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Vistisen

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  1. Vistisen

    Playing trains

    By Vistisen,

    I am lucky to be godparent to a nine-year-old autistic girl. One of the few things she does is play fantasy games with a dragon. Chard Junction is often the scene of carnage bought about by me 'moddeling' but today it suffered an even worse fate: attack by dragon, The sheep were under attack and saved by being loaded into a truck and driven off at the limited top speed of my new Hornby 48DS. It actually managed to escape and hide in the tunnel that leads to the fiddle yard. She has now reluctantly gone home. While clearing up the destruction, I realised that for an hour I actually played trains, and it was great fun. I often get annoyed by my lack of skills, points that derail stock, or the constant need to clean track. But playing trains IS fun. And as part of the escape I can inform that the 48Ds coped rather well with home made points and could pull a train consisting of its own flatbed, an Hornby custard and cream mark1 coach and an open private wagon  containing 24 sheep and four lambs up the incline up out of the fiddle yard.  Its total distance travelled in the last hour is about 100 times longer than it has done since I got it in September last year. In fact it is now probably run in.

  2. Vistisen
    This is a quick follow up. In my previous post I showed my third attempt at scratchbuilding in its pristine condition 
     
    I have not tried any form of weathering before. But I have now tried using ground pastels. I started by tried it out on an old Superquick card kit of a cottage. This seemed to work ok so after taking a deap breath (not actually that wise when the tale is full of finely ground particles)  I 'did' the station, and I am really quite pleased with the result.
     
    There is still some touching up to be done and the picture was taken before the matt varnish was completely dry. To my 50+ year old eyes it looks better than my merciless camera-phone thinks it does.  One thing I am surprised about is my eye for sizing it. I planned the model entirely from photos and had no idea of the dimensions. Now my copy of an excellent book Branch line to Chard by Ian Harrison has arrived. In this book he states that the station building was 84' by 26' . In 4mm to the foot, that means the model should be 336mm by 104mm My model is 338mm by 105mm!  The time I spent count bricks was not wasted.
     This book has given me  a lot of useful information including the fact that The platform awning was still there in 1966. I had assumed  that it was removed earlier than that so I am now going to have to add that. 
  3. Vistisen

    Year report

    By Vistisen,

    To call this a blog is to misuse the word. It has turned into an annual report!
    So, what has happened since last April? To be honest not that much, I spent a large part of the year avoiding the model Railway. My MOJO was AWOL. But a few months ago, I crawled in under the base boards to try and get going again. Actually the catalyst turned out to be, that the DCC 8 way Solenoid controller that I need to control the points at the other end of the fiddle yard that had been out of stock for almost a year, was again available. I bought one straightaway and got the points (and therefore the wiring of frogs) done at both ends of the fiddle yard. This left just the largest crossover. A curved one with a total length of about 4’. As this was on an open frame incline, I decided to cut sections of the extruded foam away and use underboard point motors. Once this was done, the up main line was complete both, in terms of track and power. To test it I pulled a Bachmann class 40 out of storage where it has not been used for about three years. I added 5 BR MK1s, including a few old Lima coaches with some serious wheel flanges. The train did a complete circuit without stalling, derailing or coaches jumping in the air as they crossed though my OO-SF points. I discovered that some of the motor growl was actually the Lima flanges crossing track chairs on my SMP flex track! But this was the first time I could sit and with a train go round and round since 2011. When I built a Hornby track plan layout together with the boys. I sat there with a glass of wine and felt the MOJO creeping back.
    As those who have read this blog might remember from a year ago I have spent  a lot (too much) time building a control panel, which the for the last year has sat gathering dust under one end of the layout, To be honest I was not expecting it to work that well when I reattached it to the layout (just one cable with a RJ12 connector for over 20 points . But to my surprise and joy it still worked. There is only one point that does not respond as it should.
     

     
    The landscaping on one of the open frame sections is now at the brown paint stage and I have bought a lot of static grass, Noch Glue and this is probably the next thing to tackle.
     

    I have spent the last few weeks building the main station building. That is now nearing completion. So, all in all at the moment things are finally moving again.  Whether or not the next blog post is up in 2020 will be a good indicator of the level of my motivation.
    I should finally add that in these Corona times. I am one of the lucky ones who still have a job, I have now been working from home since the midlle og March. Since the day job is maintaining unemployment benefit systems, My job is probably more certain than most people’s. Denmark is under a lighter lockdown than the UK, but it was implemented much earlier and has been such a success that they have actually closed the special Corona wing down in the largest hospital. The lockdown is being lifted as I write this, with the certainty that this will cause the number of new cases to rise, but hopefully under control. I follow what is happening ‘back home’ with anxiety as I have senile and house bound parents. I know that politics can be a problem on forums, but this is a blog. The NHS is really proving its worth and greatness. Whilst I applaud the praise it is getting from politicians, I would like to say to them, Put our money where your mouth is. Pay the NHS staff a decent wage, raise taxes on the rich to pay for it if necessary. To those (including myself) who were dismayed to see Boris Johnson as PM. Always remember it could be worse… you could be in Trump land.
     

  4. Vistisen
    After being directly encouraged by a number (smaller than 2) of RmWebbers to start a thread about a new modelling project, I decided to have a go at a blog. This first post is intended to introduce me and outline my plans for an extension to my model.
    I am an ex-pat Brit living in Denmark. My first Hornby trainset arrived on my 6th birthday in 1972. By my early teenage years, I had far too much stock running on a layout that was built on two 6’ by 4’ pieces of unsupported and therefore sagging chipboard in an L-shape and consisted of four circuits of track with three sidings all under the control of Hornby Zero1. This disappeared in my late teens and was replaces by a spartanly furnished room with a big Hi-Fi system. I emigrated to Denmark in 1989 and now live in a large rundown farmhouse in the middle of Jutland in the Danish Lake district. I work in IT. About 6 years ago I decided to start modelling again as a way of having a joint hobby with my three boys who are all now teenagers (well the youngest is now 12 but definitely a teenager) we built a model based on the largest Hornby track mat. With Superquick and Metcalf buildings and the obligatory church on a hill with a tunnel through it. Not a great modelling success, but a definite hit with the boys. I have managed to find a photo of it here.

