Where Worlds Collide

In a few months the Royal Mail will be transferring carraige of mail from rail to air and road. This posting (from another lists) was posted to the Diesel & Electric Modellers group, indicates that all might not be well.

Air:
EDINBURGH-EMA-EDINBURGH
De-icing at Edinburgh.
Following de-icing at Edinburgh the aircraft departed 30 mins late and arrived at EMA 20 late. Departed EMA 23 late and arrived at Edinburgh 8 late. Due to the late arrival 30,000 Inverness itwms failed to connect to the plane amd were forwarded by road.

BRISTOL-SPEKE-NEWCASTLE
Aircraft went tech (engine) at Speke.
The aircraft was repaired but subsequently went tech again with a different fault and eventually departed 155 late. Arriving Newcastle 152 late, all mails were offloaded and sent to Newcastle to be forwarded later that day.

SPEKE-BELFAST
Aircraft went tech (steering) in Belfast prior to positioning to
Speke.
The aircraft could not be repaired, the operator provided a back up plane which positioned into Speke from Glasgow (delayed refuelling & pushing back in Glasgow). Departed Speke 155 late and arrived Belfast
147 late.

Rail:
NO PROBLEMS

Road:
47 breakdowns.

There are continuing rumours that the Royal Mail is in negotiation with some train company other than EWS, using some rolling stock already owned by the Royal Mail. If the above figures are typical, let’s hope they concentrate minds. Otherwise we’ll have to get used to a lot more late mail.

Like most railway modellers I’ve got far too much rolling stock. I’ve reached the point where the limiting factor for for an operating session is the capacity of the layout, not the amount of stock available. In thinking of plans for future British outline layouts, I’m wondering how many trains you really need to give a representative selection of the trains for any specific location. This will determine how many storage roads I’ll need in the fiddle yard (that’s staging roads in American).

I’ll take as an example the line that I’ve modelled before, and is likely to form the subject of any future British N-gauge layout I’m likely to build; the Cornish main line between Plymouth and Penzance. I’m most likely to model a location east of Burngullow. There’s too little freight traffic at the far western end for my tastes, although I have considered the terminus of Penzance as a subject for a model.

I’ve identified the following six trains as the ‘signature trains’ that any model of the Cornish mainline will be incomplete without.

• Paddington to Penzance Inter-City
• Cross-Country Inter-City
• Plymouth-Penzance local
• Parcels
• Local china clay working
• Long distance freight

This is of course the bare minimum; with more space and rolling stock available I could easily double up on all of those. What follows is a the formation of those six trains for three different time periods, 1987-89 (the period I began modelling, for which I have the most stock), the post-privatisation 1999-2002 era, and turning the clock back to the 1976, the final year of the ‘Westerns’. Most of the stock required for each of the three periods is from the collection I already own; but there are a few gaps, which I will use a guide for future purchases and kit construction.
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Ananova – Mills and Boon helps M6 toll road to stay intact

Engineers used 2,500,000 old Mills and Boon books in the building of the new M6 toll road.

Unsold copies of the books were shredded into a paste and added to a mixture of asphalt and Tarmac.

It’s intended to help prevent the road surface from splitting after heavy use.

(Link from Sore Eyes)

Jarvis Rail are denying rumours that the West Coast Mainline rebuilding has used pulped Labour and Conservative election manifestoes for the same purpose. But nobody will believe them….

Lawrence of Amish Tech Support suggests a solution to people making illegal turns in front of the shiny new Houston Metro.

The best way to solve the problem is to put big nasty spikes and plows on the front of each train, Road Warrior-style. Anything that got in the train’s path would end up mangled, eviscerated, and torn to bloody/rusty chunks in less than a second. Then accelerate the trains to about 100MPH, mount webcams or air live broadcasts of the tracks, and people would pay good money to see the Downtown Houston Deathtrain 3000′s run amok.

I’m sure the Dellner(?) automatic couplers on the front of the Manchester Metrolink trams would make a nasty mess of anything that got in the tram’s way. As far as I know, there has yet to be a fatal accident on this line, which has now operated for ten years. Admittedly the street running sections form a small part of the total network.

