Once upon a time, I penned a couple of pages of scene setting, telling you what modules are all about, sharing some of my experiences from the US and generally outlining what we at the Fareham & District MRC have done so far. Finally, I invited anyone who is already involved in modular model railways to contact me and tell me what they are doing so that we can develop the DOGA standard to be as `inclusive' as possible of things others may already be doing in this field; this was also the thrust of the press release you may have seen in the mainstream modelling magazines. At the time of writing this article (early September) we have not had any replies to this appeal because, as I suspected when I set out on my quest to find a champion for a standard, nobody seems to have walked this way before. We have, however, had a lot of interest in the subject and hits on the Modules page of the Fareham Website have rocketed in the last 6 weeks. And oddly, in the letters section of the last journal there was a letter from Don Holmes also talking about Ntrak modules. You would think this was all planned wouldn't you! Incidentally Don, my club N gauge group have been talking to West Sussex Area Group of the N Gauge Society and I have been in close contact with the South West Area Group to discuss track adjusters, of which more in a later article.

This time I thought it would be a good idea to give you some idea of what the modular standard is likely to be, together with the reasoning behind it. So, just what am I looking at as regards a modular standard? Well, the starting point is that there are already two standards available for 16.5mm gauge track, but they are both for HO gauge. The first, and probably the most well known, is the NMRA standard used in the US. This is very similar to the NEM standard used on mainland Europe by the EUROTRACK association (our near neighbour and fellow WAMRC member, the Solent Model Railway Group, are members of this organisation; they host the UK EUROTRACK show in Southampton each year, and they have modules built to the NEM standard). Our Chairman, Charlie Bloomfield, tells me that there is a group based near him that runs HO modules to the NMRA standard and so you will not be surprised to hear that I don't intend to go off at a tangent and with a system that is completely incompatible with these. Indeed Soberton, the layout that started us off down this road in the first place is actually built to a fairly close approximation of the NEM standard.

So why not just adopt the NMRA/NEM standard and have done with it I hear you cry. Well for a start both of them are for HO not 00, and neither of them reflect UK practice; and one issue which has a particularly DOGA spin on it is that both the other standards specify Code 100 rail while DOGA has just gone down the road (and quite rightly in my opinion) of specifying a track standard which uses code 75 rail. Clearly, if we have any faith in our own track standard then the other two systems have to be considered as non-starters. That is not to say that I intend to rule out anything with Code 100 rail on it, don't forget that Soberton is built using ORDINARY Peco Streamline which has code 100 rail.

So, what is the standard going to be? Well the NMRA/NEM standard is based on a basic 4' by 2' unit but the unit length is not 4' it is multiples of 2'. Why? Well I think it was Philip Parker who said in the onlinendebate that he could not carry a 4' baseboard on the train, but that he could carry two 3' boards bolted together face to face, this would give him a module length of 6'. Oddly enough, the reason I was given in the States for the NMRA ~ standard being multiples of 2' rather than 4' was exactly that, except that is was carry onto a plane rather than a train. In the US it is the duty of the Modular Convention organiser to have a couple of 2' x 2' modules available in case they are needed, and I would see that being the case here as well, in fact Soberton has a choice of fiddle yard exit boards which convert from flat earth to geodesic, 2 are 2' long and 2 are 4' long.

How wide should the boards be? Again the NMRA standard is 2', but it does allow for wider boards to be used. It says that if you build a board that is over 2' in width you should mark the end to show where a standard 2' width board should be positioned to link with the over width board. We have taken that one step further and actually have 12" wide boards that form the corners. You don't get much scenery on a 12" wide board and I think they will be rare beasts, but we will allow them in the standard. Height is also an issue, the NMRA standard is 40" from floor to rail top, and the NEM one is 1 metre. I intend to propose we go with the 1 m variant because both standards include a + or -1" adjustment, and if you do this you are effectively working to the 40" standard anyway.

Finally on the subject of baseboards, what about corners? Well, I am working on that one and I have an answer which is dictated by the fact that one of Fareham's infrastructure modules is a triangular junction. This is 8' along its straight edge and 4' 6" front to back. The practical upshot is that this makes a corner board 4' 6" along its two outer edges. Going into greater detail here would probably take up the rest of this edition of the Journal and I don't think the editor would thank me for that.

Trackwork.

The basic requirement for running lines on a module is two, one up, one down. The NMRA allow a third `inner line' at a different spacing to the two main running lines that can be used for shunting purposes although it is not compulsory to have this track. My proposal is going to be for an up and a down line with a 2" spacing between track centres and this is the core requirement for NMRA and NEM modules as well. We will `drive on the left' as for standard UK practice and there should be a space of about 4" from the end of the module before any pointwork is encountered. Where practical any crossovers should be of the trailing variety. Finally, the running lines should be displaced towards the front of the module. On a standard 2' by 4' module the centre line of the right-to-left track should be 5" in from the edge on the public viewing side of the baseboard, the centre line for the 6' way should be 6" in from the edge and the centre line for the left-to-right track should be 7" in from the edge.

The only thorny question in the Trackwork section is how you link from one module to the next. The NMRA solution is to utilise a piece of 6" Atlas set track, you end the rails on your module 3" from the edge of the board, when you connect it up you use 2 pieces of track to bridge the gap to the next board. The NEM solution is similar, except that it uses two 4" lengths of rail for each track that crosses the joint. We looked at both of these solutions at Fareham, indeed we actually started to implement the NEM solution but we were fare from satisiied with the results and so we have borrowed an idea from the SW area Group of the N Gauge Society - track adjusters. These gadgets are still undergoing a certain amount of research and development at Fareham, mainly in simplifying their construction and with our editors permission I will devote the next article to describing them and also how we intend to bridge the module to module gap electrically.

To read Elliott's previous article introducing modular layout concepts, click here.