New reports

Little activity on the railway for a long time. So we have planned a railway weekend for May 2023; that means work to get everything to a good "known" state. 

This has been my "to do" list:

1. Fix the piece of track that buckled in the heat last summer
2. Take photos of new locos (Dapol Pannier tank, Scotrail class 170, GWR Class 800)
3. Add decoders to GWR class 800
4. Add new loco photos to train roster, and re-print
5. Purchase Traincontroller V10 & install
6. Add photos of new locos to TrainAnimator
7. Add new locos to Traincontroller
8. Program the new signals
9. Mount new 7" camera display
10. Add magnets for the carriage sidings
11. Write driver instructions for Portsmouth, Clanfield, Eastleigh
12. Add a piece of wood at the front edge for Portsmouth to protect the brick paper
13. Purchase and fit new number plates for second Farish "Castle" class
14. Speed profile the new locos
15. Reprogram decoder for second Castle class and update in Traincontroller
16. Look into the turntable, which seems to have stopped turning. Contact cleaner?
17. And along the way, update the website to Joomla 4

Mostly complete! I need to do the speed profiles, and understand the new TC10 features. 

Was it really 2 years since the last railway weekend? With Covid intervening, I guess it was. Since the last weekend I'd added stop sensors for two blocks, and added quite a few signals to allow manual driving interlocked to automatic train operations. I'd added uncoupling magnets to the carriage sidings in Portsmouth. And I'd bought some new throttles and sound decoders. 

We used the new DT602 & UT6 wireless throttles. For train driving they're OK; for some reason they lock up when used for CV programming. Interestingly when plugged into LocoNet they program OK so it seems to be a wireless issue. Chris was able to use the UT6 single handed without problems. 

The turntable had stopped working; The TXC1 just stalled with its LED flashing meaning it hadn't reached a destination. It turns out that its slip rings needed cleaning, and to do that several of the "blanking" segments needed to be removed; needless to say I'd glued them in. A few minutes with IPA and cotton wool fixed that, and it is turning eagerly again.

An access road into the engine shed caused a short circuit as the loco drive onto it. At first we assumed this was an issue with the power reversing relay for the turntable, but eventually we found that the track was simply wired the wrong way round and it had never worked. 

It turns out that my carriage sidings are too short for 4 carriages: you can't have the magnet under the resting point for the couplings. They uncouple just fine, but you can't recouple again. My only ways out of that are to use an electromagnet, or just have three carriages per siding. 

And as for traincontroller.... it seems that if you go to drag a loco from a block when you are accidentally in edit mode, instead it drags the block away from its track. "Undo" put it back but doesn't fix all of the schedules it was removed from. That took a while to fix!

And the new sound decoders are great. I have a "Desiro" electric train sound, and a steam sound. Both have their moments but I love the power controller sound as the Desiro starts to pull away - just like the real thing. I'd worried that they wouldn't be loud enough to be heard when the models were running, but it has worked out fine. 

Not much had happened since last October. We had partly completed the "steam excursion" schedule, but a watcher had to call all the block signals where the train was required to stop. For it to work properly, we needed all the rest of the signals to be added to the railway and for Traincontroller block signals, when red, to force a SIGM20 signal to red. That pretty much took two days to resolve - adding in the end 13 new signals. 

There are still a few more needed:

At the top of the hill, on approach to Portsmouth;

The four fiddle yard roads that take two smaller trains each need "intermediate" signals;

The long block behind Portsmouth and running up to Petersfield needs to be split into two. That will mean a visible signal, and a hidden one. The catch is we have a spare sensor to add a stop marker for one track, but not the other (power zone G has 15 of 16 sensors used, but zone C has all 12 of 12 sensors used). I do have a BD4, so I could in principle add one more set of sensors to zone C.

Railway weekend October 2018 - so I had to do something!

I want to get to the point where you can run a "manually driven" train around the railway on a Traincontroller schedule. That meant being able to see where the trains are on underground sections, and see the signals. The simple answer: CCTV.

I was able to get on ebay a pair of 7" monitors, each of which could take feeds from two cameras. I also got three miniature cameras. o provide light, I got LED tape lights. The cameras are mounted to the baseboard and look along the track pretty much head-on.

My initial assumption was that I should have lights above the track I wanted to see, but not elsewhere. That resulted in very poor image quality. We added diffusers; it just kept getting worse. Eventually we found the solution was to have light everywhere, with no "blacked out" zones. The image quality was much better.  We added two aspect signals, with the direction reversed so they face the cameras. 

So, a simple solution, that works well!