Dave

 

In your piccys of the area you are re working your access area looks quite small but from the photo it looks like your crawl under area looks very low or is it the photo giving the wrong impression.

At the moment i have visions of you shuffling along on your back to get to the access area:lol::lol::lol:

 

cheers Brian.W

Crawl under! The lower level is about 18" off the floor so I just step over it.:lol:

The hillside that I will be building will be hollow so access for track cleaning,etc wont be restricted.;-)

step over— just don`t step on, that scalescenes station looks ok,they are good kits.
:roll::lol::lol::lol::lol::cool:

Managed to fit in a bit more modelling this weekend. A while back I downloaded some scalescenes houses to use as a back drop for the railway. After much 'kit bashing' here’s the result………




The pipe sticking out of the roof on the end house is actually the gas pipe that goes to the boiler on the other side of the garage hence the houses to disguise it! :D  ;-)

Neat Dave.

Between Scalescenes, Metcalfe, Superquick, etc, there is no excuse for no buildings at all.

Dave

you have been a busy bee the buildings look great much better than the gas pipe

half relief buildings are very good i like them as a backscene

 

cheers Brian.W

Wow, nicely done. Makes a huge difference on that plain wall.
cheers

Nice work makes all the difference i must say.

Phill

Thanks guys for the comments. Not much time for modeling over the past couple of weeks mainly due to me doing some long overdue work to the railway room(garage) I have recently been given a load of old laminate flooring that has been used to cover the ceiling and walls. Other work has seen construction of some 'built in' shelving over the railway under which has been installed some lighting for the layout. The row of scalescenes houses has been joined by another row of smaller houses along the back of the railway. Work has started of the alteration of the middle section. I have fitted a piece of chipboard along the edge of the rear baseboard that will support the new board with the houses on. This has had some holes cut in it to allow access to the lower storage sidings. With the fitting of the chipboard the opportunity has been taken to widen the cutting and install a roadway leading down to the washing plant. Here's a few pic's………

Dave

There are often many jobs you have to do in the railway room that actually relate to the actual layout like the ones you have been doing

It s surprising how quickly space becomes a premium and you have to start  looking carefully of where you can fit this or that and think of ingenious solutoins

cheers Brian.W

great progress there Dave!

John
RJR

Thanks guys for all the comments I need all the encouragement I can get at the moment! Two weeks ago my computer picked up what I thought was a virus. As my firewall subscription had expired I was prompted via a message frome the taskbar to click to fix the problem. I was taken to page that had all the windows icons on and was offered 3 choices of what I thought were genuine windows software. I picked windows antivirus 2008 and the program downloaded and then scanned the PC. A list of errors came back and I was then asked to register to fix the problem. During registration the screen froze with my details on. I pulled the plug out of the modem and went to pc world the next day for replacement software. Needless to say I fixed the PC and the bank are recovering the funds lost. The real reason I mention this is so no one else gets 'conned' like I did. Anyway with the worst behind me so I thought I parked outside B&Q on tuesday whilst I had my dinner. With 10 mins of my break left I decided to nip in and price up some insulation for the garage roof. On returning to the van I found the doors unlocked, tools gone + wallet and mobile phone. So not having a easy time just now. On a positive note the lima mk2 that I had picked up from the sorting office that morning was still on the front seat!

Moving back on topic now i'm now on holiday for two weeks :Happy As we are not going away that means two weeks of modeling! So plenty of time to finish off bording out the garage and working on the layout. Last week I managed to fit the point work on the lower level storage area. Hopefully today I will get a replacement soldering iorn so that the tracks can be wired along with fitting the point motors. These will be automaticly controlled via reed switches and will allow automatic operation of the lower level sidings. Another project that i'm working on is RTC lab coach 6 (see here for details http://www.railwayz.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=27084#27084). The fox transfers that I have ordered have a good selection of RTC stock on the sheet so looks like more conversions in the future!:hmm

Dave

What a terrible time you have had you must be well pissed.

The online con emails are on the increase i have noticed over the years as they have tightened up security features with windows operating systems the criminals are either using email or emails with attachments to trick people.

the trouble is unless you are very computer literate it is very easy to be misled by them as they appear as very genuine correspondence and do look graphically correct. Also unless you have an extremely up to date virus checker you are vulnerable as some times trojan viruses are attached to some programs which can be downloaded.

You also had you van robbed thats really annoying as it temporarily stops you working.

