Ashwood Dale - Lockdown and an itch that needs to be scratched

[lezz01]

Very nice trackwork Dave.

Regards Lez.

[eldavo]

Well that was a bit of a point building marathon!  The tier 4 challenge is complete albeit not before we ended up in lockdown.  Two 3-way points and a standard turnout built and stuck down. Actually I built 2 standard turnouts an A6.5, I didn't like the alignment with the rest of the track, so built a B8 and fitted that in its place.  This provides all the track for the approach to and within the loco shed area.

 

 

The B8 on the left leads to the 2 road shed, the right hand road runs to the turntable (sited where the yellow glue pot sits) with the 2 other roads being the coaling and ash road and a siding for coal wagons.  Gonna be a bit busy in this space!

 

As I've run out of rail, until an order for 50 metres arrives from Slater's, I'll have to do some more wiring and actuator fitting or other bits.  Unless I can source a 50 of 55 foot turntable from somewhere I'm going to have to scratch build that but that will have to wait. I need to start on a control panel etc. so I can test some of this track properly.

 

No shortage of things to do in lockdown then!

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

 

[Kris]

There is a lovely flow to the track. 

[lezz01]

Hi Dave. Once again I love your trackwork. 

See the following link for turntables.

http://www.midrailcentre.com/turntable-kits-general-information

I have no connection to these guys other than knowing that they exist.

Regards Lez.

[eldavo]

Still looking for a turntable but no response from suppliers. Need to be patient at this time I guess.  Luckily plenty of other stuff to do.

 

Decided it's time to do some testing of trackwork.  Most of the baseboards are at least partially wired so I've jury rigged the down main line so I can give some of the toys a run.  At least nothing has fallen off the track yet!  As is tradition with my layouts I have to run an 08.  Actually it's a useful way of testing as it's a short wheel base and is fitted with sound so you can identify any track peculiarities through the stutters in the sound.

 

 

Of course you have to test with some other bits.  It's a Midland layout so better crack out a big red engine.

 

 

Maybe not quite the right sort of red engine but it makes a heck of a racket.

 

Of course while I was searching for stuff on the internet I got sidetracked and ended up looking at DIY DCC control systems.  So obviously I didn't test the layout using the DCC system I've had for years that works perfectly.  I bought 3 circuit boards on eBay from the finest chinese suppliers and rigged up a DCC++ EX command station.  Pretty easy to do, not many wrinkles and the gen is all online along with free software.

 

The system is built using an Arduino microcontroller (Arduino Mega 2560) which is loaded up with the DCC++ EX command station software.  On to this is mounted a standard motor shield and a wifi shield.  The combination provides a 2amp DCC base station complete with a built-in WiThrottle server accessed through it's own WiFi network.  You control the trains by connecting one of the free apps, such as Engine Driver, running on your phone.

 

 

Better get on with building and wiring more track before I get too distracted playing trains.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[eldavo]

The good thing about this lockdown lark is that you get a couple of hours a day in the workshop, if not more. Progress has been steady and I now have all the track down and wired for all 3 platform roads, the up and down running lines, the run round loop and the loco shed pointwork. The goods yard is yet to be started and I can't progress the engine shed area until I've made progress on the turntable issues.

 

This is what the underside of board 5 looks like.

 

 

I followed up on the link provided by Lez above and though the website suggests the turntables are out of production I sent an email.  After 2 weeks and no response I phoned up and spoke to the guy who produces the kits.  He had some kits in stock, not the 50 foot Cowans and Sheldon I was after but something that would do the job.  He said he would ring me back later the same day to confirm. Of course be didn't. How can it be so difficult to give someone several hundred pounds? I guess I'll have to ring up again.

I've spent the last couple of days butchering sheets of Wickes finest Chinese plywood (is there anything we don't get from China anymore?).  I seem to have produced a crude shipping crate with no lid...

 

 

More to do.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

[eldavo]

The packing case has gained a lid and some holes...

 

 

So this packing case is actually the control gear for the layout packed up for transport.  It's built in 4 parts with the lowest part providing a base and storage for cables, extension leads and the like...

 

 

The uprights hold the various boxes together for transport and raise the control panel to a convenient height for operation. Castors are yet to be added. No point in lifting and carrying if it can be rolled.

 

The lid is inverted and located on top of the uprights and the middle box sits on this. This box will contain a bunch of tag strips and connections to all the baseboards will be terminated here. In addition the box houses a mini ATX PC power supply which will provide 5 and 12 volts ancillary power for the layout.

