Footeryneuk

[LesGros]

An occasional 'blogosphere for the purpose of sharing some my ramblings; as the "Armchair" is vacated in favour of a still somewhat cluttered, but now insulated, Railway room.
It is known here as The Attic and located above our similarly cluttered Garage, which has not had a car inside it since 1999.

Why Footeryneuk? Back in the mists of 2009 (ish) I was looking for inspiration on a map of Fife (on the Frith of Froth) The railways of the East Neuk caught my eye as a potential subject. It was about that time that the P4 promoters at SECC caught my interest. Following membership of the society, It quickly became apparent that this finescale modelling caper could be a lot more "footery" than I had imagined.

The first idea was to build an Ingle-nook shunting puzzle, but I would first have to build an Ingle-nook; far too much mess in the living room!
At this point the space above the garage beckoned. As usual there was a snag. It was sweltering in summer and arctic in winter.

Then, a plan was formulated; insulation and heating would be installed; meanwhile research material and new skills would be needed. A comfy armchair? essential. The ingle-nook idea was replaced with something much more ambitious; it would need a name. "Footeryneuk", a place for fiddling, and footering about...

To be continued...

[Jim Summers]

An unspired title, Les, and mellifluous to boot.

You remind me of the father of a friend of mind, whose home-built armchair at the ingle nook was such that he could lift the seat and produce his lathe from within. The hearth was painted black, so he could reach out from his chair and do his calculations on it in chalk.

Or so I was told, but it sounds fine anyway.

Jim

[doktorstamp]

Just don't take the finished layout to Holland!

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neuken

regards

Nigel

[Terry Bendall]

Just don't take the finished layout to Holland!

No but you could bring it to Scaleforum.

An unspired title, Les, and mellifluous to boot.

I think our esteemed past Chairman probably means inspired, and yes it is a sweet idea.

Great work Les, keep us posted.

Terry Bendall

[LesGros]

Thankyou, Jim, Nigel, and Terry,
No worries about Holland, Neuk aka Nook is a noun, and the meaning being related to harbour or a tranquil place of rest. That other word is a verb which implies action... the rate of progress here will hardly justify that description. Still, Nigel has given us a new sweary word for when things go not according to plan.

That's the etymolgy covered, except to point out that an alternative title of "durex" (to cover the c**kups) was rejected as being a tad unseemly for our august gathering(s).

Another reason not to worry, is that the layout will be mounted on fixed, round the room storage units; although it will be built in manageable sections; both to aid construction, and allow transportability. We do not intend to move from here (other than in a box).

Time to get some logs in, before tomorrow's blizard sets in.

[David Thorpe]

That's a marvellous name for a layout, Les - wish I'd thought of it!

The verb "footer" or "fouter" is in fact in fairly common parlance in my part of Scotland, and I use it myself quite often ("For goodness sake, stop footering about", usually said to myself!). It applies pretty perfectly to my modelling efforts - definition from "The Concise Scots Dictionary" is "to potter, trifle, fiddle; work in a fiddling unskilled way". Nigel, that was a very naughty post of yours!

So have you decided on the East Neuk as a potential prototype, Les? It's a great location. On the other hand, the word "Neuk" is not confined to Fife, and seems to be in usage throughout the east of Scotland and, indeed Northumberland.

DT

[LesGros]

The saga continues...
To answer Davey T first; The detail is still to be decided, but the concept is to build a layout focussed on operating, and based on LNER territory in the North of England and Scotland. More on this later.

As the following picture (... 4283 jpg)of the main fiddle board shows, the level of clutter in the railway room has been reduced, This is the relatively tidy end of the room.

The English Fiddle yard mounted on the transit cradle

reduced English fiddleDSCF4283.jpg (64.74 KiB) Viewed 5760 times

Some of the bench framework is in place, but a shortage of timber to complete one of the corners persuaded me to change direction for a few days.

The "English" Fiddle yard has been mounted vertically on trestles so that I can inspect and trace the wiring. The Boards are called" English" after the builder, a late member of the Falmouth & District MRC from where the boards were obtained last year.

The preliminary visual survey revealed the following:

a. The 12 road storage track is NS on copper clad sleepers, on which there is some oxidisation which will need to be treated. ( an opportunity to experiment with " on-board" cleaning methods; suggestions welcomed)
b. There is a manual Turntable, with slide bolts for power supply to the table; in need of TLC to replace missing side bolts.
c. D connectors on the lower edge, at the entrance, a 15way D socket, at the other end a 25 way D socket.
d. At the centre edge, is a pair of double row tag strips with 72 available double tags.
e. Connected to the tag strips, an umbilical bundle of wires with a 50 pin D plug

Tag strip and Umbilical

reduced English FiddleDSCF4285.jpg (64.93 KiB) Viewed 5760 times

f. The board has been designed for DC, and has an imaginative method of reducing the number of track-power wires by attaching droppers shared between pairs of adjacent track rails. [ +- -+ +- -+ +- … etc] Fault tracing could be an interesting exercise.
g. All wiring appears to be 7/0.2mm probable rating 1.4 amp.
h. Qty. 13 Peco board-top mounted point motors with slide switches on top, linked by recessed wire in tube to moving sleeper type TOU.

Points connected by surface link and wire in tube

resized English fiddle DSCF4288.jpg (64.01 KiB) Viewed 5760 times

i. 5 of the motors appear intact with correctly working linkages
j. The remaining motors will require to be re-attached having been dislodged during transit and storage.
k. One or two may need to be replaced.
l. All bar one of the linkages is intact and the points operable.
m. The shorter extension board has 12 tracks and a 25 way D socket.

The wiring on the underside can be traced fairly easily, but the D sockets will be more difficult to de-cypher; unfortunately, the original builder's circuit diagrams and notes are not available. The next decision is whether to spend a lot of time tracing all of the connections through the sockets, or to start again and wire for DCC.
cheers all,

[Terry Bendall]

but the D sockets will be more difficult to de-cypher; unfortunately, the original builder's circuit diagrams and notes are not available.

From your picture Les, it looks like the builder used a lot of wires that are all the same colour. This is fine if you keep a careful record and number the terminals at each end. I prefer to use colour coded wire which means that things can be identified more easily and have the same colour all the way along the circuit. Getting hold of lots of different colours of wire is not always easy but one way, although it might be a bit expensive, is to buy multi core cable and strip it down into the component cores. It does mean however that you may end up with a lot of unused wire of some colours.

Terry Bendall

[Russ Elliott]

Les - I would suggest tracing and recording the connections through the sockets, and making a new wiring diagram. You would probably need this anyway even if eventually going for DCC.

[Dave K]

From your picture Les, it looks like the builder used a lot of wires that are all the same colour. This is fine if you keep a careful record and number the terminals at each end. I prefer to use colour coded wire which means that things can be identified more easily and have the same colour all the way along the circuit.

This reminds me Terry of Barry's story of the layout at the Brighton show where they had used an old school desk for the control panel, which looked fine till the chap lifted the lid to sort out a fault then Barry saw that every wire was of the same colour.