Ray H

You've got a Sprog and DecoderPro. You can use this combination to check the decoder's CVs. There's also a throttle facility - PanelPro? - that can be used to check on the decoder's responses to CV changes. One of the changes that you won't see is an amended value for CV8 even if the decoder has recognised that requested change. You should (I believe) find the loco number reverted to 3 afterwards though. I'd remove the capacitor, leaving you just a basic decoder. I'd then take a look at CV266 which is the master volume CV (or is it 267 - the manual will confirm which. If you have any paperwork from the sound file producer take a look at whether there are functions to decrease/increase the volume (and make sure the speaker is still working as well - I've had more than one fail). Try the volume increase function with care. Turn on the increase function and fairly quickly turn it off again. A colleague left the increase function on and had to replace the decoder 😒. As young Pete the Elaner has said whilst I was typing this, try and speak to the retailer/sound producer to see if they can help you further. Provided damage is not maliciously caused, Zimo will usually replace damaged decoder for a nominal fee. I think that has to be done via the original decoder's sales outlet to get the sound file re-instated.

I bought a so called O gauge brake van via ebay a little while ago only to find that whilst it had O gauge wheels and resembled a BR brake van, the height was too great and the width pushing the normal loading gauge measurement. It sat demoralised wherever I could hide it until . . . . . . . We had a new member join our club last year. He had converted a (heavy) GWR van into a track cleaning vehicle by the simple expedient of cutting a couple of rectangular holes in the van's floor over where the rails would be and dropping a couple of Peco track rubbers (mounted vertically) into the holes, leaving gravity to keep the track rubbers in contact with the rails below. I quite liked this idea but hadn't got a heavy enough vehicle that I could do similar to. Not so long ago we visited a garden based layout in need of some TLC (when the warmer weather arrives). Subsequent to that one of our member's who unbeknown to me, had been a regular at the garden railway, brought a colleague to the club. Said gent brought with him a Tri-ang Big Train Hymek that had been modified to be a track cleaning vehicle for the garden railway. The Hymek had been modified to have a horizontally mounted piece of hardboard positioned between the two bogies with the rough side nearest the rails. Judging by the state of the hardboard this idea had definitely worked. I don't clean my track too frequently and quite often then only the easy to access stretches. This generally means the hidden sidings escape that treatment although they can be reached with a bit of effort. I was talking to Jim about this yesterday and suddenly thought of the disgraced brake van. It was made from wood and (as I was to find out this morning) was pinned and glued together. Off came the body (reasonably easily) so that I could get to the floor. I drilled a couple of holes in the floor - one on either side - and did likewise in a 50mm square piece of MDF. I loosely bolted the MDF to the underside of the floor using nuts, bolts, washers and springs (to keep the two wooden parts apart) I found in the garage. I applied some adhesive tape backed Velcro to the underside of the MDF and to the smooth side of a similarly sized piece of hardboard. The springs are compressed enough to push the MDF/hardboard against the rails. A couple of pieces of lead offcuts were glued to the floor of the vehicle and a test run began - the lead isn't on the wagon in the first image. And this was what the rough side of the hardboard looked like after a return trip between Gawcott & Westbury behind the Terrier: My original intention was to leave the vehicle like that but I took pity on its aesthetics and made up some plastic sides and ends to give me this: I'll paint the bodywork grey in due course. The tail lamp came from the body of the brakevan. The wagon is very good at finding even the slightest stepped rail joint (and the occasional track pin that hasn't been glued down). One of the rubbing pieces from the Hymek was made of plywood with some coarse emery paper used as the rail cleaner. I might give that a go as well in due course.

Has the Bobby let a GWR tank loco go before his A3?

I think the above poster is an imposter. There's at least two coaches in the above images where the sides are in only one colour 😃

I mentioned in my previous post that I'd been working on the Westbury Crossing based LCUT Creative water tower. It sort of hides the lever frame. I've added a little over 20mm to the height of the "brick" walls as can be seen in the lower of the above two images. Early signs are that the addition is enough (which is good because I didn't fancy having to patch in some more of the brick paper). Gawcott's station building has also been attacked with the brick paper as can be seen below. The card hides the frame from passengers on the platform (as well as providing somewhere to affix the box diagram). I'll probably do something similar on the inside of the water tower. The rest of today has been spent assembling an LCUT Creative small goods shed for Gawcott. This is also destined to have brick papers affixed to the walls and, if I can get appropriate ones, to the building's roof as well.

You're route knowledge astounds me. Is there anywhere in the UK you don't sign?

