Another Idea for Roundhouse Doors

My friend Mark Dance has been coming up with all sorts of ideas for mechanisms for Pembroke lately. This week, he sketched an alternative mechanism for opening and closing the roundhouse doors. I’ve reproduced his sketch here, along with my usual ruminations. Mark’s idea is to use Lego bevel gears on a shaft that can […]

Soft Pastels for a Fun Mockup

I’m a little exhausted by the whole turntable gear fiasco. So, I thought I would relax this evening by mocking up the roundhouse. I’m going to want a mockup to experiment with the doors, soon anyway, and I was originally thinking of only mocking up the front wall. However, I needed a break, and so, […]

More Thoughts on Roundhouse Doors

I’ve been pondering the roundhouse doors for a couple of days. Earlier this year, I came up with the idea to drive the doors with magnets beneath the layout. However, the tangle of rods and levers beneath the baseboard was hard to visualize. So today, I thought I would sketch it out. It still […]

Roundhouse Door Mechanism Design

I’m on a sea cruise to Nanaimo today to visit some family. Not much will happen on the turntable, but the enforced downtime gives me an opportunity to refine and explore my thoughts on making the roundhouse doors operate. The plan is to drive them with magnets beneath the layout; operating doors that need to […]

Roundhouse Excavations

Originally, I hadn’t thought I would be building pits for the engine house as you weren’t supposed to be able to see inside. However, because the corner of the roundhouse is going to get cut off, I’m going to need pits. Well, that’s a great excuse to get the router out! So, after a little bit […]

Laying out the house tracks

I had hoped to make a bunch of progress on the roundhouse tonight, but unfortunately, the Boy and I wound up talking about Bill C-51, and I had to promise to actually read the whole thing before he could relax and go to bed. Every Canadian should read it, along with the existing provisions in […]

More Roundhouse Drafting

As I was finishing up yesterday, I realized that the roundhouse needed to come closer to the turntable a little bit so as to avoid sharp points at the pit edge. A quick review of Engine Houses & Turntables on Canadian Railways, 1850-1950 by Edward Forbes Bush (thanks for the loan, Scott), shows that a […]

Concepts for Pembroke Roundhouse

It’s really inconvenient to run all the way down to Golden Lake, the other end of staging (12 feet away) to turn the engine, and so, I’m starting to turn my attention to the Pembroke turntable. One of the first things I need to figure out is the spacing of tracks for the roundhouse, and that […]

Engine house doors

Part of my vision is that an operating session starts with the engines shut in the engine house. The first thing the crews must do is open the doors and bring their engines out; and the last thing they do when retiring is to close the doors behind them. Now, I could just make the […]