Dunedin

Thanks for all the interest in my recent posts. The next few are on the subject of automating aspects of the operation of the layout to make it easier to operate, but also hopefully more interesting to watch at exhibitions. This may get a bit "techie" in places, but hopefully, you'll bear with me and find it interesting or useful as reference. Now that I have a permanent home for Kirkhill, I have been able to start working on a few related projects for the layout that have been on the “to do” list for some time. Since the rebuild in 2016/17, there has always been an issue with keeping things moving on the main lines. The layout was originally conceived as a depot layout and it worked really well in that original form; then we decided to add the mainlines to create additional interest. As soon as we did that, it stopped being a depot layout and became another roundy-roundy layout with visitors to exhibitions expecting to see continuous running on the mainlines, never mind all the shunting in the depot. This wasn’t quite what we had intended or expected, but we were where we were so to speak and we had an issue that we needed to resolve. Some people think that if folk don’t like the way we run the layout, that’s their problem, but at the end of the day, you only get invited to exhibitions if you can put on a show that the visitors enjoy watching. Negative reviews equal fewer invitations to future shows – and remember at the time, we were only really able to run the layout at shows - so we decided something had to be done. Increasing the number of trains on the mainlines means more work for the mainline and fiddle yard operators and in our case that is frequently only one person, so it was clear that some help was required. In May 2019, we took the layout to Manchester Museum of Transport. There I got talking to Steve Saxby from Sheffield and he told me about the NCE Minipanel controller. This is basically like another DCC cab, but instead of being hand-held and used by an operator, it runs macros (mini programmes) when prompted by a series of inputs on its terminals. The photo shows an NCE Minipanel: The DCC control for Kirkhill is already NCE, so this seemed to be an interesting possibility. During the show I bought a Minipanel from Digitrains. The idea I had was to automate the operation of the mainlines, so we could reduce the workload on the mainline operator and enable the depot operator to keep shunting, whilst keeping things moving for those visitors who just want to see mainline trains running past. How hard could that be? It was certainly more of a challenge than I had expected. To give a brief overview of what the Minipanel can do, it can issue commands to set points or a route, address locos, set their direction and speed and then stop them again in response to an input, say from a block detector, or after a predetermined delay. It can then set another route, start a different train and eventually stop it and so on. The Minipanel is connected to the cab bus, just like any other NCE controller and issues commands via the bus to the tracks through the booster. If I was going to use the Minipanel to set routes, the first thing to do was to change the control of the fiddle yard points from manual pushbutton control to DCC control. Fortunately, or so I thought at the time, I had two 8 output DCC accessory controllers from a previous layout, so the obvious solution was to reuse these. They were SMD-82 switch machine drivers made by Team Digital in the USA and the nice thing about them which set them apart from other accessory controllers at the time, was that in addition to responding to DCC commands from a cab, they also work from pushbutton inputs, so as far as an operator who was used to manual pushbutton control is concerned, the transition to DCC is seamless. The two decoders are shown here during installation on to the rear panel of the fiddle yard control panel: Under manual control, the layout just works in the same way as it always did; no having to remember accessory numbers or route numbers etc. You just push the buttons on the control panel to set the points individually. What it did mean however was that I could also group a series of points into routes which could be called up by a single command or by one pushbutton. The control panel therefore grew some additional buttons in order to call up the routes and reduce human error, whilst the same route command could be issued by the Minipanel. The philosophy for operation of the layout with the Minipanel is fairly straightforward: The Minipanel needs to be told when to start the sequence or macro, then It calls up the route the train is to follow The decoders set the route The Minipanel selects the loco on the train, selects the direction and speed step (just as an operator would from a cab) The train runs The block detector identifies when the train has completed its circuit and is back in the fiddle yard again The Minipanel stops the loco. The Minipanel then moves on to the next part of the sequence, sets the route and the process repeats with the next train and so on. At the end of the sequence, after all the trains in the sequence have run, it stops. The Minipanel needs prompts to know what do or which commands to issue when. It does this by having a series of input terminals – 30 of them – which, when connected to the ground terminal either by a switch or some other device such as a block detector, will ground the relevant input. When it sees the input grounded, it executes the commands associated with it. Are you still with me? I hope so. More on the set up in the next few days, followed by how it turned out in reality - which of course wasn't exactly what we expected and then what I eventually did about it.

