Saturday 30 December 2006

New Beginnings

Steve and I had an old-style planning meeting, but at the Ship at Upavon rather than at the Dog and Gun at Netheravon. He agreed that we should stick to Plan B, which is to say he will do Lynton and I’ll do Bratton. Accordingly I’ll do a fresh WBS.
I’m about half-way through indexing what I currently have on the Lynton & Barnstaple, but I’ve not been recording time spent. Therefore I cannot estimate the time remaining! So I’ll keep a record from now on.
Meanwhile I’ve bought Jeff Geary and John Shaw’s book Track Construction and the accompanying software (Trax2). When I get that far I should be able to use it to construct track templates and even the whole layout plan.

Sunday 17 December 2006

Work Breakdown

Work breakdown indeed! I’m out of sync, doing things on my WBS without fleshing it out in sufficient detail. What I’d intended to do was to put each phase of the WBS here, but then I started on some tasks and ran into problems. Among other things, the WBS didn’t have in any detail the time needed to administer this blog. Since doing the blog is part of the learning curve for me, that’s a bit of an omission.

Another problem was the reading I did the other day as ‘Research’. I didn’t prepare my visit to the British Library well enough, so some of the information I went looking for I already had, some was not available there anyway, and I wasted an hour by not booking the source in advance.

The WBS I wrote for that task read:

1.3 By Sunday 17th December 2006 I’d like to have produced a schematic of the type, position and operation of the signals at Bratton Fleming in the period I’m modelling: 1908. There is a useful web site (Railwest) that gives some information, but I’d do well to read a copy of Gordon Brown’s book on the operation of the railway. I have a British Library reading card, so getting the book should be no problem (no sight of it on eBay!). It might also be worth re-joining the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway Association. I let my membership lapse years ago because of some internal wrangling, but it would be very useful to tap into all that knowledge again. I also believe that there is a copy of station plans in the Hampshire Record Office at Winchester, and possibly a copy of a survey that the London and South Western Railway made of the line in 1922 (with other sources, I should be able to say what the state of play was in 1908). The cost of visits and membership I estimate to be 15 hours in time and £20 cash.

I’m not sure that the task numbering is rugged enough for the task, but never mind for the moment. I found that Gordon’s book was a self-published typewritten precursor to the one he later published with Prideaux and Radcliffe. Therefore I already had all the information I was likely to get from that source. So I need to produce another task, which is to read through the information I already have and index it. I need, in essence, a project library. I remember reading in Richard P Feynman’s book What do you care what other people think? about his intense annoyance at the time that was taken in setting up the administrative side of the inquiry into the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Like him, I can now appreciate why it’s important to get your ducks in a row.

I’ll take time to re-write the WBS, and I’ll use guidelines I came across in G.M. Horine’s Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Project Management.

Meanwhile, on work breakdown of a different nature, Steve is evidently now having misgivings about us abandoning Barnstaple Town. Long ago in a land far away, or 10 years ago on the Hampshire/Surrey borders, Steve and I sold our Barnstaple Town layout. Steve and family were in the process of moving, and I had no idea that within 6 months we too would have moved house and ended up only 10 miles away from them.

We got together for ‘planning meetings’ in The Dog and Gun, only we never got past planning. Can you see a theme developing? The plan, such as it was, was for a newer, larger, Barnstaple Town layout covering the L&B line from its terminus to the Pilton Causeway level crossing.

Just over a month ago, Steve dropped the bombshell that he wanted instead to model Lynton: a layout that’s not easily shared between modellers who each want to run rolling stock in their own time. On that basis, I started this project to model Bratton Fleming. However, Steve has come back from a visit to Warley Model Railway Exhibition having seen someone else’s Lynton. Now he has doubts, and is considering coming back to our original plan.

There is a lot to be said for Barnstaple: the sweeping curve that takes trains behind trees, in front of a river, and between buildings has lots of potential. It’s just that I’m quite warming to Bratton, now, and I know I can’t do both.

Oh and Steve thinks we should build a model of Chelfham Viaduct for the Howard Clark Trophy!

Thursday 14 December 2006

Research

Used a spare couple of hours to read Gordon Brown's self-published book on Lynton & Barnstaple Operation. It was the precursor to the Brown, Prideaux & Radcliffe book now in print in an Atlantic impression.

It was in the work breakdown structure to do, it's just that I haven't got as far as putting the WBS on this blog yet. I noticed in passing that the British Library's collection of L&B magazines is incomplete. Now that the L&B Railway Trust is offering re-prints of the earliest magazines, perhaps they ought to pass them on to BL?