jukebox

I'm rather tempted to post a photo of Jimmy Page on stage whilst Jeff's away, in response to that last post...

Well, well, well. It only took a year for the announcement, and it will be another before we will see Hornby's RTR P2 on the shelves. That's okay - I tip my hat to Hornby for having the courage to take a risk on such a large beast. So, yes - assuming they get it substantially right - I'll be happy to put my money on the counter for one.

Could it be 60139 ???????

I thought there were only 39? Despite the firm grip, Jeff still had trouble keeping his thread on track...

Ah, now thats the view you need! If you look closely, the side wall actually projects beyond the "column" towards the bottom of the mouth - although when modelled this may not "look right", so perhaps you could use modeller's licence, and have the toe of the retaining wall end in line with the tunnel mouth edge of the stone column. Let me know if that doesn't make sense and i'll sketch what I am bumbling about... Also, I do agree with Michael on the capping stones - esp. now I can see then from this angle. (Trust me, I'm no engineering genius! But some of this comes from what you can I have talked about before - things "looking right", be it thickness of bridge spans, angles of wall etc... like a lot of what we do, it comes from observing real life buildings and structures and wondering 1/, how they did something and 2/.why they did it the way they did. I explained to my son the other day I could never be an electrcal engineer: if I can't see what is happening, I often struggle to understand it. That makes me a natural as a civil engineer!) Scott

Those capping stones across the top may project out fromnt he face of the sidewall, Jeff... I'd also see if you can find a more head-on view: I suspect the side wall is not vertical, but canted. Check the width of the column of stones either side of the portal at both the top and bottom of the portal. Regards Scott

Why wouldn't you just make the "steps" a nominal 20mm deep, Jeff, and stack them one atop the next, like a splayed deck of cards? Since you are building "on the flat", they would have self supported once the PVA went off. I guess if the polyfilla helps, it's no bother, but boxing in with a couple of vertical risers between the "floors" of wood you have now would also have got you there. Not a criticism, just food for thought.... Cheers Scott

Good morning/evening (delete as appropriate) all. I am comfortable with where I am with the MPD now - I may need to tweak and tinker when the track goes down, but as a concept, what I have is light years away from the fiction I started with, and will be a better model for that effort, I am sure. Hannem was indeed a curates egg; Graham shot some "on board" videos with a fob cam; if I can find the links I will post one here, to give everyone a tatse of what he'd achieved (although he was the first to admit it was a work in progress, no less than 30 years on from when he first started it!) Yes Iain, a summer's evening here, and not too shabby, either - we hit 32C this afternoon, so they lawns got their last mow of the year this afternoon, after I spent the morning at nippers (surf lifesaving club) with the kids. It's well and truly action stations around the house at this time of year. And inside the house, too: Yesterday, occupation of the railway room formally commenced, with the ritual climbing of the the 17 steps to Stockrington. About 20 times (which is rather appropriate considering Jeff is in Stockton, and descending into his bunker - I'm in the Southen Hemisphere, after all!) All the goodies that have been accumulating in my study are finally out of the way: flex track, turnouts, those blue shopping bags are the telltale signs of a visit to DCCconcepts, some tubs of rolling stock, all securely wrapped up for th e last 12 months... on the right is 30m of timber - mostly "4 x 2"s - recovered from the temporary works needed to build the extension, plus the larger off cuts of the 12mm hardwood floor boarding. Not sure if or how I can use the latter, but it looks useful, so I was loath to se it thrown in the skip... I have two tubs (those 50L plastic storage boxes that are a dime a dozen these days) of smaller pieces of each material as well, that I will try and keep int he shed until I need. I figure that if I bring too much up, I will start playing the shell game of having to move too much stuff as I build: the trick is to bring enough up to get the long side built, then shift the materials under that side and out of the way. Of course as I paused to admire the handiwork, I realised I'll have to shuffle some of this lot out of the way to get curtains fitted. That's an early 2013 job, after which I can get cracking. But at least I'm underway. Scott

*cough* ...so would that mean you are working in 0.004m scale, Jeff? *cough* Me thinks mm should be considered the de-rigueur metric unit for engineering - even model railway engineering.

