Designing and Building Fiddle Yards E-Book

Richard Bardsley

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This invaluable, well-illustrated book is essential reading for all those railway modellers who are considering building a fiddle yard. The fiddle yard is a train storage area for locomotives and rolling stock that often remains out of view. For the modeller, it represents the 'rest of the railway network' and it is essential for layouts as it is somewhere for trains to 'come from' and somewhere for trains to 'go to'. This fascinating book defines what a fiddle yard is in terms of operational variety, storage and swapping trains. It demonstrates how a fiddle yard can be integrated into a model railway layout. It covers track-only fiddle yards using a single track, ladders of multiple tracks and reversing loops and considers design issues for oval and terminus layouts as well as combination fiddle yards and the importance of train length and baseboards. There are four detailed projects for the reader to build, each one providing a different fiddle yard solution. If you have ever wondered what fiddle yards are all about and whether your layout needs one, then this is the book for you. Well illustrated with 141 colour photographs and 59 diagrams.

Leseprobe

DESIGNING AND BUILDING

FIDDLE YARDS

A Complete Guide for Railway Modellers

Richard Bardsley

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2014 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2014

© Richard Bardsley 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781847978172

DisclaimerThe author and the publisher do not accept any responsibility in any manner whatsoever for any error or omission, or any loss, damage, injury, adverse outcome, or liability of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any of the information contained in this book, or reliance upon it.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: OVERVIEW OF FIDDLE YARDS

CHAPTER TWO: TRACK-ONLY FIDDLE YARDS

CHAPTER THREE: MECHANICAL FIDDLE YARDS

CHAPTER FOUR: DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

CHAPTER FIVE: DISGUISING A FIDDLE YARD

CHAPTER SIX: COMMON BUILD FEATURES

CHAPTER SEVEN: LADDER FIDDLE YARD PROJECT

CHAPTER EIGHT: SECTOR PLATE PROJECT

CHAPTER NINE: TRAVERSER PROJECT

CHAPTER TEN: CASSETTES PROJECT

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing this third book was as much fun as the first two and the arrival of Samuel Thomas Bardsley halfway through the project made it all the more challenging. Therefore, my biggest thanks go to my wife Sharon Bardsley for her continued support while also looking after our baby boy. As always, thanks go to my father Stuart Bardsley for his keen proofing skills. My train buddy Colin Whalley was as helpful as ever, so thanks to him for lending me rolling stock and materials. For permission to use their superb photos, I thank Steve Flint and Craig Tiley of Railway Modeller. For letting me photograph their layouts, I thank: John Spence and Steve Weston (Melton Mowbray); the Warrington Model Railway Club (Glazebrook and Dienw); Tony Bucknell (Eskmuir); Katherine and Allan Stephenson (Stockton Mill); Trevor Webster (Stamford East); Mark Tatlow (Portchullin); and Bob Rowlands (Tetfield-under-Bolt).

INTRODUCTION

Model railway layouts come in all shapes and sizes. You might model steam or diesel, urban or rural, standard or narrow gauge. It could be a small layout on the dining table, or a huge layout that fills a large room. Despite all this wonderful variety there is one feature that almost every single layout will have and that is a fiddle yard.

There are many things that a fiddle yard is not. Do not think of it as a wasted opportunity for scenic development. It is not just another baseboard taking up space that could hold another station. Nor is it a potential eyesore at the back of the layout that can detract from the visual splendour and excitement of the layout. Most of all, do not think of it as separate from your model railway. It is very much an integral part of any layout. Rather than some kind of necessary evil in the corner, it is the operational centre.

Think of the fiddle yard as the beating heart of your model railway. Like a human heart, its job is to send the trains out to the rest of the layout, gather them back in, process them in some way and then send them out again. The fiddle yard is the engine room of your layout, a powerhouse that drives everything that happens. Yet just like the best heroic actions, it is often the unsung hero, quietly getting on with its vital role while the rest of the layout takes all the glory.

As with the model railways that they support, fiddle yards come in all shapes, sizes and types. The design of a layout will influence the design of a fiddle yard and vice versa. Nor do you have to be limited to just one fiddle yard. You can have as many fiddle yards as you need for the operational requirements of a layout and each one can be of a different type if necessary. So it is important to understand all that there is to know about fiddle yards before beginning to design any model railway large or small in order to choose the correct type.

