Kidneston

Evening all,

So I'll attempt to cobble together threads about my current layout projects (there are three) using posts from elsewhere, updated to reflect the current state of play where plans changed.

Short version:
Analogue DC.
Steam to early diesel era.
Any region (mostly Western, but I will be running other things on it).
Branch line terminus, small goods yard, basic engine shed, rail-fed industry.

Basically, a house move provided me with a bit more train-playing space in the shape of half a double garage. While a significant portion of this is taken up with storage, I've plenty of time to get rid of a lot of junk and rearrange what's left. This has left me with one 4-metre section along one wall to be earmarked for a layout.

I also wanted to try a few things I hadn't before:
- A proper mimic panel, initially planned to use BLOCKSignalling's Point Position Indicators but since joining MERG I'm going down the CBUS route, with a number of control panel options including laptop/tablet control.
- Electrofrog Streamline points
- A better baseboard system, with alignment dowels, adjustable feet, and just to be overall better manufactured than before.

All this started last July, in fact, but I wanted to make a little bit of progress so I had something to show, as it has been a slow year, in all honesty.

So, what we know so far:

The Background

Kidneston (pronunciation varies anywhere from Kinston and Kidney-stone) is a mid-sized village in ...nominally Shropshire, in an overlap of GWR and LMS catchment, but Rule #1 will apply and I do have Eastern Region stock to run, so it may well be occasionally relocated to south Lincolnshire. Era is to be in the post-war years up to the early 60s, so stock ranges from GWR Panniers and 56xxs, and a WD Dean Goods, through to early green diesels and DMUs.

The station is a small terminus at the end of a quite long branch line. The railway which built this line then added a second branch line from here, leaving from the same end (conversion to a through station was not practical due to local geography), however this was not profitable and closed to passengers in the 1920s, now remaining open to serve local freight/colliery/quarry workings and WD operations. The War Department have taken over most of this branch now, in similar style to the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire Railway, and built a number of camps and facilities along its length. Civilian freight traffic is permitted as far as the first former station along the line, but no further.

The Plan

The primary branch line approaches from the bottom left, through a road bridge, and the tunnel at the top left is the secondary/military branch.

The goods yard arrangement may be odd, and awkward in some respects, but I've gone with the reasoning that a lot of this kind of station had their oddities. It will make operation more interesting, I'm hoping.

I may want to straighten out the bay platform a bit, to widen the platform. It doesn't need to be parallel to the primary track... We'll see.

And the fiddle yard is to use cassettes.

The Layout (so far)

As the size and arrangement of the layout is set by the area available, I set to work on the baseboards before doing the plan. Learning from mistakes made on previous layout attempts, I opted for something a bit more rigid but also a bit lighter, using a box-section plywood structure and 50mm softwood cubes in corners. As my previous attempts at precise cutting all failed, I took to the Internet to get it all pre-cut. I used a company called 'SmartBabel' for this, who gave me a very good price, so I got all the pieces calculated and put in an order.
(Smart Babel appear to have closed down since then. I've since started using WoodSheets instead)

The wood arrived in July 2017:

But first I had a couple of display units to build:

In September I got around to putting the boards together:

The leg setup is pretty crude, in all fairness. Cheap timber from Homebase (on sale at less than £2 a length at the time), so cut to 900mm long to fit safely inside the frame, and attached using large lockable hinges (these). Adjustable feet have since been added, making life a lot easier.

But it does stand up:

And they do connect together well:

At this point I moved focus to the control panel. I shan't go into too much detail due to the amount of changes since then. But built out of the aforementioned cheap timber and ABS boxes, I built it quite sturdily:

Track control will be through a choice of two Modelex controllers, one panel-mounted, and one walkabout.

With controller and first mimic panel (car striping tape):

First steps at wiring:

Second draft mimic panel (professionally printed and laminated) and wiring diagrams:

As I said, those steps are now back-tracked to go down a different path.

So a few months passed, because... well, life. You know how it is.

Then in May 2018, I got around to getting back into the garage, and plotted the track plan onto the boards:

And during some spring cleaning, I took the boards, down, fitted adjustable feet to all the legs, levelled it all, and attached the back/end scene boards:

Then in June, I put down cork trackbeds.

By this time a little bit of misalignment has appeared, to the tune of about 0.5mm in some places, so cardboard has been used to make up the difference. Hopefully that will do, but we'll see.

Following this, holes in the cork (accidents or fiddly bits) were filled with a cheap Polyfill substitute and it all painted matt brown (Wilko's "Nutmeg Spice", if you want to know):

In July I managed to get most of one weekend in the garage, mostly having a tidy up and working on an N-gauge building I was working on for the club, but did get a couple of things done on Kidneston.

One end scenic board, screwed to blocks then glued to the board (unfortunately the structure of the board made screwing it down impractical), with track holes cut (may need to open them out a little, especially the back one to get a hand into the tunnel, but the front one is on a straight and just to a road bridge, so should not be a problem:

Using a few offcuts to mock up the basics of the hill scene at the end of the layout. This will comprise of a wooden structure with foam cut slopes:

And eventually, some track was laid:

And there was movement:



At this point, a number of major changes were decided on and a few months have since elapsed while behind-the-scenes things are done.
Since joining MERG, and deciding to implement the systems they provide in kit form, this has required an entire redesign of the wiring plan. I took the opportunity to add to the track plan a bit, and swap from solenoid point motors to servos.

So I got to work building this, and its cousins:

So that brings us to present day. As it stands, the points have been taken up again to have the dropper wires re-soldered, and the circuit boards for one board have been built, and just need programming with the correct data to operate the points and isolation relays (the isolation sections are controlled by relays on PCBs I've designed and had built). Once Christmas is out of the way, I will try to get back to work on this!

 

I did consider JMRI, and did a bit of experimenting with it, but then found a tool (CANWEB) which was much simpler, and very easy to edit (I've entirely rewritten the Javascript to suit my purposes), and have written my own web-panel to use with it. As it's designed specifically for CBUS, I'm just able to understand its workings in and out, which, as a software developer, and quite a controlling one at that, I like to be able to do, haha.

So the panel currently looks like this:

Clicking on a point (or a stud in the case of the 3-way points) changes it. The black/green dots are isolation sections, again changed by clicking on them.
The "lever panel" visible at the bottom is a prototype for another mode.

 

Thanks very much.

And yes I remember Oakamoor very well; was good fun operating that.