Sean

Prototypiclly ccurate coupling system............ The little pin then flew away, never to be seen again.............

yes

Everything runs on the command station, the coding is a bit clunky. but its not really that bad once you get your head around it. things can be coded to happen automatically on startup or only when you trigger it from the controller.

IMG_2974.mp4 First run of the Ruston and first run on home made track!

Unusually I am only playing with the track planning stuff now, ive been too engrossed in other aspects of this project that it has gotten away from me. I wanted to really wind up my search for the site and i had not yet finalised on a base board size, so it made most sense holding off until now. This is sort of another reason i have gone for h0f over 009, it is MAD what you can fit onto a medium sized board. I am working with 4 foot by 1 and a half foot. upon completion of my research I have come to the conclusion that i need to model either the factory or the lansdale yard line or some sort of hybrid of both which would probabaly become too messy and detract from the realism. For this plan, on one side of the board could sit the yard with the loop and tippler/conveyer, trains would leave along the right hand exit and travel around to the point. this area would be modelled as the branch line from the yard to bog. Anything beyond the turnout can be considered bog, with a scenic break to disguise the loop back into the yard if the train goes straight. turn into the left and you get a long siding for peat harvesting and a shorter siding for tracklaying and refuelling trains as is typical on a peat bog. Operationally we have continuous running or we have a system whereby the train of empties is hauled up to the point and the main loco is uncoupled and the shunter comes out off of the small siding and hauls in the empties, the main loco can then be coupled back to the other end of the rake for the return leg of the journey. A backscene separates the scenes but there can be no tunnels etc so it will be a matter of hiding the transitions with many trees! I have a little celebrity cameo planned, but this will be revealed later! diagram here of a typical peat bog as a sort of quasi basis for my plan, no matter which line i build i am sure it will be taking basis from this diagram! with this plan, prototypical train lenghts also become very possible without looking terrible.

we have liftoff!

Right so, I have gone off the deep end altogether! it was decided that i need a simplex, I just have to have one, however any 3d models of such are not of the type I need! so ive set out in making one, and in a further bout of insanity as soon as the chassis was designed i said, hey lets see if we can motorise this thing before proceeding with the rest of it LOL the design has progressed a little bit and the 4x8mm motor that @LNERW1 introduced me to on the other thread seems to be the only one i can make fit in comfortably. Now initial designs had the motor mounted where the bottom pulleys are and a direct belt (O ring) connection to the wheels The issue there is that the largest pulley i can fit onto the wheelset would be 4mm and the smallest pulley i can comfortably fit is also 4mm so this would lead to some fun gearing. Moving the motor up in the housing and adding a lay shaft where i previously had the motor seems to be the answer. as soon as i did this i realised that i can change the motor pulley out for a set of gears to drive the layshaft with a proper ratio, the layshaft to wheels will still remain belt drive however. Presumably I am going to have to rework this a few times and i dont actually have any motors yet so thats kind of it for now. but looks very promising. I need to find printable gears!

Unfortunately not, I was thinking about it when I was looking at the first BNM site but i dont think I could justify going up there for what little is left. There are also private property no right of way signs up going into the yard, so any such visits would probabaly have to be mandated by klassman themselves also! I have done similar levels of obsessive research into the locos and will be doing a similar deep dive on those here soon. After that i will be focusing on working on the layout, I actually havent got any sort of a plan at all yet, mostly cos of the wild goose chase i had been undertaking to find the railway I have also become highly addicted to the 3d printing side of things,so this has taken loads of my time.I think it is going to be a big change in the hobby for me!

Here are the known photos of the permenant way that i have. I have spent far too many nights on this, so to be able to match all of the images to locations on a map has been a big thing for me heh.

So this is where the confusion begins. The Lansdale yard branch of the system is the most documented part, and along with that, the most interesting part, however in the available photography the location is credited as being at the works. There a permenant way documented that is around a mile long however with some sources saying there no rail link to the works. a little contradictory! Having searched the works area many times and coming up blank, as well as the area around smiths bog for any trace of anything I FINALLY had a breakthrough. A long time was spent trying to geolocate any trace the elevator in this photo around the works and I just could not make sense of it being anywhere on or near the main plant. After another while of searching I focused my attention on smiths bog. still after another few evenings of looking i could find no trace of anything, then by chance i set the map imagery to 2024 over a random area and FINALLY I managed to spot a set of rails which were not visible on any other map and sure enough I was able to follow these back to a fairly nondescript yard, set street view to 2009 .... AND https://maps.app.goo.gl/YNqCSkfhH1pabVCV6 THIS is lansdale yard. THIS is the proof! the 2 tracks are still embedded just like in the flickr photo above! https://maps.app.goo.gl/VCSP532Zt194LtAZA from What i can make out, this is a surviving level crossing. you can follow the tracks down to smiths bog and back into that yard but you can see where it breaks up at one point, it is said that this branch line flooded and this was the final nail in the coffin for the railway here.

This particular trope has been really annoying me as i have struggled to geolocate some of the photos whilst others were fitting into place perfectly. There are infact 2 systems and possibly even a third that isnt documented online but thats speculation untill I see proof. the locos and rolling stock were moved from site to site as needed I Initially had been misled as railmap online lists the system as existing northeast of rathowen but once i found out how to get historical google street view working it quickly became obvious that this was a BNM system. The second piece of misinformation in my brain was that there was a rail connection directly from the peat works out to smiths bog and that lansdale yard existed close to or inside the peat works at killinagh to nessesitate this link https://www.drehscheibe-online.de/foren/read.php?017,5203442,5203442 this 1993 visit lists the 2 sites as not being connected but this was the only real reference to this i could find. everything else was fairly ambiguous. Last night I was able to locate landsdale on the map and absolutely everything clicked into place regarding the geolocating. The first system was at the works and there is absolutely no trace of it but the wagons and some track can be seen on the historical imagery and it has allowed me to piece together the layout. in this 1996 photo you can see the outline of the plastic sheeting they used to lay under the track. there is a line running down the left side of the works which is where they had some sidings and I think the maintenance area adjacent to the road around a sharp bend. the tippler and run around loop are not really visible in this photo. once track goes into the bog it becomes a temporary thing until they work the area and lift the track so no 2 aerials are really the same. the 2006 photo shows us a bit more. the run around loop at the tippler is full of wagons and there is a separate rake of wagons on the other side of the loop, this is a really crude run around loop that is not symmetrical and this compares well on the photos. the line that runs down the side of the plant and around the bend now leads into a little shed that wasnt present in the 1996 shot. the trackwork itself is greened over. This was basically the whole system at the works except for the temporary layinga out accross the bog which would have changed semi often.

Spent far too many hours altering this last night to suit the chassis, glad with the overall fit though and it should be easier the next time i need to do such a thing! This is printed with the 0.2 and otherwise default settings, took about an hour so not much longer than the 0.4 settings I had been using. the most obvious thing is with the roof and the top of the radiator, the stepping on those curved layers iis much less noticable now another print was done on finer settings which took around 5 hours, but honestly I did not see much if any improvement to that except for a smoother roof and the radiators didnt work on that either. very happy with this overall, the front grille looks great and the one to the side of the radiators is not reproducing all that ell yet.

Do any of ye know how to actually control the camera in this? its manageable but i find it a bit all over the place and sometimes if i go way off ill end up refreshing the page to get myself back to where i want to be.

Ive been at the same lol. this is about the only cad program i can wrap my head around so far. ruston has needed a load of adjustments to fit my chassis but its good now the turf tippler, fine tuned for symmetry LOL

2009 vs Today, Health and safety have come a long way!