A fiddle yard serves one simple purpose – to represent the rest of the railway network as connected to the layout that you have modelled. If you have modelled a busy railway location, you need a big fiddle yard to supply the necessary variety of trains, as with this fiddle yard that supports the Warrington Model Railway Club’s N gauge layout, Glazebrook.

If you have a large collection of rolling stock, you do not want to have to hide it away in boxes, let alone face the chore of reaching it all out and putting it away again. A fiddle yard offers the chance of keeping all your trains ready for action at any time, as with this view of this N gauge layout, Melton Mowbray (North), by John Spence and Steve Weston.

The types of fiddle yards broadly fall into two categories. There are those that are simply track-based, such as a ladder of sidings, and there are those that are mechanical in some way, such as a traverser. Once you understand the differences, it is possible to appreciate how each one can be operated in the context of a layout and thus choose which one is right for the layout you want to build.

Despite the importance of the fiddle yard, there is still a tendency to want to hide it away. There are many ways to disguise a fiddle yard, such as putting it behind or under a layout, even making the effort to provide full scenery for it. Concealing a fiddle yard gives more opportunity for adding the pretty bits to a model railway, or simply the greater operational potential of more stations. It can be made to work, but do not sacrifice the ease with which the fiddle yard can be accessed just so that you can put out it of sight.

When designing a model railway, if the fiddle yard is so important, which comes first, the layout or the fiddle yard? Of course, the layout is always the starting point. You would not design a fiddle yard first and then design a layout around it. The layout defines what trains you are interested in;the fiddle yard supports that. Once you know the layout you want, the next step is to design the fiddle yard. Do not leave decisions about the fiddle yard until the very end so that it is just some kind of last minute bolt-on. If you do that, the fiddle yard will not work with the layout. The two share a symbiotic relationship and they must balance each other exactly for the model railway to work effectively as a whole.

Building a fiddle yard is not much more difficult than building the rest of the layout. A mechanical solution such as a sector plate requires a modicum of engineering, but this is easily accomplished even without any previous experience. Many of the fiddle yard types have common features; these may be electrical, such as isolating sections, or mechanical, such as track alignment and track gaps.

A fiddle yard can be as complex as you wish to make it. It can just be a few sidings of track, or it can feature electronics for setting the route or detecting whether a siding is occupied or not. Some of these complexities are really just ‘nice to have’ features, while others will actually be essential for the fiddle yard to operate on the layout that you want to build.

While it is important to understand the different types of fiddle yards, their uses and common build features, there is nothing like getting stuck in and actually building one. This book has a number of projects to show the process of designing and building different types of fiddle yards. Although each of them is different, and you may have decided to build a fiddle yard that is similar to just one of them, it is still worth looking at each one of the projects. In some cases, there are common design considerations that crop up time and again, while one project may utilize a build step that is just as applicable to another type of fiddle yard.

There is more to building a good fiddle yard than just cutting wood and laying track. Although these tasks are covered, it is also important to consider how a fiddle yard will be used, so each project starts with a design brief for a proposed layout. The fiddle yard that is built will be the solution for the layout. Your layout might be the same or it might be different, but the key thing is to understand the design approach and to use that when building your fiddle yard.

Model railway layouts are fun to build and fun to operate. The greater the level of operational variety, the more enjoyment there is be to be had. Without variety, there is always the chance that boredom might set in. The one thing that will guarantee that your layout never gets stale or uninteresting to run will be a well-designed fiddle yard. It gives you the ability to have a broad operational spectrum and, best of all, if you fancy a change, it is the means to facilitate that change. Never underestimate the importance of the fiddle yard to your layout. By getting it right, you open up a whole world of operational possibilities.

CHAPTER ONE

OVERVIEW OF FIDDLE YARDS

If you are new to the model railway hobby or perhaps just have a train set, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about fiddle yards. If you browse through some model railway magazines and look at the plans for other people’s layouts, you will see an area labelled ‘fiddle yard’. It is a bare space with no stations, no scenery, just track. In fact, some plans omit the detail of the fiddle yard altogether – there is just a dotted line for the track leading to an undefined area called the ‘fiddle yard’.

You may feel that your layout needs a fiddle yard because everyone else’s layout has one. Alternatively, you may wonder, do you really need one at all? This is a reasonable starting point, but there are many questions that you will ask. The most basic ones are what is a fiddle yard and what is it for? There will be a tendency to see the fiddle yard and the layout as separate entities when really they are just parts of a bigger whole. Its most basic function is to store the trains that will deliver the operational variety required for the enjoyment of your layout.