02/03/07: I May Be Some Time...

The plan for Redhill has been suffering from ‘feature bloat’ for a while as I have tried to squeeze more things in. The railway is the chief culprit. Having started as a double track line with a single 3-car DMU shuttling back and forth it has grown, first to include a cement terminal and then a complete circuit of the garage with storage sidings for some background freight trains. This has made the planned portability an issue as extra baseboards would be needed to change to an exhibition configuration.

The straw that has broken the camel’s back however is sound. I had always intended adding ambient sound to the layout, and the current trend for sound in DCC equipped locos only heightens the problem that the section built so far is quite noisy. The Peco point motors change with a big thump, the home-made junction and stop mechanisms do too. Then there is the drumming as vehicles run along the thin plywood road and trains along the thicker plywood roadbed. Extrapolating this up to the planned full size and you might have difficulty hearing yourself think, let alone ambient sounds.

The answer appears to be to decry the fashionable light-weight ply baseboard in place of something heftier with some acoustic damping built in. Iain Rice, for whom I have great respect, has already crossed this particular Rubicon as I found out when, in an idle moment, I leafed through his treatise An Approach to Building Finescale Track in 4mm published by Wild Swan at £12.95. This is an excellent read, as are all of Iain‘s works, and in it he gives his solution to the noise problem. The track is laid (or in his case built) on cartridge paper. Underneath this goes a layer of camping mat which, in turn, sits on 12mm MDF. Subject to being able to take the weight of the roadbed the underlying baseboard structure can be whatever you like. You’ll need to read the book for the full details, but what you end up with is track that allows a quiet locomotive to stay quiet.

So, faced by rebuilding the baseboards already completed, I looked at the plan again to see if I could improve on the more obviously ‘tacked on’ bits and, needless to say, squeeze anything else in. The main problem lay in the elevated railway which acted as a backdrop to the main scene. The loop around the garage was planned as a non-scenic section. It needed a duck-under or removable section to give access and caused big problems with the desire to be able to make the layout portable. After much head scratching, gnashing of teeth, chewing carpets and contemplating taking up something easier like lion taming it was Bruce Lake's Ridings that provided the answer. Go underground.

No, I don't mean dig a cellar (don’t think I didn’t consider it) but put the railway in a cutting. Suddenly everything fell into place (with a bit of shoving). By putting the railway in a cutting along the front it could run around minimum radius hidden curves to storage sidings that would be underneath the town scene. The roads needed to be ‘lost’ behind buildings rather than under bridges, and there was less off-stage storage for road vehicles but it started to look promising.

By extending across the garage at one end not only could I fit in a gyratory system in place of the roundabout but also a canal and a preserved railway as well. All of which had been on my original wants list. (Yes, there is a preserved railway at Brownhills since you ask.) This one is narrow-gauge and the rationale is that it was built along a disused standard gauge formation rather like the Bala Lake Railway.

Having moved the track from above eye-level at the back of the scene to right in front of your eyes I had to reconsider my previous decision to use Peco Code 75 track. Something closer to scale in the sleeper size and spacing department was called for. Given that this would probably involve building some of it by hand I did toy with the idea of both P4 and EM but decided to stick with OO on the basis that life was complicated enough. When it was pointed out that MMRS‘s Dewsbury Midland layout uses SMP OO track the decision was made. SMP plastic track with copperclad pointwork.

MMRS‘s Dewsbury Midland. Photo by Andy York of RMWEB

The problem of noisy point, junction and stop actuators can be solved by the use of ‘memory wire’. This is a special alloy that changes length when an electric current is passed through it. This can provide the power and movement necessary, comes with built in ‘slow motion’ operation and is totally silent. I shall provide some ‘how-to’ guides in due course.

I may be some time...

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