colimate

Happy new year to every one, another modelling year is upon us. At the moment I am building a layout that is going round the three walls of my upstairs front bedroom and partly into the landing making a question mark shape, it is aprox 35 feet long and 1 foot wide but it is enough for a ladder of five sidings at each end and there is a single branch line connecting them together. This is a cab ride at the moment you will have to use your imagination, start off with the five ladder sidings in the hall ( at the bottom of the question mark ) and move out to curve out to the right, this goes into an 'S' shape and there is a siding to the right at the top of the 'S' then it goes round to the left and over a bridge crossing I am not sure of yet then splits to double track and curves to the left so we are at the top of the question mark, this has a small loop to the left for loco shed and a siding until we get to the other five ladder sidings at the end. At the moment the track is layed and the testing is in progress, it has about twelve points on the layout and I am using the easy method of point control by using a bent piece of piano wire through to the side of the layout and then using a micro switch for the frog polarity change of which the bent wire presses against. The problem at the moment is that my Hornby Elite is finding all the switches are switching over too early and so shorting out so at the moment I am spending time moving the switches back a couple of milimeters to get them to work properly. I will take some photos and post them on the blog soon. It is mainly a shunters layout with main line locos dropping off and picking up wagons after they have been sorted as I love watching them slowly trundle past with a train in tow. At the moment only the two 03's are shunting with the four 08's being prepaired for chip fitting but the odd 31,60 and 66 are helping them.