Pacific231G

There were experiments with steam haulage of canal boats in several countries, including Britain but the very slow speed made them uneconomic. The mules used in the Panama Canal Locks are apparently more for keeping ships pecisely in line laterally than for actually towing them. There was an electric haulage system on the Tetlow Canal near Berlin with Siemens tractors on both banks hauling barges in each direction (It didn't survive the division of Germany) and a set of locks in Belgium that used rail haulage. However, all these fade into insignificance compared with the vast system of electric canal towing railways that ran across northern and eastern France from just behind Dunkerque to Strasbourg and Mulhouse with branches to Liile etc. a total route of over a thousand kilometres of metre gauge operated by the CGTVN (Compagnie General de Traction sur les Voies Navigable), using 1700 electric tractors, and several hundred kilometres of 60cm towing railway in Alsace, which had been part of Germany until 1918 and had narrower towpaths. This was operated by the separate Traction de l'Est company. The system was electrically powered with overhead wires (not very far overhead in some places!) with a trolley running on them connected to the tractor by a cables. Parts of the system date from before the First World War but the system ran at its full extent from the end of the First World War until it closed in 1973. All barges without engines were obliged to use it (no horses allowed) and the railway effectively occuped the towpath. The CGTVN also had about 140 kms of haulage on quieter canal using rubber tyres electric tractors with trolleybus type overhead and offered diesel tractors elsewhere.

18 inch seems to have been the standard narrow gauge used within British military depots etc.including Woolwich Arsenal where locomotives were used and the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey (which also used 2ft and 3ft gauges). It was also quite widely used in factories- though mainly for hand propulsion and there were 18 inch gauge railways in Crewe works (with Webb experimenting with the same gauge for canal haulage) . Arthur Heywood pushed quite hard for 15 inch gauge which he considered to be the minimum-and therefore cheapest- gauge with sufficient load capacity for an estate railway of at least a mile in length using locomotives . His book Minimum Gauge Railways published a a pamphlet in 1881 and revised and published for private circulation in 1894 and 1898 (the 3rd edtion reprinted by Turntable in 1974) makes for fascinating reading and he did think the whole thing out. I think he was probably on a hiding to nothing with 18 inch gauge already well established by the military and 15 inch a bit marginal for loco haulage. He saw 18inch gauge as being suitable for railways 3 or 4 miles long carrying perhaps 60 000 tons a year but thought there was a gap for a cheaper sort of railway where the route length was between one and three miles and carrying 5-10 000 tons a year. Sir Arthur Percival Heywood (a hereditary baronet rather than a knight) was a landed aristocrat with a passion for developing such railways for the benefit of agriculture. In championing 15 inch as the minimum practical gauge he quoted the gauge of 40cms (about 16 inch) adopted by Paul Decauville. Decauville however, who had since 1876, turned his concept of a portable railway into a very successful industry and understood his customers' needs, only recommended 40cm for animal or human haulage and, in their 1890 catalogue, offered steam locos only for gauges of 50 (19.7 inches) or 60 cms. The catalogue shows an interesting range of actual uses of Decaulville's products from the obvious such as quarries and forestry to the more exotic such as in oyster beds or wine caves and even, with a few tens of metres of track and a couple of bogies, carried on explorers' steam boats for portages around rapids with the rail progressibley laid ahead of the boat and lifted behind it.

Perfectly valid techniques. Some of John Ahern's locos are still going strong on the Madder Valley, eight decades after he built them and probably seventy five years since he converted them to two rail (and remotored them as he used 6V DC for third rail and even grumbled about Hornby Dublo using 12V)

Interesting. I thought Greenford East was the only remaining mechanical box (though the number of actual semaphores gets fewer all the time) in this part of London.

