Thursday, July 06, 2006
A long awaited update
I must apologise for the lack of updates recently. This has been for a number of reasons.
Firstly it’s been the busy season in my day job. I help run a plant nursery, which means working up to 60 hours per week during the spring bedding season. That’s left me very little modelling time, and even less blogging time, especially when I seem to find my free time so tired that I end up napping.
Second, I spent a long time waiting for a delivery of Lenz modules for the inner loop from MG Sharp. These arrived early in June and have been redesigned internally, though the external connection and programming is still the same. Hopefully the redesigned units will be cheaper to manufacture, and hence become cheaper (or should I say less expensive) for us end users.
And finally, I’ve really been putting off fitting point motors. These didn’t matter with the outer loop, I could manually switch the points and use the point blades for current switching. But for the inner loop, or at least for the electrofrog single and double slips the frog polarity needs switchng, either manually or (preferably) by a switch attached to the point motor.
So, what has happened to the layout?
Track laying on the inner loop is complete, apart from a little finishing off in the fiddle yard. The photo above shows the western end of the station. The two left hand tracks are the main lines, the third track will become the branch line, rising up as it rounds the bend. On the extreme right you can just make out where a headshunt for the carraige sidings (or goods yard, I still haven’t decided) will be connected.
The second photo shows the much simpler east end of the station. The tunnel mouth shows the approximate position where the real tunnel will start with the upper station being above the tunnel.
Without the Lenz LB101 feedback modules I wans’t able to wire up the inner loop, but I did make a start at fitting point motors. Each point motor will have one of the Peco double microswitch units attached. The first switch will control frog polarity switching, the second being used by the computer DCC system to sense for which direction the points are set. I started with the single slip at the east end of the station. Being a slip the frog switching of each motor needs to be interconnected to correctly switch each end, which makes for two motors plus switches attached by a mass of untidy wiring.
The bit I’ve really been putting off is attaching the motors to the points and the underside of the baseboard. I feel I need to be above board to check the motor is positioned correctly to switch the point as well as being underneath to screw in the motor. I need to pluck up courage to take the plunge and see if this is really going to be as difficult as I’m imagining it will be.
On an unrelated note, I’ve received a shipment of new locos, including a few kettles. When I got back into the modelling scene I wanted to use DCC, so I looked on the internet for DCC fitting guides for N gauge. But I found practically nothing. One of my inspirations for starting this site was to get put some proper DCC fittting instructions up and, judging by the popularity of the two I’ve already done, this is very much needed. So the new locos will be for creating these guides, at least for the current batch of Farish items.