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QUOTE (Greyvoices @ 9 Jan 2013, 15:35) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>...I first thought of modelling Bury St Edmunds but when I dimensioned it for 4mm I soon became aware that to do it justice I would need a room 60 feet long. ... So, the lack of 60' to play with and a complete inability to accept compromises that would enable a 4mm version of BSE, complete with 31E and the must have bridge over Fornham Road plus the cannot do without Thetford and Sudbury branch junctions has led me to the conclusion that I must find another location to model...
The usual problem, even a fairly modest location simply sprawls across the landscape. Sometimes you look at the land area reputedly cash starved promoting companies sparsely installed a very 'strung out' station over, and really wonder about what was going through the minds of those involved. Surely on a modest country branch a single line with a parallel platform and a siding behind it with a combined building for goods and passenger: overall perhaps 50 yards width at maximum, and 200 yards over station limits, would have been enough? Apparently not, from the evidence on the ground.

Nonetheless, I feel you have the space to model the functional parts of BSE if you will compromise on the orientation. Station on one long wall and 'round the bend', and the junctions on the other long wall in essence. Write yourself an alternative history: a promoter other than the actual one that built the line obtained his Act of Parliament for a route on a significantly different orientation, accounting for the curvature; or some other such variant?

 

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QUOTE (Greyvoices @ 10 Jan 2013, 19:24) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>...or should I call you Hatfield...
John, I will definitely answer to that! Happily for me a main line junction station and inner sub service terminus and loco shed that will fit inside my 30 foot space with minimal compression. And it has some GER content too, Swedey Mets, Buckjumper, Little Goods and more can all be seen in BR operation. It is actually a loco fantasists playground, with getting on for 60 classes appearing during the 'end of steam' years. Even a Parker N5...
QUOTE ...until I came across this book did not understood the sheer complexity of ideas and schemes that were vying for parliamentary approval and investment funds. It eventually boiled down to who had the most clout, the deepest pockets and the brass neck to ensure that it was their plan that was the eventual winner...
You left out one final necessary characteristic: greatest physical endurance. The Great Northern got the preamble to its bill 'proved' (that is ready to advance to being read before both Houses of Parliament to be passed into law) after seventy days of continuous committee hearings in undersized and unventilated rooms. The Commons committee clerk responsible was a Mr Mitchell, who said many years later that the smell of that committee room would never be effaced from his memory. (This was the greatest single railway bill ever passed up to that time, and met concerted opposition by the LNWR and Midland interests acting in consort as wishing to retain their monopoly on routes to the north of the UK.)

QUOTE ...a train of GN or NER Warflats (or whatever they called them back then ...
This you should like. A wagon was built for the very purpose, titled 'Rectank', later Rectank 'A' in LNER ownership. The LNER liked the design so well that a variant 'Rectank B' was subsequently constructed. ABS made - and perhaps still offer - a very good whitemetal kit; I have one made up years ago in its bogie bolster form, which was how they did most of their peacetime service.

The first demonstrations of tanks for official approval were conducted conveniently close to London, on the Hatfield estate of the Cecil family. As a boy with many others, we scrambled in and out of the trenches and craters and over parapets in some waste ground adjacent the Commons plantation, near Burnside farm: completely unaware that this had been the proving ground. Hertfordshire clag with poor drainage replicating the awful conditions of the western front extremely competently. Now all obliterated under the Mill Green golf course...

 

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QUOTE (Greyvoices @ 21 Jan 2013, 14:59) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>As I mentioned in an earlier post the rails on the returned layout were in a shocking state...
In my youth I had access to all sorts of groovy analytical lab gear to characterise model railway rail muck and two things were very clear.

It is wear debris from the tyres and railhead, with plasticisers and heavier lubricant fractions acting as a binder.

Nickel silver rail and tyres improve with use with respect to dirt, as the worked surfaces are depleted of copper and polish up.

The way forward is to have both track and wheels in metal, nickel-silver or harder. No plastic tyred wheels, traction tyres, plastic crossings; and don't let soft solder get on the running surfaces.

Lubricate sparingly, ideally with grease which stays put.

Run the trains a lot. The wear debris is dark grey and flaky, doesn't adhere well.

Sweep this muck off the railhead using a drag. I just use hardboard, rough side down, a technique I got from Pendon. Small piece, block of lead on top, weighted up all wheel drive chassis to haul it about daily, job pretty much done on all the running lines. Once in a while I get a soft blobby lump stuck on a tyre. As soon as a vehicle is seen 'hobbling' it is checked and this is generally the cause. I think it is random lumps dropping out of loco mechs, cannot correlate it consistently to any source, just have to live with that.

Using regular nickel silver rail and a mixture of kit and RTR stock, here's an interesting side effect of all this. New rail and tyres offer poorer traction. I can put well run in locos hauling scale length trains up a grade on old rail no trouble. When it comes to the newly laid parallel track on the same grade, those same locos slip to a stand. Needs several weeks of running to get the new rail to the required standard. Never knew that before beginning construction of my present project.

