Details and construction photos of our New Exhibiton layout

The Calgary British Railway Modellers Club has taken on the project of building a new Exhibition layout. Our old layout Much Muddling had become too bulky, heavy, and needing constant wiring landscaping repairs. It is now in storage with hopes that at some later date the club will be in position to restore it in a new home.

When Much Muddling went into storage, and Covid became less problematic, a few members decided to take existing bare boards, and create a simple end-to-end branchline layout, combining it with an existing 12′ section that had been added to MM. This was put together, and exhibited at both Supertrain and Heritage Park’s Railway days. We immediately realized that the difficulty of operating a single line layout were many and diverse, including the main difficulty of always having trains moving. At an exhibition this is the key attraction for visitors. In addition we found that too many members wanted to run trains, and the station at one end, and the fiddle yard at the other became full very quickly creating bottleneck that precluded train movement again.

The criteria for a new exhibition layout is the following:

  1. A double main line with continuous loops to allow for long passenger trains, and large radius curves where they are visible to the public.
  2. A branch line for slower smaller trains.
  3. A station with both through and stopping lines.
  4. A small shunting area.
  5. A fiddleyard to allow storage and varying main line trains
  6. The station platforms will be mostly underneath a ‘town’ board to hide most of the long platforms, and provide opportunity for more structures and interest.
  7. Both DCC and DC operations be possible on the main lines.
  8. The boards will be 24″ x 48″ each, will be lightweight, easy to store, assemble and maintain with a lift bridge access to the operating well.
  9. An overall length of 24′ and depth of 12′ allowing an operating ‘well’ of 20’x8′
  10. The detailing, landscaping and buildings be of highest quality to maintain our reputation for ‘trains running through landscape’.

The following is the track layout that we decided upon.

This was created in the SCARM software. Red & Yellow lines are main lines, green is a branchline, with an industrial canal in one corner for a shunting area. The green areas are our public viewing boards and will be landscaped; the top boards will be visible but only functional. All track is Peco code100 flextrack, with mostly Peco insulfrog points, with a few Hornby short radius in the canal area. Cassettes (removable track in cases) will be used to enable easy and quick exchange of trains, and easy under board storage.

Further decisions that were made as the need arose are:

  1. None of the lines will not interconnect. This will simplify wiring and allow changing from DC to DCC to be a simple switch. It will also remove the possibility of collisions at crossovers.
  2. Two mimic (control) panels will be locate at board #2 to control all of the branch-line, and at board #8 to control the main lines and fiddleyard.
  3. The track-power buss lines would run along continuously along the inner edge of the boards as a 4 double-wire snake (3 sets of trackpower and a 5v power for nodes). This will plug into each board, bringing track power to each board without the ‘daisy chain’ under-board connections, and will allow easier trouble-shooting any power outages.
  4. A Power Distribution Box centrally located at board 9 will distribute the power both ways to the track snakes, allowing each main line to individually be switched between supplied DCC or DC power. All DC and DCC controllers will be plugged into it, along with the 5v dc for the nodes. All cables will be bundled removing loose or hanging wires.
  5. Point control will be using wifi-enabled microprocessors in 4 ‘nodes’ under each corner of the layout. They will control the servos under the points in their area. The ‘nodes’ will receive wifi signals from the same microprocessor in both mimic panels telling them which servo to move, and sending back a signal when it was done so that the control panel can display the correct LED. This will remove ALL need for wiring between point and mimic (control) panel, and only a 5v dc power lead to all nodes and mimic panels, making wiring far simpler with less opportunity for wire/plug issues when transporting and storing the boards.

FOR ANY QUESTIONS please joing us at PUBNIGHT (info on the home page) or contact us at [email protected]

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