    We have a largish L-Shaped room on the first floor about 18’ by 16’ on the two longest sides. This was full of stuff belonging to friends who were working in Africa. But about four years ago they returned home and the room was empty and mine! After a few aborted attempts at designing imaginary stations. I decided I wanted to try and model something prototypical.
    My childhood in Tunbridge Wells meant that the trains I grew up with were Hastings Line diesels. Not something I wished to model. But I wanted to run both steam and diesel, southern and western region. Somehow I came across the Chard branch line which to give a short history was originally a broad gauge line built by the Chard canal company who went bust and it ended up being owned by the London and South Western Railway, Then the SR but the running rights belonged to the GWR. The branch line finally closed in 1962
    After buying a fascinating book on the line Working the Chard Branch by Derek Phillips and R. Eaton-Lacey. I was sold on the idea. I use a fantastic planning programme AnyRail which really makes it simple to design and modify track work. I arrived at a design with Chard Junction station where the Chard branch line joins the main line from London to Exeter and a single station from the branch line at the ‘town’ of Hatch Beauchamp. This was quite an ambitious design with about 90m’s of track. So I decided to build it in stages. Stage one was the branch line station of Hatch. This was an experiment in terms of me trying to do things properly. This meant real baseboards, ballasting, scratch building of builds and a section with open framed construction. My next post will cover the building of the first stage.
  5. Vistisen
    Track laying has ground to a halt… to be honest because I’m finding it hard to get points that work consistently, and this annoyed me so much that I was forced to refrain from modelling and do more work to relax. Which is the opposite of what function the railway it meant to fulfil. I decided to start work on the scenery. As I have written before I am reusing the branch line station and the new main lines drop beneath the branch line boards to new fiddle yards. Like this:


     I have been wondering how to make this look right in scenery. Turning this into summerset countryside. Obviously, I was going to have to have a tunnel, even though the contours would indicate that a cutting would have sufficed. I decided to use ScaleScenes Kits to create both the tunnel portal and the embankment walls. And the scenery has got as far as having the contours built up using a lattice of cardboard strips cut form cereal packets and hardboard formers. There will later be covered with several layers of plaster cloth, brown paint and flocked/static grassed. I’m quite pleased with the results so far.


    The secret is to place the harboard contours quite close together and I have a quick tip it is good to turn the carboard lattice so that the shiny printed sides face each other on the underside of each cross. The smaller amount makes it much easier to thread then from the underneath whereas the two rough sides on the upper crosses do not matter so much as you can lift the pull from the end of the strip from above the layout.
     

     
    I built the embankment wall according to the instructions, although I suspect that the design is possible incorrect as it has Buttresses that are vertical with the wall sloping backwards. As far as I can see all the pictures and diagrams I can find, always have the buttress thicker at the bottom and then sloping in towards the top. This seems logical to me but would give me clearance problems with stock.  
  6. Vistisen
    I have now reached a major milestone. It has taken me almost two and a half years. The main lines are now laid and ballasted. Apart from the points which need to be tested thoroughly before painting and ballasting. This means I can for the first time since I was a teenager, watch a train go round and round. Actually, this is not quite true because not all the points and dropper wires are attached under the baseboard. But we’re close and it all works by finger power.
     

     
    At the moment there is only one out of 10 lanes which is complete in the hidden storage yard under the branch line station. I have discovered that it is quite fiddly laying track with only 8’’ of headroom. Here are a few photos to show the progress
     


  7. Vistisen

    Post summer status

    By Vistisen,

    Here is an update. In the last six months there has not been a lot of time for modelling, and to be honest there seems to have been a lot of wasted time, as the learning curve for motorising and laying of hand-built points has been steep. There has been far too much ‘two steps forwards and 1.9 steps back’. This has made it hard for me to keep up interest. But I hope I have reached a tipping point. I have decided that this post will focus on the things I have learned in that hope that others can avoid some of the pitfalls I have jumped into.
     

     
    The current status is that a lot of the point work in the main station area is now down and fixed in place and wired up. This means that I have now reached an area where I can lay several meters og track without having to worry about points. I’m also pleased with the control panel, but this is where the problems start. One of my major focus points was to try and keep the wiring tidy. I am using the DCCConcepts Alpha system which certainly looks good. It is also very easy to use with easy to fit wires that plug into sockets. I plugged it all in and it all worked.
     

     
    But then whilst doing the second half of the board I discovered that I could make the wiring even neater and self-contained by fixing the two digital switch panel boards to one side of a strip of plywood and the corresponding alpha unit to the other side. So I unplugged all the wires, moved the boards and then re-attached all the plugs, To my horror only half of the switches worked. By fiddling about with the plugs, I could see that there seems to be a problem with the wires sitting too loosely in the sockets. I could get most of the lights working by moving the wires about, but the connections are too unstable to trust. I have a few extra wires and have tried replacing the most troublesome wires and that seems to do the trick. My advice is to avoid moving cables about. The plugs are easy to connect but that does not mean that they should be moved repeatedly. Also make sure that you buy wires that are long enough to avoid putting strain on the connections. My current plan is to buy new cables and make sure that they will not be moved after being plugged in the first time. This really ought not to be necessary and I feel that DCC Concepts should perhaps look again at using slightly more robust connections. Whilst they are rethinking that, I have another small wish. In the instructions they make it very plain that you must take great care with polarity when connecting the power supply to these switch circuit boards. Why not just put a couple of diodes on the board to make it impossible to connect them the wrong way around?
     
    My next issue was with insulating joiners which are very necessary for my hand-built points.
     

     
    Peco have introduced excellent metal joiners for their bullhead rail and these work well with the SMP flex track and C&L rail I am using. But when it comes to insulated joiners for bullhead rail there seems to be only extreme options ranging from The Peco ‘Gumboot’ which looks horrible and is far too long to be used in the middle of points to separate the frog from the switchblades, to the ExcatoScale cosmetic ‘Stilettos’ I rapidly gave up trying to use them as they normally broke before I got them on to the rails. I ended up using the Tillig insulated joiners that are designed for flat bottomed rail. But they can be ‘persuaded’ to fit bullhead with a bit of finely applied violence. Until a better option arrives this is for me the best compromise.
     
