Martin S-C

I kept it brief because I know you old geezers have a short attention span.

That DOES look nice! Mr Turbosnail, do you accept orders, sir?

These look wonderful. I like how the snow lies up and just over the rails in a few places. How does the game deal with snowdrifts? Are they proper interactive features you can push through or has the route builder just raised the ground level in a subtle way to make it appear like a snowdrift? Back in MSTS days (sorry to keep harping back 15 years but it was my only experience of train simulators) we could build "wagons" that were pieces of rolling stock you could place on the track in an activity but the 3D model of the wagon wasn't a railway vehicle but a humped mound and if you textured this one way you got a snow drift blocking the line and if you textured it a different way you could replicate a landslip across the track, or in the case of my route where we had some activities set during the line's construction with dirt wagons and a contarctor's engine, these mounds would represent the limit of construction of the line. We gave these wagons a colossal mass and loco bar couplings so you couldn't couple up to them or propel them! Being pieces of rolling stock of course you couldn't push through them, they were a complete barrier to operations across the track at that point but you could still write a clever scenario based around thatfeature.

Thank you Neil. A parcel this morning contained this. No comment from me other than I think this is money well spent.

My LNER 7128 version arrived this morning. I'll just let these images speak for themselves with the single comment that I think this is a product worth buying!

More procrastinating. Trolley design now abandoned as it was pointed out that shifting the trolley around with various sundry operators and having to get through the door was like one of those puzzles with 16 spaces and 15 sliding blocks. Having endured one minor heart attack 6 years ago one always lives with the thought in one's head that another could easily happen and if I were in the railway room on my own and there was an accident, the trolley with its suitcase style catches on the inside face and bracing struts for the legs below would make it very awkward for anyone else to get in to render assistance. We are therefore going back to the lifting flap idea but will in the end I think plump for a simple top hinge set-up hidden by suitable pieces of scenery. On the side nearest the wall a goods shed and loading bank can be adroitly positioned to cover that hinge and on the operator's well side probably a clump of bushes or a small field barn will do the trick. Keep It Simple is always sound advice. I'm also pleased to report that finally my very first fully repainted, lettered, weathered, named, numbered and decoder-fitted loco is ready for the railway. All my other stock has one or more of that list incomplete. Dean Sollers Colliery Co. Peckett No.501 was 99% complete last summer but just before Christmas Modelmaster supplied a lovely big bagfull of nameplates and its only taken me 7 weeks to get around to fitting the first pair. The Peckett is named after my father. He looks like a Wilf, doesn't he?

That was funny. I was scrolling down the page and the outside scenes made me feel quite cold, then once the cab interior came on the screen I felt toasty warm.

I wouldn't be without sound now. I'm aware it isn't very realistic (yet), nor will it ever be if you set your requirements as high as real-world perfection, but silence is less realistic, and 00 gauge even more so (if you're going to wander down that line of argument) and in our imaginations we add all kinds of things to our miniature worlds that are not there and have always done so. Clive - correct, the point has been repeated made several times now by both you and those who favour DCC that on a small layout DC is fine unless you need its other features. However even on your trackplan more is possible with ease with DCC than DC. Its the people who insist DC is better, period, and appear to refuse to entertain DCCs alternative options, that cause these kinds of discussions! I've never said DCC is better at everything, but it is a better system in the majority of circumstances once your layout becomes bigger than a BLT. Of course the caveat must be added that's its better to plan a project (and loco collection) with DCC in mind rather than convert later. And why would you want music playing while an operating session is in progress? https://youtu.be/e8-1DnQBHfI

Something this epic needs to be O Gauge BTW, cracking model of the model.

Super work Annie, I have a special fondness for the 19th century GWR coaching stock.

I've said this before and no doubt will say it again at some point, but for me the highlight of your layout is your dirt. It's by far the nicest dirt I've ever seen!

