Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to size my video such that I could upload it to Blogger. This morning, whilst walking the dogs, I realised that I should've put it on Vimeo, in HD, and then linked to it. Like this

If you're not familiar with Vimeo, the little box at the bottom right with the outward pointing arrows will take you to full screen. Highly recommended.

Quite a lot has happened since the previous post. Track laying is complete and all the point motors are installed, wired and tested. The use of three core cable certainly makes the point wiring very simple but it does add to the weight, however this doesn't matter as the layout is not portable. I've glued and screwed a central spine along the full length of the baseboard and removed the front temporary batten (a) because this edge will be cut away to roughly follow the shape of the yard and (b) in order to do the busbar work.

The busbars are each formed from a row of screws and a double run of the earth wire from 2.5mm twin & earth which was left over from doing the club busbars which use the red and black cores. My colour code is red and white as determined by the drop wires.

I have decided to leave the rear batten in place as the land at the back will rise from the baseboard so there is no benefit in removing it. Its isn't glued but this is fine

The road to the station will rise up from the valley and continue past the station yard and over a level crossing where it will make a sharp right turn and run along the back of the station, rising up to the scenic break between the two main blocks of the layout. I haven't decided exactly what will be beside the road but it will almost certainly be cottages, garage, pub and shop. I am a big fan of ScaleScenes as you can print their kits as often as you like which is very cost effective, especially if I decide to have a lot of cottages along the road.

My next job is to make the platforms.

First some good news. The Dapol 57xx arrived with chip complete and did not work on our test track! Solution? Clean the track, at which point it worked fine and Martin's modified loco also worked. Martin is now fitting the pukka brushes and we will then have two locos.

Track laying is under way. I have had two sessions and a third should see it done. Then it will be the point motors and wiring. The main line is dead straight so I wanted a way of trying to achieve this. I settled for screwing a straight edge to the baseboard against which I pressed the sleepers whilst also using a Tracksetta straight. The end result is passable so long as you don't look too hard.

The MDF had a slight bow in it so at present it is screwed to two temporary battens, as if it is a flat baseboard unit. Once the point motors are installed I will fit the actual spines, remove the battens and jigsaw away the surplus board which will then be ready for installation in the loft.

Meanwhile up in the loft I realised that the fiddle yard was too wide so I lifted it, split the boards down the middle and reinstated them to form a 12'-4" long yard which will have just two long roads with two crossovers. Thus we will have six sections. When a train arrives I will reposition the loco and brake van if applicable, and then reverse the train to the furthest available place in the yard, ready for future dispatch. This way I will only require generous access for my large hands (strangler's hands as my loving mother used to call them!) at one position. It's a great theory. I'll report again when the scenic work is complete! It just occurs to me that if I want to operate a FIFO system then it would make more sense for the first train in to go at the front of the yard. I will give this some thought.

Turn Number One

Why is the piece of sheet material which you want always at the back of the store?

It looks like it will fit!

Straight edge and Tracksetta

Work in progress

The first thing you'll notice is that I have re-named the blog. I did that at this point in time because I just learned how to do it! More to the point the name made no sense as the station names have changed along with all of the design concepts.

The detail change of Corkerton to Corkerbridge is because I think it sounds better and feels more appropriate for the major station.

Construction has begun in the loft and we now have some flat baseboards for the fiddle yard which is now located under the main layout. We also have the backscene in the form of brown MDF. Once the joints around the joists have been sealed I will paint some random sky using watercolour techniques but working with white emulsion and artists' acrylic paint.

Our first foray with DCC has not gone well. The old Farish loco failed at the first when its brushes disintegrated. When Martin told me I realised that I had been a bit stupid and have ordered a Dapol 57xx from Model Junction which will come to me chipped and ready to go. Thus we will have a guaranteed test unit. I have also ordered brushes from BR Lines who are specialists in Farish repairs. If we don't get a tune this time I will turn the loco into a static model of a loco being worked on in the Corkerbridge running shed.

Last night I drew Fornham St. Jude full size using Peco point templates and what a good job I did. I expected that standardised format points like we must use would take up less space than those in the real world but I was wrong. The next problem shown up was that some tracks will be too close to accommodate the goods shed so I will build that next. I have in stock a Ratio kit which was given to me, many Christmases ago, by Jackie. Once I have this to hand track laying can begin.

