Mayner

The carriage shops have been kept busy overhauling and upgrading rolling stock with a 'new' passenger train for the narrow gauge and HOn3 couplings and SSM lettering for freight rolling stock. In the early 1950s CIE transferred an ex T&D van and a coach from the West Clare to the C&L for use on the main line, it looks like another set may have been transferred or the van strayed from the main line onto the Arigna-Sligo branch. The model is a Backwoods kit dating from around 94, more or less as built, airbrush painted in a Humbrol green and Railmatch weathered black. I need to replace the snail without damaging the paint work. The GSR/CIE "cascaded" several T&D bogie coaches to the West Clare to replace the indigenous 6 wheelers which were in turn replaced by diesel railcars. The T&D coaches seem to have been a standard narrow gauge design similar to coaches supplied to the Muskerry & North Wales Narrow Gauge. Although bogie the wooden longitudinal seats were unlikely to be an improvement on the West Clare 6 wheelers and original C&L bogie stock. The model is built from a Branchlines kit of a T&D 3rd class coach dating from the early 90s, the coach is shorter and quite different in window arrangement from the coach transferred to the C&L for main line use in the 1950s I think the body was painted with a motor aerosol and finally was recently fitted with floor, seating and glazing following complaints from passengers. The convertibles were originally built from Backwoods kits in early 96 in Carrick on Shannon and painted in automotive aerosol grey primer. Before lettering the models were coated with Clear Coat Gloss using the airbrush and sealed with Testors Dullcoat aerosol. Despite the run-down locos and coaches, C&L wagon stock seems to have been maintained to a reasonable standard right up to the end of narrow gauge operation. While passenger traffic was light on the Belturbet and Arigna lines general goods and coal traffic appears to have been reasonably heavy. SSM prepared a custom deal set enough for my current wagon fleet and some additions. Most of the stock is now fitted with Kadee HOn3 couplers, a bit fiddly to assemble but mush more reliable than the N Scale couplers previously used.

Like the Clonakilty branch in the 50s the rumours of lifting the Arigna-Sligo section appear at least a bit premature. The reserved section from the loco shed to the roadside section was quickly re-laid and trains are again running. 8L had the honours of taking the 1st westbound train with an urgent consignment from McArdles & PJ Carroll for Sligo with traffic diverted over the Belturbet Branch and C&L following the September 57 closure of the GNR lines through Enniskillen & the SLNCR main line. On the day the line through Keadue seems to have been fierce busy with 3T preparing to work the daily mixed to Sligo and 6T working a goods. [video=youtube;Lp-cfwBas1I] Meaning I have finally sorted out the control system for the yard using a combination of hand held analogue controllers, with switching between sections controlled by Blue Point point actuators and a few fascia mounted section switches.

Keeping Britain on Track Great behind the scenes series including the policing aspect. Perhaps RTE or UTV might do something similar on Irelands railway and public transport operations.

The TPO is at design stage with artwork prepared with alternative parts for the TPO and Heuston Tool van versions. I am looking at expressions of interest/orders for a minimum of 10 vans before proceeding further. The kits will be in a similar price range to the Heating Van & Luggage van, and include an etched brass body, underframe and roof, whitemetal detail castings, top hat bearings & NMRA RP25 disc wheelsets set for OO gauge.

Probably as much to do with politics as economics. In the long term Serbia is more likely to source new locos and stock from Russia or European build, than repair/upgrade Tito era GM power. To a certain extent the turbo charged 645 engine used in the 071 and other similar classes like the SD39-2 & NZR DFT is now considered to be obsolete with railways moving to more fuel efficient Caterpillar, MTU & GE power. Locally Kiwi Rail seems to be running down the DFT fleet dating from 1980 while continuing to upgrade older GEs to run alongside modern MTU powered CNR built locos.

Kieran Love the MPDs the cut an shuffle from rtr hauled stock is totally in keeping with the prototype & the UTA approach to designing relatively advanced diesel trains with very limited resources.

