Another non-meeting tonight, I’m afraid. With the Chairman and Treasurer on holiday, and Japanese Paul also missing, only 5 of us made the meeting. So no trains running, just a good chat and home.
Not much ESNG news, so here’s another ‘believe it or not’ scene for your railway…..
However, I’m beginning to get my head around the 2016 show, and the first flyer is ready.
It’s the start of the school holidays, so for the 19th time in 20 years Maxine and I went on our annual pilgrimage to the ‘New Wine’ church conference. Once again, there were 12,000 people camping on the Bath & West Showground near Shepton Mallet, Somerset, in the south-west of the UK. And of course it rained. The now Archbishop of Canterbury said that he had been to New Wine for seven years running and it rained all eight of them. Still, it was an excellent week!
This year, I remembered my camera, and took some pictures of the miniature railway that is on the Showground, run by the East Somerset Society of Model & Experimental Engineers. Most of the main line is dual gauge 5″ and 7¼” gauges (just a little larger than ‘N’ gauge). Each year at New Wine, ESSMEE open up the railway for the day and offer rides for all and sundry. I took the photos below, and especially like the Garratt locomotive. Despite the small size of the engines, the smell of ‘steam’ is still most evocative. And note that the sun was shining that afternoon! Read more about this little railway at http://www.essmee.org.uk/ .
A picture from the BBC website, of derailed engineering trains in Scotland. This looks remarkably like our ESNG layout on a bad day (and I suspect most modellers will identify with the incident!)
According to the article:
Two trains carrying ballast for engineering work have collided on the track near Cumnock in Ayrshire, Network Rail has said. No-one was injured in the incident which took place at about 11:20 on Saturday but a number of wagons derailed and the track was damaged.
The line, which was closed for the weekend for engineering work, will remain shut for several days. It is believed one of the trains ran into the back of the other.
A spokesman for track owner Network Rail said: “At approximately 11:20am yesterday, in a Network Rail work site, two ballast-carrying trains collided, resulting in the derailment of some wagons of each train. No-one was hurt in the incident but it has resulted in some track damage. Once the derailed wagons have been recovered the repair work will take approximately three days to complete. Therefore it is expected the line will remain closed for a number of days.”
Our local paper the Sorry Error, whoops, Surrey Mirror published these aerial photos of the London Bridge rebuilding project. This rebuild will increase the capacity of the through tracks that feed the Thameslink lines through to north London. It will no doubt be a good thing, but the present disruption to commuters is pretty extreme. The Shard looks pretty impressive over part of the station concourse.
For us modellers, we are unlikely to aspire to modelling London Bridge in any form, although the through lines past the old Ewer Street stabling point, and the smaller terminals at Cannon Street and Holborn Viaduct could appeal. However, these shots remind us what good prototypes urban railways can make, squeezed into the available space and winding their way – in this case on viaduct – between the buildings.
Just before we went on holiday, I made my last visit to offices in Kew Bridge, reviewing designs of the river crossings for a gas pipeline in Turkey. This has been a regular trip, from Redhill to Clapham Junction and then back out of London to Kew Bridge.
Changing trains at Clapham Junction is always interesting. Routes from London’s south and south-west termini, London Waterloo and London Victoria, funnel through the station making it one of the busiest in Europe by number of trains using it, 100-180 per hour except between midnight and 5am. On a typical brief visit transiting between platforms one will see trains and liveries from Southern Railway, South West Trains, Gatwick Express and London Overground. Occasionally one can also spot the odd goods train, although most cross-London traffic is in the quieter night hours.
One of the delights of Clapham is the complete hotchpotch of architecture on the main footbridge spanning all the platforms. On my last visit I took my camera, and these random shots record my visit…..
Browsing (as one does) I came across a New York Subway site with this excellent picture of a Pacific Electric PCC car at an unknown, but very modellable location. (OK, New York site, PE picture, does not compute….. but it’s still a great photograph).
The spindly palms and the large white houses would make a good backdrop to an interurban or trolley line.
PCC 5010, photograph: Joe Testagrose, 10/1950
Most people are wrong about the things that will make them happy. Professor Paul Dolan, speaking at the Hay Festive, said it’s actually quite simple. I’ve adapted them for model railway use – I think they still work!
Rediscovering websites that seem to have gone for good is always good news. I enjoyed Andrew Martin’s site as it had a good number of very buildable small layout plans. Although based in Australia, small stations are small stations worldwide – the difference between locations is often that of buildings, scenery, and of course rolling stock.
