Something i'm very concious of is the fact that i have a rather ambitious and imaginative brain... This isn't a combination that goes together well when coming up with a layout design. Now i'm not going to announce a complete change of the track plan, just one thing which has made me think.
S scale has been 'on the brain' again of late, i scaled up a drawing of a 009 loco and realised it had the potential to fit a portescap sized motor/gearbox combo, and a sound decoder inside it. Now i'd like to try S scale, but when looking at the track plan for PnC i'm not sure if i would be happy with it in S scale. I'd have to shrink everything slightly and lose some areas of the scenery to allow for the slight increase in scale. Sound decoders and improved running are the main things which have been driving me down the S scale path.
There are two ways round this, one is to reduce the track plan to accomodate S scale on the board sizes i've got available. This is something i would consider doing to see how it looks, but i think i'll have to greatly simplify the goods yard, and shorten the station meaning i can't run trains of a length that i'd like.
The other option is to stick with 009 and make sure i can get it to run as well as possible. This will be greatly aided by DCC, and investigations into building my own chassis a bit like Jeff Bissonette has done. The only thing left to overcome is the size of loco bodies for accomodating speakers for DCC sound then. One thing i've thought of is to make PNC into a through station, this would allow trains passing through the scene to have a speaker located in the first coach or wagon and for the sound to come from that. This wouldn't allow any shunting of that loco/wagon combination, but perhaps i could build a loco suitable to have a speaker located inside to act as a shunter...
For this plan i think it best to stick to 009 as i said before. Whether i go for a through station i don't know, i would however like to portray the junction that PnC is supposed to be located near to if possible so i may see if it's possible to squeeze this in somewhere.
For sound i think the decoders are simply slightly too big to fit in your average 009 tank loco, however i might be able to design a freelance one where they would fit. This is something i'd like to have a go at with one loco to see if it's worth it, if not then it'll make my life a whole lot easier!
I think it's going to be important for me to realise what my initial objectives for this layout were:
1 - portray scotland with typical scenes merged into one believable town
2 - operate as realistically as possible
3 - give an impression of space, not being a layout with scenery stuck in around the track
Then i think i'll have to remind myself of these when i get delusions of grandeur again! At some point i'll have to cure the S scale bug and make a layout in it, it'll have to be small as PnC will take up a LOT of room in our loft so i doubt i'll get permission for anything sizeable!
4 comments:
Would shunting work if you put the sound decoder in the wagon/coach too? I doubt it would be possible to tell that the sound wasn't coming from the loco. I don't know how the sound synchronisation works though - that might rely on the decoder being connected to the motor.
The other option would be not to have the sound on board which has the advantage that you can use large, better sounding speakers. I've read about that being done successfully.
I've been thinking of putting the speaker in the adjacent coach/wagon as an experiment. Might be looking for my first sound decoder at ExpoNG. :-)
Otherwise i've seen the Ossynths system which uses under baseboard speakers and would like to know of other systems. The only drawback i can see is that none i've noticed so far have the capability to have more than one loco 'in steam' at a time. DCC would enable as many as the controller can handle.
Ossynths was the system I was thinking of but I couldn't remember the name. Their carrier system sounds like a good idea but wouldn't work with DCC.
Hmm. The trouble with an under baseboard system is that to get the sound to appear to come from the loco on anything bigger than a small layout you need multiple speakers and to fade the sound from one speaker to the next as the train moves. The Ossynths system does that but it looks like it can only track one loco at a time. Tracking more than one loco should be technically possible but not in the way they are doing it with magnets.
Yeah, Ossynths was the one i was thinking of too... it's good but as i'm likely to operate 2 locos at once on the layout i think i might stick with DCC and just design locos large enough to accomodate the speakers and decoders ;-)
Post a Comment