Such a great operation. The freight would give the operations a different element which looking at the layout, is substantial. Looking forward to seeing Sheffield develop further. Clint
Hi Clint, Thats the plan... The interesting challenge is adapting the existing layout to allow freight operations. When we built London, Birmingham and Manchester stations, little operation thought was given to the non-passenger side. More on that later.
Happened to see Charlie's video so came to check this out, and have spent most of today catching up on your videos. What a magnificent undertaking! Congratulations to all involved, and I look forward to seeing further progress. I thought my dad and I had a big layout (60'x10'), but I see we were only playing at it! One question that has kept coming up in my mind, as the operation of McKinley Railway seems to be fairly closely timetabled: how do you govern time on the layout? Presumably not a scale time, as that would be far too stressful for all the human operators. When we timetabled our layout, we worked on the basis of simply manually moving on the hands on a clock when we had completed an operation, or simply were ready (we had some trains noted as being CP [=circuit possible], which basically meant we could sit back and watch them run). But we weren't trying to advance years as well!
Hi Andrew, Thanks for your comments. W.r.t your question on timetables, we run the timetables on real time. We did run on a sequence basis for a number of years with a printed timetable, but that proved to be both repetitive, boring and dificult to update. Our digital version is quite fun to develop. The trick is to schedule the workload for a specific station based on the number of operators that are planned for a location. This gets further complicated because there are many stations of the layout which requires load balancing between them! We have a person who performs a role that sits above all the stations who in effect performs the function of the old "District Controller" Their job is to balance the workload between the stations and the layout operationally. Even when we have designed the timetable to flow evenly, a different set of operators unfamiliar with a station will need some help. Its in its infancy here - but is quite demanding. When we get further into it I'm sure we'll publish a video on that role... It might even get to look like the old BTF film - "This is York".
Very impressed with your work, although a bit too much like 'work' for my liking ;) My 00 railway is freight based centred on a marshalling yard connecting a mainline to 2 industrial branch lines. The branch lines are populated by the rail interfaces of various industries and docks. The national network is represented by fiddle yard, as is the the larger coalmine and steelworks and the ferry port for international freight. Based in the BR steam era I wanted purpose for my railway so I devised and wrote a simulator running on a laptop to simulate consumer and supplier companies. Each company has products and consumables defined in a database together with stock levels, re-order levels, manufacturing rates, consumption rates, regular output (e.g. milk, newspapers), loading and unloading times. The system is time stepped manually, and the output of the simulator is traffic requests specifying quantity of wagons required, where required and when to collect. The laptop application runs as a webserver which allows wifi access to the traffic requests by browsers on simple tablets. The 'web' browser interface is interactive with the application on the laptop allowing confirmation of wagons received and dispatched. The only difficulty is uniquely identifying wagons, I trialled some bar coding equipment, but far too bulky to be cost effective, small bar code labels discretely fitted to 4mm wagons require very expensive readers, have you guys come up with a solution to tracking wagons?
HI freightuk, Thanks for the comprehensive picture of your world. Have you posted any plans or videos on the web yet? We have been developing some clever stuff around RFID which looks promising. After a few wrong shunts up a dead-end or three, we think we have cracked how we will use it, but we need to integrate the RFID output into the database and test it until we care certain it will be dependable. As soon as we have something to report we will share. Where are you based?
@@dattouk Hi, I live NW of London so rather a long way from where you appear to be, I have not posted any plans or videos on the web as yet as I have not had the time. Look forward to seeing your results, Jim
Hi Mckinley, i just came across you and have been watching your videos, i came across a reference that you were somewhere on the south coast, so wondered if there was a point of contact for arranging a visit (or possibly joining up depending on where you are), many thanks Ian
Hi Ian, we are along the south coast and we do organise visits, primarily through clubs... I'll talk with Tony and Charlie about a web link for arranging visits.
thanks, i was also wondering, with your hi-tech computerised system, how does it cope with formations where the locomotive/power car is not the leading vehicle, for example i have a 4 coach 450 Desiro, with the power car in coach 2 , is the system able to adapt to trains like this so they don't end up plowing into buffers or spading, how is this achieved? regards Ian
The simplest answer is to put pickups on all coaches. The second and safest answer is to put optical sensors at all the stop indicators. That way the system know where the front of train is. Another good reason for two sensors per block and make them both different 1 current draw the other positional/optical. See my comment to Dylan on video 9.
