Off the Wall Idea...

[IrishPeter]

I happen to live in a mountain town in the SW USA about 5400' above sea level.  One of the quirks of the local climate is that we have a monsoon season (July to September), and in times past folks came up out of 'The Valley' for the summer to escape the heat.  A few still do.

My yard/garden is a half acre of hillside which dictates where the railway runs - it basically winds its way around the massive granite outcrop on which our house stands.  The present incarnation of the beast in the back yard is ground level and has gradients of up to 3.5%.

My basic interests are in the 2'6" to metre gauge range. with an especial nod to a certain E A Calthrop, Esq. who was a Lincolnshire man like myself, and whose engineering led thinking appeals to me.

Anyway, do the geography and climate remind you of anywhere?

Yep, me too. But with the amount of pine trees, and the regular light snows in winter it could pass for Norway too. I am not really into landscaping, and water is expensive here, which is an incentive to avoid non-native species.

The question is, do I explore the colonial hill railway theme or stay with Norwegian 'Tertitten' style operations?  The hill railway approach fits the climate an geography, and also my NG ethos. On the other hand, Norway has the advantage of simpler in terms of signalling an operation, and they also had some good ideas on how best to exploit NG. After all, they started using swap bodies for transferring goods between NG and SG as early as 1919.

Cheers
Peter in AZ

[Peter Butler]

The choice is yours as it is your railway. However, if you want to give some flavour of what has gone before and the area you have to play with, perhaps some of the previously 'promised' photographs would assist us in helping you?

[IrishPeter]

OK, let's try with the piccies. This is the middle part of the line looking from Hedgehog northwards to the middle station


This picture from the 'Top station' should give an idea of the worst of the gradient. Going away from the camera it is successively 1 in 25/30/36, and then settles down to 1 in 40 at the kink:

[IrishPeter]

And a couple more -

The bottom end of the line. There is room for the line to loop back behind the photographer on the former lawn area which is flat, but not level:


The view route south/compass west from Hedgehog shows the 'forest' quite nicely.


For what its worth, grasses struggle here apart from the native weeds.

Peter in AZ

[Peter Butler]

Looks like a good landscape you have to play with there, I see what you mean about the rocks now, they are there to stay!
You are lucky not to be fighting grasses constantly; because of the wet weather here (wettest August on record I believe) and West Wales suffering more than most, the grass has really taken over.
You have potential for whatever you wish and my personal choice is irrelevant.
The fluffy toy is possibly a distraction and certainly out of scale.

[Dr. Bond of the DVLR]

That looks like an awful lot of fun to drive on, I can only imagine the face of the novice fireman as the train rounds the kink and he sees the road ahead...
Were you thinking along the lines of the Barsi Light Railway?

[MDLR]

You could do a fairly good representation of part of the Darjeeling line in 32mm gauge on that plot - you could even put in a spiral!

[IrishPeter]

This is the Kink Bridge...


...which is precisely what it looks like - a concrete block turned on its side. This replaced an 8" pipe which had replaced a length of old 4" down pipe. I reckon it has the water clearing capacity of three lengths of 8 inch pipe placed side by side. When we have a monsoon shower the camera lens would be just above the water, which occupies a channel 15" wide at that point. There would be only a few mm of clearance under the bridge.  Looking at the photo I need to dig some of the silt out from under the bridge before the next heavy 'shower'.

And no, I am not going out to take a picture when it is raining that hard!

The fence is there so we do not loose kids and dogs - well, dogs really - over the retaining wall which is six to eight feet high at that point.  We actually look out over the roof of the bungalow on our northeast corner, and standing on the front porch, my eye line is level with the gutters of the two storey house to the east!

Peter in AZ

[IrishPeter]

That looks like an awful lot of fun to drive on, I can only imagine the face of the novice fireman as the train rounds the kink and he sees the road ahead...
Were you thinking along the lines of the Barsi Light Railway?

Depends on your concept of fun  :twisted:

Downhill requires very little regulator apart from the short stretch south of Hedgehog which is a short adverse gradient.  You crack the regulator JUST open to get the train moving, then let it all but coast down to the Kink Bridge.  At that point you open the regulator to about a quarter and then close it as you enter the Middle Station.  Quarter regulator again to just after Hedgehog Bridge, then you either wait for a very slow and halting assent of the adverse gradient there, or open up a little more.  Then you close down to about a quarter for the final descent into the present Bottom station.