Thank you! I don't have insulated doors. There were and still are two up and over doors - you can see them both here: I decided rather than brick up the near one, it would just be sealed and blanked off internally, but remains in place, so if someone wants to reinstate it at a later date, they can. As with the walls, it has been blocked off using a wooden framework with insulation inserted and then covered with plasterboard: From the inside, you wouldn't really know there was a door behind the new false wall, but from the outside, it looks the same as before. The remaining door isn't insulated as you can see; it's just a standard steel door. The garage would probably be warmer in winter if it was insulated, but it isn't too bad to be honest. I have noticed that this last week, the door acts as a radiator though, because that side of the garage faces west, so gets the sun in the afternoon/evening. The insulation on the building works really well and keeps it reasonably cool until about 4 or 5pm, when you start to notice the heat increase. Insulating the door would make a difference, I'm sure, but it's only an issue when the outside temperature is above 25-27 degrees. Below that, it's fine. Something I might try is bonding some insulation material on the inside, similar to that used on the walls. I'm sure that would be possible and certainly far cheaper than a new door, which wouldn't match the other one either!

Thanks for all the encouraging comments and feedback. Like I said in the post, I still can't quite believe it myself, but it's been an excellent lockdown project. Why did I go for carpet tiles? The floor of the original garage was in a poor condition and something needed to be done about it. The builder considered breaking up the original concrete and renewing the floor completely, but was concerned it may destabilise the walls of the garage because the details of their footings were uncertain. You can see the poor condition of the floor here: The most cost-effective way to deal with it was to cover the floor with a layer of Cellotex insulation which would deal with the unevenness and then top that with chipboard. You can see the insulation laid here and the chipboard going down on top - all bonded in place, but it is effectively a floating floor: This was the surface I was left with and I wanted something to make it less echoey and to further improve the insulation. Carpet tiles were easy, cheap and quick for me to lay myself. The carpet tiles starting to go in once I'd finished the painting: If I end up doing something messy out there such as cutting more wood etc. then I can either cover the tiles with plastic covers or simply lift them. To be honest, given that the layout is built now, there shouldn't be much dust to create and the tiles just seem nicer than a hard floor.

I haven’t posted on here for a while, but that doesn’t mean things haven’t been moving on with the Kirkhill layout whilst Graham has been busy making wagons of all shapes and sizes to run on it. I had always wanted to be able to have the layout set up in a permanent location rather than having to hire a hall each time we wanted to have a running session outside of shows. We were only ever really able to run Kirkhill at exhibitions; it was simply too large to set up anywhere at home, so the only way to test the layout was to hire a hall somewhere. We used to hire the community centre hall at Mickleover, so not only did we have the cost of hiring the hall, we also had to hire a van to get it there and back. This meant that running and testing the layout occurred on an infrequent basis and we never really had the opportunity to really ensure it was reliable. One to the things people used to comment on with the original layout was how well it ran. I was very conscious that there were some issues with the newer version and wanted to be able to improve things. When my dad died in 2018, he left me some money and for the first time, I was in apposition to do something about my ambition for Kirkhill. Make no mistake, given the choice, I’d much rather have my dad still around, but he was 90 and we all have to go sometime. I decided building an extension to my garage would be a good use for part of my inheritance. Dad’s hobbies were important to him and he knew how important mine are to me, so it seemed an appropriate investment. I began planning the extension in the latter part of 2019 and bought myself an AutoCAD licence so I could design the extension. I have to say that AutoCAD is not the easiest of CAD packages to use and I had to get some paid help in the end, but it was still cheaper than employing an architect. I found a builder who was able to take on the job and I also obtained a certificate of lawful development from the local council, so in July 2020 work commenced. The following photographs show the before, during and after the build. The original garage was a 1950s or 1960s construction of single skin brick and a flat roof with no insulation. The original inside with part of the layout set up: It was dim, cold and damp or scorching hot, depending on the time of year. View from the outside as it was: The extension is also single skin with a flat roof, but I’ve had the whole thing insulated, with heating installed and it now means that there is a really good space for the layout. In fact, I’ve worked in offices that haven’t been as good as this! The inside looking from old to new - before Kirkhill went in there: The old part of the garage - one of the doors has been blanked off inside: The contrast with the previous interior shots still amazes me! The original garage was about 5m square and the extension is 4m x 5m, so it gives ample space for Kirkhill, although it does pretty much fill the place. It does however mean that it can be stored securely, without it having to be in a storage depot, or in a damp garage and so will preserve it for what will hopefully be many years to come – or until the time comes to do something different anyway. View from the outside: What it was all about in the end - Kirkhill installed in its new home: I just managed to get it all finished before the November lockdown; the photo above was taken on 15th November, having got everything there on 31st October! There's now good access all round so we can have operating sessions whenever we want - or whenever Covid will let us anyway. As Graham then reminded me, having got the layout in a permanent location, I could then get started on getting the signalling system working. More on that in a future post.

