Bother

 

To be honest, my actual language has been much stronger.

The day we were due to exchange, having been delayed by a firm of incompetent conveyancers, our buyer pulled out.

So we are back to square one since we will almost certainly have to start house hunting again.

The good news is I've had a good clear out and the skip is nearly full. The bad news is that if we are staying we need some things at the bottom of the skip.

The Final Countdown.

We now have a  date for our move to Shropshire. Unfortunately, a bout of post-Xmas illnesses means we are woefully unready. Today we are very sadly saying goodbye to our feral cats, who are being rehomed. It wouldn't have been fair to move them to a house with a small garden in the middle of a village. It is pretty heartbreaking. One of them is staying with us because she has become my office cat.

My next job is to move the remains of the ELR. Thank goodness I built it so all of it it can be carried by one man.

I'm expecting it to be a long time before trains run again, in any gauge. On the ELR - now the Ercall Light Railway- I'm going to have to rethink coaching stock as well since the ruling radius will be even tighter. Whilst Tug is definitely too big for the line I think I'll need a BE loco as well for the sake of the neighbours.

Back to Xmas. I thought I had escaped the curse of well-meaning presents that are railway tat. My wife disabused me of this on our second Xmas, with the children.

Trying it out for size.

 It is a long time since I dabbled in OOn3. So to get a feel for size I treated myself to a Shapeways purchase. Unfortunately, my wife mistook the opened box for rubbish so before I could come to any conclusion I have to go through the dustbin bags. Not nice, but it did take me back to the days when I would do that as part of my job. At least this time I wasn't trying to reassemble shredded computer printouts in search of frauds...

I think I found most of the parts.

It is a Blanc Misseron . How it is meant to have found its way to Shropshire will require some creative thinking. 

Thoughts on track plans are also developing, and I've identified a possible second site to be modelled. Trawling through old maps to select it has also thrown up a major surprise: An area I've always known as woodland was once watercress beds, and as we all know, watercress beds need an 18" gauge tramway to serve them.

Pico Pogress

 

Can you tell what it is yet?

Stage one of my experimentation is prototyping a very simple interlocking and route indication system. At some point I'm going to have to figure out how to add servo control of the point motors.

It is a new experience for me, combining coding with the logic of external hardware.  When to use a hardware I/O rather than software is something I'll be exploring.

Down another Rabbit Hole

 Anxiety about the house move and the future of the ELR is getting to me. Today Teddy comes home, seven years after his first arrival, and tomorrow I start track lifting.

I had a dreadful dream about it last night, but all is not doom and gloom because the nightmare also included, incongruously, an idea for a micro layout.

Actually, I can see how my unconscious mind came up with the key concept, an on-scene fiddleyard. I've been reading lots of back numbers of Railway Modeller. Fiddleyards were much less common than today. many layouts ran from station to station and had all the track on display. My plans for the Tern Valley have also deliberately avoided identifying the fiddleyard boundary whilst I figure out how to arrange it. I've considered the idea once before, for an HO layout with a car float acting as a side facto fiddleyard. 

I've no idea how the idea in the dream could be made to work, it would certainly involve some visual trickery.

Thinking for the Tern Vally has also progressed

I'm increasingly keen on the idea of access to the foreground goods yard, engine shed, and carriage shed being from the fiddleyard. It was actually part of the original plan in Voie Libre. It would simplify a lot of things and make operation more flexible.

At this stage, the White Rabbit still hasn't made an appearance.

Ah, here he comes, late as always.

When I was a teenager I used to look through the Maplins/Radio Shack catalogue at the electronic components and kits. I never had an actual use for them, apart from once building an electronic dice set.

I also used to spend my lunchtimes coding, initially on punch cards, in the school computer club. Coding played a big part in the early years of my career as a statistician, IT auditor and lecturer.

And then I stopped.

New and very different languages came along, but I had no real reason to learn them. My view of coding was always as a means to an end and I simply didn't need to code anymore.

I must admit that the Raspberry Pi piqued my interest when it appeared, but it was back to the days of the Maplin catalogue. I saw interesting projects, but nothing that would be useful for me.

Recently though I've been thinking about how I'm going to control any future layouts. Especially if any one day expand beyond being micro layouts. My day job means it would be remiss of me not to build in long-term maintainability and resilience. 

DCC seems the obvious answer, or even radio control going forward. But that doesn't solve every problem, and much of my narrow gauge stock will never be DCC.

At the Spalding show I was both impressed with the digital displays on St Ruth, and worried by the number of comments from operators that related to mis-set turnouts and isolating sections. If I ever exhibit a layout it will likely be singlehanded, and that is when you make mistakes.

I'm beginning to think about adopting the MERG CBUS system, or at least elements of it.

And now we follow the rabbit.

So somehow I now own a Pi Pico. Unlike the original Pi which is a computer on a single board, this is an even cheaper microprocessor on a board. How cheap? £5.





I'm still at the playing stage, getting to grips with Micro Python and Thonny  But I can see real potential. In particular, it can control multiple servos for point control, 16 from a single Pico, and integrate with different sensors.