Yes it is Jeremy and you've solved the mystery. I knew about using a single M for Main but it was the small OR following it that I couldn't figure out. It's now clear that crews using the shed simply knew that "UP M or" meant "UP Main or UP Sidings. Many thanks. I can now stop searching for the Banbury South Signal Box Diagram. If anyone fancies a real constuctional challenge, I did find one GWR/WR "cash register" indicator* with no less than six describers! *I guess you need to be of a certain generation (or an avid viewer of "Open All Hours") to remember that sort of cash register, but then you do to remember steam at Oxford.

That's how they look to me but " UP M OR "didn't make any sense to me so I wasn't sure they really were an O and R . The signal was at Banbury until very late- about the late 1980s apparently.

They could in principle show a blank display when set for a fast route but I don't know if the GWR/WR's mechanical "cash register" or "clack box" indicators ever did. I suspect that they had to offer a posiive indication of direction past a cleared signal as, unlike a junction signal, they'd give no indication of direction, so wouldn't fail safe . All of those I've found in SBDs so far had a lever for each indicator that also clears the stop signal but no lever indicated to clear a stop signal without a directoopn indication. I thought I might find something at Oxford where a gantry just off the down end of the platforms had no less than five of them. howeve, those on the down lines are associated with a junction signal and the remaining three are for reverse down working on the two up lines and the bay. none of which would have been a fast movement. I was though wrong about there being no fast movements through Oxford, I've just seen a photo of a football special passing through the station on the down middle road. I have also found, in a very grainy corner of a photo, an example of how they were lettered I can't make out what the two smaller letters to the right of UP M are.

Indeed (though I didn't know it could also apply to a junction between two single lines) I assume this was to avoid a facing crossover that in principle could put a train on the wrong line. Yeovil Town was odd though (AFAIK) by using the up platform for down departures on the branch rather than having a bay. I'm guessing that the Yeovil Town shuttle was an autotrain.

I'm not so sure. I've seen them myself at various places, especially Oxford where there was a gantry at the North end of the station with no fewer than five mechanical indicators accompanying the starter signals However, while going through signal box diagrams in the OPC books, I found a good number in the approaches to multiple platforms etc. but very few at platform starters They would in any case though only have been used when movements were fairly slow (at Oxford, almost everything stopped or ran through rather slowly). For example, a train arriving at Penzance might pass two of them with three indications each: 1,2 & MAIN at the down inner home (with calling on arm) and 3.4, & SDG at the down main starting signal (also with a calling on arm). There was a third at the shunting signal from the two carriage sidings with four indications* (1,2, DOWN MAIN, SIDING). Newquay, which was relatively small with three platforms, had one at the down inner home (with calling on arm) with no less than five indications No. 1 platform, No. 2 platform, spur, No. 3 platform and SIDINGS. Exeter West SB had one on the up side backing signal with no less thn six indications (UP RELIEF, UP MAIN,UP MIDDLE, DOWN MIDDLE, DOWN MAIN, DOWN PLATFORM). There was a platform starter at West Drayton (East Box) but only for the Back Road where the home signal had one with indications for, up sidings, up relief and up Main. At Yeovil Pen Mill the down starter on the up platform** had a four way indicator for the Engine Shed, Up Branch, Down Branch and Down Main. At Weymouth, at one of down shunt signals, there was an Electric Route Indicator with no less than seven indications. *Rather unusually AFAIK for Britain, this one shunting signal covered the exit from both carriage sidings. ** The Yeovil Town branch at Pen Mill was double track for about a hundred yards before singling and it took me a while to figure out this rather odd arrangement. I assume it was to enable the shuttle train that had arrived from Yeovil Town on the up platform to return from the same platform, either via the down main line and onto the branch down line or, to avoid blocking the down main line, by leaving "wrong line" on the branch up line.

Interesting. It seems that this manufacturer at least is only offering kits for undecorated models. I guess that makes sense as it's a lot easier to paint the flat components than the assembled model. Athearn-Roundhouse (now one comapny) also seem now to only offer RTR though the detail and quality looks to be much the same as the kits I remember. Does this mean that modellers today are less capable of assembling a simple kit (it took about ten minutes) or are there other reasons? ISTR that one reason for offering cars as "shake the box" kits, apart from being less likely to get damaged in transit, was they attracted less sales tax. You also got a certain, rather spurious given how simple they were, satisfaction from having assembled them yourself.