Why is tapping a few keys to set up your loco a "problem"? Tapping in the loco number can be seen as analagous to a crew signing on, learning what loco they are rostered to and going to find it in the yard, getting aboard and getting their gear stowed. If your imagination can suspend disbelief, its quite an accurate process. All we lack is little animated figures walking to their loco. DC has no such analagous procedure. Its plain that DCC is not for everyone and it was never meant to be. Micro and small layouts gain little benefit from it unless you especially like sound and inertia and such, in fact DCC can be a negative on some layouts as friends may not be able to bring visiting locos but for bigger layouts with multiple drivers, routes, signalmen and such, DCC is a huge step forward in simplicity of wiring and ease of operation. For the less mechanically minded it also makes things like point/signal interlocking easier because its a simpler process. DCC is on average a good deal more expensive however. But you are paying for greater flexibility and ease of use, as well as the extra features. If you are not a user or fan of DCC it must still be seen that it is an advance on DC otherwise it would never have been designed.

I had the great misfortune of being born in Croydon, south London, in 1959. Not a very auspicious start. The tragedy was that two years prior my family had moved south from Doncaster of all places due to my father's work. If only his job had required him to move ten or fifteen years later! How diferent my formative railway years would have been! So my earliest railway experiences were trips to Victoria from East Croydon and (sad as it may seem) the most fun my brother and I had was rushing down those wonderful (and to us little boys, endless) sloping ramps to the platforms to see if the train was a green one or a red one. These were the coaches of course, not the loco! I must assume the green coaches were the SR electric units, maybe 2BILs and 4SUBs but the red (in fact maroon) coaches must have been loco hauled though I cannot say by what! I guess there was a steam engine on the front unless it was an early BR electric loco. Maybe someone here with knowledge of mid-60s Southern Region practice on the Victoria-Brighton line can suggest what they were? I therefore have no recollection of steam trains at all in my childhood except for trips to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch and the Bluebell Railway and my earliest memory is being entranced by the smell of a steam engine - such a heady concoction that I have never forgotten it. When I began my more serious phase of modelling in my teens the most commonly available RTR items seemed to be GWR so it was to that company that I turned to accumulate both models and knowledge and my early layouts all gravitated to South Wales in the 1950s. This was the late 70s when everyone and his dog seemed to be modelling GWR BLTs set in a perpetual rose-tinted 1930s summer and as has become my signature practice, I reacted to that and, bucking the trend, went for something far grittier and more industrial. This brought me into contact with the Welsh constituent companies of the GW with their hosts of lovely Victorian engines, colourful coaches and quirky wagons and from there I discovered the Forest of Dean and its small independent and joint railways which seemed to me the perfect mix of GWR, MR, LNWR and independent lines. The rest is history as I have, in the quest for the unusual and quirky, and to avoid the mainstream of what so many others model, gone back in time to pre-grouping and a setting where the heavy industries of coal mining, timber felling, stone quarrying, tinplate working, limestone burning, etc, all sit in close proximity to each other and a small railway system running in an otherwise bucolic rural setting. In the late 70s I went with some friends to Pendon, clapped my eyes on the Madder Valley railway and knew from then on what I really wanted to model. On the other hand I am collecting a late 50s/early 60s set of BR steam and diesel to run on my layout for when I want to ring the changes. Again, its the early and unusual BR types like 14s, 15s, 16s and 17s that appeal. I lose interest when BR diesel class numbers begin with anything higher than a "2"!

We had a choice. We either used the height data taken from an OS map scan and laid it square on the terrain so that after a few miles your Lat and Long were completely off and you could no longer cross-plot real world objects direct into your route but had to hand place and guesstimate everything, or you could distort your OS map scan in PhotoShop before you began plotting your contours so that the 1km map grid was squidged in one direction and a bit stretched in the other. This fitted fine into the game's world tiles allowing you to "real-plot" all the other features but your route came out distorted in the simulator. This wasn't too noticable on a short rural route like a branch line but Swindon came out looking very strange in my route so we gave up with that. It was early days and very fun however, even with these curious impediments thrown at us by the software developers. We often wondered what clown seleted that globe projection and if he/she had any idea what a mistake it was. Annie - loving the frosted/etched glass on the toilet cubicle windows of the WNR 6-wheeler. Thats really nicely done.

One could argue that after 57 varieties of Pannier you don't actually need anything else. If you do, you just string a bunch of them together like sausages and away you go.

One can do that on a DC layout as well, but to suggest that there isn't much more you can do in DCC that DC can do with some well thought-out wiring is a trifle simplistic. I don't think this thread is the place for that sort of discussion though. If you use DC and it works for you that's great. It has worked for me all my life except for the current layout build where I am heading off into DCC for the first time and from what I am learning so far its a system immeasurably ahead of DC, well planned wiring or not and I'd never go back now.

