New reports
At last, the final pieces of track have been laid! All of the points feeding the turntable/engine shed area were laid before Christmas 2015, but the turntable itself still needed to go in before the tracks around it could be added.
We have a Fleischmann 9152C turntable. This needs to be sunk into the baseboard, to a depth of around 8mm deeper than the plywood and cork. By chance, there were two sets fo supporting timbers under the turntable that have had to be cut away. Most of the plywood cuts were simple using a jigsaw; the bits above the softwood supports, and cutting the supports themselves, was done with an "oscillating saw" tool whose blade vibrates but doesn't rotate. The trick is to not press hard - doing so stops the vibrating action. The softwood in particular was really easy to cut that way.
Mounting the turntable itself is easy: impact adhesive holds it into place. Joining the tracks wasn't so simple. It's well documented that neither Peco nor Fleischmann fishplates inter-mate with each other. The reason is that the Fleischmann track has a "flat bottom" profile with an very wide flat base, and the Peco code 55 track has a very bulbous centre section. As usual, after you've completed the job you discover the right solution...
Initially I set about using the Peco nylon fishplates to join the tracks; those stretched onto the Fleischmann track OK. However they also dislodged easily while trying to mate the Peco track onto them - not good with a clock ticking for the Evo-Stik glue to set.
The solution came to me at the end: use a Dremel tool plus grinding stone to grind a little off each side of the Fleischmann track flat bottom. I'd removed about 5mm of plastic base from the Fleischmann rail joiners to give access for fishplates. (See the "before" and "after" picture below). You can then fit a Peco fishplate with a bit of pressure applied. The rails join at almost identical top positions, but the peco sleepers are approx 1mm above the baseboard.
The Peco track was laid onto a 1mm plastic "spacer" then a 0.5mm spacer to step down the height above the baseboard. As usual the track was glued down, and seems to be stable.
Finally I've modified the bridge to remove the spring contacts from the bridge track to the exit rails. Each exit rail has its power fed directly; those contacts would only cause shorts as the turntable moved. I also bypassed the relay that isolates a short length of track at each end of the turntable (I used two solder bridges between relay pins marked on the photographs)
The turntable is powered and controlled by a CML Electronics TXC1 controller, mounted under the baseboard. It indexes automatically to the next track position and skips unoccupied tracks. It's set to use DCC base address 401, and address 451 for computer control.
The remote knob and display have been integrated into a DTM30 control panel.
November 2015: finally the last point has been laid. It must be nearly 10 years since I started.....
We completed the Portsmouth Station area in March. That just left the goods Yard to go, and the access point from the main line was already there. So with an operating weekend set for mid November, I thought I'd get going again in mid October and got the first few points down. Then the operating weekend was cancelled, so I slowed down.... then with around 3 days notice it was back on so I had to get on again! A mammoth session from 3pm Friday to 5pm Saturday saw the last point laid; all the point motors added; the point motors wired to DAC20; and all the power wiring to the BDL168 completed and tested. Now we have just the turntable, carriage sidings & engine shed to go.
The 3 tracks through the container yard use 3 way points. They are the first (and last) of them I've used. The good feature is: they are inherently made "DCC friendly" with carefully placed isolating sections. The slightly less good feature is: some pieces fo track can only get power through the sitch blades. I thought I'd found those and added wired power feeds, but discovered a need for two more after laying them. Oops.
traincontroller now has access to its last 3 blocks where it can send and receive trains. The track got well tested the same evening, and seems to be robust. We've worked out some logic and rationale for the goods train movements, and sketched that out in the "operations" section of this website. Welaos worked out some more "how to drive traincontroller" issues - getting the hang of schedule sequences to make a trian visit one loction, conduct 5 laps of the railway then return. It had to be possible!
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!
It seems there's been no progress since the last railway weekend, a good 6 months ago. Oh well.
This weekend we've put all of the effort into two apparently simple projects:
- Adding more backscenes behind Eastleigh and the first part of Portsmouth
- Adding a working level crossing.
The backscenes were quite simple. We use the Gaugemaster 12" high backscenes. A new complication though was a need to match the horizon height in a corner, and a need to join two completely different backscenes on a 15' run. The former wasn't too hard: we were able to get it roughly right, and there was already some trees in the corner on one wall. We then cut out trees from another backscene and superimposed them onto the second backscene. The result: a very nice clean join. The join from a rural backscene into an industrial one is a bit more abrupt: I suspect that a similar approach - harvesting a picture of a building or tree that can be superimposed - may be needed.
The level crossing took two days: I'm not at all sure where the time went. More details in this article.
At the end of all this: the railway now looks more the part, simply because of the backscenes. We've done some essential planning for how the corner between Petersfield and Eastleigh will develop, and added an animated scenery item. The general idea is, now I know how to do that I can go on to do more on my own....
Finally - a weekend working on the railway. The plan this time was train operations: no more scenery work. My friend Tony Ellary visited and over 3 days we've made a lot of progress setting up more Traincontroller operations.
- We worked out how to interlock a DTM30 with Traincontroller: there's a note in the "tips and tricks" section.
- We reconfigured some of the short tracks in the fiddle yard. Three of the 4 roads that can take two short trains will now take trains up to 64cm long: sufficient for the "voyager" trains.
- I finished the remaining coupler conversions from Microtrains to Dapol magnetic in NEM pockets.
- We've set up a load more schedules for Clanfield and the new Easteigh depot
- Various "fixes" to logical errors in the way I'd configured Traincontroller
- Re-did all the loco speed profiling (version 8 uses a different approach)
- Set up some three sets (a dreadful name!)
- Caught up with the loco photograps for Train Animator
- Fixed the Eurostar, which wasn't properly driving both bogies: the driveshaft at one end of the motor was only just contacting the hexagonal holes in the motor flywheels. The solution was to move the driveshaft back a bit at the bogie end.
I think that will be it for a while!