My friend Tony and I had a railway weekend 6-8 March. I'd recently laid a new area of track for Portsmouth station, and it needed to be brought to life. We were able to make substantial progress on a number of fronts?
- We established a working, automatic way to join and separate locomotives at terminus stations. That's important for Portsmouth and the Eastleigh oil depot. (There's a traincontroller tip written for that).
- We discovered schedule sequences (another tip): these are essentially a set of schedules execute one after the other with the same locomotive.
- All the Portsmouth track was tested and debugged. I had to change one track feed, to improve train tracking, and add "start" sensors to each platform to allow trains to be tracked into an occupied platform for joining a new locomotive.
- Added uncoupling magnets on the Portsmouth platforms, and on Clanfield platform 1 (which will get short goods trains).
- Where sequences loop to create activity, Tony added some randomness to when the train stops at Petersfield (the "through" station).
Along the way several things decided to stop working. We have only one "Cobalt" point motor on the railway, in a location where access is difficult... and it failed. We took it apart and found the motor seemed to run OK, and put it back together and it seemed to work again but it wa failed again by mid morning on Saturday. Luckily I was able to get another one locally to replace it. We also had a normally reliable loco indicating a track short as soon as it was moved from zero speed.... in the end I removed the DCC decoder and powered it up from a 12v power supply. after a moment of taking over an amp it cleared itself and started running normally. Often this has turnout out to be a cracked gear in the bogie - but this more wouldn't run with both bogies removed. Interesting.
All in all a very productive and enjoyable weekend.... need to lay more track and construct scenery before I'm ready for the next one now!