Little And Often

Whilst blog updates have been quite sparse lately, it doesn’t mean that progress hasn’t been made. Just that photos of wiring aren’t the most exciting!

Work on the layout has progressed on the ‘little and often’ principle, with some work being done every day, even if it’s just half an hour to the extent that wiring the layout is now complete. 

Electrickery is still a dark art as far as I’m concerned and I’m sure that any electrical genius will despair at my efforts, but working in a logical (to me) manner and testing my work as I go has given me hopefully robust electrics that work and I understand should anything require attention. 

The layout is fed through the fiddle yard, with two isolating sections as I expect operation to be one engine in steam with the occasional visitor from a brickworks or quarry loco.

Wiring started with two dropper wires being soldered to each rail (it’s easier to solder a second one on now than trying to reconnect any that come adrift after scenic work is completed). Underneath, these are screwed into chocolate block electrical connectors and these were marked as I went with the two wiring colours I’d chosen (blue and white in this case) so that the correct polarities would be connected up in time. Any dropper wires from turnout crossings were dealt with first and connected to the blue point operators with a third colour (green) wire. 

Once all the chocolate block connectors were fitted, I strung wires between each one in a bus wire type approach and everything was connected up. All worked fine and a big sigh of relief resulted. 

The controller is a simple Gaugemaster Combi, nothing fancy but it does the job and satisfies my ethos of getting this layout up and running quickly. 

With 68 days to go until Mickleover, I have a working layout!! A cause for celebration, but only a short one as there is a lot to do. But there is great satisfaction to be had from being able to put a loco on the track, turn the controller and see it glide along the track. 

Next job is to fit point control rods and then maybe a small amount of playing trains will be indulged in. By then I’ll be glad of being able to keep the boards the right way up all the time.