I think British Transport Police have some officers allocated to general policing and crowd control duties in the major city stations and also an investigation and education role around public safety/trespassing. BTC regularly visit schools in areas where there are reports of children trespassing or playing chicken at level crossings. When there was plenty of staff on the ground CIE checkers and porters managed crowd control/public safety. I remember a couple of rather well built Kerry railwaymen shepherding passengers onto trains at Killarney about 20 years ago when Kerry was playing in Croke Park and everyone else was visiting Kerry for the holidays.

CIE had plans for a city centre "Transportation Centre" in the area around Halfpenny Bridge as part of a 70s metro plan and bought up a lot of property in the Temple Bar area. I think the metro was part of an integrated transport plan for the Greater Dublin area with heavy rail services and dedicated busways and motorways to serve the new town centres planned for Tallagh, Clondalkin, Blanchardstown, Ballymun and the Airport. The metro and dedicated busways were dropped in the 80s combination of opposition to investment in public transport and an attempt to capitalise on the "Left Bank" environment which emerged in Temple Bar when CIE began renting building to art groups and artisans. The rest is history with the Taoiseach Charlie Haughey's personal opposition "over my dead body" to a bus station in Temple Bar and setting up a development corporation providing tax breaks to investors in hotels and clubs in the area. In the 90s IE looked at diverting Southern, Western and Belfast intercity services into a new "Central" North Wall station. I suppose at the time £100m to re-develop Heuston and the prospect of a future income stream from the Spencers Dock development seemed more attractive than building a North Wall Intercity Station.

The plan as dawn just about works in OO with a minimum radius of 2', but would work/look better in a larger space. In 21mm gauge a larger minimum radius of around 3'6" would restrict me to a conventional around the wall scheme with an oval or folded or the traditional U shaped terminus fiddle yard scheme. Keeping the width of the baseboard down to 1'6"-2' can be advantage in an around the wall scheme, making the layout look longer and more circulating space for operators/visitors. I have an 8X4 work bench in the middle of the layout room. One around the room layout I have visited is an O Gauge mountain railway with basically an oval with floor to ceiling scenery another HO American marshalling yard with a branch line serving several industries. both with a large circulating space in the middle

Amazing stuff 33Lima hard to believe what can be achieved kit bashing plastic body shells. Impressed with the standard of finish and detailing especially the ends complete with jumper cables. Takes me back to one of my first journey on NIR an IRRS tour in a 70 Class set from York Road to Larne & Whitehead, lunch with the NIR driver and guard, reversed on the main line at Bleach Green and over the viaduct to a tightly timed connection with an 80 Class set on a Belfast bound train at Antrim connect into the Enterprise at Lisburn a great day out.

Interesting example of a crossing station squeezed into a tight space between a viaduct and a tunnel. The main line at the South end of the station is set for the siding to provide a margin of safety if a train over-runs the Down starting signal to Arklow at danger. The arrangement at the Northern end of the station is more common with greater stopping distance (overlap) between the Up starter and the beginning of the single line section to Wicklow. The goods yard closed about 50 year ago, the site became a sawmill. Apart from conversion from semaphore signalling to colour light and jointed bullhead track to CWR the station has changed little visually in the last 30-40 years. Miss those lattice post signals and loco hauled trains though.

Moving on to the 2014 version the track plan was prepared with Templot to get a better feel for the programme before tackling something in 21mm gauge and also to use up some of my stock of bullhead rail and C&L chairs. Templot is designed to produce templates for handlaid track rather than a layout planning or CAD programme. In this particular case the template is drawn on top of a drawing showing the outline of the baseboards and a rough track diagram. As drawn the run round loop is restricted to a loco and wagons, version two involves moving the crossover further around the curve and possibly adding a loco shed or other siding in the corner on the outside of the curve. Closeup of an actual templates plain track is SMP plastic sleepered bullhead by Marcway models Sheffield points will be laid using C&L chairs on plywood sleeper strip, most of the finer scale track is laid on relatively thin sleepers which takes most of the drudgery out of ballasting, simply lay the sleepers/track on a bed of pva or scenic cement and scatter on the ballast. Locos and stock will be the usual suspects. The Ivatt was built from a Comet kit, the wagons a mixture of Airfix, Dapol and Parkside. The Parkside iron Ore Tippler is probably one of the best designed and highly detailed plastic kits on the market. The Walthers quarry loader was bought when I was going through a American HO phase but looks quite impressive. The original idea was to keep the layout self contained to the two main boards, adding an extra board would allow loaded and full wagons to be exchanged through the loader to keep the shunter busy tripping wagons back and forth between the station and screens. Building the layout is a good motivator for finishing off a long list of projects which ran out of steam, the Austerity was a rtr Dapol model re-motered on a brass chassis with a Mashima motor and a reduction drive, the small saddle tank is an unfinished High Level industrial some of which ended up running in the 1970s in "plant yellow" she will need a lot of weathering though.