Fortunately the Y is on the far side of the line from the Canyon side of the line as the station is only 154 metres from the rim! This is very off topic but, since we started I might as well finish I've just had a good look on Google Earth (search for Grand Canyon Village) and hence Street View. The area each side of the tail track is now fairly built up with several "lodges" -basically motels but presumably operated by the Parks Service: it was all trees when I first visited in 1971. Curiously there is a siding off the tail track that splits into two at its far end and I assume the freight depot was moved to there (early photos show it opposite the station). In 1971, I don't think there was anything there apart from the tail track itself. There is a building alongside the siding that parallels the tail track that looks like it might have been a freight depot. It's now the National Park Service's Back Country Information Center but, at its rear, there is a platform (at 85m too short for a full length passenger train) alongside the siding. A tank wagon sits at the end of the siding, presumably fuel oil for the locos (steam and diesel) but I couldn't make out anything that looked like a watering facility for the steam locos that still run monthly and for specials. The station itself has four tracks (with the remains of two more and i think a seventh serving a freight depot to the west of the station building. The furthest one from the station building is served by a 380m long platform (the same length as the tail track clear of a newish level crossing). The middle two are either side of a low concrete island platform 223m long and the track nearest the station building is without a platform and possibly used as a carriage siding. I think it may be an extension of the original freight depot track. There were no platforms there in 1971, just gravel to rail height as in this image from1974 and I think it was still like that in 1992 when I returned. This is a schematic plan (of the current situation at Grand Canyon, It's definitely not to scale and the actual line is curved throughout. When I was exploring it in 1971 (and I think in 1992) none of the level crossings and associated roads were there. The station was rather off to one side of the main South Rim tourist area. and both the main line and the Y disappeared off between the trees. Looking in StreetView at the new buildings south of the line and eeither side of the Y tail track now they all look very recent.

Though both were used, I think Y's were more common than balloon loops as they take up less space (though for turning a complete train the tail track has to be long enough). Balloon loops were probably more used in urban areas especially when they could be built around the perimeter of a large depot and are of course very common on metros. They are also used for unit trains carrying coal etc. that can simply keep running forward as they pass the loading and unloading facility ("Merry-go-Round" trains in Britain did the same at large power stations. I've come across turning Ys in several places in N. America and they are still used to turn snow ploughs and other specialist equipment. They use them on the Cumbres and Toltec, though just for locomotives, and I'd guess that the land required plus three turnouts was a lot cheaper than a turntable. I did hear of one interesting variant where both ends of a horseshoe curve, built to gain height, were connected by a steep track to enable helper(banking) locos taking trains up the curve to return to the lower end without occupying the main line. There were several places in France where a balloon loop was used to enable a through train (usually on a metre gauge line) to serve a branch without having to be run round and there was often a Y at the junction. Le Perréon in the Beaujolais was a particularly good example where the station, which was just after the points for the loop, was built as a through station after which the line followed a sharpish curve to bring it back the other leg of the points. If you look at the rating map for the village and the shape of the local sportsground you can still make out the route of the line.

