Intermission.

As you can see, a pause in the project has been reached. My unfamiliarity with the scale and the size of the items I’m planning to recreate, has caused me to sit back and think about the design and the layout. 

I know my furnace will be about the size of a Pringles tube. I know I’d really like the layout to have an area of no more than four square feet. I have an idea of what I’d like the scene to look like. But will everything work together? This then is a first sketch of what I’d like.

First thoughts

You can clearly see which holiday snap of mine influences it.

Influence

It contains the elements I’d like to see. The stone walls. The furnace. An open roof space to show the joists and timbers. A wagon turntable. For no other reason than I like them and I’ve never recreated one. Patterns, moulds and other casting accoutrements strewn all over the place. One detail that I’d really like to include to see how many notice it. Is to have a pattern and mould for the window frames. It was something that we noticed at Llanberis. Back in its heyday they must have made everything there, and I mean everything. There was even the pattern for the window frames on display, right next to a window containing the cast frame. All in all, the foundry display at Llanberis was quite remarkable, and has certainly made quite an impression on me. 

You will notice one thing missing from my sketch that is in the photo, and that’s the crane. That’s one thing I really can’t visualize the size of. So I’ve left it out for the minute. Though a crane that could pick something off a wagon and place it on the foundry floor would be a great working feature. It’s a feature I’ve recreated before on Whinny Lane in Gn15 and that went down very well at shows.

The Whinny Lane crane

The layout really needs to have the facility for a continuous run when running at a show. So that when I get distracted by the public, the train can run in circles. As long as there is activity on a layout people are happy. When I’m running a shunting layout and I am pulled into conversation, I need someone to step in to take over seamlessly so trains can run and I can talk. There have been several times lately with the 16mm scale layout, when people tried to engage me in conversation as I was pushing the skip up to the tipper, and my concentration was focused on that. It may have made me look standoffish and anti-social. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

A quick draft of a track plan using the geometry of Chris Rennie’s LocoRemote track pieces as a guide, shows that it might fit in an area of 3’6 x 2’. But does it “fit”?

A track plan

How much space is there in front of the mouth of the furnace? What size of mould could you fit between the furnace and the track to recreate a casting process vignette? Can I fit a crane in? Will the geometry of the track allow me to fit everything where I’ve drawn it? 

The track is drawn at the width of the track gauge, with tighter radius curves hidden off scene. As you can see, the track runs pretty close to the baseboard edges. It may well be too close. The grid squares are one inch. So you can see that the track comes within one inch of the edge. 

Clearly some track is needed so I can see if everything will fit. The LocoRemote track is available as a free download for those who have 3D printers. I don’t have a printer myself, but there is an ever-growing band of modellers who do. So I asked one of them nicely if they’d be able to print some sections of track for me and they kindly agreed. 

Their printer is working away as I type, and as soon as I receive the package of track, I will be able to see what fits where and I can move on to the next stage of the layout design.