Certainly you should not feel shame; your layouts are quite a bit better than many that I see drawn by students in the UK.
Not missing out any trap points is certainly something that should be relatively easy for you to train yourself to be good at.
It will need a bit of study and application to sort out 3 to 4 and vice versa transitions but one likely to repay the effort.
Understanding freight operation is much harder to do purely theoretically than if you can merely witness it. Try to visualise what it must be to have a locomotive at one end and then a string of wagons stretching into the distance and often these are pretty basic vehicles. Traditionally they may not even have been braked but even modern wagons that can be quite sophisticated in many ways tend not to have any electrical connections and therefore the only communication from end to end apart from the actual pull / shove motion is the air pipe which charges and also applies the brakes. Except for shunting movements the locomotive always needs to be in the front so that it can pull rather than push the train- hence the need for it to run round when there is a change of direction required.
Despite what the IRSE Exam tends to indicate, freight acceleration and indeed braking is quite a bit lower than for passenger. Trains tend to be heavy and therefore particularly influenced by gradient. Each vehicle tends to be quite short and there often is a degree of slack in the couplings so when starting there is actually a delay between the front and the rear of the train moving and when it finally does so typically there is a noticeable jerk. Hence even if the loco is powerful it is necessary to start a train slowly to avoid the shock causing the train to part. Since the brake demand propagates along the air pipe, this takes its time to work its way back to the rear of the train and so again it is wise to apply brakes gradually or else the back of the train smashes into the portion that is already being braked. Once the brakes have been applied, they then take quite a time to get them off again as need to recharge all the various brake reservoirs on each wagon. They are therefore not easy to control. The point is that once the train has been got moving then you don't want to stop it, but having decided to stop it then you can't suddenly change mind again.
Historically there was much shunting, taking out portions of one train to sort the relevant vehicles so they could be left at a station to transferred to another train. Nowadays freight trains tend to be kept largely in a fixed formation and are often loaded / unloaded on the move where the cargo is coal or aggregate etc carried in hoppers. However there can be vehicle defects and rather than delay the whole train, then the offending vehicle is removed from its position by a shunting operation that cuts the train, then places the then end vehicle into a "cripple siding" to wait fitter's attention whilst being out of the way of other traffic, before the portions of the train are re-joined without it and then proceeding on its way. The 1999 layout gave such an example.
Regarding the operational impact of signalling; look at a layout (e.g. an IRSE Module 3 plan) and imagine a particular route set and a train about to enter it; consider which other movements on the layout would be simultaneously possible and which would not until the first movement has come to a stand and released its overlap. Suggest if you practice doing this it will help you spot such things more easily in the exam.
I have attached a scan of my comments on your plan to this post.
PJW
Not missing out any trap points is certainly something that should be relatively easy for you to train yourself to be good at.
It will need a bit of study and application to sort out 3 to 4 and vice versa transitions but one likely to repay the effort.
Understanding freight operation is much harder to do purely theoretically than if you can merely witness it. Try to visualise what it must be to have a locomotive at one end and then a string of wagons stretching into the distance and often these are pretty basic vehicles. Traditionally they may not even have been braked but even modern wagons that can be quite sophisticated in many ways tend not to have any electrical connections and therefore the only communication from end to end apart from the actual pull / shove motion is the air pipe which charges and also applies the brakes. Except for shunting movements the locomotive always needs to be in the front so that it can pull rather than push the train- hence the need for it to run round when there is a change of direction required.
Despite what the IRSE Exam tends to indicate, freight acceleration and indeed braking is quite a bit lower than for passenger. Trains tend to be heavy and therefore particularly influenced by gradient. Each vehicle tends to be quite short and there often is a degree of slack in the couplings so when starting there is actually a delay between the front and the rear of the train moving and when it finally does so typically there is a noticeable jerk. Hence even if the loco is powerful it is necessary to start a train slowly to avoid the shock causing the train to part. Since the brake demand propagates along the air pipe, this takes its time to work its way back to the rear of the train and so again it is wise to apply brakes gradually or else the back of the train smashes into the portion that is already being braked. Once the brakes have been applied, they then take quite a time to get them off again as need to recharge all the various brake reservoirs on each wagon. They are therefore not easy to control. The point is that once the train has been got moving then you don't want to stop it, but having decided to stop it then you can't suddenly change mind again.
Historically there was much shunting, taking out portions of one train to sort the relevant vehicles so they could be left at a station to transferred to another train. Nowadays freight trains tend to be kept largely in a fixed formation and are often loaded / unloaded on the move where the cargo is coal or aggregate etc carried in hoppers. However there can be vehicle defects and rather than delay the whole train, then the offending vehicle is removed from its position by a shunting operation that cuts the train, then places the then end vehicle into a "cripple siding" to wait fitter's attention whilst being out of the way of other traffic, before the portions of the train are re-joined without it and then proceeding on its way. The 1999 layout gave such an example.
Regarding the operational impact of signalling; look at a layout (e.g. an IRSE Module 3 plan) and imagine a particular route set and a train about to enter it; consider which other movements on the layout would be simultaneously possible and which would not until the first movement has come to a stand and released its overlap. Suggest if you practice doing this it will help you spot such things more easily in the exam.
I have attached a scan of my comments on your plan to this post.
PJW
(01-09-2014, 03:07 PM)asrisaku Wrote: Dear PJW
Thanks for your kindly patient reviews.
-I truly feel sorry about the mistakes that I should not have done and I feel shame on my attempts.
-After looking the reviews, I need to work out freight train operation and overlap locking the point in converging direction and others.
Thanks and take care,
Arnut
PJW