Entry posted by MinerChris
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My last promise to update within 6 months may have been broken quite resoundingly…
I have been slowly plugging away at some of the projects, the main one to finish off the 14xx “Vomit Comet,” project in order to run it at St Ruth’s various outings, more on this to follow soon.
I have also been making a start on the trackwork that will be eventually laid on my dual-boxfile layout “Congdon’s Shop.” As the layout is small, I decided that “easi-track,” points were the way to go, sacrificing potential mechanical strength for some chair detail. Needless to say, the publication of the “Track,” book was enormously helpful, particularly as no-one in the Midland Area Group has any prior experience with building plastic points.
After building said first point it was apparent that my preferred method of TOU wasn’t going to work. This TOU is a modification of the film tie-bar, made out of 10thou brass, split in two pieces soldered together with sleeper PCB. Perhaps a picture would be a better description?
Installed correctly through a slot in the baseboard, this has the potential to look like a good representation of a locking bar, whilst also having the benefit of being removable and replaceable. These TOU’s are also used on St. Ruth, Swanage and South Yard. They do however have one drawback, they rely on a fairly stable anchorage on the last chair of the switch rail, upon which to spring it. From experience, plastic easitrack chairs don’t provide this
The solution I settled on was to substitute the offending sleeper with a PCB replacement also using old chairplates to bring the top of the sleeper to the right height. This took me quite a while to get around to implementing, being mindful of how not to melt the rest of the point in the process.
At this point I was becoming increasingly aware that I still didn’t have anything to test the 14xx on and not still entirely sure that the tie-bar would work with the points. Hence, I created a small test layout of a branch line and a siding with the single point that I had made.
I actually wish that I had made this layout slightly bigger, as trying to fit a location to the track-plan has been unfruitful (any suggestions??) The original specification had been to create a layout of B5 size (250mm x 176mm), with the TOU being driven by a DPDT switch which also controlled the frog polarity.
In order to make the layout “ultra portable,” I have only used a maplin plug-in transformer powering my home made controller. The entire assemblage with some stock fits loosely into a picnic hamper obtained from a Christmas Present. I may one day get around to making it a protective carrying case, using the backscene as two sides. It would have been nice to get the hinge to fold the layout properly, but unfortunately my woodworking skills aren’t that good, and hence they are only used as locating pins.
This ramshackle assembly does at least work! It has been out to Aylesbury and Wallingford on St Ruth, wheel cleaning duty taking over from South Yard. I am really unsure as to what scenery to kit this out with eventually, possibly a light railway platform? (I forgot about catch points from the siding :-s) again suggestions are more than welcome.
The learning’s from this have been carried forward onto the points for Congdon’s Shop, with construction of the remaining points progressing well. The next probable stumbling block is how to drive the crossover across the board joint, as I am increasingly thinking that using servo’s are a bit overkill for this job.
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