Rug-railways pre-date my attempts at serious model railway layouts, and I wish I had never tried to make the transition from just playing train to becoming a would-be modeler. There is no stress with a rug-railway. You lay it out as quickly as possible, and then take it up at the end of the session. If you don’t really like the track layout you’re not stuck with it, you just don’t lay it out that way again. There’s no need to fiddle around with a soldering iron trying to find out where the poor connection is that is stopping your train from running, because rug-railways are clockwork, steam, on-board battery powered, or even just push-along. There’s no need to try and position point motors or uncoupling ramps so that they work correctly, because you just reach down and do the job directly using the big hand from the sky.
My rug-railways from years ago were clockwork powered, and after setting up the track, my first job was to calibrate the engines we were going to use. I would work out how many turns of the key were needed for each engine to run a set distance so that it would coast to a halt when it reached the destination station. These stations were usually terminii. I didn’t go in for round and round layouts and solitary sessions, my rug-railways were a group activity. We would each have a station, three or four of us, depending on how many were around at the time, and we would make up trains and send them to each other. Once the train arrived the wagons were put into sidings at the station, and then we would negotiate amongst each other for who wanted what. One brother would ask for a cattle truck and some coal wagons, my sister wanted a passenger train with at least one first class carriage, sometimes I would decide I wanted to exchange engines with someone else, or perhaps we would send the breakdown special out to wait in a different station for a while.
When I started to grow up I gave up all that, and I suppose it wasn’t just my fault, my sister discovered new interests, another brother began to teach himself guitar, and I became obsessed with visual realism, and with electric controls. I really wish I hadn’t; life became an endless round of track-cleaning, locomotive wheel-cleaning, dead frog electrification, and baseboard thumping. All to try and make that obstinate engine run forwards or backwards reliably to pretend it was shunting the yard.
Partly by coincidence, I have just resumed playing on the floor. I was wandering around the local Focus DIY store, and passed a largish box with a model railway inside. I looked through the cellophane to try and see what scale it was. It looked like 7mm to the foot, gauge O, as I always call it, (incorrectly), but there was nothing on the packet to confirm that. It was battery-operated and infra red controlled, with lights, sounds and smoke. I came back the next day, having done enough gardening work to have the spare cash, and took a box home with me. I found 8 nicad batteries, set all the track up on the carpet, and started playing.
The new trainset is one of the best rug-railway systems I have seen in a long while. You get enough track and points in the box to make up an interesting variety of layouts in a small space, and it runs beautifully, even on the varying surface of a Chinese rug. It is robust enough to not be bothered by a cat on the line, and runs as well going backwards as going forwards. I haven’t yet managed to derail any of the trucks when pushing them around reverse curves or over points. And the models themselves are quite realistic, not the cartoon-style Wild-West engines festooned with cowcatchers and clanging bells that formed the role-models for most toy trains.
Allowing for the time to vacuum the carpet, it took me 10 minutes to set up the layout shown in the heading picture. I let it run round for a few minutes while I mastered the controls, and then began to play properly.
Since there are three trucks it is possible to set a shunting challenge, such as completely reverse the order of the trucks.
The only problem I encountered was after the original batteries ran down and I replaced them with fully charged high-capacity nicads. The problem now was that the engine was running faster, and I hadn’t realised that there was a minimum on time. After pressing the button to make it start moving forwards or backwards, there seems to be a delay before it will then recognise and act upon a stop command. Shunting in the short sidings I had laid out suddenly became a succession of disasters.
I’m fighting my instincts, which tell me to get the screwdrivers out, dismantle the engine, and fit some sort of voltage-drop device into the battery leads. I feel I ought to wait a few weeks before beginning the butchery. For the moment, I’ll just make longer sidings to allow for the 9 chuffs before it can be stopped.
