Spiral Layout

[burnthebox]

This may be for those with a Helix in mind, but be warned, this could leave you feeling a bit dizzy,

 

[BosKonay]

[Glenderg]

The poor wife and dog (3:20)sitting on the couch listening to that...

[DiveController]

Great tractive but doesn't really appeal...

[Noel]

Somebody having a bit of fun with an experiment. It is interesting that he managed to balance the effort of the 9 locos which avoided derailments due to wagon compression on the tight inner radius curves, or tension on the wide outer curves pulling wagons towards the centre of the circle.

 

I remember over 40 years ago on a club layout trying to see how many coaches we could pull behind a single loco. The contest was won by a Hornby Dublo 'Castle' class loco that managed to pull a rake the length of the full orbit of the small layout bar one coach length. Can't remember how many coaches but it seemed like about 20-25 which was one heck of a deal back then with old and heavy coach technology with plastic wheels.

[DiveController]

I wondered about that too and thought a whole lot of you DCC buffs would be straight on this:confused: Whether the locos are running on DC or DCC it seems unlikely that any given power setting would run this many locomotives at exactly the same speed due to slight individual variations in the locomotives (I have a number of 141s that run at very slightly different speeds on any given circuit with one very slowly catching another, maybe I need to service them, I don't know).

I'm thinking 9 locos would have to be run on DCC especially with this load and back EMF might assist maintaining a constant speed when the locos climb the gradient over the bridge and back down into the spiral but still not sure if all the locos would run at exactly the same speed to start for any given throttle setting when they first start. Would they have to be balanced by trial and error? Or are we just overthinking this?