    As those who follow this blog will know (I salute your patience), I have built very light baseboards that use 5cm of extruded foam for strength. This excludes using under board point motors. I am using the relatively new DCC slightly strangely named SS point motors. I assume ‘SS’ stand for Small Surface, and not a refence to a historical German military unit! They are small and powerful. Again, my experiences are mixed. But this I think stems more from my limitations. One of the good things about them is that you can wire two points to a control panel so that a crossover can be controlled from one unit. They also have an adjustable throw, but that is where my problems start. My hand build points are not the most uniform, which means that sometimes the throw of the two points in a crossover is not precisely the same. This gives me an issue as the throw is only adjustable per output and I am running two points of it with different requriements. Normally the difference is small enough for the flexibility of the rail to soak up the difference. But I have experienced that the stepper motor can end in a situation where the midpoint of its throw can drift off-centre, and this gets progressively worse until it is actually stuck at one end of its travel. DCC Concepts have obviously encountered this as they have included a ‘recenter’ button on the control unit, which does NOT function as it says in the instructions. In that it does not recenter the switch but actually moves it to one endpoint of the travel and then when the point Is next changed this will move it back to the middle. NO, that does not make any sense to me either! Especially if it is stuck at the ‘wrong’ end of its travel what happens then?
    How to handle what happens when you are running two points off the connection and then reset is not easy either. I end up unplugging the ‘OK’ point and here again I am worried about how robust the supplied connecters as they are the same design used in the control panel switches.
    What the reset button does to the adjustable throw is unknown to me. It must be involved as it is the change after a reset which ACTUALLY recenters the throw ( not the button that claims to do it) this change must surely be the maximum thrown or it will not be re-centred?
    Not to mention how it affects the polarity of the Frog switching which is not directly connected to the direction of the motor, this I know because as there is a switch to change the direction of throw compared to the DCC command which does NOT change the polarity of the frog power as well.
    I fear that there are lots of things with which I am going to have to experiment. The simple but expensive solution for me would be to only run one point off of a connection and use two circuit boards with the same DCC Address to control a crossover. But there must be a better way.
     

     
     
     
    In my station area I have a lot of points relatively close together, and since the whole area has only wide radius curves I have chose to set the track centres at 50mm. This means that I can not fit even the small SS motors between tracks. My solution is to use rods in tubes under the track bed to the outer edge of the track sections. This seems to work fine but it means you have to lay points in the right order… which I didn’t. I managed though to force the rod and wire through the foam track bed without damaging the point that I had glued down. Given that the point motors are wider than they are long, a little right-angle crank would surely make things easier as they could then be fitted parallel to the trackwork.
     
    As you can see form the first photo I lay and ballast plain track at the same time. I use a thinned Copydex mixture that I paint thinly onto the foam track bed. I then lay the track, cover it with ballast. Then I lay a strip of 9mm plywood on the rails and weight it down at 20cm distances with 1 kg weights. Once dry, I hoover the extra ballast up using a bagless handheld vacuum so that the ballast can be reused. Point work that is still attached to the paper templates printed from Templot. These are also glued and weighted using the same Copydex mixture, but I have not painted or ballasted them yet. I learnt from laying the very first point that something that seems to work fine on the building bench might not work as well when it gets the test train which in my case comprises a Bachman Prairie pushing three Dapol 6 wheeled milk tanks. These trucks are terrible runners that can suddenly derail at the slightest provocation. It is much easier to re-solder check rails or switch blades in situ if the points are not painted or packed In plastic ballast!
     

     
    One of the big issues for me has been wiring dropper wires and getting frogs wired correctly. It can be difficult to check polarity when using AC DCC power to the track. So I have found a new use for my Power TEST panel that I originally built to test the four pin XLR connections (two for DCC power to the track, and two for a separate DCC accessory bus) between each baseboard. By plugging the relevant baseboard’s XLR plug into this panel I can check polarity in the rails by using a 9volt DC transformer and a multi meter instead of the DCC power. The powercab runs on the accessory bus so that I can test point motors as well.
  9. Vistisen

    Get thee behind me...

    By Vistisen,

    Happy new year everyone. Richard my friend from Copenhagen was here for new year’s eve as usual. In Denmark it's a big thing to celebrate it with friends, Lots of food, drink, and fireworks until about 3.30 in the morning, and after a couple of Irish coffees, he was persuading me to change from Tillig track to hand built track. He’s just built his couple of points in OO 4-SF or something like that. They look brilliant, and I do like the proper sleeper spacing. To quote a certain TV presenter ”How hard can it be”? Now I’ve already installed Templot. But do I really want to solder 90 meters of track (he says it’s cheaper) including over 20 points I normally burn my fingers, melt things and get dry joints when using a soldering iron…
  10. Vistisen
    The first section of the control panel that replaces the old one for the Hatch branch from the old layout is now complete.

    I have now drilled holes and fitted bezels and switch’s, wiring, and plugged it in to the DCC systems control bus, added power... and nothing happened. After a detailed read of the instructions, as an experiment I moved the power switch from ‘off’ to ‘on’. This has a major effect on the performance (an important tip to others). All the points worked and every single one of them changed in the wrong direction, at least I am consistent. A couple of minutes changing each pair of wires around means that everything seems to work. Although some of the wire's plugs seem to sit a little loose in the sockets after moving them around. This means that a couple of the switches didn't light up until I wiggled the wires. I hope this does not cause problems later on.

    The end result looks a lot nicer than this.
     

     

     
    And the wiring inside is much improved.
     

