Hi,

As it's been nearly two months since the last blog entry, there's been quite a flurry of activity, particularly with the scenic items.

Retaining Wall

This is where the bulk of the effort has been spent. The left hand side of the wall is now complete and it is now being painted and weathered. I notice a section has even been tagged already buy a local 'youf'

The bridge (the break between the on and off scene sidings) is also progressing well and is now nearly complete, just a bit of tinkering with the positions of the parapets before it will also be ready for painting.

Catenary

If you can remember back to previous entries, we are building our Catenary from kits obtained from N Brass Locos. One of the many jobs on the to do list, has been to prime and paint these. Well finally work has started on this with the 2 track portals being primed. Once dry, I think the primer colour is a little darker than we had thought, so they need to be lightened a little bit before we have a good base colour for weathering. Maybe a dusting with some sea grey will do the trick.

Work has also been progressing on the 3 track portals which are used on the main scenic boards, with the fitting of register arms and positioning of the portals on the boards themselves.

Block Detection

As one of our plans for the layout was to have working signalling, then a key piece of that puzzle is block detection. As we are using DCC, we have chosen to use DCC Modules that detect current draw from the track blocks. We have had a single module a 'BlocD8' from Team Digital installed on one of our boards for a while now as it has a LocoNet interface and we've successfully demonstrated the ability to both set signals based on block occupancy and also slow or stop a loco based on how a signal has been set.

I've included a picture of one of these boards installed under one of our scenic modules. Although it's not in any way installed as described in the manual, it's worked perfectly and in the future, I'll tidy up the wiring with some pluggable connector blocks, so that if we have a failure, the board could be easily and quickly swapped.

Play Time

We also found time to get some running in, here's a link to a short video

Cheers, Mark.