Will look into those, thanks!

Thanks for the feedback and apologies for the delay in replying - lots of other stuff going on and not been on RM Web for a while now. I've also noticed that the depot doesn't seem as busy as before, but I think this is due to the same number of moves going on in what is now a visually longer space. This results in it only appearing to be half as busy, which is an unintended consequence of the extension. We have a few ideas to improve on this, which involves replacing the DMU with a loco-hauled set, which will result in more shunting moves. The curves and the Kadees: We have always used No. 5 Kadee couplers on all our stock which isn't fitted with NEM sockets - and in the case of the Bachmann Mark 1 and Mark 2 coaches, we've even retrofitted the No. 5s to those as well because we can achieve the correct height standard. (The NEM sockets are too high for some reason.) The No. 5s worked fine on the original layout where we had minimum 3ft radius curves, although with our Mark 3 coaches we had always noticed a tendency for them to roll slightly when propelling them through reverse curves on point ladders - i.e. a medium radius RH followed immediately by a medium radius LH. I had always thought that was due to having the couplings set too far into the under frame so the gangways were tending to foul, but it didn't result in derailments so we left it. That changed with the extension project when we were forced due to space constraints to use curved streamline points (SL-E86 & SL-E87) which have an inside radius of 30in. The other thing that changed was the increase in running speeds from a crawl around the depot to running at mainline speeds on the mainlines. All of a sudden, we began to get derailments, which came as something of a surprise and an unwelcome one at that! We also noticed that the derailments weren't only confined to the curved points, but also occurred on the ladder roads in the fiddle yard which used the 3ft radius medium points that we used in the depot. We were running at higher speed in the fiddle yard though, to minimise the delays to getting things onto the viewing side of the layout, so that was a contributing factor. Another thing we found was that our pairs of powered HST power cars were no longer speed-matched. This was either pulling, or squeezing the middle of the train off on the curves. This is probably worth a post in itself, but after several attempts to correct this, time got the better of me and I reverted to using dummy power cars at one end of the sets. In the end, I built a small length of test track with a left and right hand point, one after the other to observe what happens in the reverse curve scenario. What occurs is that the Kadee No.5 couplers reach the limit of their lateral travel and the the two coaches lock up solid, so the flanges start to climb the rails. At low speed, it can just about cope, but a higher speed it will derail. This is actually worse with a long set being propelled - i.e. dummy power car leading. I've tried a couple of solutions, but neither is ideal: Kadee 149 couplers have longer shanks, which don't create the foul condition referred to above when they are in tension. Unfortunately, when propelling, because the combination bends in three places, the knuckles become off-set to one side, the gangways begin to foul and the lock-up situation occurs again, so that isn't exactly ideal. My other experiment was to refit tension-lock couplings on the bogies again, but this doesn't seem to work either with long rakes, so this is all still a work in progress. I've bought some Keen Systems floating gangway faceplates to try, but I'm not convinced these will have low enough friction to work with the Kadees and I don't particularly want to do a full scale conversion to the Keen system. I'm not convinced that will work on a layout the size of Kirkhill. Watch this space for further updates and ideas.

