Eurospoor 3

DB concludes with his two favorite layouts from Eurospoor

Gipsbahn

This layout is another octopus, with the center leg actually a small Y, and although this is a wide-angle shot, the two outer legs are at less than 90 degrees. Quite interactive being able to walk all around it, and it was set nice and high too, so you could enjoy it. One downside was that if "oo, a train at the quarry", you had to figure out how to get out of the maze to get to the quarry!

The thing I liked most about this layout was that it had a purpose. Empty gypsum trucks would head to the quarry, be "filled" and taken up to a kiln/factory to be turned into plaster or something I guess and then the final product shipped out. Another thread had tubs of clay going somewhere else, and I think a third thread was log traffic

Gypsum Mine

"Loading" the wagons with squares of "load"

At the junction

 Another eye-catching feature of the layout was a working incline - a-la Denniston.

The locos would position wagons at the top and the bottom, a 'rope' would be hooked over the couplers, and away they'd go. In this hemisphere, as gravity is upside down, the loaded wagons going up drag the empties downhill.

Positioning wagons

So inclined

Long tweezers are used for uncoupling and to slip the 'rope' over the couplings

Up top, a 'stop board' is inserted into a hole between the rails to stop wagons rolling downhill until the loco fetches them 

The last third of this video shows the incline, complete with some lovely noises from the little shunting tractors (one below)

Narrow gauge meets standard at the top, where the plaster products are trans-shipped

A nice wee transfer table makes a compact staging yard with runaround facility...

Warren Lane

The final mesmerising layout. I could have spent hours watching this, in fact I spent so much time watching, I hardly took any pictures. Not that that matters, because pictures don't do it justice.

Warren Lane is simply a container yard, with a mainline behind. 

They run trains along the mainline of course.

They run trains into the yard and shunt them, picking up trains with arriving locos and so on, as you would expect.

The killer thing about this layout is that the container cranes WORK. 

Note the dangling silver Maersk container under the far/top of the near container crane, and the green one in the top pic is being loaded onto that truck...

Yes, as well as an operator at the front of the layout working the yard from this end, another operator picks up containers from trains and puts them on trucks, or into storage and vice versa. The remote controlled cranes made by Heljan are pricey (about a thou NZD) and no longer produced, but are bloody impressive. They run along the yard on single tracks, the top piece traverses, and the container-liftey-bit, raises/lowers, picks up and releases containers by electromagnets and can rotate (if you want to place a container on a truck that's not exactly parallel for example.

Its all gorgeously detailed, the rolling stock is superbly weathered and the sound is extremely noice too. Check out the work paint on that EWS loco above.

As I say, pictures don't do it justice, so here's some Youtube. I'm sure you can find more. I haven't seen OO scale since I was a Hornby/Triang lad, and was reminded what a nice scale it is for modeling countries with more confined loading gauges - a bit more beefy than HO, but perhaps a bit more useful than S.

Well that's Eurospoor. There's certainly some neat modeling going on in Europe.

So it's good night from me, and goodnight from him.