Progress (or otherwise) on Jeff's new layout

Thanks Ed. No, the deck sides are still "under consideration". I will be trying out a couple more ideas in the near future.

I do like the look of the half height plates as opposed to the full plates. :thumbs

Cheers, Gary.

Another new addition to the parcels stock is this Hornby Magazine (Dapol) six-wheel Stove R van in BR crimson. I am aware of the well documented faults with this model but it still makes an unusual addition to the variety of stock I have available to run. On receipt, I immediately immobilised the rotating end wheelsets with a couple of lumps of Blu-tack, oiled all of the axles, then placed it in service and it runs with no problems at all. It fits into the 1950s to early 1960s era in this colour scheme.






Later on, I will weather it and the CCT from Invicta Models. I may consider modifying the wheels to 14mm and doing a few other jobs at some time in the future. Such modifications are fairly well documented in the modelling press and online.

Next Saturday, the 15th August, I am hosting a British Railway Modellers of Australia (BRMA) meeting, so besides frantically cleaning up all the clutter around the house (or at least, that which will be in the "public" areas!), I am also trying to clear up the layout clutter and 'foolproof' the electrics.

To fix the latter, I am replacing the old double switches that allowed either inner or outer circuit to be switched between DC and DCC. this had a small risk attached in that if someone not in the know switched one circuit and used one of the crossovers, there was the potential for the two systems to meet, with possibly disastrous consequences for the DCC command station.

I needed a four pole switch, so shopped around on eBay and ended up with an eight position four pole rotary switch (actually, two of them, to allow for the upper circuits to be done the same way). Now, eight positions is way overkill, three or four positions would have been better, but these were the most suitable ones I could find, and they were very reasonably priced. I only want two 'live' positions and one isolated one.

After figuring out the wiring to allow the two track circuits to be powered separately by two DC controllers (actually an H & M Duette), but the whole layout to be powered at once by the NCE DCC system, I made a start this morning. It has involved a bit of rewiring but it is progressing. I have completed the DC wiring up, and am taking a short break, but when I go back to it, I will complete the DCC wiring to the switch.

While rewiring, I have also moved the two circuit breakers from their temporary positions to the main control panel.

This was the old temporary switch panel.




And this is the new arrangement, as yet unlabelled. I have put a mark where the DC live position is.




Doing it this way means that no one, not even I, can short it out or cause other problems. The whole LT part of the layout can only be DCC or DC at any one time.

A wise move Jeff, especially seeing how expensive the DCC gear can get. Nice looking little panel, it clearly shows what's going on. Good luck with the wiring, I'm sure the BMRA meet will be a great success.

How many folks are you talking about?

Cheers

Marty

Thanks Marty.

When I hosted a BRMA meeting last year, we had around 34 people turn up (according to my rough count).

Generally, anywhere between a dozen and 30 people go to most meetings. It also depends upon where the meetings are held; the more far-flung locations often get fewer visitors.

A quick update to say the DCC side is now working successfully and reliably.

I decided to hook up a second DC controller temporarily to the DCC connections so I could be sure I had the polarities correct for the two track feeds - the locomotives on the tracks each went in the same direction when the controller was connected, firstly to one track at a time, then to both tracks.

Once I was sure all was as it should be, I connected up the command station and turned on the power (with a just little trepidation, still!). I have just hada half hour running session with several DCC locomotives running on both tracks, so I am now happy, and especially, feeling secure that no one can accidentally switch anything across from DC to DCC on adjacent tracks.

I have now labelled the rotary switch on the LT control panel, so any visiting operator can see ata glance what it is doing.




Underneath, the wiring is still messy. I need to tidy it up but it works for the moment. The black wire cutting across from the 8-way 4-pole switch to the left of centre in the photo is actually cut too short and limiting the amount I can hinge the panel upwards, so that is another job for me to do … later.




I have also added labels for the terminal block with the track feeds out, 12V DC feeds in and DCC feeds in, making it a little easier to fault-find … hopefully, that won't be necessary, though! Again, much tidying up is needed. The track wires leading downwards at the left-hand end of the block are inadequate for DCC. At least using screw terminals makes it a relatively easy job to fix this.

Before the BRMA meeting on Saturday 15th August, I wanted to 'pretty' up the Church Hill. However, circumstances worked against me in the form of a gout attack in my left foot, so I had to minimise standing up for a while. As a quick fix, I used some of the Scalescenes road and pavement textures just as plain printed paper laid over some of the expanded foam.

Today, I re-did some of it, using the same printed bits attached to some card, then glued to the scenery properly. I ran a small amount of extra glue along the edge and put some grass material there.

This is by no means finished but it still improves the look considerably.

The lower road section is the access way to the cemetery. There will be more land sculpting and filling, plus stairs and pathways in the future.






Now: where did I put that Oxford Diecast hearse?

Sorry to hear you've got the gout mate, that's nasty stuff and I wish you the best and fastest recovery possible.

The church is looking good and once you get the rest of the scenery done will fit in nicely in that corner.

How did the layout perform in front of an audience?

Cheers

Marty

Thanks Marty.

The layout performed well, with only a broken wire to the programming track (due to my careless tidying up of the wiring!), and the Heljan class 16 playing up briefly when the first person arrived. The 16 performed faultlessly all morning, and on previous days, and soon recovered its reputation (as a model … the real ones had a poor reputation anyway!!).

Hi Jeff how many turned up to the meet?.Piran

I counted 21 not including my wife, who is very supportive and serves up tea and refreshments and chats to people.

My Heljan LT (ex-Metropolitan) Bo-Bo Electric no.8 Sherlock Holmes arrived today. After a quick check on DC on the rolling road, I fitted a decoder. I started with a Lenz Silver+ 21 but, like others have reported on RMweb, it surged and stopped repeatedly in one direction, and the lights didn't respond at all either.

I then tried a TCS EU621, a six function decoder which works faultlessly with the drive in both directions. However, there is an oddity with the lights: the lower two white lights come on with the direction of travel on function 0, as do the cab lights at the relevant end. Function 1 turns on the upper white light at the leading end and function 2 turns on the upper light at the other end. Now I feel sure that the cab lights should be the switchable ones on functions 1 and 2, so next time I take the 'lid' off, I'll have a look at swapping the connections - Heljan usually use identical two pin plugs for these so it should be straightforward … [gulp] I hope!

I'm not sure why the Lenz decoders have such a problem with this mechanism, but I think it is probably something to do with the BEMF settings. The TCS one I used boasts that it is self-adjusting for BEMF, and it seems to work, thus justifying that claim.

I have now solved the lighting glitch. It was as simple as flipping over the small lighting boards over the cabs. The cab lights now come on individually with functions 1 and 2, while all three white end lights turn on (and off) with function 0.

Odd looking beast IMO… Ah, (quick bit of research) underground electric… explains it.
Looks like they've done a good job on it. Glad you got the lighting sorted.

Marty

Well! I'm back from 10 days in New Zealand  (had a lovely time for Agnes' and my 30th anniversary), so only a couple of days left of the school holidays before reality sets in and I have to go back to work.

I have promised to widen the layout slightly to provide more clearance for the front viaducts, so went to Masters Hardware today and bought some 12mm square and 12mm x 30mm wood. This allowed me to add a strip 12mm wide at the front edge of the layout. To compensate for the projecting lip, though, I also had to add some timber behind the pockets for the controllers, using this as a good excuse to also lower them slightly so they don't project upwards over the layout top surface quite as far.

Of course, it also meant unscrewing the hinges for the control panel and resiting that onto one of the 12mm x 30mm bits of wood.

Continuing on from the previous post, a quick lick of "Hurricane Grey" paint completes this stage of the project. The first pic shows an overall view, while in the second, I have moved the viaduct into what will be its final position (or very close to it).

It's getting a little closer: an approximation of the track alignment on the upper level viaducts.

My 6-car set arrived today in a nice big parcel from the LT Museum.

After unpacking the individual vehicles, I worked out the correct order for the particular ones I have. I ran the two motor cars in simultaneously on the rolling road on DC, then after an hour or so of perfect running in both directions, decided to fit two identical decoders. I had two TCS EU621 decoders in the box and one Lenz Silver 21+ (the preferred choice), so it was the TCS ones that got installed … except that on interrogating them on the programming track, one of them was a Lenz decoder! So my preference was realised with two Lenz decoders fitted.

I programmed the two decoders simultaneously to address 87 and set the inertia/momentum CVs to CV3 = 25 and CV4 = 20, which give nice balanced acceleration and deceleration rates. I left the top and middle speeds (CVs 5 and 6) at the Lenz defaults for now but may adjust them later.

There was no need to reverse one decoder using CV29 as the motor coach pairs seem to be wired accordingly.

Once the set was assembled on the track, it behaved impeccably and didn't highlight any clearance problems through the platforms either, at least in the direction I am running it at the moment.






As can be seen, the 6-car set just fits the platform and loop lengths perfectly.