Happy New Year to all our followers! We have a few things to report now that we are in 2018: 1. Look out for Railway Modeller February 2018 edition - on sale from this Thursday. Aberdeen Kirkhill is Railway of the Month. We don't know quite what the final version of the article looks like, or which photos were finally chosen, but the results of the photo session with Paul Bason looked excellent when we had them for preview and captioning. 2. Over the Christmas/New Year break I finished the control panel for the fiddle yard, so we now have all points electrically operated which will save a great deal of walking and hopefully will also mean fewer mistakes when setting routes. The following photos show the new panel under construction and fitted to the fiddle yard board after completion: 3. Our next exhibitions for 2018 are Glasgow, Model Rail Scotland 23rd - 25th February and Nottingham Model Railway Exhibition 17th - 18th March. In terms of future developments, I mentioned in previous posts that implementing the signalling scheme is one of my projects for this year and to that end, my Christmas present from my wife was a Raspberry Pi 3 computer. I reckon it will be far cheaper to implement the signalling control using that than the cost of all the relays I would need to do it the way I had originally intended, plus the Pi will take up much less space. I just have to learn how to programme the thing first though, so how hard can that possibly be?? I suspect Jo hadn't quite realised just how much swearing this is going to require, when she decided to buy it for me! I'm actually quite excited about this, because I'm going to be learning a new skill and hopefully having fun into the bargain. As an even longer term project, I'm also investigating the possibility of using the Pi to control the flow of trains on the main line sequence, so that part of the layout can run either semi- or fully-automatically if we are short of operators such as during lunch breaks etc. That way, we would be able to keep some variety going, whilst one person can continue to shunt the depot and yard. For now though, that is all in the future, but it shows the depth and breadth that this hobby of ours can bring. Looking forward to seeing some of you in Glasgow and/or Nottingham and hope you enjoy the RM article.

Hi. Well today has been a bit like the morning after the night before. The Derby show went very well thank you - on the whole. The layout worked pretty well, all in all with the exception of a few failures. One was a point motor, which having worked on Saturday, decided to fail yesterday and the other was the loss of a feed to a piece track, which had to have a running repair made to it after the show closed on Saturday. I say the loss of a feed, but it was more a case of the complete absence of one on a section that was part of the original layout and was laid (but never wired) back in 2009, so it's a wonder that it worked for as long as it did! The other issues were with some of the stock which needs tweaking to cope with the tighter curves on the curved points and our lack of familarity as operators with the new operating sequence and with the sequence itself. We had a number of pregnant pauses which we need to (and will) overcome by running more trains on the main lines than were actually in the timetable that we are basing the operation on. I made a view video clips yesterday, towards the end of the show, when things had quietened down and posted them on You Tube. I've also set up a channel for Aberdeen Kirkhill, to which I will post further clips as time progresses. I'm hoping this link will work, but if not, I'll post it later when I get access to my laptop again! http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU9txzQBp-oaqPCsdEORz7iA Finally, a big thank you to the MMRG Committee and Club for organising the exhibition and taking the chance on giving us the chance to give the layout its first public showing. In particular, thanks to Alex Hall, MMRG Exhibition Manager.

Less than two weeks to go now before the show at The Roundhouse in Derby! This last weekend, we had a testing and shakedown session at Mickleover Community Centre with the intention of getting everything fully tested before we need to run the layout for real at the exhibition. This was the first time we had been able to set up all the scenic boards together since my mega-wiring changes and our scenic additions and it was also the first time we have attached the scenic boards to the fiddle yard. I think it's fair to say that it's big; very big! We had our fair share of challenges and we finished very late on Saturday night/early Sunday morning. We only had until midday on Sunday, but I can say that for one, I really enjoyed running it and we do now have an operational layout. The weekend at Mickleover was invaluable and we are now much better prepared for The Roundhouse and hopefully, things will go ok there too. There is still some scenic work to do, which will be completed between now and the show, but the following YouTube clips give a brief idea of the set-up: I haven't made these public yet (I'm still a novice with YouTube!), but I'm hoping that sharing these links will work.

Anyway, we actually might want to prevent the staff from escaping... I had a colleague, when I worked at Craigentinny in the '80s, who had been a supervisor at Duddeston in Birmingham. The Manchester - Birmingham Mark 1 sets in those days were vacuum braked and didn't have automatic slack adjusters on the brake gear. Every few days they needed adjusting - known as pin-shifting - and none of the staff liked this job. One night during a pin shift, my colleague who was also on-call, got called away to an incident. When he returned, all the staff had gone. They'd just done a runner and left Andy to finish off the pin-shift on his own!

Or you just walk in through the gate, which would be open most of the time anyway. I haven't added those yet by the way. I wondered the same thing - i.e. Which way round the posts should face and I can see your logic Mike, so I did some research. On the packaging from Ten Commandments, it shows them facing the way round I've put them, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's right, I looked at some real fences that I pass on my way to work in Derby. The tops of the posts on those also face inwards, so I at least have a prototypical precedent. I suspect it may depend on ownership of the adjacent land and the space available at the boundary. If the posts face outwards, then they overhang somebody else's land and encroach into their space. I suspect both ways round are therefore accurate.