Safer to send back and wait than risk voiding the warranty on an expensive loco. Heljan had reliability issues with some of their diesels and ended up supplying free replacement chassis for the 1st batch of Class 17 Claytons which had similar reliability issues to the real locos.

I used JMRI several years ago as an interface with a Digitrax system for route setting on an American N gauge layout. I never advanced beyond point control to detection or signalling. The main advantage was I had a lot quicker and easier to build a virtual CTC panel with JMRI than build a hard wired one, easier to alter and far less in terms of emotional loss & physical waste in dismantling/scrapping a physical panel when the project was abandoned.

I like the idea of steam working one of the specials as I have vague memories of a big blue steam loco with smoke deflectors from around the same period crossing the viaduct at Gormonstown. Its just about possible that steam may have been used on one or more of the specials. It would have been simpler for the UTA to roster as steam loco and a crew to a special move, than try and co-ordinate a pair locos and at least two sets of crews with CIE. Presumably Belfast still had enough steam drivers and firemen who still knew the road to Dublin and wanted on last trash at the mainline. In 1963 the UTA bought four ex GNR steam locos from CIE S Class 170, 171, 174 & Vs 207 Boyne. The 207 appears to have been used mainly used the Tourist Train an additional summer service on the main line, she seems to have held down this duty until the summer of 65, there is a photo n Irish Railways a Second Glance" of Boyne 'roaring' through Malahide on a southbound train in July 1965.

I built a minimum space 4mm shunting yard layout based one of the plans in Layout Design by Iain Rice.I was living in the UK at the time & going through an industrial railway phase. The layout was self contained with a small marshalling yard and hidden storage on an 8'x'1"6 baseboard but capable of being extended or connected to another layout. The layout started out as a small yard on a an industrial system worked mainly by industrial and ex-BR diesel shunting locos. Smaller less powerful locos did most of the visible work, shunting loaded and empty wagons in the yard and working trips to an off scene quarry. The more powerful locos an Austerity 0-6-0ST and a pair of ex-BR locos worked trips between the yard & British Railways exchange sidings. Manning Wardle propelling empties into quarry mainline on right Some industrial systems continued to use ancient looking Manning Wardles into the mid 1960s Ancient and Ancient Hunslet & Manning Wardle The diesel is a 1930s Hunslet standard design one of which became the 1st LMS diesel. Hunslet acquired the goodwill of Manning Wardle in the 1930s and supplied/overhauled steam locos into the 80s. Pride of the line Austerity with Hunslet Patent Underfeed stoker and gas producing equipment Modern image steam? Hunslet & the National Coal Board developed a gas producing system to reduce smoke and make more efficient use of coal, not quite sure how the loco ended up on a quarry system. Although I started and completed most of the work on the layout before returning to Ireland, the layout was stored for several years in the UK before taking it home thanks to some high level pressure from the presidents of the Milton Keynes Model Railway Society and MRSI. Bankfoot became a widely travelled layout exhibited on its own and with the late Frank Davis layout in Cork, Bangor and Warley. The layout was passed on to Frank before I moved to New Zealand in 2004 not before running a "last train" when an Ivatt 2MT picked up the last load of iron ore from Bankfoot a scene replayed in many part6s of the UK as many small maining and quarry operations closed down. The last train Ivatt 2MT 46455 drags the last train off ore hoppers out of the yard at bankfoot 46455 leads her train across the crossover from the loop to the main line quarry siding leads off to the left After 10 years I have dusted off the Bankfoot idea once again as a small British outline shelf layout to keep Keadue company in the office and a home for the stock. The theme this time is based on a BR branch line connection to a quarry somewhere along the Welsh Border country between Hereford & Chester something that was not exactly un common. The space is slightly better than the original Bankfoot a 7'6" X 4'6" L modelling will be restricted to between the railway fence due to a 12" width restriction with the shelf. The track layout will be similar to the old layout main difference will be signalling and a passenger platform probably disused, a couple of sidings for sorting laden and empty wagons into trains and a longer running line to the quarry. The main change is to extend the run round loop to handle a reasonable length of train without turning the layout into another typical branch line model.

