I’ve been involved with our club (the Greater Waikato Railway Modellers) building a loop extention/fiddle yard to compliment our existing one at the opposite side of our exhibition layout. Briefly our DC layout consists of interchangeable and controllable modules that are set to suit the available exhibition space. Primarily it was intended to give more mainline interest and flexibility.

We used to have an end to end layout that dovetailed into a much larger oval one at our clubroom which it still does, but exhibition experience since with other exhibitors and public reaction to ours has been such that people enjoy watching with interest the various aspects of the layout’s operation and interaction with the club members who will let some of the more enthusiastic learn how to operate a model railway.

So getting back to my own project, the experience in wiring Peco point motors for Diode Matrix operation has proved invaluable. As most readers would know a Diode Matrix is used for setting a route through shunting yards, stations etc. If one doesn’t want to completely use a computer to run a layout these proven DC systems are for you. Of course DCC gives you the manual choice as well but there appears to be many combinations of the the two systems being used today.

My next challenge will be how to wire a servo motor controlled three way point! To this end I am in the process of experimenting with servo mounts and micro switching the electrofrog and LEDs. Here’s a couple of photos of the prototype progress so far.