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About this blog

How I am turning the attic into a tribute to steam in the 1930s, but with high tech train detection and DCC under the layout.

Entries in this blog

turntable, design

ADM turntable

A quick search on the internet for turntables will likely get you a list of products for spinning your vinyl collection rather than for an accessory for your model rail layout. I mention this because looking underneath an ADM turntable you'd think it was a record player - It has a toothed belt drive and a pretty sophisticated circuit board amongst the other wizadry.  Land Rover may have had a hand in its design as it looks very robust and is reassuringly heavy and it's so well built you cou
deepfat

deepfat in turntable, design

2
dcc train automation

Detection and automation basics

While it's possible to run trains automatically on a layout by relying on accurate measurement and knowing exactly how fast your trains are moving, in practice you need feedback about where your trains are to make automation reliable, otherwise positions will drift  due to all sort of variations and inaccuracies.  There are several ways to detect a train on a track including optical detectors, switches, magnets and by measuring a voltage drop on a section of track.  However in most of these scen
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deepfat in dcc train automation

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backsecene

Creating a backscene in the loft

My layout is in the attic and was designed when I was new to model railways and BRM. With hindsight and reading more I probably got the track to close to the edge of the layout (120mm in some places). To make matters worse  the basic pyramid shape of my loft means that my backscene is only about 120mm high:   Also  the transition between the backscene and the roof is very obvious, even with both being painted with the same pale grey emulsion.  This looks even worse/odd  in the cor
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deepfat in backsecene

2
Layout Design

2 - Layout design with SCARM

Note this post has been updated following the loss of photos on RMWeb Converting a loft for a model rail layout The only internal timbers in my loft are three ties at roughly chest height you can just see all three in this shot of the loft as it was insulated:  It seemed logical to use this to support my layout.   Timber in 1946 was clearly of better quality as these are just 50x100mm in section and yet they stop the roof sagging by being connected to purlins around the edge
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deepfat in Layout Design

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Baseboard construction

3 - Baseboard construction

Note this post has been updated following the loss of photos on RMWeb   There are some beautifully engineered baseboard on RMWeb, and even if I was working in an empty room my woodworking skills are not that good.  My layout is built on existing loft ties about 1.5m off the floor as above those ties it's an empty void.  I have had additional 100x50mm struts on which the baseboard can rest but this is an old house and the tops of these timbers are not level and have also twisted a bit. 
wiring

Euston we have a problem

Apollo 13 suffered from a main B Bus undervolt resulting from an explosion. my layout used to just have a single bus but now I do have two one for Track power and on for accessories. However I did get a couple of shorts after some redesign work and that took a long time to find so here’s the sorry saga of how not to wire up your layout and what I did to fix it, which I hope you'll find useful   As I say, I now have a dual bus setup and if there is a short on the track  it trips the Z21
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deepfat in wiring

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Saying goodbye to RailMaster

I have several posts on RailMaster(pro edition) on this blog as I got more and more into it. It is simple to use and suited my needs as someone new to DCC. However I have been more and more frustrated with its reliability: It is not designed for Windows 10 It has an arcane licensing setup It has a lot of lag on throwing points and sending functions to locos as it is working like an old dial up modem over a com port and this also means it takes ages to read and write CVs to lo
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deepfat

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iTrain - It's not that hard

Having deleted RailMaster, put my Hornby Elite in the electronics recycling bin and swapped in a Roco Z21 controller with iTrain I wanted to see how they worked with my layout before getting into the detection side of things.    Here's my layout in Hornby RailMaster Pro:   I have enabled displaying the point's ID numbers as I want to refer to them when setting up the same points in iTrain. The old Railmaster  diagram does resemble my layout in SCARM    
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Layout Design

1 - Introduction

Note this post has been updated following the loss of photos on RMWeb   Like many kids back in the day I had a train set. In my case my dad got my brother & me a Hymek Freightliner set from Hornby. It was setup on an 8' x 4' board and stowed under my bed when not in use.  We got bored of it pretty quickly and eventually it died a horrible death like some of the figures in the original Toy Story! Fifty odd years later and along bought of illness & enforced rest and I suddenly go
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deepfat in Layout Design

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backsecene

Backscene West

The easiest bit of my backscene is the sea to the west of my layout. It's inspired by the view from West St Leonards with Hastings seafront to the west and Beachy Head to the right.   In my last post I showed how I set up my backscene and created the sky.  For the sea behind my layout I cut a 100mm x 3000mm strip of lining paper and airbrushed that with a slightly varying dark teal colour and stuck that so that the top was completely level to simulate the horizon.     For the
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deepfat in backsecene

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ballast

My name is Bond ,Ballast Bond

All the Youtube videos I have seen on ballasting casually gloss over how to deal with points and specifically that hardest of all points,  the double slip.  My hypothesis is that it isn't the ballasting itself that is an issue, rather it is the pre-wetting of the ballast as that seems to disturb the ballast and that's the very thing we need to avoid around points.   To set the scene -  my peco 75 track is laid on DCC Concepts foam bed, not cork, and I have spent thousands converting th
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deepfat in ballast

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