Swanley!

Normally getting home from work and opening white envelopes means someone is telling either A) how much money I owe them, or B) how much money i've not got... Fortuntately today I got a rather nice surprise in a white letter...

I've been asked to exhibit Dunbracken at this years ExpoNG at Swanley (31st Oct). This was one of my modelling goals when building an exhibition layout. I guess i'll have to think of a new one for PnC...!

Dunbracken is going to be replaced by PnC, and unfortunately I don't have room for both of them at home, so at Swanley it is going to be up for sale.

I'll be making a start on PnC later this year (probably cutting up baseboard bits in summer time) so hopefully the blog should become more construction orientated than planning soon(ish).

RTR 009

To be honest i'm suprised someone else out of my fellow bloggers hasn't posted on this yet...



This week Roco announced that they are to release a ready to run 009 Ffestiniog Railway Fairlie as shown below in an excerpt from their 2009 catalogue that was found online.

This is great for 009, but many people are discussing on internet forums that it is likely to be pretty pricey, especially given the current exchange rate between the Euro and the Pound. However you look at it though it's a great thing for 009, yes we've had ready to run with Eggerbahn before, and maybe the hobby wouldn't be where it is now without that but this is great step forward.

I can't help feel that there would have been a more universally appealing loco than the Fairlie, but it's a pretty safe bet that it'll still be popular regardless (price issues forgotten about until they actually confirm a price!).

Will one be appearing on PnC? Maybe... we'll have to see.

Update - I've emailed Roco and had a response saying that they can't give a set release date or price as yet. I also questioned if they would consider any other UK prototypes after this one, and again they weren't able to comment but have logged the suggestion, so fingers crossed!

E. R. Calthrop

Whilst down in the Westcountry over Christmas and New Year I went to visit the Launceston Railway and had a ride on one of their 'Bah Humbug Specials', however this was only half the reason for going. They have quite a good shop, and i can normally guarantee that when i go there i'll come back with a new narrow gauge orientated book!


This time i found this...

Not quite how to build your own light railway, but an interesting paper written by E.R. Calthrop (of Leek and Manifold and Barsi railway fame) in 1897. In the paper he goes into the cost effectiveness of using narrow gauge, and how 2'6" is the ideal gauge for a combination of reduced build costs and maximum carrying capacity. He also goes on to talk about standardisation of parts between all items of rolling stock etc. and basically reducing costs... dare i say it, something that a Scottish line would be interested in?

It's ideas like this that i find interesting (maybe from being an engineer by trade, i don't know...) and as such i've decided to incorporate him into the history of the Aradig Bay Joint Railway Co.

As i've alluded to in a previous blog entry of mine i'm going to come up with a history of the line for an added bit of fun. The basic concept is that two lines operated independently, then merged and paid for a line to be constructed through the hilly area that separated them.

My thought was to have the joint company appoint E.R. Calthrop as the chief engineer for the design and construction of the line that would pass through the mountains. This would give me three sets of stock that i could run...

1 - From the first original line - one distinct style. Possibly smallish locos as it would have run on a comparatively flat route.

2 - From the second original line - same as above, although one these original sets would very rarely venture over the hills...

3 - That bought for the new joint line which was powerful enough to operate through the hills - more likely to be of a slightly more modern appearance.

This would basically justify me having all sorts of items of stock running on PnC from small(ish) tank locos to large locos for the more strenuous route. Also a variety of carriage and wagon stock could be built up. E.R. Calthrop advocates the use of stock with the same axle loading as the locos (5 tons for the Barsi rly. mentioned in the book), so a variety of older and more modern stock also.

Plus i've always liked the Leek and Manifold locos, and he seems to have adopted that style as a standard design, simply experimenting with the wheel arrangement as can be seen with this shot of a Leek and Manifold loco at the top and a Barsi loco below it...

The Barsi one seems a little over the top, but a variation on the L&M one might well appear in some form.

When the layout proper gets underway i'd like to set up a website and use this blog for build updates, so all that is being developed for the history will transfer over to the website to form the story of the line...

I always enjoyed reading Narrow Gauge Adventure by P.D. Hancock, i'm sure mine won't be as influential as that, but hopefully someone will enjoy reading it.

Trackplan again!

