Thursday 24 October 2019

Hopwood operation

Hopwood model railway layout
 All day. That's all day. Operationally tearing Hopwood to bits. The main point of the exercise was to see how it worked with what stock. The ex-Rhiw (see here) blue livery set was the default position. The new, improved fat-shape fiddle yard was the main player - it's tight, so some stuff fitted and some only in a certain order i.e. the Cl 150 would only work out of road 3 as in road 2 the longer wheelbase meant it reduced the foul point and clouted the Cl 108  parked in road 3. Flipped around and it worked. We are talking fag paper clearances here - Sprinters... no chance.

 A green set of stock was tried, but there are massive gaps in the stud. The wildcard was an idea to use BR(S) pull-push sets (essentially DMU working style) this sort of worked on the layout proper until the obvious dawned that the locos wouldn't fit in FY roads 2 and 3. Doh! It did look nice though.

So after about 6+ hours of trying every piece of 16.5mm gauge stock in the house on it, it all came back to blue with a base stud of 150, 108, 121, 37, 25, with a Lima 40 as a spare which surprisingly fitted the headshunt… just. A brace of VDA vans and some MDV opens for a trip freight and CCT/NPV for parcels stock.

1 comment:

  1. That's looking good. Know exactly what you mean about fag-paper clearances - encounter it every time with micro-layouts. But that's the challenge and the fun of it...

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