 

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Regarding the cleaning drag my first version was a vehicle. But smplify, simplify, and now it is just the hardboard with the block of lead on top. It needed a lot of power to get up the 1 in 80 grade and also needed to be completely reversible. The arrangement now arrived at is top and tailed by a pair of the earlier design Bachmann 'Peak' chassis stripped down and running as BoBo's , which supply all the guidance necessary to keep it on the rails. I use bar couplings from bent wire to hold the ensemble together. Not elegant to gaze upon, but effective.

 

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Looking back I see that it is Julian who brought up the foam/ply baseboard idea and I have been pleased with its performance ........... it did not warp even though it is very light. I will have to carry out some surgery as the kids layout had no underboard electrics whatsover...

It was something of a Eureka moment for me when designing the current layout, that the DCC track power bus need not be under the track support, as it was just two wires rather than the bundle of switched section feeds, and that's easy to conceal. No need to drill holes for 'droppers' to each rail length, fine wires go under flexi track very easily with a cut in the sleeper base linkages as it is laid.

What about the point motor busses? My arrangement is they go on top of the track support, but at the rear. However the point motors are on the underside: but all groups of motorised points are on separate boards which are wired inverted and tested off the layout, then installed and permanent unions to the track and point busses made then.

...I thought about making an acrylic display cover so that the layout can be dust proof but initially costings for that are not very encouraging (in the region of £200) so if anyone can offer a better suggestion I would be appreciative...

Don't bother! Throw a sheet over it. The problems with a transparent dust cover are that it is bulky, awkward to lift and store off the protected item, and are either lightweight and not robust, or if robust are heavy adding to the handling difficulty.

And finally the sheet dust cover can just be lifted off, taken outside, and have any dust that has settled shaken off. You have to clean a rigid dust cover, carefully...

 

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Right, misunderstood the intent. Possibly my bias showing from one previous experience, I helped with construction of just such a thing, which (good outcome!) gave me the 'kickstart' to resuming an active interest in model railway.

The big issue is that the covered layout has to run very reliably in all respects, or the cover has to come off, with the handling difficulty that goes with that. The solution that was developed - beyond using well established sound practise in layout construction and optimising the model's operational performance - was to operate everything on an every other day basis as the minimum frequency of use.

That quickly got 'old' for the owner, who was a more of a 'once a month operator' and the cover was thrown and a sheet was used. Whip it off, shake it out, prod the loco that didn't start to get it going. That was a DC set up, and DCC may well help in reducing the frequency of operation required. I am convinced that a large share of my layout's 'everything starts every time' reliability is due to DCC; but that's untested for occasional use, because I operate daily.

...vulnerable to purchase bum check elbows...

I can usually work out what a spill chucker has done to mangle the input, but this one has me beat!

 

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Aha! The females of my immediate family (and the broader tribe) restrict themselves to the little smile and slightly raised eyebrows supercilious look.

Except my dear wife, who has been won over by Pullman Cars; and regularly asks if anyone is making any of the Royal train coaches, a couple of which she got to view the interiors at the NRM in time past, via a fellow from her University undergrad days. (There's a real interest in passenger vehicles, her maternal Grandfather was a foreman joiner at Swindon carriage works, and she has some royal vehicle crockery which he 'salvaged' in the 1920s. And then there was the guy working on the L&Y club carriage restoration at Oxenhope, I could see the increasing look of desperation on his face at the never ending stream of detailed questions. He certainly earned the donation that day...)

 

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...The comments about covered layouts are well made and I've started thinking about a theatre stage type of layout with a top and ends...

Now there's a thought. Add a pull down roller blind - like the safety curtain of a real theatre! - and the dust cannot get in while the layout isn't in use..

On this line of theatrical presentation; Miniatur Wunderland. Have they gone to any lengths to keep the dust etc. from the mass of visitors off the layouts? Positive air pressure gradient from layout section to viewing space would be one way.

 

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...(Reminds me of a railway meeting where I mischievously suggested that a "mobile pit" would solve a lot of our rolling stock failures in remote locations and one chap asked where we could get one. I felt very guilty)....

Glad it is not just me. As a youngster in the office I proposed using Nikolai Tesla's wireless electrical supply concept to speed a greenfield project to completion, and someone swallowed it whole. Yet later joy, and this time on the railway front, at an Ove Arup hosted presentation to local residents, on the possibilities for fourtracking the ECML bottleneck of Welwyn and Robbery Bottom viaducts and tunnels. I asked whether there had been any thought given to a TGV style solution, of simply ramping the fast lines over the low hills, including second decks built on the viaducts; for much less constructional disruption to the current running lines. The Arup representative came straight back with 'Entirely possible and would be an ideal solution'; the slow motion explosion in the room was most gratifying.

 

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...The point was well taken that the standard UK couplings were not ideal and that pickups also needed to be improved to ensure smooth running. This was back in the 1990's and I hope that Hornby have upgraded their engineering standards...

