Gravel Sidings

Not been back for a while - doesn't mean I've not been doing anything but combination of bad weather (rain and lots of it) and bad back, plus couple of weekends away have meant I've not got out in the garden.

My plans are very much for operations - rather than just watching trains.   One of the recent purchases was a couple of secondhand 3 way points.  Not something that comes up very often on ebay (these came via a shop) but from the viewpoint of making the most of space then something very much for me to consider.

One of the things I've been kicking around is a gravel siding - using the Radio Control crawler crane previously featured to load (eco friendly) chick peas into tipper trucks.   The problem therefore became two fold - access for the crawler crane to load, and sidings for the gravel train to shunt.   A recent purchase gave me three more second hand tipper trucks, so I can run two trains each of three trucks with a final rectangular truck to function as a caboose/guards wagon with a rear flashing light.  The rectangular trucks (I got two) were a very early purchase and I now realise have homemade, non standard couplings - which is presumably why I got them cheaply.

So, I played around with Rail Modeller, and then today (which has been a dryer day than before, althogh I had it off work to fix the shower/bath seal) I put some track on the ground.  The first problem was that any train that arrives at the head of a train will have to go backwards with a loaded train.  A quick call to my train loving chum satisfied me that this was in fact very normal practice.  The picture below illustrates some of the planning:
(the blue rectangle being the train, and orange/red rectangles tipper trucks).

I then came to put this on the ground, with a tweak of further sidings...

As originally put out - the three trucks to be loaded, and the shunter can turn in the end bay of the three way point. 

Overhead view - not enough clearance to get the shunter past that last truck.  It overhands the points by a little - not much, but enough to prevent an engine getting past it.   

Arrival - not enough room to get the shunter around the loop and then shunt the trucks into place on the siding.     

The garden soon gets eaten up by track.   

In conclusion, two engines working together offer up much more possibilities - as does lengthening the middle straight bits to allow more flexibility with just the one engine.   It the centre straight becomes long enough to accommodate the 3 tippers/1 small truck then one engine on its own may be able to do things.  These boards are the small 450 x 450 mm ones available from B&Q.  They have a summer special of some 500 x 600 mm boards, and the "standard" size is 600 mm square.  The wide board should offer me another track - I'd hoped to have an Engine shed and a miscellaneous siding for things like a diesel tanker or box wagon with spare parts.  It's also possible to see where the boards have stood for a length of time, and I'm beginning to wonder if something like roofing felt or preserving the bottom surfaces needs to be done.