I now have 15 Seep point motors and yesterday I did a bodge test to check that a transformer I have in stock will do the job. It delivers 18v and is rated at two amps. It worked a treat. I intend to wire each motor back to the mimic panel using 3183Y three core cable. Blue to A. Brown to B. Green/Yellow to C. In this way I have a simple colour code for the motor, I can pick up the common (C) from a hefty busbar under the panel and I will only need a label on the cable to show which point it operates e.g. F01 = Fornham St. Jude point number one. I will put the numbers on the mimic panel

The station track diagrams

The diagrams were scanned from the two volumes of An Historical Survey Of Selected Great Western Stations. The terminus was selected simply by its general attractiveness and overall facilities, passenger station, goods shed and sidings, engine shed, turntable. They appear to offer interesting operation. To print it at the correct size was a simple matter of scanning into PhotoShop and resizing as follows. The plans are at a scale of 120ft to 1 inch so by simple measurement you get that the overall size is 11" therefore the real world size is 1320ft which at our scale is 2640mm. The layout drawing is one fifth full size so the scan should be resized to 528mm. However I want the station to fit within one half of the overall layout so I made it 400mm i.e. 2m. I then checked the platform length, 150mm i.e. 750mm which is long enough for 5 coaches and a tender loco. I also checked the track centres which are 5mm i.e. 25mm which is what's required. So this all looks good and the print was pasted into place.

I had previously drawn the two 180° turns and linked them with the back straight. Newquay was positioned and the connecting line added to take the track to Turn 1

Bourton-on-the-Water was selected by a similar set of criteria as above but additionally it needed to be from a single track environment and be compact in its depth. I didn't want any overlap between the stations so I positioned the two tunnel mouths on the back straight and using the method outlined above resized Bourton-on-the-Water to fit the space, again checking platform length and track centres. This time the platforms are 100mm i.e. 500mm long which will handle four coaches with the loco beyond the platform. Again perfectly acceptable.

Construction Plan

Because of the level changes I intend to build the fiddle yard first, then Fornham St. Jude and install them along with the hidden track work up to and including Turn 1. At This point I will have a useable, albeit non-scenic layout. I can then build Corkerton which is a considerably larger job and install it and the connection to Turn 1. The final phase will be all the scenic work, buildings, and all the myriad things which make a model railway

I have no idea how long this will but who cares?! The fun is in the construction every bit as much as it is in the operation.

And now for the good news. We have a design which I like. It's a terminus station out and back design and it has a fiddle yard. So why have I used a fiddle yard? The simple answer is that (a) it was the only way to receive larger trains (b) I solved the real estate issue. My big objection to turning loops and fiddle yards is the space which they consume but I have solved most of the issues. First the fiddle yard is alongside the layout and so does not waste length and by being the lowest point is can be ignored when viewing the layout. Next reversing loops. Although turn one (I number from the main station) will have to be under a scenic hillside in the usual way, turn two is under the main station and so has no impact on space

In the photo, red lines are hidden tracks

The stations are taken directly from standard texts and have not been modified by me (yet). The terminus (Corkerton) is Newquay and the through station (Fornham St. Jude) is Bourton-On-The-Water. My next task is to make a full-size replica of the layout by using Peco's templates. I have made up a master sheet which I must now get copied. I will then build the layout in paper just as you would when working with the real thing. This should produce the final design from which the layout can be built with confidence; particularly cutting the station baseboards to shape.

So now for the bad news. We have another failed design. If you look at the photo you can see that I was working on a tail chaser design with a single through station. It should have had more than one station but I abandoned the design for another head scratching session

Speculations on the source of the 9mm gauge for 2mm modelling, with some observations on the Theory of Scale (with apologies to C. Dickens and S. Pickwick). 

The gauge of the track is the distance between the rails which, in the case of standard gauge track, as used in Britain and large parts of the world, is 4'-8½" (1435.1mm) The gauge of the track for N Gauge is 9mm

 The scale of a model can be stated two ways, either as a simple ratio e.g. 1 to 50, normally written 1:50 or, as is common in model railways, so many millimetres to one foot. For N Gauge this is stated as 2mm per foot but it is also stated as 1:148 (in Britain)

 If we do a little arithmetic (not maths and certainly not math!) we start to see a few issues 2mm per foot is 1:152 based on the following. 25.4 mm in one inch so a foot is 12x25.4=304.8mm. Normal rounding would give us 305mm and a scale of 1:152.5 but this is not very clean and rounding down gives a more usable scale

 At 1:152 the gauge should be 1435.1/152 = 9.44mm or to put it another way 9mm at 1:152 = 9x152=1368mm or 4'-5.86" call it 4'-6"

 At 1:148 the gauge should be 1435.1/148 = 9.70mm or to put it another way 9mm at 1:1148 = 9x148=1332mm or 4'-4.44" call it 4'-4"

 At 1:160 the gauge should be 1435.1/160 = 8.97mm or to put it another way 9mm at 1:160 = 9x160=1440mm or 4'-8.69" call it 4'-8½"

 And there you have it. The original scale for N Gauge was intended to be 1:160 but the locomotive body size which this produced would not accommodate the motors available at the time (1960ish) and so 1:148 was adopted because it was!

 So now the question has to be, when modelling a building which is, say, 100 feet long should you make it 200mm long or 206mm long. My vote goes for 200mm

Yesterday morning I could hear my mentor, Johnny Mann, saying "Young Eric, if the design is becoming too complex then (a) it's probably wrong (b) it will almost certainly cost too much. Think again!" So that's what I'm doing.

I've gone right back to my original broad spec but armed with what I have learned along the way. I don't like fiddle yards, at least not for a home layout. I fully appreciate their use for exhibition layouts where you have a terminus station and the fiddle yard represents the rest of the railway system but when you have limited space, as I do, then to me, they take up too much real estate. So I want all my layout to be modelled and the stations to provide the storage space for stock which is not moving and also the justification for running the trains.

The layout will be DCC, again something I had not intended but once I started reading up on it I became convinced that it was the way forward. (Roxy & Izzie: there is an explanation below). It means that I can revert to my original desire of a continuous loop so that having built and dispatched a train it will trundle round and round while I build another. In due course it can arrive at one of the stations and be handled.

I know that the space I have available is considerably wider than first thought and longer than I originally allocated. You can see in the photo that the layout is 4.2m long and 750mm wide with a further 150mm right under the eaves which adds to the turning circle and provides a straight which can be a cutting and will give access if something comes off the track under the hill.

I was having great difficulty getting an interesting design so I reverted to standard interviewing techniques and to cut a long story short, Fishguard & Goodwick got the job. However the track diagram will be altered slightly and there's no way that the finished station will be said to be a representation of F&G. I just want a diagram that looks believable, which this will.

I have two shortlists for the other positions but I want to resolve Rosedale Junction first.

My next job is to modify the diagram of F&G to suit my purposes.

DCC

In a conventional layout it is necessary to know all the places where you will want to park a locomotive so that you can create isolated sections with switches in a control panel. If you don't do this all the locos will move when you turn up the regulator. Not very desirable!! But, simply put, DCC (Digital Command Control) sends an instruction to loco number one to, for instance,  move forward slowly and all other locos simply ignore the instruction. Thus you avoid a massive wiring exercise and you can park locos wherever you wish, just like on a real railway. Imagine my dad, organising Top Shed, and having to tell his crew "you can't park that loco there, we forgot to put in an isolator"

I have been informed that my niece Roxanne and her girlfriend Isobel (both undergraduate students) are following this blog, so from now on I will try to make my posts intelligible to normal people i.e. not railway modellers!

Minor change. Corkerdale will become Corkerton. There seemed to be to many dales for a layout not set in Yorkshire!

The design at 1:5 is taking shape as you can see in the photo. I have a preliminary shed design (drawn in red because it is above turn 2) which should allow my best mate, Martin, to come up with a control design for the turntable. I have always felt that turntables are the least reliable part of a layout but as my revised design really needs a turntable I must provide one.

The factory at the back of RJ will be a visual homage to Standard Telephones and Cables, New Southgate where I served my engineering apprenticeship but the industrial sidings are my own addition. STC did have a private siding which ran the length of the site but to the best of my memory it was a single road and there was no private loco, not in my day anyway.