With me its getting to the stage where I don't know if I have remembered something or have imagined it ether way its good stuff though

Kieran Brings back childhood seaside memories of dark green trains without an engine at the front speeding across the viaduct at Gormonstown all that's missing is the Tourist Train with its big blue steam loco and smoke deflectors, it was never the same after the summer of 65?

The C&L closed at the end of March 1959, the final train was a double header with most of the available coaches that were just about fit for service. Not to be outdone a double header was run over the Keadue branch with Dingle engines 3T & 6T and a train made up of Cavan & Leitrim, Tralee and Dingle and Clogher Valley stock. Shortly afterwards the road was broken where the line crossed the L2 to the North West of town and track lifted back through the cutting towards the station. Looking back from the L2 Sligo-Blackbull cross secondary road. I decided to re-lay and ease the curve when the layout was out in the workshop as one of the C&L 4-4-0Ts used to stick on the curve. I thought it was worth taking the pictures as the imprint of the sleepers in the ballast looked like a recently lifted line. Luckily enough it was easy to remove the pva/ballast mix without damaging the foam rubber track underlay. The Council finally paved the street in front of the background buildings though its barely wide enough for a mini. The carriage shed received a coat of dark brown enamel and now needs to be painted/weathered so that it looks like it did not receive a lick of paint in 30 years. I used the same brown enamel to give the turntable a rusty weathered look, the Peco HOm turntable has a steel rather than timber decking though I thought I would leave well enough alone. In real life a turntable would not have been allowed so close to a running line or tight up against the wall of a cutting, but it was a must have and there was no more space to fit it in. A fault has opened at the back of the loco shed, revealing that Drumlins are actually made f expanded polystyrene and the Arigna Mountans and sky of 6mm MDF. I have in filled the tracks in the loco shed with filler, then cleared out the flangeways with a sharp knife and the point of a small screwdriver, the area needs covering with fine scatter to represent 60 odd years accumulation of muck and ash.

I drew this one up mainly to see if it was possible to fit OO gauge E shaped block plan into a single car garage, rather than a more traditional around the walls effort. It just about fits in with a reasonable aisle width by reducing the minimum radius on the turn back section on the peninsula section to 2' radius. The scheme is just about workable in OO though would look a lot better visually in a wider room or in N or perhaps American or Continental narrow gauge in either HOn3 or HOm. This time I have included one medium and two small stations on the section between Barnagh and Abbeyfeale with staging on one side of the room. It might be worth designing the staging as two side, by side yards representing Careys Road & Tralee with a linking track to allow through running. Each yard would have its own run round and spurs for storing locos to allow for a more interesting timetable operation than tail chasing. Ideally Barnagh should be modelled as a summit section rather than on a flat baseboard with trains climbing from Abbeyfeale and the Limerick end of the staging. I have been getting to grips with Templot a track template design software for a small EM layout before I try my hand at serious planning for a broad gauge layout. John

Donelli gantries in use Indian style http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuEefyIAO9k CIE 1st used Donelli gantries to re-lay the Cork Line in the early 70s, usually a tractor and a harrow was used to scarify the ballast before dropping in the new panels. In Ireland the gantrys worked in pairs with two machines on a single 60' panel, a lot safer and less wear and tear on the plant. The gantrys run on cwr dropped by the welded rail train in advance of the re-lay, the machine can be used to lay jointed track with the rails swapped out at a later date or fitted with a bale to lift sleepers only allowing the CWR to be laid in a single possession.

