Imustbemadatmyage

No room for a New York skyline this time?

After a while where I was helping my wife after her knee replacement, I have restarted work. I have got the cork down and the track laid. The droppers are in place and terminated in small choc blocks. I still have the main bus to install, but it’s too hot to do anything more today!

I have taken my first steps to building this layout now! My progress was delayed because SWMBO has had a new knee and has needed a lot of TLC. I transferred my track plan to lining paper, leaving a generous margin for slight adjustment and then cut it out. Again leaving a generous margin, I transferred it to a sheet of 2.5mm cork sheet and cut that out also. As the cork sheet was tightly rolled, I am now going to leave it a few days to flatten out before fixing it to the baseboard.

Which locomotive do you have? N gauge has very little room and I had a Dapol Mallard which, I was told, would only have room for a particular Gaugemaster chip. Others were too big. I returned it as it burnt out on its first run and another chip made no difference. With a different locomotive I chipped it with a Zimo decoder (they do really small ones) and it runs a dream with my Prodigy controller.

Many thanks

Many thanks for all your comments. I am now managing to solder fairly well, as this picture of the underneath of code 55 n gauge rail shows (I hope!)

Possibly OT but I have the dc version of the alpha mimic board and the leds on that are also the switches. It is ridiculously easy to set up, being plug and play. The dcc version (which I considered, but decided that my small dcc layout didn’t need the complexity of dcc points) appears to be even easier.

Thanks. Hadn’t seen that on the website, although Chris at DCC suggested it so I thought it must be ok

Went for a lovely drive in the Yorkshire Dales the other day and my self driving car arrived at Settle! I couldn't resist wandering down the sidings and happened to notice DCC Concepts. A quick dive inside found me buying some Cobalt Omega point motors and a Cobalt Alpha switch. The manual suggests a special power supply using two wall transformers wired together. This arrangement looks a little bit unsafe to me and I was advised that simply using one power supply and not connecting the common terminal in the middle was easier and cheaper. Has anyone else tried this and with what result?

Definitely not. It's Peco N code 55 flexi. I realise that soldering to stainless steel is harder.

Dcc concepts flux. Definitely for this type of work. NOT plumbing flux!

I have a 50W iron with variable temperature settings (Atten SA50). Despite using plenty of flux I seem to be unable to get the solder to flow well enough to reliably connect droppers to a rail. Any suggestions as to the best temperature setting to use? It goes from 200 to 500 C

What a shame - they looked so easy to wire up! Many thanks for the information. Looks like I will have to rethink my plan.

This may be a silly question but I am finally getting round to starting my first small digital layout. I am considering using Cobalt IP digital point motors but can't find a reference to using accessories in my prodigy Express 2 instructions. Does this mean that the controller can't operate them?

Bampton Grange is in GWR green so presumably era 3