Well, I thought my plan of spending the entire Easter weekend working on the layout sounded like an excellent idea, but for some reason it was not met with unanimous enthusiasm and was vetoed at the committee stage. (Well ok, fish n' chips on the promenade at Lyme Regis, a spot of gardening and a walk along the towpath taking in the 1812 beam engines in operation at Crofton locks on the Kennet & Avon canal - all in glorious sunshine - was an acceptable subsitute. )

But I have been getting the wiring sorted out and have now got power back to the track, so at least I can trundle a loco with a couple of wagons back and forth a couple of feet. My design principle is not to have any actual switches or controls on the layout boards themselves, only the 3 mains transformers (2x 16v AC and 1x 12v DC) which are built into the frame underneath Board A.

The train controllers, isolating section switches, point and signal switches etc... will all be built into two separate handheld modules so that the operators can walk around and operate the layout from the front, back or wherever.

I am using standard PC 25-pin parallel cables (aka "D plug") for connecting control modules to the boards and for board-to-board jumpers, with the plug cut off one end and the cable fitted with "choc bloc" terminals instead.

This does however require soldering up the sockets that the cables plug in to, a little bit of a tedious job perhaps, but having done a few of them (and mucked up one or two in the process) I've now got the hang of it.

Each connection is then individually tested with a LED to make sure I haven't (literally) got any wires crossed. (Channel 8 is being tested in the picture.)