With just a month to go until the Derby exhibition, it's been a busy few weeks, so I'm taking a weekend off. I think I deserve it and my wife certainly does with me having been out in the garage each evening and weekend recently. As always, most of the work won't be directly visible to those watching the layout, but the results should be. There have been many more wiring alterations to take account of the changes to the track work, which also nessitated a change to the points control panel. These are just about complete and ready for testing. There is also a new panel for the additional Kadee electromagnetic uncouplers. The more visible changes have been to Board 7. This was the new board which was added in order to accommodate the relocation of the fuel point to where our fiddle yard used to be and the transition off-scene to the new rear fiddle yard. Graham's last post showed a photo of it as it was a few weeks ago, but I've shown it again here so you can see the contrast: Over the last few weeks, the new Wellington Road Bridge has taken shape and more scenery has been added to it: This week, I've added more grass and weeds and the security fence down Girdleness Road from the bridge to the depot entrance: Graham has also modified a section of the maintenance shed that had to be removed so it would fit its new location, into a depot stores and it looks really good: We have a shakedown session booked at Mickleover Community Centre in two weeks time to identify as many bugs as possible, so we can (hopefully) fix them before the show. The layout is now too large to set up at my house, so this is our best option. We'll give you an update as things progress.

Just a few things have been going on over the last couple of weeks: Graham has finished laying the track on the fiddle yard, so I've started wiring it: The lighting gantries in the yard have been extended to take in the additional road, which is now where the maintenance shed used to be. This is the first gantry on test: In addition to adding an extra three lights along the gantries where they have been extended, I've also added them facing in both directions, which is more prototypical. We've installed the third gantry this afternoon. The glue is still drying and the right hand support is still to be added (although that end of the gantry can't be seen in this view): On the approach to the sleeper discharge road, we now have a crossing, to allow access from the maintenance end of the depot to the cleaning end. This view also shows part of the mainline, looking south. Signalling cable troughs are in the process of being installed. The bridge over the mainline at the south end of the layout still isn't fixed in, but it has been surfaced now. This is an occupation bridge, so it isn't a metalled road; it's dirt and weeds: Looking north from the southern end of the layout: cleaning and stabling roads on the right, farm track ahead, leading to the bridge and the mainline stretching off to the north and Aberdeen station and the city centre:

Happy New Year to all our followers! More progress over the last few weeks. Over Christmas, I made a bridge for the south end of the layout to help disguise the scenic break. This is a plywood shell, covered in DAS and then scored to represent the stonework then painted and weathered: Before painting: After painting, in situ for trial-fit: After a few false-starts, I'm now reasonably happy with the sleeper discharge road. It needs the CET equipment adding and then weathering, but the effect is getting there, with the concrete apron and walkways evident. Also the retaining wall is now in place: This week, Alex and I have started to experiment with some scenic additions. There's still a lot more to do, but I'll keep adding updates over the next few weeks as progress continues:

Things have been a little quiet on the forum recently, but that doesn't mean things haven't been progressing on Kirkhill. Here are a couple of photos taken this evening of developments on Boards 1 & 2: Looking north, sleeper discharge road on the left (this is where the shed used to be) and main line to far left, disappearing off-scene in the cutting: Same two boards, looking south: There will be an occupation bridge over the tracks to partially hide where the mainlines go off-scene. More of this to follow. Thank you for following us on RMWeb over the last year. All the comments and likes etc. have been a great source of encouragement and we look forward to bringing you more news of developments in the New Year and meeting some of you at exhibitions in 2017. So far, we are confirmed for the Mickleover Model Railway Group's Derby Exhibition at the Roundhouse in May 2017 and have just been invited to the Alsager Railway Association's exhibition on 4th - 5th November 2017 in Crewe at Bentley Motors. Wishing you all a great Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Tonight I've reached a significant milestone: track-laying on the main boards of Kirkhill is now complete! The up and down mainlines now make the transition on to the bridge board which will connect to the fiddle yard: The connection to the fiddle yard will be single track to make it easier for accessing all roads from either up or down main, so this will be via a curved point on the bridge board. The mainlines cross from Board 1 to the bridge board at quite a shallow angle, which made getting the alignment more difficult than on any of the other board joints we have. All our others are straight, so two sleepers either side of a joint are secured with three track pins each and this seems to have worked well for the last six or so years. It doesn't work at a shallow angle, particularly with concrete sleepered Peco Code 100 track, so I've gone for the copper-clad paxolin method: It certainly doesn't look as neat, but nothing derails over the transition, which was the problem I had originally and because this is the scenic break, it will be hidden in a cutting, under a bridge, so it won't matter. That just leaves completing the wiring and the scenery.....oh and building the other bridge board.....adding more uncouplers where they're needed and then matching it all up with the fiddle yard when Graham's finished it. Tomorrow, it's off to the NEC and the Warley Exhibition with a reasonable shopping list of things to complete the scenic parts.

OK, so as Graham said, I've been laying more track - exciting eh? Well actually, there's been quite a bit of progress: What is now the wash road, was our fuelling road originally, so I've had to take out the original plastikard bases that were the fuel aprons and also the track had to be re-laid. In order to fit the original Knightwing aprons, I had to cut the ends of the sleepers off, so without the aprons there, it would have looked odd. Hence new track and also a new uncoupler beneath the board. This doesn't really show the new track that well (it's too far away), but it gives a good general impression: I've also extended what was our loco holding siding as Graham said, so it can now hold a 5-car rake: What was our shed road, will now become the sleeper effluent discharge road with concrete aprons and walkways each side. You can see the wood which will form the walkways to the side of the sleepers: I've also progressed the mainline, but now I'm at the point where it leaves the viewing area of the layout and curves away off, on to the bridging board which will link it to the fiddle yard that Graham is working on. I have a bridge board from a previous layout (good bit of up-cycling), so now it has cork tiles on it and is ready for painting and track-laying. I've also added dowels to it and coach-bolted it to Board 1 of the layout. That way, when it's painted, I will be able to get the curves passing from Board 1 to the bridge board to pass smoothly over the join. This photo shows the curves, although incomplete at this stage and you can see the gap cut in the back-scene, so the trains can get through! I actually need to enlarge it slightly. The mainline will run through a cutting and under a road over-bridge as it goes off-scene. Between the sleeper road and the mainline will be a hill, with a retaining wall next to the walkway. This will form the support for the ends of the lighting gantries, which will be extended, with additional floodlights. I've no idea whether any of the above makes sense to those of you reading this, but trust me; I know what I'm doing (I think!).

Some further progress this week on Kirkhill. I've now installed the trainwash on Road 1 of Board 3 and added a new uncoupler on Road 2 - you can just see the new area of ballast on Road 2, a little beyond the wash. Just to give an idea of the changes that have taken place, here's a "before shot", taken from operator's side of the layout, after we added the extension, but before making any other alterations: and here's the "after shot", taken from a similar angle: Progress is a bit slow at the moment, because the glue holding the ballast is taking ages to dry with the low temperatures out there in the garage! The next jobs on this board are to sort out the scenery and amend the wiring underneath the board to take account of the track changes and the new uncoupler.

Hi, I hope you enjoyed reading the Kirkhill thread and glad you think we captured the atmosphere of a depot. Regarding the question about whether a 47/7 could be controlled from another: it couldn't. Although it seemed advanced at the time, the Brush two-wire control system was quite basic by today's standards. In theory, the electronics could have done the job; all they did was convey messages between the control units in the loco and DBSO, but the hard-wiring in the locos wasn't there in the 47/7s to enable control messages to be broadcast onto the two RCH wires. All the loco could send were wheel slip, general fault, engine stopped/started and fire alarm messages. I seem to remember that Brush also provided BR with similar two-wire control equipment that was fitted to a couple of 47/3s which was for multiple working, although I think only two were ever fitted as an experiment. By then, BR probably had enough Class 56s with multiple working wired as standard to make Class 47 conversions uneconomic. Your question has made me wonder though whether a DBSO could have controlled two 47/7s? It's not something I ever thought about before, but I don't think it would have worked because there would have been three sets of equipment rating to modulate frequency in a system that was designed for two and I think the fault messages would have become seriously screwed up! Also, to be honest, there was nothing to be gained from it: Class 47/7s were like hens teeth anyway in terms of availability, so there were never enough to be able to afford the luxury of running them in multiple. If a loco failed, you could (and they did) assist from the rear with another 47/7 and drive from the leading DBSO, but then the failed loco had to be isolated in terms of the two-wire control (two-wire control switch on the two-wire control cubicle set to "Normal" as opposed to "Remote").

