Beeching Axe

I had been finding it increasingly difficult to make compromises with what I wanted to do with the railway layout and the space available. Ideally I wanted to be able to set up a train consist (as our North American friends call it), set it going around the layout and then I could do some interesting shunting stuff in the station yard. This concept had worked on a layout I had built some years ago, but then I'd had much more room.

Raised track at the rear of the layout (see posts passim) was created to provide some scenic interest; the idea was to create an illusion of mainline running tracks separated from the station area by the difference in height. However the inclines were starting to cause difficulties with train running and it was clear that it would cause difficulties scenically too. Ironically it was lack of space that was the reason for the failure of this idea.

Unsatisfactory. That was my view as I tried to fit the quart of ambition into the pint glass of baseboard. In the end I decided to dismantle the whole lot, baseboards included, and have a fundamental rethink. Whatever I decide to do, it will have to be built in the attic as there's no room in the house for what I want to do. Before that happens some kind of flooring and insulation will need to be installed to prevent my frostbitten (or, depending on the season, roasting) foot coming through the ceiling.


Weather Report

Nearly a year ago I wrote about using a Raspberry Pi to upload weather data from a Fine Offset WH-1080 weather station to a website. For the most part the WH-1080 has worked well and has been a worthwhile introduction to weather data collection. At the time of writing the WH-1080 is being sold in the UK by Maplin for a whisker under £60 (product code N96GY).

There have been some hiccups with interruptions in data transmission from the outside unit. Prompted by an outage lasting over a day I bought a replacement transmitter, only for the original unit to start working again. It's still prone to occasional dropouts, seemingly without any correlation to weather conditions or invertebrate infestation. The latter stopped the anemometer until I was able to clear the spider webs.

Weather Station and Spider Habitat

Presently, however, the unit isn't recording wind speed or direction data. The receiver unit shows changing wind direction but not the wind speed, and neither are being uploaded to the website. This isn't just an issue with pywws, the Cumulus weather software isn't receiving the data either. Dismantling the anemometer showed nothing apparently wrong with it; not surprisingly as all that's inside is a reed switch and a tiny magnet. As repair wasn't possible I ordered a new unit from Maplin. And I'm still waiting for it. The buggers have taken my money (£5 with postage!) and it's still 'on order'.

Finally I decided to order a Davis Vantage Vue weather station and data logger from Prodata, who are selling them together at a 'special offer' price. The Vantage Vue consists of a combined sensor unit containing rain bucket, anemometer, wind direction, temperature and humidity sensors. Like the WH-1080 the sensor data is transmitted wirelessly to an internal console with an LCD display. An optional USB data logger is required to store data and send it to a PC. My plan is to use weewx, a linux-based weather software application, installed on the trusty Raspberry Pi in place of pywws (this program won't work with the Davis unit).

Presently I'm waiting for the thing to be delivered (every noise outside sends me to the window to see if the courier has arrived) and when it is, I'll document how I set up both it and weewx more carefully than I did for pywws and the WH-1080. I'll spare you the unboxing, though.