Wylde, an alternate Thame

[unravelled]

Thanks, I do have a code 100 short crossing which I used as a placeholder until I could get a new code 75 one. I may have to resort to building a copperclad version if all else fails, but I think that's beyond my current skillset.

 

Dave

[unravelled]

Nearly a year on, time for an update. I had a long idle spell after my last post, but then managed a few weeks good progress. During this I compleeted the trial wiring. Those of a nervous disposition should probably look away now...

 

 

What I have done is bring out all the tortoise, frog and feed connections to the front, where I can make the necessary interconnections. At a later stage I can simplifym and tidy up somewhat. Honest. One of the reasons for the quantity of wires is that I opted to use 4 pole changeover switches for point operation, which with a bit of cunning allows for a degree of non prototypical "interlocking". The intention is to use the spare poles to swich the appropriate controller to the track sections adjacent to the points. In most cases, thee switches operate two pairs of points, or a pair of points and a slip end as a crossover. The tortoise switches can be used for frog polarity, and a spare way, although so far I have found the unifrog work well enough without frog switching. My point butchery to get prototypical spacing caused some problems, but nothing that couldn't be sorted. My biggest problem was with the short crossing scissors arrangement accessing the goods yard. The construction of the flat bottom electrofrog crossing required that the polarities for the bottom left to top right route were opposite to the bottom right to top left one. If both were switched together, I'd have a short circuit between them. My solution was to cross wire the operating switches, so that when one is set, the other switch does nothing. This does mean that if both switches are thrown then one does not match the points, but it works for me. In operation, the fact that there is no noise from the point motors is an alert that something is amiss.

All this wiring made me decide to relocate the operating position to the middle of the of the scenic section, and further to have all the ponts for the main station operated from a control panel. I spent some time drawing this up on GIMP.

 

 

The circles indicate positions of point switches. This will be A4 width, so quite compact. One decision I made was to operate both ends of the top goods yard loop, and half the double slip, together. Looking at it now I'm not sure if that's a good idea. I may have to squeeze in another switch for the right hand end pair of points.

The goods yard layout, with the back loop is interesting. At Thame it was changed when the goods yard was widened, to more conventional single ended sidings, but with the lack of space I have, it seemed an interesting arrangement. I'd like to know how this layout would have been worked. One thought is that as wagons/vans had been processed through the goods shed, they could be moved out of the way to the back loop for collection. I'm assuming a shunting horse was on site.

On the layout there is not enough room to fit a catch points as shown on the diagram, so I had to resort, with some trepidation, to a bit of Peco butchery, to make this.

 

 

It s prototypical for at least part of Thame's history, and it fits the space. It still needs a bit of tweaking, and chars replacing, but does the job. The way I made it was to select the places to cut the rails, hopefully leaving emough chairs for good support. Then I cut away the chairs where the rails were to be realigned. Next was what I thought of as the risky bit, cutting the rails. I just used a Xuron cutter, so as to leave the cleaner cut side where the point blade would be fishplated. Then I put a slight bend in the diverging stub rails. The blades were quickly filed up from  spare rail, (not very well, I must redo them), and soldered to a copperclad tiebar. All in all I was impressed by how robust the bullhead points are. While they feel a lot more flimsy that their other ranges, they will put up with a lot of abuse.

 

One of the other tasks I have been working on is how to build the platforms. At the moment the plan is to build each face separately on a wooden core. then install them, fill between, and finally fit the platform edging.

This is my first real attempt, and I think it shoes promise, as long as I can get the corbelled rows squarer faced, I need to play with scoring to sharpen them up. . However they will be shadowed by the edging, so difficult to see. I just need to keep the camera away.

 

 

I'm using the brickwork software from Beckenham MRC. Very flexible, if a bit frustrating at times.

 

One blow to modelling. My main source of free card has been discontinued. Lidl have changed their porridge packaging.

 

Fortunately I have built up fairly good stocks of the card already.

 

 

So that's me up to date for another year...

 

Thanks

 

Dave

Edited April 28 by unravelled