Hazel Markham has a home.

OK, the summer house is now cleared out, electrics have been restored, lighting installed and the baseboard has taken up residence, The Summer House is now, unofficially "The Engine Shed".

On Saturday I purchased the cork sheeting, 3 additional Peco point motors and a pack of Peco / Wills  SSMP226 Brickwork, Flemish Bond for the Signal Box and Goods shed bases.

SHE is out on Tuesday, getting inebriated with the WI and then at a meeting Wednesday night, so chance to get into the Engine Shed and start laying the cork.

As I said in the last post, having Hazel Markham set up in the Engine Shed mean that I can leave things out, half done without the need to waste time packing up and clearing away, bliss.

A Home for Hazel Markham

Well with the baseboard constructed and the partner home, SHE has banished the railway to the shed, which is fine, but the shed was full of rubbish, so last weekend was spent clearing out and re-organising.

The shed is actually supposed to be a summer house, so now it's cleared out and tidy how long until SHE decides to use it as such, in the meantime it's home for my railway :-).

The shed is 8 ft 6 in by 6 ft 6 in is partially insulated and will have power to it by Monday, the supply is there but keeps tripping, so I have a qualified electrician coming tomorrow to investigate and resolve the issue.

Being a shed it will probably suffer from cold and damp, it's at the end of the garden so security is also an issue, but it will offer a space to leave the railway up and work in progress can be left out, meaning, when SHE lets me, I can just pop off down to the shed and play :-D

Baseboard

So been a while but have now had time to do some more work.

Over the weekend I built the baseboard, this is built in two halves, each measuring 45" x 27".

The side are made from 12 mm ply 45" long by 100 mm wide, oh don't you just love to mix imperial and metric measurements. The deck is 6 mm ply.

One alteration from the original plan is that there is one central traverser instead of the two planned.

This means that there are only two sets of tracks to line up

Another change is that points 9 and 12 on the mimic plan will be operated by the same switch so reducing the "lever frame" by two switches and an LED .

Signal Box Graphics

A chance to play with the computer today.

Drawn up the Signal Box Track Plan and corresponding Level Tags.

The Track Plan will be reduced to be put inside the Signal Box once built, it may never be seen but I will know it's there.

The larger version will form part of the control panel for the railway.

March 2015 Update

Just an up-date.

Baseboard and track laying will start over the 2nd weekend of April, got the house to myself for a week :-).

I now have 4 Peco 0-6-0 Tram Loco kits ready to build.

Rolling stock construction continues.

Gauge and Scale

Symington Hoo Railway is a narrow gauge line, but what is narrow gauge.

Gauge is the distance between the two rails of the railway track.

UK mainline railways operate on standard gauge which is 4 foot 8 1/2 inches

Railways running on tracks wider than 4 ft 8 1/2 inches are known as BROAD Gauge and on tracks with a gauge less than 4 ft 8 1/2 inches are known as NARROW gauge. Common Narrow gauges are 2ft (most common in UK), 2ft 3in and 2ft 6 in.

The Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Railway runs on 2 foot gauge track

www.buzzrail.co.uk 

Scale

Building a model railway requires scaling down the prototypical elements of the real thing to a suitable size to fit in the space available to store and use the model.

As children we would be given toys to play with of different scales, so our toy motor bike was bigger than our double decker bus, the houses smaller than the toy people who we imagined lived in them.

So when we want to build a model everything has to be to scale, a common / standard unit of measurement needs to be used for everything.

Modelling of mainline standard railways in the UK is known as OO, for distances, length etc. measurements are taken as 4mm = 1 ft and OO gauge has a track gauge of 16.5 mm.

As seen above British main line railways operate on a gauge of 4 ft 8 1/2 inches (4.75 ft), commercial available OO track is gauged at 16.5 mm so we are not working to true gauge, WHY ?

Well in the UK we model at 4 mm = 1 ft, so 4.75 feet at 4 mm to the foot = 19 mm not 16.5 mm so there is some compromise when dealing with commercially produced track. In other countries (including the USA) model railways are modelled in HO scale which is 3.5 mm = 1 ft, so standard gauge of 4.75 feet = 16.625 mm (taken as 16.5 mm)

                            

For Hazel Markham I am not looking to build a standard gauge railway, I want a narrow gauge railway.

However for easy and availability I want to work with 4 mm to the foot scale, this means I can get and use OO gauge houses, people, animals, trees, structures, signalling and scenery all off the shelf.

But being narrow gauge I need the track gauge to be narrower than standard OO track.

The next readily available track a size down from OO is N gauge. 

N gauge track is produced at a gauge of 9mm.

So what prototypical gauge will that give me?

We know 4mm = 1 foot, 8mm = 2 feet etc

Therefore 9mm divided by 4 = 2.25 feet or 2 feet 3 inches, which we can see from above is a more than suitable gauge for as narrow gauge railway.

So a model railway scaled to 4mm (OO gauge) running on a track gauge of 9 mm is known as OO9 

The track I will be using is from Peco and is made for OO9 modelling, the sleepers are more to scale in size and spacing, than the closely spaced tiny N gauge sleepers.

Station Sign

1st draft