Author: Simon Wood

Lecturer in medical education, lapsed mathematician, Doctor Who fan and garden railway builder. See simonwood.info for more...

Train shelves

It’s a year since I knocked a hole for the railway to enter the shed and it had always been my intention for this to provide storage for keeping trains coupled up and on the rails to get things going more quickly when I wanted to run something… but since I’d got a couple of yards of track under cover, I lost the motivation to take things further. Even just having one train ready to go makes a huge difference.

But I’ve finally got round to bringing the line round the corner and making my train shelves – these were inspired by the 4mm scale cassette fiddle yard system – but out of necessity (it’s not a big shed!) the cassettes are stored vertically. It’s a space saver and also a money saver – no need to shell out £50 for a pair of points for each storage siding… I’ve ordered enough angle for a couple more shelves already.

Trains sit on aluminium angle gauged at 32mm of course, I’ve printed a flap to sit between them, this firmly locates the cassette with the approach road…

But when it folds back so you can remove the cassette, it acts as a buffer stop, preventing trains from diving onto the workbench…

And on the cassette side of things I’ve printed these pegs that slot into a hole to stop unbraked trains sliding off if I don’t manage to keep the shelves perfectly horizontal as I lift them.

The weak link is, of course, the shelves themselves – they’re wooden (decking board) and some have already warped… in a damp shed there’s no guarantee they’ll keep their shape. I had considered trying to construct them entirely out of aluminium but these seemed like a lot of designing and manufacturing so I went ahead with these as a proof of concept. They also need side rails, which should be easy enough when I’ve decided how best to implement them, and ideally handles so that the centre of gravity is much lower than the point from which one lifts the shelf…

It has occurred to me that a solution to the material issue would be to replace the wood with… eco-ply (aka Flicris) although I’m not sure how resistant to warping it will be. But something to experiment with.

Simon
Moel Rhos

Progress since easter

As I suggested during the Easter weekend virtual event, my sm32 system could grow and indeed it has. Simon has some video of a test train running along the extended system which now forms an end to end layout approximately 35 feet long which is set up on a garden wall. I hope he will be able to add that to this post.

At one end is the shunting puzzle game 8’ long, and at the other a new station 7’ long. Linking these are two straight sections of track on ply boards which are supported within straight sections of my O gauge test trackwith a small bend at the centre. Joining the to ends to this straigt section are curved sections to take note of the curvature of the wall. None of this is intended to live outdoors.

Shown below is the station section a couple of days ago and this morning with the platform painted.

Phil.

7/8ths Micro layout competition

Hi all, on the 30th March I had the good news that my micro layout had won the competition that was run by the 7/8ths group on Facebook. I didn’t have time to finish what I wanted to do but all in all I threw it in the competition anyway.It is a 7/8ths scale on 1foot gauge mine railway. I used Lemax xmas train track, custom built to little critters, a few wagons and adapted some existing figures.
Garden Rail want me to put an article in so will crack on with that on my return. Although Libya is a nice place to earn some cash I am keen to get back to the Gwili valley, hopefully in the next two weeks.
Take care all.

Doctor Who and the Easter of Doom

As I’ve mentioned before, the Doctor, being a time traveller, is not out of place on any garden railway in any period… indeed, one of the consequences of time travel is that there may be several of him. I mentioned on the email that after I’d printed a John Hurt that I’d discovered the Eaglemoss figurines are 1/21 scale and I picked up a few for around a fiver each – which is remarkable given they are painted and actually pretty close to 1/19 scale, extremely well detailed and very nicely finished. Unfortunately, for those whose railways are out of bounds to Time Lords, it may not be easy to convert them to ‘regular’ people as they are cast from a rather brittle resin (the Doctor has lost his head already in a couple of his incarnations). I would also recommend cutting the figures from their pedestals with a razor saw rather than trying to prize them out… I managed the latter only once without damaging some shoes.

Anyway, here, then, are the telesnaps from Doctor Who and the Easter of Doom:

The Doctor, fresh from space-sailing with The Eternals, pays a visit to the Moel Rhos railway in the 1950s, where he pays his respect to The Easter Bunny.

Some time later, and looking a little different after his misadventure on Androzani Minor, he takes a break on the Moel Rhos after exposing the Zeiton-7 scandal. Naturally, he wants to drive himself…

Later still, and with a different face following the Rani’s attempt to create a time manipulator, the Doctor pays another visit to the Moel Rhos when he finds himself in South Wales in the 50s on a holiday he won thanks to being the tenth billionth customer at Navarino Spaceport.

Having been shot in San Fransisco on the last day of 1999, the Doctor changed again, and later still he seeks escape from the Time War on the Moel Rhos where he is clearing the line of the chickens, who have to take care of egg delivery on the 364 days when The Bunny is not on duty. (I ran low on filament and rather than replacing the spool straight away or risking running out during a big job, I tried using it up by printing a chicken and when there was still some left another chicken, and then another… I now have 9 chickens, most still needing paint, and inspired by Peter I’m going to need to design a chicken wagon.)

Finally, the Doctor, in the midst of the Time War, weary of the temporal flux created by the conflict’s multiple paradoxes, lowers his guard whilst visiting the Moel Rhos and is unsuspectingly about to fall foul of the Blinovich Limitation Effect…

Easter Sunday 2021 part 2

A picture of Porthmadog, finished apart from having a crew (painting figures is one of my less favourite tasks). She was last shown in late August last year when I was unhappy with the running, since then replacement nylon (instead of the original metal) gears have been fitted and she now runs well. Simon may be able to add a link of a piece of video of her running on my finescale O gauge test track a few days ago where she also pulled the two red coaches. The loco managed to run over the entire folded figure of eight layout with slight hiccups across the pointwork. The coaches could only manage the plain track. It occurs to me that the wall in the picture could easily form a temporary home to more sm32 track. If these three boards became the right hand end of an end to end run and a new set were made to form the left hand end having a platform and run round loop I could use two 8foot long straight boards from the O gauge test track as supports for some sm32 track mounted to plywood and make a couple of small angle bends to join it all up!

Phil.

Easter Sunday 2021 part 1

A year on from my first posting of a picture of my shunting game layout some pictures of where it is at now. Some ground cover needs to be applied and the level crossing gate finished painting. IT is a typical ignlenook puzzle. Eight wagons are distributed between the three sidings, in this case they have coloured discs magnetically attached. Eight counters of the same colours are shaken in a bag and five selected at random and put in a row. The loco then shunts wagons to assemble the correct five in order. The results of two games are shown.

The loco is my third build. This one is a PDF models Skylark whose kit arrived before the instructions had been written, having built a PDF Port class previously I got most of it done before I saw any instructions and it seems to be OK. A little more work is needed before she is fully finished. I am pleased with the way she runs.

Phil.

First ever run round on the Moel Rhos

The Moel Rhos permanent way team completed track laying on the new station formation this morning, so I have put together the most boring video ever, recording the first run round in my garden. I’ve even included my big hand coupling and changing points, it’s not an action packed thriller but I am very excited to be able to do this…

Simon