eldavo

That's 2 posts in a year! You wanna go a bit steady me old mate. ;-) Love the general grot and grime around the engine shed. Still trying to get a similar effect on me own trainset. Cheers Dave

Duplicate post

Still waiting for rail chairs to arrive so my focus has turned to the goods shed. Rather than draw the whole building in a 3D CAD program as I did with the engine shed I thought I would wing it. Things were going well till I came to bed the building in to the baseboard at which point I realised it was a bit too low. The old adage of measure twice cut once is all very well but you do have to measure the right bit twice! Somehow I had managed build the walls 10mm too short. As you can see the walls now have a 10mm plinth around the base to get things back where they should be. I also decided to add an office at one end... It's getting there but it still needs doors, windowframes and a roof before I add the fiddly bits. No time for that in the next few days as I will be eating and drinking too much as seems to be the norm for this time of year. Cheers Dave

Good work on those Slater's bogies. They are hateful things to build and I invariably end up with bits falling off! I ended up creating a 3D printed version which is just 3 parts and goes together in a couple of minutes. Doesn't have the same level of detail but I get to keep my sanity. Cheers Dave

Well I think the radius of the 5.5 route on the tandem should be ok. Templot suggests it has an effective radius of 73 inches but I did check it with a couple of wagons once I got the stock rail in place. I just need to make sure I don't put too tight a radius in further down the siding! The assembly has been installed and I've laid some plain track in the goods shed siding. As ever my estimating skills have been found sadly lacking and I've run out of rail and chairs again. Orders have been placed but I'll have to look at other things for a while. No shortage of things to do as I need to build some more point actuators/servo mounts and servo control boards amongst many other things. Cheers Dave

Looking very neat and tidy Geoff. Good to see you've started a thread. Cheers Dave

This is how it looks this morning for this Android tablet user...

I'm not sure how Andy puts up with this. It really seems as though the owners of this forum have completely lost the plot. If I were a new member coming to this site for the first time the sight of all this advertising with intrusive video and creeping adverts would send me away never to return. Would I be taking a subscription to get rid of the adverts? No, because I would never have get as far as seeing the wealth of good stuff. The chances of picking up new subscribers seems little to none. If the site needs proper funding then it needs a radical rethink. A mass of tacky advertising is not going to do it as it will drive new subscribers away not attract them. If you want to extract money from the users you have to provide something of extra value while still allowing new users to get a hint of what they can get. The current state of things is simply pissing off many longtime users and the site has become unusable. Cheers Dave P.S. It took me ages to type this as there's a stupid video pop-up getting in the way and a really annoying creeping thing coming down from the top of the screen. Time for me to take a break from this site until it sorts out it's identity, either a really useful modelling resource or yet another tacky bit of click bait.

Cheers Andy. From my 40+ years of software development it really seems as though the control of this site is now in the hands of the wrong people. The fact that folks are able to make fundamental changes on a live system with clearly no testing is a recipe for disaster. RMweb is becoming increasingly like many other tacky sites overloaded with advertising of a dubious nature. It's not the site you created and worked hard for. Cheers Dave

Argh! This is getting more and more maddening. I'm now getting a blooming great video at the top of every page and a white window that creeps down from the top of the page and obscures useful content. If someone is "testing" new advertising features they need shooting. Do this sort of style change on a test system not on a live one. The site is almost unusable! I'm not one to moan, especially about something that is free, but this is ridiculous. Dave (very frustrated)

After a bit of pondering of photos and drawings of goods sheds I've knocked together the basic shell of a shed. This looks about the right size for the layout and let's me finalize the track plan for the goods yard. Originally I was going to put a cattledock at one end of the shed but this would make the yard too cramped for my liking. I will move this to the short platform road or omit it completely. I will retain the same number of sidings but one will become a short stub for dumping brake vans and odd bits rather than for cattle. To access all this I need a couple more turnouts and I was looking at a simple pair of B6s. Nothing ever stays simple on this layout and these have morphed into an all right-hand tandem turnout with the smallest being a B5.5. just need to get it built and working! Cheers Dave

Failing again for me. :-( Cheers Dave

Whoopee, it's working again. Makes it so much easier to find the threads you're interested in. Cheers Dave