The pedestrian access to RJ station is to be at high level with a footbridge traversing the yard. This time an homage to New Barnet station where I was born. That is I was born in New Barnet but not on the station and according to my sister Rosalie's account of that affair it is just as well that I was not!! In order to get the street levels correct I have had to work out the incline for the road which first provides access to the factory and then rises behind the station to justify the high level access. 1 in 14 hits the spot and based on a simple sketch appears ok. Vehicular access will be down a slope, of similar gradient and ending at the left hand end of the yard where the coal merchant will be, however that design is paused while I work on the shed design.

The low relief buildings on the slope will be terraces of houses which I think will work as each house can be dropped to accommodate the slope. I will put the front doors to the left such that the weather step is a modest height. On the level road I will put shops and business premises.

Forget most of what I said the other day. I rang Peco because I couldn't see a Code 80 slip on their website. Well, there's a good reason for that, they don't make one. However, the good news it that this has caused me to re-think the design.

I've gone back to single track main line, end-to-end operation with a possible add-on fiddle yard to justify main line express operation. The scenario is that FSJ has become a popular excursion destination and so will receive occasional trains headed up by large locos. Upon arrival the coaches will be housed in a siding and the loco sent to RJ for turning and re-fuelling. In due course the coaches will be pulled from the siding, the loco attached and the train departed back to the fiddle yard. On other days I won't bother to fit the fiddle yard, which impacts access to the loft, and operate only the branch line activities. The fiddle yard also provides a source/destination for long goods trains.

So to the design, which is currently being re-drawn at 1:5 scale so I can check these ideas. Corkerdale will be the datum and the track runs level to just beyond the crossing point. It then rises at 1 in 100 to turn 1 and is then level until a point just beyond the east end of RJ from whence it rises at 1 in 100 to turn 2 which is level. The track rises again at 1 in 100 to a point just before FSJ which is level. This should provide headroom at the crossing bridge and between the underside of the FSJ baseboard and stock on turn 1. The baseboard for RJ's Motive Power Depot will be at a height to clear stock on turn 2 and will require a ramp of about 1 in 30 but I think this will look ok for light locos running to and from an MPD. It will be slightly disguised by the running road beside it rising at 1 in 100

If you're wondering what's been happening since 13/02/2014 then the simple truth, in model railway terms, is absolutely nothing. I have built a small barn in our garden to house our Marlin Roadster and carried out substantial repairs to my workshop but that was summertime work, so can't really be blamed. No, the truth is, I got it wrong. To quote my dad upon being asked for directions "Well, if I was you mate, I wouldn't start from here" and that's it in a nutshell. So I've gone right back to square one. The baseboards have been dismantled and I'm scheming and cautiously building.

My first mistake was in not constructing a box to define the area of the layout so my first move has been to construct the right hand back-scene and to determine the height of the main back-scene. My next mistake was in opting for a flat baseboard instead of open construction. I then realised that I could use the area under the eves to accommodate reversing loops and so now I have a scruffy sketch of what I think I'm going to build. My next job is to draw this at a much larger scale such that I can reasonably represent the correct track spacing particularly in the marshalling yard. My intention is still to have no fiddle yards and to have plenty of modelling and operational interest.

The layout, in round numbers, is 4.2 meters long and 650mm wide (not including the hidden loops under the eaves.

There will be three stations. Rosedale Junction, Fornham St. Jude and Corkerdale. Why these names? Well, our house is Rosedale; my wife's maiden name and our favourite niece's surname is Corker; Fornham already has a couple of saint's and St. Jude being the patron saint of lost causes, it just seemed appropriate!

The design of RJ will be my own as it is entirely a product of the station's function in the context of a model railway. The two termini will be heavily based on real GWR branch line termini. My desire is to be able to run from terminus to terminus via RJ direct and to be able to run round the main loop. The RJ goods yard will be on the road side away from the marshalling yard as will be the carriage sidings. There will be no engine shed as there are full maintenance facilities to the west and a triangle to the east. There will be basic coal and water at all three stations.

I'm stating all this now because it will be interesting to see if the final layout bears any resemblance to these initial ideas!!