Except that the majority of North American rolling stock kits are supplied with fully painted and lettered bodies. Undecorated kits are available from the usual manufacturers but they cost the same. Unless it's changed since I was modelling North American railways and buying rolling stock from Victors, the bodies were generally moulded as a single piece in plastic of the appropriate base colour. The big difference from here was that rail companies rarely built their own rolling stock so car designs were faiirly standardised. Passenger and freight cars rarely seemed to be supplied RTR (apart from the "toy" ones) but frankly, anyone unable to assemble a "shake the box" kit from Athearn, Roundhouse et al. isn't going to get very far as amodeller. All you had to do was to add the roof walk and brake wheel to the body, add the centre sill to the underframe, fit the Kadees and screw on the trucks. I would though doubt the ability of many modellers to reproduce the complex paint schemes of modern TOCs

It's interesting that David Jenkinson- who was a champion of period authenticity (qv Is Your Mutton Dressed as Lamb etc)- allowed himself a ten year window in which locos that couldn't have been seen at the same time were. This is how the Grand Canyon Station looked in winter 1938 SANTA FE "EL CAPITAN" IN GRAND CANYON STATION DURING FIRST LOS ANGELES TO CHICAGO RUN. SNOW. 19 FEB 1938 NPS PHOTO. I discovered the Grand Canyon Railway Depot (it's official name as an historic monument) during my first visit to America in 1971. It had been closed to passengers since 1968 but the track was all intact (According to Wiki, the line remained open for freight until 1974 though I saw no sign of that and the rails were rusty ) I also noticed what seemed to be a branch heading south (away from the Canyon) into the trees which I natutally had to explore. It turned out to be the turning Y that enabled complete passenger trains to be turned but I'd never encountered such a thing before. It would be interesting to know how many trains the AT&SF ran on the sixty mile branch each day during its peak. I'd hazard a guess that it was one or two with maybe three freights a week. A bit more than Lucius Beebe's "Mixed Train Daily" (when short line and branchline passenger services were being kept open by US mail contracts) but not busy by our standards. I did also have a good look at the Grand Canyon that day!

You could use the "Piano Line" principle where the fiddle yard (often a cassette) is on the main baseboard and feeds into the middle of the loop not the end. This is the basic principle (though the the actual layout it's based on only had the left hand siding) .The maximum length of train is defined by the distance from the toe of the entrance point to the left hand end and the loop should be able to take that number of wagons. Distributing wagons to the two sidings (and picking others up) can give a very satisfying amount of shunting. I think the two opposite oriented sidings make for more interesting shunting than an Inglenook. The original Piano Line was just five feet long and built by the Rev. P.H. Heath (who was also a pioneer of 00n3). This plan is based on a layout inspired by it 5ft 6ins long that appeared in Railway Modeller in Feb 1983 but with an extra siding added. I'd be inclined to extend it on the right hand side to six foot. The only catch is that the hidden siding is at the back which is good for exhibitions but less so for a home layout. However, this layout and Heath's original "Piano Line", featured RM in July 1965, were both home layouts. This is La Planche Port a version of it six foot by one foot (plus six inches for the water) that my friend Tim Hills built, adapted from a plan of mine. The platform is optional but it allows a railcar to provide a "basic railway" passenger service. This is a port of course but it could be any kind of industry. There are other ways to cook this particlulat goose and I rather like Tony Collins' Goonhilly - an 0 gauge GW Branch line terminus version on a pair of boards just 9ft 6ins long by 18 ins. wide. He used a footbridge to disguise the entrance/exit and the join between the two boards is between the two back to back points

small radius (nominally 24inch) and medium radius (nominally 36 inch) . They are much gentler than Hornby or Peco Setrack and they'll be fine.

Having a small and simple layout set up somewhere where you can shunt a few wagons whenever the mood takes you can be very therapeutic. Before my study became my office, I used to keep my H0 BLT (without its fiddle yard but cunningly designed to enable all shunting of a train to be done on the scenic section) on the back of my desk. When I was stuck on some task ten or fifteen minutes of wagon bashing was a great stress relief. The one thing I'd advise against for a shunting layout is using Setrack points to "get more in", a friend of mine did that and had endless trouble with short wheelbase locos stalling and derailments. On my own layout, which is 63 inches long (+fiddle yard) I mostly used Peco "medium" points (3 foot radius) but did use a couple of the short (2 foot radius) type and I've always regretted not sticking with the mediums throughout. .

