Greg's Railway Modelling Musings: A great week for getting to the To Do List

Monday, January 9, 2012

A great week for getting to the To Do List

The second week of leave was a great for getting a few things knocked off the To Do List. The weather was not too hot to be in the shed. Wednesday came along and I decided to forego going to the club so that I could get a few things done on the layout. Well great plans as they say. I spent the morning working on Lachlan's layout but the afternoon was all mine!

I got the third MRC and third DS64 accessories decoders mounted on their perspex boards, installed and wired in. The USB interface card was also similarly treated. However I haven't had a chance to test it by connecting it to the laptop. Hopefully soon.

The street and platform lamps were wired into a piece of copper strip project board to provide the parallel connections to the common MRC subdecoder. I also used liquid electrical tape for the first time to cover up the soldered connections of all the wiring (which was a lot) that were too small for heatshrink. The stuff worked a treat and I am sold on it. Underneath the layout is looking like spaghetti junction but at least it isn't too onerous. I also installed a momentary ON-OFF-ON DPDT switch to try with the Minipanel to control the lights. This works perfectly. I am only using on half of the DPDT function (SPDT) at the moment for the KH side lighting, the other half will be for the Bray MPD side.

I finished off the signal box and temporarily placed it on the layout. The original place near the tunnel mouth did not look quite right so I moved it first near the station platform. This looked better. Then I moved it up the line a bit to the first point and this was the spot. I placed some cork down and painted it gray to imitate a concrete base, then installed the box. Looks great, especially when the light is on and you can see the signalman.

Having cleaned up the shed has allowed me to move a lot of stuff from the BMPD side off the layout into other shelving, so I can now run trains.

So what is next. I am hoping to get to wiring in the remaining points (6-12) into their DS64 decoders to get that out of the way. Then I can concentrate on some more KH structure / scenery work.

The hot weather arrived yesterday and today is particularly hot, so how much I can do in the shed this week will depend on when it is bearable to be out there. Even with one of the tilt a doors open it is hot without a south-easterly blowing in.

I am happy with the work done over the last couple of weeks.

Club on Wednesday and again on Saturday for the monthly meeting. Unfortunately this will be the last weekend before heading back to work to pay for the holiday spending!