I'm undecided. The area that I Artexed yesterday is definitely firmer than the area I painted in PVA this morning. The PVA was diluted slightly to get the Acrylic paint to mix. All I would expect to do to the Artexed area would be to flock it, add some static grass(es) and stick some clump foliage on top. I wonder if a second coat of Artex before the flock etc., would be a good idea? There was no shunting today. Instead I spent the time applying Scalology's adhesive brick papers/vinyls to the LCut Creative water tower as I didn't trust myself to do a decent job with a paint brush. That said, I didn't really have an option because I've increased the height of the brick walls as the building is around the lever frame at Westbury. Its original height made access to the levers less easy - it's much better now.

Just checked the new MS manual, the use of the two CVs mentioned above hasn't changed. I don't know if there is a separate CV related to braking aligned to the light engine function.

And so to scenery (ugh!). I was lucky some while ago to acquire what I presume is 5mm foamboard. I've started using this for the upright supports for the grassed areas, using a hot glue gun's glue (😃) to fix it in position. I've then stuffed scrunched up newspaper into the gaps between the uprights. and stretched 50mm wide masking tape between the uprights and over the newspaper. I purposely didn't pack the newspaper tight to give some flexibility in the surface so it isn't all flat. That part of the process went well (if you like decorator's masking tape coloured grass). I was introduced to Artex plaster as useful for scenery some while ago and have used it previously as a layer over some plaster impregnated cloth (that didn't seem to have too much plaster impregnated!). The attraction of the Artex is that it is unlike ordinary plaster insomuch as you can re-wet it and then reshape it. I mixed some Artex last evening (around 9pm) and applied it over an area of (lightly supported) masking tape. It didn't seem to have dried completely by 8am this morning possibly because the garage temperature was around 14º. It also doesn't feel too rigid, maybe because the supporting structure isn't rigid enough. That said, the layout is not designed to be portable, so I'm hopeful that it shouldn't be too susceptible to damage. And so today . . . . . I'm going to use a hot air blower over last night's produce and see if that makes a difference in its drying. I'm then going to mix some green acrylic paint with some neat PVA and paint the Artex - the green paint is partly to show if I've missed any Artexed areas. I shall also try painting the so far non-Artexed masking tape with neat PVA to try and induce some rigidity into it. In between times I might do some shunting.

Take a look at CV349. That's the CV used with the active brake facility. Is function 2 (or whatever key has been nominated for the active brake) selected when you run light loco? CV309 will tell you which key has been assigned for the active brake. The above CV numbers were those with the MX range of decoders. I don't know if they've changed with the MS range.

Came through Mursley en route to MK last evening and judging by the cars coming off the Newton Longville Road at Bottle Dump roundabout that the road may be open again.

You're modelling is brilliant Kevin, that looks just like I imagine the real thing will do nearly 80 years on from 1938. Do you know the winning numbers for this week's lottery?

The job was finished off yesterday albeit not without the Arduino resolutely not doing what I was expecting - it was doing what I'd previously told it to do 😐. It took a while to sort that out, highlighting the concept that any comments included in programs are there to be read, not ignored. Anyway, once I'd sorted that, all was good and the day's service was completed without further ado. I knocked up a rough sequence a while ago. That's now been run through a couple of times without failing so I typed it up last night. This sequence has but 24 moves and seems manageable by one operator, unlike the 90 plus moves in the sequence for the OO layout which got a bit overpowering when it was just me operating it. I suspect that the requirement with this layout for the LR train journeys to got round the garage 1½ times provides a respite (and, for the BR trains, allows them to run round and round if I let them).. I've also refrained from having (theoretical clock) times associated with this sequence. More running today.

Yesterday was a fairly productive day, the results of which are shown below. First though, the initial image below shows where I was starting from yesterday. It shows part of the recently laid (fiddle yard) pointwork just visible in the background and the solitary two sidings which represent (BR) branch end in the right foreground. Next there is an illustration of how the adding of a third siding as part of the earlier trackwork would have eaten away at the space in the inner of the two sidings that eventually went down. The wagons in the foreground represent the accommodation that the third siding would have given and the space consumed by the point needed to create the extra siding. There was room for an extra wagon below the camera. It also has to be remembered that the loosely laid point has a radius of around forty inches which artificially keeps its length down. The third image shows what I was hoping to achieve. The extra point is laid temporarily on the through line but I can't work out which of the two points that I had in stock was used for the photo. And finally, in more ways than one, is what I ended up with. The railcar comfortably tucked out of the way of trains arriving and departing from this end of the fiddle yard. I tried both the partially curved and straight points that I had and settled on the latter as it gave the maximum siding length with only a minor disturbance to the through line. Prior to yesterday I had a couple of short lengths of Peco track remaining from previous trackwork/laying and was thinking that I'd have to make up something using PCB sleepering to get the maximum length from the new siding. I'd completely overlooked the fact that inserting the point into existing plain track would free up some Peco track for the siding. To add insult to injury, so to speak, I did end up making a short length of track from odd sleepers and pieces of rail for the end of the siding only to find, as I cleared the various odds and ends away after the track laying finished, that said odds and ends had hidden a short length of the track recovered from the through line. Anyone for a four inch long programming track? The PW team surrendered their track possession yesterday afternoon and the signalling "boy" had installed the wire in tube and the servo before he packed up. That (just?) leaves the servo to be connected to the Arduino, the Arduino sketch to be updated, the frog and associated track wires to be connected to the relay and the point operating switch to be found and installed. With luck, the railcar currently waiting at Westbury will be able make it to the branch end later today.

