Pacific231G

It's funny that everyone seems to have had this impression for as long as I can remember because it simply is not true. I've got bound volumes of all the Peco Railway Modellers from the end of 1951 when they took the title over to the early 1960s and though the GWR/WR was probably better represented than any other single railway this was mainly in the form of main line layouts like the North Devonshire and Little Western. The only layout based on St.Ives I could find was a description of Cyril Freezer's own Tregunna "railway in a cupboard". It is true that the branch line layouts included Torpoint and the Culm Valley which were GW but they were outnumbered by the most famous BLTs which were probably Charford (Southern) Berrow (S&D) and Buckingham (GCR). Of the "Railways of the Month" more were generic or freelance than based on a particular railway and there were notable layouts representing the Highland, County Donegal and of course the mythical Craig and Mertonford. addendum I've just made a quick count of layout articles in early Railway Modellers - mostly Railways of the Month- through the 1950s up to the end of 1962. Out of 140 articles just 24 were about BLTs and only 10 of those were GW/WR There was though a total of 25 articles about layouts mainly featuring the GWR. Articles about GW/WR BLTs were actually fewer than the twelve articles on narrow gauge layouts though half of those were about P.D. Hancock's Craig and Mertonford. I think the myth about the preponderance of GW/WR branch line layouts in Railway Modeller got repeated so often that it became accepted wisdom and I think even Cyril Freezer came to believe it but the facts simply don't bear it out.

Now there's an idea, a layout based on Midsomer county- a place that makes Juarez seem a nice spot for a quiet vacation.

I've also got those two articles on the Potwell Mineral and amazingly for a largely shunting layout it was clockwork. It was an excellent little layout based on the East Kent Railway junction at Shepherdswell and one of the coal mines it served and well worth another look. There are a number of layouts such as Pempoul, Calcott Burtle, Buckingham and the Madder Valley that I find inspirational but in terms of those that have actually inspired my own modelling I think the three in no particular order might be. Charford- I agree with everything Western Sunset has said about this layout. I've got a file with all of John Charman's articles about it and probably dig it out more than any other. St. Emilie - Giles Barnabe really captured the atmosphere of a Secondaire (well two secondaires- one SG and one metre gauge to be precise) serving its local community somewhere in France Profond. I think the standard gauge terminus got as much operation out of five points and five and a half feet as any layout I've seen and the experience of operating it at a number of shows definitely influenced many of the ideas for my current small layout (as well as providing a couple of its buildings!!) The third is probably Llanfair, a very simple 00n3 layout built on a plank by the Rev. P.H. Heath in the 1960s. Craig and Mertonford was inspirational but Llanfair looked doable so more than any other one layout probably inspired me to try NG modelling. P.H. Heath also built the original Piano line that would be well up this list and I wonder what he ever went on to model. Those are today's choice of three but, in terms of articles that I refer to most often, on another day my three might include Maybank the original pre-war terminus to fiddle based on a GCR main line terminus, Achaux and Borchester. (Can I take twelve discs to my dersrt island please ??)

Yet in the days when controls were strict on most European borders there were still plenty of through trains. All that happened was that passports and luggage were checked at the border crossing itself by police and customs who came through the train often between the two stations either side of the frontier so passengers not crossing the border simply weren't affected. Even trains that crossed the iron curtain were able to mix domestic and international passengers and those were far stricter borders even than the UK.

