Category: May Day Bank Holiday Weekend 2021

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.