    The observant (rivet counters) amongst you will notice that there is a missing pair of lights on the right hand end. Hatch needs seven switches, and there are six in a pack. Pack number two arrived today, Also included in the parcel were the fishplates I was waiting for, which means I am about to connect the first of my hand-built points to the laid track, I am quite nervous about whether I will be able to run trains through it. If I can then I will need to try to fit a point motor to it as well. If not, then I will have to try and build it again or fettle/bodge it into submission. I have weathered the point by spraying it with a very matt camouflage brown out of an aerosol. This is fine to start off with, and I plan on doing a bit more weathering of is later. Let’s see if it works first!
  11. Vistisen

    Baseboards:- CHECK!

    By Vistisen,

    Finally after two years! all the baseboards are now finished. Including the open frame boards that now have all the track beds in place. As I said many months ago I decided to go for a lightweight design. Using extruded 5cm thick floor insulating foam to give strength. This gave me an more than four feet long baseboard that is so stiff that it carries my 75+Kgs without bending with just a trestle at each end, but it weighs less than 4Kg including the support for the trestles.
     

    As you can see from this picture the foam has been used to support track beds on the open section as well. This has worked really well. There are three main advantages.
    · The beds are really firm and require much less of a framework to support them. This really helps with the weight.
    · By gluing the foam to the 5mm plywood while it is lying flat on the floor, you get nice even inclines with no sagging in between the supports even if they are two feet apart.
    · The foam works well as sound deadening. There is a lot less wheel noise when running trains across sections of track bed that have foam on the underside.

    I bought one pack of xps 300 5 cm foam which had 6 panels each 120cm X 60 cm. It cost about £60 in Denmark. But was enough for all the baseboards. The frames are made up of 8 cm deep 9mm plywood glued and screwed.
     
    The trestles are my own design. They have a top beam that fits into a corresponding plywood supports with a central groove that matches the width of the trestle's top beam on the underside of each end of the baseboard. These plywood support grroves are glued to plywood spacers on the underside of the foam to give space for wiring to pass through them Originally, I thought that I would have to use string to stop the legs from sliding apart. But the ‘sitting on the thing’ test proved that because the ends are om carpet that the legs do not slide even with 75 Kg vertical pressure. I have used DCCConcepts dowels to hold them in position in relation to each other and toggle clamps to hold them together. The layout is not meant to be portable. But it has been built with an expectation that we might move to a new house in its lifetime!
     

    This means that the wiring is self-contained within each baseboard, using a 4 pin XLR plug and socket to connect each board. Track will be ‘prepared’ for cutting between boards. I intend to solder the rails to copper screws each side of the baseboard joins, but not actually cut the rails. This way I won’t have to worry about misalignment until the layout actually has to be moved. Scenery will be built with joins at each baseboard using a pair of hardboard (3mm mdf?) profiles mounted on each side the join to match the scenery levels across the joins, Any buildings, platforms etc that cross boards will be removeable.
    So what next? Obviously trackwork. I have laid the first metre of track and am using thinned copydex to hold both track and ballast in place. It seems to work OK. Here is the test section which has not yet been painted. (I’m not sure about the colour of the ballast).

    The other project that needs to be started is the control panels. More on that in the next instalment of this blog… probably in 2018.
  12. Vistisen
    Wow almost six months since the last post, it’s just as well I’m not doing this for a living. As always, I seem to be dividing what little time I have to several different fronts of the project

    Baseboards are now almost finished I have tested that the storage yard boards fit under the existing Hatch branch line. And the solution seems to work ok. There will be enough space to get for ‘hand of god operations, but not really enough to do train assembly operations. The main open frame boards are made including a five sided one. There are two boards left to make which will join the main lines to the storage boards. These will have to wait because all the wiring on hatch has had to be redone as it was too untidy to allow trains on the storage lines to run unimpeded. This means that I cannot put the storage boards in place until the wiring is finished. I have chosen to go for the DCC Alpha system which means that I have just four bus wires to go between each baseboard. I have found some 4 pin XLR sockets and pugs that can cope with the current necessary. At the moment, I am in the middle of rewiring Hatch and have decided to make a test unit that will enable me to check each board’s connections before I join them all up and find there is a short circuit, or more likely a dead soldered connection somewhere.

    But for now, I have, just for fun positioned the points build for me by my good friend Richard where they will go on the main lines. And plonked some track down. Knowing me I will be tempted to open a new front and start laying track as well as doing the electrics and the last of the woodwork.
  13. Vistisen
    After an uncharacteristic burst of optimism, my base line pessimism has reasserted itself. I have built three points and tested them by running a couple of trucks through them by finger power and I was really pleased. I tried doing the same thing with a coach, again no problems. But then I tried to push through a locomotive (my Bachmann Prairie tank) and it got stuck. I tried another 0-6-0 loco and it had the same problem. I have checked the Back to back measurements and they are fine, and the same as the trucks that have no problems. What has gone wrong? I tried the other points and they were exactly the same. I have tried to muck one of them about a bit with the end result that now the coaches also derail.
    This stopped me from wanting to build any more points until I find out what has gone wrong.
    Since I have destroyed about half of what was already built, and have ripped all the point wiring out to be replaced by DCC concepts alpha system, which is currently waiting for the A2 mimic print diagram to arrive from a friend who has access to a plotter. This left me with nothing to do except cut the grass, and the wretched garden tractor manage to throw one of its knives through the shield, so that has also brought that activity to a halt.
    I have already decided to paint the wall a more suitable colour that the bright orange that they are now. But this project has been upgraded to replacing the very uneven wood panelled ceiling and putting up new plasterboard walls. After a couple of day days work, I now have a new wood panelled ceiling, these are very common in Denmark. Now there is a stack of plasterboard to be hacked to bits and screwed to the existing walls. The thought behind doing it now is that once the baseboards are up I’ll never get the chance to redecorate again. Once this is finished I hope to have built up courage to try point work again.

    and I have no idea why this is upside down, it's not in my photo editor!

  14. Vistisen
    Now that point building is underway and baseboards are almost complete. It is almost time to destroy about a third of what I have already built ☹. A shame but it has to go to make space for Chard junction. Hatch was built as an end to end with a three track fiddle yard at each end. The fiddle yard at the right-hand end will now be replaced by the branch line platforms of Chard Junction. Here are a few of pictures that show what is about to be demolished.

