of the product and it's likely production volume rather than "premium" pricing.

It did strike me, looking at the photos on the R.H.D.R.website, how OOish the RHDR's "British outline" Pacifics appear. Perhaps that's no coincidence I've long suspected that the real reason for OO was far less about cramming clockwork mechanisms into small boilered locos and clearances behind splashers than with Henry Greenly's aesthetic sense that British rolling stock simply looked too small, particularly when compared with North American S.G. or "colonial" 3ft 6in gauge. According to the RHDR website, Hurricane was based on the railway's earlier Pacifics that Greenly based on Gresley's A1. It's probably sufficiently different to be a splendid basis for a freelance main line loco. The two RHDR Mountains Hercules and Samson would also be interesting as examples of how a British standard gauge 4-8-2 might have looked like if say the LNER had built them.

All three of Stephen Siddle's articles are well worth reading and he's made an excellent study of the hobby's history as recorded in its magazines. I would though quibbble with a few points. I believe that Henry Greenly was more responsible for the 4mm scale ,16.5 mm gauge, situation than Stephen suggests. As the effective founder of the hobby he gave respectability to the compromise and was backed in that by the Model Railway Club which he'd more or less founded. Going right back to Greenly's own pre Great War magzine Models, Railways and Locomotives it's clear that, once he had determined what a standard should be, he considered it to be "settled for once and for all" so he championed 4mm/ft vigorously and argued furiously against anyone, such as A.R.Walkley with the temerity to suggest using the correct scale. There was a slightly amusing exchange in MRN in 1925 when Stuart-Reidpath presented a "00" coach scaled at 3.5mm/ft. Greenly immediately claimed that it was seriously "underbodied" (i.e. the body was too small) and practically ordered Stuart-Reidpath to give its dimensions. He did and, needless to say, it was a very accurate scale model. Stephen also repeats the myth that "foreign" steam locos don't have splashers so their wheels can be over wide with impunity. Many don't but many others do, including a lot of passenger locos that are deservedly popular as models. The first convention of national model railway associations in the early 1950s (that led to MOROP and the European NEM standards) actually saw off an attempt to saddle European H0 with a similar compromise of 1:80 scale using 16.5mm gauge that did get built into some proprietary "H0" models. Those points aside, it's a very good and well documented account of the development of our hobby. The turning away from the contemporary railway in the 1960s is well noted and something I can certainly remember. That didn't happen in the rest of Europe, probably because railways didn't appear to be in terminal decline while in most countries steam's twilight was more an orderly retreat than the massacre it felt like here.

Thanks John and Bernard What I was wondering, and probably didn't express very clearly, was whether the extra 0.2mm was added to the track gauge for existing EM wheelsets which would loosen the tolerances but at the expense of increasing the check rail gaps and clearances. In his writings Peter Denny says that he widened his gauge to 18.25mm very early on simply because the Romford wheels he was then using seemed to need it. Unless I've got the wrong end of the stick my understanding is that, while you have to decrease the gaps when using narrower tyres which would otherwise not be supported through a crossing , the converse isn't necessarily true if the flange thickness and back to backs are consistent and the gauge is adjusted appropriately. That could enable far better looking trackwork in gauges beyond EM/P4 (notably H0) . I'm a Friend of Pendon but have simply never asked the right questions. I know that their railway team considered going to P4 for the Vale scene but in the end opted to stay with the same standards as the Dartmoor scene.

Because Pendon is an example of EM and if that can look as good as P4 it may be more practical for more modellers. Minimum radii would be rather smaller and it may be more tolerant of less than perfect tracklaying That would be a factor in making an RTR offering viable. My own interest is in getting around the narrow gauge appearance of over wide check rail and flangeway clearance without having to go to a proto scale and tolerances to do so.

Hi Bernard According to the Scalefour Society the P4 tyre width (TW) is 1.85-2.00mm and according to a couple of fairly old Pendon guides from 1990 they had by then got their tyre width down to 2mm though it's wider on some older stock. The major difference between Pendon's EM wheel standard and P4 seems to be the flange depth of 0.6mm against P4's 0.38 though of course the gauge of 18mm (not 18.2mm) is different. When it comes to the check clearances isn't it the flange width that determines how narrow they can be rather than the overall tyre width though the gauge has to be right to take advantage of that so is the Pendon gauge of 18mm significant in this? Comparing my own photos of Pendon with those of various P4 and EM layouts I can see that some of the tyres are a bit wide-it's particularly evident on some pony trucks- but the flangeways do appear to be narrower than the width of the railhead. That isn't necessarily (or generally?) the case with EM, especially with older examples such as Leighton Buzzard (Peter Denny) or Metropolitan Junction (D.A. Williams) I believe that Pendon did consider going to P4 for the railways in the Vale scene but opted to stay with the same standards used on the Dartmoor scene. The deeper flanges allowed them to avoid compensation but it is clear that Guy Williams was using finer standards for EM than many others working in the gauge. Apart from some of the tyre widths, I find it very difficult to see any visual difference between Pendon's track and rolling stock and P4 but accept that the differences may be glaring to others.