Isn't that a bit big for the platform Ade? Hat, coat, gone!

And just when I thought I'd finalised the track layout . . . . The lower level (under Gawcott) effectively features two storage yards/hidden sidings/fiddle yards, facing each other but not directly accessible from each other. The traverser end represents the world at large whilst the other end comprises just two relatively short dead-end sidings representing the end of the BR branch. These two sidings can accommodate no more than 6 wagons. In what I take as not totally unrealistic (and certainly not one engine in steam), the railcar that occasionally shuttles between both sets of sidings (via Westbury) waits at the smaller (fiddle) yard for the branch freight to arrive there before the railcar returns along the branch to be followed by the returning freight. One of the two (hidden) sidings holds stock for the departing freight leaving the other siding for the arriving freight, which leaves nowhere for the railcar to lay-over and requires said railcar to be shunted around to avoid the freight. The two sidings were a late addition following a (brilliant) suggestion from Jim. I thought about adding a third siding off of one of the two when I made the recent changes but calculated that the presence of the extra point (which had to be kept clear to be usable) wouldn't give me any extra siding capacity. Shunting the railcar around to avoid the freight yesterday made me question another option. The plain track between the recently laid pointwork and where the BR track emerges from the depths below Tingewick could possibly accommodate a (left hand) point which could lead to a third siding into which I could run the railcar if the siding is long enough. I initially thought of using a Peco point because I was under the impression that the two points I rescued during the recent changes were both right hand points. They weren't, they're both left hand points, albeit that one is curved slightly. I have a spare relay on the shield (for the new point's frog polarity switching), a plentiful supply of servos, plenty of left-over cork sheet and reckon I can find a switch for operating the servo as well. I even think that adding the new point and siding can be achieved by only needing to remove the short upper level baseboard to get to the work area. I'm off to do some measuring and will report back later.

All the frog juicers have now been replaced with relays so no more burn outs 🙂. I always seem to manage to forget installation/wiring work when I position PCBs and the like on the layout. The Westbury relay shield is mounted on the front edge of the baseboard for ease of access in the future. It had taken a while to workout where it would fit without being too cramped. Unfortunately the 15-20mm space above the actual relays screw terminals didn't make attaching wires easy. Anyway, with things back together, it was time for the (late running) morning freight to leave Westbury en route to Gawcott, pausing at Tingewick to detach a couple of wagons for the factory and collect two others that needed to leave. The said train was photographed just before it reached its destination. The glow under the "bridge" is from the LED strip that illuminates the lower level tracks between Westbury and the entrance to the fiddle yard. With the electrics hopefully all now sorted I suppose I need to do a bit more scenic work 😒.

I bet you're glad that you no longer have to pay to get them all developed and printed. Mind you, circa 1938, you'd have had to do just that (unless you had your own developing facilities).

Another attempt at the sequence albeit for only part of the day and I wasn't half way through when I called time. The early part of the day was spent creating a programme track. I'm using one of the Westbury sidings which I've disconnected rail wise from the layout. The wiring to this track is now via a double pole switch which when switched one way will link the track to the rest of the layout and the track's power comes from an NCE PCP track feed when switched the other way. Things weren't helped later in the day by a courier who sent me a text to say he had delivered an item from Rapid Electronics to my house when in fact he hadn't! I called the courier's customer services and the item, which had been delivered elsewhere in error, finally arrived here. For the second day running I have managed to blow one of the frog juicers. The loco had stopped at the toe end of the point and had no speed set on either throttle. I found that the loco had moved onto the frog a little while later and was alerted to the loco's movement when the juicer emitted a cloud of smoke. I'm expecting a couple of visiting operators at the end of next week and had planned to delay the replacement of the Westbury juicers until after their visit but with two blown juicers in as many days I'm not so sure I can delay it any longer. I had envisaged that I'd have to re-arrange everything to add the relay board but I think I might actually be able to add the relay shield and the associated PCF8574 to the end of the servo board - the PCA9685, all of which are connected by the I2C bus.

