This is the home of the South Downs Railway - a fictitious, modern image (ish) railway set in southern England modelled in N gauge. The layout is 15 x 10 feet (5x3m). It is Digitrax DCC controlled, and automatically controlled using a PC running "Traincontroller" software.
The layout has been "on the way" for over 10 years, and we do make progress, slowly. All of the track has been laid, and most of the train operations have been tested. The "main" track loop is a "folded dog bone" arrangement around 3 and a half sides of a rectangle. Clanfield station is complete, and scenic. Petersfield station in in the "scenic development" phase. The oil terminal has been ballasted. Portsmouth station has its track laid covering three distinct areas - the passenger side, the container terminal and the GWR preservation area with an engine shed and turntable.
We've completed the work to develop the electronics needed to control the railway. there are a number of CML Electronics modules involved: DAC20 point control, SIGM20 signal control, MSC8 scenery decoders and a TXC1 turntable controller. The railway is Digitrax controlled, with some of their products too.
Rolling stock is entirely shop-bought, with DCC decoders fitted. We're adopted Dapol magnetic couplings: some of our stock pre-dates NEM pockets so this requires effort. They work well, and we have added the magnets to operate them in terminus tracks where trains will separate.
Main line train operations are fully computer controlled. The "Traincontroller" software moves the trains from one place to another, making sure that there are no collisions. It is possible to manually drive a train, obeying the signals on the way, but the points are controlled automatically on the main line. In the terminus stations (Clanfield, Portsmouth and the Eastleigh oil depot) there are opportunities for manually driven train movements - repositioning a locomotive to the other end of the oil train so it is ready to go for example. The operators have pushbutton panels to control points in the terminus areas, and there is interlocking with Traincontroller so that a manually driven train doesn't upset an automatic train operation.
It's great to see it in operation: there can be 5 or 6 trains in various stages of moving around the railway at the same time. They all wait for each other with no conflicts. Two or three people could operate most of the railway now - one dispatching one the computer, and the others manually preparing trains at the stations.
Once upon a time, I planned to write an article a month for the website about progress. Then I did nothing for 9 months, and started again. Then the same thing happened again. although I had made progress, it didn't fit the way I wanted to write about it and somewhere along the way I planned to rewrite the web page.
We now have a different web site. It allows me to write "blog" entries (whatever they are) simply and painlessly. I can write as much or as little as I like as often as I like. So no "two sides of text or nothing". That's why this section is in two halves: the "old" method and the "new" method.
This is what the railway is all about - the trains that run on it. To an extent, the rest is just there to give the trains somewhere to go.
My railway is set in no world or time. I will have trains from anywhere, from any era, although it is supposed to be loosely set in the south of England. Trains visit from other parts of the country, surely? And steam trains still run on today's railways as excursion specials?
I'm not a modeller per se. I expect in 10 years to find that the rolling stock is still all shop bought. I have models from Graham Farish, Dapol, Tomix, Bachmann USA and Kato so far. What I am doing is changing to MicroTrains couplings, and investing effort to make the running very reliable. I'm slowly building up knowledge of what it is that prevents reliable running, and even the most poorly running models have one way or another being transformed.
This section collects information about the rolling stock and the modifications made to it. There is information about DCC decoder installation (not the art it used to be!), wheelset modifications and coupling upgrades.
People who know how model railways are made may be able to sketch out a layout, and go on to construct it with little by way of planning. I was new to railways, and couldn't do that: I needed a plan. That was undertaken at several levels.
- A simple sketch drawn to scale allowed me to choose a mechanical layout to get the most railway into the space available.
- A railway CAD program was used to get an accurate track plan, and from that an accurate baseboard design
- Careful records on spreadsheets have been used for the electrical side of the house
- This website holds the locomotive roster!
So, definitely not "once tool for everything" - instead I think I used what was to hand in sensible ways. The outcome is a robust understanding of what I've made, and records to support maintenance long into the future.