Well, it's always "not quite enough space"... when I tried to run a line along that imaginary top boundary, it didn't seem to mesh as well as it should. So with a little tweaking, I came out with this: As the right hand and upper limits ot the sketch are actually layout edges, I was keen to keep a 100mm barrier around them - so the boundary did not want to play nicely - if i ran the track stright, and avoided the turntable, it looked too parallel (still). I was thinking of having a coal stockpile to the side of one of the roads on the right - they seem to be a very common aspect of NE MPD's, but one that I have never seen modelled. I might even be able to extend the headshunt at the upper left - the area behind the shed is the embankment and viaduct for the Monkwearmouth-esque bridge, so there could be a little wriggle room to play with. I like that besides the shed roads, there are still some places where locos coming off shed can be held - the head shunt off the slip, the loop track that leads to the turntable spur, even the wandering track at the top of the board. There's a 300mm square that looks rather empty behind the turntable - I shall study my LNER Shed in Camera volume to see just what sorts of infrastructure there was around a steam depot. I'm sure I will find something of interest - it's a rather large piece of real estate - maybe a boiler sludge pond, with some reeds and a few ducks on it???

Ah, now that's better! I, too, was struggling how to justify the wayward path of that uppermost track - I was thinking that I may need to introduce some terrain* that needed avoiding on that edge of the layout. But now that you have marked it up, a laneway, road or even just a fenceline there would make good logic, and provide a reason for the track to run along as you have drawn it. If it were the laneway leading to the shed, I could even take it across the headshunt and run in down next to the side of the shed. I only have the plotter for another day or so, so I'll burn the midnight oil tonight to update that diagram and print it out. *The area where Northmoor MPD will sit is the only area I plan to use a flat board as the track base - so the prospect of having to introduce contours here was a little off putting. The logic here is that an MPD is one of the few areas on a railway that you would actually find large open flat expanses - most other places, the object of the exercise was to shift as little dirt as possible to fit the tracks in. Therefore, the rest of Stockrington is planned to be open topped L-girder construction, so i can try and let the land flow in contours, not rise off a plain. Coming in 2013, as they say.

I've got two different Double Slips "at hand" as it were - the Peco, which is 600mm radius, and a Shinohara #6, which is 1067mm radius ~ allegedly (I suspect it may be a little less). I do like the idea of using the smaller one - in keeping with the "cramped" way a shed yard flows - I may be able to tweak the plan a bit more so that upper four roads are accessible by long wheelbase and kit locos as these would pass straight across the slip, and the bottom four shed roads could be for smaller and RTR locos. But that would keep those same larger locos from being postioned under the coaling stage; it may just be a compromise I need to make - we shall see. I will be laying one of the Shinohara slips early in the piece, as it is used to get down to the storage roads, so I'll be able to take a look at how much that taxes all my locos before I proceed with installing the Peco ones anywhere. On another note, I forgot to relay the sorry conclusion to the floorboard debacle: it turns out the engineered (floating) floor has less tolerence to local level variations than the direct stick boards, as the tongues in the tongue-and-groove board tend to sheer off if overstressed, and the village idiot builder's floor was that badly built that the floor installer could barely get it to the edge of tolerence, let alone level, and so was compelled to run the boards across the room (there is a 10mm drop over 2m across the face of the room right near the doorway). He claims he explained that to me when he told me how he planned to make it all work - but clearly he didn't do a very good job of it, given my reaction this week. Mind you, he also claims I spoke of installing carpet in the room - which is utter b*ll*cks, as I'd never contemplate carpet in a railway room - I would have gone a vinyl or other faux finished floor. But, honestly, I just have to stop thinking about what might have been: I run the real risk of ending up with depression (or worse) if I stew on it any more - it's been a year of utter anguish managing these moron tradesmen, and like so many other things, this last mess can't be made right, so I'm stuck with it, and I just need to learn to live with it, or I risk doing my health a serious injury. The microscopic grain of silver lining is that I now can shift the myriad boxes and materials upstairs this weekend, and feel like I am moving forward. I just have to focus on that.

