Building a switch panel - part 1

Entry posted by ifoulds August 26, 2017

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Slowly been making progress on point motors. All 23 motors around the main Newcastle Central station are installed, and I've planned out wiring for the capacitor discharge unit, frog polarity, and LED status indicators. I need to then get all the point motors wired up in order to correctly run trains, as I don't want to keep manually throwing the motors with the accessory switch and I want to make sure the motors themselves do work before I trim the pin that runs in to the points.

I'd had some issues with the Seep PM-1 point motors, and I ended up with Peco PL-11 surface mounted point motors in 5 locations as a result. I actually don't mind the look of these, but I wouldn't want them in every location. There's also no available accessory switch to flip the frog polarity since I'm using electrofrog points. I'll probably use frog juicers on those points to make sure the trains run happily. In testing, I was also having some weird issues with stalling on the older Hornby locos, but more modern locos were fine. A couple of people suggested checking and adjusting the back to back measurements on those locos, so I have a gauge to figure this out, as the trackwork and points seem fine for newer locos.

Anyway, on to the switch panel build. I planned out the schematic in Microsoft Excel, which was a bit of an odd choice, but I read an old forum post suggesting that approach and it actually worked out great. It was quick and easy to lay everything out. I then printed this at 12" x 24" and had it laminated, then used plexiglass as the base material. I punched and drilled holes in both the overlay and plexiglass for all the toggle switches and LEDs, then installed the hardware. It's going to take a while to start to solder and wire all this up. Here's the front of the panel with all the hardware installed:

And then the rear of the panel. The LEDs have pre-soldered and heat-shrinked wires on the legs, including a resistor:

My plan is to attach connector blocks on the back of the panel to hook the LEDs into. I'll then solder 2ft or more wires to the toggle switch terminals and run those to a bank of connector blocks under the layout that all the point motors will run to. A common from the CDU then runs to the center terminals on each toggle switch. That is part 2, which I'll hopefully get done over the next week.

Video of each stage in the first part of this switch panel build is on the YouTube channel. Do subscribe and follow along - I'm finding the videos are a great way to document how I'm doing and keep in touch with people: