Saturday 7 November 2015

A big rethink.

We’ve had a few operating sessions over the past year. Most of the crew has enjoyed the calamity that has ensued from the signalman getting things wrong. I can’t say that I have enjoyed them as much as others.

When we first started over a year ago, we had seven blokes in the shed and all at the front of the layout. After a couple of squishy sessions I decided to put a couple of people into the access holes in the middle of the layout. With the new branch line station mentioned in the last post, three people were put in the middle.

However, visibility for these drivers is poor. They need advice of where to stop their train. This stops other operators from running their trains. The yard work is also held up by locos going to and from the loco sidings. With the planned harbour extension this will make this section busier and more cramped. It will be difficult for operators in the middle to bring their trains out from staging, run through the station and onto the harbour.
I was taking about this with my wife after a session. Her reply was, “I don’t know why you didn’t just build it around the walls of the shed instead of just to the middle. You could build a lift out section and have heaps of room in the middle to move around.”

That was about six weeks ago. Since then I have been working ideas and plans.
After a few frustrating weeks I began to realise that I didn’t need to make too many changes. I started to make a list of what I liked with the current plan and needed to take into consideration the building kits that I had purchased and constructed or are on the to do list.
I liked the station. That’s staying. I liked the marshalling yard. That’s staying but I have an opportunity to make them double ended. I would have liked to be able to add an extra siding or two. That’s not really going to happen. However, they will be longer. I’ve kept the carriage sidings and they will be accessible from two platforms so hopefully they will be easier to work without blocking the running roads. As the new layout is a large oval, there could be some empty carriage workings around the layout to the right platforms. As I type this, I have just wondered why I haven’t thought of this before.



The layout will be on three levels. Below will be a staging yard with 10 dead end sidings, 8 double ended sidings and one through road giving access to the dead end sidings. More may be added if there is space. The line at each end will climb a 2% grade and reach the main line via a double slip near the lift out section. There will be a small station here with a turn back road for suburban trains coming and going in each direction. Heading east trains will continue to climb, though a planned tunnel, pass through another suburban station and in to the main station. If it is a goods train it will need to cross to the inner line to access the goods sidings. Goods trains upon leaving the yard will need to do two laps before vanishing into staging. Heading west from the lift out section, the four tracks will need to be bi directional to gain access to the right platforms and the goods yard.

The line underneath the town scene along the back wall will be at zero level and in the staging yard. However, the second line will climb to the third level where there will be a branch line station. There is also a peninsular which will be a future harbour extension and another section that could be another place to operate later.


The big issue is that everything needs to come off the layout and I start all over again. I know I’m not the only one to have done that.

Monday 28 September 2015

'Does this mean your layout is finished.'

That's the question I was asked when I visited my local hobby shop and bought a handful of points.

The answer was that I thought that I had finished it last year.

There have been a couple of changes. Gone are the set track points in the loco depot. The 50 class didn't like the reverse 18 inch curves that they produced. I contemplated moving the loco depot to the back of the layout but thought against it as it would be too hard for most of the drivers to work. 

I guess the great thing about having a blog is that you can look back over your meanderings and I found this aspect useful. Since beginning operations on the layout I have found that there are sometimes too many people to run the layout from the front. This has meant that I needed to put people in the middle to operate trains from the staging yard to the front to the layout. The station and goods sidings shunters are out the front, along with a third driver. When a driver brings a train in, he then takes the engine to the depot and swaps it for his next task. This could be taking another engine out or bring another train around to the front. They have all been short tasks which have involved swapping lots of trains. Unless you are the station or goods yard shunter as their engine are the same for the whole session.

That was until now. Over the past week I have rid myself of four pesky staging sidings to create a destination for some of my trains.
It's not the best picture and the scene is in a spot where scenery was never planned. Believe it or not, the four sidings are on the same alignments as before. During the previous ops sessions these sidings held a suburban electric train, a couple of rail motors and a Vlocity set. However, with the last ops session these sidings were used only once. Things seemed to run more smoothly not using them. One of the rail motors still has a destination the other one may need to find a new home. I am contemplating adding sidings under the town scene but that's for another day.

The four sidings have eight different places to spot wagons. The run around will hold four bogie wagons and a CHG guards van and the there is just enough room for a 50 class to work the sidings. One draw back is that most tender locos have a KD coupler on the tender and not the front. As all of the sidings are facing the same way, the engine will be turned using a loco lift. It can then shunt to its digital heart's delight and bring the train back to the front. The engine will drop off its train, be serviced at the newly renovated loco depot (it still needs more work) and then take the next train to its branch line destination. This should take a driver a whole session.

This means that there will be two drivers with jobs that they can work with at their own pace. If this works out well, another similar area may have the same work done to it.

Something else that changed this week was the passenger train line up.
My little plastic people will be able to travel to Sydney in less time and with more frequent services.


Wednesday 12 August 2015

A New Standard

I'm pretty sure that I have an audience of two. They being myself and some computer in the Ukrane, according to my Blogger stats. From this, I can assume that not many will read about this. However...

Last week I received my Eureka 50 class. Just like a kid with a new toy, I raced home from work to play with it. After picking it up from my local post office, I took it straight to my local hobby shop in  Hornsby (Hobbyland) to buy a chip (and thanks to Ian for putting it in) before heading home to give it a few laps of the layout. 