Well I was around then as well albeit quite young. I do remember a certain bias towards the GWR amongst modellers at that time (perfectly natural for Britain's best railway !!) but it wasn't because CJF was pushing it any more than he was the BLT. Talking to him later in his life I think he'd heard the same accusations so often that he'd become convnced of his own guilt on both counts. I think the real reason for the enduring popularity of the GWR was simply that it was the only railway to keep its original identity right up to nationalisation so it had plenty of time to gather a great deal of brand loyalty. Serving all those holiday destinations didn't hurt either. David

I was never quite sure why Quainton Road wasn't Quainton as it's only about a kilometre from the the centre of the village. Maybe the Met/GC were particularly scrupulous as Tring station nearby is more than twice as far from Tring. The GWR could be quite cavalier about this too as anyone arriving at Watlington station would have discovered to their cost. This habit does have definite modelling bonuses as there was often a small knot of buildings clustered around the station usually including some kind of pub (Café de la Gare in France) local merchant's warehouse, and a few cottages but not an entire village. Rather than so and so road the French had a habit of naming stations in the middle of nowhere after two villages they'd managed to avoid. For example, even though it was on a rural tramway that followed the local roads, Le Mortier-Gumond in Correze was nowhere near either village but by way of compensation it did have the line's main loco depot (now a garage)

Which I'm pretty sure he said in a piece extolling the virtues of the compact main line layout and pointing out that an accurate model of a real branch terminus such as Ashburton would be severely limited in the stock that could realistically be run. There was a similar comment in the 1957 article introducing Minories and I think the idea that CJF ever pushed GWR BLT's really is a myth. There is nothing in his editorials nor in the layouts featured to support that myth and in the Railway Modeller of the 1950s and 1960s the LMS and its constituents was actually represented in more layouts than the GWR while main line layouts were featured at least as often as branch lines. Of the most influential early small layouts featured in RM I think only Torpoint was GW. Charford -originally built in a residential caravan in Scotland- was SR, Berrow was S&D, and the Buckingham Branch- then a portable BLT in Peter Denny's cramped London flat - was of course GC. There were actually more narrow gauge Railways of the Month than GW layouts including Craig and Mertonford The prototype station layouts described in RM were drawn from the whole country and the one thing that does strike me is that, far from confining his attention to the areas near Seaton, CJF was assiduous in visiting as many clubs around the country as possible and that was very much reflected in the layouts featured and the wide range of people who wrote for the modeller.

Really? I pass by one every time I take the Central Line and you clearly didn't use trains into Oxford from the south where the several minute pause alongside the cemetery for almost every arriving train was notorious. I agree though about old churches simply because parish churches were more often than not in the heart of the community they served and the railway tended to run on the edge. Poorer housing tended to be built alongside railways so non-conformist chapels would have been more likely. I think the problem with clichés is that they detract from the sense of being taken into a real world. You do very occasionally see the fire service putting out a fire - there was one round here in a shed a few weeks ago- but it usually only takes them a few minutes: you do sometimes see the police questioning someone and it's not that unusual to pass a church with a wedding party outside. What you never see is all those at the same time so it's surely better to model little vignettes of the scenes that you really do see every day. Although I personally find them rather boring I'm not sure though why grain silos would be seen as a cliché on American layouts. In many parts of N.America they are the dominant traffic generator and often the most prominent feature of the rural landscape. Much the same is true of large tracts of rural France and in both cases following the line of silos is often a good way of tracing the route of even closed railway lines where almost every station had its own silo. Nowadays all but the largest tend to be served by road and there has been a tendency for smaller silos to close so that in France the countryside is littered with derelict silos alongside equally derelict railways.

