As track laying on the scenic section nears completion work has started on some of the other parts needed for the layout. Several N Brass OHLE gantries have been built and as you can see from the photos we've made progress on the accessory decoders needed for the fiddle yard.

Early on in the design of the layout, we made the decision to control the points via DCC. For those points on the front of the layout we've opted for the Traintronics TT300 slow motion units which contain built in decoders. These are kinder to points than solenoid type motors which change the points with a thwack! Hopefully we'll have less problems of points failing due to heavy use (and so no need to patch up scenery around replaced points).

However, our fiddle yard will eventually have seven tracks in each direction and so to keep costs more manageable we've gone for solenoid type point motors. If points do fail then those on the fiddle yard are easier to replace as there's no scenery to worry about. From our research the best value decoders (we are mostly Yorkshiremen after all!) are the MERG ACC4 units. A total of eight of these have been purchased and the first four have been built and can be seen here.

The decoders come in kit form and are well presented. The kits contain decent instructions and all the components are easy to identify as they're laid out on cards with each part labelled. Recommended.

Cheers.