Much has improved in RTR OO, by the simple adoption of proven HO mechanism technique since the move to China. In particular the Athearn pattern of a centre motor driving both bogies has made the former feebleness of OO unpower bogie D+E but a distant nightmare.

Couplings though, UK still in the dark ages. Despite near two decades of continuing trouble with tension locks not operating swinging close coupling systems anywhere near optimally, the best practical effort is Hornby's inclusion of the Roco pattern coupler head (albeit on an overlong mount) with their coaches.

Even one of the newer outfits bidding for the 'better than ever' place in RTR OO: 'Accurascale', have not grasped the nettle of informing their potential customers that really you do need to make the move to a coupler that forms a rigid link between the coupler pockets to get the best from these close coupling systems. Equipped with Roco 40271, their fitted mineral wagons have buffer heads in contact, such that the buffers compress on curves.

Or alternatively follow Bachmann's path on a couple of knuckle coupler equipped vehicles by installing their Kadee clone, correctly positioned with the shank through the bufferbeam frame end crossmember; although they then dropped the ball by not making provision for a matching height knuckle coupler on the appropriate traction. (Easy job by DIY.)

Presumably the wall of silence on the inadequacies of tension locks is lest near the entire group of UK RTR OO purchasers run away screaming at the prospect of Tensionloxit...

 

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...one evening, Phil T. Was chattering away about the dual gauge track.

If there's one thing that I wish had been enough of a commonplace in the UK to enable reasonable justification on any mainline layout, it is that NG had been used more extensively. Just so that I could fit in a dual gauge section somewhere, with a couple of divergences and a sway...

 

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The 'Little Goods'. looks lovely, the dusty look suits it at the scale it appears on screen, and the turntable has 'good bones' so will look very well once painted up and located in a brick lined well. You could always go for the Norwich Thorpe look, and part fill it with water. (Doubtless this happened at other GER territory locations.)

...Turntable... I know how this works as I have had it slowly turning using a 12 volt dc controller. I have no idea how to get this working via DCC so that too has to be investigated. There is also the matter of registering (if that is the correct word) with track leading into it....

A loco decoder does the job. If you happen to have one that has no warranty burn out half the the rectifying bridge - so it is no good for a locomotive as it will only drive in one direction - that's a repurposing opportunity, wire a DPDT switch in the motor feed and you can turn in both directions if that's necessary.

Aligning the approach track to the bridge deck rails is no great problem in construction: then you learn to drive the bridge, finishing with a slow creep to bring the rails in line. DCC really scores for repeatability of the dead slow creep on speed step 1. Don't worry about it, this is all an intrinsic part of the DCC package; just like you don't worry about your TV somehow fishing the one programme you want out of a mutiplexed digital stream with 378 channels available.

...I still think of electricity as being magical, a mysterious force that brings light at the flick of a switch but I have no understanding of what's behind that switch...

Quite right too, we can't all be on the team of Michael Faraday and his peers. What the electron gets up to is beyond our imagination.

 

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Ah, all is revealed, you are a member of the chain gang! I was thinking that your recent duty list sounded suspiciously like LA leader or some like role.

There's an idea for your layout, get yourself scanned in 'full dress' and you can preside at the opening ceremony of the new <insert worthy civic facility> amongst the scenery of your layout

 

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I would have to go for something of LNER group profile. A GNR six wheel full brake would be my top pick, I believe Andy Edgson (son of John Edgson of Isinglass drawings fame) was developing a 4mm 3D print kit.

Fall back, either a knocked about Kirk kit (like the Gresley 52'6" brake end that hung about for years in departmental livery on the down side near Finsbury Park) or from RTR knock about Hornby's Gresley 51' non gangwayed brake end to suit.

 

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...Kit built metal full brake with a fine paint job, even down to correctly painted wheels. Surely too good to tamper with though I note a slight warp in that roof line...

Much too good for what would be a pre-group design (ex-NER?) now a tool and stores van for a breakdown train. There's a fine picture credited to RC Riley on page 32 of Hugh Ballantyne's 'Eastern Steam in Colour' A J6 'knick knack' on a breakdown train, the first vehicle of which is a clerestory vehicle of probable GN or GN/ECJS provenance, in the tattiest black 'livery' and more than a little warped.

... I have many others including a variety of Ian Kirk kits........... though I sadly lack an example of the GER mainline shortened Gresley coach...

As I am sure you are aware, not least of the joy of the Kirk kits was the ease with which they could be cut and shut. All those convenient vertical guidelines on the bodysides...

 

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Ouch. Hope it all heals well and dexterity is fully restored.

Were the A&E staff good with you? The past seven years experience with our parental generation as their various declines got underway, and independence had to be reluctantly relinquished to varying extents, have demonstrated to me the quality of the NHS A&E with respect to those richer in years. In my youth in what was then 'Casualty' it was always a very brusque reception, for my own sports and cycling injuries various, or when my future wife was knocked over by a motorcyclist; the contrast came as a real surprise!

What's the dividing line in age I wonder? I haven't been on my own account since turning 30, and certainly don't want to go, just curious...