Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends

Having fallen off the railway modelling map for some six months, I am now managing to get some modelling done. Our business purchased a second outlet in July and needless to say, this has taken up much of my time!

Anyway, back to more interesting stuff. The priority is to get the layout fully functioning by EXPO 2010 (you haven't forgotten about that, have you?). The second and third boards needed wiring and a bit of trackwork completing. To ease myself gently back in, I started with the third board which only has two points forming a crossover. After a few teething problems (mainly me not reading the Tortoise instructions; the switching contacts aren't Left/Common/Right as I'd assumed, but Left/Right/Common), everything seems to work well on here. The temporary loose wires will be replaced by plugs and sockets at each board joint.

On to the second (middle) board now. This need a few bits of plain trackwork inserting before starting the wiring. Here are the three scenic boards assembled. Looks like I need a bigger house...

Brafferton Update Pt. MCXXII - Pointwork & Drives

It goes like that doesn't it? You do very little for a goodly while and then, all of a sudden, you do lots of things often in a very short timeframe. In these instances I reach for my Latin Dictionary and exclaim "Carp Dime!"; or something like that...

Anyway board No.1 is sort of moving along under its own momentum, so back to board No.2 and get the trackwork sorted. I've been cleaning the soldered elements of trackwork using a copper brush mounted in a mini-drill. This was suggested to me by Bob Jones at a recent NEAG meeting, and it has really helped clean the track and reduce the excess solder thereon.

At the same time I've been preparing the Tortoise Point Motors for fitting. Suitable holes were drilled in the baseboard so that the actuating wire could reach the switch. Several unsuitable holes were also drilled, but I'll refrain from telling you too much about those!

The motors have eight PCB type contacts on the bottom; two for the power to drive the motor and six contacts for a DPDT switch. As I'm using DCC, I reckon I'll only need one double throw switch to alternate the polarity on the crossover of each point. To avoid having to solder the motors into the baseboard, I've fitted each with some screw terminals wired onto the PCB. Each unit can then be screwed physically into position and wired using the screw terminals:

By having a couple of spares available, any failure can quickly be remedied without a soldering iron. That's the plan anyway!

I Dream of Wires

Another small step forward in the race to have "Brafferton" something like for Expo 50. As I am going down the DCC route, the layout will be wired accordingly. To be honest, I can't see that there will be that much difference from an analogue set-up other than the ommission of isolation switches. And I might still put some of those in yet, for de-bugging purposes.

So, on board 1, we have a very technical arrangement; two rails, two busses and three connections! You will see that I did manage to position some copperclad sleepers over a baseboard truss, hence the wire runs at an angle from the trackbed to the main board:

Here you may marvel at the complexity of it all! On the next board the busses will need to be offset to avoid the various point mechanisms etc. but here they can just follow the approximate line of the track. Short term there are flying crocodile leads to allow power to be connnected: