esngblog

I have a sheet of plywood sitting on the lounge floor, to mark out the layout trackwork.  But it won’t get done tonight!  However, some helpful advice has been received!

Phil wrote…..

Hi, Jon!

Have you seen Jago Hazzard’s channel on YouTube?
Some interesting clips and stories including some about London Railways.  It was the view of the London & Greenwich line arches that made think of you, since you had blogged that you were trying to re-create some railway arches.
See them at 3:50 into this clip:

Take care, stay well!

Phil.

I’ve also received some thoughts from Duncan.  This may be a bit of a challenge, an interurban Grand Union on steroids!

Once you get the hang of making track, are you going to tackle something like this?

In a word, no.

Next email was interesting.  I see that FineTrax are going to make 4mm scale track (in any gauge) like this, with integral rail chairs, and ‘N’ gauge track may be upgraded and follow.

I don’t know if you remember the Wye point I made for the magic roundabout? Basically, it’s a 3-D Printed base, including chairs, and then I threaded Peco code 60 rail in. I was surprised how easy it was, and how well it worked:

The ‘magic roundabout’ was nothing to do with Zebedee, but is an interesting multi-directional train turntable Duncan helped build for the Stuttgart Nm setup.  He continues…..

Anyway, I’d be wary of tackling slips, but turnouts and crossings could be done fairly easily this way I think. Even something huge, like Newcastle junction, is just more 3-D printed pieces, and thread the track in. The track planning software always uses set pieces, like individual points, but it wouldn’t be hard to make a really flowing junction, like in the photos, and then make individual pieces from that:

Newcastle Central. Photo: Ben Brooksbank. Wikipedia Commons

Sorry, Duncan, haven’t got the room, even in ‘N’!!!!!

Just to calm me down, here’s another picture of West Croydon, with the carriage sidings and the old loco shed site to the left.  The retaining wall was indented for a small turntable to take the small LBSCR tank locos used for suburban services prior to electrification.

Anyhow, many thanks to Phil and Duncan – all very interesting and it keeps me on my toes.  I think I shall return to that sheet of ply in the morning, when I have some natural light to work with.

And I must finish with a picture of the REAL Magic Roundabout.  Formative viewing for my A-level and university years.  Probably explains a lot…..

I’m still working on the baseboard design for the layout.  I’m minded to wait until the FineTrax points arrive in the post, so that I can check that the published templates match the real thing.  The problem with a layout on arches, is that the raised baseboard section needs to be shaped to match the track.  I’d be confident that I’d get Peco geometry correct, but am less sure about FineTrax,

In the meantime, where is this station, and what have these outer platforms been tacked onto?  I have placed it to the west of the old Ludgate Hill station, imagining a new link built from Waterloo to directly link the Holborn Viaduct line with Waterloo.  This does make a bit of a mess of Ludgate Circus, and I’m making no attempt to match any of the actual road layout, but Ludgate West is a tentative name for the layout.

This location gives a lead as to the train shed that forms the backdrop to the station.  Here’s The Engineer magazine’s sketch of the structure.  There are plenty of pictures of the bridges at either end of the station, that may give a lead as to structures to choose for the layout.

I’m not sure where I got the next photos from, so my apologies for any copyright problems.  They show the old Ludgate Hill station in its latter days, and in one case, ready for demolition.

Hopefully, I can report on the baseboards next time out.

Moving forward, I need to select the height of the arches under my Minories.  An obvious place to start is the South London prototype.  We could also move out to Liverpool or Fenchurch Street to the east of London for very similar pictures, but these are typical of my area of interest.

We start around Brixton.  All these first pictures come from Google Streetmap.  These are very low arches, with little headroom, but they have a most attractive decorative line of brickwork at the top.

The next two are close to London Bridge.  A similar design, but a higher structure.

This is in Walworth, on the SECR line up to Ludgate and Holborn Viaduct.

And this is close to Blackfriars.  A very plain, but high, structure.

Google couldn’t provide me with many drawings of such mundane things as railway arches.  But this is a neat architect’s drawing of a South London project.  The arches have a lot of decorative brickwork on show.

Finally, for the prototype, we return to Brixton, and two architect’s drawings that I have extracted from a planning application open to the public on the web.  They show the same sort of area as my photos above, and details of the arch decoration.

So, that’s the prototype.  How could I model this in ‘N’ scale.  ‘OO’ would be easy, as the Ratio/Wills plastic kits do a very nice arch.

But that’s no good for ‘N’.  I’ve rejected the vacuum formed arches you can get.  These are cheap and cheerful.  The brickwork is oversized, and really closer to stonework.  And the arches on my proposed layout will be in the foreground, so need to be well modelled.

There seem to be four options.

Metcalfe make a very nice brick retaining wall, with some complex detailing.  However, the arches are retaining wall shaped, not the prototype occupied arches.  Not useable.

Scalescenes sell a downloadable set of arches in a range of different brick and stone finishes.  This is brown brick, and it looks the part.  They also sell a neat set of shops or industries to fill the arches.  I’d need to get these well printed, probably on laser-jet for durability, but they look pretty good.  And the basic download is cheap.

A solid outsider is the German laser-cut ‘High-line’ series produced by DM Toys.  These kits are made from laser-cut, pre-coloured, card, and MDF for the trackbed, if used.  They are fairly expensive, but not unduly so for my relatively small layout.  And they are a whole lot cheaper than some equivalent UK laser-cut arches.  Perhaps the catch is that they do look German.  That may not be a problem, as arch design does vary a lot around London.  One could replace the fancy railings with simple ones, as in Brixton, and cut the pillars between them down a bit, but the lack of decorative courses of bricks at the top of the wall stands out.  And UK arches do seem to extend higher into the structure.  The brickwork does, however, look excellent – perhaps a little overscale, but not too much.

