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The "Look What I Made!" Topic.

My new LED project has been in for a few months now and is working pretty well. I’ve installed three strips that automatically light up in the direction the person is walking in. It also has themed days that auto activate when it gets dark and plays all evening in certain dates.

With this build I sourced a Dig-Quad to control the LEDs, a 12v PSU for the LEDs, a 5V PSU for the controller, a relay for the 12V PSU, in line 5 amp fuses for each LED strip, super bright WS2811 LEDs, Arc LED deep profiles with diffuser, enclosure for everything and a fan to keep the enclosure cool in the summer with mesh in front to stop spiders crawling in.

The two sensors I use is a Phillips Hue outdoor Zigbee motion sensor, which I’ve adapted to power from the mains instead of batteries. I then have a zigbee contact sensor on the front door. If the door sensor activates first it knows I’m leaving. If the motion sensor activates first it knows I’m arriving. The hue sensor can also see the lux level.

All the above data from the sensors and LED controller goes into Home Assistant and Node-RED to ensure the right effect is run when it’s dark enough to need it. It also does a daily check when the sun sets to determine if it is a themed day. It also integrates with the doorbell I've built. Here are a few pics and videos of the setup and with everything in place

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And here is the themed day effects. Just a note the colours don't come out very well on camera. They are a lot clearer in real life
 
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At our railway, here's something I've been helping with making and that is laying track running alongside a newly relaid Levenmouth line...very satisfying thing laying track, a real sense of achievement that makes you feel good.
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rob666 said:
As a good gardener, I'm drooling over those sleepers!
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All from different parts of Scotland though funnily enough most of the newer sleepers are from the old Leven line over on the left of the picture in which they would be replaced as the track has been relaid with the newer concrete sleepers.

So it is funny that the old track has literally moved just a few meters to the right instead of being sent elsewhere to the other side of the country like other sleeper situations.

But all seriousness, we do have some sleepers not fit for purpose so if you DM me nicely, I could get a contact to have some sleepers delivered at a price. ;)
 
Sadly, my days of juggling old sleepers are (just) over.
I did landscaping of a failed retaining wall recently, lovely job, most creative, but done on a thurs/fri, so I could have a whole weekend to recover.
Needed another week!
 
Ripsaw97 said:
I make coaster digital art and here is one that I've just finished, a phone lock screen with the main coasters, Sorry Spinball ,RMT and OctonaughtsI've not done an artwork for you yet so here is the main 7 . I hope you all like it.
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I have to say that this looks really good. It would pass for something official.
 
As anyone who lives, works or visits London knows, the tube map has become an absolute mess. Nothing quite fits together, there's no flow or balance or logic or internal geometries and symmetries to it or anything. It's a shame that arguably the most iconic wayfinding diagram of all time has fallen like this. Compare what we have now to my personal favourite from 1977. So I decided to make a new one, and while I was at it, have a bit of fun and add in some of the projects that are either planned or were before covid slashed all the budgets.

The first thing that had to go was the zones. Although I'd prefer to get rid of them entirely, on a system this big it's probably an inevitability. But that doesn't mean they have to be on the map the way they are, dictating the layout so much. I don't actually think they serve much purpose at all on the map. The vast majority of riders are either commuters who will know their zones (or their costs) or tourists who mostly stay in the inner zones where it doesn't really matter too much what zones they pass in to. If they must exist at all they can be made available elsewhere, such as the back of the map, or just add little numbers next to the station labels. Removing the zones allows the Sutton loop to be drawn as a nice rectangle, and on the version I made without National Rail, a perfect square, which I'm so pleased about. The current loop is one of the absolute worst features of the map.

When I started drawing, the intention was to properly follow TfL's own rules for interchanges. Shared platforms and tracks get lines that touch and a single interchange dot. Changes that require moving to different platforms get connector dots and lines that are seperate. At the moment, it seems almost random how they are displayed on the official map. Yet despite this, many big stations are a hideous mess of blobs. Unfortunately with the big stations serving so many services now this method doesn't really work how it was intended to back in the 30's. So I've decided to allow myself freedom to allow different lines to share a dot if they head in different directions. It should still be intuitive that lines crossing at 45 or 90 degree angles are not on the same platforms. This has allowed some really neat interchanges.

