I had another go at building a point on Monday evening, hoping I'd be able to do one in its entirety from start to finish. I didn't' quite succeed, though, but

only a few bits were left to be done on Tuesday.

With two points in place, it was time to sort out the frog switching:

I ordered some small sliding SPDT switches from ebay. I drilled a small hole in the plastic switch and then glued the SPDT down over the wire running

to the tiebar. With the switch then soldered to the rail feeds and frog wire, the polarity change-over worked perfectly. Not getting involved in point motors,

and all the wiring that comes with them, is a big plus on a small module like this.

I thought I'd try this Bachmann 2-8-0 through the points as it's a bit of a picky runner where bad trackwork is concerned. This was not necessarily a good thing! I'm testing the layout

with a very unsophisticated Trix DC controller which I normally just use for throwing points and testing motors. The Dapol pannier runs like a jack-rabbit on that controller, but

the Bachmann 2-8-0 was capable of very smooth stop/starts and very nice slow running, which had me wondering whether I ought to build the module as an Appalachian coal mine

instead! But I'm pretty sure the Dapol engine was OK on a decent controller, when I first tested it, so hopefully the performance will perk up when I wire in the "proper" controller.

I think the Bachmann engine has an advantage as it's fitted with a dual-mode DCC decoder, so presumably the jerky low voltage control of the Trix unit gets smoothed out somewhere

in the DCC circuitry. In any case, the loco didn't have any trouble through the pointwork so again I'm confident about pushing forward.