Well At least you have a few weeks modelling ahead something to look forward to

cheers Brian.W

Dave,
I have just spent the last 35 minutes reading and viewing all the information you have posted in this thread. I've been gone for the last three months, so I have a lot of catch up to do.

What can I say? Well :hi first and :wow:wow:wow second :exclam

What a layout you have made there. It is 00 gauge right? The pictures make it look larger to me for some reason.

Truly Awesome Dave, truly Awesome!

Wayne

Sorry to read of your misfortune, Dave. Thanks for the warning, though.
 At least you're putting it behind you and getting back to the real world [railway modelling!]

 Mike

As I hav'nt posted any pic's recently here's one taken last night of my RTC coach conversion as mentioned in my last post……



 


Well apart from finishing off my model of Prometheus, yesterday was spent fitting the point motors to the lower storage sidings. These were wired first before fitting using six core alarm cable. The cables have all been brought back to the operating relays mounted on the top of the lower baseboard. This is where the headaches began!! The lower sidings will be operated automaticly using reed switches to opperate the point motors via a bank of relays. I have done this previously with an old N gauge layout sucessfully however with this layout I hit a big problem. As there are only three sidings I only have to switch four points. Great thought I, reed switch switches a double pole relay that fires two point motors at each end of the siding. So I wired up the motors to the relays and hey presto it did'nt work! :thud

I found that switching two points together even with power via a CDU they were sticking. Worse still when I looked at the track plan I had two of the points the wrong way round! I will try and explain… With three sidings normaly there are two points at each end that would operate in pairs. So lets say that point a is at one end of the siding and point b is at the other. The next siding would have point c at one end and point d at the other. So switching a+b together would allow either train 1 or 2 access to the main line. Similer by switching c+d would allow either train 2 or 3 access. Now my problem is that my storage sidings are curved and the point work has to fit in the available space. After I had walked away from the layout had a cup of tea then returned I relised that instead of the train reaching point a first before point c I had infact got point c before point a. Confused. I WAS!! Anyway to get the sidings to work as intended I had to switch the points one at a time in a logical sequence. So eight relays have been used each one switching just one point in one direction. Now to control them I installed eight reed switches in the track. Two in track A three in track B and three in track C all six inches apart. Problem solved! Now that I had all the point switching working as intended I hit another snag. As the layout will be operated as an out and back some of the push pull trains will end up running the wrong way round when the reach the sidings. So magnets will have to be fitted to the underside of the DVT's as well as the locos. This is where the 'fun' begins. So to prevent the magnet at the back of the train from operating the reed switches I have used another couple of relays to form a 'latching' circuit. Now on entering the sidings the leading vehicle will 'latch on' the relay that switches the common to all the control reed switches. The points will then operate as normal as the train passes over the switches. On leaving the sidings the train operates another reed switch that resets the 'latch circuit' so disabling the rest of the switches before the other end of the train passes over them. I can also use this latching circuit to switch the power off to the track entering the garage thus protecting the sidings from 'unauthorised'access!

Todays problem is how to control the power to the trains in the sidings. Normaly I would leave a length of rail isolated and switch the power on and off but with push pull working and with the power car on my APT in the centre of the train I have to switch off the whole siding. So it's off for a cuppa while a plan devlopes………

:hmm

Glad you have got it straight in your head !!!!!

John
RJR

I think I understand what is is talking about latching relays, etc ,etc  :hmm.   Yes I confuse my mates ( yes Neil - I do have a couple) when I talk about the electrics on the D&S.

didn't do much then:lol:

Yesterday I went to the steam gala at shildon and ended up spending more that I intended to!! I did however come away with a bag of points for the layout, two lima mk3 pullmans and some realy nice prints of some paintings that will look great on the wall in the 'railway room'. Most of the points will be used on the Albert dock branch however three have been used to finish of the approch to st Davids station. Now that the trackwork is complete the rest of the catenery can be added. Talking of pullmans a while back I got a set of names and numbers for the mk3 pullmans off ebay. Does anyone know what pullmans Lima produced as I wanted to use the names not available in RTR?

The control system for the storage sidings is still causing me headaches. I can get the trains to run in sequence ok it's the disabling of the reed switches for the power that are doing my head in. After spending a couple of days on this I decided to do some other work on the layout so a couple of tins of stone effect paint were aquired for 'balasting' outside……