Given that wireless and Bluetooth can both be integrated I'm also wondering about possibilities in the garden. I'm mostly using Loco Remote for the battery locos, but I could imagine using the Pico to change points.

OOn3

This is almost an aide memoir for me.

I think I've got an OOn3 plan in my head that works. Based, on all things, on a tramway plan that appeared in Voie Libre a few years ago. It should fit perfectly on top of an Ikea Kallax unit. It is reminiscent of the Clun Valley Tramway but a lot simpler. In particular I don't think it will require much stock. I'm thinking two working locos, one static one, a railcar, three coaches and a handful of wagons. I've worked out sources for all of them.

As for the fictional location, I'm returning to one of my early OO9 layouts.

This was Hales. I was rather fond of it. I built a static OOn3 version a couple of years later that I never photographed.  The concept is a general carrier 3ft line with aspirations to link Market Drayton with Shrewsbury that ended up only getting as far as Hodnet, but later extended to a quarry at Hales as a mineral extension.

I might even repurpose some of the Apa Valley buildings.

If anyone recognizes the station building I used on Hales I would be very grateful. I think it was an HO kit. I could use the wills kit but it is both too wide and too recognisable.

The beginnings of a plan. I slipped in the double slip in homage to Iain Rice, but it overcomplicates it.

The line in the foreground that run off the on-scene turntable are the loco and railcar sheds. I might or might not extend one into the fiddle yard to provide a "virtual" shed larger than the one modeled.

The middle road would be a carriage shed, again possibly running into the fiddle yard to solve an operational problem I came across at 3am this morning...

On the other hand, I want the passenger facilities to cause a bit of an operational problem, to make the operation more interesting and to add a touch of the Schull & Skibbereen atmosphere, with passengers unable to leave or board the train until a shunt has taken place. 

That leaves the goods facilities. I envisaged the goods shed to be on the headshunt, but now I'm thinking that it is a case of choosing between the goods shed or a carriage shed.

Stalled

 I'm writing this whilst supposedly packing up the office and studio before the house move. Ideally, of course, I would have been at Warley this weekend.

I say supposedly because I'm running out of boxes and places to store them. The multitude of cats and dogs isn't helping. Another cat has just arrived through the window as I typed that. Yesterday she tried to come in via the door.

It also doesn't help that I keep coming across things that I'd forgotten I owned, many of which are relics of past projects that stalled because of home office moves.

There is no doubt that, with less space to play with in the new home, I have to do some thinking.  The plus side is that the new house will need less in the way of outdoor tools and equipment. The ride-on mower can be replaced by a small robot one, and I hope never to have to start another cheap two-stroke garden tool.

I've also made room by moving Tug and the coach offsite, into the care of Steve Purves and his There and Back Light Railway. They now reside on the Stapleford Park estate, and Tug is destined to a rebuild to 10 1/4" gauge. Not to run at Stapleford, though that would be amazing, but to be available for semi-commercial work. At the same time, Teddy has finally come to the end of its overhaul and should be returning to me soon. And rather splendid it looks as well, thanks to CDM Engineering's protracted overhaul. 

The future ELR will use lightweight temporary track, but I've decided to keep hold of the current PNP track for now.

The garden railways will adhere to my belief in simplicity, a simple L shaped 45mm 7/8ths line hidden in what is now the flower bed, and a slightly raised 32mm circuit in an island bed for Grandchildren to run robust 16mm stock, and me to run a couple of my 18" gauge 7/8ths models.

So we come back to the indoor projects...

My plan, if we weren't moving, had been to move to 7mm in the long term, with a GVT based line and a simple interchange with a very simple standard gauge line. The whole office/studio was built with housing that in mind.

The good news is that the original Roy Link GVT plan that was based on will still fit in the new house once I retire. For now, though, 7mm is a non-starter.

I really want to try out TT120, but not for a big project. I think I can fit something onto one of the existing TAoC baseboards. TAoC itself looks like being the other major victim of the move. There is one possible location for it, but it would need to be hidden away when not in use. 

Looking at a map, the Tanat Valley will almost be within cycling distance. It will be a very low priority, but I'm wondering about a 2mm version of the original Apa. 

The Cadeby and Flemish Wharf micros will continue to sit in their existing bookcases. I have half an idea for a very simple Penhryn-inspired OO9 layout as a home for some of the recent RTR products. 

So what will be my main focus? Well, I still have a lot of W&U tram locos, and I love the Rapido W&U coaches. So I think I'll carry on with that plan, but with two significant changes.  I'm going to drop the Inglenook aspect and abandon the White Swan Yard second baseboard. I'm also going to move it to a more generic East Coast LNER location and add in some North Sunderland aspects to widen the options for stock. Whilst exhibiting has never appealed to me, I suspect I might build this layout with that in mind.

And the overall winner? We need to move in first, but I think it might be a relatively old-fashioned OOn3 layout set in the Welsh borders, and using a corner cameo location. As much diorama as layout., where nothing much happens and most of the stock will never move again.