Every new model seems to show a few weaknesses in your permanent way and the class 50 is no exception. It's no fan of second radius curves. This is not too surprising but as my loco depot is full of set track points, there is some replanning in the works.

I did find that the wheel on the leading bogie was a bit narrow. Not by much but enough to make it derail on some of my older Peco points. I adjusted the wheel using a wheel gauge and gave the blades on some of the points a gentle squeeze to bring them in a bit more. Over the years these standards and construction of the points have changed and even though I still use code 100 the difference between new points and points which are fifteen years or more older is fairly noticeable. The last post which I made can show the difference between an old double slip from last century and a new double slip from last year.

It was with the former that I had the most difficulty, especially when going backwards. It appears that the tender doesn't have enough weight in it. When running backwards, the bogie next to the loco derailed. I adjusted the wheels using the wheel gauge but to no avail. When running backwards trough the vital piece of trackwork this bogie kept coming of and shorting the Digitrax Zephr. It wasn't long before the red LED in the tender for the marker lights refused to work.

From what I was able to conclude from observations on straights and flat track (Let's face it, that track was great when it was laid two years ago but expansion and contraction aren't a railway modeller's friends.) when running backwards it appears that the bar between the loco and the tender pushes the front of the tender up. Both bogies are sprung and that can cause a little wobble but the spring doesn't seem to be strong enough to push the bogie onto he track. I stopped the loco from revers on the test track and the bogie next to the loco was not sitting on the track and was easy to push off.
A thumping large nut did the trick but it's too big to fit in the tender. However, the loco and tender ran well through all of the trouble spots on the layout.

I messed about with a couple of sinkers and weights from other sources. In the end, as I had a strip of lead, I folded it to triple thickness and placed it into the area where the speaker will be fitted for the sound version. I cut one of the sinkers above in half and attached it to another strip of lead. The half sinker is placed between the plugs on the left and the e DCC chip with the strip of lead sitting above the chip. The lead is wrapped in electrical tape to avoid shorts and any weird corrosion that may occur. 

It is important to remember that the weight needs to be over the leading bogie, otherwise the bar will continue to push the front of the tender up and you will have the same problems.


I have now bought these weights from Hobbyland which should be easier to use next time. 

Saturday 9 May 2015

Some Things Take a While

Today I picked up my second Trainorama 48 class loco, close to eight years after the order was placed. 

More importantly, I finally put numbers on my ballast hoppers. I bought a rake AR Kits BBW ballast hoppers when they were released sometime last century. I put them together quickly and painted them but for some reason I put numbers on all but three of them. I have no idea why the whole rake wasn't completed. The rest were weathered after numbering. 

After fitting a chip into the 48, I put numbers on the ballast hopper, however, they still need a bit of grime added to them. 



They also need a load of ballast to put on the tracks. 

I've also added another double slip between the station and the goods sidings. There was a crossing originally but this restricted access to the yard. Trains leaving or entering the yard (where the loco is in the picture below) could travel via the loop only. I thought that it would be operationally interesting which it was but it soon became to much of a challenge. At the time, I also didn't have two double slips. 




I took the opportunity to replace the medium right hand point as the old one was originally a second hand point which had some wear and tear and was causing some shunting difficulties with one of my locos. 

Now trains leaving the yard can run through the station using either the loop or platform five. 

Another job that has taken a while has been constructing the carriage shed. I'm building the shed from foam core board. The shed is half built for the moment but in place. Even in its half built state it protects the carriages within it. I reckon that a shell of thin cardboard and brick paper should finish the job. 

It could be a while yet before this job is complete to but in the meantime the car park behind the shed is done. 


Sunday 4 January 2015

Park Life

Summer holidays are a great time for modelling. The track has been down for a while and trains have been running. It’s time to get a little more serious about the scenery. 

My idea is to start at one corner and work my way around the layout. The far left hand corner was the place to start. The plan was to make this area a botanical gardens or park. The park would be hosting sculpture display, a bit like Sculpture by the Sea. Up the back of the scene would be a mound with standing stones with druids. It may not be very Australian but I like standing stones and I have already messed about with historical reality in previous posts anyway. In July, I acquired a Faller kit of the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, Germany, at a discounted price. It would look good in the corner.

Originally I thought that this corner of the layout would not be seen but after squeezing seven blokes into the shed one night for a running session, I would need to move an operator into the access hole near the park scene. This meant that this scene would need to be fairly decent. I also wanted the scene to be lit for night running, or night photography at least.

Lights and people were added to the planetarium during construction.
Strip LEDs (the type that you cut into strips of threes) were used to light the outside corridors of the planetarium.

The area still needs a few trees.
The area of the park was built up using polystyrene foam. The footpath was built up using foam core board overlaid with Scalescenes pavement. The walls are picture mounting board covered with Scalescenes stone prints. The road is Scalescenes tarmac. The standing stones were picked up from a gravel path and the druids are Prieser monks painted white (and given more hair.) The fire in the middle of the stones is from a LED tea light candle. The flame cover is still in place for now and I will need to add some sticks.

Druids gather around a fire in the centre of the standing stones. Records show that druids have been coming here for 4 000 years.
The scene is yet to be finished. It needs a bit more tweaking and some trees, which I have yet to make.

A dark sinister figure lurks under a lamp post on a cold winter night.