Not quite true Simon (and nothing Tim to do with the bl@@dy French who seem to have taken their lead in railway modelling from Britain) The British Railway Modelling Standards Bureau did most of their work during the war when the suspension of model manufacturing seemed to provide an opportunity for a fresh start. From the start they decided, and it was controversial, that "Scale OO" would have a scale of 4mm (to the foot), a gauge of 18.0 mm and a rail height of 2.0mm (close to code 80) while "Standard OO" (they never called in Coarse) would be 4mm scale, 16.5mm gauge, with a 2.5mm rail height (almost identical to code 100) The Bureau, really an ad hoc committee of four or five people, was chaired by J.N. Maskelyne the editor of Model Railway News and in the piece introducing its H0 and 00 standards in April 1942 he says "The adoption of 18mm gauge for Scale "OO" is deliberate and intentional and was decided upon only after the possibilitiies of 19mm had been most carefully investigated. The latter figure is not impossible; but it is very slightly over-scale, and leads to difficulties with certain types of outside cylinder locomotives and some specific examples of British rolling-stock". The Bureau made a similar and also criticised decision with O gauge by adopting 32mm rather than 33mm which would have been more scale accurate for 7mm/ft but would have required larger curves than the 5ft radius they felt to be practical . Unlike the NMRA, who were also taking advantage of the wartime hiatus to establish and refine standards, the BRMSB standards were all expressed in millimetres. It's not terribly difficult to see why. Rulers marked off in cms and mm often combined with an inch scale were far more common in Britain than in America and it was far easier, even without a scale rule, to multiply a prototype dimensions given in feet by four (or seven in the case of O gauge) and mark it off in millimetres.A lot of early modellers also used 0 scale plans and reduced the dimensions by half which gave them 3.5mm/ft I always reckon that a model scale expressed in mm/ft is a dead give away of its British origin as those developed in N.America (such as 1:48 O, 1:120 TT and of course S scale) tended to be expressed as fractions of an inch to the foot. I have a copy of the first volume of Model Railways News from 1925 when O gauge was still considered small scale and 00 gauge was still in the hands of a few experimenters, long before anything was commercially available apart from tinplate trains from Bavaria. There was already an argument about whether the scale should be 4mm or 3.5mm/foot and that was almost invariably how they expressed it. In fact, most all the actual models that appeared that year were 3.5mm/ft but there was a strong lobby for 4mm/ft The one exception is a description of a fairly large clockwork powered layout in 1/8" to the foot scale by a Rev. H.A.Turner who was adapting the German mechanisms and building his own track from wire.

But despite the close to accurate gauge, commercial 19mm OO generally known as "American OO" wasn't built to finescale standards any more than most H0 is. Lionel's version was very much in toy train territory but smaller manufuacturers did produce scale models. It's probably mathematical luck that makes HO, a scale defined to half a milimetre to the foot and a gauge defined to a half millimetr e so accurate to gauge. just multiply 16.5mm by 87 and compare it with 1435mm- but tyre widths, flange depths, check and crossing clearances are all way larger than scale unless you go to proto 87 standards. I've seen Peco plain track used in fiddle yards etc on P87 layouts and with the same gauge that makes perfect sense. That's about where the concurrence ends though except that I believe in America you can get P87 frogs and checkrails for I think Shinohara track as well as wheelsets to substitute for the normal H0 variety. On freight and passenger cars simply changing the wheels would still give axle boxes further out than they should be but just how noticeable is that? BTW Is the difference between P4/S4 and the fine scale EM used at Pendon in any way noticeable without using a micrometer?

Has there been anything on Hornby International's brands (Jouef, Rivarossi,etc).?

The trouble is that it's a gnat's whisker in the wrong direction (P4 is 18.83 so the whisker of a slightly larger gnat) There were several British workers who used 19mm gauge before and soon after the war, most notably Norman Mathews with his quite extensive outside third rail Southern Transport layout, It was seen as the "correct" gauge for 4mm/ft, which to the nearest half millimetre it was, and the BRMSB were under some pressure to adopt it for fine scale OO. In the end they opted for 18mm gauge based on a mathematical calculation of the reduction in gauge required for any model scale. 19mm OO was quite popular in N. America for a time - it's not really "American" OO scale as it was developed in Britain (any more than H0 is "foreign") but it's disadvantage was that you could simply get more layout into a given space with H0. If you "do the math" as Americans would say, you'll find that 8 cars in HO occupy the same length as 7 cars in OO . It's possible that the development of small powerful 12V motors during the war helped remove OO's big advantage over HO in terms of cramming a mechanism into a model locomotive. I wonder too if the war had another effect with far more people trained in precison engineering and manufacturing so used to working to very fine tolerances. Interestingly, until the early 1950s, OO and H0 were being used rather interchangeably in France to refer to models running on 16.5mm gauge track - originally 1:86 taken by halving 1:43 scale plans- but then 1:87 scale. It is rather ironic that most of the world uses a different scale for O gauge than we do, (though the French also use 1:43.5) yet the most popular scale almost everywhere except in Brtiain, was based on halving that scale. H0 (1:87) isn't half of German (1:45) or American (1:48) O scale but it is half of British O scale.