Welcome To

Robspalu Railways

I started building my model railway in the kitchen of our previous home back in 1989, the first boards were for the station at Robstown which where evenually located in a garden shed as part of my proposed garden railway. Following our move to our current house in 1996, which had a massive usable loft area Robspalu Railways was born. 'Robstown' would be integrated into a large 'Tail Chaser' layout.

Track Plan

Nothing beats

SPACE

My Plan

The main objective was to build a model railway that would give me hours of fun, both in the building of it and the operating sessions.

Before starting the build I had to come up with a design, which would include the existing 'Robstown' boards. So I came up with a main station 'very' loosley based on Maidstone East in Kent as my layout is set in 1960's Southern era. So Robford came into being having 2 platforms, a bay and bi-deirectional through line. In addition to the station itself I have carriage sidings, goods yard and a 4 road engine shed serviced by coal road and turntable.

The overall design would also include passing loops in the non-secnic areas to achieve what I wanted I went for a 'folded' figure of 8 style, this gave me a run time at scale 45 mph of around 3 minutes!!

DCC Control System

So it's Christmas 2012, with a it more time to spend on the model railway. The original Control System was the tradiional Panel style, with switches and buttons, and I start to think that actually DCC is the way to go. so I spent my free time over christams investigation available systems and decided that 'Digitrax' would suit my needs especially the availability of lineside modules which use LocoNet which is the proprietory communications protocol used by Digitrax. And a bonus was I was learning a new software language(Delphi) at work so could use my new learnt skills and develope my current control system and hone my Delphi skills

My Locomotives were slowly retrofitted with Digitrax decoders as I wanted to use 'Transponding'. Over the last years most of the original decoders have beed replaced by Digitrax Sound decoders with simple sound files I developed using 'SPJ Helper' by Fred Miller. In the last year I have started to upgrade the Sound Decoders again, this time using sounds by John MacMasters.

How Long Did It Take

Absolutly years, spending maybe 4 hours a week for maybe 8 years I finally had two complete circuits of track but very little in the way of scenary. and no storage sidings. Over the next 5 years I added the 9 road storage sidings and started on the scenary.

Then having cleared some more space and laid additional flooring I added a Branch Line.