Lacathedrale

Just isolate everything from each other, put in about seven frog juicers and let God handle it?

I thought, naievly, there was no such thing as a "wye" - just a right hand point on a left curve, or vice-versa? i.e. they always have to be handed somehow? I think the only reason I know this is Martin Wynne telling me that's why you set curviform or ... whatever the other option is ... is whether the main line curves with the diverging route or away from it.

EMDs engines in the UK? A sojourn to modern image british 00 ?

Thank you also @Allegheny1600 for your points around Tillig vs Roco.

So I've recently gotten into signalling, and I think that's a great opportunity to further tame the fiddle yard - for example, if you've got four fiddle yard/staging roads which loop back around: At the head end, there's a switch panel (I can't deal with DCC controller actuated turnouts) which represents a junction box (or sequence of signal boxes, whatever) that has them marked as: Saalhausen Furstenwald branch Nuremberg (mainline north) Forbergen (mainline south) which correspond to train destinations from the terminus - I feel like having the end-to-end conception of the route would be helpful, i.e. the branch shuttle to Furstenwald is pulled off from the station and routed through the passing station and into the 'shadow station' staging road, and the return journey is similarly controlled from end to end. The mainline tracks could probably be bidirectional, but just for flavour for wayfreight/etc. one might choose to have them logically separated. Anyway, just a thought!

If only for this quote, I will read the lot:

I think it might be a bit like a helix, too much time spent unobserved breaks the illusion rather than supports it? Maybe the front of the balloon loop could be a scenic section between two tunnels or something?

How do you plan to access the back of the top-right corner? Cutouts? The top half of the plan does indeed look very 'universal' and I imagine should your whims change at any point in the future, it would support any number of layouts 'above'. I might be inclined to slew the passing station more opposite the baloon to get it on a curve, and then include the junction as part of the throat of the station - it would give a bit of space on the right before diving under the terminus approach? Did you consider tillig elite? I'm still musing on plans for h0 so insight there would be interesting.

@Railpassion I think it's easy to get a misunderstanding of scale speed - both too fast AND too slow. There are many recollections of drivers and firemen clouting wagons around at speed, or shunters racing back to the platform ends behind the trains they've just piloted. Clearly, not quite as simple as just going 'as slow as possible' although that does often give great visual flavour.

Thanks for the link to this thread, what a wonderful layout!

No tar pit intended, I'm observing merely as an uninterested third party at this point, having neither the patience nor inclination for either at this stage!

I’ve been watching some videos on YouTube and quite apart from the fact that sometimes I can’t even tell if the layout is 00 or N, often I see EM layouts about but proportionally fewer P4 equivalents. Why is this? The only thing that comes to mind is the oft touted thought that P4 requires compensation but you can just get away with a re wheel in EM?

Quite like your circuit with the return loop on a corner, what kind of gradients are you looking at?

.... Proto:87

Presumably the chair moulding is bigger, even though the rail height is the same?

By the way, I'm sure we know - but the main SSL certificate has expired for the site bluebell-railway.co.uk - expired 21/02/21) which is where the images are hosted and what's causing all the images to fail - the main site on bluebell-railway.com is fine.

Thank you, for your information, specific wording was as follows: (a) Is the property (or will it be) within 200 metres of the centre line of a proposed railway, tramway, light railway or monorail? - Within 100 metres of the Bluebell Railway Extension (b) Are there any proposals for a railway, tramway, light railway or monorail within the local authority’s boundary? - The property is within a Local Authority area that will be affected by the extension to Bluebell railway into Haywards Heath.

One of the interesting tidbits that popped up with a new house purchase is "railway development earmarked for within 100m of the property" in the local authority search - the railway at the end of the garden is the northern approach to Haywards heath station, and the Bluebell Preservation Society suggests this is for when the route through Ardingly is relaid and connected through. I was wondering, is this a pie in the sky project, or something likely to happen? I think I'd be very chuffed to hear steam locos at the end of the garden but it seems like a huge piece of work!

Very interesting stuff! I think a system layout (as per my thread in the layout planning forum) has so much potential, but I guess the balance is making it interesting enough for a single person while not being too much - and being achievable! Paddington-Seagood has two terminals, a junction, a passing terminus and a regular way station. Do you think you could incorporate one of the features into your passing station? I guess being a 14' x 8' shed rather than a large billiards room, you are a little limited in scope: http://templot.com/martweb/info_files/seagood.htm In terms of attraction - it seems you've settled on circling around BR(S) , CIE and German railways - what for you, is the sticking point for the latter? I can understand being stuck on BR(S) growing up in the south-west, but in aforementioned thread I pulled out some pictures of the Milwaukee Road layout you helped me design way back when, and I remembered it was disassembled almost as soon as it was scenically complete because I just couldn't hold enthusiasm for something so remote!

