Lessons from an exhibition

Corrieshalloch made its exhibition debut last weekend at RailexNE in North Shields, albeit as a "work in progress" rather than a finished layout. Overall. I was relieved that it worked pretty well, with the soldering iron having to come out on only two occasions for repairs. A succession of three trains (all of my available locos) supplemented by a class 37 running light engine (courtesy of Mick Simpson) dutifully paraded back and forth. The comments of "oh, look at this one: it's a snowscene" were frequently heard, sometimes intended as a joke but not always. Alisdair Campbell (whose prize-winning Strath made a static cameo appearance) had the inspired idea that we block the line with a snowdrift and suspend operations for an extended lunch break.

One lesson learnt was in the setting up and taking down. It took me a whole hour from close of play to driving away, which seems like a long time given the size of the layout. Although I was working alone, I decided that a lot of time was spent fiddling with nuts, bolts and washers for assembling the legs. As a result, I have now glued washers and nuts to the inside of the legs, and modified the bolts to have a handy wing nut on the outside (photo below). This, coupled with a bit of widening of the holes, should mean that assembly is much quicker and easier in future.

The other major lesson relates to the appearances of the soldering iron alluded to above. Both repairs were to the homemade bolts that connect the fiddle yard turntables. These were originally just soldered to a couple of pcb sleepers glued to the baseboard, but this was far too flimsy to withstand constant use. As pointed out by Mick (after one came off in his hand), heavier engineering is required! So version 2 will see the rails attached to heftier pieces of pcb that are screwed right through the balsa trackbed and into the plywood beneath. Hopefully this will be better. The photo below shows the version 1, as it was at RailexNE.

The turnouts at the entry to the goods yard are also a little bumpy, causing some wagons to couple up again against the operator's will. So another task is to iron out these minor issues with the track.

The good news is that the layout will appear again at Shipley on 20th-21st September, along with the 2mm roadshow, so feel free to pop along and say hello. With any luck, some of the issues above will have been ironed out, and another loco will be in service to boot.

Quick photo update

As you can see, I've started work on the landscaping, using various offcuts of polystyrene. At the front left there will be quite a steep river gorge, while you can see the beginnings of a hill and roads behing the track formation. The grey square is a planned foundation for some railway workers' cottages.

Tracklaying is complete in the fiddle yard, and I have put on all of the brass tubes for track alignment. However, there is still some wiring to be completed, along with some sort of "end-stop" to prevent disasters...

New Year Progress

During some time off work this week I finally got around to fitting the curved backscene board:

It is made from 5mm flexible ply, which turned out to be simple to use as I could bend it to shape in the existing framework, then fix with glue. Unfortunately I had to get a full 8x4 sheet, so I now have plenty spare. I thought about bendy MDF from B&Q but this was only a 4x2 sheet - not long enough for my whole backscene in one piece.

You can also glimpse the goods shed which has occupied idle moments over the Xmas holiday. There are still quite a few details missing, not to mention the roof, but the basic superstructure is in place. I will post better pictures in due course, but it is based on drawings of the shed at Garve.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Turnout Operation

I've recently been working on motorising the turnouts. Here is a short video of the first one in action:

Below is a side view of the trackbed. The turnout is operated by a servo motor mounted by screws onto a simple wooden frame. If you look carefully, you can see the operating linkage made from brass wire. I coiled it to give it extra spring length to protect against any inadvertent over-throw by the servo. The multicoloured wires from the servo simply plug directly into the ESU SwitchPilot Servo unit, which attaches to the main DCC bus and will control all four turnouts. Since the layout is small, I'm just powering this from the main track supply.

The last view is taken from underneath (with the baseboard upside down!). You can see the functional plastruct tie-bar, as well as the microswitch installed to change the crossing polarity. This is operated by a 12BA bolt through the tie-bar. The SwitchPilot Servo unit has some "programming" buttons which make it easy to set the start and end positions of the servo movement, as well as the movement speed. The turnout is changed via the "accy" button on my DCC handset. If I get fed up of the couple of key presses that are required, the SwitchPilot unit has a band of extra terminals allowing push-switches to be wired in for each turnout.

Track 3

An update with some recent photos (of limited quality). I've just finished tracklaying on the scenic board, although testing and tweaking is still in progress.

The photo below gives an idea of the underside of the board. Dropper wires from each section of rail have been attached, but I've yet to connect all of these up. I've also installed functional tie-bars beneath each of the four turnouts. These still need to have servo motors attached - some experimenting is necessary with springing and microswitches.

Close up of one of the functional tie-bars on the workbench:

These essentially follow Geoff Jones' design in the Track book. The blades themselves are attached to cut down 12BA bolts which sit in the tubes you see here.

Track 2

Work in progress on the first turnout. The crossing was constructed separately in the Easitrac jig. Attaching all of the interlaced sleepers and wires in the correct order requires concentration. The plastic sleepers are still loose and not in their final positions. I'm thinking it will help with the other other stock rail and switch to leave the sleepers loose at this stage - in particular, it will allow me to clear a bit of space to solder the dropper wires. I'm attaching two droppers to each piece of rail as I go along - you can see some of these wires poking out from beneath the board.

Before laying the track I drilled/filed holes through the baseboard for the turnout operation. It's hard to see but I've attached a cut-down 12BA bolt to the switch blade, as recommended by Geoff Jones. This will sit in a brass tube and operate the turnout via a functional tie-bar beneath the trackbed. The current plan is to operate these from DCC via servos.

Track

At long last I've started tracklaying. Here are a few progress shots.

1. I'm using a mixture of Easitrac and PCB sleepers. So far I've glued down the PCB sleepers on the printed Templot plan. Essentially I'm following Jim Watt's practice of PCB sleepers for the switches and crossing areas, with Easitrac everywhere else. With the interlaced timbering, most of the sleepers are ordinary length. The reason for this hybrid approach is that I'm worried about the flimsiness of all-plastic points in this scale, and also the inability to make easy adjustments.

2. Close-up showing one turnout where I've used more PCB sleepers owing to the interlaced catch points (I wanted my sidings to hold as many wagons as possible!). You can see that I've started adding etched chairplates.

3. On the PCB sleepers I'm using Versaline chair plates (and will eventually use the accompanying whitemetal cosmetic chairs). Following advice in the track book I'm pre-tinning these on both sides. I used solder paint which makes this job simple. Owing to the non-standard sleeper arrangement, I'm not using the Versaline jig, just locating the chairplates by eye. I'm also not using them at their intended locations.