 

 

Finally the top section locates onto the middle box and houses the schematic control panel for points and signals plus track power of either DC or DCC depending on my mood.

 

 

With the basic structure put together I now have to get my paint brushes out and slap some primer and top coat on before embarking on the job of installing the wiring.

 

What fun!

 

Cheers

Dave

 

[eldavo]

I've got past the boring bit of painting all the butchered timber of the control boxes. My clothes and the floor of the workshop will for ever bear the evidence of the use of black and red paint!

 

Next step is to make the connections from each of the boards to the concentrator box. The connections from five of the boards have been made to tag strips.

 

 

It's been a bit of a slog but I'm getting there. I can now jury rig power feeds to get all the track tested. All seems well so far!

 

It's now decision time.  I had a bit of a result and a kit of parts for a Metalsmiths 60 ft pregrouping turntable arrived on Monday so I can either finalize the track layout of the shed area and lay the track or push on with the next steps of the control panel construction. May well add some switches so I can test the pointwork. We'll see.

 

Onward.

 

Cheers

Dave

[eldavo]

Building the turntable and finalizing the engine shed layout requirs several decisions so the obvious thing to do is prevaricate!  I pushed on with a bit more wiring and have all the connections to the boards tested.  My intention is to allow the layout to be configured for DC or DCC operation so there is a bit of faffing involved.  For DC operation the control panel will have isolation switches and will determine how track feeds are supplied to various areas of the layout allowing the use of two controllers simultaneously through a form of cab control.  In DCC mode none of this will be required and needs to be bypassed plus I want to separate the feeds out into up to 4 districts with cutouts.

 

This is how far I have got...

 

 

On the right just visible beyond the power supply are two sub miniature 15-way D shell connectors. The male of these currently has no connections but will receive signal control information from the control panel. The female connector will again be connected to the control panel and is linked to the point control connections. These will always be connected.

 

On the left can be seen 2 25-way D shell connectors. The one with the black cover has connections to the 12 track feed areas and the one with the grey cover connects to the isolating sections.  In DC mode two more connectors from the control panel will plug in here.

 

As it is here the system is rigged for DCC operation with the black covered D shell connector combining the 12 feed areas into 4 power districts accessible from the small tag strip bottom left.  The tag strip currently bridges together all 4 districts into one for testing (and because I haven't got 4 cutout boards yet).  The grey covered connector on the left simply bridges together the isolating sections so they are always live.  As with the 15 way connections on the right, the 25 way connectors are one male and one female to avoid any accidental wrong connections.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

 

.

 

 

[eldavo]

As ever I've been flitting from one thing to another.  To help finalize the shed area I've had a bit of a look at the turntable kit.  The mounting kit is already half built having been a demo unit so I can easily see how it will fit in the layout. As supplied the mounting unit is made up of several layers of MDF each 600mm square. For a 60ft turntable this seems a bit over generous so the first thing to do was take a jigsaw to it and lop off 60mm all round.

 

 

Should fit ok I think but I have to work out a way to motorized it.

 

I've also been continuing with the control panel.  I've sorted out the timber bits and started drilling holes and fitting switches.  I've fitted a sacrificial graphic with double sided tape and use this as a drilling template.  Points are controlled by a bunch of rotary switches and eventually I hope to use some RGB LEDs to highlight drivable routes.  The colour of the LEDs will indicate which DC cab has control.

 

 

The point switches actually didn't take too long to wire up and I'm now able to operate everything and start testing the track.  There will be quite a lot of fettling to do!  I've started running some of my collection of Midland locos and this has highlighted the fact some of them have not been run-in since I built them and others that I have acquired have been sat in boxes for years and have "issues".

 

 

Once I started running locos in earnest this highlighted another problem.  The servo control boards seemed to be seeing a lot of electrical noise on the control lines which could lead to a twitch fest with points changing intermittently all over the place. Argh!

 

A bit of head scratching and a review of the code running on the ATtiny processors and I realised the switch debouncing wasn't very good. A change to the code solved the problem and the points now behave themselves.  This meant I had to lift each of the baseboards, unplug each ATtiny chip, insert into a programmer and reload the code then reinstall the chip.  Lots of room for error with 5 baseboards and 16 chips to do.

 

One of the chips refuses to reprogram but luckily I have spare. I also managed to reinsert 2 chips the wrong way round which should be a recipe for disaster. I discovered my error when they didn't work and I gave one of the chips a good shove with my finger to make sure it was properly seated. Ouch, it was red hot!

