With Steinruecken disassembled from the move, I took the opportunity to tidy up the wiring and add plugs between the boards. My first step was to set up two buses the length of the layout on the low level boards, being DCC power and 16V AC. I used 15A wire for this task, as there's nothing like overkill where power buses are concerned! Theses run from four pads of verroboard at the board ends (attached with epoxy- I tried hot melt glue at first, but guess what that does when you put a hot soldering iron to it...). From these pads go the cross-board jumpers, which for use a four pin PC style power plug (the style go to disc drives), and the feeds to individual tracks. There's rather more of these feeds than are actually normally necessary, as I intend to add in full track circuiting for use with MERG RPC. From the low level to top level there are at present 15 pin sub-mini D connectors, although I fear this may not be enough on all boards once I get into the signalling. For now though, it means I can easily remove the upper level for continued work.

This all done, I reassembled the layout, and caused the first damage of the house move- I dropped a corner board, and knocked off the copperclad sleepers at one end of the main lines on the upper level. However, even with this happening, the copperclad proved its worth, and after resecuring it I was able to run trains. Ordinary track would surely have needed replacing.

Then came the serious business of playing trains testing. First off, just confirming that the wiring was all correct. Initial signs were promising, no instant shorts on start up. Then, I simply ran a loco round each track in turn, quickly finding that I'd missed a couple of feeds. Not a big drama. The next fault found was that as a train entered one board of the low level on one track, it shorted. The problem was as easy to find as it was to fix, I'd simply got the droppers the wrong way round. These few faults located and addressed, I am now looking at the actual running characteristics of the layout. Being on a new floor has resulted in some boards not being quite level, for now addressed with slipping plywood pieces under the legs, but utimately I will try to find some screw adjusters. There's still a sag in one track needing addressing though.

One one of the helices I had been having trouble with trains of longer than six coaches. The sheer weight of train pushing against itself seemed to be causing derailments. However, this had been with Sachsenmodelle coaches, and now I'm running full rakes of Roco I actually put the issue down to SaMo's poor assembly and light wieght. I'm still suffering rogue uncoupling with Roco close couplings though, as these have no vertical lock. I could change to Roco universals (which have a very positive lock in all directions), but I have traced the problem to the change from Atlas to Piko track on one helix- the change point has a slight change in radius, and this seems to be the source of the issue. I'm tempted to build a whole new helix, as I have a mass of Piko A track of 422mm radius, and the timber required costs less than new track- the present helices use Atlas 15" radius.

So that's about where I'm up to now. I've still got one road to lay, and a whole lot of things I could do with buying- I'm out of point motors for a start. But I think my next bit of shopping will be a quanity of timber.