Modelling Narrow Gauge Railways in Small Scales

I got home from a rather wet day gricing Listers and their like at Lamport Hall  to discover my Amazon pre-order of Chris Ford's new book had arrived.

That's quite impressive considering Amazon aren't even showing it as being released yet.

So far I've only had a chance to skim through it but first impressions are of an excellent guide that takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to build your first OO9 layout, or, for that matter, your first layout in most scales, I particularly liked how balanced the content seemed with no undue emphasis on any one aspect. and also how it dives straight in to projects that presume the reader is going to build things for themselves.

I could see a definite opening for a similar approach to a book on finescale standard gauge modelling.

Well worth a more detailed read..

A Lucky Find

With the house move on the horizon I decided it was time to visit some of the local museums that I've not got around to going to nearly ten years.

The first, and most relevant here, is the Electric Railway Museum.

I never have worked out why it is located next to Coventry Airport rather than somewhere with strong historic links to electric railway. It also only opens sporadically, but fortunately last Saturday was one of their access days.

If this sounds familiar it is because Phil Parker, another local, also only fairly recently managed to make the same visit.

So there isn't much I can add to his observations. Except that in the on board shop I found an October 1959 Railway Modeller.

And in the back of it was this advert for my father's old shop.

Not only that but it also had a fascinating article by P.D. Hancock on building the trams for Craig, and by Doris Stokes on shop window displays.

More photos here and since it was only next door I also popped into the Midlands Air Museum.

Toy

For those of you who have been wondering about the prototype loco I mentioned  for the proposed 7 1/4" gauge line

Designed and built by Colin Edmondson to use an old Suffolk Punch engine, or the more modern Loncin.

To find out more have a look at the Minimal Gauge Railways group on Facebook

Go East Not So Young Man

So a  quick update on the house move situation. Things continue to move rather fast. Within twenty four hours of my last post we found a house we both fell in love with, our offer has been accepted, the mortgage is in place....and every finger and toe is currently crossed that nothing goes wrong.

Actually I'm sort of hoping one small thing goes wrong just so we can get it out of the way.

I'm not going to tempt fate by posting too many details yet, but the photo above gives a very strong clue about the approximate location, especially to a few of you who I know are reasonably local to the area. A pity this site wasn't for sale itself really.

What it currently lacks is an office and a proper workshop, but it has plenty of space for both that is currently occupied by kennels. Mind you with the poodles managing to be rather annoying this morning the idea of keeping the kennels has its own appeal.

As for the garden....

Well I think it makes a 7 1/4" gauge line pretty much compulsory. There is ample scope to start with something simple and then add in a more circuitous route at a later date. And in a remarkable coincidence the ideal loco for it has just been successfully tested before entering production.

The Long March

I think I've alluded in the past that we have been planning to move home at some point. A sudden and incredibly positive shift in the local housing market means the emphasis has suddenly shifted from trying to sell our house to finding a new one PDQ.

The short term implication of this, allied with a greater emphasis on my photography has been zero modelling.

The longer term  implications are something I'm only just daring to start to think about.

With the children moving out, and both Issy and I working from home much more of the time, we can be somewhat selfish about our new home. So bedrooms are being swapped for more office space, much more garden, and more utility spaces. There seems to be a never ending list of other considerations to take in to account including making my journey to at least one of my offices cheaper and preferably shorter. The easiest one to accommodate is the desire to move nearer to the coast, since it is quite hard to move anywhere in the UK that is further from the sea than our current house.

Where does this leave the railway?

Well first of all my bitter experience is every house move I've made, and I've moved around a lot, will end up with models broken, lost or stolen so there doesn't seem any point investing effort in any other projects until we've moved.

That is the only negative, apart from knowing what ever property we move into will need time and effort investing in it to make it work for us as a living space. Oodles of poodles need careful fencing in, and the home offices will need to be more than just a traditional study if I'm going to become more relaxed about working from home.

The positives are hopefully immense. Having a separate workshop, rather than it sharing office space, will make it a lot easier for me to switch modes between work and relaxation. It will also mean the layout can have a permanent home. I'm not intending to develop grandiose plans as a  result, but it will give me more options to play with. A few inches more foreground and background space and the possibility of modelling a through station rather than a terminus are the only changes I'm currently considering.