    The new 10 lane fiddle yard for the double track main line will in the future be underneath the current Hatch station like this:
     

    (This is an old plan that only shows 6 tracks in the storage area, and is made in ANYRAIL using Tillig track. As I have previously blogged. I am now building points and using DCC concepts bullhead 'OO' track all designed in TEMPLOT. But you get the idea from this drawing).
    This means that the hatch station baseboards will be raised from their current 77Cm to 90Cm in height. The fiddle yards underneath then will be set at 70cm and the boards containing the main station are at 75 cm. This gives me about a 1.3% gradient for the mainlines as they drop from 75cm to 70cm and a 2.3% gradient for the branch line as it climbs from the main station to the 90cm high Hatch section. The gradient on the current (about to be demolished) section is 2% and my Bachman 8750 pannier has no trouble pulling 15+ wagons up that! Mind you the Bachman collet 0-6-0 goods can only just about pull 8-10 wagons.
    The 20cm difference between Hatch and the fiddle-yards is a bit too tight, but increasing it to 25 cm gave me gradients that I did not like the look of. I have done a test and the 20cm is OK though fiddle yard is probably the wrong name as there is not much space for putting things on rails. The DCC concepts point motors used on Hatch are rather on the deep side and there is need for drastic tidying up of wiring if trains are not going to strangle themselves.

     
    This brings me to the next decision, What do I do with control panels? The current panel for Hatch is a spaghetti solution.

     
    The problem is that I have got used to having both DCC controlled points and pushbutton switches with LED route indication on the control panel For Hatch this resulted in there being two 37 pin connecters between the control panel and the layout. Chard is much more complicated and I guess that there will be at least 200 wires between the panel and the layout. My current working symbolic design for the whole layout looks like this:

    There seem to be three possible solutions to how to wire this board
    1. Carrying on using the current approach. I have at least discovered a 37pin parallel connecter system that has screw connecters which will make things much easier than the screw blocks currently in use.

    The pluses for this is that it is relatively cheap. Minuses include the need for soldering and lots of wires
    2. DCC concepts have their ALPHA system. To be honest I’m not sure about this. I already use a NCE Powercab which seems to make things easier and cheaper. Pluses would seem to be two wires between the control panel and the layout, tidier wiring looms in the control panel as the Switches and LEDS are combined in one unit. The biggest minus is the price. Another minus is that there seems to be no programming options, for example the fiddle yards for each line have a three way and two normal points. It would be nice to be able to put a single ‘push to make’ switch on each line and have the correct points set for that line. I don’t think that this is possible. It has to be said as well, that the marketing for the ALPHA system is confusing (still, even though the new website is up) Since I’m planning to use the new DCC surface mounted pointmotors with their obligatory control board there seems also to be bit of an overlap in functions that means buying the same functionality twice!
    3. I have just today discover that NCE have their own system for controlling dcc accessories with just two wires. https://ncedcc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200980015-Mini-Panel-The-NCE-Route-and-Automation-Controller I know next to nothing about it, but it seems to do the same thing as the DCC Concepts alpha system. Pluses include the ability to do route settings via ‘macros’ and not least the price compared to the Alpha system. The major minus is that there is no led indication of route settings which would mean that I can only reduce the number of wires, by about 50%. But then there is a new Alpha MIMIC product that appears to be able to create route indication by sniffing dcc signals from the power bus. So that might give me the best of both worlds.
    I need to sit down and work out the prices necessary for each solution. The other problem is that there does not seem to be much experience of either the ALPHA og NCE system om this forum. What do others think about the best way to go?
  15. Vistisen
    Hurrah!
    As I wrote yesterday. I now have a plotter full size version of my plan. I was concerned that it would not fit. But it does, even allowing for the sloping ceiling

     
    Now all I need to do is build it.
  16. Vistisen

    looking promising

    By Vistisen,

    This time I am not going to start my post by saying it’s a long time since… Those who do follow this blog will be used to that, those who don’t’, won’t care anyway. It’s winter, there is a lot of influenza about, and the day job is taking a lot of time due to a major reform in the Danish unemployment system. (I work as system administrator/ consultant in this area). But this weekend I managed to fit in a trip to Copenhagen to my tame guru Richard. My last post was about a D6 point that I started to construct with DCC stainless steel rail and the wrong thickness of sleepers, and the problems that caused. I decided that since the point was the wrong geometry, wouldn’t solder, and would stick up above the flex track, that I should start again. I spent a few hours fiddling about in Templot to turn points into better combinations of letters and number, bought some nickel silver rail, thinner sleepers, slide chairs, and a sheet of copper that turned out to be slightly too thick (☹) and started again. Being a professional pessimist, it shames me to admit that things seem to be going rather well. I am now building a B6 semi curved something or other, and after about 12 hours have got as far as soldering the vee, checkrails and stockrails.

    To my great joy running a wagon through the point gave the smooth movement that I so admired on Richards points, as hard as I tried I could not get the wagon to derail, and it does not even appear to hop as It crosses the vee. I am frankly in shock. I’m close to finishing my first point! The picture that appears to show me pressing down on the rails with a screwdriver is actually me supporting myself after an hour of sniffing glue fumes whilst fixing plastic chairs to plywood sleepers.

     
    I have also managed to obtain access to a A0 plotter and now have a roll containing the entire length of the trackplan that I have a nasty suspicion will not fit in the space available. I’ll find out tomorrow when I clear enough space to roll it out.
  17. Vistisen

    Pointless?

    By Vistisen,

    It has been a long time since my last post. This is not just because I’m busy with other duties. It’s also because I did not want to write while in the depths of despair! I finally took the model railway rite of passage and tried to build my first point. My long suffering friend Richard, who as a highly competent school teacher is used to dealing with ‘special case’ pupils undertook to teach me the black art of bending rails and filing vee’s It stated off well. I calibrated my printer and printed out a point from Templot. It is one that will end up in a siding, as I was advised not to build a mainline point as my first attempt. it is a BH-4SF GWR curved D+V-6 RH (that’s what it says on the paper) I have bought DCC concepts rail, flux, solder and track gauges. The sleepers are from C&L and are the thin ones that match the DCCconcepts track, I also bought Exactoscale GWR 2 bolt chairs. I even joined the P4 society to buy a vee filing jig. So I was ready to go.
    I manged the first bit without any errors. That is to say, I could stick the pieces of A4 paper together, and cut the sleepers out.

