Things are looking up a bit for Mercia Wagon Repair, and the business seems to have escaped the liquidator's clutches.....

 

Two or three weeks ago I was feeling more than a little hopeless about the whole thing here , partly (if truth be known) for one or two reasons external to the layout. Although there were enough problems arising within the project to cause dispondency.

 

In the end after a certain amount of glum staring at N gauge points, I decided to see if  the second of the list of increasingly drastic options - fit frog wires and lift and replace the damaged points - would be viable.

 

And it was. I managed to attach a frog feed wire to three of the five undamaged points. Awkward but, as it proved, quite doable. The other two points were hopeless cases, One , up against the backscene, did not permit me to get at the relevant areas with a soldering iron. And the other had gaps at the joints patched with plasticard scraps superglued in place. You do not solder anywhere near cyanoacrylate bonds, because in the presence of serious heat it decomposes to give off ..ahem cyanide gas . (The clue is in the name, cyanoacrylate...). 

 

These happen to also be the points where the motors are SEEPs without switching. Not that SEEP's point motor switching is anything to celebrate, as we shall see.

 

I already had Peco switches in stock, so these were stuck to the motors with Gorilla Glue contact adhesive and wired up . Excellent! I also wired up the one switched SEEP. Not so excellent...

 

The "switch" on a SEEP motor consists of a small spring fitted round the vertical actuator rod. The point motor is built onto a PCB : there is a slot through it  for the actuator rod to move along when the point is thrown. On each side of this slot , there is a broad metal contact track on the PCB . On one side it ends in the pad to which the frog feed wire is soldered. On the other side it comprises two short sections, seperated by a gap. One of these sections ends in the pad to which you solder  the positive feed wire  , the other in the pad to which you solder the negative feed.

 

The spring round the actuator rod presses against the PCB and shorts across from the track on one side to the track on the other ... When the actuator rod is at one end of its travel that is the bit of track connected to the positive feed. And  when it is at the other end of its travel, it's the bit connected to the negative feed.

 

 

The words that come to mind for this bit of electrical engineering include "crude", "bodge", "primitive" and "Heath Robinson"

 

The throw of a 9mm gauge point is of course rather less than that of a 16.5mm point. And the problem that this causes can be summed up in the words of The Grand Old Duke of York: "And when they were only half way up / They were neither up nor down" . Or positive , or negative....

 

In one position the spring didn't quite reach the track connected to the feed. So the point is dependant on blade contact when set that way. Unfortunately that way is into the wagon works - which will be the route the shunters take most often . This is unfortunate. I tried fiddling about with the thing, but the PCB base is screwed into pads of thin balsa and I can't shift the motor along by about 1mm

 

It seems that holding the switch across for slightly longer (say 2 sec not 1 sec) may induce sufficent travel to establish contact. What that will do to the blades long-term is an awkward question - remembering that this all started with a switch blade broken at the tiebar. And the point with this SEEP motor is the only point even more deeply buried in the formation, and even more disruptive to operation if it goes, than the point I've had to replace.

 

But there are certainly a few issues with the shunters finding the blade dead when they shunt the works fan

 

Speaking of which , the replacement job is done and here is the proof - point on the right .

 

It works ok. (Peco point motor here so no switching issues. Just a dirty great hole in the board top). 

 

So the Board are pleased to report that Mercia Wagon Repair is no longer facing liquidation. I just have to finish laying the track.

 

 

In the meantime several other issues have been resolved. When I was in the nearest model shop buying the replacement point and a few other bits I spotted a recent issue yellow Network Rail 57 for sale second-hand at a reasonable price. A little discussion with the man in the shop ended with me returning and exchanging my Freightliner 57 and £20 for his Network Rail 57.  

 

I now have 57 312, in a state current from about 2012-2019  (I can't now find the video of her emerging from repaint in order to confirm whether she lost the custard livery in early 2018 or early 2019).  She was hired out to a freight operator (I think DRS - again I can't refind the reference) so it's perfectly reasonable to have her turn up on a train of stock for repair/ recently repaired .  But she shouldn't really be seen with the Dapol 33, which with a little stretching of reality is good to about 2003 but no further. On the other hand the Freightliner 66s are fine as companions.

 

I am starting to realise that "post-privatisation" has become rather a long period, and I am being more than a little hazy about the exact dates of various "modern" airbraked wagons....

 

No plates were supplied with the loco although she has carried various names at various times.

 

Here she is , along with my first two efforts at kit-built wagons in N .

 

These seem to have taken forever to sort out but they now have couplers and can be used, even if they still need weathering/varnish coat. A degree of approximation applies with both, and I'm not entirely sure the chemical tanker really made it to the late 1990s never mind the present. As I said, "contemporary" suddenly seems to be about a 30 year period. It's startling to realise that the 57 must have originally been built by Brush almost 60 years ago...

 

 

A further excursion has been provided by the question of backscenes. I was pondering the need for some kind of photographic work - or at least something - at the left side of the layout. Then Peco gave away a fine photo -backscene of a townscape with the January Railway Modeller (it's actually Exeter - the cathedral can be seen near the middle of it)

 

This seemed ideal , even though I had already repainted the backboards with a clean sky colour. But it's just over 5' long, and the layout is 6' long. By the time I thought to phone Peco about the availability of an extra copy of that issue they'd run out

 

And by that time I'd bought some Gaugemaster photo-backscene for the ends. But those sheets are rather closer up.

 

Hmmm

 

I have at least decided to disguise the non-exit at the left-hand end by a road bridge on a rising gradient , at a slight angle to the board. If I were ever to cut a hole at the end and go to an external cassette fiddle , this might disguise it. And in the meantime, it occurs to me that a mirror buried here might help, scenically