Such a great operation. The freight would give the operations a different element which looking at the layout, is substantial. Looking forward to seeing Sheffield develop further. Clint
Hi Clint, Thats the plan... The interesting challenge is adapting the existing layout to allow freight operations. When we built London, Birmingham and Manchester stations, little operation thought was given to the non-passenger side. More on that later.
Another great McKinley video instalment (thanks Charlie for getting this video to us)
My God this layout is awesome, love it!
A very good idea to have groups of three wagons and build up stock based on that principle.
Happened to see Charlie's video so came to check this out, and have spent most of today catching up on your videos. What a magnificent undertaking! Congratulations to all involved, and I look forward to seeing further progress. I thought my dad and I had a big layout (60'x10'), but I see we were only playing at it!
One question that has kept coming up in my mind, as the operation of McKinley Railway seems to be fairly closely timetabled: how do you govern time on the layout? Presumably not a scale time, as that would be far too stressful for all the human operators.
When we timetabled our layout, we worked on the basis of simply manually moving on the hands on a clock when we had completed an operation, or simply were ready (we had some trains noted as being CP [=circuit possible], which basically meant we could sit back and watch them run). But we weren't trying to advance years as well!
Hi Andrew, Thanks for your comments. W.r.t your question on timetables, we run the timetables on real time. We did run on a sequence basis for a number of years with a printed timetable, but that proved to be both repetitive, boring and dificult to update. Our digital version is quite fun to develop. The trick is to schedule the workload for a specific station based on the number of operators that are planned for a location. This gets further complicated because there are many stations of the layout which requires load balancing between them! We have a person who performs a role that sits above all the stations who in effect performs the function of the old "District Controller" Their job is to balance the workload between the stations and the layout operationally. Even when we have designed the timetable to flow evenly, a different set of operators unfamiliar with a station will need some help. Its in its infancy here - but is quite demanding. When we get further into it I'm sure we'll publish a video on that role... It might even get to look like the old BTF film - "This is York".
brilliant!
Very impressed with your work, although a bit too much like 'work' for my liking ;) My 00 railway is freight based centred on a marshalling yard connecting a mainline to 2 industrial branch lines. The branch lines are populated by the rail interfaces of various industries and docks. The national network is represented by fiddle yard, as is the the larger coalmine and steelworks and the ferry port for international freight. Based in the BR steam era I wanted purpose for my railway so I devised and wrote a simulator running on a laptop to simulate consumer and supplier companies. Each company has products and consumables defined in a database together with stock levels, re-order levels, manufacturing rates, consumption rates, regular output (e.g. milk, newspapers), loading and unloading times. The system is time stepped manually, and the output of the simulator is traffic requests specifying quantity of wagons required, where required and when to collect. The laptop application runs as a webserver which allows wifi access to the traffic requests by browsers on simple tablets. The 'web' browser interface is interactive with the application on the laptop allowing confirmation of wagons received and dispatched. The only difficulty is uniquely identifying wagons, I trialled some bar coding equipment, but far too bulky to be cost effective, small bar code labels discretely fitted to 4mm wagons require very expensive readers, have you guys come up with a solution to tracking wagons?
HI freightuk,
Thanks for the comprehensive picture of your world. Have you posted any plans or videos on the web yet?
We have been developing some clever stuff around RFID which looks promising. After a few wrong shunts up a dead-end or three, we think we have cracked how we will use it, but we need to integrate the RFID output into the database and test it until we care certain it will be dependable. As soon as we have something to report we will share. Where are you based?
@@dattouk Hi, I live NW of London so rather a long way from where you appear to be, I have not posted any plans or videos on the web as yet as I have not had the time. Look forward to seeing your results, Jim
Hi Mckinley, i just came across you and have been watching your videos, i came across a reference that you were somewhere on the south coast, so wondered if there was a point of contact for arranging a visit (or possibly joining up depending on where you are), many thanks Ian
Hi Ian, we are along the south coast and we do organise visits, primarily through clubs... I'll talk with Tony and Charlie about a web link for arranging visits.
thanks, i was also wondering, with your hi-tech computerised system, how does it cope with formations where the locomotive/power car is not the leading vehicle, for example i have a 4 coach 450 Desiro, with the power car in coach 2 , is the system able to adapt to trains like this so they don't end up plowing into buffers or spading, how is this achieved? regards Ian
The simplest answer is to put pickups on all coaches. The second and safest answer is to put optical sensors at all the stop indicators. That way the system know where the front of train is. Another good reason for two sensors per block and make them both different 1 current draw the other positional/optical. See my comment to Dylan on video 9.
Really great, so loving the devolvement of McKinley Railway.
Interesting as always...