The other reason I've decided not to follow the dot rule strictly is I decided to prioritise line simplicity and get rid of the wiggles. The Northern line through Charing Cross (now seperated from the City branch of course) and the Central line are completely straight and form an x-y axis through the centre. I thought about having Crossrail be the east-west axis but the distortions required were too much. I think having it weave across the central grid still conveys what its purpose to the system is. The 'thermos flask' is completely symmetrical too. The entire central portion is based on a square grid, and an earlier draft has Crossrail staying higher up to avoid having extra kinks to get to Farringdon and sticking to the grid better, but the stretched out connections were unpleasant to look at. The southern, National Rail section has the familiar pyramid shape centred on Blackfriars.

The downside is there are a couple of stations which have really big, unweildy dot networks, but I decided to accept this compromise in exchange for preserving the central grid. Maybe I could have compromised and had the Central line have one dip for Bank. Overall though I can't believe how simple stations like Liverpool Street reduced to considering how that's looked on recent real maps. One of my other favourite tube maps was Beck's proposed 1961 map which had the Victoria line heading at a perfectly straight 45 degrees end to end. I didn't quite manage that - the northern end needing to connect with the Overground and the entire southern extension makes that impossible, but the central chunk is straight, and all it cost was giving Euston some big arms. Of course, Paddington is displayed correctly. I was dissapointed I couldn't get the straight line right across it from Richmond to Dartford that I've seen others achieve, but other design choices - especially the decision to show the proposed Northern Line extention to Clapham, meant it wasn't possible.

I've decided that the District and Piccadilly lines should swap over at the Ealing and Uxbridge ends, not only would this improve operations it would allow platform alterations to get level boarding and screen doors at most stations. Great Northern, Greenford line and the Victoria - London Bridge service is to be brought in to Overground. I've kept the new colours but decided against the new names as I find some of them a bit try-hard. The current parallel lines for non-tube services I've changed though, I felt with the new colours on the Overground it became hard to tell lines apart from a distance. I'm not a fan of the dotted line currently used for Thameslink as I find it distracting, but when I tried it out on my Overground, it actually seemed to work nicely. Crossrail has been made a full colour line, as from a rider's perspective it's just a modern, bigger tube, so why should it not only be different from the tube, but be drawn in the same way as the Overground which has much lower frequencies.

The parallel lines instead go to local and regional National Rail services, and long distance services are faint lines with thin hard borders, inspired by how central London NR services were sometimes shown on older maps. Obviously in my version, the railways have been renationalised so Network South East and Intercity are back. I thought a lot about how to colour these services, originally each terminus had its own colour, and although it made it easier to follow where services from multiple termini meet, it was just a mess of colour, and so I went for something done in the past by NSE - just using the NSE colours to group services based on which direction they head in, except for Thameslink. Reusing colours in opposite directions means they don't clash, and that the Watford - Croydon service can fit into both North and South Central regions. The downside to this is it becomes difficult to follow where two or three services interact, such as at Selhurst. Combining lines would have helped but it was more important to me to maintain seperation of each termini so those unfamiliar with the network can see that not every station in the suburbs goes to every termini in its grouping. For similar reasons I decided to seperate Tram and DLR services based on where they go.

One thing I do need to do to improve the map is add back in disability access. The current system of blue circles with the symbol in place of ticks and dots does not look good and gives too much weight on the right of the map. The distinction between step free access to train and step free access only to platform isn't entirely obvious without looking at the key to see which colourway for the circles is which. I'm not really sure how best to implement it though. I've thought about little blue dots next to the station names in the same way things like the Double Arrow or airport symbols go, with an empty circle for platform access and a full circle for train access; or changing the ticks to their own colour instead of the colour of the line, but neither of these really looks right or is very clear. Ideas?

The full size image is way too big for TS so hopefully the compression hasn't made it totally unusable lol. As always with these things it's a work in progress so any advice for usability improvements, tidying up or obvious mistakes I've missed ,give me a shout

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You had me the moment you suggested swapping the Armpit line back to the original District along my local branch, so I never have to step foot on a 73 stock again.

Amazing work mate!
 
I love this design!
I do want to know though; how did you decide where to end the map? The WCML stops at Watford Junction but the MML goes to Bedford (some 30 miles further north), this makes the "trains to St Albans Abbey" sign no where near St Albans City.
 