Way back in the 1950s and 1960s John Charman did a lot of work on Southern timetables to draw up a realistic timetable for his pioneering Charford branch (set in 1947) He reckoned on 25 MPH for the local train, 27MPH for a four coach express section hauled by a Bulleid Pacific or a Schools and and 20MPH for the branch goods. By contrast I've got the 1961 working timetable for the fast and fairly flat main line between Mantes and Rouen on SNCF's western region and this would be pretty comparable with a British trunk line of the time with passenger expresses handled by fast powerful Pacifics (class 231D) and parcels and goods trains mainly by "Liberation" 2-8-2s of class 141R. Over the 82 kilometres (about 50 miles) the speed limits were mainly 120-130 KPH (75-80 MPH) for expresses and autorails (railcars or DMUs), 100KPH (62MPH) for ordinary passenger and parcels trains and 70KPH (43MPH) for goods. Rapide 101 (Paris S. Lazare- Le Havre) one of the line's fastest expresses and loaded to a maximum 400 tonnes ran non-stop through Mantes and stopped for three minutes at Rouen and made the run in 48 minutes so an average speed of about 62MPH. Express 133 Paris-Rouen loaded to 500 tonnes made four stops (of one or two minutes only) took 1h17 for the same distance so averaged 40MPH. Omnibus -stopping passenger train- 1113 hauled by a 2-8-2 tank loco (141TD) with a max loading of 185 tonnes travelled 49 kms in 1 hour making seven intermediate stops and averaging 30MPH but none of the stops were allowed more than two minutes in the timetable so no checking of doors. Messageries -Parcels train- 4109 a direct overnight train from Paris to Le Havre hauled by a "Liberation" loaded to 800 tonnes did the run in 1h20 with one very short stop to pick up a guard so its average start to stop speed was a little below 40MPH train 54313 a typical "fast" through goods train loading to 1250 tonnes took two hours for the same run at an average of about 25MPH. By contrast the daily "marchandises omnibus" i.e. pick up goods train no. 4112 (Rouen-Mantes) loaded to 500 tonnes and took about four and a quarter hours to do its run with 35-40 minute stops for dropping off and picking up wagons at four intermediate stations. Between these stops its average speeds were about the same as 54313. What Britain's railways still had at that time were unfitted mineral trains and these were far slower but I can find no equivalent in the French timetable. I hope this is useful to you.

I've had a more detailed look at this in XtrkCad, tried a few shunting moves and adjusted the lengths a little to suit the rolling stock I use. This clearly has too much stock on it to operate but shows the capacities and clearances. With standard European swb wagons and a 6" long loco it will enable a five wagon train to be hidden in the fiddle, emerge and be shunted. The two goods sidings each have a three wagon capacity so an Inglenook puzzle is possible. The loco release will also hold two wagons while the platform track will hold three wagons clear of the loop or two wagons and a loco so the five wagon train can be moved fairly quickly into the sidings. One small catch with the Piano in 00 and HO scale is that the near central position of the fiddle yard point makes it hard to split the layout into two equal sized boards for transport. With this plan I make it that you end up with a 3'4" and a 2'8" board but that is then the whole layout. P.H. Heaths original version was built on a single 5ft x 1ft board which could be a bit unwieldy.

Using medium radius points only increases the total length of the loop by about four inches and IMHO looks so much better than short radius points. I had a go at my suggested plan based on G. Howell's "imitation is..." layout with an extra siding in Xtrkcad The loop will hold a two foot train without loco and the maximum train length is two foot six with the loco. Although I've assumed a six inch long loco I've made the loco release eight inches long to give flexibility but ideally that should be long enough to take the longest piece of rolling stock you intend to use in a shunting situation (probably but not necessarily a loco) and there is a bit of wiggle room to make the loco release a but longer at the expense of a couple of inches off the loop. I've just tried it in Xtrkcad's operating mode and with a five wagon train (European short wheelbase wagons) the loop was longer than it needed to be so the loco release could be lengthened a bit to accomodate a small tender loco or a BoBo Diesel so you'd have the flexibility to use a short loco and more wagons or vice versa on different occasions. I think that for shunting layouts having sidings facing in opposite directions does make life more interesting.

