Friends of the Rail Forum

I've been very quiet recently, partly due to other activities getting in the way of the model railway, but partly due to doing things which are not very exciting visually. I've been running trains to find where are the dodgy bits of track, and gradually trying to fix those. I've also been concentrating on wiring. I've now wired five isolated sections (one at the end of Platform 1 so that the coaches can be removed from the train loco, and four in the loco depot so that more than one loco can be storred on each track). I've also started wiring points motors and colour light signals, although that has now come to a halt as I've run out of wire - when your layout fills a forty foot shipping container you need a lot of wire!

But one visible achievement is the control panel for the points and signals in the station, the goods yard and the loco depot. The only other points are two passing loops (one upper level and one lower level) and the points at each end of the spiral, and they don't need a control panel, just switches in a convenient place. The colour light signal at the top of the spiral will be controlled from the main panel. The bottom of the spiral emerges under cover so a signal is not needed. The two loops don't have working signals. I've also started constructing some Ratio kits of ground signals, again non-operational.

Another long period without any change to the wiring, but in the last few weeks I've done a lot.

I've replaced the plywood control panel with a thin metal one. The plywood was too thick for the switches. The plain metal switches are points, the red ones are signals, and the two blue ones reverse the polarity of the triangle.

I've started wiring the points motors. I had a lot of problems initially, mainly because in the mess of wiring under the baseboard I was connecting them wrong, but I've now succeeded in getting four points working with motors, three side mounted and one under-baseboard mounted. There are about four other points which I want to wire, and I'll do that in the coming days. Most of the other points can either be reached easily from the control position, or are worked manually by wires - I have two working at the moment and a third one about to be finalised.

I've wired up one colour light signal just to see what it's like, and I'll gradually do more of them.

I've also wired a few lights in the shanty town, and will gradually do more around the layout. In another post I've shown the lights in the Anglican cathedral, and I'll also add lights in the Catholic church and the mosque, both of which have stained glass windows. There'll be street lamps in some places. I plan on having two lighting circuits, one for lights which are only on at night (eg street lamps) and one for lights which are on 24 hours a day (eg the red light in the brothel).

Much of the early wiring was done with difficulty using an old and inadequate soldering iron. After watching a video of a UK railway modeller who highly recommended a particular brand of soldering station, I splashed out forty quid and bought one, and it's one of the best purchases I have made! Soldering is now quick, easy and efficient.

I attach photos of the new control panel and the soldering station. I'm not posting any photos of the spaghetti mess of wiring under the baseboard!

Recently started trying to organise the wiring a bit. It's still rather spaghetti-like, but I'm gradually organising it and labelling it.