 

 

I now have a chip shaped brand on the end of my finger.  Amazingly I powered the board down, refitted the chips correctly, powered on and they worked!  Surprised? Very.

 

I now have quite a lot of track fettling to do and the turntable to install. Or I could do more fiddling with wires on the control panel.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

 

 

 

 

[lezz01]

It seems to all be coming together well Dave. Where did you get the turntable from mate? Is from the place I suggested or did you source it elsewhere? I'm eyeing one up for a model of Nailsworth in EM but I also like the LMR ones so I can't decide properly till I see them both.

Regards Lez. 

[eldavo]

8 hours ago, lezz01 said:

It seems to all be coming together well Dave. Where did you get the turntable from mate? Is from the place I suggested or did you source it elsewhere? I'm eyeing one up for a model of Nailsworth in EM but I also like the LMR ones so I can't decide properly till I see them both.

Regards Lez. 

 

The turntable is a Metalsmiths/Midland Railway Centre jobby as you suggested.  They are not really in production as the guy is supposed to be retiring and also at the moment there are problems with supply of some parts.  Originally I was looking for a 50ft Cowans and Sheldon but after a couple of phone calls and an email he managed to put together a kit of parts for a 60ft C&S so I went with that.  Looks to be quite a nice kit.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

[Titanius Anglesmith]

How have I missed this?  Following with interest 

[G.M.R.]

Great project Dave. You clearly haven't lost your touch. That trackwork looks superb. I am very interested in seeing how the turntable develops.

 

Can it really be 5 years since I last spoke up on here?

[gordon s]

Good grief, I thought it may be you, Geoff as soon as I saw you had moved over to O gauge in your post re couplings. I wondered if there was a link back to Dave.......

 

Hope you’re keeping well. Still golfing?......

 

One day we’ll all catch up again...

Edited March 2, 2021 by gordon s

[eldavo]

More progress has been made and the cab control system for DC operation has been wired and tested. For some reason when it comes to control panels I don't seem to be able to keep things tidy. It's getting messy.

 

 

In fact once I started adding LEDs to provide for route indication I got frustrated and had to step away from it for a while.  I'll figure out what to do with it in a few days but in the meantime I decided to start work on the turntable.

 

Generally the kit seems to be nicely engineered but it's not without its challenges.  Some of the bits are a tad fiddly and this particular kit has its own problems as it's been cobbled together.  It took me quite a while to spot that the M2 cheesehead bolts I was supposed to use to fit bits together weren't.  There's a clue when they won't fit through a 2mm hole!  Not surprisingly they wouldn't mesh with the M2 nuts. Doh!  Thank goodness for Amazon Prime next day delivery.

 

More fun and games today finding that various bits of etch don't actually fit where the instructions say they should. Probably just as well that not many people will know much about Cowan and Sheldon turntables.  Lots more to do but it's getting there.

 

 

Cheers

Dave

 

[eldavo]

Assembly of the turntable is pretty much complete so it was time to get the knives out...

 

 

One advantage of building the baseboards out of foam is that holes are easily made.  A few minutes with a carving knife and a bread knife (the domestic staff weren't keen on the idea) and a nice big hole was cut to house the beast.  

 

 

I need to make some adjustments to the race rail as it's not quite circular and tweak the wheel mountings and it should be good to go.  Painting is next up and some fiddling with stepper motors.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[eldavo]

The mojo for working on the control panel is somewhat lacking and I'm awaiting bits to motorise the turntable so I thought I would break out the paintbrushes, paint and glue.  I've slopped various colour mixes of acrylics on some of the sleepers and started ballasting. This could take some time...

 

 

I'm going with the painting the glue between the sleepers and sprinkling the ballast method.  The white is latex glue slightly diluted.

 

Onwards.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[eldavo]

Painting glue between the sleepers might seem like a tedious way of ballasting but actually it's pretty time efficient.  This morning I vacuumed off the excess ballast and voila...

 

 

No rework or cleanup required.  It's a lot easier to do in O gauge rather than N!  It will have a dilute glue mixture added at some point to make 100% sure its all locked down but it's pretty much good to go.

 

Of course trackwork is a project that just keeps on giving.  Having threaded thousands of chairs onto hundreds of yards of rail and then glued it all down you then get the job of painting it all.  I've added a general rust colour to the rails and chairs. Still to do is to pick out the keys in a timber colour and the fishplates and slide chairs in a greasy colour. Then it will need weathering.

