#railway modelling

[whirligig-girl]

concept: 'basement empire' style model railroad with the tracks filling out the entire edge of the room in a big twisty loop with sidings and industries and multiple mainline tracks, the whole nine yards--but it's on a rotating space station.

the train can always appear to be going roughly straight, albeit apparently climbing a grade, and still eventually loop back around on itself.

[brasskingfisher]

In the course of researching plans for a OO gauge layout I've got excited about the fact that I could justifiably run a model of the LNER U1

Does this make me weird?

[half-a-tiger]

ANNA MEREDITH - “Paramour”, off ‘FIBS’, her second studio album due  October 25th, 2019 via Moshi Moshi Music.

Directed by Ewan Jones Morris

Lego Master Builder: Gary Davis

Produced by Rachel McWhinney

[scavengedluxury]

High Visibility. Great Central Railway, Quorn. June 2015.

[whirligig-girl]

Eaurp Guz's roughly 1:30 scale live-steam model of Slaibsgloth Coal Railroad No.32, a ~1.6 meter gauge 2-8-8-2 garratt steam locomotive built on planet Mellanus in (earth-)year 2346 and retired in 2379 (two years ago) for service bringing coal carriages from the coal pits up to the interchange at the Glooiw & North Eastern. It is unusual for a coal burning steam engine to remain in revenue service--the majority that remained in use after the development of Diesel-Hydraulics were decommissioned with nuclear-powered railway electrification in the 2360s, and the ones that remained were mostly converted to oil burning. The Slaibsgloth steam engines meanwhile persisted right up until the closure of the coal mine. Glooiw & North Eastern has acquired the 40 locomotives. Their fates are uncertain but railway preservation groups remain optimistic.

When Guz first came aboard the Cerritos she was overworking herself constantly, which lead to her being so tired that she was leaving residues on the consoles and generally doing sloppier work. It turned out that Guz had been working double shifts, and when Billups found out he put a stop to that. That's when Guz turned to a hobby she'd done a lot of before joining starfleet--model rocketry. Armed with far more advanced tools than she'd had on Mellanus, she made accurate working model replicas of real historical prewarp spacecraft from a variety of planets and would fly them in real space whenever possible.

Eventually, she also found a new appreciation for her childhood love of trains, and her model-making skills and tools translated well to model railroading as well. She has a little shelf layout in storage that she occasionally tinkers with, and she runs large scale model trains on the holodeck. She could run full-scale holographic trains on the holodeck too of course, but it wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. And then there's the 1:5600 scale BM-gauge railroad she's building on a microscope slide! (Bµ gauge is "Byte micrometer" gauge or a track spacing of 256 µm)

Guz eventually wants to build a roughly 1:80 scale modular layout of the Slaibsgloth Coal Mine, with smaller scale electric-powered models of the Slaibsgloth coal-burning steam engines and enough track to wrap around a room and give them a good run, but unless she can rally support for a Cerritos chapter of the Starfleet Rail Transport Modelling Club or she can get her own crew quarters, it's a pipe dream--or maybe something for her retirement.

Replicators and advanced computer aided design tools reduce the amount of time it takes to get modelling projects done by whatever factor is desired. Technically Guz could probably replicate fully assembled working models as long as they fit in the replicator bed, but where's the fun in that? But she's still only got so much time in an off-shift, and doing it 'properly,' scratch-built using machine tools like 'real' modellers on Mellanus, or manually defining all of the geometry in a CAD program like modellers on Earth, would take too much time.

see also: alt versions of the locomotive.

[whirligig-girl]

To Eaurp - infodump anything you want about the railways on your homeworld? Everything I've seen about Mellanoid (I think that's the demonym?) trains seems really cool so I wanna know whatever you think is interesting about them :))

Lt. J.G. Guz here. I was just reading some old Xindi model railroad catalogues that Lt. Boimler picked up planetside (we're in the former Delphic Expanse doing infrastructure work, and next we've got to deliver our decadal reparations package to the Illyrian homeworld). And it reminded me of how the way model railroading standards work for other species is really different to how it works on Mellanus.

Historically, Xindi had standard gauge, but multiple of them--every single Insectoid Railway was built to 1,332mm, every single Arboreal Railway was built to 1,090mm, etc. And because that era in their history was marked by interspecies war, there were very few interchanges. And since most Xindi colonies were single-species, the industrial railways they built on other planets just kept the same gauge. So more modern Xindi model railroaders essentially have a small handful of gauges to choose from, with the engines accurately scale for the gauge. So for instance, in this old catalogue from the 2140s, you could get D gauge (30mm), O gauge (12mm), or K gauge (7mm) models, but if you tried to put an Avian engine next to a Reptilian one, they'd be totally out of scale.

