Thanks to the very helpful comments Mike the Stationmaster (in this related thread:http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/50382-gwr-branch-terminus-signals-and-services/page__fromsearch__1), I have now arrived at a suitably prototypical signalling and track layout for the Burwood terminus. Now, to plan my uncoupler and sensor locations I need to work out how operations will be done. My guesses below are just that, pure guesses from someone who knows nothing about real railway operat
I'm using Peco code 55 track for Burwood and have decided on Servo operation as this offers the realism of slow action at a much lower cost than stall type motors. My kit is as follows:
Merg CBUS (connected to PC)
CBUS servo module (can drive 8 servos)
9g servo
Adapter plate
Peco code 55 point
I'm not using microswitches for frog switching, as this is being done by separate relays.
I've come across a number of people describing methods of mounting and aligning servos man
Just before Christmas I joined MERG as they offer a number of well developed electronics designs for layout automation (my interest - there are other things available too) which can be built for a tiny fraction of the cost of commercial systems.
I wavered for a while before joining - as I have to be careful with my hobby money. However, now that I've joined and have full access to the designs I'm glad I did. If anyone out there is also trying to decide whether or not to join I strongly rec
Hi everyone,
Just catching the blog up with my progress from the last few months. Last June we finished replacing our internal doors. Salviging the old ones, I cut the baseboards for Burwood. the West board is shown below. Where cuts were made I planed the edges and reinforced the cavity of the hollow door with some 30mmx20mm pine strips.
I took over our living room for a day to fit removable pin hinges which I am going to use to join the boards. (sorry, I forgot to take a pic
To automate my layout I've been investigating sensors to accurately locate the trains so that I can run realistic operations without user intervention. I will update this post with photos when I get my camera out at the weekend.
I've been experimenting with using hall effect sensors for detecting train position on my N gauge layout. In particular I've been trying this sensor:
Honeywell Latching Hall sensor
As I see it these sensors have a number of advantages over other sensor syst
My intention for this layout was to be able to have a good mix of operation and mainline running of decent length trains (more than 5 coaches). I'm not too concerned about continuous running - which is why the layout only has 1 loop that could be used for this.
It is important for me to be able to build the layout one board at a time - so that the project can be done in bite sized chunks. the whole layout is very ambitions for a first layout (with over 50m of track) - and I'm keen to avoid
The layout will eventually live in the sitting room, so it has to be discrete. For this reason I've designed it to fold away into a sideboard sized unit. There's still a significant amount of design work to specify the lifting mechanisms, but I'll wait until I have a feel for how heavy the boards are going to be before doing this. The importance of doing the space model shown in the pictures below was to assess what baseboard size and shape I could fit in the room. This then played chicken a
My girlfriend and I recently moved into a new house. Something that immediately got put on the list of things to replace were the hideous internal doors. A side effect of this was that I was left with no less than 5 standard 1970x755mm doors and one slightly larger one ... I wonder what they could be used for?
Having already done a fair bit or research on baseboards I was aware that hollow core doors tend to be very noisy as baseboards - as the cavity in the centre acts like a sounding box o
Hi everyone,
I've created this blog to document the build of my first layout - which is called Burwood. I'm an electronic engineer by profession - and I hope to incorporate a significant degree of automation in the layout. This might stretch to computer control and a scripted timetable but at the very least I hope to control operations remotely without any interference from the big pink finger in the sky.
Having previously played with HO as a child I've chosen N scale as a compromise betwe
