This project was stopped and restarted multiple times, with several other projects getting done in the meantime. Anyway, it is finally done, and has been to its first show with the second coming up this weekend. As a reminder, it is a fully automated 6'x2' layout in 1:480 scale, using a linear motor drive.
Absolutely stunning! Magnificent! Your hard work paid off with a beautiful layout. The working turntable is really great! All that at a scale that is nearly six times smaller than what I'm used to. Major kudos...
It's absolutely incredible to see something THIS SMALL operating as well as it does. The 0-5-0 switcher at the end puts its actual size into perspective. BRAVO!!
Yep and yep. This is the first of these layouts that was complex enough to warrant adding a full semi-manual control panel. However, I chose to keep the automated sequences simple for exhibition (and video) running - don't want to bore the audience!
BTW, can you perform switching "car" by "car", or only by "block train" ? In other words, are trains single objects, or assemblies of individual "cars" such as 1:1 scale life and "true" modelrailroading, that may individually be uncoupled and switched ? (Sorry, maybe I'm not using the right words for you fellow Brits, aren't you speaking of "wagons" and "shunting" ? Just wondering.) Dom
I am actually an Aussie, but US versus UK/Australian rail terminology is confusing - about the only words we agree on are "train" and "track"! Yes, I can switch individual cars, with a few caveats. I have kept it to block trains for the exhibition sequences to speed up turnarounds and avoid boring the general public. Penzance is a station I have always wanted to model so I was willing to accept a few limitations, but if I was building a layout intended for fully functional shunting/switching, I'd do things a little differently. One such project is currently #2 on my to-do list. First, there is a practical minimum car length of 24mm that forces me to put two short 4-wheel wagon bodies on a combined chassis. With bogie stock, or even longer and larger scale 4-wheel stock, this would not be not a problem. Second, all the cars have a built-in direction as the magnets are in N/S pairs, so I cannot simply turn one around without causing mismatches. Since this is a terminus with a hidden reversing loop that does turn things around, many complications would ensue when mixing and matching. The block trains are carefully set up as double-ended to avoid this issue. With a through station, or two terminals and no reversing loop, again not a problem. Third, the cars must all be a compatible length. The magnet/coil pattern repeats every 6mm, so life is simplest if all cars are an exact multiple of 6mm long (with a minimum of 24mm), including the inter-car gap. I chose the layout scale of 1:480 instead of T Gauge's usual 1:450 so that the standard UK types just "happen" to hit these numbers. A few specific vehicles have been distorted slightly to match. While I can build and run accurate-but-odd-length vehicles, these require a fixed marshalling order and would have to run in small blocks that total up to one of those magic numbers.
With this description, it seems unit trains of all the same car type, like coal, would work fine. My mountain railroad brain strays into dreaming of an eastbound coal load pulling into Minturn, Colorado, stopping for the crew change, then pulling through the yard 2/3 of a train length, stopping, pulling the first 2/3 ahead while a midtrain helper set cuts in, reconnects the train, and away they go up Tennessee Pass...
Absolutely, and actually simpler than I probably made it sound. Engineer's disease - I look at any any project or system I work on as a collection of problems that remain to be solved, and tend to ignore the bits that work perfectly! The only real limitation with what you describe would be that the length of the helper engine would have to be a multiple of 6mm long so it could slot right in. Ditto for any loco in a consist other than the front one, unless they are designed to always run as a fixed group, such as A and B units.
OK thanks for your reply. So not yet the time to switch industries from a drag freight. But one of these days, maybe ? Dom
Scratching my head here, as I am not quite sure what you are asking on that one, even tongue-in-cheek. I had to look up "drag freight", as I don't think the UK or Australia has an exactly equivalent concept, but I wouldn't have thought they would have done much switching! From how I do read it, it would be much, much easier for me than all of you, since I routinely reverse long trains without any difficulty. That is how I manage the storage roads on most of my layouts (not Penzance, however). I pack multiple trains nose-to-tail in hidden track controlled as a single electrical section, so when I extract a train all of them move up and leave a long gap at the back. I then reverse the remainder (at full speed) until they are back where they started, so when the running train comes back in they all shuffle up again without wasting space. At exhibitions, I get a lot of people poking their heads around the ends of the layout and watching all this with amazement!
I'm a Frog but mostly interrested in north America trains.. From what I'm understanding, typically a drag freight is a train that picks up and drops cars (wagons) or groups of cars here and there to serve industries. Cars are dropped in a yard or on a siding and then a switch locomotive (shunter) picks up cars to drop them at every industry that needs them, and the reverse. But the guys in the USA and/or Canada will probably give you some more accurate information. Dom
The definition I came across was absolute maximum load, even at the expense of time keeping, to maximise the revenue and line/equipment utilization. I would imagine them running as block trains, or at least yard-to-yard, with little or no intermediate switching. In real life, the length of those trains would make that sort of thing more than just a little difficult anyway. Obviously, this is an outsider reasoning from first principles, so I await correction and chastisement. It sounds like what you are talking about is what a Brit would call a pickup goods, a local train that potentially stops at every station and siding along a stretch of line dropping off and picking up wagons, starting and ending at a concentration yard where longer-distance trains are put together and received. That sort of thing is really easy to implement. One of my previous layouts, Dauntsey Lock, has one train doing exactly that.
Ok, thanks for this input.. Yep, I was speaking of what you're writing above. Besides your wonderful layout and its operations, I will thus follow this technology with great interrest. End of digression on my side. Dom
Last time I checked, around here (Canada, North America) a drag is a long and heavy freight train moving at low speed. A lot of those would be unit trains (in French, un train-bloc). For example, a coal drag. What @martink described as pickup goods would be a way freight here. Sort of like the courier guy going from place to place to drop off or pick up packages. In this case, the packages are freight cars. I love the technology used here too. The ingenuity in using embedded transformers in the track and magnets in each piece of rolling stock is amazing (like maglev without the lev part). I showed some of the videos here to my boss (who has a doctorate in electronics, but not a train fan) and he found the technique fantastic. It tickles my electronics engineering side too.
Thanks for that. Even when I was still doing N scale, what I really wanted to achieve was reliable hands-off operation and shunting/switching, with enough automation to hide the unrealistic model-side practicalities and get a decent illusion of prototype operation. Even in HO, while you can get very close to that that goal (DCC plus keepalives plus autocouplers, etc), it is hard to achieve and harder still to maintain. Doing it in N, especially British N, was just a bit more challenging! In the end, that is why I went down this strange and lonely path. While it certainly has its own complications, compromises and headaches, it is the only approach other than a pure software simulation that lets me do all this. And being able to do it in T scale means that I can build a new layout each year and gradually work through my long, long list of potential layout ideas.
