New Layout

Hi,

Thank you all for your interest in and kind words about my RTB layout.

All the control track does is to control the three signals giving access to the junction where red trams continue round the city circuit, and the blue ones join and diverge, the junction I call Karlstrasse. It makes those signals behave like traffic lights, so they change to ‘go’ in turn, while the other two change to ‘stop’. However, when they change to ‘go’ there is a 3 second delay, so that any tram already on the junction has time to clear. Also, when a tram approaches one of those signals a control forces the signal to ‘stop’ to avoid accidental collision, particularly with the trailer portion of the ‘tram’. These controls came about through trial and error, and now I think that section of the layout will perform without collisions.

At first I made the control track too small. As there is no way of setting the speed in a digital layout (not that I’ve found) I had to enlarge it. I added the coaches to try and slow things down a bit, but it didn’t help a lot. I left them in anyway!

Even though I made this layout, I love watching the way the trams integrate. There appears to be a certain amount of randomness to it, but, of course, various factors actually control what happens.

A side effect of this traffic light system is that the trams stop at some of the tram stops instead of wizzing round non-stop. Further controls could probably be added to force trams to stop at every ‘station’.

Of course, colour-light signals would be much more tram-like, something which it seems we might see in the future?

Cheers,

David