E misses out!

E missed out because Dad forgot to ask her what her train set wishes were. So here as a late addition is what she would really like: a Hornby Devon Flyer train set – which she says looks really good!

Christmas Wishes

Its probably a bit late to be thinking of what we want for Christmas, but here are a few of the items we’d like the Reindeer Express to deliver.

I’d love a rake of electric motor units (“EMU”s) in BR Southern Region green. We’ve got two carriages that are pulled by locos, but they are in different scales (HO and OO) and look out of place together!

The Hornby Trackmaster software sounds good, although I haven’t seen a proper review of it yet. I’ve spent a lot of time searching for software to help plan layouts, and they all have drawbacks – Hornby’s previous attempts have been interesting, and fun, but somehow tended to stop just before they were really useful!

We would all love a really impressive steam loco and tender set. But they are certainly not cheap at roughly £130 plus!

Al would like a “cleaner train”. We’ve talked about track maintenance in the blog, and one option is to have a train clean the track. There are some really cool examples (including one by Dapol) which have tanks to store cleaning fluid, and “hoover” type vacuums” which pick up power from the track. 

But overall the things we’d probably love most would be more space for our layout (preferably in the warm rather than out in our garage) and more time to spend “playing” trains together.

Wherever you are and whatever you are up to in train set scale or in real life, we wish you a Happy Christmas.

Ps if you are still looking for your own Christmas gift (to give away or to keep for yourself) check out the train sets sold by Hornby and Bachman – they are great value compared to buying the individual items, and you will often find some sets being offered at a big discount around Christmas.

pps thanks to "callmestacy" via photobucket for the tree picture.

Wheels of Progress

After the Railway Maintenance Working Party had done such sterling work in wheel cleaning Al had taken the cleaned locos and run them around our layout. One of our pride and joys is an old Tri-ang R653 loco, a 2-6-2 SNCF black steam model (a Continental “prairie” model from the 1960’s). It’s the most majestic looking loco we have (Al would probably vote for the Hitachi bullet train, but I am an old enough fogey to feel nostalgia for the steam engine!). It was the last of the three cleaned locos to be test run, and he called me in to show it running. But - it stopped. 

A Tri-ang R653, a Continental Prairie in French livery

Now there are lots of possible reasons for the stoppage. It was stopping near to some points. One of the constructional differences between original Tri-ang and modern Hornby is that the track is smaller in height. It is more “finescale” in the jargon. The flanges on the wheels (the bigger bits that drop down to the side of the rail) were made to suit older higher track. When a Tri-ang loco goes over a point there is a piece in the middle – called the “frog” where the two running lines come to meet. The groove in these frogs is not deep enough for the depth of the flanges on most Tri-ang locos. This means the main wheel is lifted up and loses contact with the rail – reducing the transfer of power from the rail to the engine. This usually results in a “stutter” in the running of the engines around the track.  Since the problem appeared to be happening just after the points, I wondered if that was the cause. We ran the loco a few more times.

If you look carefully you can see the dirt on the wheels.You can
also see the deep flange which makes it difficult to run on modern track

Yes that’s right – we ran it again – even though it had stopped. What we found was that if we turned off the Hornby power controller for about a minute, it seemed to reset things so that it could run the loco again. And on the next test run , the loco stopped again, but nowhere near the points. The way our weekends go we didn’t have time to do any more testing, so the problem remains a mystery at the moment. I am wondering if the engine is somehow building up electrical resistance so that eventually the power controller cuts out. This does seem to be a feature of the Hornby rail controller. More research is called for – but that’s going to mean finding some more time to spend at the trackside!

Geometric Designs

In a previous post I talked about track geometry. I explained about the problem I had had with a full straight track section being used instead of two quarter sections. Here is an illustration which shows the difference between a quarter section (R610), two quarter sections joined together and a full straight (R600) - all of these are Hornby current track sections.

In looking back, I remembered that it took me some time to realise that “track geometry” was the magic phrase (the one to put into google) to help me work out how to get a layout working properly. I suspect too many of us would rather leave “geometry” as a vaguely remembered school topic long since relegated for much more useful things.

As a kid I remember pulling out my trainset and fitting all the track together from time to time, and being mystified why some curves seemed to end up in one place and others went somewhere else. With all the ingenuity of a 10 year old, this was seldom a problem – pushing it a bit usually worked, after a fashion!

As a now adult helper to Al and E, this “push until it does fit” approach no longer washes. I had to find out what was going on. It fairly quickly became apparent that Hornby, and Tri-ang before them, make curves that allow you to build three concentric circles (circles within circles). In fact Hornby introduced a fourth circle not so long ago.  These go by the names of first, second third and now fourth radius. In each radius it takes eight standard curve sections to create a circle, and if you had all four circles they would sit one inside the other with 67 mm between them - enough clearance to allow trains to go around them without interfering with the trains on the next circle. Hornby have a useful diagram showing how the different pieces fit together; you can find it on the Hornby website, but its not that obvious so you might like the direct link just to the diagram, which is

http://www.hornby.com/_assets/files/Track-Geometry-PDF.pdf