Hi,

Again it's been quite a while since the last update (3 months this time). Work is still progressing, but the pace has seemed painfully slow over Christmas.

TINGS 2015

Countdown - 6 Months

Retaining Wall

With the Retaining Wall having been finished before Christmas, it was time to paint it and then apply some weathering to it. The brickwork is intended to be Blue Engineering brick, so a suitable colour was found to represent this, then the Arches / Capping Stones were picked out to represent stone work. The wall then had a light wash applied to it to pick up the mortar and tone down the brick colour, followed by the arches being dry brushed black. There's quite a bit more weathering and detailing left to do, but it's a great base to work from.

Ballast

The ballasting is now finished. There were a few places around the sidings that needed some attention and we went back over each of the points filling in the areas that we'd originally avoided. In the main this worked out OK for us, but there were one or two points that needed a bit of attention afterwards. Nothing was too far gone though and a little scraping with a craft knife was all that was required to clean out a few bits of ballast from the switch mechanisms.

In the next few weeks, we'll be adding the switch cabinets and hopefully some drainage catch pits that we're making if they turn out OK.

Storage Boxes

One of the main areas of concern for the layout has been the Storage and Protection of the Scenic Boards. At the moment the boards are bolted together into packs, but otherwise have no protection from accidental knocks and we have found that parts of the retaining wall had been damaged while moving the boards around for working sessions.

Our solution to this was to create a box that the modules would slide inside. The box would be a 2" x 1" frame which would be strong enough to take the weight of the modules and also to allow other boxes to be stacked on to it for transport. This frame would then be clad in 6mm ply to provide extra strength and finally a closed end and an opening end added. Here are a few pics of the design and the first test frame with the centre module inside it.

The construction of the frame is pretty simple and has to be as we don't have access to allot of tools or carpentry skills, so we've gone for a simple glued and screwed approach.

Signals

We are intending to drive our signals from Arduino boards that will be acting as DCC Accessory decoders. We have proved that this is a workable idea and one of our electrical wizards is busy building the necessary circuit boards to house the Arduino Nano boards and the various power, DCC and LED connections we will need for each one. One snag we have hit though, is that we want the Signals to be easily replacable and to facilitate this we wanted to use some kind of pin connector that the signal would effectively plug into. Unfortunately our choice of connector didn't seem that reliable and our wizard spent many hours scratching his pointy hat and mumbling incantations to himself before the problem was found.

Hopefully we'll have some pics or video of a working signal for the next update

Catenary

A little more work has been done on the Catenary, although the Portals have been completed for some time now, the Register Arms had been stuck in the bottom of a box unfinished. Anyway, the arms are all finished now and the remaining two portals on the centre board have had them fitted. We just need to complete the Portals on the 2 remaining boards on the RHS of the layout and they will be ready for painting and weathering.

Here are a few pics of the completed Portals on the Centre Board (hadn't trimmed the arm masts when I took the pictures).

Cheers, Mark.