Tapiola Parish Model Railway Club

Track layout. For further reading about Project Kauniainen here

Loading of the truck begins. All except fiddle yard, steel tubes and trestles were ready on wheels.

Erecting of the layout starts. The original Idea was to use the laser beam spirit level for getting the layout absolutely straight but other members considered this a nuisanse and hence the spirit level wasn't used.

First module lifted on steel tubes...

...and here the last is being laid on top of steel to wait for alignment

Before aligning the modules rail joiners (fishplates) were inserted flush at interface to other end of each module.

Due to not sticking with timetable the last of the four corners got it's temporary track on site before the exhibition started.

And we were signposted.

After the modules were aligned and fastened to steel tubes the rail joiners were fitted.

The last corner has got it's rails.

The curtains were also added.

First train starts it's round.

The whole lot at Model-Expo 2004.

The trains were mostly hauled by Sr2 type (Lok-2000) locos and Opa's Hr1 pacific ("Ukko-Pekka"). Wagons were mailny assembled from brass by Kari and coaches were ready-to-run coaches modified by Johannis.

I'm very sorry, but this shot does not show Antti's new booster. The whole show was run with this new booster built following the design of SLAMRA's booster.

Time for teardown. It started with sliding the railjoiners aside and then loosening the modules from steel tubes..

The rail ends were protected with plastic covers.

..and after protection the modules were loaded into racks.

..dismantling was a snap!

..and soon all modules were loaded into racks. Note the old fiddle yard that has the cross bars added to fit the new system.

The layout has returned to the church..

..and this time we used the lift to get all to the basement. We left the club approx. 1 1/2 hours after closing the exhibition. Another record!

See also the Bug Report

Club's internal raport

Due to technical problems and timetable/organisation problems the layout was far less ready that I had expected!

The layout was built every day during last week (even during the day!). The greatest amount of work was certainly done by Mr P. Koivu.

After getting the pictures of M. Janda, K. Hovinmaa and others shooting at the exhibition I'll prepare a more technical resume of problems.

This time we were again transporting with Helsinki MRC (Pienoisrautatiekerho regd. ass., the PRK). They managed to get the lorry rental paid by expo organisers, and managed to arrange free transport to us also. Many thanks to Mr A. Alku of PRK for driving.

The size of Kaunianen is such that it didn't fit to original location of Tapiola club at the show. The organiser, Mt Ronald Lindberg called and asked if we could be located "on ice". He suggested the outer edge, but the steel plates covering the draining ditch are not solid enough to be used as foundation to layout so I asked us to be placed anywere else but not on top of the steel plates. hence the location was somewhat difficut to find (one guest said he searched us for a full hour!). The layout was prepacked "on wheels" (except the Bauhaus supports and long steel tubes) so the transportation was very quick!

On Thursday the lorry came slightly past 7 pm and we left the unfinished layout at ice hall at about 9 o'clock pm and continued in the Friday morning. One of the curves got it's rails on Friday so the setting up fas a difficult project. The first train was driven just before the audience came in! The main problems were car relay turnout motors and section joints within corner modules. Again the wirelss throttle's speed knobs were worn out and I still have a bug in the "PC-Eliminator" code: the system looses loco addresses (bug fixes welcome, the source code is at the web).

Teardown was fast! We had left the layout to the club after 1 1/2 hours of closing the show!

Club membes also assisted in teardown and transport of the Helsinki club's Löylymäki. The layout was slightly -- yet not severely -- damaged due to us having no experience in loading of Löylymäki -- we are very sorry for this.

I think we all got home about 10 o'clock in the evening.

Again, thanks for all those participating!