The first back boards - blue emulsion painted plywood and bendy MDF - were never going to be the ultimate solution. I'd used I D Backscenes on the OO layout and was pleased with them so that was the intended way to go with the O gauge layout. I ordered several sets a few months back and have just been waiting for the layout to get to the stage where there weren't likely to be any major upheavals - I hadn't at that time bargained on having to replace the frog juicers. Anyway, the backscenes were sorted a few weeks back with particular attention paid to the lifting access flap where there had previously been nothing more than a 6" high piece of (blue) MDF and even that had part cut away to allow the flap to be folded back on itself. Jim came round a week or so ago and suggested using a completely removeable backscene on the flap, something like this. The problem was how to (temporarily) fix it to the layout and where to put it when the flap is folded back. I've largely solved the layout fixing by mounting the backscene on a sheet of 1mm plastic with a few vertical holding screws along the length of the flap - the screws are partially screwed into the top surface of the actual flap material and the plastic sheet slides down between the track supporting blocks and the screws. I then screwed further screws horizontally into the plywood sub-base pieces on which the track is mounted. The back of the plastic sheet had some small rare earth magnets super-glued in the appropriate places (to be magnetically attracted to the screw heads) and covered the magnets with some masking tape to stop the magnets being knocked off. The result is this: Ideally I'd like the plastic to retain its shape when not in its chosen position but it looks like I'll need to live with it laying flat somewhere where it won't get too damaged (although I've yet to find that place!).

It did largely. There were a couple of blips like blades temporarily parting company with their tie bars and one instance where the lasers/relays didn't do as they should have but otherwise an interesting running session which for a sequence of just 24 moves took most of the day - there was a lot of shunting!

The best laid plans of , , , , , Can you spot my deliberate mistake if I tell you that the two foreground tracks are on the traverser and the two tracks at the back are on the baseboard that passes over one of the back corners of said traverser? Why did I have to wait until I tried to move the traverser before I noticed that I'd mounted the laser and associated MERG PCB on the traverser (with the receiver on the fixed baseboard behind). It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the laser beam was horizontal as the laser would have just moved further away from the receiver. Unfortunately, that's not possible with my 39" radius or thereabouts curves which mean that the receiver is mounted almost at baseboard level and the laser is angled down from (rolling stock) body height towards it. Anyway, the laser and PCB are now fixed to a different adjacent fixed baseboard and all is working well although I spent a good few hours first re-locating everything and then extending the various wires in the limited space below the upper level and, with that done, trying to work out why things wouldn't work. I got everything working in the end but no thanks to some mysterious oddity that causes one of the upper level servos and associated relay to operate after a train on the LR has passed over the crossing. It only happens with trains in one direction and only when the laptop is connected to the UNO. I'm just hoping that everything is OK when I switch on tomorrow. Only time will tell.

I'm in the (on-going) process of building an O gauge layout in 18ft x 8ft garage. Some curves are a minimum of 39 inches. I've no intention of owning anything larger than an 0-6-0 but we've run short wheel based Heljan diesels - the likes of Class 40s can't hack the curves. I had set out to have a ruling gradient of around 1:55 and limit the trains to around 6 wagons. I discovered yesterday as I was returning stock to where it had been prior to some work on the layout, that at least one loco can definitely handle around a dozen vehicles up a gradient slightly steeper than that. I appreciate that you might not currently be planning to have gradients but its worth catering for them (and numerous other things unwanted at present) to make upgrading easier as the O gauge bug bites deeper.😐

There is also the option to have something like the basic NCE PowerCab and use it with a MERG booster (and [power] district cut-outs) kits although the MERG items would need to be built/assembled. What size layout are you thinking of and are you planning to have any of the Heljan diesels which are a bit heavier on their power requirement. I'd also suggest that you try out as many different systems as you can before you make your purchase. A friend of mine didn't. He bought a system which needed to be set up using a Windows phone/computer and he only has Apple devices.

I've finally got things working 🙂 I spent the morning working with a test program that did no more than read the Arduino pins to which the lasers were connected and displayed the results on the serial monitor. All worked fine. It seemed to work when I copied the same program code sections into the full sketch (program) and when using my hand to simulate the presence of a loco interrupting the laser beam. The Arduino detects the loco/train approaching the diamond crossing and energises the frog polarity switching relays. It then monitors the loco/train leaving the crossing and de-energises the relays once the train is clear. I was getting some strange results initially that I discovered were partly due to me getting the energising and de-energising the wrong way round in the program. With the sorted I wanted to check that the two lasers were working in unison so I stopped using my hand to represent a loco and turned track power on. The program stopped working as designed. 😒 I eventually traced the problem to one of interference being unwittingly picked up in the wiring from the laser furthest from the Arduino. Replacing the single wire from said laser to the Arduino with a length of screened cable solved the problem (at long last). The baseboards have all since been put back, secured in position and had trains/locos over both the upper level and the new pointwork in the (truly) hidden sidings. I'll have a day or two using the layout. This will be followed by catching up with work on the club's control panels and once that's sorted I'll swap the frog juicers at Westbury with relays.