If you're just starting out it might make sense to go with DCC as that can give sound, lights etc. For DC however, a simple layout like this,doesn't require a lot of isolating to be done as you can use point switching for most of it. If the points are set against a dead end siding then it's electrically dead. Unless you want to have more than one loco in each of the fuelling sidings then you need just two feeds (points are alway fed from the switch end and never from the crossing end) and three isolations (achieved quite simply with insulating track joiners). I've marked these on your plan as red dashes. The feeds are shown conventionally as red and black triangles and the section breaks (i.e. insulating track joiners) as red dashes- it doesn't matter which rail you put the break in. Because you have in any case to insulate both rails between the two points facing each other, this is also the minimum set up in DCC . Assuming that you want a loco to bring in a train of wagons that is then shunted I'd sugest a switched break at a loco length from the end of the longer siding to enable the incoming loco to be isolated so that another can draw the wagons back to shunt them. If incoming trains are propelled in and drawn out then you don't even need that. If you want the fuelling depot to accomodate more than two locos (I assume the shunting locos are short) then you need a switched section break in one of both of its sidings as indicated by red dashes (it doesn't actually matter which rail you break) and then bridge with an on-off section switch.

I can reassure you that the largish terminus as a branch off a main line isn't at all improbable. Birkenhead Woodside (five platforms) was a case in point as was Plymouth Millbay (four platforms and also a reversing terminus which operationally gives a lot of bang for one's buck). and I'm sure there were others in Britan. A bit further afield is Tours and Orleans (and there was Biarritz before it closed) where the original main line was built to a city terminus but was then extended to skirt the city centre so leaving the old terminus as a branch. Boulogne used to be a terminus too - more or less where the car ferry terminal was built with the main line to Calais avoiding it to the East then burrowing under the old town. Had history been a bit different there might have been the same situation in Oxford (and, for a few months there was) where the original station was a terminus (at Grandpont (near Folly Bridge if you know Oxford) but the new line to Birmingham left it at Millstream Junction (where Hinksey yards were built in 1940) 3/4 mile to the south of the terminus and, until the new GW station on the Botley Road was opened in 1852 , trains on the Birmingham line had to reverse in or out of Grandpont. https://southoxfordhistory.org.uk/interesting-aspects-of-grandpont-and-south-oxford-s-history/the-coming-of-the-railway-to-oxford.

Given the low forces involved,I'm surprised that the end thrust in a small motor, expecially one designed for use in model locos, would be a significant problem. They are after all used in the gearboxes of vehicle windscreen wipers where they must be subject to constant reversals of thrust. Non worm gear drives for 4mm scale have though been around for a very long time I remember as a small child - probably in the late 1950s- that my father acquired a pannier tank (a Gaiety perhaps?) with spur or bevel gears rather than the usual worm. It was two-rail so couldn't be run on my HD third rail layout but I remember it because I got into trouble with him for pushing it around the layout as he said that would break the gears. One advantage of not using a worm is that it makes wheel cleaning a whole lot easier.

Yes. According to the GWR/WR SBDs I've been looking at, the OP's position for that is fine as the down main starts were all just before the points that split the route to the different platforms. However, it would almost certainly have a calling-on arm but not a distant. What you probably wouldn't have is the single track only splitting at the platform throat (though that was the case for the three platform single track terminus at Fort William) For a model- assuming this is a terminus to immediate fiddle yard scheme- you could extend the headshunt to end just off-stage and visually it would appear to be part of a loop (as at Porthcawl) I think also that the isolated down distant signal would probably also have a home arm as that would be needed to protect shunting moves. My other comment- looking at places like Penzance- is that you probably wouldn't have a separate Motorail siding but more likely end loading at the end of platform 4 leaving that siding to be a down carriage siding.

