Sean

https://www.world-of-railways.co.uk/news/hornby-cancels-the-titfield-thunderbolt-train-set/

Although the other layout is not yet finished, I have been talking myself into building a small inglenook that could be Placed ontop of the main fish tank in the living room as a place to display rolling stock on. Well ambitions have gotten the better of me and that idea has now morphed into somthing a good bit larger. Had been looking for a prototypical location to base it on which narrowed me down to 2 completely different scenes. either the south facing yard at greystones (omitting any kind of station), or westport quay and branchline to the dock(also omitting the station except for the loading platforms). I also did not like fintona, as unusually i did not want to have a run around loop due to space constrains. however in the end it was realised that without it a very long headshunt would be needed regardless so tried to squeeze one in as best i could. Greystones would be simple, but westport has been a favourite of mine since getting back into the hobby and would give the opportunity to model a real bit of "countryside" rather than having a layout completely centric around a yard on station. we all love wesport to the point that it has been done to death, but its a very versatile little terminus. SO i got to work on making the smallest iteration of this plan that i could with the following constraints: it has to be built from existing in stock track and it must follow the rules of the inglenook game. it also MUST incorporate the dock scene to be located in such a way that it does not feel incredibly bunched in ontop of the station and as part of the same facility. a LOT to ask but i have an 8 foot wall off of the slaney lake fiddleyard, so it has been designed to fit into this space. taking this length into consideration, and the fact that I still want a fish tank display piece, I have designed to build the layout over 3 baseboards which I will A. allow me to work in phases, B keep a module downstairs as i am working on it or to be left as the display piece whilst i am building the others and C allow me to later make other modules which could extend or change scenes within the layout as i will explain below. The track on the right at 250 will be the existing fiddleyard which will be laid with traffic from both layouts in mind and a clear thru road for layout to layout running. The dock module on the left will be quite simple with an extended single track down to a small dock area built to accomodate 3 wagons plus a locomotive with the level crossing gate shut, this module will be built first to later become the living room piece if and when desired. it also allows for a small branch off through bare boggy land to the docks and creates a feeling of seperation between the dock and station. short 3 wagon loads can be pushed and pulled from the dock which in real life would be a couple of miles away. the middle board is essentially westport quay station. scaled down to as small a size as possible whilst maintaining the rules of inglenook. the headshunt will be big enough for loco+3 and the siding will just accomodate 5 wagons. the station house and platform have long since closed and all that will remain is a old abandoned platform with plenty of weeds etc growing up out of it. Quite often we see stations modelled in quite a detailed fashion with the yard areas either omitted or very much scaled down. I want to challenge this concept by focusing on the goods, with passengers being an afterthought or simply nonexistent, this makes sense from another point of view also. Era wise I am aiming to be around 1970s with the main stars being my supertrain 121 and 141's But a caveat to this is that i also have a grey 121 which i am wishing to run on this(and BNT on the shopping list) and lets face it is going to see all manner of stock when connected to my other layout so the era is simply going to be "loose goods" and left at that. lack of any station signage and only generic sort of road and dock signs from the general period should mean that by lifting all of the cars and rolling stock and changing them for those from a given decade means i will be able to change between given eras depending on what i want to operate at the time.. my other layout is very rigidly sticking to half of a certain decade whilst this one will allow me a bit more freedom in that regard. the railcar will also operate on occasion to the abandoned halt. but rarely. the station also has a through road. meaning with given space the middle module and right modules could in time be used with a continuous loop of track to create a round and round circuit. The third board is mainly just a means to connect to the fiddle yard with some space left over for some boggy fields. the loop is on a bend and squeezed into a tight space im mostly planning on running dapol loose coupled stuff, with the slightly bigger couplings so im not as worried about issues here but it is a concern. running older stock like this also means it should be more forgiving on the hornby trackwork, which is once again reluctantly being used but actually makes sense for this one. Another version of the third board will also eventually be built which will just be a bufferstop and headshunt with no connection to another layout. for standalone use should i ever want to use the layout away from home. Plans wise its pretty simple. I'll get all my baseboards built at once, decide on an underlay system and lay all of the track, from there ill split the layout back up and build a board at a time starting with the docks. Expect progress to slow as i am still finishing the other layout but the boards and trackwork should happen quickly enough.

The larger express type points are far more reliable than hornbys little points, they also plumb into set track geometry without issues. you cant do this with any of the larger peco points from what i have found however for smaller points peco ones are very reliable and hornby ones are the devil. I think the peco curved point may be the same as the hornby one but im not 100% sure, peco have a template you can print on their site. railmodeller express will allow you to plan the layout in peco.

I think its a lovely looking steam choo choo that is not necessarily being marketed towards prototypical scale modellers. Maybe some people just like collecting jintys or their only concievable space to build in O gauge is out in the garden. And as i said in the other thread. it will most likely look smashing with a whole heap of grey dapol vans following it! not every toy train we buy needs to be pulling the exact set of toy trailers that it pulled in real life along an exact carbon clone of the exact same railroad it travelled along in real life.

