Progress Report 90

 April has been an interesting month. We had a prolonged spell of dry and sunny weather and so, rather then spending time in the workshop a fair amount of my time was spent out in the garden - running trains. However, between running sessions I found time for a few other projects - editing together videos of my running sessions, writing and trialling a Google Sheets version of my freight handling program, improving the programming of my Psion version of the freight handler and levelling up some of the undulations in the trackbed - particularly at Bulkeley and Beeston Castle.

 

Permanent Way

 A few months ago, I designed and 3D printed a model of one of the early Southwold Railway 6-wheel coaches (see Progress Report 86  and How I designed and constructed a Southwold Railway 6-wheel balcony coach - pending). 

I spent a considerable amount of time experimenting with the six-wheel chassis so it could successfully negotiate the tight curves and deliberate and accidental gradients on my railway. 

 My experiments were reasonably successful but there were two places on the line where the coach sometimes derailed - one beside the platform at Beeston Castle station and the other beside the platform at Bulkeley station.

 Closer inspection revealed there was a hump in the trackbed at Beeston Castle (in the red rectangle) ..... 

.....and a dip in the trackbed at Bulkeley. 

 

The long wheelbase on the coach meant the centre truck would act as the fulcrum of a see-saw on the hump and leave the rails in the dip.

 

 

Beeston Castle

At Beeston Castle, after removing the cast concrete platform with a cold chisel, I undid the screws holding the track in place and replaced them with longer screws. The track was then raised by inserting pieces of slate, tile and concrete under the sleepers until the track was raised to the same level as the hump.

 This process was repeated through the length of the station to gradually reduce the height of the rails above the trackbed. A spirit level was used to ensure any changes of level were consistent.

Once the track through the station had been suitably levelled, the platform was re-instated on a layer of concrete. Wiring was installed at the same time beneath the platform and brought to the surface at intervals to allow for the future installation of station lampposts.

 Once the concrete had set, the track was ballasted with my usual mixture - three parts horticultural grit to one part cement, applied dry and then fixed with a misting of water from a hose attachment.

 Bulkeley

At Bulkeley, I tried the same approach but the dip was so great, even the longest screws weren't sufficient to hold the track in place ........

...... and so I but the bullet, lifted the track and removed the concrete breeze blocks of the trackbed. I then relaid them, suitably raised and levelled ......

.... and then relaid the track.

After reballasting, the track looks a lot better.

.... and, furthermore, the Southwold coach now traverses these sections without so much as a murmur (though I am touching wood as I write this!).

 

Rolling stock

 Schull & Skibbereen Loco

From my previous Progress Reports (see Progress Reports 88 and 89), you will see that I have been in the process of 3D printing and building a Schull & Skibbereen loco on a Bachmann Lyn motor block (see How I constructed a Schull & Skibbereen 0-4-4T loco). It has always been a poor performer and so I decided to try modifying the gearbox to see if that would improve its performance.

The new worm and worm-wheel eventually arrived from China and after a couple of attempts, I managed to redesign the motor block housing to take it.

As you can see, space is very tight and I am unable to centre the worm above the worm-wheel, but the gears do mesh, though not quite as sweetly as I would wish. I might tweak the block design to lower the motor another 0.2mm or so. The difficulty with a closed motor block design is that, once the two halves are screwed together, there's no way of adjusting the position of the motor inside.

The modulus of the new year set is 0.5, which means the teeth are considerably smaller than on the original gears. This makes meshing them very tricky and I am also concerned that they may wear quickly given the loads I will be placing on them. I have ordered gearsets from China with a larger modulus (0.8), and so will have to abandon my experiments for a couple of weeks until they arrive.

3D printed Southwold Railway goods rolling stock

The 3D printed Southwold Railway goods stock has now been weathered and some weight added in the form of a piece of lead flashing under each wagon.

 

Freelance flat wagon

The freelance flat wagon, which was one of the first wagons I designed in TinkerCad, has now had a brake block and lever added - quickly drawn in TinkerCad and printed out.

This wagon too has now been weathered

 Freelance open wagons

Another early attempt at designing and 3D printing my own wagons was to replicate those which I had constructed from my own resin castings in 2014 (see How I created my third batch of open wagons from resin castings). These had been constructed on HLW mini series wagon chassis which were plentiful and cheap (under £10) at the time. However, HLW have now ceased production and so I wondered if I could design and 3D print my own chassis as well as the bodies (see Progress Report 85).

The two wagons which I produced in this way have now also been weathered.

I now have to decide what sorts of loads to give them and the other open wagons.

Incidentally, the .STL files for all the wagons shown above are freely available as downloads on the Garden Railway Forum, though you do need to register to access them.

 

County Donegal (ish) Luggage Van

This too has now been weighted and weathered.

Operation

 Operating sessions

The fine weather allowed me to have a couple of really good full operating sessions - both spanning out over two days.

I took the opportunity to make another couple of videos - the first following the operating session's running by taking a virtual stroll down the line

.... and the second, showing an extract from the middle of the second operating session describing how I actually go about running my trains. As my operating sessions can involve two, three and sometimes four trains running simultaneously, I end up running each one sequentially - though occasionally, I will set an ore train off while I shunt the goods or run round a passenger train at one of the stations. 

Mostly, the ore train is quite reliable and will happily potter on unattended but, of course, there are occasions when I have forgotten to set one of the points correctly or a leaf falls on the line to thwart its journey.

Google Sheets version of my freight handling program

The main issue with my original freight handling program (see How I manage freight on the railway), was that it could only be run on my laptop computer and hence required me to use print-outs in the garden. I tried in vain to export the program as an Android version to run on my phone, despite there being a facility in LiveCode to achieve this.

After discovering that Google Sheets could be programmed through a version on Java, I dived in and taught myself sufficient Java code to replicate an amended version of my freight management program on Google Sheets.

This version has the advantage that it will run on any device - my laptop, my tablet and/or my phone and all changes are synchronised across all of them. The disadvantage I have found is that although it's possible to create large buttons on the screen, they do not work on Android devices. This means that the program can only be used by selecting items from menus or drop-down boxes in the cells - something which is tricky on a phone, exacerbated when the sun shines on the screen.

However, if you are interested in replicating what I did and maybe amending the code to suit your own circumstances, then I have made it available here - How I created a version of my freight management program with Google Sheets.

The code can be simply copied from my blog post and pasted into the Script Editor in Google Sheets, once you have set up the four worksheets needed. All the instructions for doing so are in the blog post.

 

A rewrite of my Psion version of Freight Manager

Having been frustrated with the Google Sheets version, I reverted to the version which I wrote last year to run on my old Psion 3a pocket computer - see A portable version of my freight management program.

The advantage of the Psion is that its screen actually becomes easier to see in bright sunlight and the keyboard is a lot easier to use out in the garden. The problem was that, with only 1Mb of RAM, it would often run out of system memory which meant that new data was lost. In effect, it forgot where the wagons had been moved to.

After writing the code for Google Sheets, I realised I could simplify the code for the Psion, meaning it would require less memory to run.

I used it on both the running sessions shown above and I'm pleased to report it did not run out of memory on either.

I've placed my revised code on this blog post - How I created the Psion version of my freight management program. If (like me) you've not discovered a way to allow your Windows 10 computer to communicate with your Psion, then you will have to type in the code manually (it takes about an hour) - a bit like the good old days of early computers when we typed code printed in magazine into our Sinclair Spectrums!

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