    Under supervision I cut and filed rails for a ‘6 vee’ and then using Richards ‘not yet patented, but it jolly well should be’ vee gauge jig, tried to solder the two rails together.

     
    Then it all went pear-shaped. I simply could not solder the rails together, finally after an hour we gave up and I was persuaded to try and use nickel-silver rail instead. Result one vee soldered on first attempt! Not only that it is much easier to file the nickel-steel rail than the stainless-steel rail.
    One angry e-mail to DccConcepts later and I was advised to buy a 3mm wedge soldering iron bit and use more heat. A few weeks later after our annual new years bash, we commenced again but with not much more luck. After a couple of hours, I gave up and started muttering about using Hornby Set-track. My teacher is made of sterner stuff and he sent me off to make the dinner and got down to work. He managed with a lot of sweating and words that won’t be allowed on RMWEB to solder the blades and one check rail. But even he was wanting to drop the DccConcepts rail.

    As an experiment, I tried to solder it to copper printed circuit boards: no luck, soldering a dropper wire to a section of flex track: no luck L
    This was the state of play until this evening, I am lucky to be surrounded by good neighbours, one of whom works repairing electrical equipment. ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the solder was his comment. And he bought along a sample of Multicore 60/40 grade ARAX Acid Cored Solder Wire, made of Sn and Pb alloy for metal fabrication. With not much hope I took a piece of wire and tried to solder it to a piece of DccConcepts track without any mucking about with glass fibre pens for cleaning and all that rubbish. To my immense surprise, It worked first time. I must admit I got a bit carried away and within two minutes I had soldered a piece of PCB to a rail, two bits of rail together, and a pair of pliers to a rail. (the last one was by accident). Mind you he stressed very strongly the need to neutralize the result, apparently unless I do the house will be melted down when I wake the next day.
     
    But I can solder! Suddenly the world seems full of possibilities.
    So to sum up: I was wondering about going back to Tillig track, But I’m not prepared to give up on the flowing point work and OO gauge sleepers.
     

    I think that I will use the pack of track and rail that I have bought. After that I will change to the new PECO track for ordinary track. Points will be built using nickel silver rail, although I will use the 10M of stainless steel rail as for the outside rails on points as there are not many soldered connections on these rails. This is because I’m a Scrooge and cannot face throwing it away.
    I feel the need to say that I AM a big fan of many DccConcepts products and use their pointmotors and still will, and their fabulous DCC modules that allow both push button and DCC operation of points are billiant. I will almost certainly use the ALPHA system for control via fewer wires and find their new surface mount point motors very interesting. But I believe true loyalty means saying what you think is the truth and I have to say their stainless-steel rail is not for me and I STRONGY suggest you sample it for soldering purposes before buying large amounts of it.
    Just so the DCCConcepts don’t feel that I om on a crusade! I have to say that Exactoscale need to look at their moulds. I thought it was just me but my friend agreed the GWR chairs 2 bolt mould is too worn out. The chairs on one side of each section consistently snap in two when being pushed onto rails more than the ones on the other side!
  18. Vistisen

    Time for an update

    By Vistisen,

    Time for an update. The first couple of baseboards are complete.

    I wanted to build light but strong boards, and as this picture shows it has worked.

    The board that is supporting my weight (about 75 Kg, honest), weighs by itself lrss than 3,5 Kg.

    As you can see from the underside there is space left at each end. it is here that the toggle clamp catches and dowels will be fitted, there is also space to put connecting blocks and such like. The whole construction is glued there is not a single screw in it. Test have shown that PVA can glue the Extruded foam to wood. But not foam to foam. By the way we discovered at an early stage not all PVA wood glues are equal. Bostik works well, a slightly cheaper literally ‘no name’ glue that appeared to be the same had nothing like the same strength. I could pull the test wood of the foam without too much effort. When using the Bostik I had to take a crowbar to it and this split the wood not the joint! Sticking foam to foam is done by using Gorilla glue. You have to spray one of the surfaces with water and spread the glue on the other. The end result is so solid that even a crowbar does not budge it.
     
    There is one more baseboard to build and then all the station area boards are finished. Then I need to make some trestles to support them. Then I must build some points.
     
    On a side note, a recent visit to my future brother in law resulted in me transporting a treasure chest back to Denmark.
     

    I’m glad that customs did not want to inspect the 80+ wagons, 80+ coaches and 30+ locos that are in the box. A public thanks to Rich, and he’s welcome to the family. Primarily because he’s a great bloke, and not just because he has persuaded my sister to live five minutes’ walk from the Bodmin steam railway.
  19. Vistisen
    In what is for me record time only a week from my last post, I have finally started building the first baseboard for chard junction. I ended up with the following baseboards.
    And decided to start with the only square one. My birthday present does an excellent job og cutting both the plywood and the XPS foam without too much dust. In fact, I was amazed at how little dust came from the XPS.

     
    According to all the books the dogma is ‘measure twice, cut once’. I’m much more of a measure ‘three time, cut once, buy twice’ school of woodwork. I never seem to get cutting mitre joints right and always end on with parallel slants rather than opposed cuts as you should. It was a close call on this occasion as well. But here you can see all the bits that will go into the first board.

     
    The foam is 20 cm shorter than the length of the board. But I think this is probably a good thing as it will give space for connecter blocks and wingnuts bolt or whatever I end up with using to connect boards. I have ordered DCC dowels to align them. So what to use to glue the XPS to foam?. I have tried a test with PVA wood glue. I see how it does tomorrow when fully dry.
     

  20. Vistisen
    The first pack of the new DCC track arrived today. Here are a few very bad pictures that compare it with Tillig elite and Hornby set track.

