Martin S-C

Maybe mamma is taking her to the dentist?

Fixed that for you.

I echo what others have said in support of Malwarebytes, and heartily agree Andy's endorsement of it. Its the only piece of freeware AV software that has ever worked for me, and boy does it work! Very useful. If you really feel a need to spend money for an annual subscription for a payware AV suite I recommend ESET NOD32 which has also saved my bacon a few times and is very good at blocking suspicious or malicious websites while browsing. I noticed it was blocking a number of suspicious domains yesterday morning and wondered why RMWeb was talking to or being talked to by such sites. Nothing popped up on my screen, ESET killed it all before it reached my computer. Recommended.

Good point Don. I've got vague plans to open a website for the layout and have live streaming of running sessions so the idea of cameras has been floating about in my head though I hadn't thought of using them to assist in operations. The carriage shed falls under the Nether Madder signalbox but is several feet away and any actual coupling/uncoupling of those sidings will be done by the MVR Exchange Sidings operator, even so the NM signalman would need to know what's in there in order to decide what needed moving so, yes, probably some form of camera will help, as will one inside the C&W Shop and, in similar vein, inside the two engine sheds. Until you mentioned a camera my ideas for the two engine sheds was to have glass panes in the roofs which had "broken" so I could peer inside but a camera might be better. I also want to make some videos of operations for YouTube and eventually an on-train camera will be needed. I know that you can get some superb tiny cameras now, small enough to put into the driving cab of an autocoach or DMU. One might even be able to have one fitted to show a view outside of a steam loco cab, a driver "head-out" view. The layout is planned to be operated by a team and six people are suggested on the plan. I want operators to be signalmen principally and therefore each station will have a box and lever frame with the intention of digital interlocking with the signals. The idea being that you only ever drive a train towards your signal box, never away. This ensures people don't get sent trains when they are not ready to receive them. I then also wondered about bell codes but with so many signal boxes in so small a space the sound would be a cacophony unless I supplied headsets and used digital bellcodes which I know is now a thing. The team of signalmen concept means if I'm alone I won't need to see very far to other points on the layout as I won't be able to control the points and signals at those stations anyway. My plan if I'm on my own is just to potter about at a couple of stations, mostly shunting, and for the first year probably designing a timetable or operating sequence. I may need to scoot between the two operating wells quite often which is why we had a long discussion about getting from one to t'other a few pages back. I need a method easy on people's backs and other joints and the dwarf wheeled stool idea is what I'm currently thinking of. You'd pull yourself along by gripping handrails fitted either side of the duckunder. If all else fails (my health that is, in time) and I can no longer easily use the duck-under there is a back-up plan of fitting a second access door to the garage just to the left of Snarling station where the two blue lines are. This can be done and still falls behind the lockable access door to the garden so would be secure(ish) If operators are okay moving between signalboxes then two operators is the minimum, one in each well, but the west end well has so much going on that I think three people will actually be necesary to run a fair service: 1) Nether Madder/Snarling/Coggles Causeway; 2) Puddlebrook/Dean Sollers Colliery/Witts End; 3) MVR Exchange Sidings/Catspaw/Green Soudley. It would be fairly intense but we could run a reduced service or only run the branch for relaxation, or just run the main line and close the branch (Sunday running).

Poor horse. Seeing that one is moved to wonder if the boys on top are passengers or luggage? Discussion of trains is suspended for holiday engineering?

In Green Sollers where the canal dives into its tunnel, there's the greaseworks on one side and some so-far unidentified-but-probably-linked-to-the-railway industrial works on the other so this area should be a bit fjordian in feel, only dirtier, and in limestone. The brewery siding has similar potential. Now I need a hardworking industrial loco named Magrathean.

Yeah, but it's risky. I mentioned trains once a few posts back and I think I got away with it. The livery has been depicted nicely in that picture.

That fitted goods was long. It took 2 days to go by.

Which gets me this. A little more clearance for the through line now, though the RH end is still tight. I have a little room to play with on the FY side of this though. I want to keep both long sidings into the C&W Shops if I can. To aid identification of and access to parked wagons inside the C&W Works I can make the north wall of the building open in some manner, perhaps folded back wooden doors or some such. It is summer after all. Something akin to this.