 

 

All good fun.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[eldavo]

I've been digging more holes in the baseboards...

 

This time it's for inspection pits in the loco shed area. The one above is one of a pair actually inside the shed building. I fiddled about wondering whether to bother with these as they will be largely invisible especially when locos are parked in the shed. Eventually I decided to get on with the job as it would niggle if actually they were obviously missing later on.

 

There are actually 4 pits; two inside the shed, another inspection pit on the shed apron (bit of overkill looking at midland shed pictures) and an ash pit on the road to the right of the shed.

 

 

Most of the track is now down in this area with just the turntable approach to do and a bit more on the coal road.

 

 

The bits for the turntable drive have now arrived so it's time to go and do battle...

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[eldavo]

More progress made. The turntable now has a drive mechanism. Actually this is Mark 3!  The first version was a 5 volt stepper motor with built-in 64 to 1 gearbox which worked pretty well in terms of positioning but had nowhere near enough torque. Mark 2 was a NEMA 17 stepper motor working at 12 volts driving the main shaft directly. Again not enough torque and took a bit of software jiggery pokery to get the positioning right.

 

Mark 3 reuses the NEMA 17 motor but adds 3 to 1 gearing using a toothed belt and pulleys.  This looks as though it may have enough grunt to do the job.  I've done some basic testing with the stepper running with 1/32 microstepping but I could probably get a bit more torque if I reduced the level of microstepping.

 

 

The stepper is driven by an 8825 stepper driver controlled by an Arduino pro mini (for no reason other than I had a spare one).  The table doesn't have to do anything special simply rotate exactly 180 degrees on request.  The bridge track power is delivered through the race rail and the basic design is not DCC friendly so the Arduino also drives a relay unit to isolate the track while the table moves. A simple pushbutton on the control panel will start things happening.

 

I need to finish the wiring on this board and the associated bits in the control box so I can test it properly.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[lezz01]

I have a number of hi torque 12V motors if you need one Dave. They are from early answer machines that I brought a job lot of many moons ago for the solenoids. The motors were just a bonus. They also have a pully system which you might find useful as well. Just drop me a PM and I'll pop one on the post for you.

Regards Lez.  

[eldavo]

Generous offer Les.  If the current scheme doesn't hack it I may well take you up on it.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

[eldavo]

As ever when I get to a tricky bit I duck out and do something else!  In this case I was getting tired of the seemingly endless wiring sorting out the engine shed on board 6.  With 9 isolating sections for DC mode there seems to be quite a lot of it.  I bought some 25mm thick rigid packaging foam to act as the core of my platforms.  I could have used a traditional method of creating a framework of strip wood or cardboard but being lazy this looked like an easier and quicker method.

 

 

The core will be faced with card and have one of two layers of 2mm card as a top surface.  One of the platforms is quite long but I'm not convinced it is long enough. May have to have a rethink.  Of course my legendary quantity surveying capabilities mean I didn't order enough foam. Doh!

 

 

Having run out of materials I had to get back to the wiring.  A concerted effort yesterday saw the control panel wiring for the shed area sorted and it works. Yay!  In DC mode I have space for 9 locos in the shed area. It could accommodate more in DCC mode.

 

 

The class 2 and class 4 4-4-0s are parked in what will be the shed with a Flatiron and class 2 goods sat on the apron.  0-4-4 1257 is sat on the ash pit with a class 3 tank engine sat next to it on the turntable road next to what will be the coaling shed. 

 

The turntable seems to be working fairly well and managed to turn the compound which is heeeeaavy. The single which is parked on it is no challenge.  I'm going to need more engines.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

[eldavo]

More packaging foam has arrived so I have been able to install the core for all the platforms.  On to these I've added a layer of 2mm grey board (cardboard). If nothing else this has used up some of my spare latex glue!

 

 

Somehow I always make to get this orrible sticky latex stuff all over my fingers no matter how careful I am.  It's all stuck down now and I've given the card a thin coat of dilute PVA glue to seal it.

 

 

The next challenge is what to do about cladding the sides.  I'm assuming most structures would be built out of stone in the peak district and whatever I do for the platforms will dictate what I do for the other buildings.  I've played around with printed paper textures and laser cutting textures into card.  The former lacks relief but has loads of colour detail whilst the latter has the relief but I have to find a way of painting it convincingly.  Hmmm....

 

 

The jury is out.