     
    In case anyone is in doubt the DCC is at the top, the Tillig in the middle and the Hornby at the bottom.
    First impressions: well I love the sleepers distance which likes right to me ( I know it’s wrong Martin ) but I last travelled by train in the UK about 27 years ago so that’s my excuse. I have to say the Tillig track if you ignore the fact that it is HO is probably just as good if not better especially because of the pre weathered rails. As for the Hornby…
     

    When I first looked at it end on I thought that the inwards leaning of the rail was hardly noticeable, but when put alongside other track it becomes very obvious. What I have not shown is that I also bought just the rail and a Maplin solder station, so as you can hear I have been persuaded to have a go at point work.
    I also have lots of extruded foam, plywood and as a brand new birthday present, a bench saw to cut it all up with. So frustration from points building will be taken out on bashing screws into baseboards. My tool bench consists of a nail gun and hammer. I have an axe as well but find it hard to be precise in the fine trimming with that.
  21. Vistisen
    We are getting there.
     
    A quick concentrated burst of energy and the Easyrail design is now Templotized:

     
    Major differences between the Anyrail version and the Templot one is that the track centres are reduced fra the Tillig standard (59mm) to 50 mm. The whole of the main line section is now on a gentle curve of about 43' in radius :-) Which is still sharper than in reality. The main line curve was 70 chains, Which by my reckoning is about 60' in 4mm to a foot. The whole of the branch station is pushed back a bit as it was in reality compared to the original Anyrail version.
     
    Update I wasn't finished anyway. After playing with the dummy vehicles that Martin told me about, a bit I decided that 50mm was too close on the sharper curves. I might want to use rule one and run HST's with mark3 coaches. and they did not fit 80cm curves at 50mm distance. but they do now that I have stretched the curves to 59mm
     
    This plan is very simple with nothing other than turnouts and crossovers. so I know that I am only scratching the surface on Templot. Every time I want to do something new I find that there is always a way, it’s not just always, well to be honest its NEVER the way you’d think. But then I think of the age of the software. If it was written in the late 70’s, then it predates the IBM PC. What hardware was it written to run on? I would love to have seen in then It must have been cutting edge in its time. I suspect that the maths involved are still cutting edge. But the GUI…
  22. Vistisen

    …and why not?

    By Vistisen,

    About five months since my last post. I am glad that I have waited. The new DCC concepts track is on the way. Indeed, the flex track has arrived and all the pictures I have seen make it look really good. I have been trying to find a copy of the book ‘main line to the west part 3’ which is like gold dust according to others on this forum, but there I was ‘panning away’ on google and lo and behold I found a gold nugget! It on sale for £30.

    It arrived yesterday and has more than doubled the number of pictures I have of Chard Junction. Not only that It has a couple of good track plans which I compared with the design I had made in Anyrail using the Tillig elite track. I was pleasantly surprised I had certainly captured the essence of the design.

    The main problem is that the whole station was on a gentle sweeping curve of about 70 chains. Which is about 18.5M in OO gauge radius. I looked at the photos and the curve is obvious, and that DCC stuff look gorgeous. But that means not using Tillig points and going back to handmade points for all the curved sections and as for the rest possibly DCC straight points when they arrive or something else.
    The family were away for a week, and I was ‘working’ from home on the day job. So I looked in the mirror and told myself that as a system administrator no programme had ever defeated me, and that Templot was not going to be the first. Knowing that no one would hear me swearing, I did what Martin says one should and saw all, well most, well a couple of the videos. I Took a deep breath and had a go.
    Having spent at a couple of hours playing at doing a simple point, I got the anyrail design imported as a background and started having a go at making the first crossover. I’m getting there. The shear bloody mindedness of some of the Templot controls still annoys me. For example, in ALL programs CTRL+Z is an undo command (it has been the standard since the late 80’s). Martin knows this as the program HAS code that handles this key combination, It pops up at dialog box that tells you that Yes he knows that you meant UNDO but that you need to press CTRL+U to do that in Templot. Look mate, if you have gone to the bother of creating the damm dialogue box for the key combination, just implement ctrl+z as undo like everyone else does!
    Having said that, Templot does magical things with track work. the maths behind it is very clever. Whether I will be able to build the points remains to be seen. One of the other benefits of using handbuilt pointwork is that I can choose a more prototypical distance between tracks. If anyone knows of a program that can tell you minimum distance between tracks for curves of a given radius, when using coaches with a known size and end overhang it would love to know about it. I’ll upload a few pictures as the plan progresses, but as you can see I’m almost finished!

  23. Vistisen

    ... on the other hand

    By Vistisen,

    I have just come back from driving 200 miles in the snow from Copenhagen, where I stayed with my friend who has started building track in OO-SF. I am frankly staggered by how good it looks and how smooooooth the points feel when running wagons through them. I like Tillig track, but his third attempt at a point is in a completely different league. It’s like comparing a BMW 3 series to a Bentley.
    He reckons that I could do the same, but I don’t know, My normal measurement system when doing anything practical is +/- a bodge job or two. I'd really like to build track using a nail gun. He was talking about the points being 16.2 mm at the frog, but 16.5 at the end to match the SMP track. I have the distinct feeling that mine would be somewhere between TT and O gauge along their length. I work in IT and am used to using nasty command line complicated databases, I can work with very complicated security protocols and code in PL/SQL, and Perl and regular expressions, but I spent an hour with Templot and could not either import a jpg file of a track plan as a background or change radius of a curve to start my intended first point. What to do?
  24. Vistisen

    What next

    By Vistisen,

    As I wrote at the end of my last post, I’m feeling the itch to move on to phase 2. This is a much more ambitious plan to model the end of the branch line at Chard junction where the line meets the mail line from London to Exeter. It is a very strange junction as you can see from this plan.
     