Oh No! Cold Spring Shops has discovered the dreaded Depot Layout. (In British usage, a ‘Depot’ is a locomotive servicing and maintenance facility, not a passenger station or freight terminal). This theme has been so popular with diesel era modellers in Britain it’s become a bit of a cliché on the Exhibition circuit.

On the subject of curves, it seems to me there’s a big difference in the way American and European modellers approach them. Americans tend to keep the curves in the open, and make extensive use of transition curves to soften them. In contrast, a common European approach is to exploit the way many manufacturers design their stock with clever extending couplings that can negotiate tight curves. So we see layouts with some very tight curves indeed (15″ in HO or 8″ in N), but those curves are hidden in tunnels.

My own layout follows this pattern; restricted to a 12′x2′ space I use tight curves (which will be hidden once I get round to constructing the scenery) to enable me to model a double track mainline that can cope with trains of nine 85′ coaches. They have no problem with the 8½’ curve on the inner main at each end, although they look ridiculous in the process, with the two coach ends at 45° to each other!

Steve Jones is giving up on 4mm British outline modelling, and returning to modelling those strangely shaped American things in HO.

So I’m returning to American modelling, where products are both cheaper and vastly superior to the current crop of UK releases. I’m convinced that quality UK products will come, if only because the terminally stupid defeatists bleating on about accepting whatever you’re given represent the static, existing market. A manufacturer looking for increased sales will obviously have to look beyond this to the lucrative and more discerning sector that currently throws money at American and European concerns. Unfortunately I’ve got a layout to build now, not in 5 years time, so American it is.

In some ways he’s got a point; if you want to build a large layout with a fleet of dozens of locomotives that are all perfectly superdetailed straight out of the box, then UK outline modelling is not the way to go. And it’s very frustrating that a number of high-profile recent releases from UK manufacturers have been released with quite fundamental errors. The Bachmann 37 with cantrail grilles in the wrong place is the worst example; if you’re familiar with the prototype it looks completely wrong, and it’s virtually impossible to correct.

I’ve been in the same boat; after 15 year modelling British N, a rash purchase of a Kato/Hobbytrain BLS Ae4/4 led to what was initially going to be a small Swiss layout as a side project. However, the vastly superior quality of Fleischmann, Arnold, Kato and Minitrix models compared with what I’d been used to from Graham Farish, combined with a house move, meant that Swiss modelling took over, and all my British N went into storage.

I haven’t abandoned British N completely, and I still plan to build another British layout when it looks like I’m going to be permenantly settled in one place and have space for a decent permenant layout. British outline is still in the blood, and not even the sight of an Re10/10 or a pair of BLS Re4/4s slogging through the Alps on a heavy international freight can quite beat the excitement of a pair of 37s hitting the 1:60 bank out of Par with the 14:55 St Blazey to Exeter Speedlink, or a 50 rushing through at dawn on the down Postal. So I’ve kept my extensive collection of UK rolling stock, and even add to it from time to time.

Until then I’m planning to build a smallish portable Swiss layout, to exhibition standards, which should keep me busy for a couple of years.

Update: today’s entry (Scroll down, no permalinks) clarifies things a bit; he’s not abandoning British modelling completely, just changing his big loft layout to US outline, and restricting his British modelling to smaller projects.

Cold Spring Shops notes my review of Iain Rice’s layout planning book, and appears to disagree with the author about the suitability of O gauge for such projects.

Sounds like it’s worth a look, despite the a priori ruling out of O Scale. Depends on what you define as main line, I suppose. Eight coach formations and 50 car coal trains do not a mainline make.

Yes, but….

It all depends on your definition of a ‘modest space’, and the level of versimillitude you want in your model. An American modeller used to building layouts in a basement the size of the total footprint of the house might consider a 20′x20′ area ‘small’. To most British modellers such a space would be considered ‘huge’; an area 16′x9′, the size of a single garage or the usable amount of space in a typical attic, is the largest space most of us can ever dream of.

As for realism, some people are satisfied with 3 to 4 coach trains representing 10 to 12 car expresses, and accept unrealistically tight curves as an acceptable compromise. Cyril Freezer has written a load of planbooks in the 60s, 70s and 80s with those sorts of restrictions. But this isn’t really what Rice’s book is about; the emphasis is very much on finescale modelling, where those tight curves aren’t an option, and where major reductions in train length aren’t really acceptable.