I’m pleased to rediscover Andrew’s site here (or maybe he never left and I lost touch or deleted the wrong link from my favourites). He recently described some Australian grain operations in a post, ‘An industry you can model – Kensington Grain Siding (Victoria, Australia)’. The track layout caught my eye as a good prototype for a scenic N-club to N-mod, 2 to 4 track transition module. Forget the goods roads greyed out on the diagram and you still have an interesting layout. The catch might be that the double junction means that the N-mod tracks will be up-down-up-down rather than up-up-down-down as usually set up. However, that will be no problem providing the operators keep awake!
And I’m pleased to see that my favourite from Andrew’s designs is back on the site. Only 10′ plus staging in ‘N’ gauge, and offering plenty of both passenger operations and switching.
Julias Modelopolis (Julia makes marvellous 2mm fine scale models, with some 3-D printing thrown in for good measure) recently commented on taking your layout to an exhibition. The money comments were…..
Browsing the interweb forums I always stumble across people critising layouts that are out and about at shows. The trend these days seems to be that people are almost demanding that layouts run faultessly and have a contunuous flow of trains passing by throughout their time in front of the layout as it’s their right to see this because they have paid to see it.
To me as a layout owner who occasionally takes it to shows it scares me rotten. It applies even more pressure to a situation which is quite stressful anyway. The thought of someone publishing critisism online about my layout because I didn’t run trains constanly or a wagon derailed makes me think is it worth all the effort. To get the layout to a show, set it all up, and try and keep things running throughout is not an easy thing to do.
I built the layout because I enjoy it (well, most of the time anyway!). If it gets invited to exhibitions then great (and it does!) but if what I read on some forums it the general mentality of exhibition attendees then I cannot see that its worth the effort. I wish I was thick skinned but I am not, should I need to be anyway for doing something I enjoy?
There were some good comments, too, including…..
Do those that criticise exhibit themselves? Or even build stuff? Are those that criticise to your face trying to make them selves feel good by putting down your efforts? Are those that do so online cowards who know that you’ll never knowingly meet the person making those comments so they can be rude from the safety of their living rooms?
As long as you’re happy with what you’ve created, does it really matter what other people think?
Don’t get stressed by the small minority of critics. They will be criticising everything (not just your efforts) and can be safely ignored.
I very much enjoy operating at shows you do get some rude idiots but you also get a lot of appreciative people. Life in general throws up rather more rude idiots so being at a show is fun for me. My favourite though are those who gaily talk have visit the station modelled and offering criticism when it is fictitious.
Don’t you just hate ’em??? I use the comment ‘I look forward to critiquing your next exhibition layout. When are you showing it??’
I hope that our ESNG show is generally free of such comments. It does seem to be a ‘danger’ of modelling a prototype to fine scale that you open yourself up to criticism from so called experts. However, I do recall my first N-gauge US module on display and two gentlemen complaining that my sidings didn’t have buffer stops. I refrained from telling them that it was quite normal for rural sidings in the USA to run out to nothing and a pile of earth, as I had modelled.
I used to follow a blog called ‘The Staging Yard’, following a UK based modeller’s trials at building a US layout, until it went quiet in 2014. Reading RMWeb the other day, I saw that the blog had reappeared and was being continued on RMWeb, written by a certain Dr Gerbil-Fritters. I thought my alias was strange…..
Nevertheless, this thread makes interesting reading, as the layout gets progressively simpler, as can be seen from these plans.
The thought is that the simpler plans are just more realistic and can be operated prototypically.
However, at the end of the thread, we have the worrying comments….
Not sure yet. The pike worked fine, was reasonably authentic, yet I just didn’t have any love for it. I am still looking for an emotional connection, but it’s proving elusive.
And after a little play with British ‘OO’ and ‘O’….
I’m having a short sabbatical from model trains.
Sometimes its difficult to decide what you really want to model. I hope he will soon be back, but I can so identify with that!
The second example of ‘less is more’ is in ‘O’ gauge, and is on the Model Railroad Hobbyist site. Here ‘Kurt’ describes his new switching layout, Cleveland Flats. A mere 11′ long in ‘O’ gauge, plus a few feet headshunt on the left. This little layout is based on the big cereal food processor at Cleveland Flats. And even in ‘O’ gauge, it is close to scale length. The plan is closely based on the prototype, with short tracks and tight clearances.
Another excellent little switching layout that could built in any scale – in ‘N’ perhaps a 6′ x 6″shelf would take the whole plan and give a lot of entertainment for its size. Imagine the care needed when crossing both grade crossings.
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