Up and Running

The internet is littered with blogs that die a sudden and unexpected death. Not a few of those relate to still born modeling projects. If I had any regular followers they could be forgiven that that is what has happened to this.

Having completed the electrics I was about to start ballasting when I took a second look and decided I wasn't happy with the wiring. It wasn't very tidy either above or below the baseboard and I was worried that if I went ahead and ballasted I would only be covering up problems that would come back to haunt me. That is if I could cover them up -  I suspect that ballasting wouldn't have disguised the above baseboard wires.

So I spent most of Xmas mulling it over and decided to re-wire from scratch using  0.45mm wire for the dropwires from the rails. Trying to do this retrospectively made it a little harder than it should have done but in the end doing it right took seconds. I've even put in the DPDT switch based mechanism for the point and  it is working OK although I'll need to reinforce the collar around the wire to the tiebar at some point.

So this afternoon I finally got to run a loco backwards and forwards at acceptably slow speed. My problem on the loco front remains that my two DCC equipped locos are the most basic Hornby 0-6-0s but now I know things work there is an incentive to invest in something more suitable. A 14xx would probably be the best option for now.

More excitingly it means I'm free to start work on the scenics. The overbridge and the overgrown platform are the first two items on the list. That is once ballasting is complete.