When I was creating the Highworth Branch route in MSTS there was no DEM data available unless you paid a shedload of money for it from the Ordnance Survey. It was annoying because the USA train simmers had free DEM data right across the USA at 10x the density of the UK! I scanned an OS 2cm:1km map and enlarged it then painstakingly traced the contour lines around Swindon (very hard due to the urban clutter) and all up the valley of the Bydemill Brook which is the principal watercourse valley the Highworth Light Railway was constructed along. Even on a route that was only about 7 miles long (the branch itself was 5.5 miles) this took simply AGES. We had a little bit of home written software to plug the resulting height data into the MSTS route editor which then "inflated" the base landscape to your plotted points. Even then a fair bit of adjustment was needed but I was delighted when the (in)famous 1 in 40 Butts Bank up the hill from Hannington to Highworth came out absolutely spot on. A real sense of achievement doing all that. MSTS had a complete world projection in its library which meant you didn't just build on terrain tiles but selected a place on the globe and plugged in your Lat/Long co-ords to create your route tiles which were 1 km square. Problem was, Kuju had chosen a horrible global projection so anywhere more than a few miles from the poles (aka every railway in the world) had horribly skewed tiles more like diamond shaped polygons than squares. It was a bit of a mess but it was all we had and we persevered with it. Here is a screenshot of a failed tile generation command I suffered while doing DEMs for a wantage Tramway route. I just happened to have kept this image for some reason (the file date is 27th Feb 2004!!!) but it shows the awful shape of what should be 1km squares, as well as the contour plotting which was actually a breach of the O/S terms of use... You can also see in the right hand panel the World Tile Number in hexadecimal and the Lat and Long. It was quite fun doing modelling in the "real world". The blue dot would probably be the site of GWR Wantage Road station, with Wantage town itself towards the bottom.

When I read that my mind saw this:

We can continue the discussion about saloons. Here's one. It even has a steam engine outside and its in the "west", (might even be the west of Norfolk County for all I know) so all highly relevant.

Trying to stay OT and desperately referencing one of Kevin's photos above, and while we're on the subject of handsome engines, as far as 4-4-0s go the D16 is a nice looking piece of machinery in my view, especially with those small tenders. Victorian engines of course were far more stylish all round but the 4-4-0 is such a classic design that you could put almost anything on top of that wheel arrangement and it'd look just dandy.

One more question if I may. Early on in this thread a link was given to the image on Heljan's site that showed where each of the hoses, etc went on the bufferbeams but this link is now broken. Does anyone have that image still? Or can someone kindly point me to a diagram that clearly shows which hose on the detailing pack is which? I've collected a good selection of photos of the prototype but the model hoses are so small I cannot distinguish which is which. Thanks once again fir any help.

Not personally, no. Does he serve a fine port?

I prefer Edwardian and Victorian loco design and am not a fan of 4-6-0s let alone 4-6-2s but there is something bluff, workmanlike and no-nonsense about B17s and B12s that does appeal. Serious engines that don't muck about with any frills.

Phil, you have this unerring but very valuable knack of pointing out the things I hadn't considered. Thank you for that. The colliery operator would have to leave their seat while the trolley is moved. They might in fact be now designated Colliery and Trolley Operator (CTO). In a session where a number of people entered the room, the CTO will have to be last in, first out. We have the baseboard frame on one side already in place but I'll contact the LLC guys tomorrow to ensure the other side of the fixed frame and trolley side form a trapezoid. They may also have a design in mind that involves slides akin to kitchen drawer runners where the trollery's castors are lifted off the ground. I will check and thanks for making the point. I will arrange a trolley structure so that people can also duck under it. I envisage the trolley being moved only at operating session start and end times where everyone enters and exits. Interim individual departures for cups of tea, nibbles and calls of nature would involve the individual ducking under. It'll be a "no drinks and food" environment so no trays of stuff being handed across the scenery and such. Much of the time I suspect I will be alone in there or maybe with 1 or 2 others so we will have lots of space to shift about. If we get frequent sessions of 6 operators I'll be so chuffed that trolley logistics will pale into insignficance.