Hi, thank you.Our next exhibition is due to be in Derby at The Roundhouse at the Mickleover Model Railway Group's annual exhibition on 6th - 7th May 2017, so we've got six months to get everything finished and up to exhibition standard. I reckon we can do it, but we may not have the signalling and control panels completely working by then. I'm planning on doing a lash-up job to get us operational, although my temporary panel from 2009 is the one that we've been using ever since, so who knows!

That's ok Graham. You can make a detour via Tutbury on your way to work this week; they've got plenty there - I had the same problem yesterday. A few quid and a few minutes is all it will take. Sorted!

Bill Prentice..... Now there's a blast from the past! I remember being on an HST with him as a trainee, making our way through the coaches from one power car to the other. Bill came across a couple of youths with their feet on the seats. He explained to them that either they were going to sit properly, with feet on the floor, or the next station we went through, they would be getting off, whether we stopped there or not. Their feet went to the floor - quickly! Bob, the person Ray used to reckon was the best, was the guy at Inverness - was it Jimmy Frazer? Don't think I ever met him, but Ray reckoned he was the dog's whatnots.

Thank you. I'm pleased with it myself. I knew what I wanted to achieve - I had it in my mind's eye - but often it takes a bit of trial and error to get the effect and for it to look like it makes sense. I think it's starting to look that way and it's good that I'm not the only one.

More progress to report on the layout from the last week and this weekend. Graham has started work on the fiddle yard boards. The boards themselves were delivered two weeks ago and Graham has been buying primer and cork tiles to provide the base for the track. He's also ordered the track, so we can expect some good progress over the next month or so. I've been busy on Board 3, which is the one that was just before the scenic break which hid the original fiddle yard. Now that the former fiddle yard area has become the new fuelling point and maintenance shed area and the original bridge has gone, the scenery has had to be modified somewhat. The original hill now has the mainline running behind it, so it's been reprofiled and extended to form a cutting through which the mainline now runs. Before adding the south side of the cutting After adding the south side of the cutting The cutting is formed from insulation foam, covered in polyfiller, painted with emulsion and then covered in Woodland Scenics "Earth blend" to give it a base. Then it will be finished with static grass, horsehair bushes and "forest in a box" trees. Finally, I'll add the snow and frost, but more on this in a later post. Today, I've been laying the track for the mainline which includes the crossover which will give down trains access to depot via the south junction. Looking south from Board 4 to Board 3 Looking north on Board 3 towards the crossover, cutting and Board 4 Looking from the viewing side of the layout The fuel storage tanks have gone, replaced by the cutting and an internal access road linking both ends of the depot will cross the line between the fuel point and double slip via a level crossing where the cork can be seen in the foreground.

Hi Derekstuart, Not at all; we were both Senior Technical Officers (STOs) back in the day. We were responsible for managing the reliability of the fleet, which meant understanding the reasons why it wasn't reliable, which varied from design issues, wear-out, inappropriate maintenance regimes, poor quality spares and also poor workmanship/lack of understanding of the technicalities of the fleet by the maintainers. It meant that we never quite knew what the day would bring. It meant that you needed to know, or be prepared to learn, pretty much everything about everything on the fleet. Ray had far more experience than I did - he'd been doing the job for over ten years by the time I arrived there and he carried on doing it for more than another twenty. I don't think he ever stopped learning and never really got bored with it. The photo was taken in the summer of 1986, when Ray was covering the depot engineer's post (depot manager) while he was away on holiday, hence he'd swapped his dust coat for a jacket. I actually think back on that job - the first in my railway career - as being the one that I've enjoyed the most. Ray and I had a great deal of fun and a lot of laughs. Somehow, we just clicked and we kept in touch over the years. My job in Bombardier eventually took me back to Haymarket on a regular basis and when it did, we would usually go for a pint and a bite to eat. Ray gave me a great deal of advice and encouragement during the building of Aberdeen Kirkhill. He enjoyed seeing the photos and the magazine articles; just a shame he never got to see it for real, but then that just proves that we all need to make the most of the moment, because you never know what is around the corner!