Legless

OK, confession time. Not my first and it won't be my last.

I've often remarked that what catches tyro modellers out is the silly stuff.

Building the baseboards for Upwold had gone really well, and I was congratulating myself on the legs being relatively sturdy and how easy the adjustable feet made it to get the boards level. Not only that but I was also really happy with the working height I'd chosen.

Then I decided to take the boards down so I could work on them as individual units

Which is when I realised the implication of having decided to make the layout semi-portable.

Many years ago my brother was helping my parents move some furniture out of our house in Herefordshire. In those pre-Ikea days I think it had probably come from Waring & Gillow, but it was still intended for home assembly.

But not for home dis-assembly, as my brother discovered when by removing one part he caused the whole wardrobe to collapse around him.

Gentle reader, you will be ahead of me by now.

Suffice to say as I lifted one of the boards I had a brief Wile E. Coyote moment of utter calm just before the rest of the layout crashed to the ground.

Looking back I can see where I went wrong. OK a child of five could see what I got wrong, but probably not why I got it wrong. To accommodate the existing furniture in the office I abandoned my original plan to use trestles. Instead I decided to use simple plug in pairs of legs. To be quite honest if I'd put the layout up in the intended semi permanent home the unexpected consequences of taking it apart wouldn't have been that bad, because the units it is fitting in around would have kept most of the pieces in place. But setting it up on the (patio/terrace/slabs - delete as appropriate) meant the safety net wasn't there.

So back to the drawing board. I suspect it might just mean building a different set of legs if Upwold ever goes on the road.

In the meantime I've not been making much other progress to report on. Once again lots of disparate jobs are progressing slightly rather than having any single project making significant progress. I'm hoping for some big news on the building front very soon though.

As a taster the guys at Lcut have taken on board some of my comments about their small signal box kit and both increased the size of the door to 4mm proportions and, much more impressively, managed to cut recessed windows.

This remember, sells for the pocket money price of  £6.00 when other laser cut buildings are being sold at premium prices.

Jigsaw Puzzle

Building a model railway, particularly a finescale one based, be it at best loosely, on a real location, feels a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle with only some of the box art in front of you.

This, let me be clear, according to "18.2mm and All That" is largely a Good Thing. It is part of the fun.

I can while away happy hours in a departure lounge trying to work out how the elements will fit together. I can even while away happy hour in a  lounge before departing and trying to work out where the door is.

Like doing a jigsaw puzzle often the moment a difficult piece is finally found is followed by the thought that it was so obvious you don't know why it was such a struggle to find it earlier. Answers to most questions are easier with hindsight.

However, I'm not at that stage yet, I'm still struggling to get the edges in place having hopefully correctly identified the corners.

Two things have brought this to mind. The first is assembling the 3D jigsaw that is a bullfrog manual point motor. I can't remember who first suggested I try these but I'm sure when they did there was a UK distributor. Ordering from the USA meant I ended up with both a hefty shipping charge and a £19 VAT/Royal Mail handling fee.

This is probably a good example of a product where overseas sales might best be handled as a downloadable file for laser cutting/3D printing and a parts list for the locally sourceable components.

The other is trying to finalise the timbering arrangements for Upwold in Templot. This, I suspect, could take some time, but will be worth it in the end. I think a little knowledge, garnered from David Smith's excellent book, is turning out (sorry)  to be a dangerous thing. I'm just not sure where I should be interlacing sleepers and where I should be using timbering.

Hopefully this link might take you to the Templot file. Otherwise here is a screenshot.

Obviously all offers of help will be gratefully, indeed grovellingly, received.

Once I've got the timbering sorted I can think about designing the point rodding and signal cabling, and in case anyone wants to help with that the intention is the groundframe will be placed on the platform opposite the entrance to the loop.

Meanwhile if you are thinking this is just more procrastination can I just say that  construction of the goods vehicles is coming along well. What isn't is my confidence level that I have the right braking arrangements for ex-GWR vehicles in the late 50's and early 60's. Yet more parts of the jigsaw.....

Good Enough For All Practical Purposes

Mike Cougill's excellent and thought provoking blog has been looking at the concept of the Freedom Layout again. In doing so he has referred to a formula familiar to project managers around the world that essentially boils down to "You can't have everything"

Mike explicitly talked about cost, size, quality and time as the main elements that need to be optimised if a layout is going to get built and not be a millstone around the owners neck.

From where I'm sitting on the learning curve I would have to suggest there are two other factors, and to complicate things they aren't static.

One is skill. I'm very aware that my skills have improved since returning to the small scale side of the hobby, but at the same time I'm learning new skills I'm also coming across new barriers of incompetence. I don't want to limit my modelling to what I know I can achieve today, but at the same time I don't want to be so ambitious that I reduce the chance of success.

The second is prototype knowledge.

When I set off on this journey I thought I was reasonably knowledgeable about railways. In fact if the conversation is about narrow gauge railways of the British Isles I can probably hold my own in a pub conversation.

What I didn't realise is the extent of my ignorance about certain aspects of standard gauge railways that I now think are essential for building a realistic model. Point rodding is an obvious example, but only one of many. Frankly I had no idea how the brakes really worked on wagons - and didn't need to until I started to think about how to model them.

There is, I suspect, a third factor, which is the point at which additional effort becomes of limited value in adding to the overall effect. I suspect it will be sometime before I have to worry about reaching that point.

All of which brings me back to TaOC again.

Whilst travelling and the weather have both been interfering with my modelling they haven't completely stopped me thinking about it, and the actual degree of compromise I'm prepared to accept. If I was building it in OO I think even at my usual glacial place I would have it up and running by now, but then what would be the fun in that?

Should I have gone with copperclad  trackwork though? That would have speeded things up even in EM.

So would going with the track plan as it came out of Trax, but I made the call that I wanted to put the final plan together in Templot so I have more guidance when converting the template to track and so I can sort out things like conflicts between timbering and sleepers.

So that is what most of my bank holiday Monday has involved, and here is the Templot design as it currently stands. A little more tweaking is needed but it just about works.

I've tried to get it as close to Roy's original design as possible whilst still using A6 points. Ideally I would have liked to use B6. For comparison this is how my Trax version looked.  At the end of the day there isn't much in it. I used A5 points in the Trax version but I don't think the space saving was worthwhile.

Baseboard Blues

Building the baseboards for Upwold has felt like a long slog at times. In reality they have gone together quite quickly in terms of working hours. Most of the delay has been down to trying to find time, the constraint of never having enough clamps, and waiting for glue to dry. Oh yes, and because most of my woodwork has to take place outdoors the weather has been a factor as well.

I had some bleak moments today though.

The first was whilst trying to clamp together the base for the traverser table. It took me far longer than it should have done to realise that the clamps I were using weren't actually clamping on the right combination of parts..

I also ran into a few avoidable issues with establishing  the best method of joining the baseboards in the correct alignment. In the end I've gone for a combination of techniques. I'm using some lightweight dowels and toggles from Station Road Baseboards for those times when I'm going to want to quickly join the boards together during construction, but for semi-permanent alignment I'm using  C+L tee nuts That was a late decision, and to be honest once I've got the boards mounted on legs it might prove to be overkill, but I was worried by the lack of rigidity relying on the just the dowels and toggles.  I would have made life easier for myself had I drilled the holes for the |bolts earlier in construction.

And then, just as I finished, I remembered that I had some removable pin hinges lying around, which is what I'd originally planned to use and would probably have been the best all round option.

And then, just as I was putting everything away, it suddenly dawned on em that I'd made no provision for cabling between the boards. Fortunately a hole cutter sorted that problem out fairly quickly.