I have enjoyed reading about Blacklade since it’s inception and am very glad it’s still kicking! Thank you for this wonderful log entry, fascinating stuff. I’m finding a bit of a quandary in my layout setting - steam era ops seem so much more fascinating but you clearly have survived with DMUs! What’s the secret??

Well, in this model we wouldn't really 'need' a fiddle yard if we had discrete areas in the railway. I tried a fiddle-less railway in the early 00's with an American plan in H0 but the layout wasn't really my core interest so didn't last long. The intent was that before operations, you would stage a train on the 'inbound' track in the yard, and switch that location, setting out cars for the 'branch', servicing locos, etc. and you would then operate the branch train around a loop over my workbench and do the same there. Cars were shuffled with car-card and waybill operation, and there was an interchange track at the end of the branch. I have a few photos: The start of the layout - the inbound main line was the track between the grey hopper and the yellow boxcar. Note, the wraparound on the left - this was actually the end of the branch that went around the room in the other direction: The throat of the yard, showing the loco fuelling depot (note, boarded up window to left!) The loop of plain track over the workbench, showing the branch terminus on the right hand side. This workbench was far too gloomy and claustrophobic! I think there were too few places in this system for it to be really effective. A terminus to terminus operation with nothing in the middle stretches disbelief too far and is too simple. However, add a junction and a passing station (maybe with a continuous loop) and I'm sure it would provide enough logical separation between components. Paddington-Seagood has some layout design elements we rarely see - goods arrival/departure lines and separate goods headshunts, lots of coach sidings, etc. - so a train could be constructed from stock on-layout at a terminus by a pilot, have a loco that's on shed draw up and take it away, split at a junction station or passing terminus to hand over to another branch line engine (which has itself run up with morning empties or LE from the top shed earlier in the day), to handle the onward procession to the branch itself. If the train was a regional or express, it could perform a non-stop service around the loop a few times (maybe while some shunting is going on elsewhere) before being directed off at the junction (this time representing somewhere at the opposite end of the line) into the other terminus. C.J. Freezer had a suggestion to model a station with multiple levels (say, London Bridge) as a single visual unit, but served by different parts of the railway (i.e. our passing station is the 'express' platforms of our terminus, which are not linked by rails directly, only via a return loop of some sort). All of this elaborate system design does somewhat preclude 4mm or 3.5mm/ft !

Well, the sale and purchase lumber ever onward, it looks like we'll miss the stamp duty holiday but should at least get this house sold, and that house bought. As has been the case since the start of my thread - the workshop remains packed up, as do all my (2mm) model railway equipment and 99% of my reference books and source material. With regard to live steam - I have managed to settle on a 5" Gauge loco - a Don Young "Glen" 4-4-0 which is a lovely edwardian design in the vein of the SECR D-class so beloved by myself. I think that i may be able to get away with modifying the platework on the Glen to represent an LCDR M3 or an SECR D-class, but it's wonderful as it is, and all of that is years in the future. For now I'm stockpiling reference docs and looking at getting some of the raw material. I imagine that this kind of content isn't all that welcome on RMweb (as opposed to Locomotive-Modelling-web), but maybe I could stretch to it being a 'garden railway' if I have a 10' test track This has the unintended side effect of focusing the spec of a spare bedroom layout wonderfully: Needs to be affordable RTR with the use of a semi-coarse standard (i.e. commercial 00/H0/N) to be achievable both financially and in a timely manner. Representative of a part of system rather than single location/diorama/cameo with focus on authentic operation, but will be a sole-operator type affair - so will need to have all areas accessible (no duck unders) and not so sprawling as to be unmanageable! Limited scenery beyond the railway boundary, except that which is required to communicate the essential flavour - be it a viaduct, mill, or embankment.

Well, if we look at layouts built in the 30's, 40's and 50's - they certainly didn't feel that realism was particularly disturbed by the use of a "modern" loco with a short train - but they would most certainly would have umbrage with the nest of switchbacks which typify most shelf layout designs - with that in mind, I think the idea of 'unrealistically short trains = bad' is very much down to interpretation, and not a fundamental truth

I definitely leaned hard into Ricean ideals, but have come to think that with such a focus on aesthetic realism, there was a huge deficit created in operational and mechanical realism. There's a huge part of model railway heritage which has been completely been cut away - Paddington-Seagood (?) being a great example where the creator says (something like) "I would have no problem modelling a train of three carriages if that train could operate prototypically on my railway, than eight and not be able to operate at all", and where designs were meant to facilitate railways rather than just glorified dioramas. I look at those early layouts and see the common heritage with our American colleagues and it's plain there was a common ground and two strongly divergent evolutions. Maybe this is another surfacing of the desire for a 'system layout' as discussed earlier?

I'm sure this has been seen before, but I just came across it - scenes from what I think are CF at around 6:15 onwards: