John & Bronwyn's N gauge layout - no name yet.

[easilyconfused]

After many years of finding excuses the time has finally come to build my model railway. My daughter will be helping me so she gets to name the layout and stations as well as dictating the scenery and lineside industries (which will influence the choice of wagons used).

Bronwyn is keen as can be seen from the UKTSlive report from the Warwick report : http://www.uktrainsimlive.com/landw2007.html - she is on the videos at the bottom of that report having been invited by the operators of the Sutton Folly layout to come inside the layout and shunt. We have met up a couple of times now and many thanks to them for encouraging her.

For the last couple of years I have been going to various exhibitions with the UKTrainSim people http://www.uktrainsimlive.com/ and last year at the Warwick MRC show I saw the publicity flyers for the Dynamis controller which intrigued me greatly. I always wanted to do N gauge for space reasons and since it gave me the option to run longer trains more realistically in the space I can spare and DCC seemed to give me flexibility without having to have loads of isolating sections in my planned TMD layout.

After a lot of thought and a great deal of advice from the folks at UKTS and various Yahoo groups I found a link to this site and forum and I am astounded at the help you all give each other.

Anyway - enough waffle. I saw a Yahoo group thread about 4' * 2' layouts and there was an interesting plan on one reply by a guy called Jim King. He kindly sent me the plan and with a bit of tweaking I have come up with the following "final" plan. Many thanks to Jim for the initial starting point.



Now I realise that no railway is ever "final" but this is what I intend to build using a mixture of Peco setrack and code 80 streamline.

DCC control using my Dynamis controller and in the late BR Blue era so a few early private liveries may appear. It is my railway so I will run what I want

At this stage I am planning on using Seep point motors and various colour light signals all of which will be controlled from a separate non-DCC control panel. Having played with my Dynamis at the UKTS show this year at the Warwick MRC show I got in a real pickle with 2 trains moving and trying to throw points in front of them to get them where I wanted to be.

I am OK with the electrical side of things but my woodworking skills are not great and I am limited time-wise due to work and other commitments so I decided to wuss out and commissioned a baseboard from http://www.thegoodsyard.co.uk/index.html I will do the rest but it is that first helping hand I needed to kick start the process.

[Pete]

Hello John

Interesting looking layout.

An observation, are you confident those sidings are long enough, I've not worked out their actual length, but I know from experiance that it's often easy to draw something up on CAD, fit a lot of track in, only to find in practice everything is a bit short. As I say they might be fine, but could be worth checking.

Any thoughts as to the rolling stock you'll be running?

Pete

[easilyconfused]

Thanks Pete.

Very good point about the siding length. Prior to Jim sending me his plan I had spent hours fiddling around in the CAD program but not getting anywhere near what I wanted. A couple of times I thought I had something that would work but then when I drew it out full size or played around with the track I already have it never really worked.

I was looking for something to shunt a few wagons about really. There is room on each siding for a few wagons - enough to set up a little shunting puzzle. Having laid down the sidings in setrack on the table I am sure of that.

The initial stock will consist of the Farish 37038 I bought at Christmas and a few wagons. For passenger services a 2 carriage DMU should suffice initially.

[easilyconfused]

Been a bit busy lately but finally got round to making some progress today. the baseboard arrived a few weeks ago but work and other things got in the way.

Today I have installed the DCC power bus all around the underside of the board. That was interesting since I haven't wielded a soldering iron in 14 years. Only 1 burn on the finger

Track laying starts next weekend or maybe sooner if the boss in work (as opposed to the boss at home) approves a day off this week.

[easilyconfused]

Well track has been laid and the layout gets it's first public showing at the Redditch MRC show this weekend http://www.redditch-mrc.com/Birmingham% ... 20Page.htm

It will be the DCC demo board for UKTrainsim. That means no scenery - bare boards and track. There is a little more track to be laid then the scenery construction starts courtesy of my 12 year old daughter who is much more artistic than me. She has some solid ideas about what she wants to do.

Not quite sure how to broach the subject of the "sexy ladies" people pack with the wife. My daughter saw them at the model shop and thought it would be exceeding funny to have a "lady of the night" on the station approach (she actually used the local school slang for the "lady of the night" term but I don't want to get in trouble with the site owners here). Apparently there are a couple of said ladies who frequent the streets near her school and all the children know exactly what they are doing there

Next month it gets an outing our our model railway club as a "work in progress" layout. It has been a real learning experience. Key findings so far are that soldering irons get hot when plugged in and Xuron cutters can fire 1/2 inch pieces of track across the room thus startling the cat.

[lmsrail]

Brilliant tack plan, cant wait to see more so keep the pics coming

[easilyconfused]

A video of the layout is available at http://www.uktrainsimlive.com/redditch2008.html

[olliereading1123]

i saw the layout at the exhibition, if i'm honest with you i didn't recognize it, keep it up

[Sprintex]

Nice trackplan for a small space, and even better with the BR blue on it

One question: aren't those gradients a little steep, they look it?



Paul

[easilyconfused]

The gradients are 1:40 That doesn't seem to be problem - the 37 and 73 can take 6 coaches up that with no problems

[easilyconfused]

The layout will be on show as a WIP at the Shirehampton MRC show next Saturday http://www.shirehamptonmrc.tk/ If you identify yourself as a NRM member to me then I may even let you have a first hand go at the Dynamis controller for a few minutes.

We have a number of visiting clubs and our club OO layout is on display also.

[easilyconfused]

Well last weekend was a successful weekend - lots of positive comments and a good few chats with people about N Gauge in general, the Dynamis DCC system and the 1:40 gradients. A good number of suggestions from other exhibitors and trade people who stopped by - all constructive I must add.

A lot of interested parents with youngish children intrigued to see how much you can fit in in N Gauge. I did point a few of them in the direction of the Tomix Thomas The Tank Engine range.

Prior to the show I did take some photos of my CMX track cleaner running under DC control and my US non-DCC stock test running .

I would post the shots but despite using my normal hosting site's thumbnail linking syntax I get the bizarre message "It was not possible to determine the dimensions of the image." when I try to post them here. First time I saw that despite posting to other forums. If I try to post regular shots it complains they are too wide - my preferred site at UKTrainSim allows us to resize automatically so anything over 800*600 is resized to that if it comes from our library (as my shots do). I won't pay for external hosting so if my shots are too big for here then they won't get shown here which is a shame given the support people here have given me.

[easilyconfused]

Couldn't figure it out so I moved a private thread at UKTS into a publicly viewable forum http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 15&t=87900