I haven't had much to report for a while, although I've been busy with my wagons in the meantime. The main obstacle to progress has been that New Zealand appears to have run out of Peco code 75 flexi. I ended up ordering some from Hattons which arrived last week - amazingly a Sprinter fell into the box as it went past, or at least that's my story...

So with track in hand I can get on and lay the last two sidings, but first I decided to tackle a task that I really hate - cutting and installing spare sleepers to go under the gaps at rail joints. Fiddly and tedious, but it' mostly done now.

I also cut down most of the excess plastic around the mechanism on the Peco points - I'd already removed the springs and keeper plates to install the Tortoise motors, so this was just for looks. I think it makes a difference although I wouldn't try and claim I made a neat job of it. It would have been much easier to do this on the workbench (kitchen table) owing to the give in the cork underlay making everything flex uncomfortably when I applied knife to plastic. Luckily nothing broke. I cut some more spare sleepers short to replace the gaps left by the plastic baseplates, and at some point I'll need to fill in the gaps in the remaining sleeper tops where the spring goes.

Finally I ordered and installed a DCC circuit breaker (PSX-1 from DCC Specialities - the only one I could find with a low enough trip current setting) in the track bus, since my Powercab didn't seem to handle shorts very well (unpleasant buzzing and display flicker - apparently it shouldn't do that?). I'd already put switches in the track and accessory bus wires, but that required manual intervention. The breaker is a really useful addition - when you drive a loco into the frog end of points set against you, the breaker turns off the track power while the accessory power is still live, so you can change the points, at which point everything carries on. Obviously sound is interrupted, but setting the "don't restart from cold" bit on the decoders means that at least it carries on where it left off.

It also affords some peace of mind that hopefully nothing horrible is going to happen to my Powercab...