LAYOUT: Tinsley South
Father and son team STEVE and CHRISTOPHER SAXBY breathed new life into their old exhibition layout - by updating it with DCC and computer control.
Father and son team Steve and Christopher Saxby breathed new life into their old exhibition layout.
I’d been building simple railway layouts since I was a kid, so I was thrilled to discover that there was a modelling club at my workplace. I joined it, and enjoyed helping to build a couple of large exhibition layouts. Some readers may recall seeing ‘Yorchester Bankside’ (featured in Railway Modeller, November 1988) or ‘Castley Hall Junction’ ( Railway Modeller, November 1994). However, the club folded in 2002, and it looked like I’d have to return to building small end-to-end layouts... In the meantime, my son, Christopher, had been developing an interest in the contemporary railway scene. My own layouts had a 1960s theme, and this prompted me to think about doing something different. ‘Tinsley South’ was conceived as a simple suburban setting. It would give me the ideal layout on which I could run my growing collection of contemporary multiple units that could be seen in the Sheffield area. The layout made its first appearance at the 2004 Derby Model Railway Exhibition. Christopher and I had already tweaked reality - the real Tinsley South was on the Sheffield District line just to the west of Meadowhall shopping centre. But the station on our layout is based on the ex-great Central line towards Rotherham in the Broughton Lane area, which the Sheffield Supertram now parallels as far as the Tinsley Viaduct. I had built a couple of DC Kits’
‘TINSLEY SOUTH’ WAS CONCEIVED AS A SIMPLE SUBURBAN SETTING. IT WOULD GIVE ME THE IDEAL LAYOUT ON WHICH I COULD RUN MY GROWING COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY MULTIPLE UNITS
Class 76s and wanted somewhere to run them. Fitting catenary to ‘Tinsley South’ seemed like the obvious solution, so we decided on a hypothetical scenario in which the Woodhead line hadn’t been closed and the local stations up the GC South Yorkshire line towards Rotherham had been kept open. And it was in this form that the layout went to Leeds Model Railway Society’s exhibition. These shows highlighted the limitations of our station end fiddleyard. For the 2005 Pontefract Model
Railway Exhibition, we made a new fiddleyard, which incorporated a scenic section to make the layout a bit more interesting. It made a difference, but wasn’t enough. There were big deficiencies with both fiddleyards, so for the 2006 York Model Railway Show we turned ‘Tinsley South’ into a tailchaser. This improved the operating potential enormously - but it was a huge chore to set up and dismantle - we were always the last exhibitors to leave on the final night of a show! ‘Tinsley South’ did about a dozen shows in the Yorkshire area before it went into storage at the end of 2007. Bookings for it seemed to have dried up, and we felt that it looked a little tired. We took our East London layout ‘Manygates’ (MR198) on a little north western tour in 2011 and at both Manchester and Rochdale shows we received invites for ‘Tinsley South’ for 2012. We brought it out of storage and identified a number of issues: the fiddleyards were dated, in that the wiring was all analogue and we’d been digital for a number of years. And while some of the scenery had faded, the biggest issue was that we had disposed of our most modern stock and replaced it with a 1970s BR blue fleet. This made our layout anachronistic: the layout featured trackside staff in hi-vis
overalls, palisade fencing, station staff in GNER uniforms and advertising hoardings depicting 1990s products and services. All these anomalies were easily replaced, but the bulk of the work took place behind (and under) the scenes. Redundant isolating sections needed to be replaced, some Eckon signals had failed and the route setting matrix had become a confusing mess. As far as the electrics were concerned, it was time for a fresh start. We replaced all the old wiring. Lenz LS150 accessory decoders were added for point switching, the station lights were renewed and new signals (from CR Signals) were installed. We were really impressed with these items - the ground signals in particular - and they can be configured for any format. For example, we’ve added a call-on light mid-post to the starter on Platform 3 for locomotives entering the headshunt. We’ve retained a limited capacity for analogue running, as our elderly Class 76s are not fitted with decoders, nor is our 40-year-old Tri-ang ‘EM2’. The ‘76’ fleet is being supplemented by new Olivia’s Trains/heljan models, but we think the old DC Kits version still looks good today. The baseboards that we used for ‘Tinsley South’ came from an old club project that had been cancelled. When the club folded, we inherited them. I can’t remember who built them but they’ve proved to be very durable. However, there’s a spot where one has sagged a bit, so ‘Tinsley South’ has a pronounced gradient change in the middle! We have resorted to ‘wedging’ it up at exhibitions, but nobody notices.
SIMPLIFIED CONTROL
Digital Command Control is still not everyone’s cup of tea, especially when it comes to sound. However, we have been using it for some time and I particularly enjoy the computerisation and automation side of it. ‘Tinsley South’ is primarily DCC, so a traditional control panel is no longer compulsory. However, this method can require a lot of user input on the handsets to set routes. To make this easier I have set up a simplified panel with buttons to select the start and end of routes, on the same
principle of an Entrance/exit (NX) panel on the real railway. Behind this is an old laptop running a script in Java Model Railroad Interface ( http:// jmri.sourceforge.net) hooked up to our NCE system which converts the button input into the routes required, and sets the appropriate points. Taking the computerisation further, we have the fleet list held within our JMRI database, so by hooking up a cheap wireless router to the laptop, we can create a local Wifi network. We can then control the layout using the Engine Driver ( http://enginedriver.rrclubs.org) or Withrottle software ( www.withrottle.com) on our mobile phones. Chris likes to bemuse spectators (and other ‘Tinsley South’ operators!) at shows by walking to the other side of the hall and initiating locomotive movements using his phone.
THE COMEBACK
So, what next for ‘Tinsley South’? Its comeback at Manchester in 2012 was well received. At times, it was difficult to run trains because so many people wanted to talk about it! Once again though, the limitations of the station end fiddleyard were exposed, and a couple of point failures resulted in a thorough overhaul. Happily, show bookings have shown no signs of drying up, so there’s no reason why we’ll need to take ‘Tinsley South’ off the exhibition circuit for some time to come.