pirouets

I am thinking of setting up a crowd-funding exercise.......as so many people want to see me operate my model with DCC I only think it fair that they contribute.

I know the room is fairly big, but once tickets are purchased where would the audience sit to watch such a piece of performance art? I can only think that is what you mean with the above statement.

I watched the video and that got me wondering about your plans for scenary on the layout and how far will the stretch in either direction once things get past the station throat?

Spent a few enjoyable hours there on Sunday. Found i may have to venture into gwr/lnwr as Hope-Under-Dinmore was the one i wanted to take home despite being a blue diesel era modeller.

I have sneaked into the train room while having my lunch. I have set the layout up for a full operating session. 22 trains, 10 DMUs, 10 hauled trains and 2 parcels. Equal number of steam and diesel locos, 11 of each.

 

Plan is to use a pack of cards, black cards for trains to come to the station, spades from Doncaster sidings, and clubs from Manchester. Red cards for trains to depart the station, diamonds to Doncaster and hearts to Manchester. Trains to depart sidings in the order of the sidings. The station departures are first train Platform 1, second platform 5, then 2 and 6, 3 and 7, finally 4 and 8. Trains arriving will be allocated an empty platform of my choice. Joker will be a fuel or coal train for the loco yards.

So reading this you have succumbed to DCC but your meaning is Direct Card Control

I'm still working on a timetable for my layout but in truth I think the biggest thing is my back and how long that will cope before it gives up the ghost as an a 12*6 shed there is not a lot of movement during operating that will keep it loose. If that wasn't a factor then for me it will be around 1 1/2 to 2 hrs.

Ideally I will come out with a way of operating that has some natural stop points so it can easily be picked up next time.

So the leak has caused a bit more damage to the area I laid with cobble stone. Not sure what the pln will be but I think I can come up with a new surface without to much trouble. The leak I think is from a nail in the roof felt about 12 inches away from where the water actually drops down so hopefully it will be dry tomorrow an I can seal it and any nails either side. The roof felt itself still looks good and I cannot see damage anywhere else though I am starting to sow the seeds for getting a large MK2 shed in the future.

I've been working on the house backs and decide that the water damage is not an issue so have now put 3 of the low relief buildings together and so far I am happy. The windows have been made using a card template backed with OHP accetate to give a better 3D effect than just printing into the accetate directly. The damaged area is going to have ivy growing over it and a bit further up the building. I

In terms if how the scene will be finished, each will have a small yard area leading out on to one of 2 options

- Wasteland area

- A greenspace with a tree or two which will break up the brown scene.

Finally I knocked up a new picture for the control panel as the layout had changed a long time ago with the station area then having 2 sidings but I never replaced this. In truth I might still make a new panel as there have been 1 or 2 issues with the wiring.

One other question that is bugging me is what sort of fencing would between the 2 buildings shown to seperate the factory area from the station yard area and store building? Also how would it align by the track as in reality someone can just walk round the fencing?

I've also managed a fair amount of playing trains and the fiddle yard for the upper level is working well as I can run any train in either direction now, so I am starting to redo the timetable to have all movements on it, and not just the lower level station/yard area. This does mean rethinking which loco's are in use on which level as I want to minimise handling as much as possible.

Good photo's and as others have said that is some space. Is the plan to have an operating timetable or will it be run what you want, when you want?

I think we can see from recent posts he likes his Sonos and the hifi is nearly redundant along with his golf has improved at times throughout this thread, though I do wonder if the latter is symbyotically linked so as he cracks on with the layout that will get worse again. That's the way mine seems to go at any rate and looking at the weather this week not sure if I will get much golf in despite the wife and kids being away till Sunday.

Well that just sucks. I've spent the last few days working on the templates for the houses at the back of the layout and had the 1st one comeing together quite nicely and had put it to one side whilst I started to cut out window frames. I heard a little splat sound and thought nothing off it as I had the tablet with me playing a downloaded programme. Thing is I then looked at the model to measure something and the splat was a drip of water through the roof and it hit straight on the model.

So back to square one on the model and also back to covering the nails in the roof again. Quite where the water has got through the roof felt I have no idea as 2/3rds of the felt got a double coating of ronseal pianted on to it to seal all around the nails in the felt.

I wonder if Cambridge Analytica have yet managed to crack the various codes such as P4, OOSF,  and J27 that keep on appearing or if they have determined the social significance of a debate about  OO and 00?   And are they ranking opinions about Network Rail and train operators on the basis of threads on RMweb in order to give DafT the criteria for their future errors.  plans.