Thameslink Rail said:
I love this design!
I do want to know though; how did you decide where to end the map? The WCML stops at Watford Junction but the MML goes to Bedford (some 30 miles further north), this makes the "trains to St Albans Abbey" sign no where near St Albans City.
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Thank you for the feedback, and that's a good question! And one with a few answers.

I'd already extended the canvas multiple times to get more of the suburbs in, and even at this size I've still had to cram a few spots in the south and Stanstead. The amount of 'stuff' that's below Watford topologically and the need to connect with the Met means it has to be quite high up. The MML doesn't interact with anything else after the Northern line so the stops can be very close together to get more in. I've tried at every line to end at a major junction (although yes some just end when the next station is just so far from London that there's no point) and Bedford made sense as it's where that branch of Thameslink ends. I did consider going up to Tring or MK if there was room, but those services would probably be served by Intercity trains rather than NSE so they were a lower priority for squeezing in. One day I will do an even bigger version that does cover all of the South East which will go further than Watford and allow me to extend the MML so that St Albans City will be level with St Albans Abbey, which should be able to have its whole line included. I left it off this time because I just thought it would look ugly having it go in the 'wrong' direction or having to do a big kink in the MML.
 
Always love a tube map! I remember visiting London as a young kid and being fascinated by the crossing lines and seeing how it all fit together, working out how to get between places in the simplest possible way.. On the whole I'd say you've gone a great job with it - looks much less cluttered than the horrible mess TFL are using nowadays.

I particularly like the look of the lines serving Heathrow and the dominance of the crossing Central/Northern lines, though I'd be tempted to try swapping the colours of the Northern and Northern & City lines due to the similarity of the latter and the Met near Kings Cross. I note you've stretched some of the interchange blobs a lot to make the overall layout of the lines work better which is a reasonable trade-off but could be misinterpreted as being an indication of the walking distance at various stations - that said, having a long connector at bank/monument is entirely justified. There's also a couple of very long gaps between stations on both Central and Jubilee, presumably needed to make space for things elsewhere, I'd be interested to see what would happen if the rail services were removed.

All in all, really shows that if you bend some of the "rules" of the current design you can create something that's much better to look at and could be easier to use for those unfamiliar with the network.
 
Thank you!

Yeah Euston was the biggest headache. The planned connection of Euston Square into the main Euston seems to have been cancelled in real life but by including it made things a bit easier. At least it shows the two Northern lines are separate, although as I've fully segregated them anyway that's less important now. Would have been nice to get it more accurate to reflect the cross platform interchange but that would have meant compromising on the diagonal. I could have taken the Victoria 'up' and then along, but this would have spoiled all the lines at KX-StP converging into one, not a huge deal though as the NR stations could move up slightly to keep it all tidy. On the TfL only version I can extend that horizontal Victoria line section along and then up again to make a nice symmetrical sine wave shape that does a good job of maintaining the implied straight diagonal. But in the end I just decided the diagonal looked neater and reflects the original purpose of the line to cut through the older parts of the tube that make the x-y grid.

Interestingly I've been playing with a version including Crossrail 2, which adds a 6th station to that mess. This does force me to compromise on the Vic, but I actually think it tidies up the stations. I'm not satisfied with the route of the line though. I think it's at the limit of either my skills, the current map philosophy, or both. It does demonstrate how the current real map got the way it did - it's so difficult with a matured design to just drop in a whole new line and make it look like it's not forced in afterwards without changing everything else.

Your suggestion of swapping the colours of the Northern City line makes even more sense with this version

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I was watching a Jago video about Crossrail 2 the other day, and he mentioned "Euston St Pancras". It got me thinking: At what point will it be simpler to combine Euston, St Pancras, And Kings Cross in to one mega station with seperate "terminals"?
 
I'd much rather they didn't, Victoria to Thameslink at King's Cross St Pancras is already one hell of a trek (before someone mentions the Euston Road dodge, that's only helpful when going to King's Cross mainline).
 
Had a go at making a film poster

Tried to capture the sibling/duality concept woven into the film's setting, characters and structure, and hint at the zero-g set piece

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Also including a first draft and an alternative idea, just couldn't get the droplets looking right, still have a lot to learn

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