Just a quick post to give an idea of the effects of the weather on a garden railway. After one week mid winter poor drying. Sun bleached sleepers, mainly in shade during winter this area is exposed to afternoon sun 6-7 months. Natural weathering. Limekiln/coke ovens built 2012. On the positive side I had trains running today (battery) after an hours clearing up/weeding.

Carrying on with the carriage shop thread after 5 years 5L finally got some glazing to keep out the driving Westerlies and the cold blowing in from the Steeps of Russia. I spent one winter working on in Drumsna and man it gets cold. There was a noticeable gap between the body side and roof on this coach so the glazing was brought up slighty above the level of the sides, scribed then folded slightly the folded bit touched in in one of Floquils 1000 shades of Railroad Black probem solved. The glazing is secured in place with double-sided tape which does not appear to have the drawbacks of superglue or crystal clear. End swing may be a problem with this coach on curves and I may need to re-lay the curve between the station and the roadside section as the C&L 4-4-0T tend to stick at one particular spot on the curve. I am completing some long outstanding jobs on the narrow gauge before moving the layout back into the house, including getting the turntable into working order. The table is a Peco HOm model, I looked at fitting a motor, but ended up copying a C J Freezer design from 1960 using Meccano gears and parts. The conversion turned out simple enough, 1st making sure the Peco turntable pit was nice and flat and the table revolved freely. The spigot from the Peco turntable is designed to fit over a Meccano 8SWG axle or rod. I was able to get all the necessary parts from the local Mecanno parts supplier though the gears are plastic rather than metal. The biggest job was pinning the axle and spigot with a piece of .8mm brass. drilling through the spigot and mild steel rod using a Dremel pillar drill, otherwise even if you Loctite there is a fair chance the spindles will shift. The turntable pit is basically designed to sit into a circular hole cut in the baseboard, leaving the deck with very little in the way of support. I ran a strip of softwood across the underside of the pit with an oversized hole bored out for the pivot. The turntable base was then screwed down to the strip with some small wood screws possibly 12mm No4. I used a slotted Meccano strip as the lower bearing for the pivot, this can be tricky to set up as the turntable deck has to be completely level. The Meccano collar and washer is to prevent the table rising up and keep the deck power pick up system in compression. With the Peco N & HOm turntables the rails pick up power off a split ring using sprung brass plungers. Setting up the worm gear drive is simple enough I used Meccano Trunnions to support the worm shaft with a hand wheel on the fascia to spin the engine around. I use "Blue Point" actuators which are basically a hand operated version of the Tortoise point motor to change frog polarity and to switch power between different track circuits, with RC rudder linkages to push and pull rods on the layout fascia to control the points. Besides the turntable there is a lot of scope for detailing around the loco shed, coal stage, basic interior detailing and ash and general loco shed muck.

The Park Royals were very smooth riding 1st journey in one was out to Bray during school holidays late 60s, Mallow-Killarney during the late 80s possibly early 90s. Up to the mid80s a uniform rake of Park Royals or Cravens for that matter would have been unusual, up to wide spread introduction of MK3s intercity sets were often made up of a mixture of TL wired Cravens, Park Royal,Laminate and older stock.

I have a fairly large G Gauge circuit in the back garden, built on raised timber framing mainly because its easier on the back than a ground level line and a lot less work to build. The frame work is all pressure treated pine (Tanalised) with the stations and yards are basically on open famed baseboards (4X2) with the track laid on decking timber the "scenery" fine pebbles or quarry screenings supported on weed mat laid on top of wire mesh. Plain running line between stations is laid on 9x2 or 6X2 pine boards. The whole lot supported on timber piles or cut down fence posts concreted into the ground. The railway has been in operation for about 5 years, no major work apart from replacing a few board that had warped or twisted. Some modellers now use composite (recycled plastic) decking as its less prone to twisting than timber. I have not found rail expansion or contraction a major problem, the biggest problem is keeping the line clear of falling leave, twigs and branches and snail shells. The birds soon discovered that rails make excellent anvils for breaking open shells. Scenery is mainly fine pebbles or quarry screenings in yards, with box and slow growing shrubs out on the line.