I promise I'll talk about mellanoid trains in a bit, just bear with me.

Human model railroad gauges are like, a little bit of a mess, which is funny to me, because they have a standard gauge which was a proper standard for a large part of the world. Standard gauge is actually a United Earth standard these days and gets used on most Earth colonies. And, uh, new build electric railways on Mellanus. Hmm. Ok I know how that sounds, but to the Mellanoids reading at home, I promise Mellanus isn't a Federation colony it's more nuanced than that.

So the main Earth model railroading standards are in decreasing order, F scale (1:20), Gross/garden scale (1:32), 0 scale (1:48), Sixty-fourth scale (1:64), Half-0 scale (1:87), TableTop Scale (1:120), Nine millimeter scale (1:160), Z scale (1:220), Three millimeter scale (1:450). At one point, O, HO, and N were by far the most popular, in addition to regional variants like British 00 scale which were not accurate, but died out during WWIII to be replaced by S scale and H0 scale.

Of course things get more complicated when it comes to modelling narrow gauge equipment. It used to be that manufacturers would fudge things a little to mix and match scale and gauges (HOn3 for HO scale models running on N gauge track... which doesn't quite work out for most of the narrow gauges but it's close enough), but since replicators have become household appliances on Earth, narrow gauge (or broad gauge) modelling has largely become fine-scale, so you have constant scale but any gauge you want. Some modellers have given up on gauge scales altogether. If you're replicating your own equipment anyway, why not? But I'm told this is a railway modelling faux pas.

Larger scales than 1:20 are usually specified by Gauge, not scale, since those are almost always outdoor club-owned railways hauling non-prototypical passenger benches, like the model railway club I got to visit in Sauce-o-lito, Earth.

So, what I've learned is, for the most part aliens have either a specified gauge (track width) or a specified scale (size factor compared to the prototype) in their model railroading standards.

Mellanoids do it better.

At least, in my opinion. See, we specify both, separately. Every single piece of rolling stock you could buy on the market is going to have a specified scale and a specified gauge. We have to do it this way because there is no standard gauge on Mellanus. Narrow gauge and broad gauge and even mixed gauge modelling can not be an afterthought!

The reason is that mellanoid slime model railroading was never all that highly commercialized. Most things were either kit-built, with the ability to change the gauge when building, or scratch-built. The economy in my country at least never really supported large scale hobby model production. A model train was an heirloom that somebody had hand-made, not something you got off the shelf. Manufacturing has taken off during my lifetime, so now you can mail-order ready-to-run models. The cheapest ones are built to a common gauge regardless of scale, but that gauge varies per manufacturer. So the cheap models are usually a common gauge, but the expensive ones are usually a common scale (sometimes requiring hand-laid track and kit-built turnouts).

Ok, I know this is seeming a little bit like we just. Don't have any standards. But this is way better, because you get more information about the product you're getting. You know at a glance if what you get is going to work on your layout, and if it's going to fit in size-wise. For some people, who just want to set up a loop of track and watch a train go around it, the gauge is what you care about. For serious modellers it's the scale that matters, and it just means you'll have to do a conversion kit to change the gauge as needed.

[whirligig-girl]

As a lower decker, Ensign Eaurp Guz doesn't have a lot of space for a model railroad. Arguably she could fit like a shelf layout precariously above her tub-bunk, but that's where she keeps some of her model spaceships. So instead, she builds larger scale model engines and runs them on the holodeck. Here's a roughly G gauge model of a Slopspit & Southern Class 80 "Easy"-type 2-6-0 steam engine with decorative smoke baffles. Like most of her models it's built with function in mind, so it's live steam.

Guz's model rockets and spacecrafts are either run in the holodeck, or in certain conditions on shoreleave or staged out of the shuttlebay on actual spaceflights. For example, the Orion Nuclear Pulse Rocket from Guzcomic was planned to make a round trip between Douglas Station and the planet's moon, DbII before it went and exploded itself, and the lunar lander she'd built for the Apollo 11 anniversary was going to actually land on the Moon.

When she can fully recover her models, she keeps them in storage and rotates them in the display above her tub-bunk.

Guz also has plans for a proper model railroad which would replicate a colliery circa 2350 with a late example of a revenue-earning steam locomotive in approximately HO-ish gauge, but it would require having her own quarters.

She's also kicking around plans to make a 1:4800 scale layout which would fit on a microscope slide.

[scavengedluxury]

More model citizens. Great Central Railway, Quorn. June 2015.