February 2015 Challenge: The Morph Line

[jbgibson]

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Why is a plain door better than an ornate one? And why did it fall down? Stay tuned.

Oh, the first one is "Woluwe-St-lambert av. des Rogations 21 902" by Michel wal - his own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons -
Second is my own photo.

[jbgibson]

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Oh, that makes sense... somewhat. The door has become a train environment. At this size, presumably a model one.

And indeed, a plain hollow-core door makes a nice fairly light, stiff, flat surface for a model train. This one is 2.5 ft by 6ft-8inches - call it 3/4 meter by 2 meter. That's a size of which my house has a couple of surplus ones, and people in my neighborhood keep leaving on the curb as trash. The train you see there is running on what is in scale 30inch gauge track - about 750mm.... so the whole door would fit between real rails of this very narrow size :-).

I haven't decided if my animated-gif method of showing evolution will be this detailed, or if I will only be able to show a couple of distinct phases. That will probably depend on how simple I keep the details. The end-state of this page of the WIP is a switching layout of modest size - enough to be self contained without engulfing a whole room.

Because whatever I map has to have a story, I'm saying this railroad runs up the valley of the Morph River - so named because it is going to appear here and there in model form purely as it suits me, with no need to be logically situated. Instead of a coherent swath of railroad, as some modelers do, this will be a sequence of scenes with quite a bit of implied space between depicted bits. This scene is the town of Tuisgemaakte, if it's in its South African mode, Cartref if in Wales, or Casero/Casiero if in some arid part of North or South America. All of those have terrain that could be similar, if one overlooks details.... and I'm figuring on making the most locale-specific details editable. We'll see if I can depict the way it evolves in map form - which is after all the theme this month, nu?

[jbgibson]

So here's a sequence culminating in the *first* stage of my morphing railway.

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Narration to go with it:
- Yeah - it starts as a door. Cheap and easy, dimensionally stable. Light.
- Track. Centerline-representation only. This ani gif already gets too fat too fast, for showing rails & ties :-).
- >Plonk< the train gets set in place on the track. It stops in a passing siding (US) or loop (Wales). The loco then switches/shunts (US/much of rest of world) one car onto a siding, and rejoins its train.
- But where will it go? >Ba-ching< one adds a fiddle yard (if fixed) or cassette (if removable) -- a piece of track that sticks "offstage". A layout like this is very much a theatrical affair, with actors waiting in the wings for their scenes. Some exhibitors of such small layouts actually do a proscenium arch like a stage for a play, with lights above. So you'd call this a cassette since it's removable & flippable. Same train can reenter from the same side of the layout if the cassette is double-ended.
- You can move a train around to the other end ... whoops, there's my first alignment alteration - need the angle at the ends to match, if want to use the same cassette on both sides.
- And if one is simulating a busy line, one can have multiple cassettes waiting. That's especially useful if one has more cars and locos than would reasonably fit on the 'live' layout.
- And that's the minimum amount of railway that would be useable for this Morph Line I'm imagining.
- Sorry, no further train motion just yet.

[jbgibson]

Including stage 2:
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Which is all the foregoing arrangement, with a fixed fiddle yard on the right instead of a cassette. This Inglenook Junction module is a connection point for a subsequent module, but in its own right it would support use as the Inglenook Sidings shunting puzzle. Strictly speaking a fiddle yard is an unadorned set of trackage to let the Great Hand From The Sky rearrange trains, out of sight and off-scene. This module could start that way, but would eventually be an integral part of the landscape of several scenes in a row.

Guess I should abbreviate the shunting part of the animation.

[jbgibson]

I'll call this Stage 2.5:
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Assuming the Inglenook Junction section has been landscaped to some small semblance of reality, and I want to use fiddle yards/ cassettes off its edges, there's a problem. Once the track leaves Tuisgemaakte and passes that first switch/turnout/points of Inglenook, the grade slopes downward all along that outermost track. After the middle branch breaks apart, it instead slopes upward. The left branch stays pretty level. That top edge has track not only a couple of inches below the edge of Tuisgemaakte, but the vertical angle means the cassettes would not attach right. A model train can't negotiate a sharp vertical bend. So I'll devise a grade-leveling piece as a converter for attaching the cassettes/ fiddle yards, on which the two tracks come back to level.

There's a reason for the grades. I want to be able to switch the sidings of Inglenook Junction from trains travelling in either direction, and if an engine was on the right end of the train, it would not have a way to run around like my initial animation showed, and pull cars off the rear and place them in the sidings. I haven't seen this done in model rail work, but I've read about using wires that can poke up between the rails as brakes. Say the train stops with locomotive between the two switches/points/turnouts. The wire sticks up a few millimeters, catching an axle, the train is uncoupled, and the engine can trundle away down the center branch - then gravity can let the cars roll down into the right branch. Real railroads actually use this maneuver.

The uncoupling is easy - there are commercial magnetic uncouplers that work invisibly from below track level.

All this thought is in support of both an unusual feature (which I am ALL about :-) ), and in support of keeping the operator out of the scene. Hands-off operation is kind of an ideal in model railroading.

[jbgibson]

Now Stage 3:
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A third full section - more landscape than fiddly details. The right track winds downhill and terminates at a set of limestone bunkers fed by an overhead ropeway from kilometers away. The left track winds uphill, just an opportunity for miniscule narrow gauge engines to struggle against gravity, delivering who knows what vital minerals and goods.

A scant few details on this would help nail down which continent the line currently inhabits. A slate fence and a scattering of sheep would place it in Wales - a round whitewashed hut with conical thatched roof would snap it instead to South Africa. Tufts of Pampas Grass would send it to Argentina, while the US Southwest is too normal to my eye to say right away what to use. Maybe longhorn steers?

[jbgibson]

Now Stage 3, with buildings:
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This adds the logical upper-end cassette or fiddle yard use, as well as building locations. And it's done - well enough to show the progression from a minimal state to a more elaborate layout. If I ever build any of it I'll post some pix :-).