Yes, you may be right Kevin. I haven't done a full size cross section there. The space north of the railway cottages to the left of the inn is a footpath and the "cottages" in my mind are dwellings plus back yards so we have a typical industrial set of house backs here. I wanted a grimy stone wall along the path with a drop down to the through line - a typical place where urchins could sit and watch trains and be told off for throwing stones down. I wouldn't want to but I think I could lose the footpath, and the dead end road at the N end of the inn and the carriage works can readily be trimmed back. Alternatively I can keep the wall and path but make the row of cottages low (or lower) relief. I have sketched them at a scale 4 or 5 inches deep which is excessively generous, even if I model back yards. The row is inspired by two sets of tinplate workers cottages at Parkend which were called The Square. Its one of those oddly Lancashire-mill-town looking sites which made the Forest industries so incongrous; a slab of Manchester dumped down in a national park and is one of the things I'd like to try and capture, an illusive mix of rural and industrial. So, yes, some potential space to shift things about in that area. I've been looking at the plan and thinking it will be a massive pain to have to uncouple wagons on the south-most road that enters the wagon works and quite frankly I'm amazed I never considered placing the carriage shed against the backscene and having the works access lines (in reality stock storage) in front of it. I think it was about the look of the thing. Having the carriage shed centrally made it more prominent, the design that bit more idiosyncratic. A layout constructed with everything leading away from the viewer and higher as you go to end at the taller structures against the backscene seems too predictable to me. The carriage shed will be one of those open-sided affairs held up on iron or timber columns with a wooden walkway down the centre between the two roads. The walls will be half height hung from the roof and allowing air to move through to assist drying out of wet vehicles. The roof will either be pitched and wooden or rounded and corrugated tin. I was thinking of a bigger version of the carriage shed at Wantage. An open-sided structure is essential here so I can see what's inside it. That would let me see through to whatever occupied the back siding but doing away with the back siding also works, though I'd like to try and keep both carriage works roads as I think I need the storage.

Correct Duncan, a turntable would not be needed if this were a real railway. As noted earlier though, the turntable is a fiddle-yard fiction and just allows locos to be reversed and put on the other end of a train without handling, even if I do use Peco loco lifts. I have chosen a 50ft table deliberately. I can turn a 4-4-0 or 0-6-0 on that but nothing bigger and I now own two of the beautiful Bachmann 4-4-2 Atlantics so if these ever venture onto the system they will need to run light engine back up to the triangle at the works for turning so creating lots of yummy light engine movements. Its also a couplings thing as well. I'm using the standard Bachmann small tension lock but I especially dislike these on the fronts of locos. I always remove the hook from locos at both ends anyay so I can buffer them up inside loco sheds without the hassle of them coupling, and I then lift the loop a couple of millimetres so a good connection to the single hook on the lead vehicle is made. Even with the hook removed the coupling loop is incongrous. What I really should do is instigate a programme of removing all the proprietry loco loop couplings and making my own of wire, but even then the front curved face of the loop must have a couple of mils of vertical plate on it otherwise the wire loop will just run over the coupling of the lead vehicle and buffer lock on curves if propelling. Due to the lack of width in the railway room I have been forced to accept a 24" radius minimum curve. Not my choice but there we are. So, long story short, I like to remove the Bachmann loops on the fronts of my tender engines and just have cosmetic screw couplings. I have to retain the loops on freight engines as they'll need to shunt their trains, but the passenger engines should be able to get away without ever having to use the front coupling - hence the turntable. Even so, passenger tender engines arriving at Green Soudley terminus will all have to reverse down the hill to Puddlebrook, then go forward down the further hill to the exchange sidings, be turned, and make their way back up. This inconvenience is deliberate so I can mess about with more light engine movements

Window circled in red. The week before last I was sat in the room behind that window enjoying a cup of coffee and a cake. The Great Northern Hotel still does great lunches though I've never stayed in it's rooms.

Hi Annie, any chance we could have a close up of the schooner and steam coaster moored at the dock please?

...and so thusly: ... *sigh* I do wish I had a foot or two more width though...

Yes, very much like that!

This is why you have technical editors these days. If you are in the business of publishing works about canal inclined planes you don't employ an editor of children's books

