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

When the dust settled

I left off the blog at the point where I had got the layout running again after the dust had all been cleared away. But summer intervened, and it’s taken us a long time to get back to the train set again. And at first it seemed like we were going to have all sorts of problems – the first three locos I tried to run all had problems of one sort or another – which I put down to poor conductivity on the rails. Then I came across one of my son’s star locos – a Hornby class 08 diesel model (an R156). And it sped around the track like there was no tomorrow! (Not bad for a shunter which according to some sources was only supposed to run at 20 mph in real life!).

Hornby R156 - a Class 08 Diesel

Now one difference was that the diesel had been kept out of sight in a storage drawer. It is also one of the more modern models, and one of the more recent additions to our collection. So the problem seemed to be more with the locos than the rails. I thought I would test the power running through the rails at different points using a small cheap multimeter I had picked up from Maplin for about a tenner. It’s a mysterious gadget if your knowledge about electrics is as rusty as mine is! But I managed to get consistent readings of 13v pretty much anywhere I tested (using a straight 12 V input from a small transformed rather than the Hornby power control equipment). It was much later that I worked out that I should have been testing current in amps, not the voltage! In any event it persuaded me to look harder at the loco’s rather than the rails.

So I picked up the Eddie Stobart loco intending to add a little more oil to see if that would improve things. But before I could do that I noticed the state of the wheels – filthy! And sure enough the wheels on the other locos’s were all in a pretty poor state too. So there we were on Saturday afternoon. Mum was out at the shops, Al had finished his homework and E had been to ballet and gotten back again. “What are your doing, Dad?” they asked, and soon enough, all three of us were sitting around the breakfast table, fully engaged in our Railway Maintenance Working Party. Each of us worked on the wheels of a different loco, just rubbing them gently with a paper tissue; a pile of blackened tissues as testament to our work. Mum came back, so we only had a quick chance to do some test running – and what an improvement.

A Shower of Debris

I have spent a lot of time recently clearing our loft to allow new insulation to be laid, and the insulation installers finally arrived last week. They were also filling our cavity walls, and about the first thing they said concerned our train set layout. “That will take a bit of moving “.

Our train set is set up in our garage, and I hadn’t expected them to try and do anything to the garage wall. However they had other ideas. They wanted to drill two holes just above the layout. “Just be a bit of dust”, they said. I didn’t believe them!

As fast as I could I removed all the rolling stock, then the few buildings we have on the layout. Next came the track supports for the elevated section my son had constructed. Finally I went back and removed the two level crossings, and then all he end tracks with buffers. Finally I felt there was nothing they could do much harm to by leaning over and on to the layout. I still covered it with a dust sheet. And then, they drilled two holes before declaring the wall in question was a single skin without any cavity to be filled; it had all been a needless waste of time. But with just two test holes the brick dust still went everywhere. In the end I had to use a vacuum to try and brush it all up.

So today I finally managed to put everything back. And in doing so came up against one of those intriguing aspects about train sets I hadn’t really understood as a child; the importance of track geometry. I discovered that we had somehow put in a single straight section (R600 length 168mm) instead of two quarter length straights (R610 length 38mm). Now those of you quick with maths might notice that 4 times 38 doesn’t equal 168, so why they are called quarter straights is a bit of a mystery; as is the absence from the catalogue of a half straight.

The impact of this extra 92mm of straight meant that the curve of the track at one end didn’t follow the printed image on the trakmat, and extended right to the edge of the mat. Probably more importantly, it also puts strain on the junctions of the track pieces, opening up gaps between the track which causes the train wheels to judder and reduces electrical conductivity. The current should still pass through the rail joiners, but it must be a better connection if the track itself joins up.

So what this shows is that the track itself appears quite flexible – you can make the track link up even if you are not following the official geometry exactly; but only do so at your peril! The more you diverge from the geometry, the more difficult it becomes to link up other sections, the more likely you are to have derailments and crashes because of the gaps between tracks, and the more difficult it will be to get your electrical current flowing freely throughout the layout.

Aussie Rules!

I've always found the website at www.modeltrains.net.au/Hornby to hold a wealth of information about Tri-ang and Tri-ang/Hornby models, much of it very hard to find from somewhere else. So I was really pleased to be able to provide them with some of the details of the Overhead Power system which they didn't have. And now Andrew over there has placed a link to this blog - which is really kind!.Thanks you, Andrew. Just goes to show, we might not agree on Cricket, or even how to play football, but Aussies and Brits can work together on model railways!