 på svenska |
The Timesaver |
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| If you visit SMJ you will most certainly be invited to the café corner at the end of the club evenings for refreshments. There you will find a timesaver which also is one of the coffee tables. |
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på svenska |
The Timesaver |
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| If you visit SMJ you will most certainly be invited to the café corner at the end of the club evenings for refreshments. There you will find a timesaver which also is one of the coffee tables. |
The man who introduced the time saver was the well-known model railway guru John Allen. You might know him as the man behind Gorre and Daphetid RR. Basically a timesaver consists of a fiddle yard where you are supposed to shunt the cars. The task is to shunt the cars from the newly arrived train to different sidings and in a certain order. And contrary bring some cars out from the sidings to the waiting train - also in a certain order - and make the train ready for departure.
Different incarnations of timesavers has been created, see e.g. the list of timesavers from the Model Train Magazine Index.
A timesaver can be a suitable building project to many of us armchair-modellers. You don't need a whole room for your hobby. Another aspect is that the traffic is the main idea. It is more interesting than normal layouts where you are mainly stuck to run the trains round and round. Besides that it is not necessary to make a lot of trees, buildings etc. Instead you can concentrate on the small areas and you can spend more time on the details. If you are building the timesaver as a table, as we did, we assure you, that your guests will have a lot of new and different subject to discuss. The timesaver in the clubroom is not the first one. It started years ago when our former secretary built a narrow-gauge timesaver, see the picture, which has successfully been used on several exhibitions and fairs. Besides that, we once built two identical timesavers in the G-scale to an event for SJ (Swedish State Railway). Two competitors competed in each heat. The task was to complete the switching movements in shortest time and a derailment or a missed move would then be costly! Indeed an appreciated competition. |
 The timesaver is built in H0-scale. It is manoeuvred from a switchbox connected to the layout by a multiple feeder. In this way it is possible to move to a position that is the most convenient place for operations to take place. The cars are market with coloured dots. On the tracks and on the manoeuvring box you arrange small corresponding coloured magnets in the order you want the train to be arranged when the shunting is finished. The different sidings have room for just a certain number of cars and of a limited length. We assure you that you will have to give the problem serious thought before you start the shunting, because every change of direction of the shunting locomotive will give you a point. The driver with least points is the winner. However, you can of course compete with yourself.
An illumination ramp gives sufficient light. The layout has a lid made of thick plate-glass. Our timesaver is rather long (approx. 2 m). Therefore it is equipped with wheels so we can store it under the main layout when necessary. Each station on the SMJ main layout has its history and is named after a fictitious place. Consequently the timesaver station is called Saxnora - the village from which the traffic once originated but ceased in the 1920's. Today it's obvious, the earlier torn up line has been resurrected in a box in the café. |