Between Christmas and New Year there are always moments of quiet thought for me, and during one of these i looked at the track plan for PnC. The first track plan i ever came up with was for a T shaped junction, and being T shaped had a junction in the track plan with the station being at the base of the T on a pier. This plan was pretty impractical, i can't see many exhibition managers liking a T shaped layout, so with this in mind i redesigned it, but still wanted it to be different.

Then i came up with the curved plan that I have now. This smaller (ish) plan meant that the junction was lost, and that was the main aspect i had associated with the station in the little bit of the Scottish Highlands i have floating around in my head! So, i got to thinking about things, firstly what the coastline would have looked like before any railway was built there...

This is based on the coastline of Plockton (albeit juggled about a little). The dotted line indicates where the two lines are supposed to be located. The area where they join is to the right of the goods yard. This plan shows two areas where the line would need building up, the first is the area after the tidal inlet on the left of the plan (crossed by a steel bridge), this section is where the 'old quay' falls. This is intended to be a stone quay used for minerals etc. to goods ships.

The area in the bottom right area of the plan is where the station is located. This is also the site of the 'new quay', this is to be stone with a wood pier to enable steamers to moor closer to the land. This is area didn't quite seem to fit it when it was based on Portree, so i've decided to make the whole layout more like Plockton and have it more barren as the plan and cross section below show. The large building behind the station is a church.

I prefer the arrangement of this end now, and will stick with this as i think it will give a better overall impression of being in a barren area. Plus the church would have been an obstacle for the railway to be built around so the idea of a line being squeezed along the coast still applies.

With regards to the junction i've decided to run the second line along the side of the road out of Port na Cailliche like the roadside section on the Glyn Valley Tramway (a scene i've always wanted to model). I think this incorporates the second line in a way that keeps operatingfun by having to run back from the station to the goods yard still, and not overcrowded the layout. The area behind the line where the crofts are will have to be rethought, i'm going to draw the layout out full size before any work starts. It may be that the line in red below doesn't run the length of the layout, and disappears between a couple of crofts long before reaching the area of the tidal inlet.

Dunbracken is progressing well, and has to be complete for its first exhibition as an operating layout at Tonbridge on February 14th. After this i shall start far more serious work on PnC with baseboard construciton beginning sometime shortly after the exhibition.

I'm looking to sell Dunbracken, so if anyone fancies rehoming it for a modest fee then please let me know. You can keep up to date with its completion on RMweb here.

Inspirational Lines, fieldwork, and an early Christmas message

A thread on Narrow Gauge Railway Modelling Online has got me thinking. I regularly Read Colin Lea's Rhydd Ddu blog about his 009 layout (link on the right), and he has been through a series of posts commenting on lines he's visited. One area which many people seem surprised about are the number of narrow gauge lines that ran in Scotland, and there were many more proposed!

I intend (after new year) to start going through these lines one by one and listing any info i can find on them. For many there is very little info, but the major ones have a little bit here and there that could be amalgamated into a blog post some time.

On the layout front i'm likely to be heading up to Plockton in February/March for a weekend away around my birthday. While i'm there i intend to take plenty of pictures of the town (buildings, vegetation, coastline etc) for more fieldwork research for the layout. I'm getting more tempted to leave the inspiration for the trackplan that has come from Portree and focus on Plockton to get a more believable scene as an end result. Because of this fieldwork will be very useful, fortunately i can fit well over 1,000 photos on the memory card of my digital camera!!

Finally, as this is likely to be my last post on here before Christmas... Happy Christmas to all those who have been reading!

Sounds like a plan!!

I went to ExpoNG last weekend and had a great time there. I spent most of my time drooling over County Gate and Pempoul, though i did end up helping out on the KB Scale stand for a while too.

I made two major purchases there, the first was a copy of Steam Locomotives in India - the Narrow Gauge, i've been looking for one of these for a while. It's got some fantastic locos in, and i'll definitely be employing some of the larger tank engines within it's pages on PnC.

The other purchase was a Soundtraxx Micro Tsunami medium steam sound decoder... WOW! DCC sound has me hooked now, i'm going to try and incorporate it into a tank loco design which i've got on my drawing board at the mo. I'll design the loco so that the speaker forms the face of the bunker which points into the cab - this then makes the entire bunker a 'bass box' in effect, and will hopefully improve the quality of noises such as chuff where bass is key.

I'll post some pictures on the various modelling forums that i'm a member of, and document the construction of the loco there.

Delusions of grandeur?

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!