Hi Michael - the blue line is the rising track that comes from the storage yard (It continues off to the left. Post #45 shows more of the detail) The siding to the coaling stage joins it, then it meets one of the running lines via a trailing turnout. The configuration is almost identical to Stockton - which is where I got the inspiration to run the coaling stage siding off the mainline. But I do see what you mean - any movement from the first four loads of the shed that requires a trip to the other shed roads or turntable, would foul that main turnout that joins the running line - something avoided in the real thing as there is more than twice the total length I have to fit the track from the shed fans to the the mainline connection: But I think I have a soloution.... I agree with all your suggestions Robert - looking at the LNER diagram, I see a water column immediately to the left of the coaling stage as well. To fit a headshunt, I would need to use a double slip at the throat - possibly slightly modified as on a certain LNER themed layout you may be familiar with? - but it certainly does work. Something like this: I do believe I can get the shed roads a touch closer to one another, and group them in four pairs. Also, the shed is essentially two four road sheds, and I'd adjust for that as well, but it seems that I can get a plausible NER flavoured MPD to work in that space. A good result! Scott

Thanks for your kind thoughts, Gordon. Apparently Graham was an accomplished painter, too - spent a large part of his last few months completing commissions of naval subjects. There are some wonderful cameos on Hannem Central - and his stable of 90+ locos was something to envy. His legacy will be the hints and tips he left in his replies to so many people's questions "how did you...?". I had actually sent him a PM about gradients on Hannem that went unanswered in late November - which I admit made me wonder if everything was as okay as he'd suggested. In hindsight, obviously it wasn't... I'm only 45, but his passing has made me feel quite mortal. He was very matter of fact about his health - but the speed at which the prostate cancer took hold still shocks me. Co-incidentally, I read this quote today: "Every time you kiss your child goodnight, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. (It) will make you love her all the more, while reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass" (Epictetus). It is so very true that we sometimes forget how temporary our passage on this planet is. An "LMS day" on the late Graham Jowett-Ives' Hannem Central

Okay, in an attempt to keep things positive, let's change gears: I've SCARM'd the Stockton trackplan: One of the limitations of SCARM is that it ends up being very set-track-esque. When it comes time to lay out the MPD, I will use a combination of the SCARM output and a 1:76 plot of the actual Stockton MPD, and then do some surgery on the turnouts to help them fit in a more prototypical fashion. For the representation above, I kept the coaling stage, lost the ash road, and shifted the turntable - now 70ft - to in front of the shed , adding a two way throat to the 'table. It was very tempting to fill the open space around the table with "just a few more tracks", but I don't want to meander away from the Stockton/Haverton Hill ethos, which I think I have started to capture in the latest incarnation...

Well, there's some small mercies at play here, Fortunately. It's not my ham fisted builder who did this, but the (previously impeccable) floor installer. This guy has been so good to us - tolerated four re-schedulings totalling four months, and arranged a workable soloution to the Frankenstein floor that he was left to lay on by Steptoe and Son. We're incredibly pleased with the rest of the job he did upstairs, and in cladding the stairs themselves, and would still recommend him to anyone we knew who needed a floor. Here's the hallway and landing leading to the railway room, which you are correct Gordon, is perpendicular to the way I want the layout room: I suspect the guys laying it will have seen the hallway and figured they needed to match that... That floor is proper polished Marri floorboards, stuck and nailed to the chipboard structaloor underneath. But I didn't want to use that in the layout room, because 80% of it will disappear under the layout and it's not cheap, and each time I split paint or glue, or made a mess, I'd be cursing myself. So I specified a laminated floor for the railway room. It's 1/2 the cost per square metre, and comes in clip fit tongue-and-groove packs of around 1500mm length. So in theory, it actually should be a lot easier to recover and re-install (apparently the Marri cannot be lifted - even though they are 12mm boards, they will just splinter when lifted...). I did think about how much I would have to be offered to accept it to "use as is". We've been charged under £400 to lay that room (that's lay, not including materials), so in the big scheme of things there's not a lot in play. Honestly, if he offered to do it for free, I'd still want it fixed... As for the alignment, Gordon, you have it in one: going long ways makes the room look longer. And the problem with leaving it as is, the operating well would have a seies of staggered joints in every second row of timbers. It would just look wrong. The vexxatious thing is the time it steals. Any plans to move boxes of railway supplies this weekend have now been scuttled. Where's that bottle of scotch I've been saving....

