Railways Blog

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.

I’m sure my luck is going to run out sooner or later. I realise that over the past three weekends I have travelled over a thousand miles by train, much of it by Virgin Trains, and not suffered any serious delay. And twice I’ve made the connection between the local train from Manchester into the Preston-London at Crewe despite it being too tight to be advertised as a connection. And coming back from Warley I managed to get a seat on a Voyager on a Sunday night!

Just about the worst problem has been outside Notwork Rail’s territory; the tube between Euston and Paddington. That bit seems to go pear-shaped every time I use it. What’s gone wrong with London Underground?

A bit of silliness at Stockport today, though. A minute before the train to Alderley Edge was due on Platform 1, the tannoy announced a platform alteration and that the train to Alderley Edge was delayed due to ‘the late arrival of the inbound service’. As the announcer spoke, a class 323 with the words ‘Alderley Edge’ on the front rolled into platform one, dead on time. After a few moments of confusion, the conductor confirmed that this was indeed the Alderley Edge train, and the station announcement was total bollocks.

Mainlines in Modest Spaces
Iain Rice
Atlantic Publishers
96pp

This is the sequel to the same author’s “Designs for Urban Layouts”.

This volume defines a ‘modest space’ as anything from a spare room to a single garage, and a ‘main line’ as a extreme provincial end of a route or secondary cross country line, giving as examples the Cornish main line, the Somerset and Dorset, or the Newcastle to Carlisle line, rather than four track sections of the West Coast Main Line.

The first four chapters are taken up with the philosophy of main line modelling, and the practicalities of building them in a limited space, with discussion of curvatures, train lengths and choice of gauge and scale. Sadly he concludes than 7mm is a non-starter; you can’t get “O Gauge”, “Main Line” and “Modest Space” in the same sentence.

Then we get fourteen complete layout plans for different scales and eras. Unlike the previous book in the series, this time the diesel era manages to gets a look in, with two of the fourteen plans set specifically in the post-steam era. Significantly both of these are in N gauge, while all but one of the steam era layouts are 4mm.

There’s a lot of emphasis on fiddle yard design in order to accommodate decent length trains in a limited space. Only a couple of designs use the traditional ‘oval with storage loops’ format. Instead, the author comes up with a variety of different ideas including vertical traversers and cassettes. Several plans feature steep gradients on the scenic parts leading to stacked fiddle yards, sometimes with an equally steep linking road to allow continuous running. Of course, we also see one of his famous “teardrop” style plans, with a steeply graded mainline in a teardrop shape fed by two fiddle yards, one above the other.

One things that strikes me is the relatively limited capacity of many of the plans. With a six road traverser or a pair of three or four road dead end fiddle yards, they only have space for half a dozen trains in a typical operating session.

Every one of these plans, just as in the earlier planbook, is set in a specific time and place. Some are based on actual locations, such as Luxulyan, Bodmin Road and Yeoford, while others are fictitious locations on prototype routes such as the Midland line through the Derbyshire peaks or the L&Y in Lancashire. The whole book is peppered with autobiographical asides. He tells us about trainspotting at Bodmin Road during family summer holidays in Cornwall with his packed lunch (“The up ‘Cornish Riviera’ used to appear at about sandwich-opening time”), and of his last sad sighting of an A4 pacific, filthy and battered hauling a humble pick up goods on the now closed Waverley route in Scotland.

Overall, while not specifically aimed at the diesel era modeller, there’s a lot of food for thought and inspiration in these pages. And the prototypicality of the plans is a far cry from the train set curves and cover-the-entire-board-with-track approach I remember from those Peco planbooks written by Cyril Freezer in the sixties and seventies.

Transport Blog have started a game of Mornington Crescent. The first two moves were Baron’s Court and Gunnersbury.

My move is British Museum, which, according to Patrick Crozier, is a legal move according to the Hepplethwaite-Everard rules.

The Warley MRC exhibition, held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, is the largest model railway show in Britain. It gathers together many of the best layouts in the country, and is also the occasion for manufacturers to showcase their latest new releases.

A couple of the most impressive layouts were 4mm scale BR steam era lines, both set in the Pennine Hills in the 1950s. First there was Blea Moor, a slice of bleak Yorkshire moorland with a stretch of the Settle and Carlisle railway running through it, served by a vast bank of staging roads hidden beneath the moor. The only thing that could have made it even more realistic might have been some cold horizontal rain. Then there was the Kendal MRC’s Askrigg Bank featuring a double track on a 1:40 grade. This is an unusual layout in that all four sides are scenic, with the visible track climbing though 360 degrees round the layout, then descending again inside the hillside on slightly gentler grade; the tracks actually make three laps of the board, two of them hidden inside the hill. Another very impressive layout was the 40 foot long HO scale Lorrette, a slice of electrified Belgian main line with some impressive scenic modelling.

American readers of this weblog my be struck by the difference in emphasis in the model railway hobby. I get the impression that the American hobby is all about big permenantly installed basement empires. In contrast, the really big and impressive British layouts are sectional exhibition layouts. This may be because British house builders typically don’t build houses with basements; in fact some layouts can never be fully set up in their owner’s homes, and only run at shows.

Yet again, Warley made a huge dent in my wallet. First there was the Kato/Hobbytrain Swiss Re6/6 Bo-Bo-Bo, released just a week before the show, a magnificent model that’s gliding round the layout on a train of container flats as I type this. Then I bought a whole load of British outline stock, several Farish VAA vans, and a Artrans grain hopper that I’m planning to convert into a ‘Polybulk’ china clay wagon. Worst of all, I succumbed to a complete HST set in First Great Western’s “Barbie” livery! And last, but definitely not least I also ordered a CJM 67. (“Why spend all that money on something that just sits there and goes ‘ying, ying, ying’”, said Roechard Wibd)

Shows like this are great gatherings of people. Nowadays I tend to keep in touch with fellow modellers over the net, and meet up with them at shows. Over the weekend I met up Alan Monk, Steve Grantham, Mike Hughes, Stu from Swindon, Paul Martin, Bryn Davies, Roechard Wibd, Natalie Jones, Kelly, Maurice Pearce, Chris Marchant and Fat Belly Jones, plus many more.

Not content with the Blogosphere Death Pool (of which all my picks are still alive), Laurence Simon continues his quest for bad taste with The Metro Light Rail Deathwatch

It’s time for the Metro Light Rail Deathwatch, where the person who guesses the date and time of the first Metro Light Rail fatality in Houston wins an Amish Tech Support coffee mug, Amish Tech Support mousepad, and a genuine $25 Metro Stored Value card!