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topic: 3804Templot user guide?
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posted: 25 Oct 2020 11:09

from:

Phil O
 
Plymouth - United Kingdom

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Hi Martin,

I have had what is probably either a Eureka moment or more likely a moment of total lunacy, with regards a Templot user guide.

Produce a couple of videos, the first is to show how to build up the templates for a basic BLT, with a main single sided platform with a loop, a short bay platform and a few sidings. This would give the beginner the rudimentary basics to get started.

Then a more comprehensive video, importing a map, with more complex trackwork, including tandems and slips, double junctions etc. Possibly including a shed with a turntable. I think that would cover most formations that any modeller would need to produce a layout.

And finally one showing how to produce mixed gauge trackwork.

I think that would cover virtually all the eventualities we are likely to encounter. It might help if you explained where necessary the prototypical reason for such and such was done in a particular way, or your reason that Templot works that way.

This is only a suggestion and no more than that, but the idea has grown from your online seminar after Virtual Scaleforum.

Cheers

Phil.

posted: 25 Oct 2020 16:57

from:

Martin Wynne
 
West Of The Severn - United Kingdom

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Thanks Phil. That's about 3 months work. :)

There is already a video showing how to create a small wayside station:

 http://flashbackconnect.com/Movie.aspx?id=YB0K8b4SCkWSA2UnXoq4Vw2

It is only a few months old, but already significantly out of date because it doesn't show the new dialog for setting the adjacent track spacings.

I have several times over the years tried to create something along the lines you suggest. It always stumbles over the intended reader base -- an 00 modeller fresh from the Peco catalogue, or a P4 modeller who has been building track for half a lifetime? It is almost impossible to write for both.

For example, do you stop along the way to explain shoving timbers? irregular diamond-crossings? differences between GWR and REA switch geometry? transition curves? and the rest. A video would last for hours and no-one could take it all in.

Or skate over such details with a "click here for more information about that" every few minutes? The viewer would be jumping from pillar to post and lose all track of where the video was going.

The core problem is that when I first designed and released the public versions of Templot, 20+ years ago, it was intended as a tool for modellers who had been building track for years and knew what they were doing. Nowadays nearly all the new arrivals in Templot are in the "fresh from Peco" category, and Templot just isn't designed with their needs in mind.

It seems to me that what is needed more than anything is a precursor video which doesn't even mention Templot, but is designed to get modellers from commercial track to the handbuilding mindset, with some knowledge about prototype UK track thrown in.

I don't know the answer to any of that, which is perhaps another way of saying that I'm not the right person to do it.

Meanwhile, I really must get 227a released, which means that I don't have time at present to do any of that (nor if I'm honest, much inclination -- the coding is far more interesting :) ).

cheers,

Martin.



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