There are far too many Zeros on the left hand side of my bank balance on days like today....

Im pretty sure they are not, hence the appeal, conveniently they are swamped with a backlog of appeals at the moment. so It would have made a lot more sense to just pay them the 9 euro. Between this and addresspal making it up as they go and not being able to prove the money has actually gone to customs it does make me a little bit suspicious of where that money is going. Im not the only person online who shares these suspicions.

Just so you know. Anpost are billing for customs on packages sent from the north right now. Currently have one in appeal. Not sure if I'm just unlucky or the NI protocol doesnt matter anymore as I sent in the appeal over a week ago and have heard nothing.

These are exactly the kind of trains my layout will be catering to, with a particular focus on the tipp liners as they were prototypically very short and i am limited to a fairly small run around loop so it makes sense. stock wont be prototypical to any one particular line though. I try to focus on stock that could have plausibly ran on the infrastructure of my layout so avoid things like cement bubbles for which i have no loading facilities for and focus very much on palletised and containerised stuff as it suits my kinda layout. safe to say my saving up for a couple of tara packs has turned into saving for a couple of fert packs, and its why im crying out for curtainside cements and some sort of 20ft flat chassis. A much slated loco but i have been thinking about it lately and i actually just love mine too much to sell, it has super crawl performance for the motor supplied and im going to DCC my one for when the RPSI mk2's are out and they will be shared between this and a grey 121 They actually look half decent towing a rake of grey dapol boxes as well. I dont really care too much about accuracy when running steam stuff so its pretty much all rule 1 there!

briquettes not actual turf.

now this is good news with such a small run, and recent ramblings around moar beer kegs, I cant help but think just what other P42 goodies might be on their way to us in the near future. and what about tiny little forkliftable bales of peat to go into our newly unveiled 48 ton variant?

I dont mind waiting as long as i know what im waiting for so im not out shopping for alternatives when an RTR is coming.

There's a magnetically fitted panel somewhere in the jacks that you have to pry off to reveal a 21 pin socket.

I thought that as well, and to be fair he made it abundantly clear that he was nitpicking because he could find little wrong with it, he was definitely a little hard on it in the performance categories and im sure if he had spent a little more time with it instead of rushing out the review to compete with all the other ones that are popping up he might have gotten the few little teething problems ironed out. Its the same standard of review that he gives to all manufacturers and to be fair he takes plenty of opportunity during the review to use this loco to bash the others for not even coming close to what accurascale have achieved with this loco. the carpet thing is just his solution for having a big layout without a whole lot of free space. I dont think its particularly bad, we get to see how the stock runs on less than ideal surfaces.

I built a reverse loop lately. Is it DC or DCC?

Very little has happened as I have been unwell. However I did manage to get in and fix up some trackwork last night. Thought it was a bit of a waste using a curved point in a freight yard to I lifted it and swapped it for the point off to the wye. Now any point curves on the running loop are of the express type and things are running great. Now I just have to redesign that frieght yard! Not many trains have run as I have been deciding on whether to use DC or DCC on DC, leaving things in a half wired state as I have been evaluating what I want to do . Thankfully I'm waiting for a shipment of Lais decoders tomorrow so that issue will be put to bed and I'll be running fully DCC on DCC again. Will be nice as this has kept the terminus out of action in the meantime.

Vespa PK. who needs a model anyway?? Maybe theyll let me bring her down the Velorail. XD Another less fortunate one. Vespa LX this time. Outlived by the 20 and 40 year old examples above. as Piaggio build quality dropped DRAMATICALLY after the successful et2 and 4 line.

nah thats the high chime.

Hi again @johnfromoz cheers for the reply. actually found these decoders within the EU for around the price you listed from claudiodcc.com so have ordered a few to give them a try. just wondering are you using the keep alive "kung fu" version with the additional 2 wires soldered to the board or just the most basic version with "no keepalive"(860019) If using 860019, do the onboard stayalive caps on the A class still work? my instinct says yes and that they are the exact same decoder with the kung fu simply just having 2 extra wires soldered into a delicate area but i cannot confirm until mine arrive. Sean

I hear every time you press the horn button on the soundchip if you listen closely enough you can hear BoJo saying "Leave" at a very low volume under the horn sample.

thats kinda why i went for ballast instead of gypsum, but now i have a burning desire for a rake of gypsum in the back of my head.

071 is next....right.....RIGHT?

Should be sorted now

im far too stingey to buy anything at those hilarious prices thankfully

@David Holman I think this clip illustrates it well. in the parts where the guy looks down the trackwork, the first few glances i was like hey that looks a lot like settrack. and from memory this is the tightest sleeper density i have seen on any kind of railway. Us railroading videos have been fascinating me lately.the sheer size of the locos and consists are out of this world. literally.

It should still be possible to get one from Chris Dyer.