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Hello and my (son's) layout


Fox_2015

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Hi everyone, as this is my first post after a long time lurking I’ll start it with a bit about myself. Being a boy in the 80’s it meant I received the ‘train set’ present one Christmas. My interest grew from there as did my layout from the garage, to a fold down layout in my room, to eventually the attic. Once I reached high school in the 90’s I slowly abandoned the hobby due to peer pressure encouraged by the constant belittling of ‘train spotters’ by comedians and the media and moved onto RC cars and eventually onto modifying real cars as a hobby.

 

Sadly once I’d left school a fire at the family home wiped out a large amount of my collection and due to being busy at Uni I never managed to chase the insurance company for replacements.  Fast forward to today and my son was showing an interest in trains thanks to good old ‘Thomas’, so I bought him a second hand Hornby Local Freight set and set it up on the dining table to see if he liked it or not. He loved it so for the last year I’ve been building him a small layout in the attic.

 

I’ve been hampered by lack of space, lack of time but mostly lack of money, so everything is either second hand or my old stuff. The base board was made out of a packing case I got from the skip at work supported on cut up fence post. The track underlay is some spare laminated flooring underlay cut into strips.       

 

Here's some pics of the base board being constructed, the gap is handily going to be filled by a viaduct.

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Welcome, and well done making a start with your (son's)* first project.  You're getting cracking in a far more visible way than myself and countless others on here, so power to your elbow sir!

 

 

 

 

* yeah, right, dad!  :angel:

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  • 2 weeks later...

We now have a tunnel! The main tunnel shape was made out of a piece of scrap mdf, I made the exit of the tunnel quite large so you can easily get your hand into it. I glued cardboard cutouts onto it like ribs in an aircraft, to define the hill's shape.  I then filled in the gaps between the cardboard ribs with rolled up newspaper before covering it in sheets of more newspaper to smooth it out. Then it got a quick coat of poundland brown paint. The portal used to be a single portal but I cut it in half and extended it using part of the retaining wall it came with, the larger stones round the arch are cut from cardboard. 

 

I also did my first ever attempt at ballasting thanks to the excellent Everard Junction youtube videos.

 

The cardboard to the right of the tunnel is being used to built up the landscape and will hold a small village.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I got the tunnel smoothed out a bit and also did some more work on the built up land for the village. I've ballasted the engine shed track and also had my first go at weathering the track by brushing some ash on it, (the left hand track entering the engine shed).

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  • 7 months later...

Small update I hadn’t worked on the layout for a good few months, recently my son was visiting a hobby shop with my OH and he asked if they sold small track workers, my OH asked why and he said it was because he wanted his layout finished! This shamed me back into work which is tricky when you don’t have much time at night and a car to fix at the weekend.

 

At Christmas my mum bought him the cheap Hornby Blue Rapier set, he loves this as it has working lights, he asked me if I could fit lights to his other locos, so one was selected as the guinea pig. I used DC not DCC so I had to give this some thought, I ended up with the idea of a 5V regulator and some dropping resistors to allow it run warm white and red leds, with a capacitor on the output side of the regulator to stop any flickering. I also fitted a low voltage drop diode (Schottky diode) to prevent any damage to the regulator when the loco was running in reverse.

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I setup the circuit up on some bread board, I put the red and white LEDs in two separate groups, with the two LEDs in each group in parallel. Each group was current limited by a 180 ohm resistor, the result of this was 16mA for both red LEDs so 8mA each and 12mA for both white LEDs so 6mA each (these are measured values). These currents are well below the design maximum so they should last for a long time. I used 1.8mm LEDs, I did have some pictures of this setup but my phone decided to lose them when I was moving them around on it.

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I mounted the circuit to a small piece of veroboard with the capacitor (rescued from an old PC power supply) floating to make mounting easier. I attached the board and capacitor to the chassis with some silicon, the idea of this being it’s easy to remove if required. In the pic below you can see that the output wires are not yet connected to the veroboard but you can easily see the two current limiting resistors where the LEDs will be connected to.

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I then moved on to mounting the LEDs in the body shell, I again used silicon to mount these, you can see in the picture below the LEDs mounted to the left of the picture, (the rear of the loco) are my first attempt and are not as neat at my second attempt on the right. I found it very hard to solder the LEDs together before fitting them to the shell as they kept sticking to the magnetic tip of the soldering iron. I used wire from an old IDE computer cable to wire them up.

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Success! They work well, too well in fact, I did my development work on the breadboard during the day and I didn’t realise how bright the LEDs were. Up in the attic in the darkness it looks like a torch is travelling round the layout, also I assumed that being very directional the LEDs wouldn’t throw much light back into the cab, however this isn’t true and both the cabs light up.

 

The next loco I add lights to will have the inside of the cab and the back of the LEDs painted black, also the current limiting resistor’s value will be increased! The main thing is though my son loves it and immediately asked if I could add lights to the other locos.

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I setup the circuit up on some bread board, I put the red and white LEDs in two separate groups, with the two LEDs in each group in parallel. Each group was current limited by a 180 ohm resistor, the result of this was 16mA for both red LEDs so 8mA each and 12mA for both white LEDs so 6mA each (these are measured values). These currents are well below the design maximum so they should last for a long time. I used 1.8mm LEDs, I did have some pictures of this setup but my phone decided to lose them when I was moving them around on it.

Wiring LEDs in parallel is not best practice as they are current not voltage devices. I can see why you did it though.

 

I assume you have electronics knowledge as you recognise the different voltage and brightness characteristics of the different colours.

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Wiring LEDs in parallel is not best practice as they are current not voltage devices. I can see why you did it though.

 

I assume you have electronics knowledge as you recognise the different voltage and brightness characteristics of the different colours.

Thanks for the reply, yes I agree this is not the best practice but I was limited by the following constraints:

1. cost - 5v regulators are cheap hence this choice of voltage, also it works quite well as the track voltage when running is always well above this voltage

2. voltage - the white LED turn on voltage is 3V, so I couldn't put them in series, like I could have done with the red LEDs (2V turn on)

3. space - I didn't really want to end up with a resistor for each LED (four in total)

 

However the circuit is fail safe. If we assume that one of the white LEDs has failed open circuit and all the current is flowing through the working one we will be left with 3V across the working LED and 2V across the 180ohm resistor. The current through the resistor will be 2V / 180 ohm = 0.011A or 11mA. The LED is rated as follows: typical current 20mA and maximum current 30mA so we are below this. If we repeat this for the red LED circuit we get a current of 17mA (3V/180ohm) which is a bit higher but still below typical and maximum.

 

So hopefully no loco fires! ;) 

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