A poly (or polygon) is a 2D face of zero depth made up of the minimum number of mathematical points - in other words three points - or a triangle. All 3D models are made up of triangles and they can be aligned at angles relative to each other in 3D space to create curves and spheres and any other shape. A plain rectangle such as one face of the pitched roof of a house would be made up of two triangles (polys). Both sides of this pitched roof is 4 polys. The two gable ends are 1 poly each. Add a basic rectangular column for a chimney gives 10 polys more (4 sides and a top... you never create faces you cannot see, in this case the bottom). Add 4 walls gives 8 more polys. That's about your most basic building - 24 polygons. Multiply that by however many buildings you need near a station (10? 50?) and you begin to see the load a processor needs to handle. Clothe these basic 3D shapes in different texture sheets all of which use more video memory to render and it goes on. In the early days of Trainz 1 and MSTS 1 making low-poly models was critical and many beautiful models were created which were gorgeous but useless as they had too many polys. MSTS locos ran well with 1,000 to 4,000 polys and rolling stock needed to be under about 500 polys. Easy for a box van or open wagon but start using bogie coaches with 3D rendered bogies and pow, you got PC crashes too often. Todays multi-core processors with Gigs of video RAM are able to crunch many more numbers per second and so its common to find 3D loco models of up to 20,000 polys. LODs were (and still are) a useful trick to reduce load on your PC. LOD stands for Level of Distance. If you render a 1,000 polygon bogie coach close up, it looks superb, but if its at the end of a 10 coach train or worse, standing in a stock siding as your train rushes by at 50mph, those 10,000 polys are just not seen by your eye - but your PC must mathemtaically compute and render them, so the coach wastes PC power. LODs are a trick that involves building several simpler models of the same 3D coach that use fewer polys and which you instruct the simulator's engine to call up and draw the further away from the camera the model is. A 1,000 poly bogie coach viewed at 10m becomes a 500 poly model at 250m, a 100 poly model is rendered at 500m and over that the game can be instructed to display the most basic model, just a rectangular box; say 10 to 20 polys, because either your eye cannot see any detail at that distance and because by then, on your screen, the coach is just a blob of a few pixels. The problem is not all 3D modellers know about or use LODs. They take a good bit of planning and extra work as well. All sims are different. A flight sim aircraft such as a Spitfire for example can have many more polys, about 75,000 and these models look stunning, but the game engines can handle that because apart from up to a couple of dozen 3D planes there is not that much else for the computer to do other than calculate all the physics. Even smoke and cloud effects can be rendered very efficiently these days using volumetric algorithms and a ground texture, even one showing detailed trees and cities, can be extremely simple until you get down to very low altitudes, by using LOD models.

Mm. Something isn't right about that. I do not know the prototypes well at all, but it looks "off". The front footplate seems too big, or maybe its because its bare of any detail. I think the texturing is not terribly well done - it sems to lack surface detail - and the clunky smokebox handrail looks just, well, a bit amateur. If it were freeware I'd forgive all those points but in my very humble opinion payware needs to be better. Sorry for the moan!

Which I think is Kevin's point. If these authors make such a dog's breakfast of their books, then their editors should have stopped them and insisted on edits.

Such a small change but that does give quite a different character to it.

Hm. Interesting observation. I am ambivalent about that turntable. One is needed to save lifting locos and turning them by hand but in reality it's not there. The storage sidings aka Madder Valley exchange sidings are a fiddle yard, its just that I decided I wanted them open to view for ease of access. The alternative was making the gradient down from Puddlebrook steeper and having them below the baseboard that carries the wood distillation works and quarry. I have experienced fiddle yards set on lower levels on other layouts and heartily dislike them. They gather dust, small details that fall off models don't get noticed, they are hard to work on and so on and so on. In addition I wanted a small empire layout in the Ahern and P D Hancock mould with no off-scene fiddle yard - it just so happened that I couldn't do all that I wanted to do with the concept if I couldn't take trains off scene and bring them back. So really the "exchange sidings" are not really there. I suppose a turntable sitting there with no other loco facilities is already a bit strange so there's no valid argument against your suggestion. In fact it will not only give me longer sidings but save me the cost of a 3-way turnout. Turntables at the ends of platforms were a nice Victorianesque feature as well. I think I will take you up on your suggestion. Thanks.

Gilbert, I especially like the first photo in post #19882 and the last photos in #19860 and #19874. Far too often modellers cram in too much and you get tiny station forecourts that you could hardly turn a Bedford van in all stuffed full of buses, taxis, flower vendors and what not. Your layout has these lovely open spaces full of nothing at all and it adds so much to the scene. The sense of space is very refreshing. Your last shot of Crescent bridge has one lorry on it. So many people would fill that roadway with traffic. Less is so often more.

I was the worse for wear after a couple of very large G&Ts last night and while typing the above post, I discovered to my shock and awe that the letter "I" is right beside the letter "U" on the keyboard, so instead of "Tut-tut" I very nearly wrote something else and much more likely to be a Freudian slip than the above explanation which I am sure none of you will believe, notwithstanding how ridiculous this sentence has now become.

Not a moronic sounding question at all as you cannot know the answer since its a fictional industry - my Dean Sollers Colliery. There will eventually be 3 Pecketts and an ex-L&Y Pug owned by the company. Digital sound has been put into No.501 and I need to get around to putting sound decoders into the other two Pecketts. The Dapol Pug I am still thinking about; is a sound chip and speaker even possible? I may have to fit a freelance small coal/water/tool wagon behind it and put the digital gubbins in that.

And with a few name changes the latest (and I promise myself - FINAL) layout plan is now this. The layout building guys are working off-site on the baseboard frames and we should see them arrive and be fitted in early January.