Fearnan is progressing nicely despite the festivities and a seasonal cold brought home from school by my son.

The track laying has begun in earnest and I’ve been connecting up the electrics as I go, which lead to an unfortunate diversion as I forgot to check the gapping on the PCB sleepers prior to connecting everything up! The inevitable short took around three frustrating hours to find (longer than connecting the electrics!) and explains why the gaps in the PCB sleepers are not as neat as they should be, still, once filled and painted I dare say this won’t be noticeable.

One advantage of track laying pre-festivities is that the bottles of booze are still full and make excellent weights to keep the track level will the glue sets (Wilko’s finest contact adhesives £1 a tube!).

The spider is the wires sticking out of the underside of the point work for board 2 prior to laying.

So current state of affairs:-

Only the loop track to build out and the switch rails to inset into the point work on board 2. The fiddle turntable is now complete, just needs a lick of paint to finish.

To demonstrate everything is working the first engine has taken a trip up the line. I’m pretty safe in saying UP yard power never made it to the Killin branch, I use this engines as my DCC test engine as it took a 4ft dive on to the floor a few years ago and one of the bogies is damaged and creaps forward as the power is applied. even though it's N scale (1:160 9mm gauge) it bumped through the point ok.

The underside is all set up awaiting the final three point motors. I think the photo below should finally put to bed the lie that DCC only needs two connections!

The Accessory switch on board two has been tested and one of the outputs will switch two SEEP point motors so will fire the crossing that is the loop release.

I’ve used copper tape to provide connectivity to the turntable, hopefully the attached photos explain.

So next jobs:- finish the track, cut the backscene card to replace the 4mm MDF, I can then start on some stock.

Santa brought along one of Mr Pixels’ Thompson brake third coach kits which looks like it will go together rather nicely ……