Since my last post I have been renovating elements of infrastructure and reorganizing the wiring under the baseboard.

As indicated in previous posts I have had problems with my point motor control. The Hornby passing lever switches worked O.K, but were not suitable for the present state of my fingers. The pushbutton switches used in their place were not designed for working with Hornby motors and both LEDs remained alight, whereby there was no indication of point direction. Finally, as I browsed through the forums, I came across the capacitor system.

The installation of two way switches with capacitor requires reorganization of the wiring. With the Hornby and pushbutton switches the common return was the black lead from the motors. So, there were individual pairs of green and red wires connecting the switches to the respective coloured leads of the motors and the black leads were connected from point to point in groups finally to arrive at a single black wire connected to the transformer.

With the capacitor system however the black lead ceases to be the return and (as I was informed on the forum) the green is the common ground, so this meant a change. To avoid a lot of work and having to purchase a new coil of black wire I decided to swap over the green and black wires without modifying the existing installation too much. Nevertheless, when I started, I realized how chaotic the wiring was, with some motors connected to terminal blocks (some with three connections in one piece, others with the green and red wires connected to one piece and extending in one direction and the black wire connected to another piece and extending in another direction) and others just soldered together and stapled to the baseboard. So I set about putting a bit of order into the chaos and decided that all the motors would be connected to a piece of terminal block so that, if necessary, they could be replaced without having to disturb the main wiring.

My original intention was to retain the black wiring as it was, just redirecting it from terminal block to terminal block but connecting it to the green lead of the motor in each case. The existing green wire was then connected to the black motor lead and the red to the red as before.

But then I considered that the wiring was colour-coded for a reason, so I removed all the green and black wiring from the base board and I am now in the process of rewiring accordingly.

I have made a small control desk (see photos) and my idea was to install the capacitors inside the desk, connected to the switches (see photo) but I realized that this was too cramped, so I am now installing the capacitors at the motors (see photos).

This last one shows some of the capacitors installed.

I have also devised a provisional system which allows me to test each motor individually without having to install the definitive wiring. So far I have installed 10 capacitors and have successfully tested 3.