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Layouts - Construction and Operations

Barry is not the only one hard at it...

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Chops124
Big Boy

Status: offline

Posted - February 16 2016 : 01:38:44 AM

FINALLY got off my duff and did some more work to the Shiplake and Sunderland,
my British nightmare in OO. One advantage to modeling in a foreign range is that
the bloody cost keeps me from going off the rails with buying every stupid New
Haven plug door box car within a 2,000 mile radius. I have to really think on an
item before I plop down a small wad of hard earned cash. Keeps me in check, it
does.

Anyhow, I've been making a study of our British cousins, and see that instead of
expanding outwards from the center, or "centre" as they say across the pond, they
expand inward towards the center. This approach was largely derided by the modeling
giants, after Lyn Wescott's seminal "A Model Railroad that Grows," which embraced
the often scorned "spaghetti bowl" paradigm of model railroading.

Well, our British cousins are not afraid of the spaghetti bowl effect, and they jam
as much trackway into a 4x6 or 4x8 as they can. They don't have the luxury of
shelf railways that consume and entire "spare" bedroom (hah! I wish).

So, with that in mind, I set about pulling up a lot of track and folding it back into
to the centre. Perhaps this is made a little easier by virtue that the British car, or
"wagon" as they call them, often don't exceed twenty or so scale feet, and are single frame four wheelers, but the passenger coaches are a solid 60 feet in length, and
with proper weighting to offset lateral forces, they track well enough around a, dare
I even say it, 15" radius. Plus, it looks pretty cool all these trains snaking in and
around curves and crossovers.

The cross overs, which Brits use in abundance, are also a lot of fun, because I am
forced to balance simultaneous train movements, otherwise known as "operations."
Hats off to the fellows who like to run trains in circles, my Tycomania layout is
simply that- to show off short trains of Tyco, but I get frankly bored witless after a
little while. Yes, it's fun to run a 32 car NH box car train with three powered Athearn
units struggling to pull the load, but for model railroading I want something that does
something and to go somewhere.

Hah, the venerable Lyn Wescott once wrote an article about operations: he demonstrated
that modelers could keep track of train consists by using common thumbtacks pressed
into the roof walks to keep a manifest going. The howls that literary contribution must
have received in its day (mid 1960's if memory serves, in Model Railroader).

Edited by - Chops124 on February 16 2016 01:40:11 AM

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