Hello again, following on from the track-laying in Issue 7 now it was time to start wiring up the layout for DCC operations. Early on I had decided to incorporate several power districts into the design of the wiring so as to try eliminate any whole layout shorts should a loco be operated against a point for example. It happens, yes we have all seen it happen at exhibitions and often rendering the entire layout dead until the controller has been reset. So I decided to split the layout into four power districts these being; the fiddle yard; the first quarry located in front of the fiddle yard on the scenic section; the main line leading from the fiddle yard into the reception loops and beyond into the long neck and finally the second quarry area.
This of course means a bit of extra wiring to put in the extra pair of feed wires leading from the power district module to each area of the boards. So most board joints will take two districts across underneath and for this I had a look around at the various types of connectors that would be reasonably heavy duty and robust and in the end settled on the four way Molex power connectors, the sort that you find inside your PC tower case supplying power to the devices like Hard Drives and CD-ROM drives. Having decided on simple red and black for the colour of my main power district feeds you will no doubt be thinking hang on the Molex connectors have two black wires, one red and one yellow... well I just made the yellow wire the honorary red wire for my layout lol. The power district feeds having got to the right part of the board then terminate in long strips of copper-clad strips - I think mine were 0 gauge sleeper sized stock. These are positioned on the underside of the board and then simply super-glued on end held down whilst the glue sets. From these bus-bars the smaller feed wires would be then added to feed the track and points as appropriate. Careful planning of the wire runs away from critical areas largely ensured that the wiring stage went pretty smoothly.
Using the Peco code 75 points and wanting live frog operation meant using some form of polarity switching and I initially looked at using Peco's own PL-11 slide switches but after some trials quickly came to the conclusion that it was going to be a nightmare ensuring these would stay aligned and be reliable enough for exhibition operation. After a question on here I was directed to try some micro-switches supplied by Rapid Electronics and so after I had ordered some plus a few spares tried these. I should at this point say that the points are manually operated by roding and so linked to the micro-switch acting on the lever arm thus changing the polarity supplied to the frog.
Once I had Board 1A and 1 wired up and I was happy with the action of the micro-switches then there was no excuse to try adding some power via a temporary connection to my borrowed Gaugemaster Prodigy 2 controller and see if it all worked... and it did lol!
So far so good.. and yes the loco was stopped with lights on and not about to run off edge of board lol. The loco is reasonably appropriate for a Buxton layout this being 37688, which was once upon a time based at Buxton and now in use with DRS and a limited edition model was done by Bachmann some years ago for Rail Express magazine and I was given the loco for a very nice pocket friendly price by a good friend :-)
So after a bit of testing and fettling of the first two board to prove the wiring and the micro-switches operation I was happy enough to continue to wire up the remaining boards. By June 2014 the wiring was pretty much complete but I had an offer to show the boards and layout at my local club open day and so I took it round to the church hall and for the first proper time had the layout up in one piece. Although only static and no power it still got people interested. One thing that was apparent was the overall height of the boards from the floor to the top of the baseboards as to me this looked on the low side. The supporting legs were designed to fold up inside the board for transportation but this might well be something I will change if I am to increase the base board height to make it easier to operate but still be at a good viewing height for the public.
So having the layout up and nearly completed gave me more of an incentive to push on and complete the wiring to test it further and then go onto the ballasting stage.
Cheers Paul
Edited: 2nd April 2023 missing images restored.
Edited by pharrc20
restoring lost photos
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