Dear Diary, today I wired my layout.

Entry posted by Will Vale October 20, 2011

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Spaghetti Monster by Will Vale, on Flickr

It started out a bit messy, but it turned out alright in the end.

This morning I started on some odd jobs on the railway, finishing shaping the front proflle board which had been glued overnight, puttying the joins, painting rocks, and doing more weathering on the track. At about 4 o'clock my wife brought me a parcel left by the courier with switches and wire, so all excited I thought I would make a start with them.

I'd already installed feeds in the running line and the single fiddle yard road, but they were never connected up except for testing. I wired the feeds at both ends to small distribution boards cut from a sheet of Veroboard, and did the same for the point motor wiring. The boards were then linked up and threaded through holes cut in the cross members in the usual way. If only I'd cut them during construction this would have been easier.

I had already worked out a scheme to control the fiddle yard power and points with a 3x3 rotary switch, after a couple of false starts on paper. I also considered a (small) diode matrix but the Märklin accessories use AC and I wasn't sure if they'd like half-wave of full-wave DC instead. Two poles of the switch act as the "matrix" and control the points for the three-road yard, with pairs at opposite ends wired in parallel. The feed to the switch goes through a momentary pushbutton, so to switch the points you set the road and press the button, all fairly standard. The nice thing (to me) is that the third pole switches the track current to the appropriate road as well, so it's all synchronised.

I soldered up the switch and button leads and ran them to a tag strip, then hooked up loose end of the distribution board to the other side. And it all worked first time! That's never happened before, not ever.

Then I went ahead and tidied up the wires. The point motor wires are over-long and therefore messy, but they're captive leads and I didn't want to cut them short in case the points get re-used on a future project. I considered desoldering and resoldering a couple of wires to make things bundle up neater, but decided against it. it does look a bit better now though:

I got my eBay-purchased BR 101 out to play with and run in, and it was rough as a rough thing. Suspecting dirty, I cleaned the track thoroughly. It still wasn't great though, and I realised it was only picking up on one bogie - clearly not as it should be. I removed the offending bogie and cleaned the wheels and contact strips after checking continuity, then tweaked the wiper which carries power to the body. The chassis then ran beautifully, so I put the body back on and it died - lights on, no motor More serious dismantling ensued, the motor was OK when connected directly to power, and it turned out that one of the tiny phosphor bronze whiskers which take power from the main PCB to the motor cap was out of line. Again, adjusted, tweaked, and it's now one of my best-running locos. Result.

Finally at about 11 o'clock I thought I ought to do the rest of the fiddle yard, so laid the track (a quick job with superglue, thanks Beast!) and soldered up the feeds. I had to spend half an hour finding the insulating fishplates first, bought mail order to replace the first lot which I lost. Thankfully I managed not to lose them in turn, well not permanently at least.

Anyway, at about half-past midnight, it was all done and I spent a happy fifteen minutes shuttling locos around in the fiddle yard and sending them out to work. Then I went to bed to write this diary entry. It was the best day ever!

by William Vale age 36 and a quarter.