Ian Holmes the editor of the The Micro Model Railway Dispatch issued a challenge to make a 'tuning fork' layout. in 3 sq ft or less excluding any 'fiddle' function. In my old fogie fashion I forgot about the fork idea and drew a Y one. I did apologise to Ian who'd spent time looking in vain for a Y shaped tuning fork.
Up until now my layouts have been about 4.1/2 ft long so I thought this at 3ft 5" total was going to be a good challenge. I've got this far with it :-
To start I will have one wagon on the traverser and two in each siding and swap them around as usual the loco release on the right performs the job and the length of a two point run around.
This is the underside, one of my Non-Warping lightweight boards. I will add two pieces of plywood at the ends so I can clamp it to the folding table I will use to make videos.
I realised that I would have to make another loco a really small one that would easily go around a 20" radius point and chose a little diesel for a change from the steam stuff I'd made in the past. I made a card jig to help in making the chassis after seeing some pointy bits of steel that 'Barclay' on RMWeb used, rather than take up loads more space on this page here's the video about it from my YT channel.
If you can watch this as is you'll avoid the adverts on YT.
Since making the video I realised that the controller was humming before the loco started so I built a Brian Tilbury 3 transistor one which doesn't do that and also has slightly better feedback that works even at the slowest speed and it's got built in short protection. The circuit is on the controller page.
More soon about low relief buildings.