I’ve been doing a lot of musing over the past week or so after a conversation with Mel at our work session last week, the module standard we’re using has vast potential beyond either branches off our main RS Tower layout or small modular switching layouts, the possibilities are pretty much endless.
So time to kick off a bit of discussion on standards then – first some background info to hopefully help you understand where we were coming from when we published this!
The standards used are a combination of the European Fremo (US HO) standards and US Freemo standards – why have we not just copied one or the other?
The US Freemo standard is impressively engineered to allow for main line running, whereas the European one assumes a US branchline with relatively sharp curves allowed – we preferred the US approach, think big, and the capability for running main lines is built in, think small and it will always be a branch line only.
However the US system has a few concepts alien to folk used to UK exhibition/portable layouts, it uses loose rails to bridge baseboard joints where over here we’re used to running rails up to the edge of boards with few problems. We also thought that some features in the US spec were more complicated than they needed to be (electrics) or unlikely to ever be used (ability to add grades).
So, our standards were a distillation of those two sources, and my intention in writing them was to try and keep the rules to a minimum – just the things that MUST be compatible to make modules work together mechanically, and not clash too much visually, whilst leaving as much as possible up to the creative vision of the builder.
So – time for some discussion I think, here’s some starting questions.
1. Have we got this right? Seems to us like we have got at least pretty close to a workable standard, but are there any other views out there – are there things that could do with changing, are there things that are too restrictive or not restrictive enough?
2. One specific issue – our group is currently operating & building modules with a 3″ straight section at the end rather than a 6″ section – the concept of the 6″ section was that when two modules were joined it would leave 12″ of straight track between any possible reverse curves, enough to allow long vehicles like passenger cars or autoracks to be perfectly stable in a long train – so my question is, should we re-write that standard to 3″ (remembering the standards should be the **minimums**) – do we need to run a few tests to see whether there would be a problem in reality with longer vehicles or whether it’s just theoretical, or do we keep the standard as 6″ and just note that certain modules are “semi compliant” and so not to be used together in S-curve configurations if we’re running main line trains? What are folk’s thoughts here?
3. What do we call this thing? It seems a bit wrong (and potentially confusing) to me to just call this standard “Freemo” – I think we need to name it something that differentiates it from both the Fremo and Freemo standards – I did think “Freemo-UK” – which is nice and catchy, but does that imply it’s a UK-outline standard (which the standard might not be completely appropriate for) instead of US-outline? What are folk’s thoughts, any better idea’s out there?
If this concept is to take off it needs to be embraced by more than just our own RS Tower group, so the more external input here the better I think.
You have the floor…
Filed under: Blog Page | Tagged: standards | 1 Comment »
RS Tower freemo modular system 