Finally, Scalecast sell silicone moulds to cast your own arches in stone or resin.  Nice detail here, but I don’t really fancy casting all of them, and making the occupied arches may be tricky (of course, they do a mould for ‘OO’).  Perhaps not this time!

So I think we are left with a choice between DM Toys and Scalescene.  DM Toys would have the advantage that they also make a couple of neat bridge kits to match the arches, but I think that Scalescenes win, as they do look so much more ‘English’.  Will they look OK in the foreground?  I think so, but it occurs to me that it would be possible to use the Scalescenes downloads as templates for scratchbuilt arches in Plastikard.

But at the moment, all I need to do is to fix an elevation for the upper board.  Scalescenes provide this useful sketch that gives the required dimension – 43.5mm between levels.

Next, I need to draw up a cutting list for the baseboards.

It’s time to move on from my (occasional) Covid-19 diary, to something new.  As you, gentle reader, may well realise, I have spent the last couple of months trying to work out a layout that I actually like.  This is the story to date…..

Starting out, I almost settled for this!  A Brio Minories.  Now that’s what I call a design…

Givens for the design

I decided that I wanted to build an urban layout.  And although I am attracted by the idea of a ’roundy-roundy’ layout, an end-to-end is more practical in our house.  As I have posted previously, the inspiration is there in ‘Minories’ and in Ian Futer’s ‘Victoria Park’.  But I haven’t been too happy with an urban 2 or 3 platform station.  The answer to this is the lovely ‘Surrey Arms’ layout, where the layout models some side platforms with a backdrop of the main train shed (think Victoria or London Bridge for two companies sharing the site, or even Kings Cross suburban.)

Surrey Arms is in a cutting, but I really wanted to put the station on arches, like most of the southern termini.  I’d hoped to do something a little different from a Minories, like the ‘O’ gauge version below with it’s central carriage siding.  But that turned out to be a little tricky, as Minories is such a perfect plan.

Planning

Although I intended to use Finetrax code-40 track for the layout, I started designing on the computer using Peco geometry, for simplicity.  I then realised that using USA ‘Fast Tracks’ handbuilt templates gave me something very close to Finetrax – after all, a B8 turnout is the same except for the sleeper spacing.  And things like Y-points were already included in my computer library.

So I started with this version, based on one from an RMWeb thread.  Reasonable radius points, but platform 1 is arrival only.  This is on 2 x 800mm boards.

I also tried this one, based on West Kirby on the Wirral.  Only two platforms, and the scenic layout is 1 x 1200mm board, with an add on non-scenic section for the end of the platforms.  This is not entirely silly, as the platform ends are often hidden by an overall roof, making uncoupling difficult, and the least realistic part of any station model is the concourse, as there is no movement there.  I’d have had to make the track for this one.

I didn’t really connect with these, and tried a purer Minories.  All the points are B8’s, that look good.  There’s an extra loco/parcels siding, and the classic Minories platform curves are mitigated by using two Y-points on at the entrance to the station.

Using B6 points in places gives a shorter layout, but I didn’t think that it looked as good.

This was then cut down to make a shorter, Victoria Park version.  Losing a crossover at the throat makes the station shorter.  Either the two entry tracks are bi-directional, or one becomes a headshunt/loco road.

And if I returned to almost a classic Minories, except for the Y-points, I thought that the end result was a very pleasing design.  This turned out to be the final design!

Visualising scenery

Dropping the track plan into Paint.net allowed me to sketch out the scenery.  The 1200mm long Minories started as a 300mm wide board.  I though that the platforms at the back just looked too wide, and I didn’t want to widen the front of the layout.

I really liked the next iteration – the 1200m long Victoria Park lookalike.  Just 250mm wide, this seemed to have a better balance.

A bit of a nudge

Come Black Friday, I saw that there was 20% off Finetrax. It pushed me over the edge so I bought the code-40 bullhead track that I need for a ‘Minories’ look-alike.

The final iteration

And thus to the final iteration.  Back to 2 x 800 x 250mm boards (although the framing to support the backscene will take it up to 1200mm.  This seemed to tick all my boxes, at any rate, and it might even get built!

So, I’ve ended up with almost a standard ‘Minories’, but with a tweak here or there. On two 800mm long boards, and the station is raised on the classic South London arches.  Operation is limited, but fun for an hour or so, and it would work well at an exhibition.  There are a number of buildings and structures to construct, especially the over-track signal cabin at the layout entrance, and the train sheds.  You might well have selected one of the other plans, but I think that I’ll stick with this one.

Next steps

There are a number of things to do next:

1. First step will be to use Finetrax templates to lay the layout out full size.  This will check all the clearances and determine the size of the high level baseboard.  I want this board to be open underneath to give access for point motors and wiring.
2. A big decision is what to do for the fiddle yard. A ladder of points is easy but takes a lot of room. A balloon loop shorter but wider, and the radius is could be a little small. Traverser, tricky for my brain. Cassettes, easy to do but also very easy to drop!
3. I also need to decide how to build the railway arches.  There are a number of possibilities, but the one will fix the distance between the two levels on the layout.
4. Only then can I start making the boards.

Well, that’s been an epic post, but it does mean that I have to build something now. I just hope that it doesn’t keep changing, like my American layout did.  More will follow…..