I thought politics and religion was banned on here hence my initial concern with ths topic? i've never quite worked out which of those catagories all that finescale stuff actually sits in

So with all the stories around scraping data from Facebook, just what do we think Mr York and his associates do with it?

Personally I think he now employee's the little people from the Railway Modeller cartoons and sends them out to our respective modelling hideaways and based on our latest posts hides the key thing we are looking for. Or alternatively he is planning a bring back Super 4 track campaign with targetted posts and adverts.

Any other wild ideas?

Andy, if you had to have purloined something from the running costs of RMweb for therapy how much would you need?

Mikkel - If we have ready to run now, does the VR headset take us in to Ready to Imagine and no one actually builds anything and Eastwood town looks different every day?

Hmm, just wondering who chairs your planning meetings, takes the minutes, bring the buscuits and coffee, etc. :-)

I haven't done much recently but finally got round to starting on a set of Lima CCT's I picked up ages ago. So far just done a couple of basic swaps to put new wheels in along with removing the old couplings and fitting new NEM standard couplings. Next job is to get some shawplan replacment glazing.

I probably won't run them as a set but will mix them in with the 3 parcels coaches I have to make 2 rakes, 1 for the upper line and 1 for the lower level which will add to the operation of the station itself.

Hmmm, was that a good weekend's modelling or is a hammer going to be involved cos there is always a big enough hammer to fix an issue. I started thinking about the house backs that could fill the corner of the layout. Just before you get in to Paddington on the right hand side is a set of white houses and I have always though the backs would be good on a model. In a nutshell you have a 4 storey building but rather than simply being flat at the back, one side of the building has a room of each floor extending back giving a more interesting shape.

So after a bit of playing around with Powerpoint (It always starts with Microsoft) I had a drawing which I printed off and glue to card. I put the 1st one together with the view that there will be around 6-8 in each of the 2 low relief backs but something kept knawing at me. Had I got my size wrong as it just looked to small. So I got a ruler out and lo & behold, the 12cm I had told powerpoint I wanted was in fact 10.4cm. STUPID PIECE OF SO CALLED USER PROOF SOFTWARE. Now I accept there is probably something I did wrong and a setting I missed.

However in principle I do like the style.

So how did I fix it - The old fashioned way. I always enjoyed technical drawing at school and got a good O level so out came rule, protactor and pencil and I sketched it instead. Funnily enough I found this more satisfying in the end than sitting at the computer so will see how we go from here.

In truth I may mock up 2 versions as I do think using 2mm card the window depth is very thick before the glazing, so maybe I will also do a thinner layer that could then be layed over the thicker card with a window frame glued in the middle. We shall see.

So it turns out curved backscene's are a pain, so its gone. In my head I have 2 pictures forming now. The first would be a continuation of the factory buildings constructed as low relief and then have a yard area up to the track where as the 2nd and I think the idea leading the way would be have some housing which could either be low relief along the sides with wasteland or maybe fully constructed houses giving the impression of roads that end at the railway line.

Either way I think I have a better space to play with now.

I watch quite a lot of sport and 2 standouts for me

John Inverdale as a rugby presenter. His England bias is somewhat ridiculous and I'm an England fan.

Colin montgomerie commentating on golf.

Hahahah, Next time I go into the Shed, I will REMOVE all Goods Stocks and just run DMU'S like Clive does.        

And i'm pretty dure that will trigger something else he will notice about the DMU formation leading to another Dummys Guide reply  

Oh and by the way glad to see your up and about and getting out to shed now.

I can be of no help on the Bridge but past experience says it will be interesting to see how the scene develops either way and as for Mr Mortimore, that is a very useful post and next time I get out to the shed will use it to try and work out where and when I need a van so thanks.

"Controller with the twiddly thing". Is that a dcc thing?

Sitting here telling my wife i need a bigger shed. Any tips?

Have to say a nice job on the boards but how many bits of a4 paper did it take to print the plan?

Hmmm, only seem to be asking questions so apologies for that.

Totally understand the fiddle yard throat idea. I recently came to the same conclusion in there is only so much i can do at once and its made the yard bi-directional as i have a roundy roundy layout with a lower level terminus.

I've always found the fiddle yard evolves once you start running trains and as i type this i am now wondering if your design where you have room for dmu tracks in what would other wise be wasted space may be something i could do as well. To late to pop to the shed now though.

