Project Layout - Skeetsmere & Rushall

The beautiful rolling countryside (yes it's not that flat) of East Anglia lends itself to grand masterpieces of  model railways that can take over huge sheds or even whole top floors of houses. The stations were also usually very long rather than the more compact setup you find in other parts of the country.

However what do you do  if you don't have a large shed or whole room to dedicate to a layout? many people especially those of us who are a bit younger abide in much smaller flats and houses and often rented accommodation therefore have a lot less permanent setup. which makes the dream of having a model railway less attainable....

However its not doom and gloom some of the best layouts out there a rather small but exquisite affairs and there are ways and means of capturing the railway you love in a small setting so that everyone no matter what their situation can have a layout. admittedly not everyone can have a scale model of Colchester or Little Bytham but we can all have something. Especially if you are willing to trade in your larger locomotives for something smaller. 

The aim of this section of the showcase is not to present you with a finished product but to show you how possible it is to build something small and practical that is still enormous fun to build and play with (after all its all about playing trains isn't it?). Hopefully this will also inspire you to have a go at building something small that works for you, We would love to hear from you if it does.

The Plan

Skeetsmere & Rushall is (or at least will be) a 4mm scale depiction of the Mid Suffolk Light Railway set around the year 1912

The aim is to build a compact layout that is small enough to:

a) Fit in the tiny 2.5x2m spare bedroom in our house that also doubles as a workshop and work from home office on a 400mm deep shelf so its doesnt impinge on the room,

b) Fit in the boot of my 57 plate Honda Jazz so could be taken to exhibitions

But it also had to be a fun thing to operate.

The Middy was a railway famous for being extravagant in promotion and unfinished in construction. So many of the stations, Laxfield in particular had track plans that were not designed for the stations eventual purpose, this made shunting, especially on mixed trains, a prolonged affair. Terrible for running a railway but perfect for playing trains!

 

As you can see from the plan, the track plan was designed to be intentionally awkward, the cattle dock at the wrong end of the station, head-shunt to Powley's Sidings, and the branch to Walberstone, not to mention the tricky fact of where you put the coaching stock when shunting, all makes for at time head scratching play factor in a scenic section only 1.3m by 0.4m.

To explain the name, if the Middy extended north from Horham towards the Waveny valley line and Harleston  the last place of any note it might have passed through would have been the hamlet of Skeetsmere and the village of Rushall (the Middy had the habit of putting the name of the smaller place first on their signage) and here as with the fate of this madcap railway my premise is that it ran out of money not able to reach its goal that is very much in sight…. Hence the need for the engine shed and terminus station

Skeetsmere is also where I grew up before my family moved to Norwich

Track

Fundamentally the things all railways need are rails, and this project was surprisingly no different.

 

I originally laid the track out with Peco code 75 streamline track but I found that for the amount of space I had I couldn’t get much in. At this point friend and work colleague JT advised building my own and the rest we shall say is history…..

 Even building my own track I stuck with 00 gauge (or at least a fine scale version of it) I'm no gauge puritan and 00 gauge me the advantage of increased clearances and tighter curves (handy in a small space) and the ability to run any of my models including the ones I was given by grandparents etc who are sadly no longer with us.   

 

Unfortunately all the fine scale track templates were way too big for what I needed and I couldn’t get my head round templot so I just drew the entire track template by hand!

 

A sheet on lining paper, draughtsman's tools and a few evenings in front of repeat episodes of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons gave me something I could work with

 

The template was then glued to a sheet of foam board and then that to sheet of plywood. The section of line to Walberstone was to have a slight gradient (yes we do have them in Suffolk) so the plywood was bent to form the slope.

 

To represent the light weight flat bottom rail the Middy was laid with I used the Brooke and Smith method of track laying by soldering the rail to rivets in wooden sleepers. But being the cheapskate I am I used 009 peco track pins with the heads filed flat.

 

Believe me when I tell you that although the end product looks good it's not worth the effort in any way shape or form. There are much easier ways to lay track! But masochist that I am I persevered to the end and although tortuous the track-work, it works and fits a very complex track plan into the space.

 

 

Firm Foundations

having spent much of my teenage years messing around in set design and theatrical productions i was quite keen to present the layout in a way that was visually pleasing.

with that in mind and taking much inspiration from Iain Rice and others of the ilk i decided to go for the cameo style of presentation



lets be honest the construction would have been a bit more streamlined if i had been able to purchase timber bespoke for the project but as the baseboards were built during the first lockdown it was very much a case of use whatever timber that could be found





so a frame was built around the track board with wings and a proscenium arch out of rather thick plywood



I hate square sky corners so opted for a curved back scene, this was done by soaking some hardboard offcuts i had lying around with water and then while wet curving and clamping in place and letting them dry in the curved shape. believe me i got covered in wet sawdust but the affect is worth it i think



the fiddle yards are both cantilevered off the main structure the small one on the RHS will hold the control systems and the LHS one holds the trains and the cassettes. i wanted them to not look to intrusive so in thier design i followed the tapered shape of the main layout and i think the shape is rather striking.



I said earlier that the layout had to fit on a shelf, well with the weight of the structure i decided rather than ballance it on a shelf to hang it directly off universal shelving racking. it works well and frees up space in my office..... would help if i kept it tidier though.....

Control

Working in the robotics industry things tend to rub off on you.... and even i am very much of the mechanical breed of engineer i have may friends who work in electronics and software, couple this with my membership of MERG  www.merg.org.uk/ and i think i was doomed to have a very high tech layout.the trains are worked via DCC using a mix of Lenz and Roco (although I've also built in an analogue option for testing) equipment. some of the bespoke track requires a complex solution to frog switching and because every bit of rail had been built with two dropper wires underneath the crossing it got very complex wiring up 9 switched sections to 50 individual wires. 



least said I've revised this plan and changes to the track have improved matters....

Points and signals will be controlled from a conventional lever frame (although the test control panel is in place at the moment)



Switches are connected to the MERG C-Bus System which distributes commands to various points on the layout without the need for complex reams of
wiring 



CBUS uses a number of output drivers to switch the points and other accessories, this is all powered off a separate 12Vdc bus from the DCC



points are driven via servo motors on 3D printed mounts (also a MERG Product)



the level crossing is driven by two servos driven by a program I wrote for an Ardunio controller, this and the correct pauses between each gate moving to allow the person opening to move from one gate to another

 

Adendum

I had hoped by this point to be able to post a video of a working layout for you to enjoy but i find that modeling never goes to plan.....firstly you end up getting distracted building things that have no real bearing on the project... such as this NBR fish wagon 



also you find you have to re build your track as your genius invention didn't turn out to be that genius at all.....



and you let the smoke out of your electronics.......



in any cases this is a hobby and meant to be fun so don't worry if you come a cropper at any point we all do, you will fix it, so enjoy the ride and happy modelling!