On the way back the reverse is true, it is half throttle to the middle station (don't shut off until you reach the end of the platform, or you will stop short) and then half throttle again until the Kink Bridge.  The last stretch is the tester.  You put Millie's regulator almost to the roof for the last 30 feet, and listen to the blast as she ascends the 1 in 30 followed by 1 in 25.  If a train is going to stall it does so at the slight curve just by the front corner of the shed where the gradient steepens into the final pull.

The fluffy toy has a purpose - he keeps the cats out of the yard, and the squirrels on their toes.

Peter in AZ

[ge_rik]

The fluffy toy has a purpose - he keeps the cats out of the yard, and the squirrels on their toes.
Peter in AZ

[IrishPeter]

Mr Bond - I am thinking in terms of the Barsi Light with a dash of Kalka-Shimla. I wish I could loose the fence above the retaining wall so that the top station would be a bit more Shimla-esque - hill on one side; steep drop on the other - but herself will not hear of it. She is big of privacy, but given we are 'roof top' to the neighbours that is really a non-issue. Maybe I should just paint some mountains on the fence...

My present locos are small, but so were the original Kalka-Shimla locos. I have a Millie, a Roundhouse-Beck 'Anna', and two 'Rubys' which may be for the sale table to obtain some sort of 0-6-2T/2-6-2T. We'll see.

Peter in AZ

[Andrew]

Hello!

You'll be pleased to hear that I've given this a lot of thought (well, more than I should have!) and have cast my vote, but so far I seem to be in something of a minority! Tempting as it is to imagine Millie repainted in a garish two-tone livery (I'm thinking of those Indian locos with the diagonally-patterned side tanks) with all sorts of smokebox ornamentation, my douze points go to Norway. I think it takes a while to reap the benefits of any chosen course of action, so my vote is for sticking to Norwegian theme for a while... Although I always liked the Irish scheme...

Have fun, whichever one you go with!

Andrew.

[IrishPeter]

Funny you should mention the Skebawn and Castleknox. I was tinkering with the T&D style Brake Compo I made a few years ago the other night. It is one of the better things I have made.

One thing I do need to do is test clearances before embarking on anything new. The standard Barsi passenger carriage was 40' by 8' over the window shades, and that may be a problem, especially at Hedgehog where I doubt that I will have the requisite 32mm between the gauge and the rock wall. Time to make a foam board structure gauge, methinks.

Yes, the garishness of modern Indian liveries is a bit of a problem. The soberer liveries of the Raj are more appealing to me as I think the only appropriate loco liveries are dark grey, green, and black.

Peter in AZ

[rebelego]

Your railway, your choice.
But why so focused on sticking to a specific prototype?
Reading some of your old threads you seem to change your
interest every now and then anyway.
Why not make the Norway India Railway?
One theme at each end.
You can even make your railway pass through Ireland on the way.
That is more my approach to this hobby.

[Andrew]

Now that's a nice idea! Completely different architecture at each station, with trains to match - and the pleasing juxtaposition when an Indian train ends up in Norway, or a Norwegian one in Ireland...

Andrew.

[rebelego]

Arctic Orient Light Express

[IrishPeter]

I think I am going to stick with the Norwegian theme for now, and keep an 'Irish Train' for a change of pace every now and again.  The pairings of 17/32nd and 15mm, and 15mm and 16mm scales are close enough that I do not feel too uncomfortable mixing them for buildings etc..  However, I don't like mixing 17/32nd with 16mm in most cases 1 to 19 and 1 to 22.5 are just a little too far apart for me, though others can mix the two without a second thought.  Three foot gauge stock with a coupling height of 24/25mm* looks silly to me, except perhaps for some very small vehicles such as the Schull and Skibbereen four wheelers.  The only 'inconvenience' will be that it will have to be either an Irish night or a Norwegian night if I go with Norwegian 750mm gauge, but not if I go with CAP gauge which would have the same buffer height as 15mm scale/3' gauge.

Of course, I am now contemplating Calthrop re-equipping an Irish line - of which he is very critical in 'Light Railway Construction.'  I can imagine him having Leeds Forge build a standard four wheel wagon weighing 4 tons and carrying 12, or a bogie van weighing 7 and carrying 25 - and acidly noting that they are 'bigger than any vehicles used on the broad gauge in Ireland apart from a few tubular steel wagons leased by the WL&WR in the early 1890s!'

Peter in AZ

* - scale buffer heights for Irish three foot lines range from 28mm for the Ballymena and Larne, and the C&VBT, through to (IIRC) 42.5mm for the County Donegal, with the TDLR, WCR, C&L, Muskerry, S&S, and the pre-NCC Ballycastle all being either 2'2" or 2'3", which scales out at 33-34mm.  The Isle of Man Railway is another 2'3" line, which is why F21 nearly ended up on the Blennerville operation.