     
    My idea is to retain the Model of hatch station and to build the new station on the other side of the room. One of the things that I have learnt that I miss is the ability to sit and watch the trains go round and round, which cannot be done on an end to end. The station is upside down compared to the drawing. The basic idea is that the main line will go downhill each side of the new station area so that there are storage lines under the current hatch baseboards. I have spent a long time fiddling with inclines and minimum radiuses to try and create a realistic model of Chard junction station and here it is:
     

    The green boards are what will be reused from phase 1. The gray baseboards are the new ‘flat’ baseboards, and the rest will be open frame. As you can see this is a much more ambitious project. Too be perfectly honest It might be too much for my limited time and money. (this blog is turning into a confessional).
    So what lessons have I learned from building the first bit that I hope will help me on the next?
    Baseboards:
    My current baseboards are too heavy. As you can see from my design Chards Junction station has so many points (about 20) that it is very difficult to find somewhere where you can have a baseboard join without a point crossing it. So the baseboards are going to be on the large size. To keep the weight down, I am going to experiment with using extruded foam with a plywood surround to see whether I can get the size I need without baseboards becoming too heavy.
    Portability. Realistically speaking, we might move house before the layout is finished. We live in a 6-bedroom house that is has an area of 2800 square feet. Our kids will probably (hopefully) have left home within the next 10 years, and it is not certain that we carry on living here. So this time I MUST build baseboards that are transportable (not portable)
    The open frame baseboards must this time also be moveable; the currents ones are mounted on walls.
    These foam baseboards will be 5Cm. thick, so how do I mount point motors dropper wires, etc? I think that I will start with the low level storage boards as a proof of concept.

    Track
    I am still intending to use Tillig track, although Joseph Prestell’s thread on OO gauge ‘scale’ track intrigues me, and a good friend keeps sending me videos of points that he has built that look wonderful. But I do need to find some way of keeping sleeper placement more even that last time. I think that I will get my son to make a 3D print of a ‘comb’ that will help me keep sleeper placement both even and perpendicular to the rails.
    I must find a quicker way of ballasting, Hatch was done manually and took me an hour per meter. It is too uneven and time consuming

    Electrics
    I want to retain my current DCC/Switch system but need to find some way of reducing the number of wires. DCC concepts have a new bus system that might help. It promises just two wires between the control panel and the layout. Hmm….
    There MUST be connections between each baseboard. So that they can be moved
    Wiring must be tidier, I read somewhere about someone who had a piece of track mounted on the underside of each baseboard and all dropper wires where soldered on to this track. Interesting idea.

    Scenery
    Scenery must also be separated at baseboard joins, but apart from that, I am very satisfied with the basic techniques from Hatch
    There will be a lot of scratch building requirements… must learn to do thing quicker

  25. Vistisen
    One of the problems with building a specific prototype layout is that you cannot just buy the buildings you need. In the past I have assembled superquick buildings with an amazing tendency to cut off the tabs you need to glue things together. As for my success rate with IKEA flat pack furniture…
    So obviously for a first attempt at scratch building it would be wise to start with a garden shed, so I started by building a Brunel Chalet type station which according to the English national Heritage is:
    Former railway station. C1865 for the Bristol and Exeter Railway Company. Red brick in Flemish bond with ashlar dressings; Welsh slate roof. Single storey. Symmetrical 5-bay elevation, the end bays projecting slightly. Chamfered ashlar quoins to angles; plinth with chamfered ashlar band; impost band; moulded eaves band. Openings have round arches supported on corbelled imposts. The doorways quoined and with keystones, the 4-pane windows with pilaster jambs and corbelled sills; all openings have fanlights, some boarded up. Deep eaves to hipped, oversailing roof carried by long iron brackets with cusped tracery to spandrels. Two cross-ridge stacks, south-eastern one truncated, north-western one with plinth and corbelled cornice. South-west front has central, 4-pane double-door, upper panels glazed. Similar doorway to centre of north-east front, which has paired windows to end bays. 2-bay south-east gable has doorway on right. 3-bay north-west end has bricked up window on left and 6-panel doors to center and right.
     

     
    Right then, one of those coming up! Living in Denmark makes popping down to the building with a tape measure a bit expensive. The station building does still exist and is today part of a builders yard. Googling the net gave me few pictures amongst other from http://www.geograph.org.uk where I wrote a quick e-mail to a gentleman who had uploaded a few good photos, it turned out that he lived close to the area and had a lot of archival phots that he scanned in and sent me, so a long overdue public thank you to Nicholas Chipchase for a lot of help. I found the building on Google Earth and from this could measure the size of the roof seen from above and guessimated the dimensions from this. As my ambition was much higher than my talent I spent a long time drawing interiors in Corel draw. These are totally invisible but I know that they are there.
     

     
    The posters are some that actually where found in stations at this time. They come from http://www.railwaystation.org/postersBR.html and reduced to OO gauge. The colours are correct pantone values for western region stations taken from the fascinating site here http://www.stationcolours.info/ . The Flooring is a real GWR design that I found a sample of on the net and then cloned in Photoshop to get the size I needed.
     
    Mistake nr.5 was the way I made the building out of three separate boxes. This means that the whole station is very warped and crooked. I now have built enough of the excellent Scalescenes to know that next time I will use a different technique. The boxes are cladded with Willis plasticard and the coping and edges were drawn in Corel Draw and cut out with a scalpel and glued ( normally first to my finger) and then finally roughly in place The roof appears to not quite fit the top of the flat section, but it does not do so I reality either, honest!

    But my gap is too large. The distinctive chimneys drove me mad!
     

    With the station finally built, I started on the goods shed, By now I had discovered York models excellent lazercut windows which are used in the goods shed. It’s not perfect but I am learning. Again it appears to be unfinished (no eves on the gables), but then the original does not have them either.
     

    The last remaining building that needs to be built is the signal box, I have had two aborted attempts, But must soon try again.
    Away from the station there are a couple of other building made from Scale Scenes kits for example the lock keepers cottage.
     


     
    Here I spent a long time doing the garden. I enjoy making buildings but it just takes me so long compared to people like Allan Downes who knock off an entire town in the time it takes me to cut out a window.
    In my next post I’ll discuss electrics and control panels, and then talk about the future. I’m tried to build up enough courage to start fase2.
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