Hi Rob It was my article on early microlayouts for Carl's site that included the Piano Line and it is a plan I keep coming back to. I think the easiest addition would be a siding on the right hand side and that keeps the original length of the loop. This is P.H. Heath's original plan with that second siding added. I actually preferred a second version of the Piano Line inspired by Heath's original that appeared a couple of years later. The tunnel and hill on the original looked a bit unnatural and having the platform at the rear avoided the sharp S currve. I liked the overbridge as a scenic break as it reminded me of the situation of the Bristol dock railway. I've also added an extra siding to this. I think that either version would be quite good fun to shunt as with sidings in both directions there's plenty of scope for problem solving while in say a quayside setting you'd have at least three places to park wagons. Heath's ingenious "Piano" plan is by the way far more prototypical than it may appear. I'm looking now at a trackplan almost identical to the second one at Saint-Mard Nord on the metre gauge Meaux-Dammartin tramway in Seine-et-Marne SE of Paris and a very similar arrangement also used to exist at the Valmondois terminus of the Chemin de Fer de Valmondois a Marines north of Paris where the MTVS museum now lives and that definitely handled both passengers and goods.

What I can't figure is the vast majority of positive feedback. Are there really people who buy off eBay but have no idea that Amazon exists. Are the buying public really so gullible? I could see this if they were selling stuff that's only otherwise available from some obscure shop that nobody has heard of but that's not what Amazon sells. Mind you, if you really want to see some eBay madness try http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tyne/8703928.stm

What the French call a "Saut-Mouton" (from Saute-Mouton meaning the game of leap frog) is fairly widely used to switch between left and right hand running as well as being used for junctions- what we would call a flying or burrowing junction. When France regained Alsace-Lorraine after the first world war the railways there had developed as part of the German system since the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. It was considered too expensive to switch from German right hand to French left hand running so a fair number of these crossovers came into being. At international frontiers they were far less common simply because trains rarely travelled through without stopping for customs, passport checks etc. but nowadays with a lot more through running many more have appeared on borders between left and right running administrations. There is a far more prosaic example on the LT Central Line just west of White City station where, for reasons going back to it being the original terminus, trains run on the right and the Saut-Mouton gets the lines back to normal running on the left. The most curious border I ever encountered (apart from W-E Berlin which was just sad and sinister) was at Brest between Poland and the USSR. At that time (1967) the train of Soviet couchettes we were travelling on from Berlin to Moscow pulled in alongside the fairly magnificent station building and we all got off for customs. passports, currency and ice cream and our train pulled out of the station. About ninety minutes later the train returned but on the other side of the station buildings having had all its bogies changed from 1435 to 1520mm gauge. The border crossing I would like to have seen was where until the early 1960s an electric interurban tram line running down the side of a main road crossed between France and Belgium near Blanc-Misseron. This crossing was in the middle of an urban sprawl with houses all around but there was still a substantial barrier to stop trams from crossing until authorised by the Douainiers- far more solid than the usual pole barrier for road vehicles alongside it.

I'm not sure about working harder and in an online age there's always PayPal. Beyond the mass market Hornby etc. stuff that places like HobbyCraft stock I think there's a middle range of supplies that model shops used to be the main source for that are harder to come by and I guess like a lot of people I tend to use exhibitions instead these days. However anything slightly more non-standard has become a lot easier to get with the internet. When I first started modelling non UK prototypes in the 1970s It was Victors (which is still missed) or some fairly complicated mail order. Nowadays there are a good number of specialist suppliers who do use the net, eBay and PayPal effectively and I can order stuff from Europe and America far more easily. I get the impression that eBay is trying to shift itself from being mainly an auction site to a more general online market place for professional traders and far more people are now simply selling products for a fixed price as Buy it Now. That seems to work well for new items but I'm not seeing it happen so much for second hand items. What concerns me a bit though it's been fairly typical of online businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, Google and eBay ) is that the first operator to succesfully reach a critical level of market penetration becomes an effective monopoly and so pretty much gets to set its own terms of trade. I'm sure Hornby is better for Bachmann's presence and vice versa. Since nobody else has answered this, sniping is putting in your bid at the last possible moment in an online auction so that nobody else bidding has time to react with a higher bid. Snipe programs or services automate this process. There's a good explanation of sniping on http://www.auctionso...FAQ-sniping.asp I dislike sniping as I think it distorts the market (but then online auctions are a long way from being a pure market) but between 8-9% of auctions are won in the final ten seconds so if you're really determined to get something- a dangerous mind set to enter any auction with- bidding at the last possible moment either manually or automatically may be the only way to do it.

