Dee See See

I spent a happy couple of hours at the weekend helping to operate on one of the Greenock club's layouts at a local exhibition in Renfrewshire and renewing my acquaintance with all things standard gauge.

Inverboyndie is a compact terminus / shunting layout based on Banff in Morayshire in the 1960s but has one link with our layouts because it also has a gravity train feature - loose shunting of carriages in order to get the engine on the other end of the train without the aid of a run round loop (or a second locomotive).

This feature (achieved by cheating with a powered carriage bogie) is made immeasurably easier since the invention of DCC - and it was my first experience of using this new fangled technology.

I can't deny I was impressed but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed it more than running an old-fashioned DC wired layout.

Frankly I found it a bit of a faff!

There's something very intuitive about twiddling a knob to control a train but I didn't get any of that with a DCC handset - it felt more like a double maths period with a scientific calculator in your hand.

There's nothing pleasingly tactile about pushing buttons for me.

Ah, said my friend, but with DCC you're really driving the train, not just controlling a motor, and I could see what he was getting at, because the simulated deceleration does mean you have to concentrate and anticipate what you're doing a lot more.

(It also massively increased the opportunities for pile-ups with inexperienced operators....)

But it was all the upshift, downshift, function x, y and z to control the whooshes, hisses and toots that got my eyes glazing over.

There's an old saying, that people in my trade like to hang on to, that the pictures are better on radio, and part of me thinks that this applies to model railways as well.

I quite like daydreaming and hearing the sounds in my head as I operate a layout rather than having a computer chip in control.

Just me?

Full Circle

When Himself is a man on a mission things progress rapidly.

Therefore it took only a week from him being press-ganged into purchasing some pre-loved lengths of PECO OO at the local exhibition to The Trainee being presented with his first proper train set.

Not content with a mere oval Himself has squeezed in a passing loop and a siding with headshunt.

(I should explain at this point that although he ended up sending a crate-load of plain track to the tip when he moved house last year he held on to all his old points - go figure.)

This has all be laid out on the baseboards which were used for the temporary fiddle yards when Bron Hebog was being shown as a work-in-progress at various points in recent years.

They're connected by hinges so it can be folded up and stored behind the sofa in the snug.

(How cunning, eh?  Not content with an entire double garage he is now moving model railway stuff into a second room in the house!)

He's sorted out a selection of locomotives and rolling stock for The Trainee to play with which are a mix of the expendable and the indestructible - the expandable being some prehistoric Triang Mk1's which have already been vandalised once by me 30 years ago practising my carriage panting skills, and the indestructible (?) being a handful of metal Wrenn steam locomotives.

(I put the question mark in brackets because we discovered the other day that unbeknown to us one of the buffers had sheared off a Wrenn BR Standard 2-6-4 at some point in the last quarter of a century.)

The eagle-eyed my also notice the obligatory Hornby 'Caley Pug' (in mock L&Y livery) and some four wheelers.

What self-respecting 3 year old's layout doesn't have one of those?

Oh Oh!

I posted last week about my fears that Himself was about to be distracted from the narrow gauge project by his grandson (aka The Trainee) and my prophesy has come to pass even sooner than I had expected.

I suspect Himself may already be regretting his innocent suggestion of taking The Trainee along to the local exhibition last weekend.

No sooner had we entered the venue that The Trainee zeroed-in like a cruise missile on a box of old OO track being sold off behind one of the trade stands.

Anyone who has ever had dealings with a 3 and a half year old will appreciate that from that fateful moment there was no way that Himself was going to be allowed to leave empty handed.

He is now the proud owner of 10 yards of finest concrete sleeper PECO Streamline which The Trainee is expecting to be transformed into a basic train set by his next visit.

(You can take it from me that Himself's life won't be worth living if it's not! The Trainee will see to that.)

Incidentally, I suspect the choice of concrete sleepers was a deliberate move - he's no doubt anticipating high speed running!