Workbench

I recently changed projects at work, and took advantage of that to have a few days of modelmaking therapy.

I decided it was time to build some baseboards for my next layout, which I tried to build in model form previously.

I’m very pleased with the result:

Seen in front is my current 00 layout, and I’m just trying out the boards to see if the track plan still fits!

Following on from Paper Model 1, here is a second go around:

The scale is the same, with one square being 50mm.

I’ve re-assesed the size of the concrete oil bunker, using this photo. if I assume the grid visible is 8′x4′ panels, then it appears to be about twice the height of a railway wagon. So the new model is only 500mm tall, which should be much more manageable.

I’ve also dropped the backscene panel on one side, so that the model is viewable from two edges.

Food for thought – it will still be considerably larger than Phoenix Yard, so I need to think about whether it should be possible to split it up for storage. The fact that the pointwork is in the centre of the plan will make this awkward at best.

You can see that on this model I printed off a trackplan from the Templot plan I have. The wagons seem a tight squeeze, so I will need to check the sidings have enough space in them for the 5/3/3 inglenook I want this plan to be.

In planning my next model railway, I want to improve on a few things from Phoenix Yard. One surprise I had in building that from just a trackplan was how much of the model I had to subsequently improvise. So this time I’m going to try to build a scale model first.

This is my first cut at a 1/10th scale model of my 1/76 model:

A paper model of a model railway

The gridded paper has a grid that will be 50mm on the ‘full-size’ model. The near vertical pieces are intended to be chalk cliffs, and the lozenge/bunker object in the corner is intended to be the concrete oil storage facility – inspired by Micheldever.

This has already been a useful exercise. I had to reject the configuration ‘in my minds eye’ as it simply couldn’t be constructed. This design then emerged, from my attempts to scale off the photos of Micheldever I found online.

There is a clear problem with this model if you measure it off – the vertical dimension will be 90cm, and easily a meter once I’ve allowed for under track space for bracing, etc.

Hard to pick out is a small tent shape in front of the oil bunker – that is a scale representation of a TTA tank wagon.

If I want a more compact and manageable model, I clearly need to rethink my design.

I’m in the slow process of planning a successor to Phoenix Yard.

Having enjoyed the operation of the inglenook format, I want to stick to that. However, I do want to draw some scenic inspiration from the real railway.

Thinking about locations that had a simple lineside set of sidings, I remembered Micheldever Oil Terminal:

View 51.187521, -1.258965 in a larger map

I travelled past quite frequently in the 1990′s, and it seemed to be sporadically active. More recently it seems to be used for occasional storage of surplus stock.

The facility seems to be a large concrete bunker built into a chalky hillside. There is a handy photo at Geograph, which I’m using to understand the relationship of the concrete bunker to the surrounding chalk hillside.

It was a sunny day recently, so time for some more photography. As you can see, I’ve bought some more locos recently!

Looking at the shunting puzzles site, and the collection of track I had, I realised I had enough bits to build a Timesaver, but it looked very complex for a layout I wanted to finish quickly. Therefore I decided to use Inglenook sidings as my base. Looking at the 2 pieces of foamboard I wanted to use to build the baseboard, butting them together would create a 1680mm length that would be easy enough to manoeuvre around the house (for storage, etc).

I wanted the layout to look relatively modern, so I wanted to use longer wheelbase wagons than the very shortest found on British railways. If I wanted the 5/3/3 proportions of the classic Inglenook plan, I needed to allow 8 wagon slots and one loco slot within my 1680mm length. After allowing for the classic BR class 08 shunter, pointwork and buffers, that meant an average wagon length of 143mm – big enough for long wheelbase modern wagons in 4mm scale.

I added the kickback siding with a fuel depot to the ‘classic’ plan, as many others do, to add more visual interest. I realised later that by using 2 locos I could shunt a tank wagon in occasionally to fill up the fuel tanks, for more operational options.

The final board ended up at 1685mm because my trackwork overhung by a millimetre or so (sloppy work on my part), and a shim was needed to allow me to fit a fascia.

One problem that I have with model railways is that I find operating them is not as much fun as building them. Once built, a lot of layouts seem to become processions of trains, with lots of similar movements for the operators to replicate. Twinned with this is the problem that complex layouts take years of part time work to finish – so they often feel like they will never be complete. I’ve had several starts at building layouts, and none have progressed well. They can seem uninteresting to operate after the track has gone down, or never seem worth getting stuck in – progress is hard to see toward the ‘finished’ goal.

Small layouts fix one of these problems – it is easy to see how to get a simple layout to a finished state – but I’ve never really appreciated that they could solve the first as well. A recent discovery was the ‘Micro Layouts’ website by Carl Arendt which contained many inspiring small layouts. Often good looking, the bold claim was made that many were interesting to operate too. Two plans stand out, and even have their own website maintained by Alan Wymann. Ingelnook Sidings and Timesaver are not new, and both present a shunting game to the operator. Wagons are placed on the layout in a starting position, and the game is to move them to randomly assigned end positions. Each plan limits carefully the lengths of the sidings, to make the puzzle harder to solve. This makes them unlike the real railway (which is engineered for ease of operation), but it makes them more compact and more interesting for the model maker.

How I’d spent around 20 years reading the model railway press, and missing the significance of these two plans is amazing. Perhaps it was simply the lovely presentation on the web – you can even try them out – that got me to notice them this time.

One other feature I liked is that they don’t require a fiddle yard, and lots of manual handling of the stock on-and-off the layout. They both run self contained, and with automatic couplers, completely hands off.

Over the years I’ve been meaning to start a layout, and I’ve acquired a few useful bits:

• 2 A2 sized pieces of 5mm foam board.
• Some Knightwing kits for portacabins, fuel depots and so on.
• A Bachmann 25 in BR blue – the first DCC ready loco I was aware of.
• A selection of medium radius Peco code 100 streamline points, with solenoid switches.
• Some matching flexitrack.
• Figures, suitable for a BR corporate image era layout.
• Souvenir wagons from my travels (so from Japan, France, Germany and so on).
• The wagons, locos and track from the late 80′s when I was using model railways more as a toy.

And finally, the spark to my recent restart – the Hornby Pendolino DCC train set.

What I wanted to do is build a layout that re-uses as much of this as I can, so that it doesn’t end up costing a huge amount.

I remember writing that life had got busy. At the time my largest customer was based in Birmingham, and I was spending a fair amount of time (as were many of my team) commuting up the West Coast Mainline. I became accustomed to the 8.10 from Euston, and I was usually impressed with the service. I’m sure I mentioned (more than once!) to everyone who travelled with me that I had grown up in a house that I could see the WCML trains from. When I decided to leave Symbian and take some sabbatical time this year, I was surprised to be presented with the Hornby model of the Pendolino I’d spent so much time on.

I enjoyed model trains as a kid, and as an adult I went along to the odd show, and procrastinated about building a layout ‘someday’. Laying the new trainset out on the floor rekindled my interest, and I’ve now spent the first few weeks of my sabbatical building that ‘someday layout’. I doubt that was the effect my colleagues expected, but thank you all, it’s been a blast!

Incidentally my picture doesn’t do credit to the model Hornby have created, which is a nice replica of the real thing – complete with great details like tilting around curves.

Welcome to my workbench! This blog is for me to publish about my model railway (that’s railroad for those of you who speak US English) hobby. Hopefully showing off my efforts will enable me to keep in touch with like minded souls, and spur my own skills to improve.