This looks great Nick and I like the idea of individual scenes- that tends to be how we see the real thing at close quarters. How did you use the hanging basket liner? So far as I can tell there seem to be three methods one where you pull it off its backing and glue the tufts onto a bed of PVA, one where you just glue pieces of the whole thing base down and one which I'm just about to experiment with where you lay it face down onto PVA spread on the prepared and painted base and then pull off the backing when it's set rather like the Peter Denny method with dyed lint which I used to use years ago. Look forward to seeing the next sections. David

It's an excellent layout Alan and from my brief exploration of the tramway's route it does capture the feel of the area really well. Probably a dumb question but what scale/gauge is it?- I'm sure I've seen the layout but can't remember where. David

I've had exactly the same problem with Fulgurex motors on an HOm (12mm gauge) layout using Tillig points. Because the switch rails on these are not hinged you are bending the metal (just like on most prototype points) and I figured that the forces generated by a solenoid motor would soon cause the tiebar to fail so opted for a slow speed motor. I thought Fulgurex was a "Rolls Royce" make so bought six for the layout and also used their suggested control method and I've come to the conclusion that this is where the problem lies. There's simply too much lost motion and it involves turning a reciprocating motion into rotation and back again in a way that is frankly an engineering nonsense because the ends of the wire arms move in an arc and the motion of both the tie bar and the point motor is linear. I should of course have figured that out but trusted the instructions. I tried changing the ratio of the two arms of the bent wire to lengthen the throw but the wire just bent more. I think the answer is to use a more direct linear drive and if necessary include an Omega or Z in the linkage and if I used them again would use something like Gary's solution which looks simple and elegant (and well worth trying. Thanks Gary) The other problem I came up against was that the set up of the switches built into the Fulgurex motor combined with the forces it was handling meant that sometimes the motor stopped before the auxiliary microswitch used to feed the crossing (frog) had completely switched and that was causing a short in the track current- the answer to that was to use both auxiliary switches (one each end of the travel) as on/off switches so that the crossing would be dead while the points were travelling. I was able to get the setup to work with a bit of fiddling but wouldn't use Fulgurex motors that way again. To be fair, before I motorised the points the Tillig points were also defeating sprung Caboose Industry point levers and I think the shorter length of the switch blades on a 12mm gauge point simply makes the force needed to throw them the same distance greater than on a 16.5mm gauge point. Davd

Eurostars a bit limited though they could in principle find their way up single track lines to the ski resorts and SNCF do have a number of Eurostar sets in domestic TGV service carrying SNCF logos (Rather as GNER used to use them on the ECML) TGVs are a bit simpler as they don't just run on LGVs (high speed lines) and most of their route length is actually on lignes classiques (conventional main lines). I've seen single eight car sets in relatively small stations such as Arcachon and even on the end of the single track branch to Les Sables d'Olonne. That was a real prototype for everything situation and caused me a definite double take. I saw a TGV set sitting in the main platform under the wire with its pans up but then realised that the branch was unelectrified and even had mechanical signalling. They'd actually built a short length of catenary just to power the train's services (aircon and so on) while it was in the terminus but it was hauled to and from the main line by a 72000 diesel loco fitted with modified Scharfenberg couplings that could also supply 1.5kV DC electricity for the train's services and dynamic brakes. (there's a page of pictures of this weird situation on http://www.railfaneu...Vendee/pix.html ) The line from la Roche to Les Sables has now been electrified so the TGVs (and TERs) can get there by themselves but it's probably a lot less interesting. I do think that ability for TGVs to travel on the rest of the electrified network is one of the several big advantages that high speed trains based on railway technology have over things like Maglev or monorails (points are another one) David