I don't know of any GWR termini with four platforms coming off a single track and, even when the line was singled Penzance still had quite a lot of double track before getting to the platform throat. So, Newquay, or Porthcawl, both with three platforms, might be closer . There are signal diagrams for both Penzance and Newquay in An Historical Survey of Grest Western Stations (R.H. Clark OPC) vol 2 and for Porthcawl in vol 2 and I'll PM them to you. In borth cases, numbers referred to platform numbers and other lines by descriptions At Penzance there were three mechanical routing indicators. The first was at the facing crossover (actually a scissors crossover) that accessed platform 1& 2 and that had three indicators for No. 1, No. 2 and down main. The next, on the down main, was before the points that accessed platform 3, 4 and the sidings with indications No. 3, no.4 and sidings. There was also a four-way route indicator between the other two but for the two down (carriage) sidings with four indications for No. 1, No. 2, Down Main and Siding. I don't know if Newquay had a mechanical route indicator before it was doubled but the SBD for it at its fullest extent (with seven carriage sidings) shows the final inbound home and calling on signal with a single five way route indicator with indications for No.1 platform, no. 2 Platform, Spur (the loco spur between the tracks for platforms 2 & 3) no. 3 platform and sidings. Porthcawl was always single track and there was a three manual route indicator on the home and calling on signal for No. 1 platform, No. 2 platform and No. 3 platform.

Both very useful advice. Trying to lay track dead straight is not easy (I'm not sure I've ever managed it) and the human eye can detect even the smallest deviation. What is can't detect so easily (or at all) are slight variations in a curve so it might be worth considering making your straight tracks very slightly curved (maybe 12 or 20 foot radius) even if the total displacement is only a couple of inches along the whole length between your end curves. It will also make looking at an approaching train far more interesting ( this applies to the big railway as well) Though the prototype does have sections of dead straight track, very gentle curves are far more common. Getting a consistent separation between tracks is also important and it's probably worth making up a template to aid that What I do find is that track planning software (and pencil and ruler track planning to be fair) does tend to lead me into planning with straight lines and fairly tight curves but introducing very gentle curves will look a whole lot better. I also agree with the suggestion of modelling a two track rather than a four track section. It will certainly look longer and I rather envy our American counterparts who can authentically model single track main lines and still run the longest and heavier trains on them.

Taking a photograph of a copyrighted work is slightly complicated. This is what the UK gov, says (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-digital-images-photographs-and-the-internet/copyright-notice-digital-images-photographs-and-the-internet) "If someone takes a photo, copyright can exist in that photo. If someone takes a photo of a work protected by copyright, and the work forms an essential part of the image, using that photo on the web is likely to be an infringement of copyright." However "You do not need permission to photograph buildings, sculptures and similar works on public display in public spaces. The photographs you take are afforded full copyright protection. This means you, as the photographer, are able to commercially use your work." I assume that a model railway would be a "similar work" but, not being a lawyer, have no idea whether a model railway exhibition would count as a public space. As far as possible, I try to ask the owner (or operator) of an exhibition layout if they're happy for me to photograph it and I've never been asked not to. In reality, I'd assume that, like me, anyone exhibiting a layout would expect it to be photographed and for photos to be shared. I wouldn't be happy if they were commercially exploited unless as reportage, or if they were used in a detrimental way such as a caption saying "this is the sort of rubbish layout that appears in too many exhibitions these days." As Andy says, there are two sets of IP, that of the layout builder in their artistic work and that of the photographer in their image of it. So for example, I couldn't use a photograph that someone had taken of my layout without their permission.

I saw Borchester Market in operation three times; at St. Albans, Ally Pally and I think at Leytonstone (but possibly Warley) and it was always fascinating to see it in operation. There probably was the odd glitch but never enough to spoil my enjoyment of it. The problem with trying to model a prototypical location is that if they have enough interesting operation they'd be vast as a model. One only has to look at aerial photos to see just how large even a fairly compact station of any importance and its yards really are. There have been several main line termini layouts that seem to really capture the atmosphere of the real thing, despite being very simplified from how such a location would really be, and Borchester is definitely one of them.