So a bit more thought about how I can use the fiddle yard for the upper lines now its bi-directional. By sheer fluke each road in the yard is made of 3 pieces of track with the centre sections all roughly in the same place. This got me thinking that if I want to store 2 trains of different length, put in insulating joiners and then wire the switches so either the left end + centre or right end + centre gets powered. I can then run them out which ever way I want and the yard will store around 6 to 8 trains in total which will give a fairly good variation in operation.

I have also added in centre off switches so that should I decide the simple act of walking the 10ft between the points to set them is to much for me, I can add point motors at a later date. This is possible the 1st time I have future proofed something. Also not sure why the picture makes it look as though the boards are warped because they are not.

Also the next photo is not showing off stock, but having been looking at (and drooling over) Wibble's Hornsey Broadway I am wondering whether to take the curve out of the backscene. This would give me a number of options for buildings but my initial though is sets of housing backs with a dirt yard area then between the corner of the sed and the track area. Not going to rush this but I have been struggling to think how I would fill the backscene round the bend.

2 posts in a day. Going back to work next week will cramp my style. I've had Dads old stuff since he passed away a few years back hiding in the shed and finally got round to sorting it out. Most of it is pretty old and tatty and I remember it being on my layouts when I was a kid but the loco's came back to life very quickly. Also neither the Wrenn or Lima loco's seemed to care about code 75 track despite the pizza cutter wheels.

The Wrenn 0-6-0 (all £3.25 of it according to the box) amazed me the most given its age yet took a quick squirt of oil and 2 laps to move OK whilst the Hornby pannier was the most locked up. Everything however has had a good 15 to 20 min run in both directions and whilst I haven't got crawling speed back they will all potter fairly slowly. I've also given the wheels a bit of scrape to clean the real much off.

This picture is my Wrenn castle which won't go properly yet with Dads old Hornby coaches and I have to say whilst not up to todays model, it looks good. I think the castle may need a bit of proper care to get it running but we shall see.

Not quite sure what i will do next as I have a B set and Autocoach that go with these as well. Maybe the odd railtour will come out.

So here we are heading in to 2018 and all the normal threads seem to be starting such as Mornington Cresent 2018, 2018 Modelling Resolutions, etc which leads me to the first post of 2018.

Now before we get to the pretty pictures that show the buffers being painted up and installed I have decided not to make any resolutions in 2018 other than to try an think a bit more because it turns out I am just a TOTAL PLONKER when it comes to wiring. As you will see in the first picture I have added 2 green lines an a red one. Why I hear you all cry. Well, for a while now I had been wondering why the isolating section on the outer most line highlighted by the red line did not work and then looking at it I realised it has never worked because i put the dropper to the wrong rail as the droppers for the other 2 are on the rails with the greenline. #MUPPET

To fix this I will need to tweak the switches in the control panel so the switch has its own power feed rather than using the same common feed as all the other section switches.

Anyway now to the pretty pictures and though I say it myself, just adding a painted up set of peco buffers does make a difference. I have noticed i have not painted one of the lamps white which I will do later and I do plan to then dab a red blob on for the light colour itself.

For the factory sidings I decided the buffers would be a more brown/rusty colour

Not shown is also the fact I have also cleaned up the shed and have a dump run of old bits to do. Amazing the junk gathered over time.

So i've been thinking about the compromises and problems on the layout recently such as the amount of compression given the space, the dip in one of the boards as i put to much weight on it once and whether I want the roundy roundy bit and I realised I could improve the operation of the upper track by creating a bi-directional fiddle yard. I only use one controller so its not an issue that at either end the dual tracks have a point back to single line before then opening out to the fiddle yard.

In doing this I have probably increased the available space by 25% and can now run trains in either direction from the yard depending whether they are on the up or down line. I need to look at what sort of control to add as I think I can get around 8 trains in, but 6 will probably do leaving 1 track in the fiddle yard always available to receive an inbound train or simply let something go round and round.

On the scenic front i've put some more cobblestones down in the factory area as well as put the roof on to a low relief factory.

Hopefully I will get a few more bits n bobs done over the next 2 weeks before work calls me back including what am I going to use to make drain pipes for the buildings.

Till next time....

My 10 year old only gave it 5 out of 10. When I asked why, because Chewie scared the Porgs and it looked like he was eating one. Also is it me or has Chewie been on a diet?

My wife on the other hand wants the ironing machine in the laundry scene.

Plot holes, yup but thoughly enjoyed it anyway.