Pushing technology

How many times have you asked “Wouldn’t it be great if…”? It’s a phrase that gets uttered a lot in John’s railway room but the key difference is that John and the team then set out to make ‘if’ happen.

Take the chimney behind the station. “John picked up a Skytrex chimney,” says Rob, ”and when he bought it, the question arose, well if you have a chimney you want a boiler house. So I designed it and Les printed it.”

But then John wanted to make the chimney smoke. Experiments with a Seuthe unit were unsuccessful so

John made his own smoke unit.

“John has it working on the bench and you could see the smoke,” Rob said, “but when it goes on the layout, with the light background, you can’t see it.”

Work is ongoing! Meanwhile, Les Green is working on a working, miniature version of the famous Joyce clock.

“We’ve just got a dummy up there,” says Rob, “but Les is working on one that will actually tell the time.”

Another idea that John and the team are working on is a way to create realistic lights for a newly completed sleeper train. There are proprietary internal analogue lighting systems available, but none that accurately reflect the operations of a sleeper, which spends a long time parked at a platform with the lights on.

“The idea John’s working on is that the cars will be equipped with their own battery,” Rob explains. “So they’re working on an idea of when the train enters the layout, the lights go on – with magnets or something; when it leaves the layout, the lights go off so that it’s not using the batteries.”