We have a winner! I'd specified - in writing - that the boards were to run the same direction as the long walls. So yesterday afternoon, when Mrs Jukebox proudly emailed me a photo of what was to be the final task that needed to be done before I could get going with Stockrington, completed and ready to occupy, you can imagine the incandesence... The power situation is, I think, fine. Four double GPO's - two at each end - should cover me, Oh well... Scott

There are days when the process of building a dedicated layout room is, quite simply, enthusiasm sapping, and I am so utterly fed up that it takes all my self control not to scream. Yesterday was one of those days. Prosecution exhibit #1: Stockrington, layout room: Mrs.Jukebox thought I was joking when I told her what was wrong. I wasn't. And I'll be damned if I am going to leave it like that. Picked it yet? Cheers Scott

7th December, 2012: Jeff admits to a "one a day" habit.

I have just learned that Graham Jowett-Ives (Capt. Jango) of Hannem Central fame passed away yesterday. This is incredibly sad news. Graham was an inspiration to me, and someone who I was proud to have known, if only briefly, and from a great distance away. His layout, Hannem Central, was the sort of old fashioned "fun" that we sometimes lose sight of in our quest for realism. You may have see it in a recent Railway Modeller, if not, there is an extensive thread here. He would not have wanted us to be saddened at his passing - he knew he was ill, and felt he had lived a full life - but I do wish I had been able to say goodbye. RIP friend. Scott

So long as it isn't simple to short, Jeff! Nope. That doesn't always work, either. I haven't had more than a Bressingham of track to run trains ince 1985, but that has never curbed my appetite for locomotion. I think the only cure is actually filling all the spaces you have available for loco storage, thus preventing the casual acquisition of more. Cheers Scott

Hi Robert; Yes, the small turntable would be a boon scenically, but operationally? Another issue with having it where it sat in the real world is how wide the baseboard would be. However, a 70ft-er could be put where the tool/van sidings are.... I agree with you about the relative sizes of turnouts and that small ones do not look out of place in a depot. I guess I am being rather cautious until I actual get the Mikado finished. Lets just say it would be an epic tragedy if I found the pride of my fleet couldn't reliably traverse into the main shed. I've got about 10 hours work to get the chassis for The Bruce operational - once that is sorted, I can do some proving trials. As I said, it may just be that I need two of the eight roads serviced by large radus turnouts and the rest can be medium/shorts. Yes, I had fixed the ash road as a "must have" - in reality I think the locos were cleaned out in front of the shed itself! There are some photos that show the clinker and muck deep in piles there. Removing the ash roads would make using the real plan much more possible... On Tuesday I was able to print a 1:76 scale plan of the real Stockton using a our plotter at work, as well as a full sized copy of my third iteration design. The more I look at it, the more I want to follow the real deal. That's a good thing, I think! Having said that, I'd like to see your sketches - maybe an amalgam of features will be the best way forward. Once the floor is down in my room - Monday, allegedly - I shall roll both of my plots out, and have some pondering time. Me, my plans, and a glass (or two) of shiraz. That's the ticket! Regards Scott

You can put that down to the harsh sunlight at Stockrington, Jeff - those are bog standard Bachmann A4 SNG's, one renamed/numbered 60012 Commonwealth of Australia - under less harsh light, all is normal: The MN is Canadian Pacific, from that same early Hornby release in the 2000's as yours - the match for Bachmann's shade of BR Express blue is uncanny! Just what it is doing in the NE of England in the early 1950's remains to be explained.... Regards Scott

I, too, have committed this sin, Jeff:

Hmmmm. 100 locos. 98 followers.... I hope he isn't offended, but it seems like a rather nice way of saying "thank you" to Gilbert, helping fill all those vacancies, and getting one's self immortalised on the footplate of one of RMWeb's star attractions at the same time, does't it?