At least indoors.

When we first moved here part pf the deal was that I would be able to build a garden railway. In reality this turned out to be pretty incompatible with boisterous teenagers, chickens and dogs.

It went through a few iterations, some of which I rather liked, but to be honest my own thoughts about what I wanted from a  garden railway were also evolving rapidly. I began to hanker after a scale based approach rather than the typical 16mm "scale" caricature. It  always amused, and saddened, me that the 16mm crowd poured scorn on G scale modelers for their elastic approach to scale whilst doing exactly the same thing themselves.

16mm might still have a place in my plans, I have an Accucraft GVT tram on order with Simon Whenmouth at Anything \Narrow Gauge because I've always hankered after one from when I first saw the Stephen Poole 016.5mm version in the window of W&H models as a child. Roy link's plan for a GVT layout in that scale is another of those, like TAoC, that has permanently imprinted itself on my  mind. If I did build a 16mm version though I think it would be based on one of the smaller roadside stations, and much more  focused on just watching the train rather than more hands on operation.

Another prototype I've  mulled over for the garden treatment is the Darjeeling, but then it looks like we are heading East, a part of Britain not renowned for mountainous terrain.

Hold on a second though. Time to put two and two together and make 7.25

Large garden + Very flat garden =  7 1/4" gauge

It might be an option. 

Nothing fancy mind, and inherently utilitarian, but just perhaps worth considering.

Sacrificial Victim

The railway has been on a bit of a back burner for a couple of weeks. Partly because photography has been taking up more of my time as I've made the effort to really get to grips, quite literally, with the Fujifilm XE-1. When using a camera with a lot of manual settings and overrides it takes a time for certain things to become second nature. There is nothing worse than missing a shot because you fumbled to find a setting.

I've also been quite occupied with a Tata Group wide competition for innovative solutions. I'm glad to say that my team won our European heat and we will be off to Mumbai in April for the finals. Anyone who thinks that the UK has forgotten how to invent and build things would have been very impressed by some of the engineering solutions coming out of JLR and Tata Steel that we were competing alongside. On top of that the end of the financial year at work is always a busy and stressful time for me as we calculate how all our hard work finally translates into revenue.

So I think I need to re-focus on a few projects. One of which is the Manning Wardle. Here is the sacrificial pug waiting to go under the knife.

Flicking through my copy of Manning Wardle Locomotives Volume 1 it appears that there were some 4ft gauge versions of the H class. Since the Tanat Valley connected with a 4ft gauge line you can probably see where my long term thinking is going.

Playing Around

Over at Wood End and Beyond Chris has posed the question 

Why, if The Art of Compromise always generates so much interest,
do you so rarely see it being built?"

Part of the answer I suspect is in his own comment that 

Its an idea, not a list of instructions

I'm sure an awful lot of people who have the plan squirreled away eventually decide to build it with their own  design changes, and it is one of those designs where you don't have to alter much to end up with something that just isn't TAoC. That is one of the reasons I'm trying to keep my effort as close to the original as possible.

I also suspect that in marketing terms it doesn't have a clear audience. on the surface it looks like an obvious beginners design, and I'm sure if Paul Lunn were to update it to use setrack points and modern equivalents of the Prototype Models buildings then it would be more popular. But then I really don't think it is a beginners layout. First of all to work at all it needs careful packaging of the different elements in such a small space. Any errors are going to get magnified and any further compromise you might make is going to come back and bite you. 

It also isn't going to be a very interesting layout for the beginner from an operational perspective, all the interest is provided by putting effort into the scenic details. Then if you are an experienced modeler you'll probably consider it to be a rather unprotoypical . That is actually why I  didn't pay much attention to it for much of my adult life until I made the connection with the Fairford branch.

All this musing comes together when it comes to decisions about the goods shed.  The Prototype Models kit was based on the timber built shed at Watlington, Visually I think a  wooden building might work rather well. I think a stone GS, as on the Fairford branch, would unbalance the design despite being of roughly the same design.  Since I'm using Lcut components it seems a sensible compromise to go for a brick built version but using the Fairford footprint.

I still have some concerns though. The goods yard on TAoC as drawn looks overcrowded and unworkable in real life.

Anyway I quickly mocked up the shed this evening to see how it looked, and I think it might just fit, but it is going to be tight.