Having finished wiring up the recently laid track and tweaking the servo controllers it was time to go back to working on the top of the baseboards. Some "testing" has been carried out which has resulted in some track fettling and then it was on to ballasting and painting. 30 odd feet of track takes a while to ballast (if you are picky like me) but it's done now. I'm also trying to finalize the goods yard layout and have printed a couple of templates from templot. Not entirely convinced by my current plan and may leave out one of the sidings. I think I need to build a goods shed and see how it looks in the space. Having laid the long goods siding it needs a bufferstop. I've got some white metal kit jobbies but not enough so I thought it was time to scratch build something. Initially I thought I would build a sleeper-built bufferstop, based on a Midland Railway drawing, using coffee stirrers. Cutting stirrers is a bit of a fag so I ended up sketching out the core structure in 3D CAD and printing it. Some bits of bent rail, fishplates and a bit of timber and it's mostly there. Painted up, bedded in and a turfed soil pile added and it looks like this... Up close you can make out a printing anomaly but standing back a bit it doesn't look too bad. It's had a bit of weathering since I took the photos and I think it will do the job. Clearly I'm not working fast enough on this project as the grass is growing! Cheers Dave

Following on from the bufferstop question, a bit of fiddling in my favourite CAD program and the 3D printer came up with this... The proportions don't look quite right as it's designed to be inset into the baseboard. In the intended location it looks ok. Cheers Dave

Recently the "Content I posted in" option has stopped working for me. It always times out with a 524 error. It's there a fix in the offing? Cheers Dave

Having pretty much completed the coaling shed I've created another problem for myself. Originally I was going to build a fairly small affair along the lines of the one at Leicester but somehow it grew into something rather larger like the shed at St Albans. With the larger shed I've sort of run out of space for a bufferstop on the coal road. Certainly no space for a standard Midland rail built stop. After posing the question on the Midland Railway Company thread Dave Hunt came up with a photo of a wooden stop at Whitwell. My first thought was to build something like it out of coffee stirrers but I ended up back in the CAD software and giving the job to my 3D printer. It's a tight fit but it should stop wagons ending up in the turntable well! Of course as with all these things you can't really see it properly. Is not wonky, now! On to the next problem... Cheers Dave

More wiring has been done which involved lifting (or scrabbling underneath) all 6 scenic boards. Just to add to the fun I realised I had missed out catering for the goods headshunt which can be switched between different control areas. Additional feeds had to be strung between board 2 and the control box and extra work done in both sections of the control panel. Not too arduous but... Some of the boards are getting quite busy. Still signals to add! Having the boards up gave the opportunity to address a couple of issues on the snagging list. One or two of the connections to the servo control boards have proved to be a bit flaky so I've rewired them all. Another issue is that occasionally some of the servo control boards will flip the orientation of throw of their turnout. Annoying to say the least. I suspect this is because the ATtiny85 chip is sensing the configuration pin has been grounded. The way you change the orientation, if you actually want to, is to short the 2 pins at the bottom of the board. To try and prevent this I've added a pull-up 10k resistor between the input and the 5volt supply. Unfortunately I hadn't catered for this on the original board design so it's a bit of a crude fix. Time to look at other things. Cheers Dave

Hmmm. Not sure what's going on, I see all the save options except the "Save Changes" button. This happens both on my Android tablet and my Win 10 PC. Very frustrating. It would be quite nice if the system just "worked" as it used to. For me the problem only started happening a couple of days ago. Cheers Dave

I'm obviously being thick as I can't see a "save" button. I can save the changed options as a new stream but can't change the default options. What am I doing wrong? Cheers Dave

I have exactly the same problem. I've cleared the browser cache (Chrome on an Android tablet) but still always fails. Cheers Dave

That's great Dave. Exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. Looks like a job for coffee stirrers. Cheers Dave

All this discussion of coal stacks is very interesting and somewhat timely for me as I'm working on the engine shed area of my layout and had planned to have at least one stack. In addition I'd like to pose a problem to this learned company. As with all layouts things are rather compressed and one area is causing me a problem. Below is a shot of the rear of my coaling shed. As can be seen the coal road exits the coal shed very close to the turntable pit. I need a bufferstop. I have some standard rail built jobbies and drawings of a sleeper built version. Both of these are really too big for the site. So, does anybody have references to photos or drawings of a small Midland Railway bufferstop? Cheers Dave

Is the problem occurring with one particular decoder or all decoders? I have seen the same on my setup but I'm struggling to remember how I overcame it! Cheers Dave

Probably because they seemed to stack it on every available free bit of ground. There are photos of lines of locos with stacks between them and just enough space for crews to get to the locos. They clearly bought big time in the summer. Cheers Dave