Monday 27 October 2008

Heresy!

A week or so ago ago finally got round to spending some Christmas and birthday money and bought some standard gauge locomotives, wagons and track. At some point I'll build a standard gauge layout in the loft.

However this isn't entirly unrelated to my narrow gauge modelling as I also bought a gaugemaster controller, which I'll use for both narrow gauge and standard gauge, and a couple of intermodal containers. In theory I know how big the containers would be but having a couple of 20' containers to play with will make it much easier to visulaise what an 2' gauge intermodal train might look like. I think intermodal wagons which could hold a 30' (avaliable from C-Rail) or a 20' container could work but one that could hold two 20' containers would be longer than the the 13m WHR(C) coaches which are 160mm long in OO9.

The question that thinking about a standard gauge layout raises (other than - I don't do much modlling as it is, is starting in another gauge really a good idea) is should I blog about it? If so should it be here or on another blog? I had been thinking of blogging somewhere else, in fact I already have another blog with draft posts containing some of my research. However as this post shows there is often overlap between standard gauge an narrow gauge, particularly if I end up doing a Chris Nevard and having a narrow gauge line sneaking into my standard gauge layout. A standard gauge to narrow gauge intermodal terminal is also a tempting prospect though I would have to find a way to keep it small. I think that I'll merge my draft blog and this one to create one blog with all my model making, and I'm cyber-squating a blogspot domain for that purpose. Blogger has tag based RSS feeds so any of you only interested in narrow gauge can get only the narrow gauge posts in your feed readers.

2 comments:

Richard Klaus said...

Are you aware that many 20 foot containers have slots in the frame, that allow a fork lift to pick them up.
For the purposes of your intermodal idea, that would allow a bare bones operation, using just a fork lift at small stations to pull a container.

Zabdiel said...

So they do. That makes the intermodal thing much more practical. I've just checked my 20' Bachmann containers and they have small indentations for the forklift holes.